YouTube Genius Shares Everything He Knows (Oscar Owen)

0:00Oscar Owen:So ideation, coming up with ideas for your YouTube channel, is the single most important thing when it comes to doing YouTube. Your idea sets the video's potential. So like how many views this video could potentially get is literally set by your idea. And then your title and thumbnail determine how much of that potential you unlock. So the whole thing is called packaging. So idea, title and thumbnail. They're the three like golden things you need to get right on YouTube. Because you can make the best video in the world. You could have like MrBeast team editing your video. You could have the best scripts, the best location, the best, you could best everything.

0:30Oscar Owen:but if no one clicks on the video in the first place, because the title is terrible, because the thumbnail is terrible, or because the idea is just not that interesting, then it's never going to be a good video, right? So coming up with ideas is always like stage one of the creation process. And what I recommend people do is look for outliers. Do you know what outliers are? I've heard, I've heard rumors about them. Rumors. So essentially when it comes to coming up with YouTube video ideas, you don't want to sit down and just guess. Cause we, let's just say we're going to make a video and it has to do with what's, what's your channel's niche?

0:59Oscar Owen:Sales, cold calling. Okay, you might sit down like, oh, I had an interesting cold call earlier. I'll make a video on that. The thing is that you're just guessing if that's a good video idea or not. So let's just say that the cold call went really well and you made some money. Amazing. Even though it sounds like a good video idea, you don't know if it's a good video idea, right? So what you need to do is you need to vet it against other videos already on YouTube that have performed really well. And that will determine whether or not the idea is like good or bad. so there's a really cool software called one of ten and basically what it will do is it goes to the entirety of youtube and it finds what are known as outliers and an outlier is basically a video on someone else's channel that's performed better than that channel's average so let's just say there's a channel out there in the sales niche that averages 1 000 views per video and then they make this random video on something that gets 10 000 views it means that that video they've got 10 000 views is a 10x outlier it's done 10 times better than that channel's average what i would do to come up with video ideas is I would look at that really high performing video.

1:57Oscar Owen:And instead of coming up with an idea yourself, you look at the idea that's already proven to work. Let's just say it wasn't on cold calling. It was on a new high ticket sales system to crush it in 2026 next year, right? You might take that video ideas, your starting point and go, ah, I'm going to make a video on this thing, not the cold call thing, because this idea is proven to work. So you start from a position of authority because you're starting from an idea that's already proven to work on YouTube. And then you might weave in whatever it is that you wanted to talk about, but you start with an idea that's proven to work.

2:28Oscar Owen:It's like the biggest hack, the biggest needle mover for people just going like, damn, how do I come up with video ideas? It's just find something on YouTube that's already working really well. And then just take that idea as your starting point. So that's the idea. And then we're going to really delve into like title and thumbnail stuff. But I was playing around last night and I'm sure you've seen that. I don't want to preach to the choir, but I saw last night for the first time, A-B testing on titles. Yeah. So let's not talk about thumbnails because I think they're their own beast. So when it comes to a title, what are we trying to, what are we trying to, I guess, what are we trying to provoke in the audience to get them to click through?

3:08Like where do we start with titles?

3:10Oscar Owen:So thumbnails and titles, I've sort of talked about them together, but their only goal is to build curiosity. The only goal is to build curiosity because the only reason someone's going to click on your video is because that video builds a curiosity gap. There's something that they want to know, but they don't know it. And the title and thumbnail basically have to build out that curiosity. So the only reason someone ever click on your video is because that title and thumbnail built curiosity. And fear or desire are the two emotions that make people click. So the thoughts that I always have going on in my head when I'm coming up with titles and thumbnails is does this either provoke fear or does this provoke desire?

3:48Oscar Owen:And if you can, the more fear and the more desire you can provoke, the more curiosity you build, the more likely someone is to click. So that's the kind of psychological element of it. That's what you've got to be thinking about. In terms of actual like rules, you basically want your thumbnails to be 55 characters or less. So any more than 55 characters and you get the dot, dot, dot on YouTube, you can't read the whole title so people don't even know what they're clicking on. And it's really one of those things where that's like the framework of a title is like what actually makes someone click as well.

4:16Oscar Owen:So again, it's kind of like the video ideas where you're kind of like copying really proven video ideas, taking that as your starting point and then improving on it. With titles, it's the same thing. So instead of sitting down going like, oh, I'll just come up with this video title, go on YouTube, find video, I call this thing framework extraction and you find frameworks of titles that are already proven to work. And then you just use that framework, but for your niche. So let me give you an example. Let's just say someone makes a YouTube video and it's like 20 years of business advice in one hour.

4:47Oscar Owen:That's like a popular video that a lot of people have made and those videos get loads of views because it's a really interesting title. You might go 10 years of sales advice in 15 minutes. So you've taken the same title framework, but you've just adapted it for your own niche, right? So again, you're not guessing, is this a good title or not? You're using data and evidence to verify that it is a good title, but you just adapt it for your own video. And that's how I basically about making titles. Thank you.