Meet the 15y/o who Solved YouTube Shorts

wait a sec how many views have you gotten in the last 2 months over a quar of a billion views how many subscribers have you gotten 1.2 million starting from basically nothing yeah meet Sam a 15-year-old who has officially solved YouTube shorts he's got over 1.2 million subscribers and over 270 million views and the crazy thing is it's only taken him 3 months and then just to show off and prove it wasn't luck he started another Channel and went from 0 to 160,000 subscribers in a little over 30 days so how does he do it well I interrogated Sam to uncover exactly how he makes shorts go viral the specific editing techniques he uses to stop people swiping away how he uncovers viral ideas and a secret engagement hack that explodes his comments in total since you started what kind of stats are you ping in terms of views subscribers subscribers I have recently reached around a million subscribers views I've crossed 200 million views just a few days ago how long did it take you to get those just 2 months do you think that anyone can succeed with shorts if they follow the right process 100% 100% it's very simple the first thing you should look at is searching a good Niche to get into I would literally just spend hours on YouTube scrolling shorts see what's being recommended to me and I would also go into Incognito so I get recommended the best and most engaging content and just watch hours of shorts if I find a viral short and I'm like I could recreate this I would then go onto the channel and if I see that that was their only viral short and and then every other short has like you know a few thousand views then that's probably not a good Niche to get into but then if I go into their Channel and every single video is constantly hitting like millions of views then that's something I'd consider I'd say probably a channel that's almost on every single video is hitting over 500,000 views preferably a million a million to like 10 million then that's probably a good Channel and a good Niche to look into just by watching maybe 30 minutes of that Channel's content you are then going to be recommended hundreds of other videos from other channels within the same Niche so then after I would watch his content i' would probably just reload YouTube and see what's on my homepage and if I see other similar videos that are from a different channel in the same Niche I would then watch those and then for every channel that I do find I'll subscribe to those channels so I can go back to them or I'll just keep the link open and I'll just create a new tab I probably wouldn't get into an ISE where there's more than five really big creators with like hundreds of thousands of subscribers who are hitting millions of views but then if there's like 50 accounts where there's like a few hundred or a few th000 subscribers then I wouldn't really worry about that because they don't really impact you that much you want to compete with the biggest not the people that have hundreds of subscribers how much time would you say that you've spent studying different shorts and like how many shorts did it take you to kind of like really nail down your formula and fine-tune your intuition for virality it probably took took me around a few months of studying shorts while also posting my own shorts and trying to put in new things that I have learned from watching other people's shorts into my newer shorts yeah it doesn't have to be hours even if you're just scrolling like 10 minutes a day maybe that would probably get you there you will find some really good niches and channels where you could probably compete in if you're entering a new Niche and your competitors are like obviously hitting millions of views or even hundreds of thousands and you're not yet what you're aiming to do is create videos that could be posted onto your competitor's channels and no one would realize like the quality is the same what is it that you're trying to copy or model like how do you actually go about stealing and repurposing those ideas I have to make it unique so it's not like completely directly copying but I will almost create the exact same sh but in my style and you probably see it a lot like thousands of people copying Mr Beast and there's even like hundreds of people trying to copy me using similar titles or just general ideas or using the same phrases or words within their videos you just want to look at their short what they've titled it and slightly change it when I first started I directly copied my competitors I would look at their latest videos what they titled how long they were for how fastpaced they were and also how recently they posted those videos and I compare them to the amount of views they got you will notice why that video went viral and you sort of just want to replicate that video whether it's the idea or editing style I take the best parts from their channels and then start thinking of ideas from my own shorts go to five of your competitors's channels look at their most viral videos and take bits and pieces from all of them to create your own video which has a really high chance of going viral so sometimes I'll go ahead and literally just take their most viewed video I'll copy their script and then I'll replace all their content with my own but it's still following the same formula it sort of gave me an understanding of how to create these viral sort of Concepts and ideas so if you're a beginner if you have only a few hundred subscribers or even a few thousand directly copying some of the top creators can actually be very beneficial and over time your style will sort of just develop and you'll adapt in your own way I want to play devil's advocate for a minute because there are two cans there are people who say you should model what works because the amount of things that don't work are far more humorous than the things that do on the other hand there's also a camp of people that say be as unique as possible and that's how you stand out that's how you'll be successful what would you say to someone who is like no no no you should just be as unique as possible and don't copy anyone being extremely unique and completely different to everyone else these days it's almost impossible there's most likely someone who's already done it before so in a way you're always going to be like the second person to do it you're never going to be completely original that's just up to them if that's what they believe that's right but I feel like it'll be a lot harder to gain any success than if you're going to copy others or at least take ideas from a bunch of other people to sort of create your own content what are the specific elements that you pay the most attention to when I create a sh obviously you need the hook which should be around 2 to 5 seconds and then