00:00:00:00 - 00:00:16:11
Unknown
Okay. In this lesson, we are going to be looking through the TSP scripting template. If this is something that you would like to use for, of course, this is very much the place to be. If you are unsure about how it works, as I did in a previous lesson, you don't need to use this scripting template for the rest of the course.
00:00:16:11 - 00:00:34:17
Unknown
It's totally up to you, but for anyone who does want to use it, let us sort through how it works. So when you first arrive on the page, you will be met with this quite blank looking page. This big word duplicate here is just to remind you that you can't immediately edit the page and duplicate it into your own workspace first.
00:00:34:20 - 00:00:55:03
Unknown
So it'll be just in the top right here around this area. There'll be an option to duplicate it. We'll send it over to your workspace, so make sure you do that first and then feel free to delete the word duplicate from from your new template because it's now yours and it's going to be customizable specifically to you. So we have two different views here on the database.
00:00:55:03 - 00:01:13:13
Unknown
This is going to be where all your scripts live. You're more than welcome to adapt this in whatever way you like to build out, to do more with it. I've kept it fairly simple for now, but let's just get into how it works. So say you're starting on a new script. You would simply click here to add a new one and you'll see that's out of it with the status.
00:01:13:13 - 00:01:40:06
Unknown
Just an idea, because we haven't done anything with the script yet. The immediate thing to say is when you open the script itself, you've got two options. You can either create a preloaded education template or a preloaded entertainment template. These are broadly very, very similar, but there are frameworks that we are going to discuss throughout the course, which applies slightly differently to educational content and entertainment content, which is the reason that I have created two different versions.
00:01:40:08 - 00:02:04:16
Unknown
But let's just say we were doing an educational scripts. I will click on that and that will start generating that template. And while it's doing that, I just want to talk through the two different views that we've got here on the on this page. So we've got the list view here. If we create lots of different scripts, we can obviously see them appearing down the side here, but say we progress this first script through to a different stage of preparation.
00:02:04:16 - 00:02:34:07
Unknown
So we got just an idea and it goes to pre prep and writing, refining and ready to film. This is a very simplified version of your workflow potentially. There's a lot more involved. You're obviously more than welcome to edit the property once it is in your workspace. But let's say for the sake of argument that we've move this through to pre prep, this might be slightly overkill for you if you are really familiar with notion, but you can see we've got this status view over here and that will have moved this script across from just an idea into pre prep, which is great.
00:02:34:07 - 00:02:53:14
Unknown
And again, you can obviously move this stuff manually like this, You can move it across to writing, you can move it to refining. All of these idea cards can be moved basically wherever you would like. And you can see they obviously then reflect back in the list view. Wherever you've moved into it will show up as the same status in both views.
00:02:53:16 - 00:03:18:16
Unknown
So that's that. Let's open up the scripting template and talk about what you're going to actually get throughout the course and how you might want to use this template when writing your script. So we can see at the very top we've got a toggle here for pre-production. This is basically where I've talked all the kind of messy pre-production stuff away so that when you're writing a script itself, you're left with just what you need here to write the script itself.
00:03:18:19 - 00:03:38:13
Unknown
And we'll talk about all this stuff shortly. But I think I'll start with the pre-production stuff. So if we open this toggle, you'll see what we've got. So again, this will make a lot more sense if you're watching this before having taken the course itself, this will make a lot more sense as you're watching through to see what each of these parts of pre-production correspond to in the course itself.
00:03:38:15 - 00:03:57:24
Unknown
But I'll just talk through it very briefly here. So the very start the course will be talking about your one sentence idea. So you can write that in here. Then we'll be brainstorming your talking points. So this is a place to do that. You can add them to the bullet points here. You can have more bullet points just by typing something pressing entered, pressing into typing, surprising into.
00:03:57:26 - 00:04:20:20
Unknown
So that's a good way to do that. That's where you can brainstorm what's going to be in the script itself. There's also a little toggle here for some research prompts that is something we do talk about. And one of the lessons, it's absolutely not compulsory to use them, but if you were looking for a refresher, once you've learned those prompts, they are going to be living just here so you can refer to them whenever you would like to make sure we've got enough bullet points left in there.
00:04:20:21 - 00:04:37:29
Unknown
Nice. And then we're going to be identifying what I call the grand payoff of your video at some point. So that is going to go in this little red box here as a reminder. Then we move on to section three, which is framing. This is where we talk about once you have your one sentence idea, how do you approach that topic?
00:04:37:29 - 00:04:56:13
Unknown
How do you angle your approach to make it the most satisfying version of that video for your particular audience? Avatar So that's going to be in here. You can see we've got bullet points here where you can brainstorm different types of framing. I realize I'm sort of overwriting the putting on that, you know what typing looks like. I don't really need to do that.
00:04:56:15 - 00:05:18:24
Unknown
But on the side there are these framing criteria. So for each of your framing ideas that you come up with, you can check it off against this framing criteria. This is also something we will talk about in the course, but it's a way of checking that the way you're framing a video has been done in a way that is going to be the most engaging for your audience and it's going to make the best possible version of that video.
00:05:18:27 - 00:05:36:11
Unknown
So you can always check off your framing idea with the framing criteria. And once you've decided on which one fulfills the criteria the best, which approach you're going to move forward with, you can write that in here at the bottom. And again, sometimes during this framing process, you might realize your grand payoff is slightly different to what you thought it was going to be.
00:05:36:11 - 00:05:58:03
Unknown
So you can then update the grammar pay off in this box here should you wish. So now we will move on to the title thumbnail section. You might be surprised this is coming slightly later in the day than the received wisdom is when it comes to titles and thumbnails. We'll talk about this in the course as well. A lot of people would say the very, very first thing you need to do is come up with the title and thumbnail.
00:05:58:06 - 00:06:17:21
Unknown
But for me it's something that I can't do and I don't think is advisable until you've come up with the framing for the video. So that's why that lives here in Section four. So you've got this little table here if you type in a YouTube title, Hello, this is a title. You can see there's a formula here that calculates how long it is.
00:06:17:24 - 00:06:39:22
Unknown
If that formula goes over, I'm apologies If that title goes over a certain length, I think it might be 5654 characters. You'll get this little checkbox here that tells you the title is too long. That is just to make sure your title displays properly on all parts of YouTube, whether that is on your own channel or it could be coming up on someone else's home page or in the suggested bar down the side.
00:06:39:24 - 00:06:58:09
Unknown
This is a way of ensuring that the full title displays pretty much all over YouTube. And if you've got any notes on any particular title, like you think of a thumbnail idea, you can write that idea down here or whatever you like, whatever you need to make notes on. So that is your title brainstorming area. You can add more ideas below like that.
00:06:58:11 - 00:07:21:17
Unknown
So let's just remove those for now and then we come on to the thumbnail ideas section. So we have a section on the left here where you can paste inspiration from other thumbnails that you've seen. And then once you start drafting your own ideas, you can paste those here and these are just underneath these two toggles. So until those for now, then we come onto section five and once again this will correspond to a lesson in the course.
00:07:21:19 - 00:07:43:23
Unknown
But this is where you get really precise about making sure the video is going to contain the information necessary and in the way that it should be presented, that's going to engage your audience the most actively. So that involves thinking about who the videos is aimed at. That will be mainly your avatar, what objections they might have, what transformation they will have experienced at the end, and what is at stake.
00:07:43:25 - 00:07:59:28
Unknown
So we'll cover all of that in the in the course. But that's you can write your answers to those things here. And then the final thing before we get into writing the script itself is the section for structure. This is where we're going to talk about arranging your scripts, the kind of skeleton of the script before you actually come into writing it.
00:08:00:01 - 00:08:19:06
Unknown
That can be done here, and you've got three different options for how you present it. So it's really up to you. This again, will make more sense once you've got this far in the course, but you can either create that structure in a table like this, in a database like this, or quite simply you can do it free form and write it out in bullet points.
00:08:19:08 - 00:08:42:13
Unknown
So you've got those three options that now I'm just going to go back to the top and close off the pre-production section because that is basically all the preparation done. With all of that completed, you're ready to move on and start the script. So this is the main scripting area essentially. So you will have decided based on your title and thumbnail brainstorm which titles you're going to bring forward.
00:08:42:13 - 00:09:01:08
Unknown
So you might write Title A and Title B here for an AB test. When you first upload. That means essentially trying one title for a bit, seeing how it performs and then trying another title to see whether or not that performance better in terms of click through right or I suppose it could end up impacting watch time as well, depending on the expectations you set with your title.
00:09:01:10 - 00:09:16:06
Unknown
And likewise for the thumbnail, you might come up with one idea and then a different idea. So you can AB test those as well. At the very top here, something we're going to talk about in the course is the idea of progression pointers. I won't go into detail on that here, but this is the area where you would add in your progression.
00:09:16:06 - 00:09:36:22
Unknown
Point is what progression looks like in the video, what regression looks like in the video, and what emotion will look like in the video, and more details on that in the course. I think it's probably a bit too in-depth to mention here, but then we've got on the right the retention checklist. So this is once you have finished the entire script, I like to review my script with these four things in mind.
00:09:36:22 - 00:09:54:08
Unknown
So again, you've got these here for quick reference, meaning when you've written a script, you can check that you have addressed all of those things and then onto the actual section where you will be writing the videos themselves. This is the area for the hook. We've got a little framework here which is useful for remembering what I suggest when writing the hook.
00:09:54:10 - 00:10:22:13
Unknown
And we've got a checklist here to make sure the hook is clear enough, and then you can write your hook itself in this section. Head. Then we've got the value section. This is the majority of the script for the bulk of the information is going to go as a default. I've created three different sections here or segments, but you are more than welcome to basically highlight any segment and then copy and paste it to create more because your video might be really long or it could be shorter, in which case you can delete some segments.
00:10:22:15 - 00:10:44:06
Unknown
So with each segment, I like to kind of put an internal title for internal reference here, just so you know what the segments are about and will be adding in here. The idea of what the mini payoff is going to be for that segment. So it keeps you really focused on what the audience is building towards within this segment and down the side here, we've also got a checklist to make sure that payoff has been done efficiently.
00:10:44:09 - 00:11:02:23
Unknown
So you can see segment one, Segment two and Segment three are all exactly the same. And then just at the end here, I like to rewrite my grand payoff just to make sure once again, as I'm writing the script, I've got a really clear focus on what that grand payoff is going to look like. Then finally, we have this section here for the call to action.
00:11:02:26 - 00:11:28:25
Unknown
We do break this down in a formula, so I like to write the component parts of the formula in these boxes at the side here and then once you've written those down, you can then convert that to your finished call to action, which you read right here. So that is pretty much it for the tutorial on the script template, if you have obviously any questions about this, you're more than welcome to email me at any points or if you're in the community, you can obviously just jump in that.
00:11:28:25 - 00:11:43:00
Unknown
When I was preparing this course, I got a lot of emails like this one I'm struggling the most with my intro sections. Often I lose more than 50% of the audience in those first 30 seconds. Now, whether or not it's 50% that you're losing at the start of your video, it might just be 40. It might be less than that.
00:11:43:02 - 00:12:01:14
Unknown
Pretty much anyone that I've spoken to about this wants their retention during the hook to be slightly higher. It's reassuring in a way that there's lots of people struggling with the same thing, but this is still a problem. If you want to get that retention up, you're going to need to take action of some sort. The problem a lot of people come across is that they're not really sure what action to take after what some people would say.
00:12:01:14 - 00:12:17:12
Unknown
You should reaffirm the promise of the title and thumbnail as fast as possible. But then equally, the other people would say, you should slow down a bit so you don't seem like you're actively trying to retention hack the audience's brains. Then other people would say you should skip the hook completely and just get straight into the meat of the video itself.
00:12:17:15 - 00:12:34:19
Unknown
But before we answer, which of these things is the right thing to do? There's something even more important that we need to talk about. In fact, more important than anything else that we have to talk about, and that is figuring out who you're actually writing these scripts for. Who is it they're going to be watching your videos once you release them on YouTube.
00:12:34:21 - 00:12:48:26
Unknown
Now, this is very tedious to be known as an audience avatar, but I promise we've done the boring stuff in the previous lesson. I'm going to make this fun. That is basically what the point of this module is. So the only action item for this lesson is to download your audience Avatar template and I will see you in the next lesson.
00:12:48:26 - 00:13:08:15
Unknown
If you want your video to resonate with your viewers, you need to know who's watching. An audience avatar is essentially an attempt to distill the key characteristics of those viewers into an imagined persona. Of course, you're going to have to oversimplify this to a point, but really thinking this through comprehensively is going to be a key step in figuring out how to write the rest of the script.
00:13:08:17 - 00:13:27:12
Unknown
Essentially. Some channels will create more than one audience avatar because it might be too difficult to distill those key characteristics into just one person. Maybe you have a couple of different types of people that you know your content is reaching or that you would like your content to reach. Ultimately, it's up to you how many audience avatars you make, but I always really strongly recommend you make at least one.
00:13:27:15 - 00:13:43:26
Unknown
Sometimes it's going to have to. Maybe you'll make three. It's really up to you. And I understand that at first this seems like a bit of a headache to try and figure this stuff out. You have a flash of inspiration for a video that you want to write and you want to just sit down and write it. But coming up with the audience, Avatar is a crucial step before any of that stuff.
00:13:43:28 - 00:14:00:24
Unknown
Because I promise you, once that initial burst of enthusiasm for the idea runs out and you're left with just figuring out the nuts and bolts of the script and making those final tweaks to the script, knowing who you're writing for and who is going to be receiving the information you're giving them is going to reduce the number of options you have later on.
00:14:00:25 - 00:14:17:17
Unknown
It's going to reduce that decision fatigue that maybe you felt when you've written scripts in the past. So this is a really important step and we really can't skip it. I was saying as well, if you're ever doing paid sponsorships in your content, maybe this is something you're already doing or further down the line you're doing. Knowing who your audience are is essential for that kind of alignment as well.
00:14:17:18 - 00:14:36:12
Unknown
So let's first of all talk about demographics. So these are something I'm sure you're very familiar with. These are the basic characteristics of your audience. So it might be their age agenda, location, that kind of thing. And the good news is these are very freely available in your YouTube studio. So if you go to your YouTube studio, you can find out in the audience tab, all sorts of things.
00:14:36:12 - 00:14:53:24
Unknown
So you can see here we've got age and gender, we've got the ages and we've got where in the world they're from. So the very first thing to do before we move on any further is to go to the audience Avatar template, which you downloaded at the end of the last lesson. It's also available at the bottom of this lesson.
00:14:53:25 - 00:15:11:16
Unknown
If you haven't downloaded it and just fill in your audience demographics as much as you can. Again, using the YouTube studio to do so. I was saying at this point, if you have your own audience avatar already prepared, you're more than welcome to convert it across to this new template. But if you feel like you've already got this stuff locked down, there's no need to do so.
00:15:11:16 - 00:15:30:25
Unknown
But I would still recommend watching the rest of this lesson just to check. There isn't anything you've missed in building up your own avatar. So what can you actually do with this information? Why is it important to do this stuff? I basically want to give you some really practical examples and real world examples of when knowing this stuff actually impacts the script that you're writing and why it makes it easier.
00:15:30:27 - 00:16:00:15
Unknown
So at its core, it could be something very, very basic. Like if you know that your audience are old people who are on the cusp of retirement, you might make a video if you're in the finance niche called How to Budget during Retirement. But if you know your audience is young, mid twenties, maybe early thirties, people who are potentially entrepreneurial minded and you know, they're going to want to try and retire early, maybe in their forties you would write a video called How to Retire by age 40, starting with $0.
00:16:00:17 - 00:16:20:05
Unknown
But that's the obvious stuff. You kind of know this intuitively, knowing the age of the people and the gender and the demographic and the geographical location is important for for obvious reasons. But what I learned very interestingly from a guy called Jason Farmer, who is a student of this community, So go say hi and well done to Jason if you if you want to.
00:16:20:07 - 00:16:39:01
Unknown
He uses his demographics to go one step further. So I awesome about this and he said my audience is mostly men age 25 to 55. So I try to write directly to them. That's why I'll use cultural references that we all recognize stuff like the Iraq War. East Coast, West Coast rivalry, Lennon-McCartney, Wu-Tang Clan, that kind of thing.
00:16:39:01 - 00:17:05:12
Unknown
Just stuff they'll recognize. And so by understanding this stuff, Jason, not only tailors the broader topic of the script to this particular group, but you can even tailor his references and the language that he's using to hit that particular demographic. So we can make some creative choices based on the demographics alone. Now, before moving on, trying to fill out the rest of the demographic section, if you can, that includes marital status, occupation, job title, everything else within that section on the template.
00:17:05:16 - 00:17:29:13
Unknown
But if you are completely guessing, you're more welcome to leave these boxes blank. But if you can fit out, then that's probably a good thing. But something even more important than your audience is demographics and something which will impact the way you write your script more significantly. Are there psychographics? So let's talk about that now. Psychographics are literally your audiences psychological characteristics, summarizes their values and interests and their personality traits.
00:17:29:13 - 00:17:49:07
Unknown
It goes a lot deeper than simply where they live or what age they are. And by identifying these traits, you create videos that tap into that deeper emotional needs. And by doing that, you're more likely to be able to keep them watching your content for longer because you're more readily able to speak to them directly. So here are some of the sorts of questions you might want to ask when figuring out psychographics.
00:17:49:07 - 00:18:08:09
Unknown
And I should say, if you're using the audience avatar template, all of these questions and more are already on there with an explanation for why they are relevant and what they might impact in your script. But just as some examples you might be asking your audience what sort of language they connect with, trying to figure out what stage of their journey they're at, whether they're beginners or intermediate or maybe further along.
00:18:08:11 - 00:18:25:04
Unknown
Do they want to learn or simply be entertained? What kind of TV do they watch? Why their hobbies? Are they looking to take specific action from watching your content or simply to be inspired? What? Their pain points. Are they afraid of anything in particular? What's their ultimate goal? By watching your content and content from people in your niche.
00:18:25:09 - 00:18:39:12
Unknown
I should say this list is not exhaustive. It's just an idea of the sorts of questions you might want to ask, and hopefully that gets you thinking more creatively about the sorts of things that you can ask your audience to figure this stuff out. If you're struggling to fill this out because you're not sure who your audience is, maybe your channel is quite new.
00:18:39:16 - 00:18:57:12
Unknown
Maybe you don't have a big enough audience yet to gather the right data to figure this stuff out and fill the template in. If that's the case, you can simply write for your past self. Imagine what you two years ago would have found valuable from a content creator like you. Now think of the pain points that you had at the time, the things you wish you could learn, the things you wanted to know.
00:18:57:15 - 00:19:15:25
Unknown
If you write to that imagined persona that's going to find people who are on the same kind of trajectory as you, but maybe a few years behind, and it's going to be valuable for them. So if you don't have the audience yet, filling the audience Avatar template, using your past self as an example. Now, we've talked a lot about all these things that you'd like to find out about your audience Avatar.
00:19:16:03 - 00:19:25:20
Unknown
So the next natural question is how do you actually find that stuff out? How do you connect with your audience and figure out these bits of information That's all going to be in the next lesson. So thank you very much for doing this one, and I'll see you that.
00:19:25:20 - 00:19:42:06
Unknown
In this lesson, we're going to talk about how you actually go about gathering the intel on your audience that you need in order to fill out the audience Avatar template. What's saying again at this point, if you still don't have a big enough audience in order to fill this template in yourself, you can very simply model your audience avatar off of other people's channels.
00:19:42:06 - 00:20:00:19
Unknown
So let's talk about the first method for gathering this intel and something very simple, something you can do across different platforms. It's running polls often. You'll see this on Twitter. You can do it on your Instagram story, you can do it in your email, even set up a Google form and send it out to your newsletter subscribers or your YouTube subscribers, whatever.
00:20:00:21 - 00:20:27:12
Unknown
And this is something that people like Dunford use very effectively. And I'm going to explain basically how this is relevant and why it might impact the content that you make going forward. So in this example here, before each of his new documentaries, Donovan will always hype up the release with a question like this one. So he says, less than 2 hours until the new doc will you be watching on a computer the perfect time on a TV or immediately on your phone?
00:20:27:14 - 00:20:51:08
Unknown
And by getting this information, it might seem like it's not particularly relevant. Maybe it's just out of interest to see what the audience is doing, but by realizing that the majority of his audience are watching either on a computer or on a TV, I mean, literally waiting till the perfect time on their TV, This validates his decision to spend more time on the visuals and sound mixing and things like that, because the audience clearly cares about that aspect of the content.
00:20:51:11 - 00:21:11:16
Unknown
They're not purely there to put the video on quietly in their pocket and, you know, just have headphones in listening to it. They want a more immersive experience. Twitter and Instagram are one place that you can do this, but a lot of creators underutilized their YouTube community tab in a big way. And so this is another place where you're going to have the most concentrated portion of your YouTube audience seeing what you post.
00:21:11:23 - 00:21:29:08
Unknown
So if you want to go straight to the source and find out directly what people think about whatever it is to do with your content, or if you want to find out more about either where they watch or who they are or what their habits are, or what their goals are, anything like that. To get that answer directly, just go to your YouTube community section and ask.
00:21:29:09 - 00:21:46:19
Unknown
So now we're going to look at three additional creative ways that you can use polling to figure out where you should take your content next, what you should be doing in your scripts and what your audience wants. So the first is idea mining. So Mike Scheidt uses his community tab to figure out whether it's worth learning a particular skill in a video.
00:21:46:21 - 00:22:04:15
Unknown
Because after all, if 90% of people find something easy, then a 50 minute video about that thing will be boring for them. So we can ask, we can see. Rather here, he asks, How long does it take you to fall asleep? 69% of people say 30 minutes. 25% of people say 5 minutes and 5% of people say seconds.
00:22:04:17 - 00:22:21:25
Unknown
So when it turned out that 95% of people took 5 minutes or more to sleep, he made a video learning how to do it in 2 minutes. So that, again, just gives you a clear idea of what your audience is struggling with, what they might want, and whether it validates your decision to make a particular type of content.
00:22:21:27 - 00:22:42:03
Unknown
This other way here is topic framing. So a channel called Damien talks money, figured out that his audience has preexisting opinions on the topic of 100% mortgages were as follows. So he asked, Do you think they're a good idea? And more people than not said no. And so he then use that data to frame the approach of his video.
00:22:42:05 - 00:23:01:26
Unknown
And we can see here the title of this video is 100% No Deposit. Mortgages are a terrible idea. And again, that's only because he now knows his audience are going to respond to something like that because he knows he's speaking directly to an opinion that they hold about that topic. So again, topic framing is another really useful way that you can use your psychographics to make decisions.
00:23:01:29 - 00:23:25:09
Unknown
And then third is detail. So it might be something more nebulous that you're trying to figure out about your content, whether it's a personality thing, how you present yourself, or a way of presenting the content itself. Jenny Hoyos literally asked the question, What keeps you coming back to my channel? And when you scour the replies of that particular post that she did, the same answers are coming up repeatedly.
00:23:25:09 - 00:23:43:17
Unknown
So if we I basically do control FTC words that were coming up over and over again and the idea of work ethic kept coming up. You seemed like a genuine person with a strong work ethic. Your work ethic is entertaining. And again, that can just help to guide the direction of where the content goes next. The second method is email.
00:23:43:19 - 00:24:01:09
Unknown
If you have an email list, you have direct access to the most engaged members of your community because they've decided to take that additional step to sign up for your email list. Just as an example, when I was figuring out which way to take my newsletter, I did a poll asking my audience whether or not they would be disappointed if I changed direction.
00:24:01:11 - 00:24:22:02
Unknown
And it turned out 96.3% of people were more than okay with me changing direction. You have this exact same opportunity to ask your audience what they think about your content. And again, if you don't have an email list, I'm not asking you to start one. If you do have it, it's a resource that you shouldn't under utilized. The third and final method is something that is probably a bit more intuitive and is scouring the comments of your videos.
00:24:22:04 - 00:24:40:10
Unknown
So another really useful piece of advice I picked up from Jason Farmer, who we discussed earlier was this. He says, I read every single comment from all my most popular videos, literally every single comment. I'll make lists about all the common questions, concerns, objections and I'll just try to answer all the most common ones in the video itself.
00:24:40:12 - 00:24:58:15
Unknown
And you can very much see this in the way his content comes out. So he is very, very specific in his hook, in the way he calls out his audiences objections. Specifically here, he says, You are not going to need to master any extreme techniques. You don't need to have your rice on a portal to Hades. Everything in this video is adapted for the average home cook on a standard burner.
00:24:58:22 - 00:25:16:00
Unknown
And again, if you're trying something new, the comment section is another really good place to get validation on that new thing. When Ali Abdul started ramping up his Harry Potter references, people were going mad for it in the comments. And so that has become a kind of regular feature of his channel. Now you can start collecting these comments on a downloadable at the bottom of this lesson.
00:25:16:00 - 00:25:34:10
Unknown
It is the comment collection database if you want to. Again, that is non-essential, but it's just another way that you can start system systematizing collecting these comments and making a better decision later on about how exactly you tailor your content to the people leaving those comments. At this point in the lesson, I'm going to ask you to stop and basically engage with some of these methods we've talked about.
00:25:34:12 - 00:26:01:12
Unknown
You don't have to do all of these things at once, but I recommend literally right now minimizing the course, going on YouTube, going on your email, going on Twitter, on Instagram, whatever it is, and making this piece of outreach towards your audience to figure out a bit more about them, to just get that slight bit of clarity on who your videos are for may feel like something you've already done in the back of your mind, but forcing yourself to do this actively is going to just really sharpen the picture that you have of who you're talking to and your content.
00:26:01:12 - 00:26:23:14
Unknown
So now you've got your audience Avatar a bit more clarify is it's time to start working on a specific video idea. Now, we're not writing the script at this point, but we are going to be tailoring everything else in the course from this point forward to a specific idea. If you don't currently have any ideas for your next script, it's worth noting at this point that the course isn't about idea generation, but my piece of advice is just to generate 100 different ideas.
00:26:23:14 - 00:26:42:26
Unknown
One sentence ideas off the top of your head, maybe using chat or anything else just to get your ideas flowing and narrow down those 100 ideas. I guarantee if you genuinely take that step and go that far, you will have a diamond amongst all the other ideas that you can then progress forward in the course with. So once you've done that, I will see you in the next lesson.
