Why Titles on YouTube (or any Content) is so Important with Jake Thomas

Joe Casabona: Did you know that you could get even longer interviews with some of the most successful creators? You can with How I Built It Pro. With How I Built a Pro, you get extended ad-free versions of every episode. We cover things like pricing memberships, how to make a course creation even faster, building a creator business while also parenting, current events, and more.

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How do you grow a newsletter to 20,000 subscribers in less than a year? Try this one trick! Want to 5x your YouTube downloads? Do this! These are both titles I could have given this episode — and taking the advice of Jake Thomas, I should have!

See, Jake studies YouTube titles to see what makes people click. And while he gives some away for free in his newsletter, he also has a whole searchable database that you can pay to get access to. So today Jake tells us how he built his subscriber base up to 20,000 in a year, as well as the importance of good titles, not just on YouTube, but everywhere.

In the Pro show, we talk about pricing. He was just changing his pricing when we recorded this episode. And we talk about the Yankees because we’re both Yankee fans. So if you don’t feel like you get enough of that from me on a regular basis, check out the pro show.

You can find all of the show notes, including a link to this database, I’m a part of it and it’s incredible. You can find a link to everything that we talked about over at the show notes over at streamlined.fm/304. But for now, let’s get to the intro and then the interview.

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Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:02:36] <music>

Joe Casabona: All right, welcome to Episode 304 of How I Built It. I’m here with Jake Thomas. He is the founder of Creator Hooks. And I’m really excited to talk to him today because, first of all, love Creator Hooks, love the model for Creator Hooks Pro. The product is something that solves a really big problem that I would agonize over. So we’re gonna get into all of that. I mean, if you read the title and description of this episode, you know what we’re going to talk about. So let’s bring in Jake.

Jake, how are you today? Joe?

Jake Thomas: I’m doing excellent. How are you?

Joe Casabona: I am fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I was telling you in the pre-show that I was gushing to my friend Brian Richards about like when you launch Creator Hooks Pro, I’m like, This is so brilliant and I don’t have an analog idea that I could steal. Like there’s nothing like that for me in my niche. So super cool.

I usually don’t start here but let’s start with telling people what Creator Hooks is and what Creator Hooks Pro is.

Jake Thomas: So Creator Hooks is a newsletter. It sends you five proven YouTube video ideas every single week. I kind of break down why they work, and then also show you how you could use those ideas for your niche.

At my last job, I was a YouTube channel manager and we were a fishing channel. And every Monday we would have our content meeting. And I was the marketing manager so I would come up with all the ideas. We had the fishing coaches that were doing the cool stuff. They were actually going out and fishing. I was sitting on my couch doing all the work. So I was in charge of coming up with the ideas. And we were posting two videos a day so I needed a lot of ideas.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: So I would do things like… I’d go to like finance YouTube channels and be like, All right, what is working for them? You know, five best credit cards in 2023. So then I would be like, “All right, well, let’s do five best Trout Lures in 2023. Like really similar but adjacent but kind of just modeling what works for them. And that worked really well for us.

And then I was like, well, shoot if this is working well for us. It has nothing to do with my industry, I bet this would work well for other channels. So I drafted up the first edition of creatives pro, sent it to a bunch of people and it turns out that they liked it. I got like my first 20 subscribers or 10 subscribers cold DM-ing people that I didn’t know.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome.

Jake Thomas: And I said in a Google doc of like, “Hey, I’m gonna turn this into a newsletter. Do you want to subscribe?” They’re like, “Yeah, sure that sounds cool.” So that’s how I got started.

Joe Casabona: How many subscribers do you have now as we record this? It’s like a lot, right? Because you were tweeting milestones for a while.

Jake Thomas: I was tweeting milestones for a while. I was tweeting like every 100 and then I did every 1,000. And then I felt like it kind of got lame. I’m almost at 20,000.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, couple hundreds shy of 20,000. We’re recording this in 2022. In January, I think January 2nd, I tweeted, like, “My one goal is to hit 10,000 subscribers,” and I had like 580 subscribers.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: And I was like, “There’s no way!” I felt like an idiot tweeting this. I was like, “I have no idea how this is gonna happen but I’m just gonna tweet about it and see how it goes.” And here we are.

Joe Casabona: That’s amazing. I feel like the struggle is real. I have a newsletter. Before May I never broke in like a thousand. And then I started really focusing on podcasting stuff. Now I’m at 1,100. But I’ve also been seeing the good kind of churn where people from my WordPress life are coming off of my list and podcasters are going on to my list.

