How to add “stakes” to any video

Every video needs “stakes”.

I mean, that goes without saying, right?

Remove the stakes, and your audience has no reason to watch.

Educational content needs to tell the viewer why their life will be worse unless they take your advice.

Entertainment content needs to show the viewer why your characters are motivated to do whatever they’re doing on-screen.

Next time you feel yourself getting bored with a video, you’ll notice you probably can’t identify any stakes.

(Heads up, I’m about to add stakes to this newsletter…)

So unless you learn to add stakes to your content…

…your viewers will always get bored and click away, meaning lower retention, fewer views, and slower channel growth.

But what happens when the stakes aren’t obvious?

This week, a student of mine was working on a video called:

“How To Make 100 YouTube Shorts In 1 Day With AI.”

But they had a problem.

When trying to add “stakes” to this concept… it felt “forced”.

This video wasn’t targeted at businesses that use short-form content as a sales funnel.

If that were the case, the stakes would have been easy to figure out.

“Short-form content is essential to your sales funnel. Therefore, if you don’t make loads of YouTube Shorts, you won’t get in front of your customers and you won’t make sales!”

But my student was targeting “creators” in general - not "business owners" specifically.

Now, on one hand, we could talk “niching down” here… but that isn’t what my student needed.

Because, no matter how much you niche down, certain videos will appeal to a broader audience.

Which means you need to feel confident identifying the stakes when that happens.

But how?

Finding stakes for ANY video

So... my student was struggling to find stakes for a broad-appeal video.

This was my advice:

“This is the #1 problem that comes with having labels like “stakes” - it adds pressure to find something like “your business will collapse”, or “you’ll stop making sales!”… but stakes can be something super low-key. In this example, my brain does this:

• Why do we need to make shorts FASTER? Because otherwise it’s hard to get a shorts posting cadence underway.
• Ok, so, why do we need to get a shorts posting cadence underway? Because the best creators have both a long-form and short-form strategy.
• Therefore, what’s at stake here? Most creators probably sleep on making shorts for months because it feels impossible to churn out quality short-form content alongside long-form content, resulting in massively reduced opportunity for channel growth.

Your video is the solution to creators not making shorts and therefore wasting potential channel growth.”

The secret is simple:

Keep. Asking. Questions.

First, ask yourself what the video will help the viewer achieve.

Next, ask yourself why that matters.

Then, keep asking why, why, why… until you reach a satisfying stake.

In this case, it only took two questions to unearth the stakes.

Sometimes, it might take 3-4.

But the process is always the same… and it’s surprisingly simple.

Then, once you have your stakes, you must include them in your hook.

Remember, stakes are what make the video feel urgent… so if you don’t call them out early, they’re wasted.

Get them in before 00:20 (or earlier, if you can).

That's all for this week.

Any questions, just let me know and I'll get back to you!

Speak soon,
George 👋