00:26:42:26 - 00:27:06:25
Unknown
Let's be honest about something. Writing a YouTube script is really, really difficult. What can start out as a flash of creative inspiration can easily turn into a slog. And all of a sudden this idea that you were really excited about becomes something that becomes half buried in notion that you basically forget about and decide not to write. But there is a way to kind of step around this feeling of overwhelm that you get when writing a script.
00:27:06:27 - 00:27:24:16
Unknown
And it's something that I've called the four hat method. Essentially the one thing that I want to do, the only thing I care about when I'm writing a script is avoiding doing too many things at once. And so this basically avoids something that we call contexts, which is when your brain has to switch from one task to another.
00:27:24:19 - 00:27:39:02
Unknown
And in the process of doing that, there's a bit of lag each time. You have to go from thinking about, say, the structure of the script to exactly how you're going to phrase X or Y thing or vice versa if you're right in the weeds of a script. And then you realize actually the structure of the thing isn't right.
00:27:39:05 - 00:27:59:11
Unknown
Every time you have to make that switch between doing one or the other thing, your brain can become overwhelmed. You get decision fatigue, and the whole process just becomes a lot more stressful than it needs to be. So the way we avoid this is by doing something that I call stacking different tasks. What I like to do is imagine that every time I sit down to write, I have a different job.
00:27:59:11 - 00:28:18:07
Unknown
Essentially, or a different kind of intention with each time that I sit down. And so I think of these in the following way. The first job or the first hat that I'm going to wear for this is the artist hat. The second job is the architect. The third job is the writer. And the fourth and final job is the wizard.
00:28:18:15 - 00:28:34:23
Unknown
This is something I've talked about for a long time, these different kind of jobs that I assign myself when I sit down to write. But for the purpose of this course, I've broken them down into the modules that you can see down the side. So this one is brainstorm. The next one is structure, the next one is right and the next one after that.
00:28:34:23 - 00:28:51:26
Unknown
The final one for now is optimize. So if you haven't already done so at this point, download the whitespace scripting template. If you want to be using it, that's going to help you break down the the kind of structure of your script into these different roles. And once you've done that, I'll see you in the next part of the course.
00:28:51:26 - 00:29:09:24
Unknown
So in this lesson, we're going to be brainstorming the content that's going to go into your scripts. This is a fairly free flowing part of the course. Essentially, you're not having to be too specific with exactly how the script is going to end up. This is really a time to brainstorm and to get as many ideas down as you can as to what might eventually end up in the script.
00:29:09:26 - 00:29:34:05
Unknown
So the first action item I need to do you may have already done this is just to write down your one sentence idea. Keep in mind, this isn't the video's title. We're going to come up with that later on. This is just in a nutshell. What you think the video is going to be about. So for example, as I've gone through the course, I have written an example when I write one sentence idea, which is how Karen Drew made $400,000 from digital products in under two years.
00:29:34:08 - 00:29:51:14
Unknown
So again, that's not a catchy tightened YouTube title. That's just the the rough idea that I might want to make my script about. So write that down on the template or somewhere on wherever you're writing a script and then we can move on to the rest of the lesson. So as I said, this is really a free flowing section.
00:29:51:14 - 00:30:19:02
Unknown
This is art, not science. Try not to put too much pressure on yourself when you're brainstorming these ideas that are going to go into the video as a few kind of initial prompts. I would encourage you to think about when you're picturing this video idea, what are the topics that you are almost certain would need to go into that video if you're planning an entertainment video, for example, are there any specific steps that you know would need to happen in this video in the build up to that final payoff at the end?
00:30:19:04 - 00:30:36:28
Unknown
Are there any key moments that you intuitively picture being in the video, whether that's things that you would say or bits of B-roll or emotional peaks or emotional lows, anything like that that you could imagine fitting into this video, even if it never actually makes it into the final scripts. So just start thinking about that kind of thing.
00:30:36:28 - 00:30:57:27
Unknown
I'm writing those ideas down. What you can also do at this stage is some preliminary research using other people's videos. If you're completely stuck for what this video should look like, you can use other videos to inspire you. It's obviously fairly mainstream to model titles and thumbnails based on other successful videos, but you can very much do the same thing with the content of videos as well.
00:30:58:00 - 00:31:19:03
Unknown
So this can be done free form. You can just watch a bunch of content that's maybe in your niche or things that you would like to inspire, but we can also be a bit more precise with this using just a little bit of AI. And I know that might strike fear into the hearts of some people watching this, but this is very, very easy and I've got some prompts for you if you would like to use them.
00:31:19:05 - 00:31:38:24
Unknown
So we're going to just look at this example that I've got here of how you can use somebody else's video to figure out what should be in your video or maybe whether even some gaps in the market that haven't been covered by videos that exist so far. So step one of this process is you're going to search YouTube for videos like the one you plan to create.
00:31:38:26 - 00:31:56:22
Unknown
So in the example I've got here, let's imagine we're making a video around being more confident you might search how to be more confident in this case. I have landed online of Blakely's 14 easy things that made me a confident person. So on the text version of the lesson below, you can click to watch the video if you want.
00:31:56:24 - 00:32:24:00
Unknown
So the second step is to copy the videos transcripts so below the video. On the right hand side, you can click the three dots, choose to show the transcripts, and the transcript will appear on the right hand side and so what I like to do then to make this transcript easier to copy across because we're going to be using chat GPT for this is you will toggle timestamps off and then highlight basically the entire transcripts and copy it.
00:32:24:02 - 00:32:45:06
Unknown
Step three is you're going to be asking chat GPT or whatever, whatever you use for your AI needs to analyze it. So I suggest giving channel CBT the following prompts. I'd like you to analyze a YouTube video transcript outpaced below. I want you to analyze the tone, style and language used in the video and tell me the key takeaways for an audience who.
00:32:45:09 - 00:33:13:02
Unknown
And then you write a key feature of your audience based on the audience avatar that you've already created. So in my case, that is takeaways for an audience who struggle with confidence because we're looking at this. Yeah, this line of live video around that topic. Then after you've given it that you're going to paste the transcript that you copied below and try to get will analyze the script for features including tone, style, language, takeaways and anything else that you asked it in the original prompt.
00:33:13:05 - 00:33:33:08
Unknown
So you can see here you've got some pretty pretty good ideas immediately of those are those features within that transcript. And again, as with everything with chat, you know, everything in here is going to be useful, but it is going to give you more of an idea of what's working in other content and breaking down what those features look like.
00:33:33:11 - 00:33:49:19
Unknown
But then we can go one step further. So this is very useful. You can kind of bail out here if that's as much as you want, but if you are looking to find a gap in the market that this video didn't, yeah, something in the video that wasn't addressed, you can use chat CBT to do that too. So I suggest the following prompts.
00:33:49:21 - 00:34:13:20
Unknown
It's always good to thank the AI for its help in case it ever become sentient and malevolent. So I start with. That's great. Thanks. Now I want you to imagine you're a YouTube expert looking to find a gap in the market for a video like this, but one which stands out from other similar content. Considering the actionable takeaways you identified, what other takeaways or ways of thinking about the topic do you think this transcript was missing?
00:34:13:22 - 00:34:37:10
Unknown
So in my case, it came out with some good suggestions around embracing failure and learning from it. Visualization and positive self-talk, mindfulness and self-compassion, etc., etc. So it's worked out based on that transcripts. And keep in mind you can feed it multiple transcripts. Maybe you go through and find three or four different videos and the more transcripts you can feed the AI, the more it's going to come up with.
00:34:37:13 - 00:34:57:02
Unknown
Yeah, really, really niche things that maybe haven't been spoken about before, but that could be perfect for your audience. So whether you are using A.I. or simply brainstorming off your own back, this is the part to get all those ideas out. And remember, it does not need to make sense at this point. You're just spewing as many ideas as you possibly can at this point.
00:34:57:05 - 00:35:16:23
Unknown
So you can take a look on the written version of the lesson. Below. You can see my example brainstorm that I did for that. Kieran drew how he made $400,000 idea. The one sentence idea at the top. Feel free to look through that and you can see what I did in basically a 12 minute brainstorm. In my case, I didn't use AI for this.
00:35:16:25 - 00:35:39:13
Unknown
So yeah, you can see what that kind of brainstorm might look like when you are doing your own brainstorm. One thing that is useful to think about and is probably really quite necessary actually as we move forward is to have a think about what I call the grand payoff. So this is something we don't need to settle on yet, but the grand payoff is the ultimate thing that the audience member is going to be sticking around for in your video.
00:35:39:16 - 00:36:01:09
Unknown
And eventually we're going to have a great deal of clarity about what that is. In our own minds. You don't need to have absolute, crystal clear focus on that for now, but just to be thinking about what that ultimate thing might be. Based on your brainstorm, what would be the most encouraging thing or the most emotionally engaging thing that the audience will feel they need to stick around to watch your video to find out.
00:36:01:09 - 00:36:11:01
Unknown
So have a little think about that during your brainstorm. But otherwise that is it for now. Make sure you have done that. Brainstorm on the template or on your own document and I will see you in the next lesson.
00:36:11:01 - 00:36:26:28
Unknown
So you've got your basic bullet points down, and at this point they might still feel a bit random. But don't worry, we're going to give you a really comprehensive way to figure out how to delete certain things and keep the right things in. And then we're going to do that is to talk about how to frame your one sentence idea.
00:36:27:00 - 00:36:45:25
Unknown
So one thing that I got asked by one of our pre-launch students was when I'm exploring ideas to create, I find that there are so many possible avenues to go down and a lot of them often seem like viable paths. If you have a framework that can sort out the different angles and positions of framing, as we're calling it, of a script in order to find the best one, that would be amazing.
00:36:46:01 - 00:37:05:08
Unknown
And so that's what this lesson is really about. And it comes down to this thought that a good idea is nothing without proper framing. So we're going to make sure in order to ensure that your great ideas that you've come up with, don't go to waste. We're going to talk about how exactly to frame your idea properly. So some definitions to start off with.
00:37:05:08 - 00:37:23:23
Unknown
I've used these words idea and framing kind of cinema interchangeably, and I want to talk about what each means. So an idea is simply the topic of the video. It could be a person or a skill or a challenge or anything, really. So for example, I want to make a video where I discuss the BBC adaptation of Sherlock.
00:37:23:25 - 00:37:39:12
Unknown
Here's an idea. I want to make a video where I learn how to crack a whip is an idea. I want to make a video where I show people how to do meal prep is an idea. And you'll notice the key characteristic of each of these ideas is that they can be taken in an infinite number of different directions.
00:37:39:15 - 00:38:04:03
Unknown
Framing differs from this. This is where you choose a specific direction for your idea. So taking those previous examples, I'm going to explain why BBC Sherlock is bad and always has been. That's now a very specifically framed idea. I'm going to test how dangerous a whip is by trying to break increasingly difficult targets. I'm going to show students how to meal prep on a budget.
00:38:04:05 - 00:38:24:26
Unknown
Notice how now these ideas have been framed. They all have a very specific direction. In the previous lesson, we wrote down our idea and thought about a possible grand payoff. Or at least we talked about it a little bit. But now we need to confirm the grand payoff, and we need to make sure that that grand payoff is sufficiently strong to carry the audience from the very start of the video through to the very end.
00:38:25:01 - 00:38:44:28
Unknown
And we do this by framing the idea, the way I like to think about this is an idea once framed becomes the grand payoff. It's worth saying that your grandpa could be really, really obvious. Like if you're making a video about how to make really delicious meringue, the grand payoff will be. Now you, as the audience member, know how to make really delicious meringue.
00:38:45:01 - 00:39:03:22
Unknown
But if it's a video essay or a challenge video or something that could be a bit more convoluted, it might take a bit more creative thought to figure out what your grandpa is going to be. But that's where this four point checklist that I've talked about comes in. So the checklist as is as follows. The first point is I'm passionate about it.
00:39:03:24 - 00:39:23:20
Unknown
If you're not passionate about the video, you're not going to enjoy making it. There's no point running a YouTube channel unless you're having fun with it. The second is my audience will care deeply about it, and this can all be worked out with relation to the audience avatars that we've spoken about already. The third point is that it makes evokes an emotional response of some sort.
00:39:23:23 - 00:39:41:13
Unknown
So a video that doesn't pull on the emotional heartstrings of your audience in some way is going to feel hollow and there's going to be no reason for them to watch it. They need to feel emotionally invested. And the fourth is that it opens multiple curiosity gaps and can't simply be answered with a Google search in the interest of time.
00:39:41:20 - 00:40:04:24
Unknown
Often, if somebody can simply Google the answer to the question that you're asking or that you're answering, sorry, then they will simply Google it instead of spending 10 minutes watching you explain it. So it needs to evoke more than one curiosity gap. Now, let's look at an example of what this looks like in practice. A client of mine came to me with an idea that she wanted to make around the idea of Hollywood reboots, but she wasn't sure exactly how to frame it.
00:40:04:26 - 00:40:24:28
Unknown
So some thoughts that she had were we could maybe frame around why Hollywood keeps rebooting stuff. Maybe that would be an interesting topic. Or we could talk about the pros and cons of reboots in general, or we could talk about the idea of why we as audience members keep going to watch them. Now, these are all good questions, but they all create a slightly different version of this video.
00:40:25:00 - 00:40:57:11
Unknown
So let's talk through these three different approaches, these different ways of framing the video and whether they satisfy the criteria or not. So the first was the pros and cons of franchise reboots. She was passionate about it. Fair enough. That's something that she writes about in her channel. That is what it is about. Of course, she will be passionate about the topic, but we realize that her audience probably wouldn't be because the pros and cons of franchise reboot reboots are maybe a little bit obvious, particularly to her audience, who are already likely film buffs, people who are interested in that kind of topic.
00:40:57:14 - 00:41:18:05
Unknown
It's going to be fairly obvious what the pros and cons are, and as a result it therefore doesn't evoke an emotional response from her audience. Yes, it opens multiple curiosity gaps because it makes you think, okay, what are the pros? What are the cons? But because it fails, points two and three, this was not really the angle that we wanted to frame this video with.
00:41:18:07 - 00:41:40:22
Unknown
When we looked at why does Hollywood keep rebooting stuff? Once again, she's passionate about it. Of course, it's her area of interest. But again, her audience probably wouldn't care deeply about it because the answer is pretty obvious. And this is kind of the reason that it fails points to three and four. It doesn't evoke an emotional response and it doesn't open multiple curiosity gaps because the answer to why do they keep rebooting stuff is because they want to make more money.
00:41:40:22 - 00:42:04:21
Unknown
And that's something that's immediately obvious even to people who probably aren't that interested in film. But when we came to the third potential angle, why do we keep going to watch these rebooted franchises? The idea felt a bit more promising because immediately it opens up lots of different curiosity gaps. I'm thinking, Well, hold on. I know that these reboots are usually very bad, but why therefore do I keep on going to watch them?
00:42:04:27 - 00:42:29:25
Unknown
It allows us to potentially dive into ideas around psychology. I thought of the the Skinner Box experiment, which is a psychological experiment that was done on Dogs X number of decades ago, which potentially would be relevant to this whole discussion because it's all about our psychology and why we keep doing this thing. So that as we thought about it, satisfied all four points on the four point checklist.
00:42:30:00 - 00:42:49:24
Unknown
She was passionate. It would make the audience care about the topic. They would feel an emotional response, whether that is curiosity or frustration or some sort of just general wondering why they keep on getting hooked to go and watch these video, these movies, even though they know that probably on the balance of probability are going to be bad.
00:42:49:27 - 00:43:08:17
Unknown
So that's really all there is to it with your idea framed. The ground payoff then becomes very obvious. One thing to say about brand payoffs at this point, and this is something I've gotten a few questions about, is that they don't necessarily have to be a definitive or an explosive moment that happens at the end of your video.
00:43:08:20 - 00:43:27:10
Unknown
What we going to talk about in the next few lessons are these ideas of mini payoffs and these moments that happen throughout the video in the build up to your grand payoff. But often these mini payoffs are going to be more definitive and more explosive than the grand payoff at the end. Frequently, the grand payoff is simply the result of understanding everything else that's happened in the video itself.
00:43:27:12 - 00:43:48:00
Unknown
So if you're looking at your grand payoff and thinking, how do I make this like the big, impactful moment of the video, it's not necessarily necessary or relevant. It could simply be that the mini payoffs form the building blocks to create this overall understanding, which is what the grand payoff is. It doesn't have to be this big, crazy moment that happens at the end of your video.
00:43:48:02 - 00:44:08:11
Unknown
So that's just worth mentioning. In fact, we can look at an example here from developed where the result of his video about doing mobility stretching is simply realizing, based on what he's been doing throughout the video, the exercises he's been doing, how he's now feeling. So let's just take a look at that by the improvement in my car's routine isn't huge from day one to day 30.
00:44:08:14 - 00:44:29:04
Unknown
My range of motion has increased a little, and I'm doing a much better job at isolating each movement. Of course, this isn't an insane transformation, but it's realistic and it's a step in the right direction to moving and feeling better every day. So you can see from that video that again, there's nothing particularly crazy. It's just the summary essentially of what's happened in the in the video so far.
00:44:29:04 - 00:44:48:20
Unknown
And the result of how he's feeling, therefore. The actual point for this lesson is to either on the scripting template or on your own document, brainstorm the different framing angles that you might have for your one sentence idea and then choose the angle which best satisfies those four criteria that we've talked about. And as a result of that, you may need to update your grand payoff that you talked about.
00:44:48:27 - 00:45:14:07
Unknown
So just make sure once you leave this lesson, you have a clear idea of how the video is going to be framed and therefore what your grand payoff is. So there's one more step that we need to do before we start building out the structure of the script. We've identified the grand payoff. Now we need to make sure we can hone in on our audience because this great idea that you have now needs to be sold to the audience in a way that's going to get them to watch the whole way through.
00:45:14:08 - 00:45:17:04
Unknown
So I'll see you in the next lesson and we'll start talking about that.
00:45:17:04 - 00:45:36:25
Unknown
Now you've got your framing decided we can start talking about titles and thumbnails. Now, as we did reference earlier in the course, the received wisdom when it comes to titles and thumbnails is that you should think of them and finalize those before you do anything else. And while I broadly agree with this idea, I think making them the first thing you do is not always possible.
00:45:36:27 - 00:45:50:19
Unknown
I think once you've decided the framing, you have a much clearer idea of exactly what this video is going to be, and it makes it far easier then to come up with the titles and thumbnails. So that's why I'm talking about it at this point in the course. And this is where I personally recommend you start thinking about them.
00:45:50:21 - 00:46:08:03
Unknown
What's saying this course doesn't go into a great deal of depth on these two subjects, especially thumbnails. That is not my area of expertise titles. I've got a system that I use. It's possibly not the most robust in the world and that's why it's not the absolute focus of this course. I can highly recommend Jake Thomas and creative hooks.
00:46:08:03 - 00:46:27:13
Unknown
If you're looking to get really data-driven feedback on approaches to titles, however, it is definitely worth talking through the system that I use for my clients, and that's what we're going to do in this lesson. So the first thing you're going to need to do is to identify some successful title formats. These are titles that have been proven to work on other videos across YouTube.
00:46:27:15 - 00:46:49:16
Unknown
It could be titles that have worked on your channel in particular. It could be titles that have worked on your competitors in similar niches, or it could even be titles that have just worked for other YouTubers in completely separate niches. Ultimately, a good title format, if you compare that way with your idea, is likely to help improve the performance of your video overall when it's paired with a good thumbnail as well, of course.
00:46:49:19 - 00:47:20:23
Unknown
So how do we identify those outlier titles? First thing to say, a tool that I'm using at the moment is something called one of ten. This is something that shows you at a glance which videos are performing well on a channel relative to its current view count. So you can see in this screenshot here, we've got this channel from April nine where all the videos that are highlighted red 67 x 49.7 x 33 x, those are all performing that many times better than the channel's average.
00:47:20:25 - 00:47:39:09
Unknown
And so this is just a really quick visual way in order to see which videos are outperforming. And this works on your own channel and other people's channels. Worth saying at this point, this is a paid plug in and it's absolutely not necessary to continue with the course. You can simply just look through the channels and spot these numbers, see which view accounts are doing well visually.
00:47:39:15 - 00:47:55:29
Unknown
But this is a tool that I do recommend if you looking to just save that kind of bit of brain space when you're looking for those outlier titles, it's always worth checking. Once you think you've identified those outliers is confirming whether or not it is definitely the title that is causing those videos to perform really well or whether it could be another factor.
00:47:56:01 - 00:48:17:09
Unknown
So when looking at April in this channel, I noticed that there were a couple of titles that were going really, really well, which had similarities to one another. So this one from three months ago was a 67.2 X, and then this next one here was only a 3.6 x, but it was from seven months ago. And again at that time, April, it would have had fewer subscribers.
00:48:17:09 - 00:48:39:10
Unknown
And the fact that this video is still outperforming the average view kind of the channel and it's a much older video potentially indicates that there is something about this title format, which I have identified, as you'll see here, as how to do desirable YouTube thing in current year. Plus reassuring subheading. Something about this title format is clearly working wonders for her channel.
00:48:39:12 - 00:49:01:16
Unknown
So that's just an idea of how you can start to pick out those title formats that are working really, really well. So I recommend starting out with your own channel first, then doing channels that are in your niche and then doing channels that are outside your niche only because you can confirm with greater certainty that say a title that someone on your channel before speaks very directly and well to your audience.
00:49:01:18 - 00:49:21:19
Unknown
And then the same with channels in your niche. It's likely that people in your audience will find the same types of titles appealing and then it becomes a little less likely the further outside of your niche that you go. But it is still very much worth looking for those successful title formats and seeing if you can put your idea into that title format.
00:49:21:21 - 00:49:42:26
Unknown
What I suggest doing is doing this until you have around 20 to 30 different title formats, for which again, the joy of this is you can then re-use these title formats for multiple videos. So this is something that will benefit you going forward. You'll then have a bank of title formats that you know are really successful. The second step then is adapting your title to those formats.
00:49:42:29 - 00:50:08:12
Unknown
So you can do this either manually or like we did in a previous lesson, you can use some air to help you. So if we take an example video idea that could be explaining bad skincare habits that contribute to dry hands and how to fix this within 24 hours, if we look at two different title formats, one that obviously lends itself to this idea and another that maybe wouldn't obviously lend itself to that idea.
00:50:08:14 - 00:50:33:24
Unknown
We can see how this title, this idea can be ported into these two different title formats. So if we take the format, my evidence based exe routine, we can easily make that about having dry hands and skin care for dry hands by making it my evidence based hand care routine or something like that. But then if we look at another example, that might be why X are getting replaced.
00:50:33:26 - 00:50:53:16
Unknown
That doesn't immediately strike me as something that could be about skin care. But you can see with a bit of creativity, you can make that into why hand creams are getting replaced by unlikely alternative. And again, it's basically around the same idea. But we're now framing this topic in a slightly different way and that becomes a very separate video.
00:50:53:19 - 00:51:15:28
Unknown
So again, this is just a way of showing you that there are different title of formats that you can definitely be applying to your idea to create something that is potentially engaging for your audience. If you want to use chat CBT for efficiency, you can do so. Using this prompt is why tend to do you are a YouTube strategist planning a new video for, say, an optometrist who wants to go viral on YouTube.
00:51:16:00 - 00:51:34:15
Unknown
You've studied numerous type of formats and other channels that may have contributed to those videos going viral, and you have a new idea for a video. You want to go viral too. I'm going to copy and paste both the list of title formats and information about the new idea below, and I'd like you to use these to come up with 20 title ideas that all have viral potential.
00:51:34:17 - 00:51:58:21
Unknown
Please ensure the title as you suggest. All 56 characters or less, and adhere as closely as possible to the exact title formats. I'll paste below. Do you understand? Once it confirms it understands, I then give it a little bit of additional context. So the way I format my title formats is I'll use a little square brackets and an X to denote an area which should be replaced by your own video idea.
00:51:58:24 - 00:52:18:17
Unknown
And so I've told it in this example here. Keep in mind, anything contained within square brackets is part of the example format and should be replaced by actual words with the square brackets being removed. So once I tell it that, I then give it all of these example formats. You're welcome to take some of these. These are all title formats that are performed well across various different channels.
00:52:18:19 - 00:52:35:13
Unknown
Then I provide it with the video idea. I say we want to make a video about the risks to our eyesight associated with too much screen time. The video should appeal primarily to parents who want to ensure that children's eyes are protected. They should feel that by clicking on and watching the video, they'll understand exactly how to protect their child's eyes.
00:52:35:15 - 00:53:02:23
Unknown
We should aim to elicit lots of coercion from the viewers, seeing as the children's eyes are at stake. So you might want to take that prompt that I've got there and substitute in the types of things you want to elicit during in your video. And once you've done that, it will then come up with some fairly usable titles a lot of the time, which are now about your specific idea but substituted in to those title formats that we talked about.
00:53:02:26 - 00:53:25:11
Unknown
So whether or not you are using, I recommend coming up with at least 20 different title ideas that you like for this specific video. So maybe of the generated ones you think, yes, these two are the most likely formats I'd like to use. I recommend then taking those two ideas and coming up with around 20 or so different titles based on those specific ideas.
00:53:25:13 - 00:53:44:06
Unknown
That is the extent of my current system. That's probably not as in-depth as other people might go, but that's certainly something that's worked well for me in the past and I think the general principle of modeling titles and thumbnails based on what has worked is the way to go. So a little thing to say on thumbnails. As I said, this is not my area of expertise.
00:53:44:08 - 00:54:13:05
Unknown
Modeling What works is good advice to one piece of advice that I do really, really strongly encourage you to adhere to is not doubling down on using text in the thumbnail that you've also used in the title. This is a waste of opportunity. The thumbnail is an option for you to convey additional meaning or create further intrigue about your video and making the audience read the text twice, both in the title and thumbnail is just a waste of time for them, but that is basically the extent of my thumbnail advice.
00:54:13:05 - 00:54:30:14
Unknown
I recommend, you know, all the thumbnail people that you can possibly think of. My old client Ed from Film Booth is really good with this stuff, but there's also people like the thumbnail Rail, the thumbnail girl, Jay Alto, Jamie Whitman is very good for this stuff as well. There's plenty of people out there that you can ask about thumbnails, but it's not really the focus of this course.