you should explain a bit more so viewers understand what they're watching and why they should continue watching so in the hook you want something unexpected whether it's weird funny or just doesn't really make sense then you sort of want to get on to revealing to them why they should watch the short like what they're going to see at the end like sort of hint at what's going to happen but don't exactly reveal it to them so they'll want to say till the end then you want to deliver cuz if you don't then they'll just scroll away and they'll be unhappy they're not going to like your video and they're not going to want to comment either you'd probably see it in Mr Beast shorts you sort of see the first second something crazy happens and then obviously by the end of the video he delivers and it's exactly what's said in the title and it was genuinely interesting where people would want to stay and watch until the end is there a way that you sort of gauge whether or not something is interesting or controversial or random enough to work versus like something else that isn't like how do you figure that out I think that just comes naturally over time from studying shorts and also Al studying your own shorts that you've posted but what I am aware of is that I do have a good understanding of the levels of how interesting it has to be but I can't really exactly explain it so you see what has worked in the past what is working for you even if you're not getting millions of views chances are you've probably gotten like 10,000 views on one of your videos but every other video gets like 500 views you did something in that 10,000 view video that got you that 10,000 views and you want to find out what that thing was and then replicator in every video that you post in the future for shorts generally just fastpaced things tend to do a lot better than kind of slow so with your voice over you want to be talking fast or speed it up in your editing software you just look at other shorts and how fast the pacing is like where every cut is how often they transition into a new scene are they talking for longer than 5 Seconds without switching the visual part of the screen and you want to apply the same to your video even if you're in like the gaming Niche or something you can look at cooking or something and you just look at how often the screen transitions into something else and you just apply that into your own video for you is there like a general best practice I wouldn't say there's like a amount you should have but I probably wouldn't keep something on the screen for like longer than 5 seconds so one sentence should be shorter than 5 Seconds one of them could probably be longer but it has to be a good sentence it has to be be something that provides value and will keep the viewer listening in terms of length of time my videos are generally around 40 to 50 seconds how did you decide to make 40 to 50 second long videos I just looked at my competitors and looked at their most viral videos and they just happened to be that long I just emulated that I made my voice over that long and just a general video that long because that's what I was working for my competitors assuming you have a good idea General content decent hook that kind of stuff what are some of the most important things that you do that help you go violent get more views in your opinion the other day I was actually on the bus and I was watching a guy scroll YouTube shorts and one of my videos popped up on his screen he wasn't wearing headphones or anything so he was obviously just reading the captions that were on the screen and if there were no captions he would have just scrolled straight past my video captions on the video are extremely important you want nice bold Big Font and you preferably want all caps so it's easier to read and then another thing I do is I often encourage people to comment on my videos what is it about getting people to leave comments on videos that you think helps the video blow up when they're commenting the video is still playing in the background for them even if they're just reading a bunch of other people's comments the video May replay like two or three times until they finish reading all the comments and they decide to scroll away so they've just given you like 200 300% average reation I think a lot of people think about comments as in like the more comments you can get the more engagement the algorithm sees so the more it pushes you short yeah it doesn't really matter about the amount it's more about people just scrolling and spending time on the video itself I have specific ways in which I get my viewers to comment for my videos you just have to act like you don't know the answer to something say something simple or easy that should make sense to you but you act like you don't understand it then people will often want to go to the comments to like you know not say you're stupid but like they just want to prove you wrong and say oh you're wrong this is wrong and you know this is right so that's quite a good tactic sometimes or you can say something that's wrong so if you say incorrect information that gets a lot of comments as well cuz people are just like oh that that doesn't make sense you're wrong cuz they just want to point it out it's just something people like doing so that's one thing another thing is a lot of the time saying something funny will make people go straight to the comments and point that out like oh there's this funny Point At You Know 30 seconds of the video which I find interesting like it's just like a random funny line it can be a word or two and people will not notice that and point that out in the comments and laugh about it so I leave one or two funny things generally around after the first sentence then I'll have maybe two more sentences and then another joke or call to action so like a comment or a subscribe thing it will get you a lot of subscribers as well like a lot more than if you don't ask for them you mentioned that every Niche has different strategies that you can use to kind kind of creatively get comments without revealing what your channel is what are some of the specific strategies or calls to action that you use to creatively get comments or to get people into the comments so that they then get caught up reading other people's comments and like watch your videoos 600 times saying things like it's impossible to do this and it's obviously not it's a very easy thing to do anyone can do it so me saying it's impossible will make people go to the comments wanting to prove me wrong so they just end up commenting and that just gave me a comment and there's a bunch of people going like haha I did it you said it's impossible but I did it that just gets you comments so saying it's impossible to do something but it's actually really