Jake Thomas: Nice.

Joe Casabona: So even though it’s like around the same… It’s like 400 more than it was in May-

Jake Thomas: Nice.

Joe Casabona: …as we record this. But it’s actually like 700 more-

Jake Thomas: Real subscribers.

Joe Casabona: Real subscribers, yeah, which is cool. But yeah, 20,000 in… Like 19,000, let’s say, in a year.

How did you do that? I told you I was gonna tee you up with an easy question for us but this is really fascinating to me.

Jake Thomas: It wasn’t me. This is gonna sound kind of weird, but I think it’s a good idea. So it’s not my opinion. It’s not like, “Oh, I think this is how you write a good YouTube title.” It’s like, “Hey, these titles did well and here’s how you can use them.” So it’s almost like a tool, kind of like software, but not really.

Think Media made like two videos about me. They have like 2 million subscribers on YouTube and vidIQ made like one and a half videos. They made one video and then I was on their podcast.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jake Thomas: So probably 10,000 of those people are from those two channels.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: If I didn’t have those, I’d probably be like 5,000 or 10,000. I’d probably be way smaller than I am. But I got big breaks by being on those channels. And those came from networking on Twitter. I met the people behind both of those channels through posting threads and just DM-ing them and just kind of chatting them up. And then all of a sudden, like, “Hey, man, we’re doing a video, are you gonna be on the podcast or whatever?” So that’s been huge.

Joe Casabona: Wow. So big lesson here, right? There’s I think big lessons to take away. Creator utility, right? People have been saying this forever. Curation is so valuable to a lot of people. You’re doing curation and analysis, right? You’re like, These are videos that worked. Here’s the score, the differential score. We’ll talk about implementation in a minute because I’m really curious about that, too. But then you also got in front of other people’s audiences, which is something that I tell my podcast students and clients all the time. Like go be on other podcasts and then promote your podcast.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, definitely. That was huge. You know, kind of like borrowing other people’s audiences. Think Media posted about me in like March, and I went from 800 subscribers to like 2,000 or 3000 subscribers in like March or April.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s awesome.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, that was that first big jump of like nobody to like, holy crap, now I’m in the thousands.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, wow. My ConvertKit subscription just got more expensive, I think.

Jake Thomas: Exactly. I was on free MailChimp. I think ConvertKit has a free-

Joe Casabona: They have a free tier now.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, free tier now. I didn’t know that. I was on MailChimp and I was like, “Oh, geez, I guess I gotta move to ConvertKit now.”

Joe Casabona: Nice. Full disclosure, ConvertKit has sponsored this podcast before and I’ve done brand deals with them for short-form videos.

Jake Thomas: No disclosure for me. I have not worked with them but I do like them.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I mean, I like them too. That’s why I work with them. My whole business is… If someone was like, “You need to move from ConvertKit today,” I’d be like, “I might as well just start from scratch. I might as well bring my whole business down. But that’s amazing. Let’s get to the core of Creator Hooks. Because the whole point of this as you talk about titles and thumbnails that worked. It’s titles more, but you talk about thumbnails.

Jake Thomas: Mostly, yeah. Mostly title. It’s like 99% title, a little bit thumbnail.

Joe Casabona: So how important are titles and thumbnails on YouTube?

Jake Thomas: I mean, if nobody clicks your video, no one’s gonna watch it, then you just like wasted all of your time making that video and you also didn’t get any of the benefits from actually people watching that video, and consuming your content. So it’s huge.

You know, you see stories all the time of people like, Oh, I just changed my title or I changed my thumbnail, and all of a sudden, boom, it’s so much better. A couple months ago, I was working with the client in real estate and they had a really busy CEO. So their whole channel is just clips of him talking on different podcasts and stuff. It was good content, but it wasn’t YouTube content. And their channel is doing okay. And then I started writing some of their titles and we like just doubled their views every single time.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: So I worked with them for a little bit, and almost every video we were doubling what they were getting last month. We didn’t change any of the content. It’s not like, oh, yeah, we also, you know, increased our average view duration and everything and better telling stories. No, we only changed the title and we were doubling views. So yeah, it’s huge.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s amazing. Maybe that’s what I should do. Maybe that’s what I should focus on in the beginning of this year, because I’m like, I need to make more videos. I told you in the pre-show I’m really focused on creating podcast content and growing podcasts, kind of like showing my audience I know what I’m doing.

