Kyle | Creative Strategist & YouTube Strategist

This thumbnail got over 2M views, but there’s one (almost stupid) subtle change I believe that could have helped it become even more viral… Now the title is already dripping with morbid remarkability: “Catching the Coyote that Ate My Son” (2.8M views) The video concept itself is bordering on a 0/1 (Aka: it’s incredibly difficult to replicate). But the thumbnail is where I believe there is one small change that could’ve potentially blown this up even more… (I guarantee nothing). I call it the “thumbnail mood”. And the thumbnail mood is the deeper layer below the glance test that happens in the split second they look at your thumbnail. It’s the immediate feeling and tone that your thumbnail creates in the viewer. Now the small mood tweak for this thumbnail is the man’s facial expression. He’s just caught the “killer” of his son, but he looks happy? That doesn’t really align with the title framing. Sure you might be happy to catch the killer a little, but he still lost his “son”. So if he looked angry or even a little sad the negative bias alignment between title and thumbnail might have blown this video up even more. In short, the different mood has changed the video's framing completely. And it’s these subtle tweaks that could be the difference between a 2M video and a 5M video… Day 20 of #Publish30.

If you want to get dangerously good at thumbnail strategy in ANY niche, you need to understand this principle: Visual languages. Aka: the visual elements like colour, style, and cognitive load that tell a specific audience in a split second “this video is for me.” Now this is just the TLDR definition because when we actually break down what makes up a niche’s visual language, we get elements like this: → Font style: Soft and elegant in female niches, or blocky and punchy in most male niches? → Colours: Softer pastel tones, pinks, whites, golds? Or masculine and disruptive neon reds, blues, blacks? → Cognitive load: how many elements are actually on the thumbnail. In an audience with an older demographic, there may be less elements with lower cognitive load. → Subject: The avatar of the creator (a 50 year old male in over-40s health) or items an audience instantly recognises. → Facial expression: Exaggerated shock works in finance and health, but could look stupid in another niche. → Text and copy: Word count, casing (all caps vs lowercase), tonality (bold claim vs curiosity question). → Eye drivers: Arrows, circles, borders. Overpowered in some niches, could be dog sheight in others. → Backgrounds: Simplistic black with depth for older demographics, raw yapper-style for younger. → Production value: A niche like business may have been trained on polished thumbnails compared to biz-op that’s underpolished with literal Google Docs as the thumbnail. → Thumbnail mood: The immediate feeling and tone created in a split second. Finance moods can lean towards fear, greed, or secrecy. Okay let’s lock this concept in with the self-development women’s niche using Jillz Guerin (highly recommend studying her channel): Font style: soft, elegant, lowercase fonts. Even uses italics for emphasis. Colours: yellows, whites, soft pinks. Interestingly, her highest-performing video has her in a red dress, immediately standing out with symbolic weight in a feminine niche. Text and copy: Her copy is lowercase and conversational, almost reads like a text message: “are you ugly? or did you just decide that?” Thumbnail mood: feels dark, feminine, and confident. All the visual elements combine to create that feeling. And there we have it… Once you enter a new niche as a strategist, be on the lookout for these visual elements that make up the visual language. And maybe even bring some of them over into a new niche to try out.

I believe this is the most underrated written platform today. And no, it’s not LinkedIn… Although it may be slightly controversial… X/Twitter. Now I am fully aware of the absolute garbage slop that gets spewed out on this platform. But I am also aware of how powerful it can be, having written 35 tweets every week and trying to master the platform for the past 5 months. Because using X alone can create one of the highest leverage content flywheels today’s. Dan Koe is probably the best example of this: 1/ He took his best-performing short-form tweets (or someone else’s like Naval) 2/ Chained them together into the beats of a 6,000-word mega article 3/ Took that SAME mega viral article and blew it up on Substack 4/ Then took it AGAIN and turned it into a long-form YouTube video that performed well The YouTube long-form can easily create more short-form tweets as well. And I have done something similar for a client. We had 3 short-form tweets go viral around a specific topic. And so I took this as a signal to go deeper with the audience on the topic with a long-form article. And that long-form article is still going viral on Substack and is one of our top-performing on X. Plus, the short-form tweets that do well also crush over here on LinkedIn. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Don’t sleep on Twitter… Day 18 of #Publish30.

Ask this simple question to immediately expand your audience and hit a new market: “who else is this video relevant to and would enjoy it that isn’t my current viewer?” If you're in the learning market, maybe it's the memory market etc. Day 16 of #Publish30.

This business channel uses the same ugly thumbnail on every video, but is crushing it… The channel is called Markbuildsbrands and he’s in the dropshipping niche with over 200K subs. But what’s actually impressive is that in a biz-op niche like dropshipping where views are hard to come by… he’s averaging around 50-75K per video. (And he has some mega outliers in there with over 1M). And the way he does this is with the EXACT same “ugly” packaging format on every video: → Web cam image of him in the corner shirtless → Image of a dashboard or Google Doc to take up the rest of the thumbnail with a bunch of images → lowercase titles for every video (minor pattern interrupt) Now I’m not saying you should use the same packaging format for every video you make… far from it. But the main takeaway is when you find a format that works, double and even triple down on it. Even if (in fact, especially if) it’s the dumbest, most nonsensical format you can’t explain. Because if you don’t milk your winning format, someone else will… Day 17 of #Publish30.

