Joshua Romero's channel was growing like most slow and steady but at the end of 2020 he noticed something that caused him to make a decision to do this to a video this to his channel and this to his bank account but how did he do that in one of the most competitive niches in the world well in this video Joshua is going to reveal the simple change he made to achieve this and then I'm going to tear apart his most viral video and show you the tricks he used to get results like that as well as show him what he could have done better I love that dude that's amazing what was the main change that you made that helped your channel explode the my first video that ever like popped was an ETF video and ever since that I was just like putting out ETF content and I would still put out the occasional credit card video or bank account or how to build your credit score things like that and those videos never perform well and so what I noticed was whenever I would put out content that was related to making money um that video would always be like a top three out of the last 10 and then I would go and put out a video like an ETF video or a credit card video or a best bank account video and that one always underperformed compared to the make money and when I finally just like said forget it let me just go quadruple down on this like that's when I started seeing the massive growth and so the biggest change I made was just like just talking about one specific part of personal finance was there anything else that you sort of felt been holding the channel back at the beginning of my journey and I was afraid to like speak what I believed was true like my values because I was afraid that I was gonna like polarize people yeah I found out over time that's how you grow a YouTube channel like when you go really strong on a certain message there's gonna be a group of people that really believes in what you're saying and because you're going so strong on it like they're really gonna be like die hard fans of you whereas if you just kind of have like this mixed message you're trying not to offend anybody it's just hard for people to like follow you and I noticed that when I started speaking my value it just the growth started happening a lot faster how do you pick an idea and then from there what's your process some guy named Brian D he came up with this this term called skyscraper basically the way it works is you look at a piece of content that's doing really well and you find a way to make it better so like if Andre skyscraper is here I'm gonna try to find a way to make my skyscraper a little bit taller than it is and that could be with the quality of the content it could be with just a new piece of information that he didn't talk about but I could talk about it just could be with the delivery there's a lot of ways to like make it different or better and so I would just look at like top creators watch their content I would come up with my own words obviously it would be me talking but I would just try to find a way to make it better just beautifully simplified YouTube or I tell people all the time listen I'm not talking about anything different on my channel that hasn't already listed on YouTube it's just the the certain elements that make my videos unique are what makes it stand out so now we know Joshua's beautifully simple strategy I wanted to take this video which picked up just under 2 million views in its first two weeks of life and break down some of the things Joshua does that made it so effective as well as look at how he dealt with two of the biggest problems YouTubers have that can annihilate a video's performance starting with this his hook I've got four side hustles that no one is talking about that can earn you as much as 900 or more per day with basically no skill all you have to do is choose one of these ideas and then execute the candle Scar the candle like if you can compel somebody enough to continue watching within the first like two seconds you lost them if the candle is just like one extra thing that I have that's going on that's keeping somebody like interest so I think it worked on me but there's one problem with it okay okay so here's the problem of Joshua's visual hook let's say you're watching a murder mystery film and you're trying to work out who done it one of the lead characters walks into the room and puts their keys down on a table now if that moment wasn't significant it would have been shot like this on a white and the keys would have played no part in the rest of the story however if those keys were a clue it would have been shot like this and that's the editor letting us know that those keys matter as viewers when we watch a film or a YouTube video we look to find meaning in what's being said and done so if you put something out there that doesn't play any part in the rest of the story and you draw of attention to it yes it could look really flipping cool flowing this candle light but it could also confuse your viewers as they scramble to work out what the significance of it was and if they find out though there wasn't any that could cause them to feel frustrated but because I actually found this trick quite intriguing as a viewer I came up with a solution for Joshua to give it some meaning now what you did is you set something up that never got paid off it never played more of a purpose than a trick so what I think you should do is at the very end pick it up and blow it out and just go black I love that dude that's amazing not amazing you're just blowing out a candle no it's it's a big it's it's such a simple thing but it's like okay yeah I'm gonna start doing that you've completed the loop the story is complete which brings us on to something Joshua did exceptionally well to explain let's just break down the video into the four key points he makes using a dummy retention grass here at the start we have his hook with the candle which then leads into the first point which was about a side hustle that makes money cleaning bins now the second Point here was about a print on demand store third this was about making money reviewing Amazon products and then the fourth here was about creating an Etsy store but the sections that are glowing are where I really want you to focus because at the start of every Point Joshua tells a story of some kind that unpacks a lot of the information