I have two YouTube channels. One’s like 10 years old, one is a year or so old. And I feel like, yeah, maybe just changing the titles and the thumbnails… Let me ask you Because I hate making thumbnails, I hate doing the dumb face and then like outlining it on Canva and then trying to figure out what word that’s not in the title to put on the thumbnail. Did you say you only changed the titles and doubled the views or you did both?

Jake Thomas: Only the title. For that company or that channel, we didn’t change any old titles. They average X amount of views. And then when I wrote the title for the videos moving forward, they averaged 2x amount of views.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Jake Thomas: But I changed the words in the thumbnail. I’m mostly a words guy, not… I’m slowly getting better at thumbnails but my strength is in words.

Joe Casabona: Okay. I mean, that’s also really promising, right?

Jake Thomas: Oh, yeah.

Joe Casabona: I read Derral Eves’ book The YouTube Formula and he’s like, “You need five photos of you with five different emotions.” And Mr. Beast just has like a library have his face that he get Photoshop. And I’m like, should I try that? I’m not Mr. Beast in content or wallet size. I do mostly tutorial videos. And I think that was maybe, again, in my old life. I was doing a lot of “here’s how to do this in WordPress”. So I think it’s really interesting that maybe I can rejuvenate some of those by changing just the title or making small tweaks to the thumbnail.

Jake Thomas: Oh, yeah, definitely. Add from YouTube Channel Film Booth, he has a video about how he unpublished a bunch of videos and just changed all of his titles and thumbnails and his channel blew up because of that.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: Then he’s in kind of education edutainment. So that worked really well for him. I’ve been trying to think… I’ve got like a little side project dog YouTube channel and I’ve been trying to think more quality than quantity. I used to just publish on a strict schedule, like all right, I publish videos every Sunday. And then, you know, Creator Hooks got on the way and I was trying to scale and trying to hire people but I kind of found that I was just scaling crap.

The videos kind of stunk, everything’s stuck about it. So I was like, “Well, let me just go back to actually making quality videos that people are actually going to want to click on. And like putting more effort into my thumbnail instead of just slapping together a stock photo. So that’s where my head has been at. It’s been working. It’s been working so far.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That is the exact strategy I also want to take this year. I have The FOCUSED Calendar behind me and I don’t know if you listen to the Focused Podcast with David Sparks and Mike something. Sorry, Mike something. But they make this dry-erase year view Calendar. They worked with this company called NeuYear. I’ll link to it in the show notes, which you could find over at streamlined.fm/304.

But it’s like this big dry-erase calendar and I’m using it as a production calendar. So like the end of every month for the first six months, I have YouTube video. And I have an Airtable full of ideas with titles based on Creator Hooks Pro.

And I think I’m just gonna focus on that too. You know, spend a couple of hours a week making a good video instead of turning on the camera, Oh, I’ll just talk about this for like 10 minutes, and I’ll use my stream deck to edit and then I’ll just upload it. There is an important part of the compelling content, right? Maybe we shouldn’t let that get lost. Yu can just put out a crappy video with a killer title. That’ll get clicks but it won’t get engagement.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’ll get you clicks, like you said, but then that’s gonna kind of be it. They might click on your video once, but they’re like, “Oh, this video is crap. This channel is crap. I’m not going to click on it again.” And just not watch any more videos.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. This was such a crazy thing. Roberto Blake, he’s like so active on Twitter. I love following him. Maybe we’ll have to like bleep that later. He’s so active [bleep] then whatever social network he happens to be on.

One of the things he did was send me a screenshot of your YouTube stats, and I’ll tell you how you can improve it. And I was like, here’s one for you. I have all of my engagement coming in the last 10 seconds of the video. And the last 20 seconds of the video is just an end screen. So it looks like people are clicking on it and going to the last 10 seconds because the watch percentage spikes right at the end.

Jake Thomas: Oh, wow.

Joe Casabona: And he’s like, “I’ve never seen that before.” And I’m like, well, at least I’m not dumb. At least I’m not really confused by this.”

Jake Thomas: I’m confused. I’ve never seen that anywhere.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. It feels like maybe people are just clicking and then like maybe scrubbing and then stopping at the end and like, “I didn’t want to watch that.” And it’s probably just because it’s me the whole time going like, this or whatever, like just faces. You know, I was again using the advice that you were sending in your newsletter. So maybe I had good titles and people were clicking and then they were like, “Oh, this doesn’t deliver. This doesn’t deliver on what I thought it would.”

