A few simple changes have me hitting a 10% click-through rate consistently across six very different channels — dating, YouTube coaching, and my general channel. None of them are complicated. Here's what's been working.
Cap every video at five minutes
The biggest change is a strict five-minute maximum. People really want to be able to finish a video — there's a real psychological satisfaction in completing one, and time is valuable. When someone sees a video under five minutes (especially at double speed, like I watch), they're only risking a couple minutes, so it's an easy click and an easy finish. Since I started doing this, far more people finish, and even though average view duration dropped versus longer videos, the click-through rate has rocketed.
Tell ongoing stories
The second change is telling stories across multiple videos. Instead of one 20-minute video about borrowing $57,000 on credit cards at $1,300 in fees, I broke it into a daily series — why I did it, how I did it, the details of the house I rented. Someone who watched the first few and sees the next one knows it's part of the same story and wants to continue. And because the videos are short, someone who finishes one is more likely to go back for the episodes they missed, which lifts click-through across the whole series.
Add a little humor
The third is humor. Viewers tell me that when I make them laugh, satisfaction goes way up — you can watch the laughing emojis roll in. Even making 10% of viewers laugh increases satisfaction, which makes people more likely to watch and click next time. One recent video pulled a 10% click-through rate on about 4,000 people from viewers who were happy with what they'd seen before. If you want the rest of my approach, watch my YouTube coaching playlist here.