265: 10 YouTube Shorts Hacks | Every Channel Should Be Using!

Hey, we're about to get right into the content, but I wanted to make sure you knew about the huge sale happening right now at ThinkMediaSale.com. You can get 90% off of our YouTube starter kit, plus our YouTube niche finder course in one bundle for the holidays. But it's ending soon, so check out ThinkMediaSale.com to grab this special offer. Most people are doing YouTube shorts all wrong, and it's costing them dearly. So in this video, I'm revealing 10 YouTube shorts tips to skyrocket your views, new features that you need to know, and how to position yourself to benefit from new money-making opportunities with shorts. You see, right now, YouTube shorts are getting over 50 billion daily views on the platform. Google's Chief Business Officer said, YouTube's number one priority is shorts. Now, before we get really tactical, tip number one is you gotta start messy. You can't have success with YouTube shorts unless you actually post a YouTube short, so you can't let overthinking or perfectionism hold you back. And one of the fastest ways to get started with YouTube shorts is if you're already creating vertical video on other platforms, don't hesitate to test it out by downloading it and then uploading it to YouTube shorts. You can use a website like snaptick.app to download your TikToks without the water mark, and then try those on YouTube, and you could also use snapinsta.app to download your Instagram reels, no water mark, and upload those to YouTube shorts. Testing out that content can't hurt, and perhaps the videos crush. And YouTube themselves have emphasized that shorts is a huge opportunity for creators to get started creating content if they're new. Shorts is the ultimate opportunity for new creators, because you're constrained to less than 60 seconds, vertical video, all you need is a smartphone, and the YouTube app alone allows you to edit and make changes to your content and add features and add music. You just got to get started. Tip number two is optimize your titles, and the reason for doing this is to try to get someone to stop scrolling the shorts feed, because not just the first few seconds, but the title captures their attention. And even though YouTube shorts titles can be up to 100 characters long, only the first 40 characters of the title will appear in the shorts player. This means that if possible, your title should be less than 40 characters long, or at least front loaded with the first few words being the most important. For example, here's a 65 character title, tips and tricks for growing and scaling your real estate business. Now, here's the problem. Not only will that last part get cut off, but the key subject matter real estate will actually be cut off, because it's towards the end of the title. So consider which words are read first, and here's a 35 character title as an alternative. Genius tips for real estate agents. Short, less than 40 characters essentially says the same thing, and is a much more powerful title to encourage people to stop the scroll if they're interested in that topic. Now, the goal of tip number three is also to stop the scroll, and that is optimize your hook. Another way to put this is optimize the start of your YouTube short. Now, in long form video, sometimes people talk about the first 10 seconds or 20 seconds being really important to capture the viewer's attention. However, when shorts, you got to throw that out the window. When it comes to YouTube shorts, second zero is critical, meaning everything that is seen in that first less than one second is speaking to the viewer. So you have to think about what's visually on screen, what's being said verbally. Is there any text or words on screen besides the title, optimizing this is critical for high performance shorts. So don't waste any time, trim any fluff out of your entire short, but especially the start, and make sure that something happens right away. Now, tip number four is optimize the content. Now, our goal in the previous tips was to stop the scroll. Now, our goal is to keep the viewer watching. There's multiple ways to increase viewer retention. And those include adding b-roll and other video clips, using a green screen feature and pointing to articles, photos, or videos that are behind you may be reacting to content. Having captions on screen help the viewer read along and especially watch the short if the sound is off and even things like emojis or animation or things that are popping up, making the video more interesting, all help viewer retention. And in long form, they talk about the rule of seven, which means that the scene should change every seven seconds or so. And so maybe that's multiple angles, cutting to a b-roll clip, some kind of animation or visual switching things up to keep the viewer engaged. But I think we realize that with shorts, everything is accelerated. So there's something about changing the scene, perhaps every three seconds or even faster. And that doesn't necessarily mean completely adding b-roll. It could just mean an emoji pops up on screen, a word is emphasized. There's a zoom in to you communicating on camera, visual elements that make the short faster paste and more visually engaging. So the viewer keeps watching. Number five is loop the video to get over 100% view duration. You probably noticed that when you're watching YouTube shorts, as soon as it's over, it just starts back again. And that is going to signal to the