Sharing your knowledge or insights with a “How-To'' YouTube video is a great way to attract potential customers to your business online. But with thousands of hours of YouTube videos uploaded daily, it’s not as easy as just holding up the camera and telling the world what you know. You must craft a video that grabs your potential customers' attention, and then concisely answers their questions while entertaining them or at least intriguing them to keep coming back to your channel for more. 

In order to craft a video that gains viewers attention and leaves the video with a high retention rate, you must carefully plan out each video by

Creating the Perfect YouTube Script To Keep Your Viewers Watching

What Should I Include in my YouTube Script? 

Just like when you are writing, you want to capture the viewer's attention, give them what they want and close by tying it all together. 

• Hook

• The hook is used to grab your viewers attention.
• This is why the viewer should keep watching.
• For hooks you can use a fact, surprise your audience, ask a question, share a story or address a problem. 

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• Intro

• Briefly introduce yourself. Tell your viewers who you are and what they can expect from your channel.
• This is a great place to build credibility and authority. 

• Subscribe

• Before you get into the body of your video, you want to always encourage your viewers to subscribe. Don’t be salesy, you want to tell them what benefits they’ll get every week by being notified to watch your new video. 

• Body 

• Once you’ve hooked the viewer in and introduced yourself, the next part is to keep your audience watching as long as possible. 

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• Give your audience what they want quickly.
• This is the meat of your video, this is where you get into your main points.
• Structuring content in a logical order is best to ensure clarity, and it makes the viewer feel as though you are telling a story.

• Rehook

• To end your video, you want to swing back to what caught your viewers attention in the first place, your hook, this way it ties any loose ends of your video up. 

• Closing

• Your closing is a great place to thank your viewers for watching, to like and subscribe and add in any call to actions you may have. This could be to download something, or to stay tuned for next week's video. 

How Long Should My Video Be?

When it comes to length, only use the amount of time necessary to get your point across. Your viewers clicked on your YouTube video for a reason. Whether it was directed to them via their search, or the title/thumbnail caught their attention. 

It’s important to not go off on tangents, as quality is what matters to the viewer, not quantity. So if you need 15 minutes, by all means make the length of your video 15 minutes. However, if you only need five, or so minutes, that works too! 

Using an AV Script for YouTube

An AV Script is a 2 column script. One column provides direction for the audio and one column provides direction for visuals. 

Once you have created an outline of what it is you want to audibly say in your video (the AUDIO) , you will want to plan HOW you present the information to your viewer and what they will see visually as you deliver your message (the VIDEO).  Have you ever heard that old saying, “variety is the spice of life,”? Well the same holds true in a video, variety is visually king! In order to retain your viewers you’ll want to plan a mix of “face to camera” video as well as “voice over slides,” “B-roll video,” snippets of an interview or maybe animation. Your visual plans will be written in the second column of your AV Script next to the words with which they correlate.

Find a great AV Script template here and give it a try. Having both the audio and visual  will help you smoothly execute the recording and production of your video and create an interesting video that keeps your audience engaged.

Putting it All Together

The goal of creating the perfect YouTube script is to make your life a whole lot easier and to increase the retention on your YouTube videos! 

Keep in mind these few key pointers I mentioned above:

• Quality over quantity
• Don’t go off on long tangents
• Get to the point of your video

By following a script, you’ll be able to stay on topic and feel confident about the content you are sharing with your viewers. If you’re stuck on choosing a topic for your YouTube video, click here.