Jake Thomas: It’s a whole package. I Creator Hooks is just one piece of the puzzle.

Joe Casabona: Now, there’s an anecdote that you kind of mentioned, right, link… I’m sorry, Ed from Film Booth did this. I listen to a podcast called Cortex with CGP Grey. I think CGP Grey is great. His video on how the interstate highways are numbered is very fascinating to me. Or why airport codes are the way they are. Just really interesting bespoke… seemingly bespoke things that you don’t think about like he deeply researches.

Jake Thomas: I love that word.

Joe Casabona: Bespoke? Yeah. So it is what the word is. But on his podcast Cortex with Myke Hurley, he was talking about how he has long COVID or had long COVID and so he wasn’t putting out the videos he had hoped he has. He’s such an established YouTuber that he makes a living off of YouTube without putting out a new video every two days or whatever, like what you have to do. He puts one out like every four to six weeks.

And he wasn’t doing the output he wanted because he was sick. But he was changing the titles and the thumbnails for old videos like eight-year-old videos. And he said that just changing the thumbnails and the titles got him like 125 million new views.

Jake Thomas: That is insane. I mean, that’s such a good story of the power of the quality over quantity and also the importance of titles and thumbnails.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. And granted, Grey is huge. You’ve probably seen one of his videos. It’s like this stick figure with glasses like teaching you something. It’s a very recognizable brands, but it cuts against what tech YouTubers might have you believe.

And don’t get me wrong, MKBHD puts out some of the best content. I just watched his best smartphone of 2022 video today and it was amazing. And I went and voted even though the results were already out because I was curious to see how it worked. But he’s not putting out a new video every two days and that’s still his livelihood.

Jake Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. There’s so many ways to win on YouTube. It’s crazy. You’ve got Paddy Galloway puts like four videos out a year. You know, you’ve got these shorts creators that are putting a couple of videos out a day. There’s so many ways.

Joe Casabona: There’s so many ways to win on YouTube. I love that. Because I think the other thing that people worry about is like, well, you are beholden to the algorithm. That’s true to a certain extent, but how else are you gonna get in front of people? Like, so if you make good content and YouTube knows so much about its people, that it’s like, Hey, you would really like this?

Jake Thomas: I feel like YouTube is the most merit-based platform. Sorry. I guess what I’m thinking about like when you’re trying to rank in search, like Google and YouTube, those are two of the platforms I have a decent amount of experience in.

Joe Casabona: And they’re one in two, right?

Jake Thomas: Yeah

Joe Casabona: It’s Google and YouTube are one in two.

Jake Thomas: Yeah. But on Google, if you’re trying to rank on the first page and you’re competing against these massive companies like Webmed or-

Joe Casabona: WebMD.

Jake Thomas: WebMD. Thank you. Or Bustle, or, you know, just these massive companies, even if they have crappy content, like they’re gonna outrank you.

Joe Casabona: And that says nothing of the ads, right? Like, you could Google something and just buy the top spot.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, yeah. But then I feel like YouTube is more if you make a good video with a good title, and thumbnail, I feel like you are more likely to have success.

Joe Casabona: I think that’s really smart. And it takes time. Like YouTube needs to learn about you and about the people that you talk to.

Jake Thomas: Yes, but… So one of my buddies, he had a basketball channel, and he launched like four videos. And within like a month, one of his videos had like 500,000 views.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: To be fair, he’s really good at a YouTube. So it’s not like he’s learning these skills from scratch. But it was just like, holy crap. And it’s been, I think, I don’t know, like two months. One of his videos is at like a million views.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jake Thomas: So, yes, I think oftentimes YouTube maybe doesn’t need to know your audience. But sometimes it’s like, “Hey, people are liking this video, we’re gonna show it a lot.”

Joe Casabona: Maybe it’s like you also need to know your audience, right? Because I think that is like party there, right? My main YouTube channel… I met with a YouTube consult, like I… You mentioned vidIQ. So I sign up for a year of their service and I came with a free YouTube consultant call. And one of the questions that he asked me was you need to look at your channel and decide if this video goes viral, “Are you cool with only making videos about that? And if the answer is no, you need to enlist that video.”