00:54:30:21 - 00:54:39:13
Unknown
So the only action point for this lesson is to brainstorm your titles and thumbnails as we discussed in this lesson. And once you've done that, I will see you in the next one.
00:54:39:13 - 00:55:02:08
Unknown
So at this point, we have our grand payoff. We have our packaging pretty much sorted. We know what this video is roughly going to look like, and we do know what the viewers should be excited about. And the reason they should be wanting to stick around to the end of this video. But unless we can translate that knowledge and what we know we want to do onto the page in language that resonates with our audience specifically, then the audience isn't going to care and they're going to click away.
00:55:02:08 - 00:55:21:19
Unknown
So that's why in this lesson and over the next couple of lessons in this module, we are going to be talking about how to stay laser focused on your audience and what they want to hear from you during the process of the script. There are three things we need to think about, and these are the ultimate three things that really should play into how you write the whole script.
00:55:21:21 - 00:55:42:17
Unknown
But it's really particularly relevant when we're writing the hook, which is going to be something we do fairly soon in the course. So the good news about these three things is that we've already spent time thinking about two of them. And in fact, one of those things we're going to talk about in this lesson now. So the first of the three crucial factors to think about when targeting your avatar is Target.
00:55:42:19 - 00:56:01:25
Unknown
Who is it that we are writing this video for? We've spoken about this a lot. The good news is usually your audience avatar. There might be some occasions where maybe you are trying to reach an audience that goes beyond your audience avatar. Maybe you're trying to go viral with a particular idea and you know that you're consciously not targeting the people who would normally be watching your content.
00:56:01:28 - 00:56:21:03
Unknown
But this is the first thing to be aware of because mixing who you're addressing and feeling unfocused with, who you're talking to is going to make an audience member feel like you don't really understand them. It's going to make them much more likely to click away. So we must be crystal clear on who we're talking to so that you can translate onto the page when you address them.
00:56:21:03 - 00:56:39:29
Unknown
You can you can use language that really appeals to them directly. So as I say, terminology that is a really simplistic example of where knowing who you're talking to can come into effect. So if you're making a tutorial, say, and you're targeting beginners, you know that your terminology is going to have to a you're going to have to define more of it.
00:56:40:02 - 00:57:07:23
Unknown
You might be a little bit less jargon heavy. You might reduce the density of information to avoid overwhelming them. But if you know the person you're targeting is a little more experience, you might skip over some basic definitions and you might deliver information a little bit more swiftly. So this really, really matters because knowing what stage your your audience are at, for example, will really affect things like terminology, but it will also affect things like but you go really in-depth with a topic.
00:57:07:23 - 00:57:27:07
Unknown
So knowing what your audience actually wants from you, do they want simply to be entertained by what they're watching? Do they want to feel inspired, or do they want the really nitty gritty, step by step process through through what it is that you're telling them? And this is something when I was working with Ed, he basically said to me of a video we were working on.
00:57:27:10 - 00:57:56:11
Unknown
I think this is an inspirational story. I don't think we want nitty gritty details, but we want to make it something that anyone can get, no matter how little they know about business and also feel inspired from. So that was in relation to this Thomas Frank video, which you can click on in the text portion below to watch, but you'll see if you watch that video, this general feeling that we're not being really, really in-depth, we're not trying to show people exactly how by the end of this content, you will know how to make $100,000 per month.
00:57:56:14 - 00:58:15:16
Unknown
It's much more an inspiring kind of story for aspiring business people, for how they can start making more money from their content without it being too in-depth. One thing we also want to address when we are thinking about who we're targeting are the potential objections that they may have might simply be a preconception they have about the topic.
00:58:15:16 - 00:58:47:25
Unknown
Like, I bet I need to already be really experienced with HTML to understand this video. Or it could just be disbelief about the concept that you've promise in your title in thumbnail. While they think, no, this has to be clickbait or something like that. So let's think of a really basic example where say you're looking up a tutorial on your working with Final Cut Pro, and for some reason the sound isn't exporting whenever you render the video, let's imagine that you've already tried the obvious things you're already fairly familiar with Final Cut, so you've already checked the audio tracks aren't muted.
00:58:48:00 - 00:59:14:14
Unknown
You make sure the export settings are all good. There's nothing you can think of that is causing this to happen. And yet still there's a problem. So imagine how reassured you feel if you click on a video that purports to solve this problem and they start out in the hook by saying So you've probably already checked that the audio tracks aren't muted and you've already checked your export settings are X, Y, Z, You feel a sense of instant validation and a sense that whoever I'm watching, they've got me.
00:59:14:14 - 00:59:33:01
Unknown
They understand that I'm not an idiot, that I've tried these things and that there must be some of the solution for it. And I now trust that whoever I'm watching is going to deliver that solution because I feel like they've spoken directly to me and the problems that I am having, the objections that I had to potentially watching the video, the objections you're calling out could be even more nuanced than this.
00:59:33:03 - 00:59:57:09
Unknown
For example, this video essay titled How much More Star Wars Do We need? What I thought about this video is that the implied negativity of the title could easily give rise to an objection, like, Well, he's probably just a Star Wars hater. What does he even know? Which is why it's really useful that at the start of this video, this created Drew Gooden starts by saying this When I was a kid, I don't think there was anything I was more obsessed with than Star Wars.
00:59:57:09 - 01:00:15:02
Unknown
Star Wars, birthday cake, Star Wars, birthday costume, Star Wars, Darth Maul, Taco Bell, practically. And so you can see it by immediately addressing the fact that, hey, look, I'm not someone who just hates this stuff for no reason. I'm someone who used to really, really like this stuff. It curtails that possible audience objection to someone who might think, Well, I'm not going to watch this.
01:00:15:02 - 01:00:35:12
Unknown
He obviously just hates Star Wars. So when you understand your audience and you make them feel seen, it's much more likely that they're going to give you that time for the rest of the video. One question that I got when I was preparing this course was whether or not objection busting of this sort should ever become a key part of the video or whether it should all be addressed in the book.
01:00:35:18 - 01:00:54:24
Unknown
And I think to be honest, it completely depends, especially when it comes to longer video essay formats, it might be necessary to have a whole two three minute section on objection busting. So if we think of the example I gave earlier in the course of that Sherlock Holmes video that was Sherlock is garbage and always has been. I can't remember the exact title.
01:00:54:27 - 01:01:20:26
Unknown
It's a two hour long video essay and the same preconceptions might come up. As with the Star Wars example, we just looked at someone landing on that video. We're probably saying, Well, this guy just he hates he hates Sherlock or he doesn't like the source material or he doesn't like X, Y, Z, which is why that creator spends a whole three minute section talking about Steven Moffat and why it's a broader issue with how Steven Moffat writes things.
01:01:20:28 - 01:01:42:16
Unknown
This is not me passing judgment on Steven Moffat or anyone else. I'm just just describing the video. So it really depends. It might be the case that you need to do some objection busting that lasts for a much, much longer period of time. But I think broadly speaking, if you're doing a 8 to 10 minute video, it's likely that the objection should be sorted out in the hook because the audience needs to trust that I'm giving them this next 10 minutes of my time.
01:01:42:24 - 01:02:00:18
Unknown
Tell me now why why I should care. Prove to me that you understand me and who I am. So that is pretty much the summary of this section is who am I aiming at and what are their potential objections? So on the script template or on your own document, fill in the idea of who it is you're talking to.
01:02:00:18 - 01:02:07:26
Unknown
Probably just your audience avatar, but make sure you also listen. Potential objections they might have to watching your video. And when you've done that, I'll see you in the next lesson.
01:02:07:26 - 01:02:28:19
Unknown
So the second step in making sure you've targeted your avatar effectively is honing in on the transformation they're going to expect. So we've talked a lot about this already when it comes to the grand payoff, but this is just your opportunity to make sure you have a crystal clear idea in your head of all the ways in which they're going to be transformed and potentially which emotions you would like to draw out of them during the video itself.
01:02:28:21 - 01:02:46:27
Unknown
So in this session, we're just going to briefly talk about the difference between how this might look in an educational video versus an entertainment video. And then I'll briefly show you a prompt that you can use to figure this stuff out if you're struggling. So in an educational video, the viewer will usually experience what we call a material transformation.
01:02:46:29 - 01:03:09:23
Unknown
That is, they leave with knowledge or skills they didn't have before they watched. So it could be something simple, like now they know how much water to drink to maximize physical performance. In an entertainment video, it's slightly different. Usually they will experience an emotional transformation. They'll feel something they didn't feel before based on the transformation they saw the character experiencing in the video itself.
01:03:09:26 - 01:03:32:24
Unknown
So usually the character needs to change in some way during the video, whether that is a change in their mindset or perspective or fortune or physicality. And crucially, that change will usually be driven by choices they have made. What this allows us as an audience member to do is to watch those choices and see how it affects the character and resonate emotionally with what we're witnessing them experience on screen.
01:03:32:26 - 01:03:53:08
Unknown
So it could be something very simple, like they've witnessed an underdog winning unexpectedly, and they feel newly inspired now to take more risks in their day to day life. So make sure based on that grand payoff that you've identified, just write a few more lines on exactly how you would like your audience to be transformed by the end of watching your video and again, potentially focus in on some emotions as well.
01:03:53:08 - 01:04:18:02
Unknown
You'd like to to draw out of them if you are struggling with this. However, there is an excellent empty promise that we can use, which was suggested by one of my freelance students, Kay James. So go say hello to her if you're in the community. Thank you very much Mikko, for this one. This is really, really useful. So if you can't figure out the the emotions that you think the audience should should be drawn on during this video, you can say this to chat activity.
01:04:18:05 - 01:04:40:25
Unknown
I am writing a video based on the following question or topic and grand payoff based on these two components. What emotional transformation will viewers have experienced by the end related to the grand payoff? And then you highlight the question and topic. You tell it the grand payoff and you'll see tangible. It will give you a pretty detailed suggestion of different emotions that you can pull out of the audience.
01:04:40:28 - 01:04:53:01
Unknown
So the summary of this section is really figuring out what transformation will they have experienced. So make sure you write a few lines on that on the scripting template or on your own document, and I will see you in the next lesson.
01:04:53:01 - 01:05:22:13
Unknown
The third and final element you need to target when it comes to your audience is the stakes. You need to figure out why the transformation matters, why what you're teaching them in this video has a deep emotional resonance with them, and that will encourage them, in turn, to stick around and watch the video from start to finish. So we talked a little bit about evoking these emotions in the previous lesson, and by identifying stakes in this lesson, it's going to make those emotions much more easy to figure out and it's going to make it clearer which ones we should be targeting.
01:05:22:15 - 01:05:55:15
Unknown
So let's first of all look at an educational example. Usually if you're making an educational video, what is at stake is usually your life will be improved by what I am teaching you or your life now is worse. It's impacted negatively by not knowing X, Y, Z, whatever it is, and by thinking about these things and holding up a mirror to your audience, it encourages that emotional response from them while they think, Hang on, I could I could have this, or I'm currently missing this, or it could even be something like I can't believe X, Y, Z is happening in this industry.
01:05:55:18 - 01:06:15:27
Unknown
It draws that emotional response out or as an entertainment video is slightly different. Now let's say you are playing the character in your video. If you shoot videos and it's just you, you being the character, maybe some of your friends, the audience generally needs to understand what is at stake for you so they can reflect on how they would feel in your shoes in whatever scenario you're in.
01:06:15:29 - 01:06:34:05
Unknown
So it could be something like why does this challenge or whatever you're doing matter to you? How will you feel if you succeed or fail at this thing? Making sure you signpost those factors, What do you stand to gain or to lose during the video? Is there a point of tension potentially between you and one of the other characters in the video?
01:06:34:05 - 01:06:50:07
Unknown
If that's how you want to think of them? Because when the audience sees you or whoever's in the video experiencing those emotional ups and downs, it forces them to draw a parallel with themselves and think, Wait a second, I would never be brave enough to do whatever it is, or I can't wait to see how I do X, Y, Z.
01:06:50:10 - 01:07:14:06
Unknown
I can't believe he overcame ABC. So some of the most common stakes, let's say that can create an emotional response are the following. So we've got things like loss aversion. They want to avoid financial risk. Why? And for that, you could draw that out by saying something like If you've ever made X Financial decision, you're now at risk of Y.
01:07:14:08 - 01:07:35:25
Unknown
Maybe it's desire that we want to evoke. They want to learn how to be so happier without massive time input. So you could say I found a way to be happier by practicing this two minute exercise every morning. So again, it brings out that sense of desire. It draws that emotion out to them. And a third example could be just curiosity that you want to know whether he will be okay.
01:07:35:27 - 01:08:04:14
Unknown
An example there is I buried myself alive for 50 hours for a week, whatever the more up to date version of that video is these days. One thing to be very conscious of when you're thinking about these stakes is going to surface level. So identifying a surface level stake for an audience member might get their attention slightly, but it doesn't speak to any deeper underlying fears or needs that when you can target those things that make them much more likely to be properly engaged and to watch you throughout the video.
01:08:04:17 - 01:08:26:04
Unknown
So a surface level design will be something like money. You might think that money is the thing that's at stake if you're doing a financial based video or or it could be a challenge video, whatever it is. Money feels like an obvious thing that everybody wants more of. And so that's that's going to be what's at stake. But if you want your viewers to feel seen, you need to understand why the money matters to them.
01:08:26:07 - 01:08:43:20
Unknown
What does it unlock? What is it about money that creates that deeper emotional need? And usually it's something like the fact that it buys comfort or status or your own time back, something like that. That is what actually matters. When we feel like we want more money, it's probably because we want more of one of those things instead.
01:08:43:22 - 01:09:01:12
Unknown
And when you can speak to that underlying desire, you're much more likely to keep people hooked. So I want to look at this example from creates called Abby Connick. And if we watched just the first 40 seconds, I'm going to show you what I mean about this idea of stakes and how she effortlessly calls them out in this video.
01:09:01:15 - 01:09:27:12
Unknown
And we don't want that. We want our businesses to be flourishing with a constant stream of clients whilst we get to be super creative doing what we love, all while earning lots of money to create freedom. Now. Right? So this is something I have spoken about in the past. I think this hook could have been just a touch shorter overall, but what the hook does really, really well, particularly towards the end, is it calls out those deeper things that are at stake.
01:09:27:15 - 01:09:48:05
Unknown
And you can see here, I've got the transcript of this, and each new collar represents a layer deeper in terms of the stakes that we're talking about. So she says, we want our businesses to be flourishing, cool with a constant stream of clients. Even better, while we get to be super creative doing what we love. But it's still all earning lots of money in order to create freedom.
01:09:48:08 - 01:10:03:18
Unknown
And I've written this out in this way here because it essentially shows what you can do to figure out what these underlying stakes are is often to keep asking why. So they want a constant stream of clients. Why? Because they want to have a thriving business. Why do they want that? So they get to do more of what they love.
01:10:03:18 - 01:10:23:16
Unknown
But why is that? Because they want to make more money. Yes, but why? Freedom. And this is something I really, really encourage you to do. If you have identified the stakes already, maybe you've already thought about them in your head or they've come to you quite intuitively, is to think about if you try and break it down, if you ask why they want that thing or why that thing matters, can you break it down any further?
01:10:23:18 - 01:10:42:07
Unknown
So that is broadly or we need to talk about. You can see the effect on this retention graph after 30 seconds. It was doing really, really well. So that's just a little sign that figuring out those elements and being able to translate those into the hook is really, really important. But we're going to talk more about hook writing in a couple of lessons time.
01:10:42:07 - 01:10:48:05
Unknown
So the only action for this one is to think about the stakes writing down. And once you've done that, I'll see you in the next lesson.
01:10:48:05 - 01:11:03:06
Unknown
So the summary of this whole section now we've broken it down, it's often actually easier to zoom out and think, What does this all mean overall when taken together? What are we trying to achieve? And this is something that I call the do they get me test all you want your audience to feel when they're watching your video.
01:11:03:06 - 01:11:26:29
Unknown
Particularly the hook is to think, yes, this creates a gets it. They understand me. I feel seen. You want them nodding along and thinking it's like this creator has seen into my brain. And so I really want you to just basically go back over the three things we've talked about. Target transformation stakes, and make sure that that is creating a comprehensive picture of the type of person you want to address, what it is that they want and what's at stake for them.
01:11:27:01 - 01:11:54:14
Unknown
And one additional way to make this slightly easier is to use a storytelling technique which is fairly simple. It simply called life before and after, and you'll usually get this in educational initiatives, maybe tutorials. So while thinking about your audience Avatar, it pays to consider whether a personal anecdote might help draw them in by sharing your own journey and struggles with the problem your transformation solves, You establish a sense of empathy and trust with your audience.
01:11:54:16 - 01:12:14:07
Unknown
They will see themselves in the old you and aspire to be the new you. And this usually works best in the hook, but it can also be used repeatedly throughout the scripts just to keep them engaged. But remember, this is one thing that I have often had to sort out when I've been doing script reviews is make sure your personal anecdotes don't become the main focus of the video.
01:12:14:09 - 01:12:33:11
Unknown
It should serve as a window into the topic. But if you talk about yourself for too long, the audience is going to stop feeling seen. They're going to stop feeling like you understand them, and it's going to see more like an opportunity for you to just just talk to them, basically. But that's just an additional way to think about how you can draw those emotions out of your viewer and make them feel really seen.
01:12:33:14 - 01:12:52:16
Unknown
So the only other thing for this is just to make sure you complete Section five on the script template or basically go back over these things on your own document, make sure they're all okay with the option of adding in that storytelling technique that we just discussed. So with that done, I will see you in the next lesson where we are going to talk about creating the structure for your script.
01:12:52:16 - 01:13:06:25
Unknown
So the very last thing we need to do before writing the script itself is to establish the script structure. At this point in the course, you should have a fairly clear idea of where the script is going, where the grand payoff lies, and the things about your audience that you need to know in order to write a convincing hook.
01:13:06:28 - 01:13:21:20
Unknown
But it's this section in between how you get from the start to the end, where creators often feel the most stress and feel that they can make the most mistakes. After all, this is where the majority of your video is going to be, and you have lots of occasions where you could choose either the right or the wrong thing.
01:13:21:22 - 01:13:36:07
Unknown
And the point of creating the structure at the start is to reduce that feeling of decision fatigue later on. And so you're very, very clear on how you get from A to B to C, to D, etc.. So a piece of terminology I'm going to be using a lot throughout this lesson is the idea of a mini payoff.
01:13:36:10 - 01:14:05:11
Unknown
This is essentially a tool that you can use throughout your script to drive tension and create little extra bits of gold for your audience before they get to the end of the video itself. So that's something I'm going to talk about a lot in this lesson, because if you imagine the idea that you've made, say, a 15 minute video, if your audience has to wait 15 minutes for any kind of payoff or for any resolution of tension, they're either going to get bored or just uncomfortable if it's just really, really tense the whole time or if they're just not learning anything the whole time.
01:14:05:13 - 01:14:23:23
Unknown
So figuring out these mini payoffs and how to plot them throughout your video is a really essential step. And that's what we going to be talking about in this lesson. So a mini payoff, crucially, should open and resolve a curiosity gap. What I mean by that is say you've opened up a piece of curiosity at the end of your hook.
01:14:23:26 - 01:14:41:17
Unknown
The first mini payoff should resolve that bit of curiosity and then immediately set up the next one. And the reason for this is that the audience needs to know all times where they are within the overall structure of this video. One of the really, really common reasons that people will leave a video is when they feel like they don't know where it's going.
01:14:41:22 - 01:14:59:16
Unknown
If they're not sure what's going to happen in the next side, 60 seconds of the video, it can be easy to lose sight of what the grand payoff is. Whereas if you are constantly driving that tension by reintroducing a little payoff throughout the video, it allows them to remain engaged and to know exactly where the video is going at all times.
01:14:59:18 - 01:15:18:28
Unknown
So to show you this in context, I want to look at an example from James Johnny. This is his video on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of X and in this video, if we imagine the grand payoff, it is essentially to understand what the hell happened with that whole situation, what happened with Sam, what happened with FDX, how it all came crumbling down.
01:15:19:00 - 01:15:39:25
Unknown
But the way James breaks this video up and the way he creates these mini payoffs throughout is with a puzzle based metaphor. He imagines a jigsaw puzzle, and he literally has graphics on screen showing this as well. He creates little pockets of understanding that unnecessary little jigsaw pieces from which by the end you have this full picture of what's gone on.
01:15:39:28 - 01:16:02:00
Unknown
And each of those jigsaw pieces contains the set up and the resolution of one of these many payoffs. So to show you this in action, I'm just going to show you a little clip from that video and I want you to just really notice is the sense that as he comes to the end of one section, you'll see how very quickly he sets up the next section.
01:16:02:03 - 01:16:34:16
Unknown
In other words, you're looking at $5,000 profit per trade sitting on the table. It was practically free money. Just one problem. There were far too many obstacles in the way. So I hope that was fairly clear from what you saw, that that is the resolution of one subject. And as soon as he's finished talking about this idea of $5,000 worth of free money per trade, he immediately makes it clear that the next section is going to be about the obstacles that are then in the way to him being able to continue doing that very illicit thing.
01:16:34:18 - 01:16:49:15
Unknown
And so got some quotes in the text portion of the lesson, which you can see here. So that was the example I just showed you at the bottom. But there is this other example here where we see him say, Sam went on to become the sixth largest US political donor in the two years leading up to the midterm.
01:16:49:18 - 01:17:11:17
Unknown
But his political ambitions started to rub people up the wrong way. I hope you can feel that intuitive sense of like, okay, we're now entering a new section and I know what I'm going to be learning during that next session. So a really useful way to visualize this idea of mini payoffs are with this diagram. That's J class from Creative Science, very kindly created as part of an interview that we did.
01:17:11:19 - 01:17:31:10
Unknown
So you've got the hook at the very end, you've got the grammar, sorry at the start, but the grand payoff at the end. And then these nodes in the middle, they represent the many payoffs that we need to be setting up and resolving throughout the video. So let's look at another example. And this time we're going to talk more about this sense of what happens in between each mini payoff.
01:17:31:12 - 01:17:52:28
Unknown
We're going to take an example from John Harris. This is a video that he did in 2023. And in this case, I've broken down the moments where he sets up a mini payoff, the portions where he's then driving tension as we near that mini payoff and then the resolution as he then hits the mini payoff. So let's just take a little look here.
01:17:52:28 - 01:18:15:11
Unknown
In fact, I think we'll start by watching the video itself. We're just going to first of all, look at this very first section here. So this is the second mini payoff in his video. We're going to have a look at this section here and just see if you can feel what I'm talking about when you watch it. Unsurprisingly, there's a whole industry dedicated to just laying down these cables and then monitoring them and repairing them when they break.
01:18:15:13 - 01:18:39:29
Unknown
Sometimes they get broken by fishing trawlers or anchors or natural disasters. Sometimes they even get broken by sharks, though that's pretty rare. But sometimes these cables are broken on purpose. Okay. So that is a very, very brief section from this video. And that basically constitutes this section that is highlighted just here. So in the set up for this mini path, we are told that undersea cables sometimes get damaged.
01:18:39:29 - 01:19:08:06
Unknown
That's the set up. We know that's what we're going to be hearing about now. Then there is some tension driven as Jonny discusses some infamous instances of where this has happened. And the resolution of that section is that we now understand this idea that cables can sometimes be broken. But what is really key to understand and what is similar to the James Jonny example is as soon as he has resolved many pay off to, he sets up mini pay off three by revealing that some countries will damage these cables deliberately.
01:19:08:09 - 01:19:29:14
Unknown
So once again, there is there's no void. There's no gap in between each two. We as audience members are immediately clear on where the video is going next. And that is really, really crucial for an audience member to stay engaged with your video. One way that we can make this even easier is by creating frameworks. And this is something that you will see across YouTube, whether it's educational or entertainment.
01:19:29:14 - 01:19:50:17
Unknown
It happens all over the place. And this is a further way, right from the hook of showing your audience exactly what the structure of this video is going to be. So they never feel lost within that structure. So it's something that Ali did a lot when I was working with him. He comes up with things like the Trident calendar system or the lazy productivity system and how to build the ultimate productivity system.
01:19:50:19 - 01:20:09:03
Unknown
This idea of a system is really pleasing to our brains because it gives the impression that we can achieve our goals just by implementing something that is quite regimented and quite simple to understand. But you'll see it in other content as well. We've got it here with Elizabeth Phillips right from the start. She's setting up what the the structure of her video is going to be.
01:20:09:06 - 01:20:33:10
Unknown
We see it in entertainment stuff here with Mike Sheik telling us exactly what he's going to be doing in this video. More examples from Ali. We've got an example from Nico. It's everywhere. And so this is something that I really encourage you to think about. If there is a way that it makes sense to implement some sort of framework into your video and to establish what that framework is going to be early on, it makes it far easier for the audience to keep track of what's going on.
01:20:33:13 - 01:20:58:11
Unknown
And then throughout the video, you can basically keep them oriented as to where they are within that overall structure. But the golden rule when it comes to these mini payoffs is as follows Set up tension resolution. You need to make sure as you resolve each character gap for each mini payoffs that you set up the next one, and that the audience is then driven towards the resolution of that mini payoff with tension.
01:20:58:14 - 01:21:20:25
Unknown
So that's pretty much all we need to talk about in this module. What I'd like you to do at this point is to go ahead and plot out the structure of your scripts. This could be as simple as simply writing what the mini payoffs are going to be, but you can go one layer deeper and go with what we've discussed here, where you write the set up for the second mini payoff is this This is how we're going to drive tension as we move towards the resolution of the mini payoff.
01:21:20:25 - 01:21:36:17
Unknown
Is this really up to you how much detail you want to go into? Probably the more the better overall. But as long as by the end of this lesson, you have created the full structure and you know how you're going to get from your hook to your grand payoff, then everything is good. So I'll see you in the next module.
01:21:36:17 - 01:21:53:11
Unknown
Welcome back to module four of the course. We are finally going to start actually writing the script. I'm worth saying at this point, we have already covered a lot of stuff and I appreciate some of this could have been quite intense and there's quite a lot of new information, and this is a fundamental re-imagining of the way that you write your scripts.
01:21:53:19 - 01:22:11:07
Unknown
So if at this point you feel like you've already learned quite a lot and you'd like to spend some time implementing those things and trying them out more and more just to make sure that you've really nailed those things that we've already talked about, then this is a jumping off point. You are more than welcome to write your next scripts, just using everything from modules 1 to 3.
