I Tested 10 Real YouTube Title Ideas. Most Would Never Get a Client.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my community here on YouTube to drop some title ideas that you have for a YouTube video, and I would test them or audit them here on my channel. I had about 8 of you submit those, and I'm gonna add in 2 more from clients that I am currently working with. So we've got 10 total title ideas, and the main question we're asking with these titles is, would this title attract a client or a paying customer, or is it just gonna attract views? By the time we're done with this video, you're gonna be able to run this same test on your next video idea in about 10 seconds or less. Ready? Just real quick context, if we haven't met yet before, my name is Trena. I've been teaching coaches and course creators to use YouTube as a sales asset for 11 years now, because every video that you publish here on YouTube is an invitation for one of two people: beginner Bettys who watch everything and comment, thank you, that was so helpful, and will never pay you, and expert Esthers who is further along in the process, has expensive problems and is actively looking to buy a solution to her problem because she's had enough. Because the same topic can invite either one of these people in. The words you use in your title will decide. The test I'm running today on this video: does this title name something a buyer would be attracted to or a beginner Betty? So we're looking for nouns, numbers, named tools, and named moments. I like to call these the wallet words. If you don't have any wallet words, you're not gonna attract Expert Esther. I promise you're gonna get the hang of this very quickly once you see me do this. Okay, first up, your portrait drawings are not capturing a likeness, and here's the most common mistake. So this one is almost perfect. We have portrait drawings, we have likeness, and we have most common mistakes. So we've got a concrete now, a named failure that her buyer is experiencing, and it's typed how a frustrated artist may be typing in their problem at 11 PM. So this title passes all the rules, but there's one thing that I would do to tighten this a bit. I would lead with the pain because right now the title is pretty wordy, and we wanna remember that YouTube titles truncate after about 55 characters. So we really gotta get to the point in these titles and make the titles hit the person's emotions. So you could tweak this to, your portrait doesn't look like the person, here's the common mistake. I think that's the best direction to go. Now why this is going attract an Expert Esther is because this person is already doing the portraits. She knows that she's not getting the likeness of the person she's trying to draw, and if she's having that problem enough times that she is searching it, then she is at the place where she's ready to solve her problem by buying a solution. Now, if this were something like the tools you need to paint your first portrait, that's a Beginner Betty. You see the difference between the two? The next title is How to Harvest Fresh Lettuce for Months. And then she also threw in there When to Plant Carrots for Fall Harvest. Now these are beautifully searched titles. We've got nouns, seasonal moments, exactly what a gardener would type. But here's the thing I can't tell just from your title. What is it that you are actually selling? If you are selling a gardening course, to gardeners, this could work, but this also does seem like very beginner gardener topics, which may be difficult on YouTube because it could be oversaturated. So what I would look for is, again, depending on your course, if it's taking somebody who started gardening but they'd like to do it better, get a little bit deeper with this problem. So with the lettuce one, you could say something like, why your lettuce isn't harvestable for months. Here's how to fix it. Something along that lines. But you see how that angle talks to somebody who has actively done harvesting lettuce, coming up with a problem that they can't harvest the lettuce month after month. Maybe it's dying, maybe it's not growing. I'm not a gardener, but that's how you're going to change the direction from a very beginner topic that may be oversaturated on YouTube for people who are maybe just dabbling with harvesting lettuce to somebody who's actively harvesting lettuce and having these problems and ready to pay for a solution so they can harvest lettuce every single month. The same thing with when to plant carrots in the fall. This is honestly something that they could chat GPT and find. And so you want to get into a specific problem that your ready-to-buy viewer would be having with carrots. Now on the flip side of that, again, that would be for people who are wanting to get better at gardening. If you are coaching people or have a course to help people start gardening businesses to like sell their harvest, these titles are going to attract hobbyists who will never buy the course or the coaching program you have that is made for people who are trying to sell a gardening business or trying to build a gardening business selling their harvest. You see how the difference plays in just the wording. So we can go from very beginner Betty to very saturated YouTube content to tweaking it just a little bit to getting out of that beginner level content and really hitting a specific pain point a potential buyer may have to also hitting a completely different person for a completely different offer. Now I wanna jump into what I see a lot is feeling titles. So this one came in, Why High Achieving Women Stop Trusting Themselves. As written, this is going to attract no one. The video behind it, the content and the information in the video may be amazing, but the problem is nobody's actually typing this in anywhere. Your buyer doesn't type into Google or YouTube or AI, I stopped trusting myself. She's searching the moment that that feeling caused her. So for example, the offer she didn't launch because she didn't trust it was good enough, or the pricing that she didn't raise because she didn't feel confident in that price point, or the third time she rewrote an email and still didn't send that email. So again, depending on your offer, which is so important when I work with my clients, which I'm gonna show you here in a minute, how I change clients' titles based on their offer, what you could change this video title to, you rewrote the email 3 times and still didn't send it. Here's why. It could be the exact same content about how high-achieving women stop trusting themselves, but now that's a specific event that your ready-to-buy viewer had last Tuesday instead of framework language. Okay, let's move on to the next one. How to know when it's a good time to take a break. And the other one that was sent in, how to know when it's time to hire help. This is the same issue with the last one, just a different flavor. So there are no nouns in this title. Break and help are not moments. They're kind of categories. To fix this title, you've got to ask yourself one question: what happened right before someone searched this? And we got to get specific because how to know when it's time to take a break could literally be when to take a break from working out, when to take a break from walking, when to take a break from your in-laws, when to take a break from school, when to take a break from work, right? It's so broad. It's not really calling out a specific