Jake Thomas: That’s a great question.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I was like, all over the place. I was like, Here’s a Sony 6400, and here how I set it up, which by the way is my most popular video. So like going based on that, I should do gear videos. But I don’t want to do gear videos. Everyone does gear videos.

And then there’s this WordPress tutorial. I’m like, “Here are my thoughts on this and here’s how you automate with Zapier.” Now as I say it, it’s like kind of shocking that my channel is monetized and still get subscribers. But it could grow faster if I know who I’m talking to so that YouTube knows who I’m trying to talk to.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve been talking about YouTube. Creator Hooks, all I do is study what makes people click and make titles, and it works for all content. And here’s a podcast story for you. So Steve Chu has… My wife quit her job… It’s an eCommerce podcast. And then I think it was Mike Jackness has also an eCommerce podcast. And they did a podcast together and they each published it kind of like on the same time. So, in my feed, they were like, “Oh, I think these are similar.” But Steve wrote such a better title so I clicked and I downloaded his.

Joe Casabona: Interesting.

Jake Thomas: That’s got to happen, you know, often where people… You know, if they’re deciding, What podcast am I going to listen to or which episode am I going to listen to?” if you have a great title, you know, it’s not an algorithm where it’s gonna go viral, but I think you’re gonna start getting those downloads one at a time and just start building an audience that way.

Joe Casabona: I love that you said that. Because again, this is what I tell my students. I didn’t realize this was gonna trigger people but I said like, “Don’t put episode numbers in your podcast titles. Don’t.” And people are like, “Why? That way people know what number it is.” I’m like, “Who cares what number it is?”

Jake Thomas: I agree with you.

Joe Casabona: It literally doesn’t matter. If it’s terrible content and it’s your 500th episode, that doesn’t make me want to listen to it.

Jake Thomas: Yeah. What’s gonna make you want to listen is a great title. It kind of like grabs you emotionally. It’s like, Oh, shoot, what happens here? Man, I really want to learn this.”

[00:26:23] <music>

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[00:30:18] <music>

Joe Casabona: So for Creator Hooks, what it does that I love is you take a title that you know worked and then you give it a score. And it’s like basically the difference based on their average views versus how many views this video got.

Jake Thomas: Yes, yeah. So like, if a channel average is 10,000 views a video, but then all of a sudden one video got 100,000 views, you’re like, “Wait a minute, there’s something here. This is a huge outlier.” So in Creator Hooks, that would be hooks score of 1000 because it got 10 times more.

Joe Casabona: Okay.

Jake Thomas: So that is cool because if Mr. Beast posts a video, he’s gonna get 20 million views or 50 million views or whatever it is. But he always gets 50 million views. So it’s like not that cool. But if like a channel that, you know, they average like 1 million views and then they get 20 million views, that’s a huge outlier.

So Creator Hooks is just studying outliers and trying to see what are the patterns between these outliers and what can we learn from them.

Joe Casabona: How do you do that? You’ll use like a tool. Is that your secret sauce? You’d have to talk about that?

Jake Thomas: No, no, no, no. There’s a video on my website about how I do it.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jake Thomas: It’s manual. I just count them up, like, all right, cool. I scroll for outliers. I’ll kind of like take a mental note of like, all right, well, this channel like, okay, 20,000 30,000, 15,000, 60,000. All right, well, it’s about like 30 or 40, and then oh, 200,000. Wait, there’s something here. Let me kind of do a scope of the kind of their other recent videos. Is this an actual outlier or do they just periodically, you know, the other views is way up and down?

Joe Casabona: That’s so interesting. How do you figure out like… do you go to like the trending tab or do you just go to like category tab?

Jake Thomas: No. I’m only looking at kind of recent videos. I’ll just look at, you know, their last 20 videos. I try not to calculate hook score if a video is older than two months old. Because sometimes, that can be maybe it’s like ranking in search and none of the videos ranking in search, but this was actually just a good keyword. Like maybe they didn’t write a good title. So I’m trying to see what kind of blew up right away.

Joe Casabona: How do you find those creators?

Jake Thomas: Oh, just spending a lot of time on YouTube.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Jake Thomas: I have a list of like 400 that I go through.

Joe Casabona: Interesting.

Jake Thomas: But also, I’ll just spent a lot of time… Sometimes I’ll open up YouTube incognito mode and I’ll like… because I’m a dude and like if it was just me, it would be like marketing and fitness channels and finance. Those would be the only the only thing. So I’m actively trying to click on female creators, just creators that are different for me.