01:22:11:09 - 01:22:27:27
Unknown
You can even write your next two scripts or three scripts or have them any one just up to that point. But when you are ready to carry on, we're going to talk about the writing process itself and we're starting off with the hook. So we've identified our target transformation and stakes and the challenge now is quite a simple one.
01:22:28:02 - 01:22:54:02
Unknown
We have to translate everything that we've identified into that hook. What I found with the hook is that it forces you into a corner. If you can really clearly draw on those factors that we've already learned about our audience and inject those really clearly into the hook, that means you are actually reducing the number of options that you're going to have down the line because you've essentially locked yourself into the type of video that you have promised in the hook itself.
01:22:54:04 - 01:23:12:19
Unknown
And because of all the up from work you've done, this is going to be a lot easier. But the first thing to do before we decide exactly how we're going to write the hook is to figure out which hook type we are going to be using. This is something that may not be relevant every single time you write a script, and it may be something that is quite intuitive based on the type of content that you're making.
01:23:12:24 - 01:23:32:00
Unknown
But certainly from some creators that I've worked with in the past, I'm going to talk about some examples. Your hook could end up being a fundamentally different style of hook depending on what type of video you are making. So let's just talk a little bit about that. So you might need to create a different hook type depending on your content buckets.
01:23:32:03 - 01:24:00:27
Unknown
So a content bucket is essentially a different category of video that you are making. So for example, a fitness channel might have one content bucket around specific workout regimes and another content bucket around cultivating a healthy diet, for example. And depending on what you're making, you might need a different hook type. So to take a real life example from when I was brought in to do some consulting with Ali Abdul, we talked through the channels hooks and specifically how they would need to be different depending on what Ali was talking about in a given video.
01:24:01:05 - 01:24:15:06
Unknown
So we realized that when he was just doing a simple listicle, the hook that was required was quite minimal. There was no need to address the fact that he was a doctor or any of this other stuff because the audience already knew from the title and thumbnail what the video was about. They didn't need that kind of reassurance.
01:24:15:06 - 01:24:40:17
Unknown
They just wanted quick, punchy payoffs. However, when Ali is talking about something a little bit more unusual, maybe something around the idea of gut health or something like that, that's not immediately evident why his audience of productivity enthusiasts or, you know, general life improvement nuts, why they would need to know that kind of thing. And so an example that we've got here from that particular script is he says it turns out that your gut health doesn't just affect your digestive system.
01:24:40:17 - 01:24:58:05
Unknown
It also affects your physical health, like your immune system, your mental health, including how well you can concentrate and you can see just by threading in that extra layer of how well you can concentrate. We've now linked this to something that is probably going to be more relevant to the productivity enthusiasts for whom that is a very important trait.
01:24:58:07 - 01:25:15:21
Unknown
So that just shows you an example there of where it needs to be. Maybe made clearer depending on the topic, why the audience should care. And then when we came to the more science related topics, which I suppose could include gut health, but it would also include sleep and maybe skincare routine, that's where we would need to bring in the full Hello.
01:25:15:21 - 01:25:34:03
Unknown
I was a doctor for X number of years. That's why you should listen to me. That's why you should care about this video. So you can see that just three different examples where depending on the context, the hook type would need to be different. And just keep in mind at this point, the way you approach your hook will affect the DNA of the entire video.
01:25:34:03 - 01:26:02:03
Unknown
So although it may be self evident from the video you're making, just keep in mind a little five minute window just to think about this and to think about what is the best type of hook that I could make for this video before you move on to actually writing it. So we're going to just talk about a couple of different storytelling techniques as a part of this lesson, just to give you a bit more of a clear idea, maybe inspire you in terms of the direction you should go, in terms of which hook type you go with.
01:26:02:06 - 01:26:27:08
Unknown
So we're going to, first of all, talk about something called in media Rez. So this is a style of work where you begin in the meat of the action and then you draw back and you eventually catch the audience up to what they saw at the very start. So it's a way of injecting a really fresh layer of excitement right from the start and then building curiosity out of the fact that, you know, how did they get that and what the how did they get to this exciting moment or whatever.
01:26:27:10 - 01:26:47:14
Unknown
So we've got examples of creative that is really well. So we're going to look at Michelle Carr. First of all, her works usually contain very, very little context, and they use this in media as a format essentially in order to generate the most curiosity possible. So if we just watch the first minute of this video for Michelle, hopefully you will see what I mean.
01:26:47:21 - 01:27:18:00
Unknown
We cannot be considered human anymore. What we are are Butler's coming here to the number one bottling school. It's almost surreal than you might think is faster, faster, faster, faster. Pop, walk, walk, walk. Now we are coming to the place where it starts to be fun. We strive to comfort others. We do it at such a high level that butlers are not normal human beings.
01:27:18:00 - 01:27:57:23
Unknown
And do you just feel like you're behaving like someone you're not? Even if someone in my family dies tomorrow, I have to put a smile on my face and work like the other days. What? Okay, so that gives you a really clear example of that type of hook where we get almost no context, but we start right in the meat of the action and it's much more inspiring than to watch the rest of the content to figure out just what the hell's going on.
01:27:57:25 - 01:28:18:29
Unknown
But then to take a similar but opposite example from Eric, his hooks usually contain full context, and what he tends to go for instead is a curiosity from disbelief. So rather than curiosity from not knowing what's happening, we see exactly what's going to happen. We just can barely believe that it's going to happen. So you can feel free to watch that video.
01:28:18:29 - 01:28:37:10
Unknown
I don't want to take up too much time in this lesson. Looking at that, but we've got the transcript here as well, just to show you what that looks like. So do take a look at the lesson below if you wanted to take a look at that one. So the way to use this is identify a moment in your script, which is more likely to open a curiosity gap than anything else for the viewer.
01:28:37:12 - 01:28:56:06
Unknown
Usually this will be a moment just before a mini payoff. So we talked in the last couple of lessons about this tension that you're driving as you move towards a mini payoff. Usually those moments of high tension are the ones to try and inject into the hook, and then you simply display those moments during the hook. So the next one we get to talk about is metaphor.
01:28:56:11 - 01:29:20:00
Unknown
This tends to be used more in the educational niches, and it's a way of basically conveying your understanding much more easily. So we did talk a little bit in a previous lesson about this idea of creating different frameworks and metaphors are a kind of tangential way to make it much clearer for the audience what they're going to be in store for and to convey your explanations in a way that is more mentally recognizable for them.
01:29:20:03 - 01:29:42:02
Unknown
So the Go to God of YouTube metaphors is, of course, Ed from Film Booth. This is one of his videos which demonstrates the use of a metaphor really, really well. Early on, 5% of YouTube channels don't grow is because of the YouTube chain and why one of the five links breaks, the whole thing falls apart. So ends your child's false growth.
01:29:42:04 - 01:29:56:05
Unknown
And suddenly, by the end of this video, many of you are going to realize that the reason the growth of your channel is so static is because you've only been focusing on this part of the chain. It's going to be that bit I'm afraid of two link chain is useless. Scooby-Doo would never have been able to help bad guys with that.
01:29:56:08 - 01:30:23:06
Unknown
Well, luckily you're also going to learn the system to use to fix this, just like these two channels did. But before we get into that, let's reveal the biggest problem you have right now, which is the fourth link on our chain making videos. So again, that's another really super easy to understand example of where this chain metaphor makes it very clear not only what is going to be talked about in the video, but it makes the explanation of each of those points much more digestible because it's broken down into nice little chunks like that.
01:30:23:09 - 01:30:39:06
Unknown
The way to use that, like I've kind of just said, really, is to break your script down into its core components and see if you can create a metaphor or a framework around that thing. And the third and final example of a technique which can be used in your hook, which is again quite easy to understand, really, is the idea of using a direct question.
01:30:39:08 - 01:30:55:08
Unknown
So in this interview that I did with Jay Clouse, he starts the video by showing an example of a script that I wrote for a booth, and then immediately after playing that clip, it cuts back to J. And he says, Do you see what he did? That I think, Is that right? Yeah. Do you see what he did there?
01:30:55:08 - 01:31:13:06
Unknown
So that's something, again, directly engaging with the audience through the camera is a much more effective way of making them tune back in If their attention is tied to wonder. When you ask them something, it's much, much harder for them to ignore. You. Naturally, they're going to start questioning if they can answer the question that you've just posed to them.
01:31:13:06 - 01:31:30:03
Unknown
So make sure you include that If that is something that is relevant to your type of content, it's a very effective way of getting engaged. But how do you check whether this stuff is working? Is the next kind of question that comes up. It's like figuring out, Well, I want to be trying these different hook types. How do I know if I'm getting them right?
01:31:30:06 - 01:31:48:14
Unknown
And a really quick, simple way in your analytics to check on how your hooks are doing is to go to the analytics and click on the content tab and you get this little diagram here which will show you your above typical intros and your below typical intro. So you can see which interests are keeping people hooked and which ones are not.
01:31:48:16 - 01:32:04:25
Unknown
And you can then start to piece together an idea of, yeah, which hook types maybe are working, which hook types are not. And that's a really good piece of advice to keep on looking at this this particular screen as you go throughout your YouTube journey and continue making videos. So that is it. In terms of the hook types.
01:32:04:25 - 01:32:09:25
Unknown
In the next lesson, we're going to be talking a bit more about actually writing it. So I will see you that.
01:32:09:25 - 01:32:24:18
Unknown
So we're now ready to start writing the hook. But for one question, and it's a question I get sent all the time, and that is how long should my hook actually be? After all, as one student of this course put it to me, you're supposed to get straight into the meat of the script so that people don't abandon.
01:32:24:25 - 01:32:41:19
Unknown
But then equally, you're supposed to compel them to watch until the end and give them every reason possible to make sure they stick with you. So which is it? And where in the middle should we be aiming for? Should the hook be 10 seconds long? 20, 30 a minute? The issue is there isn't really a right answer to that question.
01:32:41:20 - 01:33:00:26
Unknown
How long should Mike Huckabee? Instead, I want you to reframe this idea in your mind and ask two different questions instead. Firstly, is my hook clear? And secondly, does every sentence have a reason to be that? And these are the two things that I want you to really, really focus on, because they are the more relevant questions to writing this book.
01:33:00:29 - 01:33:26:29
Unknown
So if you think back to the previous lessons, we've identified our target transformation and stakes. Happily, these are the three elements of any hook that you should be focusing on as long as every single thing within your hook adheres to that three step formula target transformation stakes. Then it doesn't really matter how long your hook is. You just need the self-awareness to go back, look at the hook, and figure out whether it contains those elements and those elements only.
01:33:27:00 - 01:33:51:08
Unknown
We're going to talk a bit more about that in this lesson. As we said, target transformation stakes. This applies really, really perfectly to education and edutainment type content. It's usually one. This is my target audience, too. This is that desired transformation. And three, here's what's at stake for them. It's slightly easier if you're making an edgy, an entertainment based video to reframe this as character concept stakes.
01:33:51:11 - 01:34:12:25
Unknown
Again, the same sense of transformation will still happen within the audience because of what we talked about. Re mirroring what emotions they're witnessing on the screen. But it's just slightly easier when it comes to writing the hook to say, to break it down like that. These are the characters. Here's the concept. Here's what's at stake. So let's just take a look now at a couple of different examples.
01:34:12:25 - 01:34:35:13
Unknown
One educational and one entertainment based, two vastly different hook lengths. Just to show you these concepts in action. So we're going to start with this video from Ali, which is called Why You're Always Tired. So if we break it down into those component parts, the target is Ali's audience. The transformation is they will learn to sleep better. And what is at stake is without these lessons, you will be tired forever.
01:34:35:18 - 01:34:53:25
Unknown
So if we take a look at this transcript for this video, you can see our marks it like this target is in green transformation is in orange and snakes are in red. This hook could have been a lot shorter in my opinion, if you look at the sections in white. These are the bits that don't really cover any of those three segments.
01:34:53:29 - 01:35:11:22
Unknown
However, the video is doing very, very well. So it's still an interesting example to look at because this is quite a long hook, but it's performing very well. I think it's got like five, five, 6 million views at this point at time of recording, at least in click on this bit lower down in the text version of the lesson, just to read that through in full.
01:35:11:24 - 01:35:28:21
Unknown
But if we look ahead to a entertainment video, this is Zuko. I faked my grandpa's at the top of Fashion Week. We can break it down like this character is the granddad. The concept is, is it possible to get anybody to the top of fashion Week? And what's at stake here is he is a fraud. Will he be discovered?
01:35:28:24 - 01:35:47:27
Unknown
And if we take a look at the transcript of the hook for this video, it is much, much shorter. You can see the target is one. In this case, it would actually be the character is this is a granddad. The concept is he's dressed head stone awful clothes from Wisconsin. So why is it getting mobbed by paparazzi? And what's at stake is he's not famous, he's not a model.
01:35:48:02 - 01:36:17:13
Unknown
And he's at the biggest fashion event of the year, which really elevates the sense of stakes that we've got going into this. And you can see very clearly that is a much, much different length to the look we were looking at from Ali's video. So that is the way to break these things down. What I want to do now just to finish off the lesson is to show you a made up example of how this might look in terms of going from identifying the target transformation stakes or character concept stakes and how you then transform that into an actual hook that works for a video before you go ahead and do your own.
01:36:17:16 - 01:36:34:04
Unknown
So let's imagine we have got a target for this video. Is unemployed men in their early twenties who don't know what careers they want to pursue. They like the idea of buying a house, but it feels like a pipe dream right now. This is obviously a very, very simplified version of an audience Avatar, but just something I made up when I was writing the course.
01:36:34:07 - 01:36:57:06
Unknown
The transformation they want is they want to have a clear direction on which jobs to pursue, and they want to know how to make themselves ten times more likely to get hired by adjusting to crucial things on their resume. Rather, that's the transformation this video promises. And the stakes for this imagined video that I'm writing is that I am aware they don't want to spend hours getting their resumes up to scratch, only to apply for a job that fills them with dread Monday to Friday.
01:36:57:08 - 01:37:16:10
Unknown
However, they know the alternative is to remain unemployed, feel directionless, which in turn puts their ability to own a home in jeopardy. So this is the process broken down into these three steps. But I want you to remember, when you're writing your hook is that you don't simply have to write the hook itself in this order. You can start to integrate them all into each other.
01:37:16:13 - 01:37:39:16
Unknown
So in this next example here, you can see in like just normal text represents the target. If it's in italics, it represents the transformation. And in bold is the stakes so that those three component parts transform into this hook, Your toes can fill overwhelming big dreams, like owning your first home are often contrasted feeling contrasted with feelings of direction business that won't seem to go away.
01:37:39:18 - 01:37:57:01
Unknown
So there were really honing in on the target, and there's a little bit of stakes at the end where it's like this feeling will go on forever. Which career should I pursue? Well, I make enough to save a deposit. What actually motivates me more on the target? Just calling out those things that they're probably feeling in this particular target demographic we're going for.
01:37:57:04 - 01:38:16:08
Unknown
But until you answer those big questions, it's almost impossible to plan out your future, hang them hard with some stakes. And then lastly, we end with the transformation that the video promises. So in this video, I'll show you how to discover the ten jobs most suited to your personality and how making two simple tweaks to your resume will make them ten times more likely to hire you.
01:38:16:10 - 01:38:32:16
Unknown
So I do recommend just going down into the text portion, having a look at those bits just so you can see how I'm transforming the three step framework into a hook. But that is pretty much all we need to talk about in this lesson. So the only action point for this one is to go ahead and write your hook.
01:38:32:18 - 01:38:54:12
Unknown
I firmly recommend writing it out in the three component parts first, then trying to transform it and an interesting way to make sure the hook is the right length. Once you have transformed it, once it's the full final hook is to go back through it and highlight all the sections that represent target transformation and stakes. And if like on the transcript we saw from Alli, there are lots of bits that aren't highlighted.
01:38:54:14 - 01:39:07:04
Unknown
It might be an indication that your hook is too long, so make sure to trim those bits out before moving on to the next lesson. In that lesson we will be looking at clarity and how to make your hook even more clear for your audience once you've written it.
01:39:07:04 - 01:39:29:11
Unknown
In this lesson, we're going to be talking about some of the main roadblocks to creating a clear and engaging hook. These are the things that I see over and over again in the script reviews that I do. And now that you've got your finished first or second, maybe third draft of your original hook, these are the things we now need to check for to ensure that your hook is going to be as engaging as possible and get the most number of people you can onto the rest of the video.
01:39:29:13 - 01:39:53:24
Unknown
So the five things that you need to be aware of are as follows Jargon, repetition over explaining unreasonable assumptions and excessive credentials. So let's first of all talk about jargon. This is where I want you to really think about how much you are trying to sound clever in your hook rather than simply trying to be clear. To be clear myself, this is not a debate around whether you need to dumb down your scripts.
01:39:53:26 - 01:40:10:15
Unknown
Nobody's saying that. And in fact, I'm very much keen on the opposite approach trying to make your audience feel smart. But that doesn't look like just throwing in the biggest words you possibly can during the hook to sound intelligent. That's much more the approach that you would have if you were writing an essay or maybe a presentation or something like that.
01:40:10:18 - 01:40:30:16
Unknown
For the sake of a YouTube video, we're looking to be engaging and using overly verbose language. Kind of like the word verbose is not something you want to necessarily be doing during your hook. So an example of that from a script review I did here is that in I think literally the second sentence of this hook, a script said or a writer rather, wrote in that script.
01:40:30:18 - 01:40:45:19
Unknown
This can be hard to accept a first as a sort of moral irony in it. And this was just much too early in the script to be throwing in that sort of jargon. It wasn't totally clear what it meant, yet it just sounded more like an essay and like they were trying to be clever. So keep an eye out for jargon like that in the hook.
01:40:45:21 - 01:41:05:01
Unknown
The second thing to talk about is repetition. Every sentence in your hook needs to fight for its place. That's obviously true of the entire script, but especially true during the hook, especially if there are some particularly unforgiving people who are watching your video who are almost on a dime ready to just leave if they find something to be on engaging.
01:41:05:03 - 01:41:22:28
Unknown
Hearing the same information more than once or feeling like their time is being wasted is not going to encourage them to watch the video. So I suggest you go back over your script and go in the hook specifically and check if you are repeating yourself or taking even two or three sentences to say what you could have said in one.
01:41:23:00 - 01:41:52:09
Unknown
And again, this really comes with a bit of time. It comes with a bit of self-awareness. Eventually, once you've written hook after hook after hook, with this stuff in mind, you can keep on checking back on your analytics, see how the retention is doing, and it will start to give you a clearer picture in, okay, when I reduce the number of sentences from 10 to 9 or 10 to 6 or whatever it is, I notice people stick around for longer during that hook and oversimplified way of looking at it, but I think it's something to just keep an eye on in your analytics AB Test different ways of writing your hook.
01:41:52:10 - 01:42:12:13
Unknown
Try and simplify things where you can try not to repeat yourself and see what happens to your retention. The next thing to talk about is over explaining, so don't over explain to a viewer why they might be interested in a topic during the hook. Yes, we want to raise the stakes. We want to illustrate the transformation they're going to get.
01:42:12:15 - 01:42:29:22
Unknown
But spending ages and ages and ages doing this starts to push things a bit far and viewers can start to realize, okay, like I get it. I know why I'm here. I've clicked this video for a reason. Thank you. I'm aware of what's at stake, but there's no need to continuously tell me over and over again what's at stake, what the transformation is.
01:42:29:26 - 01:42:49:15
Unknown
Once you have illustrated it once or twice, the next thing to talk about and you can actually at this point, I should say, check down on the text version of the lesson. I've got the edited version of the transcript we talked about with Ashley's video down there, so you can see how I would have edited that to reduce those instances of over explaining.
01:42:49:17 - 01:43:11:24
Unknown
The next thing to talk about are assumptions. So while we don't want to overexplain anything, we also don't want to assume too much prior knowledge from the audience. After all, if you are writing about a topic that is very, very familiar to you, it might seem like certain things are obvious. But if you are skipping over key bits of information that the audience needs to know and you're not telling them that in the hook, they're much more likely to leave.
01:43:11:26 - 01:43:34:11
Unknown
So an example from a video that I reviewed began like this. This is Cassie, who gained £63 of muscle in one month with this exact workout. But how? The problem was, I didn't intuitively know how difficult gaining £63 of muscle was without being told. Now, against people who are in that niche, it might be clearer, but this video had a kind of broad appeal.
01:43:34:11 - 01:43:52:11
Unknown
It was more like a documentary style thing. And again, without being told initially, like, I get the feeling that that's a lot. That feels like I'm sure that is a lot. And as I now know, that is very, very difficult. But to me, everything that happens in the bodybuilding world seems extreme and difficult and something that I could never, never achieve.
01:43:52:13 - 01:44:11:10
Unknown
And so it just needed to be made slightly clearer, maybe by saying what the previous record was or something like that. Just to give a bit more context to why this is such a difficult thing to do. So now we're going to go into the fifth and final thing to check for in your hook, and that is the idea of a credential dump.
01:44:11:13 - 01:44:31:21
Unknown
So we spoke about in the previous lesson the idea of hook types and that maybe some types of hook, some types of video might require you to state your credentials if it's relevant to the video itself. But sometimes creators can rely on this too heavily. And the reason this is a problem is that there are basically two scenarios where someone has landed on your video.
01:44:31:23 - 01:44:57:23
Unknown
Either they are a new viewer and go they mainly don't care who you are or what you do. They're just here to because they've been piqued by curiosity based on your packaging. And now they want to get into the video and find out what's going on. The other example or the other scenario is that it's a returning to you who already knows who you are and what you do, and therefore spending a minute or 30 seconds or whatever banging on about what you've done in your past isn't something that's going to be engaging.
01:44:57:23 - 01:45:17:18
Unknown
So in either scenario, try and limit how much you talk about your credentials, but if it is necessary, please do it. But just mind you, don't go on about it for too long. So that is it for this lesson. The action point here is just to go over the hook that you've written with this clarity checklist in mind and make sure it is not falling afoul of any of those five things.
01:45:17:20 - 01:45:19:16
Unknown
When you've done that, I'll see you in the next lesson.
01:45:19:16 - 01:45:39:07
Unknown
Now we finished writing the Hook. It's time to get on to the rest of the scripts. This was saying, at this point, this is another jumping off point in the course. If you feel like you'd like to spend some time practicing getting your hooks right, maybe writing a few more scripts, implementing everything we've talked about thus far, that is absolutely fine and you're welcome to come back to this point in the course when you feel ready to progress further.
01:45:39:09 - 01:45:58:03
Unknown
So in this lesson and going forward, we're now dealing with the rest of the script. We've got the hook sorted out and on the near horizon we can see this ground payoff that we're trying to get to. Now we just need to figure out the most effective way of getting from A to B to C through all those mini payoffs to get to that grand payoff at the end.
01:45:58:06 - 01:46:15:00
Unknown
Now, we are briefly going to cover some stuff we've already talked about. We have already spoken a fair bit about how you plot those mini payoffs out. One thing I would like to suggest at this point and the main kind of action point for this part of the course is to ensure that you do have those mini payoffs plotted out really, really firmly.
01:46:15:02 - 01:46:41:18
Unknown
Initially, if you only plotted out the payoffs themselves, I would encourage you at this point to try expanding them slightly. And as I did mention in a previous lesson, doing payoff one set up payoff, one tension and payoff one resolution. So splitting up each of those payoffs into its component parts so you know how you're going to be setting up what the tension looks like as you drive towards the resolution and then the resolution itself, what that looks like for each of those mini payoffs.
01:46:41:18 - 01:47:06:00
Unknown
So the text portion of the course at this point mainly goes back over some of those points. So I would just encourage you now to make sure that it is really firmly established in your plan. So the one thing to say at this stage regarding if we zoom out slightly and we're looking at this scripting portion as a whole, is that payoffs are one of two things you need to worry about when you're trying to get from the hook to the ground payoff at the very, very end.
01:47:06:02 - 01:47:20:22
Unknown
So payoffs are one and the other one is progression. And we're going to move on to progression in the next lesson. But if you can keep these two things in mind, payoffs and progression, the two P's, that's all you really, really need to worry about in order to make your way through the quagmire of the middle of the script.
01:47:20:22 - 01:47:42:04
Unknown
So payoffs and progression. So let's talk a little bit more in this lesson about payoffs now. Now you've established those mini payoffs. You've got the set up, the tension, the resolution for each of them. And we're going to talk a bit more about them. So one thing to address is that it can sometimes feel like the introduction of these mini payoffs is almost a way of delaying giving the audience what they're actually here for.
01:47:42:11 - 01:47:56:16
Unknown
It feels a little bit like we're kind of being a bit sneaky and trying to make them watch the video for as long as possible just to drive up our watch time. While that is sort of true to an extent, the whole point of this medium is that we are trying to make our content the most engaging way we can.
01:47:56:21 - 01:48:15:23
Unknown
We are trying to leave the viewers of an impression with an impression of this video that sticks with them and maybe makes it easier to take on board the information I've gained or to experience that emotional transformation that we've talked about previously in the course. So there really is no no shame and no harm in approaching the script this way.
01:48:15:25 - 01:48:34:12
Unknown
This is just a way of creating some sort of building blocks for the viewer to learn piece by piece in order to experience that brand payoff in its fullest sense. So these are the two ways that you can kind of approach many payoffs. Either it is, as I've just said, this idea that at the mini palace, they're like little bricks.
01:48:34:19 - 01:48:57:20
Unknown
And the grand payoff is the wall that they get by the end. In this case, they need to understand each brick in order to understand the wall at the end. So each piece that they learn throughout the video, each mini payoff builds on the previous one and allows the viewer to experience the the overall transformation. And without those mini payoffs, perhaps they wouldn't be able to understand the full context of the video itself.
01:48:57:22 - 01:49:17:23
Unknown
The second way to approach many payoffs is that they are themselves an interesting enough intrinsic CLE that the viewer cares about watching each of them and that there is no temptation, even though they don't technically need to watch all of it in order to understand what happens at the end. They feel compelled sufficiently that each minute payoff is interesting on its own merit.
01:49:17:25 - 01:49:39:21
Unknown
So so now we're going to look at what this looks like in context by talking about a storytelling technique that is called signposting. Now, signposting is essentially establishing for the viewer what we have established for ourselves in terms of the many payoffs. You may know very clearly now what your mini payoffs are in your script, but unless this is illustrated to your audience, it's very easy for them to get lost in the ebb and flow of the video.