viewer that they should swipe and start watching another short. Unless, of course, the short is super entertaining or educational or fascinating. So people want to re-watch the whole thing. But another way of doing this is ending your short in a way that connects it to the first words of the video. Then in a way, kind of keeps the story going, maybe encourages the viewer to watch it a second time. And in a lot of cases, they probably don't even notice. And of course, the result is that if you're getting over 100% average view duration, this can really hack the algorithm. YouTube wants to show that short to more people. So let's say I was making a YouTube short about the opportunity of starting a YouTube channel this year. And my first line in the video was right now is the best time to start a YouTube channel. What I could think about if I'm structuring and outlining my short is the last line could be that's why right now is the best time to start a YouTube channel. And so if somebody just watches this short and it stops, you'd be like, dude, is that just cut off? But when it loops, the end of the video says that's why this is the best time to start a YouTube channel. And perhaps this tactic is even better done when it's not done verbally, but visually. There are different art channels or channels that do something creative where the start of the video or the start of the action sport or whatever. When it hits the end, it loops back to the beginning, creating kind of a cycle where sometimes people don't even know that they're rewatching the video because the loop is seamless. If you master this hack, it'll produce great results for your YouTube shorts. Tip number six is select a custom thumbnail. Thumbnails on YouTube shorts have an interesting history. When they first launched, there was no way to do a custom thumbnail. And YouTube themselves said that it was something that they didn't think was that important because of the way shorts are distributed in the feed, etc. Now recently, they've added the ability to select a custom thumbnail. However, at the time of recording this video, you can only do it on mobile only. So when you're uploading on mobile, when you're adding in your title, you can click the icon of your video and then drag and select a frame of the video to be your short thumbnail. While this might not be the most important factor in a short's performance, it's absolutely worth doing and not ignoring. My current experience on my mobile app when consuming YouTube is that on my homepage, it's mixed with long-form videos full-size thumbnails and groups of two or four or shelfs of different shorts. And so that first frame or whatever the thumbnail frame is, is a big deal because it's catching my attention or not based on what I'm looking at. And who knows, maybe in the future, YouTube will give us the ability to upload completely customizable thumbnails. But until then, the mobile option is the best solution. Now we have four more tips to hit and these ones are super important. But if you've been getting value out of this video, can you smash the like button? And I need you to know about a super cool resource that we have here at Think Media. That's on sale right now at ThinkMediaSale.com. It's called our viral video bundle. And it includes our AI for a YouTube guide, our YouTube shorts master class, our YouTube starter kit, and a new year's YouTube strategy session where we're going to be talking about the best practices for starting and growing a YouTube channel with what's working right now. And it's on a major discount. So if you want to check it out, you can just go to ThinkMediaSale.com or just click the link in the description. But now let's get into the next tip. Number seven is use popular music legally. People always wonder how can I use popular music in my long forum YouTube videos because it causes so many headaches with the monetization being claimed by the label or the artist or distribution and all kinds of stuff that's super frustrating. The cool thing about YouTube shorts is you can use popular music legally. So the way I like to do it is whenever I'm creating content, I like to create it without music. And so using the YouTube shorts mobile app because I want to be able to do the custom thumbnail, I'm going to select a popular song that fits the vibe of the short. And of course, I'm going to make sure I mix the audio levels properly. But here's some practical tips for vertical video overall. Personally, at ThinkMedia, I post a lot of vertical video on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Reels, and YouTube shorts. So I like my original vertical video asset to be music free. I know the YouTube shorts app is all you need to get started with editing YouTube shorts. But personally, I like to use cap cut. And when I'm done creating my vertical content, I like to export the video with no music. So then I can post it to Instagram Reels and select the song natively in Instagram, TikTok, and select the song natively there and YouTube shorts and select the song natively there. It does take extra work. But now I'm tapping into the viral music that's approved on the platform itself, and I run into no issues. Earlier, we mentioned that you could download your TikToks with no watermarks or your Instagrams with no watermarks, and we talked about those websites. I'll make sure I link up everything in the description down below. But the issue there could be that because popular music is embedded, when