BIGGEST Mistakes New YouTubers Make WITHOUT Knowing It

The biggest challenge as a smaller YouTuber is just getting seen and discovered on YouTube. And for YouTubers, we know that that's an impression that means someone sees a thumbnail and they click on it. But you are suffering from two problems with your YouTube channel. First thing is channel authority. All right? There's not a lot of data on your channel, especially if you're just getting started. Maybe you've only uploaded 10 or 12 videos. I think it really takes, like 30 to 50 videos to get into your back catalog for YouTube to really start understanding who your audience is, what content you're releasing on your channel, and who they should actually show this to. The other thing is, you're new, so you don't really have a brand yet. People don't really know who you are. They don't know if they can trust you. People are very hesitant to try new things. So when I was starting out my channel, I'm a guitar teacher. You know, we have little Lauren Bateman, who's coming new on the scene in 2017, and I'm going up against people like Justin Guitar, who've been on the scene for, like, well over a decade. So when two thumbnails pop up and you got Lauren over here and you got Justin Guitar over here, people are gonna be like, well, I don't know who this Lauren person is, but I've seen this Justin guy. I'm gonna check out him. So there's a brand and a trust that people start getting familiar with your face as you grow a brand. But when you're just getting started, that's very, very hard. So I'm going to talk about some things you can do, the top mistakes you're making as a small YouTuber, and what we can do to kind of give you a little bit of an edge so that you can get more impressions and get discovered maybe a little bit quicker. So I found one of the biggest things YouTubers do when they first start out is they spend so much time focused on the content. And I suffered from this, too. The majority of my time went to making the content, editing it, getting it up, and then at the end, I'd be like, well, I'm just gonna throw a thumbnail up and I'm just it putting a title on it, and then it's up, and that's a waste. All right. In the beginning, you're not going to get a lot of impressions. For the reasons I mentioned before, YouTube's going to show your thumbnail. People probably don't know you, and they're not really going to pay attention to it versus someone else like Justin Guitar, who people know. Okay, so what you need to do is you need to focus on making those thumbnails and titles count as much as possible so that when you get an impression, you, you might actually get a click to come through as well. So one of the biggest tips I can give you on making thumbnails is to take an official photo. In the beginning, I was just like pulling something from the video and I'd end up with like the best freeze frame I could find. And it was me doing something like weird like that. So, you know, we would pull from the video. Stop. When you sit down to record a video, take a few minutes. All right? Think about what you want to do. Do a freeze frame. Okay. Before this video started, I had a little chit chat with my editor saying, hey, let's do, let's go use one of these other photos for this thumbnail. Let's look at what other people are doing around this topic and let's make something cool out of it. So we're not just going to grab a freeze frame from this video and throw it up as a thumbnail and expect it to perform well. So I'm going to give you example right now. I'm going to put two thumbnails up on the screen right now, and then we're going to take them away really quickly and you're going, hey, Laure. Really wasn't enough time for me to look at the thumbnails, but it was. So they did a study and they found that on Netflix, the average user spends about 1.8 seconds looking at a thumbnail before they decide to move on to something else. Either they're going to watch it or they're going to move on to something else. And YouTube's a much bigger platform. There's a lot more choice. I mean, there's tons of choices on Netflix. There's even more on YouTube, but that's the split second choice that you have to make. And even though those thumbnails were only on the screen for 1.8 seconds, I guarantee you probably chose B. Why did you choose B? It's a better photo. Okay? It pops. It's very simple. All right. A lot of new YouTubers, you guys are making these thumbnails way too complicated. And that's why you didn't choose my other thumbnail. That was an old thumbnail of mine. Too much text. Too much text. There was no point of focus where in the B thumbnail. The contrast was really high. There was a really great focus on the hand. The. It really caught people's attention. So that thumbnail caught people's attention. And then they went to the title. And the title is Get Faster Fingers in One Week. All right, so the thumbnail was number one finger exercise and the title was Get Faster Fingers in One Week. So you can see how my title wasn't the exact same thing as my thumbnail. They complemented each other. And that video has gotten over a million views and about four and a half months. So it took off. It was an awesome video. It worked really well. We thought about the thumbnail ahead of time. We thought about what that title was going to be and bam, it just took off. So my tips for you on thumbnails and titles. One, Take a photo. Take a photo with your camera. Even if you just turn the camera on and you go, you know, whatever, just pause, take a freeze frame, take a thumbnail, and then think about what the title is and keep it simple. A lot of people, the thumbnails are too cluttered and it makes. The more cluttered a thumbnail is, the more time it takes to process what the thumbnail is saying. So keep the thumbnails simple. If you start right now just by working with simpler thumbnails, I bet you will get a lot more clicks. Alright, so this is another rookie mistake that a lot of YouTubers made. I made it in the beginning too, and it's great. We got the impression, we got the click. Then people start watching the video. And the thing is, they start watching the video, but then they don't finish watching the video. And the biggest ranking factor on YouTube is watch time. YouTube's trying to sell ads. They want people to stay on their platform. So the more watch time you can get, the more they're going to push out a video. YouTube will tell you this video is being pushed out more because it has more viewers, it has more watch time. That's what YouTube wants to do, wants to find a video that gets tons of watch time and then they want to show it to more people so that they can sell more ads. So for a lot of you, you got to fix those first 30 seconds of the video. In the beginning, a lot of us get that dreaded hockey shape where we, you know, we start with a lot of viewers and then about one minute in, we've lost about 70% of the viewership. And then we get to the end of the video and there's like 5% of the people left still watching. So the higher we can keep that Drop off in the first 30 to 60 seconds, the more people you're going to have at the end of the video. Okay. To tell them about your course or to tell them to go watch another video. The more people you get to stay on in the beginning, the more people you'll have at the end. So in the beginning, get right into the content, just like this video. It's like we just got right into the content. All right. A lot of you are just like, hey. And I did this in the beginning. Hi, my name's Lauren, and I'm going to show you in this video all this thing. I'm going to introduce myself, and I'm a guitar teacher. And then people are like, okay, I don't care. This isn't answering my question. I'm leaving. You need to deliver on your thumbnail almost instantaneously. And we did a test on my channel where I was playing the music, I was trying to play the song before I taught the song. And the drop off was. Was so much greater versus me just getting right into teaching the content. So that's what we do now. It's like I just go right into the lessons. No introduction. I do introduce myself maybe one or two minutes into the video after I've given them some value. Give them some value for first, deliver on the promise in your. In your thumbnail and your title, and then you can introduce yourself. But don't do it at the beginning of the video because so many people, they just don't care. And like I said before, if you're not a brand and you're not an authority yet, they don't know who you are, and they just don't care who you are. So you're either going to answer their question or in a split second, they're going to be gone and they're going to be looking for the answer for someone else who's going to get right into the meat and potatoes of the content. Now, if you want to know how to increase watch time and keep more people on your videos, then go watch this video right over there. Run. Going to give you five tips for the perfect video script.