01:49:39:23 - 01:49:53:21
Unknown
And I want to remember that a confused audience is a bored audience, even if you've set up a really compelling hook. If they start to get confused after the first minute or 2 minutes and they don't know where this video is heading, it's going to be so much easier for them to start to think, I'm not really that fast.
01:49:53:21 - 01:50:18:22
Unknown
I got 100 other videos I could watch right now. I could go watch Netflix, I could go play football, I could do whatever. And they're much more likely to leave if they start to feel like they haven't got a clear grasp on where they are and what's going on. So the first example of this I'm going to show you from an educational perspective, and this is one of those instances where each of the many payoffs builds on the last one and allows the viewer to eventually understand the full picture.
01:50:18:24 - 01:50:42:16
Unknown
This is an example from creates a booth that is called this stops 90% of YouTubers making money. So the grand payoff for this video is that viewers will learn how to avoid building a YouTube channel that never makes any money. And the many payoffs that are established very early on are that each of the traffic lights in this picture represent a necessary step to understand first, before the viewer will understand the grand payoff.
01:50:42:19 - 01:51:04:02
Unknown
And so we can see here the early introduction of that metaphor and the fact that that signposts what the many payoffs are going to be makes it much easier to grasp on to what is going to happen in the video itself. So we can see by this transcript here, Ed says the following And most people totally ignore the red light and then they fly straight into the green and wonder why they end up with a car crash.
01:51:04:02 - 01:51:23:23
Unknown
Usually business with no ability to make any sales. So what are these lights I'm talking about and how can you use them to become a full time YouTuber with a really strong business? Well, they work like this. Watching this, I completely understand where I'm at and where this video is going. And then again, he re signposts. This idea of the metaphor further on.
01:51:23:23 - 01:51:40:21
Unknown
About a minute later, he says every single one of your goals will affect the next two stages of the traffic light system of success. So again, if the audience's mind has started to drift just a minute later, they're re reminded there's no need for a double re on re reminders. They are reminded exactly what is going to be happening next.
01:51:40:28 - 01:51:59:24
Unknown
yeah. It's the traffic light metaphor. We've done the first light. Now on to the second. But if we look at this entertainment based example from Max Fosh, this it's called I hatched a fish from supermarket caviar. This is an example where you don't necessarily need every single minute payoff in order to see what happens at the end.
01:51:59:26 - 01:52:20:10
Unknown
Spoiler alert. I'm sorry to do this as part of the course. He does manage to catch the fish and at the end he releases it into a pond and it's very happy. You can understand what's happened there just by watching the last 20 seconds. But the many payoffs that Max integrates into this video make the entire thing intrinsically interesting enough that you want to stick around for each many payoffs.
01:52:20:12 - 01:52:44:05
Unknown
So let's look. The grand payoff is whether understanding whether you can actually hatch supermarket caviar. But the mini payoffs are things like this going to buy the caviar and knowing why you do that. Locating fish, sperm, extracting the fish sperm, fertilizing the caviar, seeing if it survives. There's a lot in this video. And each of those things that I've just mentioned I'm kind of intrigued about on their own merit.
01:52:44:08 - 01:52:58:18
Unknown
I mean, I guess I could figure out that you buy caviar from a supermarket, but do you need to go to a specialist? One that's kind of a pay off? That is fairly interesting. But everything from that point onwards that I don't really wish to repeat is definitely intrinsically interesting enough for me to want to just watch it.
01:52:58:21 - 01:53:14:22
Unknown
He makes it crystal clear at all times what his current goal is by signposting it. For example, when he says the next step, the fertilization. So we know straight away, you know, we've now acquired the fish sperm. If you are going to force me to say again and the next step is to try and fertilize the piece of caviar.
01:53:14:25 - 01:53:32:17
Unknown
God, this is one of the weirder lessons in the course, that's for sure. All this to say, you need to pick your path and ensure your audience already knows, or rather always knows where they are within that structure. If you find at this point that you are looking at these many payoffs, they don't seem like there's enough meat to each of them.
01:53:32:17 - 01:54:01:12
Unknown
They don't seem like you need to understand one. In order to understand the next and you maybe don't feel like they are intrinsically interesting enough, it might be the case that this idea isn't framed well enough to be turned into a full video. It's probably not the case if you've gotten this far, but if you are kind of finding that to be the case at this point, I would suggest rethinking the framing of the video because you need to be able to break your video down into components like this in order to make a video that is longer than about a minute long.
01:54:01:14 - 01:54:25:15
Unknown
So that is what we need to talk about in this lesson. I would broadly suggest at this point that you don't actually start writing the full script until you've watched the next lesson on progression. This is just something to keep payoffs at the top of your mind to make sure you are thinking about them. But seeing as you've already got them well-established in your plan at this point in the pre-production section or elsewhere on your document, I would suggest watching the next lesson first and then writing your first draft with both of these things in mind.
01:54:25:15 - 01:54:41:07
Unknown
Now let's talk about the second piece of writing your script, and that is progression. This is the idea of how we move from A to B to C in your scripts in the most engaging way possible. And one thing that I want to talk about before we get into the meat of the lesson is the idea of the Mr. Beast ification of YouTube.
01:54:41:09 - 01:54:56:28
Unknown
This is the idea that a lot of people have taken on board, and maybe this is getting slightly better as we move forwards. But it's the idea that in order to create an engaging video, you need to have lots and lots happening on screen at once. Maybe you need lots of flashy editing effects. You need people talking very, very fast.
01:54:56:28 - 01:55:19:13
Unknown
And that is the way to keep an audience member engaged. But if you look past the craziness in a mr. Beast video, you'll see that it is not the fast pace of footage or the shouting or whatever else that keeps you engaged. It's actually the progression of what is happening is happening meaningfully underneath all the madness. And just to clarify this, I had a call with one of the ex, Mr. B's editors.
01:55:19:13 - 01:55:35:15
Unknown
In fact, I think he was head of post-production for Mr. Beast and he was the lead editor for a while. His name is Taylor Gunn, and he said this of their editing process. A video can be whatever length it needs to be in order to be the best video possible. We don't edit for speed, we add it for clarity.
01:55:35:15 - 01:55:57:17
Unknown
And through trial and error, we've discovered that there's a lot of fat on the footage that most people live in, but the audiences appreciate when you cut it out. So by that logic, the key is figuring out what the fat actually is. How can we categorize that fat and know that it needs to be cut off? Well, the simple way to do that is by breaking down the process into these four component parts.
01:55:57:17 - 01:56:17:06
Unknown
Again, it's a nice, easy framework to think about when you are writing the script itself. During almost any high retention script, you will notice that one of four things it's happening. There is an introduction of new information. There is progression towards the eventual outcome. There is regression away from the outcome or there is some kind of emotional change being instigated.
01:56:17:08 - 01:56:47:28
Unknown
And that is the case for Mr. Bass. That is the case for even a tutorial. There's always going to be these four elements happening at any one time, and often it is the lack of one of these four things happening that causes an audience mind to wander. So if you are experiencing a feeling of losing interest in a video, even if it's being edited really flatly and there's lots of stuff happening at once, if you start to think about it and break it down and analyze the video you're watching, you will usually realize it's one of these four things, or rather, none of these four things are happening, and you need at least one of
01:56:47:28 - 01:57:03:25
Unknown
those things to be happening, to remain engaged. So let's look at an example from Clio Abrams that shows this in motion. So this is a video she made for why human referees are getting replaced. And I'm just going to play the hook for you at this point.
01:57:03:27 - 01:57:25:09
Unknown
Okay. So it's 24 and Serena Williams is playing Jennifer Capriati in the U.S. Open. What you're about to see is a referee call so bad it changed a sport forever. So she hits the ball, it bounces just inside the line. The crowd cheers and then suddenly the umpire calls it out. What? No way. John, weigh in. And that's one of the worst callbacks.
01:57:25:12 - 01:57:44:21
Unknown
And the Serena's right. You can clearly see on this review. The ball is in, but the umpire wasn't using that release system. Only the TV stations could see it. The system is called Hawk-Eye. And you can hear the commentators begging them to use it. no. Hawk-Eye, please. Within just a year from this controversial game, Hawk-Eye was added as an official part of the US Open review process.
01:57:44:27 - 01:58:03:05
Unknown
And today, it's replaced over 200 of their human judges. So if we take a look at the transcript from that video, we can very clearly see that every single line of this hook is doing one of those four things. So the first line is 2004, and Serena Williams is playing Jennifer Capriati in the US Open. That's new information.
01:58:03:08 - 01:58:21:08
Unknown
What you're about to see is a referee called so bad it changed the sport forever. That creates some emotional change. We're now curious. So she hits the ball. It bounces just inside the line. The crowd cheers. And then so that's all new information. Suddenly, the umpire calls it out. That's an example of regression. We're now moving away from the final outcome of this video.
01:58:21:10 - 01:58:37:16
Unknown
We then hear a quote from Serena That ball was so in. That's emotional change for us. We are now empathizing with her frustration. And Serena's right. You can clearly see on the review the ball is in. That's more information. The regression happens again here. But the umpire wasn't using that review system. Only the TV stations could see it.
01:58:37:17 - 01:58:56:20
Unknown
So, again, we're moving away from that final outcome. We're illustrating how bad things were before this eventual change in the system. The next bit is more information. The system is called Hawk-Eye and you can hear the commentators begging them to use it. And then we get some more emotional change when we hear them saying, no, I know Hawk-Eye, please.
01:58:56:23 - 01:59:13:24
Unknown
We're now feeling desperate and frustrated on their behalf. We kind of empathize with those feelings. And then lastly, we get a little bit of progression towards that goal where we hear within just a year from this controversial game, Hawk-Eye was added as an official part of the US Open review process. And today, it's replace over 200 of their human judges.
01:59:13:27 - 01:59:34:05
Unknown
So that is a really, really good example. And coincidentally, this happened during the hook. But it's a really, really clear example of this feeling that there is always one of those four things changing in order to keep you engaged. Before we move onto another example, I just want to talk about what this looks like in practice, because it's all well and good looking at a transcript of an existing video and seeing, okay, yes, I can clearly see how they did that.
01:59:34:07 - 01:59:52:05
Unknown
How do I actually implement this stuff in my script? So we're going to talk about that now. The first bit information is very simple. You're naturally going to build new information into your script. Otherwise, you wouldn't be writing at all. You would just be sat waving your pen in the air or pen. If anyone writes scripts by pen, please let me know.
01:59:52:07 - 02:00:09:20
Unknown
That is. That's very cool. I want to meet you. I'm assuming you'll be typing so if you're typing some new information, it will be something like, here's a map of all the piracy incidents over the last 40 years. I have over 50 cameras monitoring every single hand on this Lamborghini. Christian Bale was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales. It's new information.
02:00:09:20 - 02:00:28:00
Unknown
It's obvious this is something you will naturally include as part of your video, but the other three are a little bit more complex, and it can be harder to distill how you actually make sure you're getting those factors in. So the one piece of advice that I have for you here and the thing I'd like to encourage you to do, if you're using the script template, you will see this at the top of the script.
02:00:28:00 - 02:00:49:21
Unknown
But if not, I would encourage you to write this above where you write your script of the other three factors progression, regression, and emotions. If you write each of those three things and then fill in what progression looks like, what regression looks like, what emotions you intend to evoke from them. Can We've thought about this quite a lot already when it came to the Avatar stuff and the hook.
02:00:49:23 - 02:01:08:00
Unknown
Having those as a quick visual reference at the top of your script makes it so much easier when you're writing a script later on to call back to these different things and to think, okay, does the sentence I've just written progress, the story regress away from the goal or introduce some sort of new emotional spike or simply introduce some new information?
02:01:08:03 - 02:01:26:24
Unknown
So let's take a look at some examples of what that looks like. This is a video I worked on with Mike Sheikh. And at the top of this script, when I was helping write it, I wrote progression, regression and emotions. So for progression, I registered that this video was going to look like the following him getting the skills as fast as possible.
02:01:27:01 - 02:01:45:02
Unknown
Every campaign discloses success, especially when he completes it quickly. That is what progression looks like in this content regression on the other hand, would be if he takes too long on a scale, if he hurts himself, if he skips the scale, if he cheats, the idea that messing up one skill will make him feel more pressured to complete the other skills later.
02:01:45:04 - 02:02:03:14
Unknown
He's also getting more tired as time is going on. Where's the emotions then that come from? Each of those progression and regression points are a fear of time running out of fear of his energy running out, fear that one failed skill makes the other 23 a complete waste of time, and the sense that stress is building with every failed attempt.
02:02:03:17 - 02:02:17:05
Unknown
So that is why I wrote the top of the script, and that made it far easier then to include those elements in the voiceovers that I was writing for this script. So we can see here at this point and say, this is the middle of the video. He's done, I think maybe nine or ten skills at this point.
02:02:17:05 - 02:02:32:12
Unknown
He's starting to get tired. At this point, I was dead. So that's a sense of emotion. We're kind of empathizing with that feeling. I wasn't even one third of the way through the challenge to find this new information, and by the time I ate and rested, I realized I'd basically only gotten six skills in six and a half hours.
02:02:32:14 - 02:02:55:28
Unknown
So it's six skills. My apologies, but that's the sense of regression. We're now failing away from that goal that he has to complete the 24 skills in the 24 hours. So then progression, we bring a bit of that back in. As we were getting picked up to the next location, I was officially running late and then we thread in that little bit of emotion at the end, that sense of urgency, that fear that he's not going to complete it, that curiosity around whether he will complete it.
02:02:56:01 - 02:03:14:05
Unknown
So that is like a really, really condensed little bit of voiceover that contains many of the elements that I had written at the top of the script, because I could easily refer back to them and implement them. So whether you are writing an entertainment or an educational script or something in between, make sure you've got those easily viewable at the top of your lesson.
02:03:14:09 - 02:03:34:09
Unknown
But if we look at another real example from Mr. Who's the Boss? If why not? A video I worked on? This is simply a desk set up video and it might seem maybe more difficult to write these progression, regression and emotions for a simple desk setup video. But here's how I would have broken it down. And this is just to show you that almost any type of video can be broken down in this way.
02:03:34:12 - 02:03:59:27
Unknown
So progression would be to demonstrate the most useful and efficient purchases to make a desk set up, set up more ergonomic or utilitarian progression would be clearly explaining how an item has improved his life and how it might improve the lives of the viewers. Whereas regression, on the other hand, would be describing what life is like without each of those items Comparing inferior tech to the tech that he has now also includes regularly highlighting the risks potentially to your back.
02:04:00:03 - 02:04:21:28
Unknown
For example, right now I'm recording this on a tiny, very solid wooden ish chair with a horrible cushion propping me up. I'm aware that my back is probably getting worse as I'm sat here and having those things highlighted in a video like this is an interesting way of highlighting the regression away from this goal of having a lovely ergonomic desk set up the emotion that you want.
02:04:22:00 - 02:04:40:10
Unknown
Then trying to evoke from all of that is that they should experience a bit of excitement for what they could have FOMO For that you want it to feel aspirational, but you also want them to worry about what their current desk setup is like and to create a low level fear around what will happen if they don't take action on this video.
02:04:40:12 - 02:05:06:20
Unknown
So again, this is all stuff that you can write at the top of your script and it will just help you when it comes to writing the rest of the script itself. The reason it's so useful is because once again, like we did in the Hook and like we've talked about in some other areas of the course, if you have the time at the end, once you've written your first draft, if you go through it and highlight in four different colors information, progression, regression and emotion, you become much more able to see the areas where none of these things are happening.
02:05:06:24 - 02:05:30:03
Unknown
And if you have huge chunks of the script where you cannot identify one of these things, it's likely that that portion of the script needs to be cut out. And that means every sentence now has to fight for its place. One interesting question that I got from somebody who was in the pre-launch for this course was about progressing, or should I say transitioning from progression to regression or regression back to progression.
02:05:30:05 - 02:05:52:15
Unknown
Now, for an educational YouTuber, this probably isn't a big problem, seeing as the points of regression will be something simple like don't do x because it will lead to why don't salt your food using a saltshaker? Because it will be inaccurate and you won't know how much. So what you've done is fairly easy to transition back to progression, which would be instead salt your food like this, make sure you use your hand.
02:05:52:17 - 02:06:15:29
Unknown
Then you get an intuitive sense of how much salt is going in that kind of thing. But for entertainment, there's a little bit more to think about. And the key here is that the actions when you are moving between progression and regression shouldn't feel random. It should feel like there is a clear and obvious reason why something has been going well and that has gotten worse or why something has been going badly and suddenly gets better.
02:06:16:01 - 02:06:38:27
Unknown
So to show you an example of that, I want to talk about somebody that I've worked with in the past, and I've slightly change this example to make them anonymous. But essentially they were making a video around the idea of teaching the protagonist of this video to dance. So they the YouTube came to me. They were wanting to create an engaging story around this idea of teaching somebody else to dance really well from the point of being a complete beginner.
02:06:38:29 - 02:06:56:28
Unknown
So the key segments that we identified were that first of all, the protagonist is bad at dancing. Then he starts to get better. But then the protagonist and the teacher argue and eventually he gets better again. And as you can see, just by looking at that, you can see the flow here is that it goes from progression to regression to progression.
02:06:56:28 - 02:07:20:25
Unknown
He starts to get better, then he gets a bit worse because they argue and then he gets better again. But unless we provide a very clear trigger for why each of these switches has happened, it will feel very hollow for the audience. Now feel like you're trying to drive tension without having a genuine reason for doing so. So if we look at this for bullet points again, but this time we think about an explicit trigger that explains each transition.
02:07:20:27 - 02:07:52:13
Unknown
So he has never danced before. So the protagonist is bad at dancing. Now we understand why he's bad at dancing, but then after some time practicing, he begins to trust his teacher and feel less embarrassed. So he starts to get better. But the protagonist becomes complacent, meaning the teacher becomes frustrated. So the protagonist and the teacher argue eventually, after he acknowledges his complacency and she acknowledges her frustration and how both were negatively impacting their lessons, he gets better again, and now it's very, very clear.
02:07:52:14 - 02:08:15:18
Unknown
Each of these transitions between progression and regression. There is a genuine reason for why it's happened. Again, we weren't having to make these things up. We we knew that these were the genuine triggers that had caused these ups and downs when they were actually filming this video. But it really makes a big difference whether or not you signpost this to your audience and you tell them the reasons for these transitions.
02:08:15:20 - 02:08:46:20
Unknown
So that is more or less fit for this lesson. So think about progression, regression and emotion. Write these at the top of your script. Make sure those three things are constantly being introduced into your script, as well as just the introduction of new information. And with that, it is time to write your first draft. So if you need to go back over this lesson and the lesson before, make sure you've got all those things really clearly in your mind and at this point, use your intuition based on what you've learned so far, based on the many powers you've got set out, based on what you've written in your hook and what you know about your
02:08:46:20 - 02:08:56:11
Unknown
audience, write out the first draft of your script, and when you have done that, I will see you in the next lesson and do make sure to have fun while you're doing it, because this should be fun.
02:08:56:11 - 02:09:16:09
Unknown
So at this point in the course, you should have your first draft completed. And big congratulations if you've gotten this far and you've managed to implement everything. Writing any script is a huge achievement, and especially if you're implementing lots of new things like this. I really just want to give a huge congratulations to you because this stuff isn't easy and I'm sure you're doing really, really well with it so far.
02:09:16:11 - 02:09:30:08
Unknown
One thing to say here is that this is a perfectly good jumping off point. If you would like to keep on practicing what we've learned so far, really thinking about those payoffs and progression and that sort of thing. This is a great time to do so. And you can come back to this point when you are ready to learn a bit more.
02:09:30:10 - 02:09:51:29
Unknown
Because in this lesson, we are going to talk about how to improve that draft. We're not thinking too much about retention at this point. This is more from a standpoint of you've got your your payoffs. You know how to progress from A to B to C, but those chunks in between where you're physically doing the explaining and your, say, writing voiceovers or you are just getting lots of information about the topic at hand.
02:09:52:01 - 02:10:10:09
Unknown
It can be easy to go a little bit wrong there and to maybe overexplain or to explain things in the wrong way. There's a few things we're going to talk about in this lesson, which should help you address that and basically tighten up your script before you start worrying about the retention things, which is something we're going to cover in the next module, which is called optimize.
02:10:10:13 - 02:10:32:13
Unknown
So in this lesson, we're going to discuss the delivery of information itself and how to make sure that it is not boring and b, not confusing because as we've discovered, if your video is either of these things boring or confusing, your audience is going to drop off. So in light of that, I want to talk about something that I have called the boardgame mindset when it comes to delivering information to your audience.
02:10:32:16 - 02:10:51:16
Unknown
So I just want you to imagine for a second, if you've ever been in the position where you were explaining a board game or a card game or whatever it is to a friend or family member, you try to present the rules in an easy to understand manner. Everyone's sat down around the table. You all like trying to explain the rules without other people jumping in and trying to explain their version of the rules.
02:10:51:16 - 02:11:11:21
Unknown
And whatever you think, you've got the best possible explanation for this game and you're going to deliver it to whoever hasn't played it before. But you notice after a couple of maybe not even minutes, it could just be 10 seconds, 20 seconds. You notice them starting to become overwhelmed with what you're telling them, and eventually they just cut you off and say, look, can we just play a practice round first?
02:11:11:28 - 02:11:39:27
Unknown
And I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. This in YouTube terms, is kind of how you need to approach your audience. You need to assume they are somebody to whom you were explaining a new board game and giving them everything, all the context they could possibly need out the gate is going to be too much information. Instead, what they need to do is play a round of this game and then you can start layering on additional information, which now they have this foundation which they've observed and experienced themselves.
02:11:40:00 - 02:12:01:29
Unknown
They can then more easily build that information on what they've already seen rather than you trying to shove it all down their throats before they even know what you're talking about. In light of this one thing to be aware of, when you are doing a YouTube video, is that pretty much any line, whether it's a line that is progression, regression in emotion, new information, whatever, all of these lines in your script can be broken down into two broader categories.
02:12:02:06 - 02:12:19:11
Unknown
One is context and one is action. So let's get some quick definitions for each of those. So context is when you are explaining something to the audience, there's obviously a lot of this in your hook because you're having to set things up. It's used to tell the audience what they need to know to understand the overall video. Action.
02:12:19:11 - 02:12:43:19
Unknown
On the other hand, is when the audience is experiencing something. They get to see the context that you were describing in action. This is when you are showing the audience how to do the thing. If it's an educational video, say, or you are showing the protagonist doing the thing, if it's more of an entertainment style video. Any video needs both context and action, but getting the balance right is absolutely critical when you are writing your content.
02:12:43:21 - 02:13:03:26
Unknown
So let's look at an example of how to balance this really, really well. This is an example from Yes Theory. This is when they traveled to the angriest country in the world. Well, I'm going to do first of all, is show you the hook of this video and then I'm going to show you a little bit of information they deliver actually, about 4 minutes in and how it relates to this whole idea of context and action.
02:13:03:28 - 02:13:28:03
Unknown
So the world's angriest country is likely not the one you think it is, But honestly, the way that these polls of the happiest or angry countries are measured in the first place is always slightly questionable to me. So our plan is to investigate what's really happening in this country and why it's been called the angriest. To do so, we devised a challenge for ourselves to go deep with the locals.
02:13:28:07 - 02:13:45:05
Unknown
We're not booking a hotel. We'll be flying in, landing in the afternoon, and having just a few hours before dark to make some friends and hopefully find a place to stay for the night. A master fan and myself will be dropped off in three different neighborhoods with three different cultural and religious backgrounds hoping to get housed and get an experience.
02:13:45:11 - 02:14:04:00
Unknown
Some of the locals we encounter the only rule is they can't recognize us from YouTube. So yes, you heard that correctly. We're flying to the angriest country in the world, hoping to find a stranger to house us. And that begs the question why? Okay. Right. So we're going to take the video of that because they're now starting to get into the challenge itself.
02:14:04:03 - 02:14:27:09
Unknown
But you can see clearly from that hook, they establish what's going on. If we break down the hook by the three step framework that we talked about back in the hook lessons to see the character is the guys from the theory, the concept. They're traveling to the world's angriest country. And what's at stake is that they haven't booked a hotel and they have just 3 hours before sundown to befriend a local and convince them to let them sleep at their house.
02:14:27:11 - 02:14:51:03
Unknown
But that's not the only context that this video offers about this country. In this case, I think it's Beirut that they've traveled to. I want to show you what happens later on at 413 in the video where we get some additional context. In Europe, where a country's currency collapsing is never the cause of one single decision, but one of a series of events and neglect that happens over many, many years.
02:14:51:06 - 02:15:21:27
Unknown
Lebanon has become, for all intents and purposes, a failed state. But simply Lebanon has been grappling with decades of political instability and corruption. After coming out of a civil war from 1975 to 1990. Government mismanagement of the economy, excessive borrowing and a lack of financial reforms led to a severe fiscal deficit and unsustainable debt levels. Okay, so taking that into account, that all feels like information that I could have been tempted to put into a hook that feels very, very relevant to understand.
02:15:21:27 - 02:15:39:11
Unknown
Okay, the fact that this country has experienced all these different factors that have led to the currency collapsing, and that's clearly a reason why it is such an angry country. Now, imagine if they tried to fit all of that information into the hook alongside everything else they already put in the hook. It could have started to feel very overwhelming for the audience.
02:15:39:11 - 02:15:57:00
Unknown
And this is something that is likely to have made them skip ahead because after all, too much context without action is boring. It's basically being told lots and lots and lots of stuff that you don't have a grasp on what it really means yet properly. You need to see some of that stuff in action in order to feel properly engaged with the subject matter.
02:15:57:02 - 02:16:16:16
Unknown
And so we're creators often can get this wrong, is that they will use language that's too specific, too soon, for example, or they'll frontload a ton of context, or the audience gets bored or confused and they feel like they need to skip ahead or leave, or they are simply too scared to introduce new context once the hook is over because they feel like that is the time to put context in.
02:16:16:16 - 02:16:44:09
Unknown
And after the hook you have to just keep on moving forward, moving forward, moving forward. But it's not the case, and I really encourage you to think of that mindset of, okay, once I've got my audience into this video, how can I layer on additional context as we go if it becomes necessary? So to check whether you're doing this effectively and whether that could actually be more of a mixture of context and action, you need to ask yourself questions like, How long have I been giving context to this video without actually showing anything that I'm talking about?
