My video titles are pretty boring. Usually they're just the name of whatever I'm explaining. Take "The Outbox Pattern." Sure, it's accurate, but I'm not winning many clicks with that.
I'm not going to fix that with clickbait, though. I'll never promise something a video doesn't deliver. And most of what I make videos about is named patterns and principles, so the boring title and the honest title are usually the same thing.
I've been playing with a headline-generator skill I stumbled across. I feed it the script for the video, and it pulls title ideas straight out of what I actually said. Nothing invented, because every angle it suggests is already in the video. That's the part I liked.
The title on this note came out of the same skill, by the way. I fed it this post and kept the line that stuck.
So here's what I'm trying. I put the boring, accurate name on the thumbnail, then I use the title itself as the hook, more like a subheading. The topic's still right there in front of you, so nothing's overpromised, and the title gets to do the pulling.
I'm about to launch a video on the Outbox Pattern, and these are the three titles I'll be A/B testing from the off:
Stop writing to two systems. Write to one.
Solving the dual-write problem
2 writes + 1 crash = lost data
I tweaked each of these until I was comfortable with it, and the the YouTube A/B test, the strongest one wins once it's live.
The order nags at me, though. All the advice says you should package first. You nail the title and thumbnail before you make anything, and if the packaging's weak, you don't bother making the video at all. Mine happens the other way round, after the script's already done.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about that. But then I'm not really approaching YouTube like everyone else, and my goals are pretty different, so maybe it's fine.
Will it work? I've no idea. Will I keep using it? No clue. But it's a fun experiment.