Sometimes I’ll open up YouTube on a incognito and I’ll type up like “best makeup brushes”. Like, “All right, cool. I am a female. I’m looking at these makeup brushes. Show me some more videos like this.” I’m trying to get out of my normal habit. So off recommended and homepage are two of the biggest ways. I’m just trying to let YouTube show me what is kind of trending right now.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And as far as Creator Hooks Pro goes, I think this is, again, brilliant because you’re doing this manual work, you’re keeping that information somewhere, and you’re giving people in your newsletter five… I should also say like you also do on that flops.

Jake Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It’s cool to learn what works but I think it’s also potentially just as helpful to see what doesn’t work. So I see kind of the same things every week. It’s like, all right, this title is like too long or too wordy, or this topic is too narrow, or this topic is too broad, kind of things like that. So just studying what doesn’t work. And I calculate that the same way. It’s like, all right, this channel get average 10,000 views video, but this video got 1,000. What’s wrong with that?

Joe Casabona: The reason that always resonates with me the most is they did a video about why and they usually only talk about X. And I’m like, “Man, I really need to focus.”

Jake Thomas: Yes, yes, yes.

Joe Casabona: It’ll be like, you know, what moving was like for me or whatever. And it’s like, they always talk about keyboards and they certainly talked about moving house or whatever.

Jake Thomas: Yes, exactly. It could be a really big thing. So if you have a fitness channel talking about how you grew your YouTube channel, it’s like, all right, well, that’s not why people watch your channel. Or it could be like a fitness channel, like you talked about weightlifting and then you’re talking about like nutrition. That’s a much smaller difference.

But there are some channels where people watch those channels for very specific reason. And when you vary from that, then oftentimes people are like, “Yeah, that’s not why I watch this channel. I’m not going to click on this video.”

Joe Casabona: It’s so funny because SuperCarlinBrothers is a channel I love. They do like fan theories for Pixar and Harry Potter mostly. And they, for a while, I think were doing Naruto, other anime. And I noticed that they stopped doing that pretty quickly. And I’m like, “Yeah, people are here for Harry Potter. That’s why they’re here.” And they’re big like. They probably decided to explore this topic. And I think they do that more on their podcast now, which makes perfect sense.

Jake Thomas: I mean, there’s so much that goes into it. You know, it’s definitely possible to do that. There are some channels that the audience doesn’t care what they talk about. They love those creator. So I think it really comes down to what type of channel do you have? Why did people watch your video? Is it because of you or is it because of your content?

Joe Casabona: I like that a lot. So Creator Hooks Pro, you keep this database. I think it’s a… Well, maybe I shouldn’t talk about the implementation. I don’t know if it’s like-

Jake Thomas: No. I wrote the newsletter for free. I didn’t make a single dollar off the newsletter. I did a little bit of consulting. But for a little over a year, I was like, “All right, well, I would like to make some money because I’m spending a lot of time on this.” So I posted on Twitter, like, “Do you all want me to do an eBook or a course?” And a lot of people said, we just want ideas.

And then also people were emailing me saying, “Hey, I’ve been taking notes. I have this Google doc of some of my favorite ideas from the newsletter.” So I was like, “Oh, shoot, I have all of these in Google Sheets and I use it all the time when I’m writing titles for clients or for myself. I always use the spreadsheet.” So I was like, Shoot let me try to turn this into, you know, make this publicly available. So I launched it.

At first, it was just an Airtable doc, and it was a little ugly. And I’ve made a couple of changes from it. I mean, it’s a big swipe file. You know, a lot of people talk about the value of swipe files, a lot of people are lazy, they don’t want to make their own swipe file or maybe people are like me, and they’re only stuck in one loop on YouTube when YouTube only shows them a certain type of video.

I mean, every week, I send out five videos in the newsletter, I add about seven or eight per week in the Creator Hooks Pro so averaging like a video a day. It’s ever-growing. It’s just crossed 500 titles and thumbnails in there a couple days ago.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s amazing. Again, that’s so smart. You’re doing this research… In episode, I want to say 298, don’t quote me on that right now, but I interviewed a woman named Molly Keyser about how she had like a $59 eBook. It was 15 pages with front end back matter that wasn’t actual content that she sold for $59 and it made her half a million dollars. 298. I was right.