02:16:44:12 - 02:17:07:27
Unknown
It's a classic rule of show. Don't tell it when it comes to basically any interactive media. Am I saying something that means something to me? But that doesn't mean anything to them yet therefore, are they likely to become overwhelmed by what I'm saying? And could I grab their attention with something they'll easily recognize first and then get into the action faster as a result of that, rather than spending loads and loads and loads of time explaining something and not actually showing it.
02:17:07:29 - 02:17:27:24
Unknown
So maybe that comes back to the immediate thing that we talked about in terms of your hook or at any other point in the script where you feel like there's maybe been too much chat and you need to show the audience something that you're describing rather than rather than just talking about it basically. So at the bottom of this lesson in the text portion, you can have a look at a script transformation example.
02:17:27:26 - 02:17:47:16
Unknown
This is something from a script review that I did, so I encourage you to have a look at that, have a look at how the script was before and after I implemented this boardgame mindset, how it was transformed to give you some further inspiration for your script. So the only action point for this lesson is to look back over your scripts and highlights if you can, and if you have the time to do this.
02:17:47:16 - 02:18:09:19
Unknown
Highlighting any sections that are context and any sections that are action. And once you have this, it's a very clear visual indicator. If you've got too much context and not enough action or the other way round just allows you to balance out the script a bit more. So I encourage you to do that and then correct the script as appropriate to try and create a nice balance between context and action.
02:18:09:19 - 02:18:29:28
Unknown
If in the past you found it difficult to keep retention high throughout your video, it can often be something as simple as reversing the order information in your scripts that solves it. And this comes back to the idea of payoffs that we've already spoken about. And when you're giving those payoffs in your scripts. So to take a really simple example, it feels natural to present information in this way.
02:18:30:00 - 02:18:51:25
Unknown
First up is ABC and then to say and the reason ABC is so important for growing beans in the summer is whatever. And this feels natural because it's how we would usually talk in conversation. But the problem with that approach is it gives your audience permission to skip ahead or just to leave the video entirely. And we think back to the idea of the payoffs.
02:18:51:25 - 02:19:13:02
Unknown
We talked about where you do the set up, then you drive tension, then you resolve it. This is the equivalent, the example I just gave you of putting the resolution first. So you're telling them straight out the gate, this thing is important. And now we're going to discuss it for a long period of time. I think it might intuitively sound normal to do, but in YouTube terms, it's a bit of a retention problem, shall we say.
02:19:13:04 - 02:19:32:05
Unknown
So if we take a look at this video from a boxer called Tony Jeffries, he's the guy who actually trained Michelle Carr in one of her other videos. This is a retention graph from a listicle video that he put out. We can see the second section here. There is quite a big problem where retention is just dipping, dipping, dipping continuously.
02:19:32:07 - 02:19:53:23
Unknown
And when I was reviewing this graph, something that struck me was that Tony was essentially providing the boxing technique that he was offering first, and it became very obvious why this technique was useful. And then he would spend five, ten, 15 seconds describing why it was so useful. So I want to show you that in context, you can see what this looks like and why it is a problem for retention.
02:19:53:24 - 02:20:10:09
Unknown
All a fighter would be trying to outbox you by a long job and using his range and moving his feet and moving around the ring. So what you've got to do to overcome that is get your feet close to him. So if I'm in here with the taller guy in the job, I move forward. He's move back, I'm too short.
02:20:10:09 - 02:20:29:25
Unknown
I can't reach him, which will want to move forward. He's move back. So what I've got to do is have faster feet because the only way I can hit him is if I get my feet closer because his arms are longer. And then that's when I can go to work and pull their punches. But if I'm trying to outbox the tall boxer from here, yeah, my punches it too short.
02:20:29:25 - 02:20:48:11
Unknown
So I've got to get my feet in and then throw the punches. Now there's a couple of ways of being right, so I'm not going to talk or show too much more of that. But I have you can see from that example, this sense that we've already understood what the technique is before he goes ahead and shows, it becomes very obvious why the technique of just swinging punches a taller person is no good.
02:20:48:14 - 02:21:07:26
Unknown
And as soon as he says you simply just need to move faster, get your feet in there. It's it's kind of done. This action is completely understood. And I feel like I can move on. Maybe I stick around. Maybe I do want to watch him then demonstrate the technique. I'm sure a lot of people would. But for those who are, again, a bit more impatient, maybe have been boxing for longer, they just want a quick idea of, okay, this is wanting to do great.
02:21:07:26 - 02:21:28:19
Unknown
He's told me that now I can move on. So my suggestion for Tony was why not reverse the order the information is presented and start off by showing the technique in action and that then gives the audience time to recognize it encourages them to actively engage with the video itself and start to think themselves. What is Tony doing in this clip and why is this so effective?
02:21:28:21 - 02:22:00:17
Unknown
And that is just a slightly more engaging way of interacting with that video rather than simply being told here, here's the answer on a plate. This is what you need to do. It might feel like this is a kind of cynical way of looking at this video. It's clearly, you know, a good video overall. It's very educational, but it's something you really, really need to be aware of when you're presenting information that if you give that pay off straight out the gate, rather than setting it up or implying what's going to come, showing the audience what's happening before telling them the answer is going to potentially be a tricky thing for your retention, whereas when
02:22:00:17 - 02:22:16:28
Unknown
you're forced to engage, you're forced to figure it out yourself. It does something very important for you as an audience member. It makes you feel smarter. It makes you feel like you're the creator isn't talking down to you. Instead, you're on a level with each other and they are showing you the information and letting you figure it out yourself.
02:22:17:01 - 02:22:32:23
Unknown
So there's another example we can look at here from Ali, which is another example where this is done badly in a listicle. And let's see if you can figure out, you see, I'm doing the technique now. See if you can figure out what it is. Item number three, something else whereby and it's having a cheap dustbin in every single room.
02:22:32:23 - 02:22:44:20
Unknown
So I have one in this room, in the bathroom, in my bedroom. There's one in the kitchen, this one small one in the living room. And the great thing about a cheap 5 to $10 bin is that it means you can chuck stuff without having to go to a room that has been in it. Super, super time saving.
02:22:44:26 - 02:23:06:01
Unknown
I do have it. Okay. So aside from being a potentially slightly obvious point in the first place, the delivery of the information in this order is just simply not engaging. We've been told the productivity saving, the time saving device that I'm going to tell you about is a bin. And as soon as you've been told what it's a bin, you start to think, well, I understand why bin is useful.
02:23:06:01 - 02:23:30:08
Unknown
That is that is fairly self-evident. I don't need you to tell me why it's useful to have a bin for the next 15 seconds. So we've got the transcript here of what was said initially. Now, this may seem like slightly overkill, but I've rewritten the hook policies is not the hook I've rewritten this particular part of the transcript with this reversing the order of information mindset in mind to show you what this could look like if you were to think about it differently.
02:23:30:10 - 02:23:47:11
Unknown
And keep in mind, I still think this is quite an obvious point to make. Overall, I probably wouldn't have put it in the listicle, and this does actually make the point longer. But the point is it now makes it more engaging because rather than revealing the point, it tells you less information and allows you to figure it out yourself.
02:23:47:13 - 02:24:03:02
Unknown
So instead, I would suggest you could have said next, I want to talk about one of the biggest productivity killers that everyone suffers from, but nobody talks about whether we've got old piles of paper lying around on our desks or even just a banana skin that we're too lazy to go to the kitchen and throw away. It's super easy to end up with a messy desk when we're busy.
02:24:03:04 - 02:24:25:29
Unknown
The huge problem this causes for our productivity is insert productivity fact about having a messy workspace that's Ali zone of genius, not mine. That's why item number three is having a rubbish bin in every room. It'll save you time, make each room tidy and stop your productivity from halving or whatever is true to say of productivity. That to me is just a much, much more engaging way of writing this section because it opens a curiosity gap.
02:24:25:29 - 02:24:44:21
Unknown
At the start, we set up what this little mini payoff is going to be, but we don't reveal what it is yet until the end by telling us it's a bin right out the gate. It's obvious what the point is. By saving it till the end. It makes us wonder the whole time and keeps us more engaged. So now let's look at the third and final example, which manages to avoid the problems we've been talking about so far.
02:24:44:25 - 02:25:09:18
Unknown
By deliberately withholding that information and making sure we don't give the audience everything out the gate and we reverse the information to make sure it's more engaging. This is a video about why getting more views doesn't necessarily equate to getting more money if you're running a business through YouTube. And the point I'm about to show you, if we were to think about this in the conversational and quite wrong way of doing this, you or anyone else could have made the point like this.
02:25:09:20 - 02:25:30:04
Unknown
Point number two, blowing up your channel before you're ready can put extra strain on your business. Fine. That's interesting enough, I suppose, but to anyone who is engaging halfway with this video, it might be quite obvious very, very quickly why that is the case, that if your channel suddenly blows up, you've got loads of inbound leads, your business isn't prepared for it, it becomes stressful.
02:25:30:06 - 02:25:48:09
Unknown
That's quite obvious to me. Instead, we approach the script like this. The set up is I used to want something that every YouTuber wants, but when I got it, the impact it had on me was a bit of a nightmare. Then ADD puts in a rocky training montage to keep building up this metaphor around the whole kind of topic.
02:25:48:11 - 02:26:08:04
Unknown
And then the resolution of this point is blowing up your business in almost any situation is absolute chaos. Suddenly, dozens, if not hundreds more people are competing for your time and attention. So getting anything else done to build your business can be incredibly difficult. Now I want to just show you that actually in the video itself, just so you feel the difference when you're watching it, the fact that you're not told the answer straight away.
02:26:08:07 - 02:26:23:07
Unknown
Now, that was something I used to want more than anything else as a YouTuber, but actually when I got it, the impact it had on me was a bit of a nightmare. What was it? Well, in the film, Rocky Sliced Alone is a pretty average unknown boxer, and one day he suddenly gets the chance to fight the world champion.
02:26:23:08 - 02:26:45:04
Unknown
The thing is, even though he puts up an amazing fight, he still loses nine YouTube terms. Most people dream of making a video that gets insane amount of views and blows up their channel to become a success overnight. The thing is, when you end up in that position before your marketing and your business is ready for it, you probably won't end up in the best place because blowing up in almost any situation is absolute chaos.
02:26:45:07 - 02:27:09:26
Unknown
Suddenly, dozens, if not hundreds more people are competing for your time and attention, which means apart from the ad revenue that flops in getting anything else done to build your business can be utter chaos. In fact, I've heard. Okay, so there's that example in action. But if you aren't sure whether or not you are spending too long giving the exposition after the payoff, or whether you've even got the information in the right order, there are always going to be clues in your retention graphs.
02:27:09:26 - 02:27:30:01
Unknown
So if you have a graph that looks roughly like this one where you've got lots and lots of spikes, particularly if they seem to stick to the starts of new chapters, which are the kind of dotted gray lines on this graph, that is a really clear sign that you've got people who are consistently skipping ahead because they don't feel like they need to keep listening to the entirety of each of your points.
02:27:30:03 - 02:27:49:04
Unknown
So that is all offered this lesson. The actual point here is to basically go back through and review each mini payoff and really, really hone in on that set up tension and resolution that we've talked about throughout the course and to see if there is a problem with that. Maybe reversing the order of information is a way to make sure you adhere to that three point checklist.
02:27:49:06 - 02:27:51:20
Unknown
So that's all for this lesson, and I will see you in the next one.
02:27:51:20 - 02:28:06:20
Unknown
Let's talk now about what to do at the end of your video. You've put in all the hard yards At this point, you've done so, so well to get to this point that there's just a couple of little things we need to think about so that we don't squander all the work that we've done so far. I'm going to talk about the first of those in this lesson here.
02:28:06:22 - 02:28:30:19
Unknown
So if your retention graphs traditionally have looked like this one here. Then there's a problem with the ending of your videos. And thankfully, it's a fairly easy one to solve and it's a fairly obvious one. The issue that is clearly being experienced with this graph here is that the grand payoff has occurred in this spot here, and everything that's gone on afterwards is clearly not engaging to the audience who for the most part have enjoyed the video up to this point.
02:28:30:21 - 02:28:46:21
Unknown
And that's a problem. And there's a couple of reasons that this is a problem if you're not able to retain those viewers for the last portion of your video, whether that is the last 20 seconds or it could be the last minute or anything more than that starts to become really problematic. The first problem is that it indicates people are getting bored.
02:28:46:21 - 02:29:06:20
Unknown
And if they were bored with this video, they're much less likely when they next see your face appearing on their home page to click on the video. If they're left with that bad taste in their mouth that they were getting a little bit tired towards the end. That's not a good thing. The second problem and really the bigger problem and this is what feeds into the next lesson we're going to talk about is that it prevents them from seeing your end screen video card.
02:29:06:21 - 02:29:24:08
Unknown
The little thing that pops up at the end of your content, which encourages people to watch another video. If you've gotten people almost to the end of your video, but you don't get them far enough to see that, that is going to have an outsize impact on other portions of the growth of your channel, which is what we'll be talking about in the next lesson.
02:29:24:10 - 02:29:39:09
Unknown
So it's a bad thing and we need to know how to fix it. Begins with a question. What do you think happens at the end of this video called Train versus Giant Pit? I'm assuming if you were one of the millions of people who've seen this video, you already know. But even if you haven't seen it, it's probably pretty obvious.
02:29:39:11 - 02:29:57:11
Unknown
The train goes into the giant pit and the video ends. That is the grand payoff. That's what the audience click to see. There is now nothing else that they're waiting around for, so don't waste their time by talking about something else. Or the biggest problem that I see that happens after a grand payoff is summarizing the video itself.
02:29:57:14 - 02:30:18:06
Unknown
And I've had a bit of pushback on this from creators in the past where they've said, no, I feel like, you know, I'm an educational YouTuber. It's better for me to summarize how things are. You know, everything we've talked about in the video at the very, very end and like with everything, like, for example, with giving your credentials at the start, this is okay to a point, but I've seen this time and time again on retention graphed after retention graph.
02:30:18:12 - 02:30:38:07
Unknown
If keeping people watching is what you care about on the platform, then doing a big summary at the end is never a good thing. Again, take everything I'm saying with a pinch of salt. That may not be the case for your exact nature, but broadly speaking, summarizing is bad. The audience understands everything. They've heard everything. If they want more detail, they will go back over and rewatch things.
02:30:38:09 - 02:31:01:22
Unknown
But summarizing everything at length is a problem. So make sure you avoid that once you've given that ground payoff, get out of that. So for risk of me repeating myself and going over things after the grand payoff of this lesson, I will end it here. Your only action point is to go back and check the very end of the script and make sure that anything that happens after that Brown payoff is, well, the call to action, which is what we're going to talk about in the next lesson.
02:31:01:25 - 02:31:08:16
Unknown
Anything else you need to try and remove it. So the grand payoff comes right at the end. That's all for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one.
02:31:08:16 - 02:31:25:03
Unknown
So at this point in the course, you have your completed script and I just want to say a huge congratulations. At this point, that is no mean feat. We have covered a lot of ground so far and to have implemented all the things we've talked about is really, really a huge achievement. So I just want to give you a huge congratulations at this point.
02:31:25:05 - 02:31:42:28
Unknown
Before we move on, this is another really simple jumping off point. If you'd like to keep on practicing the things we talked about so far, you're more than welcome to do so. But the point of this module is really to figure out how to make your scripts. Maybe ten, 15, 20% better. But that is absolutely not a requirement at this point.
02:31:42:29 - 02:32:03:18
Unknown
So whenever you're ready to come back and start integrating these additional lessons, then feel free to do so. So let's talk in this lesson about the idea of audio visual storytelling that is using not just the words you're saying, but the visuals, the B-roll and the music in the background as well, to really create a much more 3D sense of the video you're trying to make.
02:32:03:21 - 02:32:35:21
Unknown
It allows us to create a heightened version of the emotions that we would otherwise be able to create with just the words alone. So let's start off by talking about music, because this is a really, really interesting thing to talk about and something that a lot of creatives will use passively. And by passively I mean you might put some stock kind of music in the background or something that you get from you know, a royalty free website or something like that, just to arbitrarily give the video a bit more of an edge, or at least that's what you think and make it more interesting.
02:32:35:21 - 02:32:53:12
Unknown
If I just put something in the background. But that is the very definition of using this passively. Instead, what you'll see the more established creators doing and those who know what they're doing when it comes to using music is that they will try and pair up the music that they choose with the emotion they want the audience member to feel during that segment.
02:32:53:14 - 02:33:11:11
Unknown
And again, this is an additional layer that I appreciate not everyone will have the time to do when they're thinking of making these YouTube videos, but it's something that while you're writing your script, particularly if you've got an editor to be writing little ideas on the script for the types of music that you want to that you'd like in certain sections.
02:33:11:11 - 02:33:38:29
Unknown
So you can elicit those emotions more keenly when the audience is watching them. So let's take a little a little look at an example from Dartford. This is a really, really good example of the use of music. You'll see in this section here, we're really, really feeling the tension of the moment that's about to come because the music makes it very clear that this segment is important not just to the video, but to the life of Donald Glover himself, which is who this video is about.
02:33:39:02 - 02:34:02:06
Unknown
So you can see by the use of this music for the audience are replaying this moment over and over again. So this is a really, really effective use of using that music to drive an emotion. In this case, there's a lot of tension and quick trigger warning at this point. This might potentially be upsetting for some people. So this obviously relates to anything in Donald Glover's career, particularly around the time of Black Lives Matter.
02:34:02:06 - 02:34:20:10
Unknown
And this is America and, you know, gun violence, that type of thing. So if that might be something you would rather not watch, then I'm just letting you know now we're just going to watch a little bit about that in this video. You know, we're saving himself for something the world desperately needed Chaos, confusion and anger. America has a new president.
02:34:20:11 - 02:34:46:15
Unknown
Outrage over President Donald Trump's immigration ban. Protests against the killing of African-Americans by police officers. No justice, no peace has now turned into a political rally. A gunman opened fire on 22,000 concertgoers. Police shot and killed drag queens. CLEMONS 17 year old Kanis Hayes was shot and killed by police officer. Lippert opened fire, shooting Clemmons in the back when Childish Gambino dropped.
02:34:46:15 - 02:35:12:16
Unknown
This is America, right? So that is that section. And you can just you can feel the tension, right? The music in the background is really, really making it clear that this is something to pay attention to. But this rule of using music can apply just as much to the quiet moments of your videos as well. All we want to do is accentuate what the audience is feeling by using music to pair up with the emotions that you're trying to elicit at any given moment.
02:35:12:18 - 02:35:34:14
Unknown
So an action point for now will be to identify those key emotional beats in your video. Maybe that I mean, when I say emotion, it doesn't have to be something that's really, really extreme. It could just be a little bit of excitement or a bit of curiosity or something like that and just figure out where different pieces of music with different, different intentions could be really, really useful throughout your scripts.
02:35:34:16 - 02:35:53:04
Unknown
So that's music. The next thing I want to talk about is this idea of show Don't Tell, which is something that we discussed very briefly in the course. A lot of the time when it comes to YouTube scripts, you can save a lot of time by saying, let's say something you might have found throughout the course of writing the script is that it feels like there's a lot of context you need to give.
02:35:53:08 - 02:36:14:27
Unknown
Obviously spoken about context a few times, and although you know that you need to try and reduce the amount of context you're giving because it feels like an overload of information, it might not always be obvious how you can do that because you feel like you need to convey a certain degree of meaning. But some segments of your video could become more engaging simply by showing the audience something instead of telling them directly.
02:36:14:29 - 02:36:40:06
Unknown
So a good example of that comes from this creator, Ali Gallop or Gallop. I'm not sure how it's pronounced actually. So let's just watch this moment here in his video about marathons. As you come around the corner to this piece of road that I've seen thousands of times straight away and just realize exactly what these marathons were about.
02:36:40:08 - 02:36:59:12
Unknown
And there you go. If it wasn't already obvious, is this screenshot here, this moment where the lady is holding up a sign saying human energy and he doesn't need to explain. He doesn't need to make a three point listicle about what marathons are really about. He's shown it all with the footage that he's using. So that's a really good example of show Don't tell.
02:36:59:15 - 02:37:16:18
Unknown
Equally, we might simply want to be delivering information more efficiently and it's trying to figure out a way to do that. So this is a video that I worked on with Mike. Let's just take a look at this video from one minute and 42, and then I'll come back and explain what what I did behind the scenes that wasn't actually too bad.
02:37:16:18 - 02:37:38:17
Unknown
This was clearly progress, but I knew I needed more power. But then some old habits came back and I went too far, and the last throw had completely destroyed the plane. Okay, so what you might have noticed in this video is that we simply summed up this whole section by saying, But then some old habits came back and I went too far.
02:37:38:19 - 02:37:56:00
Unknown
What we could have said during that section, and I think possibly what I originally originally wrote when I was drafting this was but the next time I threw the plane rather than it coming back, it flew like a dart. Maybe this was because I was used to a different throwing technique from other skills. Anyway, because of that, the plane smashed into the door and it broke.
02:37:56:02 - 02:38:23:22
Unknown
I don't think I would have written that. Actually. That is really, really quite verbose, but that is a really clear example of the the need that you often will feel to explain everything word for word to explain exactly what's happening. But sometimes if the audience can see what's going on, it was very clear from the footage of Mike throwing the paper plane at the door and by cutting in those bits of B-roll showing Mike throwing other projectiles in a more aggressive way, the meaning is conveyed is already clear from the shots.
02:38:23:22 - 02:38:44:12
Unknown
What we are trying to say in that section, and we just need a little bit of voiceover to clarify it. So that's it. In terms of show, don't tell. So just go back over your script now and take a little look, see if there's any areas that you could summarize or show more succinctly by simply showing some B-roll rather than feeling like you need to explain absolutely everything.
02:38:44:14 - 02:39:11:20
Unknown
The last thing we going to talk about in this video are motifs. So motifs are something that really are more of a kind of broader channel strategy thought, but something that you can maybe start to thread into your scripts now if this is something you're interested in. So creating a recognizable motif is a really underutilized method of building a deeper connection with your audience because it makes them feel like they are part of a little internal group or club or a closer community with you.
02:39:11:22 - 02:39:36:28
Unknown
It makes them feel like they know something that other people don't, and that makes new viewers more interested because it feels like they want to get involved in that kind of inner circle and understand why people keep on, you know, why everybody seems to know what these little motifs mean. So to do this in different examples, we'll look at this point from Mike as we're on the topic of Mike, this is a verbal motif which has since been retired because he slightly pivoted the direction of his channel.
02:39:37:01 - 02:40:02:00
Unknown
But this whole idea of yes, go is a kind of phrase that he says whenever he completes a skill. And this is really, really effective because it ties into the message of his channel, which is about positivity and keeping on trying things over and over until you succeed. But it also serves as a community building phrase because it basically allows people to is very simple to attach to, to understand the meaning of it.
02:40:02:00 - 02:40:23:25
Unknown
Once you know what he's talking about and it's something that you could potentially be saying in your own time if you were trying a skill and you were succeeding in the same way that he does. So that's a really, really interesting and useful verbal motif. But then we can also look at something like a visual motif. So Joshua Mayo is a really clear example of this, where he begins all of his videos by lighting a candle.
02:40:23:27 - 02:40:43:02
Unknown
It doesn't really mean anything. It doesn't serve the video in a particular way, but it's sort of become his thing and it's the thing that we now know of him for. And I think a lot of people would recognize the candle motif before actually knowing who he is because it's become so kind of customary for him to do at this point.
02:40:43:04 - 02:41:05:13
Unknown
So that is another thing you could think of if there's any visual motifs or things that you can use to bring the the audience with you and bring them into your inner circle by using these very recognizable visual things. The final one to talk about is, as I've called it, the train Chanties. This is something that's a bit more abstract and it really opens the floor to you to figure out, okay, what kind of motifs could I create for my channel?
02:41:05:15 - 02:41:22:29
Unknown
So in the case of Ryan's videos, his content is littered with different types of motif. So the classics include slapping a burrito every time he buys one, opening his penny videos with Good Morning Sleepy Heads, so you can see pictured above. But he also does loads of other things that if you're familiar with his channel, you will recognize.
02:41:22:29 - 02:42:03:08
Unknown
So he always plays this same adventure music when he's exploring a new place and he uses deliberately basic editing to draw your attention to relevant people and items. This is like a really easy way of doing a low edit, but actually turning that into something that your audience comes to recognize you for. So at least the time of creating this course and then recording this at the very end of 2023, the are the swing of the kind of YouTube trend generally is going away from the big budget beautification stuff and more towards the more personalized community building channels where people feel like they have a real connection with the audience.
02:42:03:11 - 02:42:26:25
Unknown
So coming up with these sorts of motifs could be a really, really strong way of writing that wave essentially, and giving the audience what they seem to want more at the moment, which is a deeper connection with you. So have a little think about that, see if there's any motifs you could include in your content and make sure to check in with your audience as well, because you can always ask them what they want to see more of and whether they are kind of digging the new things that you're trying.
02:42:26:25 - 02:42:32:17
Unknown
So you've always got options available too. So what I'm getting through this lesson and I will see you in the next one.
02:42:32:17 - 02:42:49:14
Unknown
So this lesson is simply a recap of all the different storytelling techniques we've talked about up to this point in the course. So make sure to just have a look down below and refresh your memory of all the things that we've discussed so far and see if you can if you want to implement any of these things in the draft of your script that you're working on.
02:42:49:14 - 02:43:11:17
Unknown
In this lesson, we're going to talk about a couple of additional storytelling techniques that didn't arise naturally anywhere else in the course. But nonetheless, really important to talk about, I think. And even if they're not possible to implement in your current script, I want you to just start thinking about this stuff so that for future scripts, maybe it's something that you could thread in maybe earlier on at the planning stage and you could have an idea that maybe you'll use some of these in your future videos.
02:43:11:20 - 02:43:31:29
Unknown
So the first technique I want to talk about is something called thematic transformation, or at least that's what I've called it. This tends to be more common in an entertaining niche, and it's about the idea of using the same theme throughout the video, but changing how the audience feels about it by the end. So in this example, we're going to look at, which is a video by another one by Todd.