Location: Tokyo Mission: Scale Coming soon... Day 15 of #Publish30.

I've distilled my most viral titles (and over 1,000 outliers) into 5 Copy Cogs you can use to create your own YouTube titles: 1. Topic It’s the core idea your entire video is built around. Whether that’s investing, visceral fat, dating, business, you name it. For example: “If You Don't Understand the [Petrodollar], You Don't Understand Geopolitics” 2. Outcomes What is the outcome you are promising the viewer by clicking on your video? Is it to lose weight, to fix their business, to become financially free? Use Gary Bencivenga's "So What?" test to discover the outcome of the video “If You Master Boring Stocks, You Master [Money]” You master money → So what? → You become financially free “If You Master Boring Stocks, You Master Financial Freedom” 3. Mechanisms The mechanism is HOW you get to the outcome. And it goes back to a classic direct response principle called market sophistication. Market sophistication simply means how many claims they have heard before you. And so when the market is sick of all the same overblown claims and they need novelty. Novelty is a new, sexier way to GET that outcome they haven't heard about before, called the unique mechanism. “If I Wanted to Go Viral in 30 Minutes, I’d Do [THIS]” The unique mechanism is the THIS. It’s hidden or revealed to create curiosity and attach the claim to this novel concept. If we’re going for revealed: “The [Skittles Effect] Will Make You Go Viral In 30 Mins” The Skittles Effect being the unique mechanism. 4. Proof Your proof could be: *Credentials (Who you are, like a doctor) *Achievements (What you’ve done) *Affiliations (who you’ve worked with or someone famous) *Studies (“New research”). And when you mix proof with your mechanism or outcome, that’s when you really start to create belief… “I've Done [9,000] [Colonoscopies], Here’s How to Fix Your Gut” This immediately leads with the experience and credentials proof, as it implies a doctor. 5. Hook The hook is simply anything that stops the viewer in their doomscrolling and gives them a reason to click. *Audience Call-outs: "[Men Over 40:] Follow This Plan, You'll Retire In Your 50s" *Open Loops: "The [Single Habit] That FORCES You To Focus" *Belief Reversals: "Why Europeans Live Longer Than Americans [(NOT Diet)]" *Loss Aversion: "[NEVER] Invest In These 5 Stocks (Instant Loss)" *Forbidden Knowledge: "Everything Wall Street Won't Tell You About Money" *Attention Amplifiers: "I'll Make You [Insanely] Confident, Just Give Me 22 Mins" Now let's fuse them all together with the topic of longevity: "This Japanese Morning Routine Makes You Feel Decades Younger" Japanese = Proof. This = Hook (open loop). Morning Routine = Mechanism. Feel Decades Younger = Outcome. Longevity = Topic. How you fuse them is up to you and what your market wants. Because the best title formula in the world will not save half-arsed market research. At least now you have a place to start… Day 13 of #Publish30.

Split testing is overrated… But the positives of using it can outweigh the negatives. (So I do use it, but I just have that awareness that it has many downsides). First of all, if you're working with a small channel, do not do a bloody split test. You will not get enough impressions and you'll be split testing until the end of time. Launch with what you believe to be your strongest title and thumbnail. But if you do work on or have a bigger channel, here’s what I like to do: Phase 1: split test 3 thumbnails against 1 title. By thumbnail formats, I mean 3 completely different concepts. Maybe one thumbnail is a blind mechanism style while another uses the panelled backgrounds. Your mantra here is: Test screams, not whispers. Which means you test the things that will actually get you results, not smaller stuff like the font of your thumbnail text. Phase 2: Test 3 titles against the winning thumbnail. The exact same principle applies here: test different title formats and variations, not the same title said 3 different ways. For example, do not do this: “How to get rich” “How to actually get rich” “How to get disgustingly rich in 30 days” Do this instead: “How to Get Disgustingly Rich in 30 days” “I’ll Make You Disgustingly Rich, Give Me 30 Mins” “This Goldman Sachs Secret Will Make You Disgustingly Rich” Phase 3: Test another batch of titles (or thumbnails) on the cold traffic flip. This is something I learned from Shay, the genius content director at ACQ. The cold traffic flip means you go into the backend of a channel and you look at returning and new viewers. That flip over of impressions and views is when the algorithm potentially pushes your video to a new cold audience. And so you can look at your other videos that have performed well with a cold traffic flip to roughly map the days it happens. Then split test titles and thumbnails that could reach the mass market on those days for the new video. Now if a video does end up doing well, sometimes I won’t split the test at all. The entire split testing game is using your best judgment and having a reason why you want to split the test. Day 14 of #Publish30.