moment that the person you're trying to attract to your offer would type in or be looking for. So a good title could be, you missed your kid's game for a client call, it's time to hire. That's a human title. Remember, while we wanna optimize for the YouTube platform, YouTube knows what your video is about the moment you upload it. It's really reading what you're saying in the video, but you've got to win the click by humans first. So we don't just want to put these broad keyword term search words in the title, but we want to really grab that human's attention. So you really want to think about the rule: if your title could apply to anyone, it belongs to no one. Okay, so the first category was like titles— we're almost there. The second category was leading with feelings and why we need to get away from feelings. And now the next category is around it depends. And then I'm going to show you exactly how I use information my clients provide me to really solidify the best titles for them. So Victoria said her title is, Your Vision Board Isn't Working? Here's Why and How to Fix It. So structurally it's strong. There's a promise, there's a fix, but the verdict really depends on who she's trying to get to pay her because vision boards could be for my 12-year-old daughter who loves doing them, a college kid, could be for a stay-at-home mom, could be for a corporate girly trying to really level up in her life. Right? And it could be for an entrepreneur running a coaching business or a course business. So we really need to make sure this calls out specifically who this is for so it brings people that really wanna buy your offer. And so without knowing your offer, it's hard to structure this particular title, but this title as is is going to attract a broad audience full of people that probably won't buy what you're selling. The next title is a mouthful, and before I say this title, just remember you wanna try to keep your YouTube titles to about 50 characters. As I mentioned earlier, it truncates on YouTube, and so if you're not getting the most important part of your title out in the first 50 characters, you're going to lose their attention and they're not going to click on that video. How to get board-ready proof that your sports program is actually developing future adults, not just keeping score. Now this is kind of the most specific title out of all of those that were submitted because board-ready proof is a phrase only real buyers are looking for. So this title is going to depend on whether your program directors are the buyers or the audience. And we also want to shorten this again so that it's to the point and it makes that viewer want to click on it. I would potentially change this to, is your sports program board-ready? Here's how to get the proof. I feel like not just keeping score is not really needed for this particular title. Again, if I have more information on your offer to really understand your ready-to-buy viewer, then maybe we need to add that. But it feels like the main pieces of this title are about board-ready proof and how to fix or what to do if you don't have that proof yet. Next, how to say no to your boss for extra work. So that is a real problem, but everything's going to hinge off of your ready-to-buy viewer and the offer you're trying to sell with this title? So are you gonna be doing career coaching for the employee or leadership consulting sold to companies? Because that would be 2 literally different titles then for 2 completely different audiences. You see how nuanced this gets and how important it is to make sure you know exactly what you want to sell on YouTube and who that person is that's going to buy that offer. So then you can structure your titles and your topics to attract that specific person for your offer. Now, the reason why it's so important for me to understand my client's endgame, their offer, and their ready-to-buy viewer is so that I can really get specific on these titles. As you saw here, I can give you a kind of direction for your titles and say what the titles are missing, but I can't say specifically what the best title is going to be without that information. So I want to give you an example of a client that I have. She sent this title, How to Grow Your Business Without Sacrificing Your Life. Now she has a coaching program for like spiritually minded entrepreneurs. So she's selling a coaching program. The reason why this title fails is because it could literally work for anyone— a single person, a married person, a dropshipper, a course creator— and you get thrown into that generic broad space of growing your business. We changed it to knowing who her audience is, who she's trying to attract. You're fully booked and your income is still capped. More clients was never the answer. It names exactly where her buyers are and is going going to repel those beginners naturally because they aren't capped out. Someone who isn't fully booked is going to scroll right by, which is the point. Now, another client of mine, she has a program for parents who are wanting to teach their children how to read. The title she brought, Not Every Struggling Reader Has a Disability. There are really 3 problems with this title. It answers its own question before anybody even clicks on it, so there's no reason to watch the video. It's literally telling you not every struggling reader has a disability, period. It's also kind of written in reader specialist language like struggling reader and reading disability, not what a parent would be searching or typing in at 11 p.m. So we changed it to your 7-year-old still can't read. Is it dyslexia? Because that age is the biggest factor to grabbing the right person. When we looked at her niche neighbors, their 2 biggest videos were what to do if your 8-year-old still can't read. And then there was a 10-year-old version as well. So that number, that age, is the hook of the title because that's where the panic sets in for the mom, is looking at how old their kid is and if they can read or not. As you can see, I can't give exact feedback on titles without having the full context because a title can only be judged next to the offer it's trying to feed. And the fastest way to do this is with my custom GPT. Here's what happens when I type these titles in. Look at that. It won't even give you any information. Because the first question is, what do you sell and what's the price point? The tool refuses to give you any feedback without knowing your offer because that is the test. Because who pays you decides whether an idea is Beginner Betty or Expert Esther. If you can't answer that question, no title on earth can save the video. ChatGPT is completely free. It's linked down in the pinned comment. It's at trenalittle.com/whoswatching, and it will make sure the next video you create has a title that will attract somebody for your offer. I want you to go run a title through that GPT and come back and share with me the before and the after title. I want to see the difference. If you shared your title idea with me, thank you so much for letting me share that. And if you wanna see how I work with my clients, just like I showed you here today, the one where I helped them get very specific with their titles because I understood their offer and their ready-to-buy viewer, watch the training that's on your screen right now because it walks you exactly through how I work with my clients help them set up a once-a-week video sales system here on YouTube.