When I started making videos about money in 2019, I had no idea what I was getting into. I’m a wealth adviser, not a presenter. But I wanted to explain how investing and saving work in a way you can actually follow. By now my channel langzaamrijker has hundreds of videos on it and I look at the numbers behind them every week. The most important thing I’ve learned in those years is this: YouTube isn’t a video platform. It’s a search engine.
That may sound odd, but it changes everything about how you make content. People type a question into YouTube, just like on Google. YouTube is even the second-biggest search engine in the world. So a video isn’t a poster you hang up and hope someone walks past, but an answer that has to be found. And just like with SEO on your website, you largely decide how findable you are yourself. Social is simply search, and because the way people search is changing, that only becomes more important. In practice I see that the makers who get this win in the long run. Not through luck, but with videos that are still being watched years later.
Start with the question people actually ask
Before I make a video, I first look at what people are searching for. Not what I feel like telling, but which question is alive. That difference is bigger than you think. I’ve made videos about current events, something that had just been in the news. They run like crazy for a week and after that nobody cares. And I’ve got videos from five years ago that are still watched ten thousand times a month, simply because people keep searching for that one topic.
That second kind is worth gold. I like to compare it to investing: a topical video is a one-off windfall, a timeless video is compound interest. You don’t see results straight away, but it keeps bringing you new viewers for years. So don’t expect one video to explode right away. Build up a collection of answers to questions that are just as relevant two years from now.
Title and thumbnail: this is where your click is won or lost
You can make the best video out there in terms of content, but if nobody clicks, nobody sees it. The title and the thumbnail do that job, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I’m a wealth adviser, I want to be taken seriously. A loud thumbnail with an over-the-top surprised face doesn’t feel like me. At the same time, my own data shows something uncomfortable: if I leave my face or a recognisable emotion off the thumbnail, I get up to five times fewer views.
You have to find a middle ground there. I make no false promises and don’t use a photo of something spectacular that isn’t in the video, because if people notice after ten seconds that they’ve been fooled, they click away. And YouTube sees that. But making people curious is fine. Make sure your thumbnail is recognisable at a glance: a fixed colour, a logo, a few words of text. And the nice thing is that you can still fix this afterwards. Take your videos older than six months, sort them by views over the last thirty days, and test a new thumbnail on the ones that are still running. I do that regularly, and the difference can be big.
The first fifteen seconds, and why watch time is everything
Don’t open your video with twenty seconds of logo, music and atmosphere shots. I understand the temptation, it looks professional. But in those twenty seconds you’ve already lost your viewer. I always see the biggest drop-off right at the start: of everyone who clicks, a good share leaves within half a minute. So give value or emotion straight away. Tell people what the video is about, or show a glimpse of what’s coming. Your atmospheric intro is fine, but don’t put it right at the front.
Why does that matter so much? Because watch time is the only number YouTube really steers on. The platform wants to hold people for as long as possible, so a video people keep watching gets shown more actively to new people. That’s why my videos of ten to fifteen minutes structurally do better than short ones. My regular viewers still get to see a four-minute clip, but it rarely reaches new people.
And be careful about going by the number of views or subscribers. I have 55,000 subscribers, but my videos are watched on average between 10,000 and 20,000 times. A large part of those subscribers clicked once during corona, when everyone was stuck at home and started investing, and stopped watching long ago. So that number tells me little. A hundred thousand people who actually watch a video to the end is worth more than a million who click away after ten seconds.
Help YouTube understand what your video is about
I’ve been lazy at times and skipped the text with a video. I don’t do that anymore, because you’re handing the platform free information. Three things that, in my experience, really work:
- Chapters. Add timestamps to your description if your video covers several topics. You’ll get those handy little bars, and YouTube (and Google) understand better what’s in it.
- A good description. Name the topic in the first sentence. That’s what the platform checks to work out what your video is about.
- Subtitles. Automatic subtitles keep getting better, but it helps to check them for mistakes. And once you have a good transcript, you can build on it again later, think of automatic translation into other languages.
Put yourself forward, people follow a person
This is maybe the most important point, and it took me years to really get it. People don’t follow a channel, they follow a person. I notice it most strongly in my own work. I regularly speak to people on the phone I’ve never met, and within a minute they say it feels like they’ve known me for years. They’ve watched my videos. You don’t build that kind of trust with a piece of text on a website or with an advertisement.
I speak to people I’ve never met who feel like they’ve known me for years. That’s what a video people actually watch does, not an advertisement.
Tim Kraai, Social Organic Specialist at GRP Digital
For a brand it works exactly the same way. A recognisable face that keeps coming back, whether that’s a regular employee or a presenter, makes your content human and trustworthy. Search engines pick up on that too: if the same person keeps talking about the same topic, they understand that this person is the expert there. You don’t have to put everyone in front of the camera, but choose deliberately who you bring forward. A real face beats a logo, every single time.
Ask for interaction and choose one goal per video
Get people to respond. Ask a question in the video and in the description, and reply to the comments yourself in the first week, because that’s when most of them come in. I notice that a call to action in the video works much harder than the same call to action in a line of text underneath. Name your newsletter or your next video out loud, and put it in the first two lines of your description, so nobody has to expand it. With your end screen you then send viewers on to a video you choose, instead of a random suggestion.
But don’t try to do everything at once in every video. Decide in advance what the goal is. Do you want to build brand experience, or do you want to rank for a concrete search query? Those are two different videos, with two different approaches. One video that tries to do everything usually does nothing well.
Start with one thing
You don’t have to do all of this at once, and you shouldn’t. I learned it myself through trial and error, video by video. Start with your thumbnails, test a few, and see what happens. Then take the next step. It’s not called slowly richer for nothing: the best results come from consistency and patience, not from that one video that happens to explode.
Want to see how I tackle this myself in practice? I show it every week on my own channel. And if you get stuck with the social-organic approach for your brand, I’m happy to think along.