02:43:32:05 - 02:43:56:22
Unknown
It's called The Drew Barrymore Curse. The same theme is introduced at the start as is introduced at the end, but when it's introduced at the end, there has been an emotional change that we feel about that theme, and it basically creates a really satisfying emotional loop essentially that we experience. This is the very start of the video, thanks to AG one for sponsoring this video.
02:43:56:24 - 02:44:15:13
Unknown
Do you recall if okay, that's it. It's very, very brief. We see literally what's that, 4 seconds of rain, thunder and it feels tense. Whatever's going on here, we feel like something is not right. I'm going to obviously give you the time to watch this video on your own time if you want. I encourage you to read the text portion of the lesson below as well.
02:44:15:13 - 02:44:31:17
Unknown
If you want to see my kind of full explanation for this. But what is really, really important and spoiler alert, I'm afraid I'm going to have to skip to the end of this video is we get to this final point here where we are now. We've seen the entirety of Drew's life. It's been a little bit difficult to say the least.
02:44:31:17 - 02:44:56:01
Unknown
There's been lots going on. And right at the end, this idea of rain is reintroduced, but in a very different way. So I just want you to have a look at that. What's the same one I've had since I was little to be on a farm with lots of animals, to be with someone I love. And one night it'll rain and I'll know that I finally got there one night.
02:44:56:01 - 02:45:22:27
Unknown
It rains whenever you can go out into the rain Do not mess it up. I love the rain and that good I. I just. I really love that video. And it all comes down to the idea that we feel that change, that sense that at the start, the rain represented this dark and stormy side of our personality and all the trials and tribulations she was yet to go through.
02:45:23:04 - 02:45:50:04
Unknown
And by the end we've seen that redemption play out piece by piece. We've experienced that journey with her. And now the rain is used to represent something very, very different. It's much more positive. So that is something really interesting. Thematic transformation is what I call it, and it's something that if you can implement it and you do that by identifying a running theme in your script and emphasizing it at the start and then reintroducing and reframing it at the end to create a satisfying emotional transformation for your audience.
02:45:50:04 - 02:46:14:13
Unknown
If you can do that, that is a really effective technique for your content, and it's going to leave people really thinking about it long after they've finished watching. On the flip side, another technique I want to talk about here is what I call thematic confirmation. So unlike the video we just talked about where this theme, which appears one way at the start and changes by the end, in this case, we are led to believe that a change is going to occur.
02:46:14:15 - 02:46:36:05
Unknown
But in fact, at the end of the video, what we had thought to be the status quo is reaffirmed and we find out that actually maybe this is a slightly more depressing technique than the other one. We find out that the change we were expecting hasn't actually occurred. So again, big spoiler out for this Ryan trailer video. What I'm going to do is just show you the very last few seconds of this video.
02:46:36:05 - 02:47:01:22
Unknown
I'm just all about spoiling these fantastic videos today. So essentially what has happened throughout this video is you can see Ryan here. He has been in GTA, in GTA v, R, and he has attempted to get his hands on the most expensive condo in the game. He spent the whole video trying to do that and by the end of the video, he appears to have experienced a dramatic transformation for call it that he gets the condo, he realizes it doesn't make him happy.
02:47:01:28 - 02:47:24:28
Unknown
And we think, okay, cool. This is a really, really good lesson about the nature of greed. And we've understood that actually. Yeah, he realized that money riches, they haven't made him happy. And what really mattered were the people we met along the way. At least that's what we think has happened. And until we get to the very, very last portion of the video where this happens, how Cheeto fingers and regret a deadly combo.
02:47:25:03 - 02:47:51:27
Unknown
But honestly, I'm just glad that that is over because after all, it's just a game. It's just so good. It's just so bloody good. Yeah. So we get that sense that actually this theme of greed that we've been explore exploring this whole time, as much as it seemed like Ryan had shaken it off, in fact, he is still very much a slave to it.
02:47:51:27 - 02:48:11:19
Unknown
And it kind of again, it speaks to that side of us where, you know, a lot of us will try and convince ourselves that X, Y, Z thing doesn't really matter to us what really matters. It's this other thing. But actually, if we really look at ourselves, deep down, we start to recognize the villain within us, which can be just as powerful as recognizing the the more hopeful sides of our personality.
02:48:11:19 - 02:48:28:17
Unknown
So yeah, those are just a couple of additional storytelling techniques I really wanted to talk about in this course are things that have really profoundly affected the way I look at writing YouTube scripts Might be something you can implement just now based on what kind of script you've written, but this is something I really encourage you to explore in future scripts if you get the opportunity.
02:48:28:17 - 02:48:31:20
Unknown
So that's all for now, and I will see you in the next lesson.
02:48:31:20 - 02:48:47:07
Unknown
So far, we've systemize every single step of this process in an attempt to make it easier. But sometimes it actually takes taking a step back and to look at the script as a whole, to feel the rhythm of the script, for want of a better phrase, to know if there is anything else that needs to change about it.
02:48:47:09 - 02:49:06:16
Unknown
And one of the big things that you'll notice, especially when you read that script aloud for the first time, is how the pacing feels and whether or not there need to be a few changes made. So there are three different types of pacing I'm going to talk about in these next three lessons, starting with this one. Those are called efficiency pacing.
02:49:06:22 - 02:49:29:06
Unknown
One is called emotional pacing and the other is called engagement pacing. In this lesson, we're going to talk about efficiency, pacing. This is the most important of all of them and will apply to almost any script that you write. Emotional pacing is usually fairly important, but it won't apply to every scripts. And the third, which is engagement pacing, will kind of depend on what type of video you're making.
02:49:29:06 - 02:49:46:07
Unknown
So it's not necessarily applicable to everyone, but this very first one at least. The efficiency pacing is relevant and it all comes back to the idea of progression that we've talked about before. So the first thing I really want to encourage you to do, and this is the first action item of the lesson, is to read your script aloud if you haven't done already.
02:49:46:09 - 02:50:01:06
Unknown
This might feel like a little bit of overkill, but I promise you it is going to make a big difference. And when I say read it aloud, I don't mean start reading it aloud and then gradually disappear down to just give them a skim reading it like it needs to all be delivered to camera. Like I'm talking to you now.
02:50:01:06 - 02:50:15:18
Unknown
You can't peter out because you won't get a true sense of the feeling of the pace. What you don't want is a surprise on the day when you sit down to film this video for the first time, you're talking to a camera like this and you realize, my God, this actually feels really, really off and there's something not right about it.
02:50:15:20 - 02:50:36:17
Unknown
That's why you need to speak to the camera like I'm doing now. As though you were trying to present this video for the first time. So that is your first action point. Make sure you have done that. The next thing to be aware of is to be conscious of the fact that you need to get comfortable with the idea of deleting up to 50% of what you have written may not be that much.
02:50:36:22 - 02:51:03:17
Unknown
It may be more than that. Or maybe it will be somewhere, you know, in the middle of the park. But the idea that you might have to get rid of a large chunk of what you've written needs to be something you get comfortable with. If you want your scripts to be as efficient and engaging and entertaining as they possibly can be, like we spoke about with that quote from Mr. Beast's ex-head editor, a lot of people will leave the kind of fat on their scripts, which the audience members will really appreciate if you cut it out.
02:51:03:22 - 02:51:21:26
Unknown
You just need to be able to identify what that fat is. So let's take a look at this example from the I wrote for Mike Sheik in this first example here. This is a section that was cut completely and replaced with a single line which we will come in to in a second. But you can see here originally the section read like this.
02:51:21:28 - 02:51:37:03
Unknown
So in person, Mike says, you know, what's the problem? I don't have a bike. I forgot the bike. I'm going to go rent it. Then voiceover says, So I lost a few more seconds trying to hire one. Then we show some B-roll of him hiring the bike, a screen recording of Mike hiring the line bike itself. Then we cut to him saying in person, I don't see the bike.
02:51:37:03 - 02:51:52:15
Unknown
No, come on. there is a bike. I found it. Reserve it right away. Nice. I'm going to go get it. I'm getting the bike. Then we had some more voiceover. I had no more time to lose. Then we see Mike running through the carpark. Mike cycling back towards us. Then him voice over again, saying, I'm pretty sure people thought I'd gone crazy.
02:51:52:17 - 02:52:10:01
Unknown
Then we cut to him, arriving back in front of the camera, making loads of noises. Then he says, all right, let me get it up there. Okay, Nice. And then a final piece of voiceover saying, And maybe I had. Now, this is something that I didn't if I was tired when I wrote this about in my mind at the time first draft, I was like, Yeah, okay, we need to see all this information.
02:52:10:05 - 02:52:31:02
Unknown
Mike Going to get the bike and then he comes back and then he's a bit stressed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that feels really, really bloated. And I hope you felt that while we were reading through that. That is a lot to take on board at once. And it's really, really not necessary because all that we actually need for this segment to make sense is the idea that Mike gets a bike in order to attempt the next skill on the list.
02:52:31:04 - 02:52:52:25
Unknown
This is a moment in between two of the mini pay payoffs where we just need to know whether or not he's going to start attempting the next scale. And will he do the skill well, the set up for that skill, the fact he needs to get the bike isn't really a big part of that. So we in the end, summarize it into a single piece of voiceover that just says So I tried to run the closest Monaco find and luckily it wasn't too far away.
02:52:52:27 - 02:53:13:16
Unknown
And we show him collecting the bike and arriving in front of camera and we move on. So that is a situation where being aware of the sense of pacing only becomes apparent when you read out loud. And so reading that out loud, that's a you just now, it really, really felt like we were struggling to get through to the actual meat of what that section was about.
02:53:13:18 - 02:53:31:22
Unknown
So I really encourage you to, to do that and once again, to be thinking about those ideas of information, progression, regression and emotion. But just to show you another example here of how much text, how many lines you might end up having to remove from your script. Here is a finalized example from another script that I worked on.
02:53:31:24 - 02:53:48:19
Unknown
So in this case here, once it finally loads, we will see the number of lines that I had originally, and all the ones with Strikethrough are the ones that have eventually I've removed. So again, this is just to give you a sense of how much of the script might end up disappearing, even though I'd spent time writing those things.
02:53:48:19 - 02:54:13:15
Unknown
So really, really get comfortable with the idea that a lot of what you write might need to disappear if it doesn't serve your script and your video. So like I said before, really think about those four factors information, progression, regression and emotion. We've spoken about that and it's important now to review your script with that in mind and read the script out loud to see if what you thought you had written actually adheres to that full point structure.
02:54:13:16 - 02:54:17:08
Unknown
So when you've done that, we'll move on to the next lesson about pacing.
02:54:17:08 - 02:54:37:02
Unknown
Now we've spoken about efficiency, pacing. Let us talk about what kind of ends up being the polar opposite of that, and that is emotional pacing. This is where the sense that you need to be super, super efficient with everything, which is usually a good rule of thumb, actually can sometimes not be the case, particularly if you are dealing with a particularly emotional segment of your video.
02:54:37:05 - 02:55:00:22
Unknown
This is a time where whether that emotion is positive or negative, the audience will actually benefit from reveling in that emotion and spending more time experiencing that feeling. So that's what we're going to look at in this lesson. A couple of examples, both of a slower, more pensive and negative emotion and then a slower, much more happy, explosive kind of emotional moment in the content.
02:55:00:24 - 02:55:25:03
Unknown
So with that said, let's look at these couple of examples. So we're going to look at this one from Michelle Carr, first of all, and basically show you this real emotional low that she's experiencing in this video and how in terms of the script itself, there's actually very little being said. And it's one of the most effective in terms of moments of pacing that I've seen throughout this course.
02:55:25:06 - 02:55:53:16
Unknown
The good thing about that is we've got things to work on. We know we're going to work on this. The first real auction that we've done and this girl has been boxing since she was like ten years or whatever. you know, Michelle, we've got to go for a little while as well. Now, the big thing is what will Michelle do?
02:55:53:16 - 02:56:22:13
Unknown
How will she react to this? Will she quit? Will she think this was a mistake or will she come back and finish off the 12 weeks of of training to give yourself the whole time? Now you got it. And then that segment actually goes on a little bit longer. So besides the occasional cutaways to Tony, who's actually we reviewed one of his videos earlier in the course, aside from kind to him, where he's giving some exposition and some thoughts to the the director of the producer or whatever.
02:56:22:16 - 02:56:42:28
Unknown
Michelle is not saying anything. We're spending a lot of time in silence. And it really highlights those emotional feelings that she's feeling. And again, we reflect that back on ourselves and think, how would we be feeling in that situation? So it kind of feels like an emotional curiosity gap because now we've seen her experiencing that and we've wallowed in that feeling of sadness with her.
02:56:43:05 - 02:57:02:15
Unknown
We're now even more invested in whether or not she will overcome it, and we start to think of scenarios in our own life where maybe we're experiencing something like that and we like the idea that we would be able to overcome anything. And so now we want that emotional curiosity gap to be close, which makes us more likely to keep watching to see the conclusion of her story.
02:57:02:18 - 02:57:20:10
Unknown
Then a much more happy example is this video from Robert, where he builds a pool made out of Jell-O, or rather, that he fills it entirely with Jell-O. And this video seems to kind of break some of the rules that we've spoken about in this course. And I want that to be a message you take away here is that everything needs to be slightly nuanced.
02:57:20:10 - 02:57:56:24
Unknown
You can always try new things and see what your audience appreciates. But we see here, after building up to creating the Jell-O pool, once it's created, we spend I think it's about a minute or so just watching people with that, I'm happy to report this is what it looks like to belly flop in a pool of Jell-O now.
02:57:56:26 - 02:58:37:00
Unknown
Yeah. can we get to. so you get the idea. And that continues on for, I don't know, another another minute or so. If not more. And as I say, that seems to break a lot of the rules we talked about. But it kind of makes sense why this works, because at this point, we are as curious as the people in the video as to whether or not this is going to work.
02:58:37:02 - 02:58:55:23
Unknown
And not only that, once we know it's worked, we're still kind of curious to see what swimming in Jell-O actually looks like and what diving in would look like or what bombing looks like or what belly flopping looks like. We still have a series of curiosity gaps that kind of opened up even once we know that the the attempt to make the pool like that has worked.
02:58:55:25 - 02:59:22:22
Unknown
So this is another thing to think about when it's when you come to creating your content is whether you can elongate any moments of particularly heightened emotion, either by adding in additional B-roll or adding an extra music and creating a montage or something like that. Whatever it is that you feel you need to do in order to let those moments hang for a bit longer, that can be something that's really, really effective in getting your audience, feeling more engaged with your content.
02:59:22:22 - 02:59:37:19
Unknown
So that's something else to try. And with that covered, we're going to move on in the next lesson to a type of pacing, which is maybe a little less applicable to some, but if it is applicable to you, it could be something that's really, really effective in how you bring your videos together. So I will see you that.
02:59:37:19 - 03:00:02:14
Unknown
Human brains are wired to detect change. And so if your video runs at exactly the same pace throughout the entirety of its runtime, your audience are going to find it much easier to become distracted. And that's why in this third and final lesson on pacing, we're going to talk about something that I call engagement pacing. If we want to increase the likelihood that a viewer is going to pay attention throughout the video, we need to just incorporate different styles of pacing throughout the content, if we can.
03:00:02:20 - 03:00:21:06
Unknown
Whether that is having some short shots followed by long shots or patterns that we interrupt, like short, short, short, long or long. Short, short, long. However it looks, we're going to look at a specific example now just to show you what this looks like in context. And it's actually a video that we've already looked at earlier in the course from Ali Gallup or Ali Gallup.
03:00:21:07 - 03:00:45:05
Unknown
I'm still not entirely sure. So we're going to just take a look at the first minute of this video and show you what this kind of engagement pacing looks like in action. This might sound strange, but for the first 35 years of my life, I thought the marathon was about running during international festivals. When I was a kid, it was just a sports event that was on TV.
03:00:45:10 - 03:00:54:25
Unknown
I just thought it was exciting for people that like running a really long way.
03:00:54:27 - 03:01:29:18
Unknown
Are you proud or are you feeling primarily about stuff that will change? Five years ago in 2018, when it sounds stupid, but quite simply, I went for a walk. I live like 10 minutes from Tower Bridge. I remember a few streets away. You could hear the sound if you come around the corner to this piece of road that I've seen thousands of times straight away and just realize exactly what this marathon's all about.
03:01:29:21 - 03:01:51:20
Unknown
You're probably familiar with from an earlier lesson. So what I thought was really interesting about this was I actually broke down how long Ali is pausing in between each cut of his video. So you see here, there is a kind of pattern that emerges where we have 2 seconds between the first and the second cut, 4 seconds between the second and the third cut, 4 seconds between the third and the fourth cut.
03:01:51:25 - 03:02:11:01
Unknown
And then we elongate to an eight second segment that comes between the next two cuts. And what this does is it just really jolts our brains. It gives us that sense that something is changing. I'm not falling into this repetitive pattern that my brain is no longer detecting. It gives us a little shock when that changes up and then the same thing happens again.
03:02:11:03 - 03:02:32:21
Unknown
Short, short, short, long. What this simultaneously does as well is it prevents us from going into the just that. Cut, cut, cut, cut fast has become faster, faster, faster mentality and brings it back down to earth with a little bit of pace and then slowing it down, something that's super engaging, exciting, and then a bit more personal. So this is another thing just to think about when you're making your content.
03:02:32:23 - 03:02:48:24
Unknown
Admittedly, this is coming in to this sort of editing side of things as well, but this sort of thing doesn't just happen by accident. It usually starts with the script. And if you are really intentional about exactly how you want the the pacing to feel and how you want it to look, all of that can come in the script when you're at that stage.
03:02:48:24 - 03:03:04:29
Unknown
So make sure you have a think about that, whether or not again, it can apply to this exact script. Then you can start thinking about it for a future script as well. But yeah, definitely something to keep an eye on. But that's it for this talk on pacing. So now we'll move on to the final lesson of the course.
03:03:04:29 - 03:03:23:18
Unknown
One of the big questions that I get all the time is how do I make sure I'm improving my script from a retention standpoint? What are the things that I need to do in order to make sure this thing is retention optimized, that people are going to be watching as far through as possible? The good news is we've kind of covered a lot of this stuff throughout the process of the course.
03:03:23:24 - 03:03:38:26
Unknown
And if you've gotten this far, I want to just offer another huge congratulations, because you are you are basically there. And what this lesson serves to do is just to go back over a couple of the things that we've talked about and give you some things to really focus on when you're going back over your almost completed draft.
03:03:38:28 - 03:03:57:18
Unknown
Just to make sure you're already doing them. But I think you'll be surprised in how much you'll actually already implement thing and the fact that you probably need to worry a bit less about this retention stuff. Now you've systemize the rest of the process. However, having said that, there are four things that I tend to look for when I'm going back over a script from a retention standpoint.
03:03:57:24 - 03:04:17:19
Unknown
And those are as follows And I do it in this order as well. So first is progression, which you talked about a fair bit. Second is payoffs. We've also covered that a lot. Third is repetition. And fourth is clarity. So you'll have heard all four of these phrases come up throughout the course. This is really just to check that you have definitely done those things and you make sure that they are all being utilized correctly.
03:04:17:21 - 03:04:36:05
Unknown
We're going to move past progression for now because we've just talked about that in the recent pacing lessons and I recommend just going back over the progression lesson, if you're not sure about that. But it really comes down to the things we've already talked about, the idea of new information, progression, regression and emotional change, making sure the script is always doing one of those four things.
03:04:36:05 - 03:04:50:26
Unknown
But we've done that to death by now. You should should know that at this point in the course. So we're going to move on to the idea of payoffs. This just comes down to, again, this idea of highlighting each of those many payoffs in your script and making sure with each one you're setting up what the mini payoff is going to be.
03:04:51:04 - 03:05:16:09
Unknown
You're creating tension as you build towards that mini payoff, and then you are effectively delivering it in a satisfying way. That's going to keep the viewer feeling happy and generally just keep them oriented within the scripts. It can be really, really easy, especially if you're reading the script out loud. When you finally got it at a stage where you can read through it all, you'll feel a sense of if the video is confusing and whether you yourself are getting lost in the overall flow of it.
03:05:16:11 - 03:05:43:04
Unknown
But if you are really signposting, each of those payoffs, making it clear what the audience needs to expect next, then you're going to have no problem with that. And that really is one of the biggest kind of secrets to retention. And it's something we've already talked about a fair bit in the course. So if you are using the whitespace template, you can check next to each of the payoffs on the scripting section and next to each segment there is a payoff checklist and you can just literally go through and check, okay, this segment, did I set up the payoff?
03:05:43:04 - 03:06:03:02
Unknown
Yes. Have I driven attention? Yes, I resolved it. Yes. So make sure to do that if you're using the templates, obviously. So the next thing that we're going to talk about is the idea of repetition. Again, this isn't something that should come as much of a surprise to you at this point. It's something we looked at a little bit for during the hook, but now it's time to look out for this throughout the entirety of the script.
03:06:03:05 - 03:06:21:27
Unknown
So are you repeating yourself throughout the script? It can be very easy when you're in the quagmire of writing the script that you might say something to 3 minutes later than you said it the first time and kind of forget that you've already covered that exact idea. Although you're using very similar phrases at multiple points throughout the script.
03:06:22:00 - 03:06:45:07
Unknown
So I would encourage you now just to go back over and really again, that self-awareness is always the most important thing when you're doing this. And just think to yourself, have I already conveyed this idea and do I need to either remove one of the instances, combine the two, or just overall simplify what I'm saying? I really, really like Jake Thomas's approach on this from a tweet that he sent back in July 2023.
03:06:45:07 - 03:07:05:10
Unknown
He said, As an entrepreneur, I highly value speed, but I'm trying a new thing with my YouTube channel. After I finish writing it, I then wait until the next day to listen to it. And so he sorry, I should say, he actually records himself reading this script and then listens to it the next day. And that is a really, really excellent way of then feeling that sense of pace, that sense of repetition.
03:07:05:17 - 03:07:22:15
Unknown
And he says, Hey, I always notice stupid little mistakes and it makes for a better video in the end. So that's a really, really good technique and something that I definitely recommend you try if you haven't done already. That little bit of time. Apart from when you first write to listening back to it or reading back over, it is really essential in spotting those repetitions.
03:07:22:19 - 03:07:38:18
Unknown
The only other thing to talk about in this lesson is the idea of clarity. This is the final check that I like to do, and it's again, why reading the script aloud is really, really impactful, because it will make you notice the things that you wouldn't normally say out loud, but that you thought you would when you wrote the script.
03:07:38:24 - 03:07:58:23
Unknown
Things that just feel awkward to say or, you know, significant sections where it feels like you're going off paced or it feels boring or it feels whatever else it is, maybe it's confusing the way that you phrase something or the way you've structured a set in paragraph going back through it and reading out aloud makes that clarity, that sense of being crystal clear with your audience.
03:07:58:25 - 03:08:19:18
Unknown
Really, really easy for you to spot. It could come up in a really, really simple way. It could be something you haven't noticed where you might have said, as in this example of a script that I reviewed, or more simply, as comedian Steve Martin once advised in an interview, Be so good, they can't ignore you. And when I was advising on the script, I just struck through that and said, Just say said.
03:08:19:20 - 03:08:35:16
Unknown
Unless the fact that he said this specifically in an interview is relevant to what happens next in the video, this is just additional context that isn't needed. And it's actually more awkward to say it doesn't it doesn't scan well when you're trying to read it out loud. And again, you wouldn't know that until you have read it out loud.
03:08:35:16 - 03:08:57:01
Unknown
So it could be something really, really simple like that. So just going back over the script and looking for those little instances where you can just be slightly clearer with what you're saying so that your audience fully understands what's going on. So those are the four things we've covered, the more that progression, payoffs, repetition and clarity. So if you have checked over your script for all of those things, then congratulations, you are done.
03:08:57:01 - 03:09:16:04
Unknown
You have now got your finished script, which is now ready to film. So really, another huge, huge congratulations for taking on board everything that we've gone over in this course. And I just want to wish you all the best with your next script and all the scripts to come. And if you have any questions at all, obviously please you can get in touch with me.
03:09:16:07 - 03:09:30:19
Unknown
If you're in the community, just drop me a message on there or message the message boards, or you can email me at any time. Find me on Twitter, all of that, because, yeah, I want to just make sure I can keep helping as many people with this stuff as possible. So do get in touch if you have any questions at all.
03:09:30:22 - 03:09:36:14
Unknown
But all I have to say is another big thank you, another huge congratulations, and I will see you very, very soon.
03:09:36:14 - 03:09:56:26
Unknown
I'm not much of a high heel type of woman. Not because I don't want to be, but because I walk a lot. Like, rarely. Will I ever leave home just for a short stroll? And so I choose comfort. Recently, however, I found an old pair of boots of mine. They have a pointy toe, very small heel like you would not know by the sound of them.
03:09:56:26 - 03:10:16:27
Unknown
Like they sound like stilettos. I think now, of course, I had forgotten about that as I put them on the other week. Went outside and was met with instant regret as that click clack you sound hit the pavement. But I was too lazy to get back inside and changed. And I felt so self-conscious for that entire walk, feeling like everyone was staring at me.
03:10:16:28 - 03:10:36:09
Unknown
I tried walking in a way that doesn't make any sound, and it just made me feel even weirder. And you would think I would swear off wearing those boots ever again, or at least seven in the morning. But I like the way they look, and I just don't ever want mine ghosts to stop me from doing something. And so I wore them again and again.
03:10:36:09 - 03:10:53:21
Unknown
And I have kept wearing them for a couple weeks. And in that time, something interesting has happened. So just yesterday I was out and about running errands here in the city and it was really hot outside. I was carrying Fred, my puppy in one arm, my jacket and my other arm. I was carrying my bag and it just was not my best look.
03:10:53:21 - 03:11:43:17
Unknown
But somehow the little clickety clickety sound from my boots made me feel like the world was my runway. I felt like with each step that I took, I was announcing that there was a fine woman coming through. Now, of course, this was all in my head. Literally, no one was looking at me, so naturally got me thinking, What are some other small, perhaps not so obvious things that may boost self-confidence for confidence come from the Latin word Fidrych future Me editing this video.
03:11:43:17 - 03:12:07:05
Unknown
It's not Fiero, it's that we all make mistakes, which means to trust. Therefore, having self-confidence means having trust in oneself. Wikipedia always has the best definitions. Personally, I define confidence as being aware that I'm actually cool. Incompetent, broadly speaking, of course. And here are some things that have helped me with that. I've been leaving some foibles in the past.
