Insights from Dickie Bush, Hayden Hillier Smith, Contact Studios, and Demand Curve.

<aside> 🚨 Note: We update these cheatsheets each time we run the Un-ignorable Challenge. So you should bookmark this page—rather than duplicate it—so you always have the latest version available.

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<aside> 💡 Table of Contents

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📆 Posting Frequency Guidelines

For YouTube, it’s recommended that you post at least once per week. But, posting more than once per week has been shown to perform much better–especially for accounts that are just starting out.

🎬 Video Content & Editing

1. Keep people hooked. Getting people to click is one thing, but getting people to stay on your video is another beast. Viewers will decide whether they want to keep watching within the first 5 seconds. You need to do two things immediately: 1) get to the point—what’s this video about? 2) pique their interest—open a loop.
   • View examples
2. Use contrast editing. Keep audience attention by going back and forth between calm moments and high-energy moments in rapid succession.
3. Withhold information. Bring up a topic but don't complete your thought; say something like "but we'll get to that later'' to open a curiosity gap. This makes viewers want to keep watching. We cover this further in the Fascinate lesson.
4. Use B-Roll when setting context or telling a story. It's far more interesting than just a video of you talking directly into the mic.
5. Steal editing techniques from cinema. Movies know how to use editing to portray emotion, so if there's a particular emotion you want your audience to feel, reference a movie that you know nails that emotion well.
6. Use variety in the speed of your cuts. If your video starts with 2 minutes of fast-paced cuts, slow things down afterwards. Just like in music, you need breaks from high intensity moments. If you don't have this contrast, the high intensity moments don't mean anything, because everything is intense.
   • "You need peaks and valleys and dynamics within the action itself, so that it's not 'at ten' all the time." –Steve Hullfish
7. Add a watermark to your videos that encourages people to subscribe. Here’s how.****
   • View example
8. Add captions. Captioned videos have a higher average watch time. You can use a variety of AI caption services like Descript or Rev.ai. It’s better to have slightly janky captions than none at all.
9. Ask people to subscribe. We’ve all seen YouTubers do this. They ask people to subscribe and “SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON” and “RING THAT BELL.” Well, frankly, it works. If you remind people to take action some percentage of people will do it. This is particularly true if you do it right after a very juicy detail.