In this conversational video, Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down five practical strategies for rapidly growing a presence on YouTube Shorts. They begin by clarifying what Shorts are—a short‑form video format on YouTube positioned as the platform’s answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels, with a maximum length of 60 seconds (Google’s official limit). The first tip is to tap into expert communities, especially the Clubhouse group where Shorts creators gather, and to follow industry mentor Alex Cooper for proven tactics. The second tip emphasizes adding upbeat, energetic music to Shorts, noting that such tracks dramatically increase viewer engagement. The third tip advises careful tag selection: choose tags with moderate view counts (hundreds of thousands to a few million) rather than ultra‑competitive ones, to improve discoverability. The fourth tip stresses the importance of light‑hearted, entertaining content; serious videos tend to underperform, while fun, bite‑size clips encourage swipe‑through viewing and can yield viral hits when posted consistently. The final tip covers consistency, repurposing existing long‑form content, and studying successful Shorts creators like Jake Feldman (gaming) and Legal Eagle (news‑jacking). They also warn against using TikTok watermarks, as Instagram may penalize such videos. The hosts conclude by encouraging viewers to explore Shorts, TikTok, Reels, and to join their free marketing community at marketingschool.io/pro.
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All right. So today we're going to talk about how to grow fast on YouTube Shorts. So let's talk about what YouTube Shorts is first and foremost. So YouTube Shorts is YouTube's answer to TikTok. It's their answer to Instagram Reels. I think everyone now, these big social giants have realized that these short video formats, they perform really well. In fact, when you go into Instagram, the main button, the middle button is actually Reels, right? Neil and I thought we would talk about Shorts a little bit because it's fairly new and it actually hasn't been integrated into the main app yet. I'll share a couple of things and then Neil, you can jump into it. So.
Wait, you actually want to make it similar to the last episode where we just break down 5 tips?
Let's do it. 5 tips again.
And before we start off, keep in mind a Short is 15 seconds or less, just to give you an idea of how short it is.
I think you can go a little more now.
Oh, it's 15 seconds.
I've been posting Shorts. It's less than 60 seconds now, I think, because some of mine are like 24 seconds and they're actually Shorts. So—
I think they're multiple Shorts then, because YouTube— let me actually look it up.
Yeah, you look it up here. I'll start with number 1 first while you look it up. So So the, actually one thing is this is a reason to hang out in Clubhouse because there's a lot of these Shorts creators hanging out inside of Clubhouse. So if you want the best tactics, there's a guy to follow. His name's Alex Cooper. If you go to alexcooper.io, I think he's actually a guy to talk to because he's worked with people that have 20 million plus subscribers on YouTube. And he talks about this stuff all the time. So my thing is, look, Neil and I, we're just getting started with Shorts. I think you want to talk to the experts. So that's one thing.
Yeah, and by the way, Eric is right. You're going to find contradictory information. support.google says it's 60 seconds. blog.youtube says it's 15 seconds. So let's go with Google because they own YouTube. So 60 seconds it is. The second tip that we have for you is just like Instagram Reels or just like TikTok, what you'll find is if your Shorts contain upbeat music, that does well. I found that you get a lot more people engaging than if you don't have upbeat music. I have no idea why, but people love it. I think you've seen it on Instagram, Eric, where people have that song and then they do the moonwalk or shuffle.
I don't watch as much dancing videos as you do.
So, so they show you how to dance and then there's this song, but I forgot what that song is, but my daughter loves it. So anytime she hears it, she just starts dancing now.
That's funny. So what do you know what song it is? I don't.
It's like some dance, like EDM type of music. And they like show you how to do like a shuffle or something like that. And they show you like step by step, and then they go fast and then they just do it.
That's funny. All right. So number 3, it sounds cheesy, but tags still work. But the key thing here is you don't want to go for tags that are too competitive. So in TikTok, if I type in a tag like millionaire or something like that, it might have billions of views. Ideally, you're going for something that has a couple hundred thousand views on it, or maybe up to a few million. You don't want to go for the super competitive ones because you're not going to get seen. So make sure that you're using tags and picking ones that are not too competitive.
Number 4, create something that's lighthearted. Shorts is supposed to be funny, entertaining. If you create something too serious, you won't do well. Like, I've tested a lot of Shorts on a lot of different platforms, from YouTube to Instagram. to Twitch. We have a team, and then we started testing out different types of quote-unquote Shorts or Reels or whatever you want to end up calling it. And we found that anything that's too serious doesn't do as well as anything that's entertaining. So think about the people that are going through it. They're just swiping and they're just going up, up, or down to keep just watching more. And when you're doing something entertaining, what you'll find is a hit or miss. So don't just create entertaining content, create it daily. It only takes 60 seconds max. If you do once a day, some of it's going to be a miss. A lot of it will be, but some of it will be a hit and then you'll just start getting a lot of followers.
Yeah. And number 5, you want to be looking at the people that are doing it well. So Jake Feldman is one. He's the guy with 3 million subscribers and he does the Minecraft stuff, but there's also a lawyer. His name is Legal Eagle. So it's like legal and eagle, the bird. Legal Eagle, he actually does less than 60 seconds. He reacts to certain things. So maybe he'll react to like something going on with ex-president Donald Trump, or maybe he'll react to something from Like a newsjacking type thing. So he jacks the news and he makes a short for it and he has an editor just jump in and do it. And he has about 1.8 million subscribers or so. So I think to Neil's point, yes, absolutely. Being consistent with it. I think if you're going to make something really good, it might actually take you 30 minutes to make a really good short. Or look, if you're making a ton of video content, I have my team actually just chopping up a lot of the video stuff that we're talking about right now. Neil does a lot of video stuff. We're doing it like this. There's a reason why we're doing this on Zoom too, to repurpose this content. And I've seen some pretty good stuff come out from my team on this. But look, if you don't have the time for it, just have the team chop things up. But I'm going to try to actually block out more time to, to be more consistent and make sure that is it for today. Check out Shorts, check out TikTok, check out Spotlight, check out Reels. You can actually repurpose all of these. Just make sure you don't have the TikTok watermark because, because I believe Instagram does see that. So you might get dinged for that. So that is it for today. If you want to learn more about the latest marketing stuff, you want to be a part of a marketing community, marketingschool.io/pro. It's free for 14 days. And yeah, we will catch you later.