Because it gave her niche a very clear strategy to make a lot more money than that. It was just this one resource. So people think, you know, I have like the profitable podcaster pack, it’s like $39 and it’s like my automation library and my podcast planners. And there’s like miscellaneous PDFs there too. But when I put it together, I’m like, I need to shove as many things in there as possible to make it valuable.

But the automation library itself is valuable. It’s just like a bunch of Zapier templates. And so it gives people a starting point where they don’t have to start from scratch. It gives them ideas for their own automations. And I think that’s so smart to take what you’re doing. And it’s such a valuable resource. So I love it.

I’m on the website right now. The lifetime value fields or the lifetime plan… I’m gonna not gonna say prices or anything just in case things change from the time we record. But the highest level price right now, I don’t see why anybody would pass that up if they’re gonna get this. So that’s probably right after this call, I’m gonna register there. I just think it’s such a great idea.

Now, in How I Built It Pro, we will talk about pricing. So if you want to learn more about that and get ad-free extended episodes of every interview, you can go to streamlined.fm/pro. And that is 50 bucks a year or five bucks a month, which is less than the coffee I paid for at the coffee shop this morning. So this is great. I really love what you’re doing. I’m really glad that you came on the show today.

Jake Thomas: Dude, having an extended edition as monetization. Dude, I’ve been thinking so much about monetization and price and what can you do. How you tee that up was great. When also we’re already here, it’s like you just asked me for, you know, a couple extra minutes. And yes, I can do that. I’m not going to say no. Dude, I like that. That’s really cool.

Joe Casabona: Thank you very much. This is what I tell my students. Your membership benefits should be about low effort for you, high value for your audience. And so for my pro members, thank you pro members, five bucks a month to never hear an ad and get what I think is probably the most valuable part of the conversation. Like we’re gonna talk about pricing. Who doesn’t want to know about pricing? Pretty easy win for them. And it’s just us talking for a little bit longer.

Jake Thomas: That’s great. Well, that’s good.

Joe Casabona: We have some mutual admiration here, which is cool. What I want to leave the listeners with right now is, if they’re getting started on YouTube today, like let’s say they’re making their first video, what are maybe the first two things that they should do?

Jake Thomas: Well, I’ll tell you what I would do. If I was starting on YouTube today, I would pick my niche. And let’s say I wanted to do a baseball channel.

Joe Casabona: Love the topic.

Jake Thomas: Are you a baseball fan?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, a huge Yankee fan. Born and raised in New York.

Jake Thomas: Can I brag real quick?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely.

Jake Thomas: You know how everyone’s sharing Spotify Wrapped?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Jake Thomas: MLB.TV, just share their stats-

Joe Casabona: Did they really?

Jake Thomas: Yeah. And I am in the top 99% of Yankee fans.

Joe Casabona: Oh my God. That’s amazing.

Jake Thomas: I watched 132 games this year.

Joe Casabona: Oh my gosh. Well, I gotta find mine now.

Jake Thomas: Dude, they just emailed it to me.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome.

Jake Thomas: I know. I’m so proud of that.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. Congratulations.

Jake Thomas: That would be the most proud accomplishment I’ve made all year.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Jake Thomas: Although my wife is pregnant, so that’s-

Joe Casabona: Oh, congratulations. When is she due?

Jake Thomas: March. So that doesn’t count for this year. That’d be my next year’s accomplishment.

Joe Casabona: This episode is airing on… Funnily enough, March 6, which is my oldest’s birthday.

Jake Thomas: All right.

Joe Casabona: By the time this episode is up, you’ll be a dad.

Jake Thomas: March 30th. Hopefully, I’m not a dad by then. But it’s awesome.

Joe Casabona: Hopefully. I mean, you’re right in the window, right? Like, any time after 30 weeks, it should happen. It could happen. Awesome. Congratulations. So you’re making a channel about baseball.

Jake Thomas: If I were making a YouTube channel about baseball, I would find the top five baseball channels. What I’d probably do if I was just getting started, if I didn’t know what I was doing, I would just model. I would sort by most popular and I would try to find the trends. Like what really, really works for these channels?

You know, maybe it’s like 10 longest home runs in baseball history. But maybe like all five channels have that same video. Well, let me make my own version of that video. So I’d try to make my own version of those best videos.

Joe Casabona: Ten longest home runs by catchers or something like that.