easy to do that thing that will get you a lot of comments and that also helps boost your video and then at the end I'd often end the video with like a question or point something out that sort of doesn't make sense where viewers go to the comments to look for answers in your experience I know you tried out like a bunch of different call to AC comment challenges what would you say are like the top two to three specific ones that you think had the biggest impact something that can apply to everyone from all over the world so everyone can participate is best so something to do with name age or even just country where they're from so if you say comment where you're from or something and see how many other people are from that same country or something like that everyone watching the video can participate it applies to everyone and then there's time so you say what time is it for you right now and people will go and look at their phone while they're checking their time your video is still playing so that's giving you extra audience retention you know they check their time at 6:00 p.m. so they go and comment 600 p.m. and then 10 other people it's 6 p.m. for them as well and then they comment under that comment and it just leads to a chain and how do you transition into something like that do you just kind of throw it into the videos randomly I kind of just throw it straight out of nowhere kind of catch people off guard if you sort of slowly get into that people will lose interest and they'll be like oh yeah he's just trying to get comments but if you're talking about something interesting and then you suddenly blurt something out like that people will want to comment and they won't really think about you trying to get them to comment they'll just do it anyway it's like a patent interrupt almost yeah so they're just watching this really engaging piece of content and then you just what's the time for you right now you know and then they just go and comment the time and just give you extra audience attention from there when it comes to actually posting the short and preparing the short to go live is there anything in particular that you do that you think is important there or none of that stuff really matters that much it's all just about the idea title and the actual content I don't really focus on tags descriptions and hashtags and things like that I don't really think about that my videos go viral without me thinking about that stuff it's just best to focus on quality and idea of video do you pay much attention to the analytics of your shorts once they've gone live yes what analytics are you studying most intently are there any benchmarks that you're trying to be more than or less than yeah so I straight away look at view to swipe ratio i w 80% viewed and 20% swiped away so when people scroll onto a short if they decide to view the short then that will count as viewed but if they swipe away from the short like on Tik Tok or YouTube or Instagram then that's the swipe ratio I have had videos that have gotten to 10 million views plus with only like 70% view ratio so it's possible but if I hit that 80% then it's much more likely to go viral what else do you look for the vew to swipe ratio is extremely important but it is probably secondary to the average V duration and I want an average V duration of probably 40 seconds plus so around 80% do you find that 80% average view duration or the average percentage view decreases as the short scales up and gets a lot more views it does decrease but not drastically sometimes my average R duration is 46 seconds when I first post the short and then you know maybe 10 million views later it's on 43 so it's only like a 3 second difference so it's not too big of an impact other people tend to study other things from like where the viewers are and what times they're most active and things like that and try to schedule post for me those two things doesn't really matter so we've talked about the things that we want people to do that are very important what are the specific mistakes either at a really high level or even at like a specific technical editing or scripting level that you see shorts creators make that are stopping them from getting views I think the biggest mistake is people often stick to their videos and the way they create them and they just keep doing that and they don't try to adapt or improve so you always want to try and make your videos better and better so if you are posting in a niche where you you're on a few thousand subscribers or even a few hundred and you're trying to emulate someone who has 100,000 subscribers and gets like hundreds of thousands of views per video and you post 10 videos that you think are of the same quality or similar it's the same style of video and you don't even get like one viral one you are doing something wrong and the best thing to do in that moment is to directly compare your video compared to their video so how long it is how long each sentence is how often you transition even just the title of the video the music you're using the style of captions all these tiny things everyone's aware that they should be good but their competitors are always doing these things better than them if they're not getting the same results were there any examples of like really really small things that maybe your competitors were doing that you weren't that when you started doing them blew you up length of video really matters so it depends on Niche I post around 40 to 50 second videos sometimes I do 30 seconds but I find that my videos perform better when they're 40 to 50 seconds one thing that you might be doing wrong is just the length of the video so if you just look at how long your video is if it's 15 seconds and then your competitors are doing 25 seconds or 30 seconds then you should obviously try doing 25 to 30 seconds for your next video then again could just be how often the visuals change so you just want to time everything you can get your phone out get their video on your screen put your stopwatch on and just like tap it every time the visual changes or something and see how often they've done that and then compare it to your video we use that technique with my students we call it the case study strategy but I've never heard about using like the lap feature on a stopwatch I might steal that yeah so that's something I've personally done so you're always aiming for Quality it could just be the video or audio quality so if you don't have a very good voice over cuz you don't have a mic or you're not using a particularly good phone then that could just be the issue some people may not be able to afford better gear for their content which is understandable but I guess that's the first thing you should look at improving if that's something that's different if your competitors