Advice for YouTube Content Creators

This list pertains to instructional/informational/educational content… generally created by sole-proprietors, not organizations. Organizations probably live in a different world where they can write their own rules that might or might not define success.

1. Keep videos under 10 minutes (Bellis’s Law of Informational Videos). If you have an hour’s worth of content, good for you… you have 6 videos.
2. NEVER SAY ANYTHING IS SIMPLE!!! If anything were simple your channel and 90% (?) of Youtube wouldn’t exist. While it is true that some things are more intricate or complex than others… and some things are simple AFTER you’ve learned them… no one seeks out a Youtube video and invests the time in watching it because of something simple enough for them to do it without watching a fucking video.
3. When asking people to subscribe, use just video overlays, NOT audio (which interrupts their investment of time in your wannabe stardom) to do your selling.
4. DO solicit “likes” very briefly — 5 seconds? — in your audio-video content. I personally feel that likes are a strong indication of value and it’s helpful to remind people, perhaps 2/3 of the way through.
5. Don’t say “Now let’s get into it.” Instead, just get into it.
6. Don’t spend more than 3 seconds on any splash screen/intro music, Hollywood style beginning nonsense.
7. Go back through and edit out every single thing that is not either useful information or very strong entertainment value-add. I’ve watched one channel where the filler content is deliberately goofy (to give the channel appeal) and it works with almost 20% goofy entertainment, but most should have a lot less than 20%.
8. Do not show how to screw in a screw and then make the audience sit through watching you screw in the remaining identical screws. Skip ahead and explain it.
9. DON’T use jargon without explaining it. People ONLY watch Youtube because they DON’T know what you’re talking about. When you hit on an industry term or acronym, stop and spell it out.
10. Put in chapters or whatever Youtube calls it. Just watch your video and write down the timestamp (with 4 digits and a phrase, like “05:04 Feeding Fish”) of every key section and paste the text list into your video’s Description. I even did this as a comment in someone’s video and it worked for other viewers!