How to blow up your YouTube channel in the next 90 days

Richard (0:00)

Today is a special day. We've got the best YouTube strategist on the planet right now on 1of10 Podcast, Aprilynne.

Aprilynne Alter (0:06)

That is way too kind of... Hello, hello, I'm honored to be here.

Richard (0:11)

This is awesome. Well, your last upload was around thumbnails, and it's your most viewed video in the past year, which is already crushing, and that's just, yeah, four weeks old. So I'm curious, for those watching, what would be your top advice if one's thinking about thumbnails?

Aprilynne Alter (0:28)

Okay, let's start broad and then get more specific. Broadly, I think the biggest thing that people have to think about with thumbnails is, and it's a little bit of a buzzword, but I'll explain, what is the curiosity gap opened by a thumbnail? What's a curiosity gap? I like to define it as the gap between what we currently know and what we want to know.

And in a thumbnail, you should be opening some sort of curiosity gap. The curiosity gap ironically does not have to be the emotion of just pure curiosity. Any sort of emotion can be powerful in a thumbnail in order to get people to click. But the way that I describe it is that in your thumbnails, you have to either be evoking an emotion, evoking a question, or doing both. And if you're not doing that in your thumbnail, it's not going to be very clickable. So in an example, for instance, let's say I'm making a video about, like, how to cook a burger, you know? It could be like, okay, how to cook the perfect burger? I could just, like, show myself holding a burger, and be like, eee, right? And in that case, I'm showing what the thumbnail, like what the video is about. I'm showing myself, and I'm showing a burger. But what emotion is evoked?

Like, there's not, or like, what questions are evoked? Only questions are coming from the title itself. And if, really interestingly, if you look across all the different surfaces of YouTube right now, across every single surface, the thumbnails are taking up physically more and more space on your screen, and the titles are taking up physically less and less and less space. This is especially prominent if you're looking at the suggestive panel. Like, how ginormous the thumbnails are, and how tiny the titles are. So, what that means is that if you rely on your title alone to evoke those questions or those emotions, people are always going to look at your thumbnail first, and they might even not get to scanning your title and not even get that. So, how can we add some emotion or question to the burger example? Richard, any thoughts?

Richard (2:39)

How do we bring more emotions to the burger?

Aprilynne Alter (2:42)

Emotions or questions to evoke in this thumbnail of how to cook a burger or the perfect burger.

Richard (2:48)

Either make the burger incredible or depends on the niche. If it's entertainment or more educational. What would increase the intrigue, curiosity gap here? Would be... I mean, yeah, if there's a special way to do it, or maybe a time-sensitive way, like you can do it in five minutes when people think it's 20 minutes.

Aprilynne Alter (3:08)

So, we're talking about adding some sort of angles here. So, for instance, it could be like, how to cook the perfect burger, seeing that that burger is like, just five minutes or something. Oh, that's really interesting. How can we get this great result in only five minutes? There's a curiosity that the curiosity gap is, like, how can you do that in just five minutes? We could add something like, three easy steps or something, right? And so, okay, like, what are the three easy steps? I'm thinking about making a burger. I'm like, do I know these three steps? I want to know these three steps.

Let's do that.

Going towards the emotion side, we lean into some sort of familiarity. And potentially even like, this is kind of like pie in the sky, but if you can offer this to Gord Ramsey and have a picture of him mid-bite and some text around shockingly good, or something else that he would say as he's taking this bite in this moment, that creates this curiosity and this emotion of familiarity. Oh, I want to know why this burger is so good that even Gord Ramsey says that this is a great burger. So these are all different examples of how you can go beyond just showing what the video is about and either evoking a question or evoking emotion.

Richard (4:31)

Just a quick mention, we recently released the best thumbnail generator in the world. It can create 12 realistic thumbnails in under 60 seconds using your channel's visual style and your actual face. And the best part is it does not look like AI. So for a limited time only, you can try it for just $1 for the first month in the link below. Amazing. And what's your thumbnail workflow to create those thumbnails?