Jake Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I try to look for trends. You know, baseball fans, they love this type of video. So I look for trends among all their top videos, I’d make those videos. I probably kind of twist those videos just a little bit. Like you said, top 10 longest home runs by catchers, you know, it might be like that… You know, you could do it a couple of ways. You could talk like 10 longest Yankee home runs. It could be like, 10 short as home runs.

Joe Casabona: 10 longest Yankee home runs, [inaudible 00:45:02].

Jake Thomas: So you would iterate that a little bit. But then also I’d look at like basketball channels and NFL channels, and I would say, All right what works for them? Because those are adjacent channels, and there’s probably a good chance that you would find something similar.

But then I’d probably take it to maybe another level of like, All right, what do I really want to do? Do I want to do these list videos or do I want to do commentary? If it’s commentary, maybe I’ll find history commentary or something like that. So, one, I’d try to find channels in my niche and then two, I try to find adjacent channels and other niches.

And I would just model. I wouldn’t come up with anything new. All I would do is model until I get a good feeling for what my audience likes to watch and until I’m kind of confident in my titling skills or my video ideas skills.

Also, I’d probably find another channel outside my niche for this. But I would model someone’s exact setup, their lighting, how long their videos are, how often they publish. You know, even their offers. Like who’s like sponsoring them? How are they monetizing? I probably wouldn’t do anything new. I would just find adjacent channels that are working and I would model them heavily.

Especially channels in adjacent niches. It’s not like you’re copying, but you’ve got a pretty good idea that this is going to work. And that’ll give you a good start. And then you’ll get a good feeling of like, okay, my audience like this, likes this, I’m really good at this, I hate doing this, and then just kind of go from there.

Joe Casabona: That makes perfect sense. Like do what look alike audiences like. That’s not copying. It’s not like you’re jacking their video and putting it on your channel. You’re making content that you have a reasonable confidence that will work for a new potential audience. I like that a lot.

I feel like a lot of people, a lot of creators… This was truly even with just blogging. Like, why am I gonna write a blog post about this when a bunch of people have already written that blog post? And it’s like, Well, you haven’t written that blog post yet. Like, you have your own life experience and insight.

The same thing goes for YouTube videos and podcast episodes. While you’ve been on other podcasts, is this interview exactly the same as the other ones you’ve been on?

Jake Thomas: No, no. I 100% agree with you. Everyone has their own voice. People are super fans of you but they might not be super fans of somebody similar. They want to hear it from your voice.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Jake, this has been such a fantastic conversation. If people want to learn more about you or they want to pick up the sweet, sweet Creator Hooks Pro, where can they go?

Jake Thomas: Creatorhooks.com.

Joe Casabona: All right, creatorhooks.com. Again, like hashtag or whatever, I don’t know, that’s called on Mastodon, but not a sponsor. But just is such a valuable resource. Because, again, you can spend all this time making great content but people need a reason to click on it.

Jake Thomas: So it’s about YouTube titles but I’ve used the same strategies for Twitter threads, email, subject line-

Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s so smart.

Jake Thomas: I’ve ranked number one on Google for kind of using those strategies. Like one of my best threads is 90% of people are making YouTube videos backwards. You know, and kind of break that down. And that is from a cleaning YouTube channel. It was like 90% of people are decluttering their house backwards.

Joe Casabona: Wow. I’m part of that 99%. I mean, I have three kids now so it’s like an uphill battle for me.

Jake Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re toast. So yes, the newsletter is about YouTube, but you can use these strategies for everything.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s right. Which is why it’s not called YouTube Hooks. It’s called Creator Hooks. That’s great.

Jake Thomas: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: So for sure, as soon as we get off of this call, and I can like focus on… I don’t like to buy things while I’m not focusing on that. So you’ll see an email come in from me after this call.

Jake Thomas: Sweet. Thank you.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Well, it’s so great. Because, like you said, it applies… because it’s buyer psychology. We’ll talk about that more in Pro as well. But Jake, thanks so much for spending time with us today. I really appreciate it.

Jake Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Joe.

Joe Casabona: And thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. If you want to learn about pricing and buyer psychology and you want to hear no ads, you can sign up for How I Built It Pro over at streamlined.fm/pro. For all the show notes, you can go to streamlined.fm/304, which there’ll be a pro button there too.

Thanks to our sponsors, Gap Scout, Groundhogg, and LearnDash. Their support is immeasurable to me. I really appreciate them. And I appreciate you. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.