you upload it on YouTube shorts, the video might get flagged or just have distribution not happening in certain countries. The bottom line, strategically integrating your shorts with popular music is a powerful strategy. So consider that when you're building out your YouTube shorts. Now tip number eight is baked in closed captions. And what that essentially means is not the closed caption feature that YouTube does if they just listen to your video or you upload a caption file, but it's visual closed captions that were created in the video editor. We touched on this tip when talking about optimize your content because the visual captions on screen can help audience retention. This is also helpful because people might have the sound off and they can stay engaged and read what is being said. But top shorts creators realize that doing captions well is a strategy in and of itself. And when you study top YouTube shorts creators, you'll see how intentionally they are with their captions. When creating fast paced content, a lot of times they'll even have one word at a time, center screen on the YouTube short, just enrapturing your attention for the entirety of the content and the story that they want to tell. This is one of the reasons why I like tools like cap cut and they're not sponsoring this video. It's just a tool I actually like. But for example, on this short that I did here, I did a style of captions where it was one word at a time, dead center. And I optimized it around the way the entire YouTube short looked. And so baked in captions means the captions are embedded in the video file itself and take advantage of this tip because it will help performance and view retention. Now we're going to hit 9 and 10. But before we get there, let's talk about money. The big question is how do you monetize YouTube shorts? Like short YouTube pays you for views on YouTube shorts, but it's not very much. For example, on my channel thick media, we generated over 51 million views and grew 53,000 subscribers from YouTube shorts alone over the past year. However, from those 51 million views, we only earned $3,475. Now when it comes to the future of YouTube shorts monetization, shopping on YouTube is very fascinating. TikTok is going all in with integrating shopping directly into the platform where you'll be able to buy products and creators can earn money. There'll be affiliate opportunities to earn money. And there's no doubt about it that YouTube is going to be adding those same integrations for YouTube shorts. However, from a monetization standpoint, long form is much more compelling. Remember how I just told you that I earned $3,400 from 51 million shorts views? Well, on thick media, we got 53 million long form views. But that paid us $424,203. The difference is pretty massive. It's kind of crazy. And what that reveals to me is that from a pure monetization standpoint, long form is the game, which brings us to tip number nine, and that is use the related video feature strategically. So one of the coolest new features for YouTube shorts is the ability to link another video on your YouTube channel to your YouTube short. In doing so, right underneath the title is a clickable link to that other video on your channel, which can ultimately be a long form video. One of the most practical use cases of this feature is the fact that a lot of people do long form video podcasting and then cut shorts out of that long form podcast. So now you can connect the two, hopefully using shorts to get broad appeal, broad awareness, and create some interest for people that want to go listen to the entire long video. But here's why I bring this up in relation to monetization. You may have heard that recently YouTube made links not clickable in your YouTube shorts comments and in your YouTube shorts description, which is super frustrating because if you had a strategic short connected to affiliate links or some other way to monetize, that strategy is basically broken now. Sure, perhaps YouTube is going to add some kind of YouTube shopping thing and control that more in the future. But ultimately, we lost one tactical strategy when they did that. In my opinion, one of the new ways to think is create compelling shorts that capture broad interest and could lead to a longer form video that doesn't just monetize in a much higher way when it comes to YouTube monetization. But that same longer form video could also have multiple streams of income connected to it. Be that your own product, affiliate links, deeper connection with you, and your channel memberships or Patreon. So many other things that could happen in that video, which brings us to number 10, which is experiment, analyze, and adapt. The truth is success on YouTube can feel like a moving target. What work today may not work tomorrow, or maybe you haven't even figured out what works for you yet. I want to encourage you to keep learning, to keep studying, to keep posting, and to analyze the data and results of your YouTube shorts and all of your videos so that you can make data-driven decisions and make your next upload, your best upload. In fact, if you actually want to learn my seven R system for YouTube, you can click or tap the screen to watch that video. And remember, we have a special sale at thinkmediasale.com, link to that in the description. That is our viral video bundle discounted for the holidays. My name is Sean Cannell rhymes with YouTube channel, smash like, and I'll see you in the next video.