03:12:07:12 - 03:12:39:20
Unknown
I strongly believe that the words that we use to describe ourselves impact our lives more than we think, even when we just use them jokingly. So I avoid saying things like I'm weird or I suck. Basically, I just don't call myself anything that I don't want to be. I'm not going to say I'm awkward if I don't want to be awkward and if I feel the need to use such a word to describe what I'm feeling, I will find a way to communicate it Using different words, learning new things and being good at something definitely boosts self-confidence.
03:12:39:20 - 03:13:01:13
Unknown
In this portion of the video is sponsored by Skillshare, the one subscription that I've gotten the most value out of over the past three years. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring and creative classes for anyone who loves learning. I'm currently taking this class called Digital Illustration Learn to Use Procreate by Jerome Vogel, and I'll show you the result when I'm done.
03:13:01:15 - 03:13:23:08
Unknown
That's supposedly. I initially started my Skillshare membership to take classes on things like videography and writing, but I ended up taking classes on so many other things as well because there is just so much interesting to choose from. Okay, so I just compared my drawing to the other students drawings because with each class there is an assignment that you could choose to participate in.
03:13:23:08 - 03:13:42:07
Unknown
And I don't know how to feel about my drawing anymore. What do you think? Do you want to know what I think? I think that you should use the link in my description box to get a 30 day free trial of Skillshare. There is no commitment. Take a few classes. Try it out. Take a drawing class. Challenge me.
03:13:42:11 - 03:14:04:12
Unknown
Can you make a better drawing than I did? Send me a photo of it and we'll compare them. If you've ever been socially anxious, you know what it's like to get caught up in thoughts? Like, What do I sound like? What are my hand gestures signaling? Am I being weird? How do I look? It's just a bunch of I look caring about how we're being perceived as human nature.
03:14:04:12 - 03:14:33:10
Unknown
And to some extent we should care. But it's easy to get caught up in our own thoughts about ourselves, that we forget to listen and to be present and to pay attention to anything happening outside of ourselves. I've gotten better. I would like to think and reminding myself to shift my focus outwards instead of inward. So thinking things like What impression is this person leaving on me rather than what impression am I leaving on them?
03:14:33:10 - 03:14:54:17
Unknown
Or do I like this person? Rather than worrying that they may not like me being able to ask good questions, being able to evaluate a person and trusting your judgment, being able to remember what someone said, these are all things that boost confidence and you can't do them if you're not present. If you do struggle with getting too caught up in your head.
03:14:54:17 - 03:15:10:25
Unknown
One small piece of advice that I have is to wear something that's going to remind you each time that you look at it. So, for example, you could wear a ring, in fact, Molly or added wear two rings, one that's going to remind you not to hunch good posture and I know this is always one, but I really had to put it in here.
03:15:10:25 - 03:15:31:26
Unknown
It's not only necessary to give a good impression to others, but on yourself too. Did you know that your posture matters even when you're sitting down, as in an upright posture, can give you confidence in your own thoughts. Body language just makes a world of a difference. Actually, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you. Now, look, I'm not even going to do anything dramatic.
03:15:31:26 - 03:16:04:02
Unknown
I'm not wearing like a cool outfit or anything. It's going to be a subtle difference. But let me know if you notice Now, I'm not a posture expert. What I think about is pretend like you're shooting something from your you're shooting bubbles from your middle region. If you're tall, that might be a bit strange. If you're short, that's also going to give a weird walk where you can just pick a different region that you're shooting bubbles from.
03:16:04:05 - 03:16:28:14
Unknown
If you're very tall, maybe you're shooting bubbles from your stomach smelling good, maybe more impactful than you think. I've read in a study that perfumery can be likened to the nose as music is to the ear. And that same study found that 90% of all women tested in the fragrance study reported feeling more confident when they wore fragrance than when they did not wear fragrance.
03:16:28:14 - 03:16:54:10
Unknown
And it had the same effect on men as well. Now, I'm very picky with scents and it's taking me about half a lifetime. But I finally found a couple trends that I really like. They're very subtle. It's yummy and it gives me a boost knowing that I smell good and I've gotten complimented for it. So really becoming aware of the spotlight effect, the psychological phenomenon that makes us all think that people are noticing us more than they actually are.
03:16:54:11 - 03:17:15:00
Unknown
You are the center of your own world, but you're not the center of everyone else's world. Getting better at small talk may be the biggest one for me on this list and actually learning to enjoy it. So I truly value human connection and I'm genuinely interested in people. But to trigger a conversation with people is not something that has come naturally to me.
03:17:15:07 - 03:17:32:18
Unknown
Until I got a dog, I would say that I probably socialize more in the past year that I've had him than I did in the three years prior to that. Not a day goes by where I don't stop and have a chat with other dog owners, and in the beginning it felt strange, but now I don't even think about it.
03:17:32:18 - 03:17:59:09
Unknown
I actually like going to the dog park and just hang out with other humans and I just feel more confident approaching people in general. It just goes to show that the more we do something, the easier it gets. Becoming more comfortable in my femininity. And I'm going to make a whole separate video talking about that. It's been truly life changing, resisting the urge to choose comfort over happiness.
03:17:59:11 - 03:18:17:28
Unknown
And I will leave that one for you to interpret. I do my homework as best as I can. Being clueless and confident is not admirable. It's foolishness. As Charles Bukowski wrote, The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are fool about and the stupid ones are full of confidence. I just do my best to be well prepared for situations that call for it.
03:18:17:28 - 03:18:40:06
Unknown
You know, we all feel good when we can study facts and thrive in a meeting or an intimate or just a casual conversation, even simply because we've done our homework. And if I'm not prepared or if I simply does not knowledgeable on a topic, let's say I'll just say it, I'll be like, Hey, I don't know what the capital of the US is, but I would love to learn.
03:18:40:09 - 03:19:08:15
Unknown
I mean, I know it's New York is just an example being useful. We all want to feel like our presence or competence in our input matters. Humans have a need to be needed, you know, we want to feel like we're contributing. We don't want to feel like an extra that could easily be switched out, in my opinion, or as much as I've been able to think of it thus far, we made ourselves useful by being competent, which speaks for itself, but also by assuming responsibility.
03:19:08:15 - 03:19:34:14
Unknown
So. So examples, but volunteering to be the one to chop the onion or to make the call. And if it gets to the point of people pleasing and others running you over, you're in the wrong tribe, my friend. Get a haircut, try different hairstyles for me. Style bangs versus Unstyled Bangs makes like a 50% difference in my confidence.
03:19:34:16 - 03:20:00:03
Unknown
Make sure that you feel good and the clothes that you wear. Do you want people to see you in that outfit? If the answer is no, go and change. Don't go out in the world prepared to hide. I've been trying to adopt more social optimism and just optimism in general. But basically what that means is that I go into situations expecting positive outcome to be more likely rather than a negative outcome.
03:20:00:03 - 03:20:20:28
Unknown
And if there is not a positive outcome, I try to be okay with that and just move on with my life. You know, when we grow more resilient, which I think partly comes with age, we no longer fear things like rejection or failure or embarrassment to the extent where we let it hold us back in our lives. And now I'd like to end with a quote.
03:20:20:28 - 03:20:42:08
Unknown
And I don't know who originally wrote this or said this, but here we go. A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking because its trust is not in the branch but in its own wings. You might have heard it. I really like it.
03:20:42:08 - 03:55:24:19
03:55:24:19 - 03:55:50:14
Unknown
We're not moving as much as we used to. And it shows. But there is something that might reverse the damage of our sedentary lifestyles. It's called mobility training, and it's helping thousands of people live without pain, reduce the likelihood of injury and reclaim the body's full range of motion. I wanted to try mobility training for myself to find out if it really works and to see how much progress I could make if I did it every day for 30 days.
03:55:50:16 - 03:56:13:09
Unknown
This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them later. So my starting point of mobility feels pretty decent. I can do this. This and this. These are just some of the ways that able bodied people can test their mobility. But even with these remarkable accomplishments, I've found that as I've gotten older, I'm feeling more aches and pains, and I've even stacked up a couple injuries at the gym that have left me feeling concerned.
03:56:13:15 - 03:56:40:26
Unknown
The algorithm must have been listening. I think I first learned about your work through a viral video of you doing Olympic style lifts for everyday tasks. What were you trying to say with that video? Yeah, that's a great question. One day I was on social media and I was on my newsfeed and I saw a bunch of fitness accounts that were like x check mark, certain movement patterns in the fitness industry, like don't squat like this, squat like this.
03:56:40:26 - 03:57:08:19
Unknown
You get like a checkmark. You know, we should be educating people on how to train various positions and ranges of motion as opposed to like saying this range is completely bad for you, it's dangerous. Avoid it when that range is actually really specific to your daily life and in sports. Amir's it injured, who's also known as beard. I'll let you guess why is a mobility coach that's helped thousands of people improve their movement mobility training at least in the form that we do it through the functional range systems.
03:57:08:19 - 03:57:38:27
Unknown
It's really about joint specific strength training, conventional strength training. It's primarily about strengthening muscles and movement patterns. And the muscles are typically being trained at mid-range as a motion, whereas in mobility it's more about those end ranges, the joints and the connective tissue. So these are areas where we often run into pain, dysfunction, limitations, imbalances, so we can really develop a more well-rounded and resilient body if we strengthen our areas of weakness.
03:57:39:00 - 03:58:00:05
Unknown
After my call with Amir, he agreed to put together an entire program for me to get me through the next 30 days. The program is targeting some specific pain points I've had in the past, like my knees and ankles, but also hitting areas like my hips, shoulders and spine. Today is day one of mobility training. I'm very excited to get into it, although I have no idea what to expect.
03:58:00:08 - 03:58:25:28
Unknown
One of the first things I learned about was something called carts. It stands for controlled articular rotations. Cars involve actively moving a joint through its full range of motion while maintaining strict control and awareness of the movement itself. Isolating the rotation of your neck, shoulders, hips, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles and even your toes in a way that pushes you through your full range of motion.
03:58:26:00 - 03:58:51:01
Unknown
A range of motion that's often neglected in our day to day sedentary activities. This is the baseline of a lot of mobility programs, and it's meant to help increase blood flow, flexibility and overall movement. That was much different than I thought it would be. I think my expectation was that it was going to be more stretching. Clearly, I have a lot of work to do.
03:58:51:03 - 03:59:06:00
Unknown
Each day I begin adding a full body. Cars warm up to my morning routine. I have it stacked it with a coffee and a podcast to work through each joint over the course of about 15 minutes. The immediate impact of this routine was clear. It started to give me greater awareness over the areas of weakness in my body.
03:59:06:06 - 03:59:23:29
Unknown
I noticed the imbalance of flexibility between my left and right shoulder, as well as my ankles, and it also gave me an effective way to loosen up my body during those days when I spent hours in front of a computer. But as I learned, this was just one small part of mobility training. As I dug into one class after another, I realized there was a lot more to it.
03:59:24:02 - 03:59:45:00
Unknown
Okay, I'm going to jump into a 50 minute mobility class now, but I'm going to condense it down to one minute for you guys. Most classes target just one specific joint, and today I'm going to be working out my knees. It begins with a car's warmup here. I'm rotating my knee joint through its full range of motion. I'm creating tension and doing my best to isolate just my knee.
03:59:45:04 - 04:00:02:25
Unknown
But this one, it's actually really easy to overcompensate and use your ankle. So you really need to try to focus on that knee joint. Next up is a passive stretch, grabbing some books. I'll rotate my knee and place a few books under my foot to hold the stretch in place. After holding this position for a bit, it's on to pails and rails.
04:00:02:27 - 04:00:25:29
Unknown
One of the keys to strengthening your joints. So for my pals rotation and then to be driving the force of my foot into these books here, rotating at the knee, it doesn't look like much, but it's a surprisingly strenuous workout. For Rails, you initiate force in the opposing direction. Each of these sets is finished off with something called liftoffs, similar to pails and Rails.
04:00:26:05 - 04:00:43:25
Unknown
It's another way to strengthen the joint. After a few more of these exercises, strengthening each direction of our knee rotation, we finish off with more cars rotations. Now, with just a little bit more range of motion than we had at the start of the class. I'm going to be honest, when I did the routine yesterday, I thought there was no way I could possibly feel soreness from it.
04:00:43:25 - 04:01:04:19
Unknown
But lo and behold, today I'm in a little bit of pain. It's not the worst soreness in the world, but it's definitely an indication that I haven't actually worked out those muscles in a long time, if ever. One thing that I've been working on a lot lately is strengthening the connective tissue with my audience by updating my website.
04:01:04:21 - 04:01:22:10
Unknown
Okay. That pun was a bit of a stretch. My sponsor for this video is Squarespace. I've been using them for over a decade to build and launch my own websites for three main reasons. They've got great templates. They handle all the technical back end stuff that I'm too dumb to figure out and their platform makes it so easy to publish new content.
04:01:22:13 - 04:01:41:16
Unknown
I can change my bio like this. I can add a newsletter sign up form like this. Then I can swap a photo like this. And just to be clear, this photo is not edited by. I totally did it myself. And that's just the basics. With Squarespace, you can also buy your domain, build an online store, and set up a custom email address for your business.
04:01:41:23 - 04:02:02:04
Unknown
Visit Squarespace dot com today for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch. Go to Squarespace dot com slash the Avella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Remember when you click the link in the description down below this video that helps to support my channel. So thanks for considering. My legs are killing me.
04:02:02:06 - 04:02:21:17
Unknown
My favorite advice I've gotten so far about mobility training is that it's better to be honest than impressive, regardless of what new activity we're getting into. We often have a tendency to think that we're amazing right from the start. We try to impress others into thinking that we're naturally gifted, but that usually leads to overcompensation. Taking a look back at day one, you can see it clearly.
04:02:21:19 - 04:02:43:23
Unknown
My neck moves to the side as I rotate my shoulders and my spine bends as I rotate my hips. So I reminded myself over and over again, It's better to be honest. An impressive. I continued on taking these classes, targeting everything from my spine in my hips to my shoulders and neck. And as each week passed, I progressively added more tension.
04:02:43:23 - 04:03:08:08
Unknown
I started out with around 30% effort and then eventually moved up to 90%. Whether you're weightlifter or rock climber, you do BJJ or a dancer or a yogi or whatever physical activity you do. Having greater joint function through proper mobility training carries over to that like no other form of training that I've seen. Because when you have stronger joints, the connective tissue, that just means you're a stronger human being.
04:03:08:11 - 04:03:35:19
Unknown
By the improvement in my cars routine isn't huge from day one to day 30. My range of motion has increased a little, and I'm doing a much better job at isolating each movement. Of course, this isn't an insane transformation, but it's realistic and it's a step in the right direction to moving and feeling better every day. If you want to learn more about mobility training and try it for yourself, I've left a few links to free resources in the description below, and if you like this video, then please subscribe.
04:03:35:19 - 04:04:01:00
Unknown
YouTube. Thomas Frank makes over $100,000 a month without lifting a finger. So this stream of passive income didn't come around overnight. And to create the system that helped him achieve it, he had to do something. Probably most of us couldn't imagine abandon his 2.5 million subscriber YouTube channel. So why is this necessary? And more importantly, why is this something that should worry creators who are totally reliant on their YouTube channel as a source of income?
04:04:01:02 - 04:04:16:06
Unknown
To answer that, I need to ask you this. Do you ever worry that you don't see your friends enough, that you don't text them enough, or even that you should just arrange a beer with that guy at work? You keep promising to hang out with. It's really easy to feel like everyone we ever meet and like deserves a decent portion of our time.
04:04:16:07 - 04:04:34:18
Unknown
But studies have actually found that we only need 3 to 5 close friends to feel fulfilled, and considering it takes us around 200 hours to reach that level of closeness, we eventually have to decide who we going to deepen our relationships with. And that brings me back to Thomas Frank, because in August 2020, his YouTube channel was absolutely flying.
04:04:34:19 - 04:05:01:08
Unknown
He was just about to hit 2 million subs, and his videos were raking in hundreds of thousands of views. Sounds like a dream situation for any YouTuber. But around that time he started a second channel called Thomas Frank explains. And today his main channel has been all but abandoned. But why? Well, Thomas Frank stopped trying to be close friends with every single person he'd ever met and instead chose to nurture the relationships to which he could give the most and which would give him the most in return.
04:05:01:09 - 04:05:25:21
Unknown
And in doing so, he sidestepped an absolutely massive financial risk that not many full time YouTubers ever think about. I'm going to come back to that. So why is Thomas Frank pretty much stopped posting on his main channel and why has that allowed him to make even more money than ever? Well, despite having grown his channel by dishing out productivity advice, the self-help YouTube sphere is incredibly broad and it gains interest from people across hundreds of different nations.
04:05:25:21 - 04:05:45:10
Unknown
But the content on his second channel is really niche down and is aimed solely at hard line notion users, the kind of people who want software for everything they do and want to learn the most complex features. And this is the most important part of Thomas's marketing plan. By focusing hard on a specific content niche and then substantial upgrading the customer experience.
04:05:45:16 - 04:06:08:00
Unknown
He primes almost every subscriber to become a customer, and his advice to us was build the go to channel in your niche, then sell a useful product to your audience. So let us take a look at his marketing funnel that allowed him to make those absolutely ludicrous sums of money from a relatively small YouTube channel. And then we'll have a look at how you can make your audience this customer experience ten times more memorable.
04:06:08:02 - 04:06:27:21
Unknown
So at the top, we've got the Thomas Frank explains YouTube channel and that's got content around notion fundamentals and Build guys, feature releases, quick tips and advanced technical videos. Essentially, it's a catalog of all the skills you need to learn a notion to the highest degree. A notion nerd's dream. Each of these videos is also then turned into a blog post.
04:06:27:25 - 04:06:48:29
Unknown
Now, you might think that an easy way to kickstart this content would have been to promote it. On his main channel. But he's hardly mentioned his existing two and a half million subscribers. Instead, he relies on a combination of organic algorithm promotion from YouTube and SEO for his blog posts. Now, Thomas actually tweets, Much of that growth comes from identifying the right topics to cover, hence the pillars.
04:06:49:01 - 04:07:14:25
Unknown
And this is a key point. Becoming the go to person your niche means you need to find the perfect content for that niche audience. And because his active audience on his main channel were always asking about notion, he was basically able to carry out his market research by scouring the comments of his videos. If you're looking to niche down in this way, you have to be guided by your audience's needs, even if you only get a few comments per video or you've got a mailing list of 100 or less.
04:07:14:26 - 04:07:31:02
Unknown
The sooner you find out what they want and combine that with what you love to make the most, the sooner you'll be able to meet your audiences needs. So Thomas is nurturing the relationship with the people who love this one thing as much as he does, and that allows him to then steer the direction of that community. Now the next level of the funnel is the freebies.
04:07:31:03 - 04:07:50:20
Unknown
Everyone loves a freebie. You can download the majority of the stuff you see in his videos for free, but his marketing is so effective. While you might have gone in there intending to download a single template, you're probably leave with his entire back catalog because when you download one template, you're given the option to sign up to his templates list to stay up to date with future releases.
04:07:50:21 - 04:08:12:04
Unknown
It's non-compulsory so it doesn't feel scammy or desperate. and because he's already done such a good job at showing you how useful they are in his videos, you feel like you may as well. And this is where he unleashes his secret weapon called Plus. And he said this about it. Plus it's that little extra spit and polish that moves what you do from merely good to truly flipping.
04:08:12:04 - 04:08:27:06
Unknown
Right. He didn't say flipping out of up in the moment. You sign up for his template list. Not only do you get the template, but you automatically receive a link for every free template he's ever released or whether asking for it. Thomas is basically that friend who brings this up to your house, even though you said you deal with the cooking.
04:08:27:07 - 04:08:48:14
Unknown
And he said the reason he does this is because he believes surprise and delight are business superpowers. And you should always be looking for ways to exceed people's expectations. This brings us on to the bottom of the funnel. The page once again, he goes above and beyond his flagship notion. Templates like Ultimate Brain and creator companions haven't simply just been thrown up on a landing page.
04:08:48:17 - 04:09:03:23
Unknown
Instead, he's created an entire website dedicated to them. Now, I'm not 100% saying that you need to go as far as him. Something simpler would be fine as long as you can communicate to your potential customers. The reason that they should choose your product to solve a problem. And again, you don't have to do this on a website.
04:09:03:23 - 04:09:22:00
Unknown
You can do it on Twitter or talk about your newsletter, or you could tie to a homing pigeon and fire it to someone. Maybe not. You just need to convince people that you have the answer they're looking for, but it doesn't stop there. So beyond the free products and the objection busting website copy, he also creates an outstanding sense of value within the products themselves.
04:09:22:02 - 04:09:46:20
Unknown
So you can buy into his two biggest templates in a product bundle. And if you go through the website, he gives you a discount code for even more off, we get better value and he gets more money. You then get access to a whole bunch of additional bonuses, including onboarding videos, help documents and a private circle community. And again, I'm not saying you have to do all of these things, but it gives you a really good idea of some of the ways you can drastically improve your customers experience.
04:09:46:21 - 04:10:04:05
Unknown
It also kind of helps. This product isn't a course. Now, don't get me wrong, I think courses can be great. I would say that I make them, but some people, they think they're scammy, scot free. So having a flagship product that's not a course only expands his potential customer base and it makes him seem less like an evil.
04:10:04:08 - 04:10:23:10
Unknown
You can tweak your existing marketing instead of focusing on just pumping out more and more content. This can lead to higher revenue from fewer views, and what's more simply wouldn't have been possible for Thomas to provide this level of care without reducing the time he spent on his main channel. So I ask this this what subset of your audience can you really go above and beyond for?
04:10:23:11 - 04:10:46:13
Unknown
To create a true fan's feeling that's necessary for continued financial stability as a brings me onto a problem. Thomas is clearly a really savvy marketer who has a ton of experience. But what if you're not? Can anyone start generating more revenue today? First, you need to make sure you don't make these five really common mistakes. I see YouTubers take all the time by watching this video here.
04:10:46:21 - 04:10:54:15
Unknown
And once you fix them, you can build the foundations that help you level up to Thomas's epic extreme marketing guru in this one day.
04:10:54:15 - 04:40:15:09
04:40:15:09 - 04:40:33:17
Unknown
If I was to tell you that the big mistake I made in this clip is the same mistake that's killing your business, Would you know what it is? I wouldn't blame you if you did, because I see so many designers doing it. But let me tell you one thing. If you're one of these people making this mistake, then you need to do something about it now.
04:40:33:24 - 04:40:53:23
Unknown
Because at first it might not seem important, but over time it will slowly start to ease at your business until there's nothing left. And we don't want that. We want our businesses to be flourishing with a constant stream of clients whilst we get to be super creative doing what we love, all while earning lots of money to create freedom.
04:40:53:29 - 04:41:18:23
Unknown
Now, to help you identify if you're one of these people making this big mistake, let me introduce you to Maya and Salma that morning routines are about to teach us a not so obvious but very important lesson about success in business. Maya's average morning routine normally involves getting up at 7 a.m. going for a run, getting ready for the day, and then heading into her office, start work before 8 a.m..
04:41:18:26 - 04:41:39:23
Unknown
Some is a little different. She rolls out of bed well whenever she wakes up this morning. Depends on what time she went to sleep the night before. She then heads to the kitchen to make us some breakfast and while the bread is toasting away, she will use that time to check her Instagram feed. After eating breakfast, she heads into the office, still accompanied by her dressing gown.
04:41:40:00 - 04:42:03:25
Unknown
Now don't get it twisted when Summer wants to be, she's a badass. She eats healthy, she exercises regularly and she's productive. But this often comes in peaks and troughs. The lesson to learn here isn't as obvious as you may think. Yes, Maya seems to be more productive and lives a healthier lifestyle, but that isn't what I was referring to because our lesson actually comes from evaluating Summer.
04:42:04:00 - 04:42:27:02
Unknown
Why did her life seem all over the place? I want you to think deep here because at first glance it may be hard to pinpoint, but it is so important because it's the same thing. I see a lot of designers and business owners doing, and it is hurting their business. It's inconsistency. Summer was inconsistent with her good habits, like waking up early and working out.
04:42:27:09 - 04:42:49:19
Unknown
Yes, some days she's super productive, but these are few and far between. But what does inconsistency mean for your business? You might instantly think it means only posting twice a month on Instagram. And yes, whilst this is a good example of inconsistency, we actually do think bigger because it's often not just about what you're doing, but also what you're not doing.
04:42:49:20 - 04:43:11:18
Unknown
Let me ask you three important questions that will help you identify why, if you're making the mistake of being inconsistent within your business. When is the last time that you learn a new technical skill that helped improve you as a designer? Do you rightly reinvest back into the business to help it grow? This could be a marketing budget or it could be investing in a course.
04:43:11:20 - 04:43:38:08
Unknown
And have you ever tried to implement something new into your business to either save time or improve functionality? For example, a client management system. Now you have the answers to these questions. It should be glaringly obvious if you need to make a change or not. See, this is so important because being inconsistent and resting on your laurels often means you're getting too comfortable and comfort only ever leads to complacency.
04:43:38:08 - 04:44:00:00
Unknown
And if you let it happen for too long, your business will suffer as a result. Just look at how many businesses felt after they neglected the importance of social media during its rise in the early 2000s. They got complacent and didn't put the time in to investigate and learn how important social media was going to be in determining small business growth.
04:44:00:07 - 04:44:25:08
Unknown
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you have to constantly be looking forward and always be thinking and strategizing about how you can improve, because that would be exhausting. What I suggest is you at least set aside some time every week to work on something that would benefit your business. One week it could be researching about Web3 and the metaverse and how you can start to think about preparing your business to that another week.
04:44:25:08 - 04:44:44:17
Unknown
It could be taking a course to help improve a certain design, skill or technique. Another week it could even be looking for useful resources that help speed up your design process. And if that is you, then impostor elements. Response of this video is the best it gets. Grab your seven day free trial by clicking the first link in my description.
04:44:44:24 - 04:45:00:24
Unknown
Now the advice in this video is very important, but it is pretty pointless if you don't know about the common mistake a lot of designers are making when it comes to getting clients. So to prevent yourself from making this mistake, you need to go and watch this video right here. I'll see you over there.