5 MUST FOLLOW Title & Headline Principles to Increase Views
Lauren Bateman breaks down five principles for YouTube titles that get clicks: target a specific audience, promise a concrete outcome, address what frustrates them, spark curiosity, and add a deadline. She walks through formulas like "The secret to X" and "How to [benefit] by [X]" with real examples.
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You're probably recording great content on YouTube. But did you know that there are five principles that you need to know to write an amazing title? Titles are so important on YouTube. The content's important, the thumbnail is important. But just changing the wording in your title can increase viewership by almost double. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over the five principles you need to be aware of so that you can start writing better headlines today. And of course, also going to give you a few headline formulas. All right? These are just some rules that you can use to create amazing headlines that will get more views for your videos. And if you're interested in getting a lot more headline formulas, you can scroll down to the description and you can get a downloadable PDF with over 60 different headline formulas that you can start using in your videos this week. Principle number one, you have to address your specific audience. Now, in marketing, a lot of times the term that's used is called an avatar, right? We all have an avatar. For me with my guitar teaching platform on YouTube, my avatar are men over the age of 60, because I want retirees, people who have time and money to play and practice guitar. And they're usually people who had a dream about playing guitar. Maybe they couldn't afford lessons growing up or life got in the way. They had kids, they joined the military, they got married. Things kept getting in the way of this dream, but now they're retired and they want to check off their bucket list and finally learn how to play guitar like all their favorite rock stars. So what you need to do is you need to dive deep into who is your specific audience. And a lot of times, trust me, I get females. I get lots of females in my courses and who are part of my audience, but I do focus more on the male Persona. Right? You gotta pick something. The more narrowed down you can be about the audience, the easier it will be for you to make your headlines more specific to them and make your more your content more engaging to them as well. Number two, specify the specific outcome or desire that they will get from watching your video. What's the end result? Okay, how to lose ten pounds in four weeks. That is a great title. Because what is their desire? The desire is they want to lose weight, and you're giving them a very specific time frame in which this is going to happen. All right, this is like a video I have. It's called Faster Fingers in One Week. All right? I know in my audience, a big pain point they have is they want to get faster fingers so that they can play songs. They can change their chords faster. So I made this video that is faster fingers in one week. What is the pain point? The pain point is they want those fingers to move faster. I'm going to give them that result, and they're going to do it in a very, very short period of time, which is one week. Which ties in with point number three, which. What is the pain point they want to avoid the most? All right, this is a great little exercise for you to do. Write down the top three to five pain points that your audience has. All right? So many times. I'm sure if you know your audience, you know what their pain points are. Okay, Pain points for my audience. They think they're too old. They think they're not talented enough. All right? Their fingers don't move fast enough. I talked about that before. Their chords sound clunky or muted or they have trouble strumming. A great pain point that I like to illustrate in a good way is, you know, making sure that you don't leave this world without playing the guitar or imagine what it would be like if your spouse came in from the other room and they recognized what you were playing on the guitar. That's a huge pain point for a lot of guitar players. They're playing something, and it sounds like crap, and they don't want things to sound like crap. They actually want to sound good on the guitar. They want people to recognize them, all right? They want, you know, get praise from family and friends. Create memories. Play happy birthday for your grandchild. Those are amazing things. Again, those are back to outcomes, but they're also tied in with these pain points. Hey, don't let life pass you by. Start learning guitar today. There's no better time to learn than today. You're not too old, all right? You're never too old to start, and you don't need talent. Let's do it. Number four, create curiosity. Okay? Ask questions. Questions are a great way to entice people to find out what the answer is. Something like how to bench press twice your weight using this one simple exercise. All right, there's a little bit of curiosity, even though that's not a question. You see this curiosity because it's like, what is this one exercise? All right, Another way to create curiosity is avoidance. Avoid eating this one food if you want to lose weight because you're like, okay, am I eating that one food? I need to find out if I'm eating that food because I got to stop doing it, right? So these Are things that create curiosity in your audience. Point number five, add urgency to your titles, all right? Things you must be doing now. All right? The five guitar techniques you must know now to be successful with guitar. There's a little bit of urgency. Again, we don't want to delay this, all right? How to lose 10 pounds before your wedding or must know exercises to lose body fat to be in the best shape of your life today. Okay? We it Urgency. It's a little bit easier to create urgency I find, when you're selling courses, all right, Doing special offers. That's where urgency a lot comes in. It's hard to do urgency on thumbnail titles for YouTube, but you can use this sense of urgency. Like you must know these things now. So I'm going to give you five headline formulas right now. But remember, if you want a lot more than just these five, just scroll down to the link description below and get that free PDF. Number one, the secret to having X, where X is the outcome that your audience desires. For example, this secret to getting a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. All right? There's a lot of YouTubers. That's what they want. They want to get that silver plaque. The secret to losing 10 pounds and keeping it off. A lot of people, they lose weight, but then they yo, yo, back and forth. So we want to know what's the secret to doing this? And here's the benefit. The benefit is you get to keep the weight off for the rest of your life. So formula number two, how to benefit by getting X. Go back to the previous example. How to lift twice as much weight by doing this one exercise. So what is the benefit? You get to lift twice as much weight. And the X is this exercise. How to get faster chords by doing this one stretch one time a week. Another great headline. Hey, we're handling a pain point here. People want to stretch out their fingers. What do they do? They need to do X. Number of steps. Lists and number of steps are great titles for videos. Four easy steps to a successful marriage. Five top tips for starting a new business. Five principles of an effective headline for YouTube. You can see where I'm going with this. Just a number and this is what you get. Number four, how the experts do X. Right? How the experts do something. How the experts do a push up. How rock legends create amazing guitar solos. How an expert edits videos five times faster than an amateur. So again, we're trying to say this is what you want to become, right? This is kind of like who you're idolizing here. And this is how they do it. So if you do it like this expert, chances are you're going to be better by watching this video. Number five, how to do a specific action within a specific time frame. These are kind of like how to videos. How to change a flat tire in 10 minutes. How to play insert this favorite song you've always wanted to learn in 15 minutes. How to fix a cracked screen on your iPhone so you can see how. These are all kind of questions that have an answer, an educational answer that you can help someone with. Now, if you want even more amazing headline tips, I'm going to show you how to increase your click through rate by 63% by just using very specific power words. Go click on that video right over there.
