Decide THIS before writing your next video

It’s great to be back!

In case you care where I’ve been, I was in Bulgaria doing this…

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A word to the wise – don’t sit on your skis. My left ankle is still complaining.

Anyway, how are you?! Got anything YouTube-y that’s been on your mind? Don’t forget, you can always reply to these!

Now, to business…

Let me be totally transparent for a sec…

Most of my emails are titled something like:

“THE BIG, MASSIVE, STUPID, THING MOST YOUTUBERS IGNORE!”

Now, while I only ever share advice that I truly believe will help you write better scripts…

I am also trying to make you open the email with a dramatic subject line 😆

But, in the next 2 minutes, I want to touch on something I really do think most YouTubers ignore.

Like, really.

Because I ended up giving this advice to numerous creators this week – across consulting calls, script reviews, and on Slack when no one really asked.

To understand this advice, let’s look back at a conversation I had with Ed (Film Booth) when I was helping write a video for his second channel, Creator Booth.

It was a script about how Thomas Frank makes a tonne of money from Notion templates.

But, when I wrote draft #1, I failed to ask an absolutely critical question.

The result… a minor telling off from Mr Booth.

“I think it’s an inspirational story. I don’t think we want nitty-gritty details. Make it something that anyone can get no matter how little they know about business, but also feel inspired from.”

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The thing is… I had included nitty-gritty details.

I’d spent ages mining Thomas’s tweets so I could reveal, down to the letter, his exact strategy for making so much money.

But not only was it a huge timesink… it wasn’t what Ed wanted.

And I hasten to add – this was not Ed simply being “picky”.

It was about the audience avatar he had in mind for his content, and my failure to tailor the level of detail to that avatar.

So… how much detail SHOULD I go into?

It’s a toughie.

Making that choice – about whether to go super in-depth in your script, or to aim for a more “inspiring”, surface-level video, may not be obvious.

Having run my agency for just over a month, we’ve occasionally run into this as a problem.

We, as a group of writers, are approaching everything from a YouTube-first mindset – that is, we want to create maximum engagement, sometimes at the expense of detail.

But, some clients (totally fairly) want a detail-oriented approach, even if that comes at the expense of high engagement and “broad appeal”.

To oversimplify things, these are your choices:

1. Go granular with detail, accept some viewers will get overwhelmed and click away, but know those who stay are more likely to follow your CTA. Or…
2. Go lighter on detail, focus on engagement to keep more people watching (which in turn causes YouTube to promote the content more), but accept each viewer may be less inclined to follow the CTA.

Neither approach is wrong.

But it IS important to choose what you want.

Are you trying to make your audience take action from your content, or simply to inspire them?

Because this will dramatically alter how you approach the script and who will want to watch your videos.

In a nutshell…

It’s the difference between making an “inspiring” video about Thomas Frank…

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…and making a “detailed” video as Thomas Frank.

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Boom. Stuck the landing. We’re back in the saddle.

Happy to be back writing this newsletter again!

So, if you have any questions about this topic, send ’em my way!

Speak soon,
George 👋

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