have like Crystal Clear audio and yours is really choppy then that's probably the biggest thing that's setting you back we've talked about a lot of things today but just to sort of like summarize this for the people watching let's imagine that both of your successful shorts channels right now get copyright strike and deleted that would be terrible but knowing what you know or at least me knowing what I know you know I think you'd be able to start another successful Channel walk me through exactly what you would do like starting right after this call to start another Channel get back on top and blow it up yeah straight away I would just go on to YouTube on incognito mode and just scroll short for hours and you don't have to do it for hours on end but if you just scroll for maybe 20 minutes a day you can do that over a week over 2 weeks over a month but I prefer to just you know do 5 hours in one day or something cuz it's just quicker but if you want to space it out you can do that and then I would try to find really high performing videos probably over a million views and then I go to to those accounts and if every single video that they've posted is hitting like a million views and above constantly then I know that's a good Channel they're obviously really successful and then I would look at when they created that channel and if it's like a 8-year-old Channel and they started posting ages ago then I might question like okay this is maybe not the best Niche to enter because they've been at this for 8 years and I'm looking for something that I can blow up you know within a week so what I'll look for is channels that are maybe a month old or less even so you want to find the newest possible Channel with the highest amount of use you'll definitely find a bunch of these and maybe you can find found five niches that seem really good that you could possibly enter and create the same level of quality and you know you can do that because you know your level of editing or even just script writing or making videos just as a content creator in general only you know how well you can make your videos so really think about can I compete in this Niche can I make my videos as good as these people and if the answer is yes then that's something really good to look into and that's probably what I'd do then I'll just look at all of them and if they're all great and if they're all easy to do I would probably just choose whatever seems most interesting or like most appealing to me cuz there are a bunch of niches where the videos you might create will go viral but you might get bored of it or it might not be as fun as another Niche so you want to find something that you also enjoy creating while creating it otherwise you will get bored of it and you will lose motivation even if you're monetized and you're getting millions of views per video you will want to give up eventually because it does get tiring and you get exhausted so yeah and then I'll just choose what I would enjoy most and then for my first video I would probably just take the best performing video if they have hundreds of thousands of views on their latest 10 videos I would look at maybe their one video that got 50 million views like a month ago or something and I would take that script and I would put that into a Google Document and I would just edit it so it's different but it still follows the same structure so you have the structure of a 50 million view video but you edit it so it is slightly different and even if people point out that you've stolen that idea or taken that idea like some people consider it bad but I think think it's the best thing to do so I now have a script that has viral potential because it basically has gone viral in the past and then I'll create the voiceover for that for the same quality that they have created and I will try to make the voiceover the same length as they have as well so if I speak too fast and make a 10-second video but their voice over ended up being 20 seconds that's obviously not good and I want to make my voice over 20 seconds as well so I want to emulate their video as much as possible and then editing just do the same thing just copy their Cuts you can use different images different background footage whatever but you want to still copy their cuts and transitions within their video cuz the cuts that have been in that video have made that video get 50 million views and then that's how I would go around editing it and then for posting it I would just take their title paraphrase it put that in my video tags don't matter to me too much but I do still use them I use a tool called Tags extractor tocom so I extract the tags from his video or you can use vid IQ as well and then I just take a bunch of his tags put those into my tags in video while I'm posting it and then I'll probably delete a bunch and add in a few of my own and then I'd post it and see how that goes if you follow everything that I've said and it's the same quality if not even better that video should go viral and if it doesn't then I don't know cuz it just has to it's like really that simple it can take time sometimes so maybe you won't get a million views on the first day I've had a few few videos of mine that were on like you know 20,000 views and they suddenly spiked up to 2 million views after like a month but it should give you results pretty quickly I'd say I'd make around 5 to 10 videos and if you haven't gone viral by then you might have just chosen the wrong Niche and I'd just start looking for a new Niche again using the same tactics that I discussed before and that's it really that was a master class if you watch this video and listen very carefully to everything I've said I guarantee you that you will succeed if you would like more depth help from someone like myself on growing your YouTube channels you can check out the link down below I do have a program that should help out with getting views it goes into a lot more detail gives you more personalized advice and will help you get a hell of a lot more views and subscribers link to that will be down below if you're interested but if you're not ready for that here's another video you can watch where I'll share 28 YouTube shorts secrets that feel illegal to know

Channel: Marcus Jones

Views: 24,218

Keywords: how to grow your gaming channel, grow your gaming channel, how to grow your new youtube channel, grow your youtube channel, grow your youtube channel tips, how to grow your youtube channel exposure, how to grow your youtube channel fast 2023, how to grow your lets play gaming channel, gaming channel tips, how to grow your dead youtube channel, how to get views on youtube channel, how to get more subscribers on youtube, gygc, youtube channel tips

Id: 7rj_MF6_hDM

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024