about the side hustle and remember what I said earlier about viewers wanting to find meaning in stories when you lead your point with a story people's brains fire up and they start to try and work out why the things that you were saying matter so when I say and watched his first point where he talks about bins my brain was going oh that's interesting I wasn't expecting this I wonder where this is going oh it looks like there's demand for bin cleaning but I do this could I clean bins yeah maybe I could because there's quite a lot of money to be made and it looks like there's a lot of them on as where if you lead with the facts and say something like this the first side hustle is cleaning bins it makes about 90 an hour and there's a lot of demand for it it's boring watch every Ted Talk ever it's the same they'll make their point with a story first not that I've checked every Ted Talk ever where did you pick that up from where I learned it was from Mr who's the boss and I noticed that he would do that with his big mystical videos and he's got like 17 points to to go through and he would kind of start off each point in a similar way which brings us on to how Joshua dealt with the two massive problems that can destroy our videos performance to explain I'd like to introduce you to some test tubes so to get around these big problems let's simplify your YouTube viewers into three different test tubes now this first one here this represents cold viewers these are people who have never watched one of your videos before the second one we have returned viewers these are people who have watched one of your videos before and they've come back to watch another and then this third one these people are your fans they come back every time right now these shoes are empty but in order to blow up a video you have to fill them up with this stuff trust not milk because the more trust a viewer has the more likely they are to continue to watch a video and give it all of the right signals for YouTube to show more people and to show you just how insane the difference in viewer types is I'm going to show you the retention of a video that I made that has no editing no prep and there's just me rambling to a camera for six minutes tada 65 retention and no it is not because I'm a video genius it's because I sent this video to my email list and the people on that list are these guys but if I'd released that video on this channel well the cold viewers would have gone what the heck is this and they would have left and then YouTube wouldn't have played it as much but how do you build trust well let's have a look at how Joshua did it and then what he did that could have maybe ruined that trust is you have a very good looking setup I saw the office I saw the art on the wall but this guy looks like he's successful and that was the first thing that made me think okay there's some credibility here it's a shame but first impressions matter so much because these guys don't trust you so the second that video loads they are looking for things to confirm their lack of distrust not things to prove themselves wrong but even if you don't have a fancy setup I'd say the next way he dealt with this trust issue is way more important so you can do the same thing I'm gonna teach you a little trick so when you come up with your thumbnail in your title ask yourself this what three questions do you think someone who has no trust in you at all would want answering when they click play on your video and to show you how this can build trust fast I took Joshua's video and asked some YouTuber buddies of mine what three questions they wanted answering when they saw his thumbnail entitled and then I asked my Twitter audience the same thing and you're gonna see how tough it is out there because the comments got nasty fast the first question is definitely what are the side hustles what are the four same hustles could this side hustle be part of my regular day is this legit what other side hustles are out there is there any one of them that I think has started right away is it difficult is it hard like cool so as you can see my YouTuber bodies are a little skeptical of this video but let's dive deep into the faceless world of Twitter and show you the unfiltered truth of what you're dealing with here hundreds of comments All incredibly negative because as viewers we've been burnt so many times meaning trust is at an all-time low so when I threw all of these comments into a spreadsheet and worked out what the number one thing they all wanted to know was it came down to one word proof so now let's look at the genius way Joshua fought back against this so at the start he leads with this candle hook and then jumps straight into the story of the bins and in this story he included a few things number one the side hustle was not a traditional one so that instantly satisfied the people who expected it to be the same old thing as they always get told number two he then showed the amount you can make backed up with a screenshot and proof it's legit followed by a comment from a Facebook group from someone raving about his service which proved once again that it was legit so in those opening minutes a level of trust has been built that lets people know they have not fallen into a trap bringing us on to the second big problem us YouTubers have to overcome that actually caused Joshua's viewers to leave right there I want you to pretend your YouTube videos is kind of like a box of chocolate but getting very Forest Gump here Jenny if I burst into your house Christmas day and I'm like Joshua do you want some chocolates like how many do you take I mean I'll take uh one for each hand all right so you eat them you want a few more sure what if I say you have to eat the whole thing now how would you feel after eating a whole box of chocolates like garbage yeah but you still like chocolate right you just had a bit too much yeah so what I'm going to show you now is how you gave your viewers too much chocolate so Joshua's video followed a pattern each point he'd tell the story and the retention would remain flat because he was handing the viewers sweet one by one then he'd do something after that that was forcing them to eat a lot more chocolate then maybe they couldn't handle and the result was these dips in retention so what was he doing well let's go back to the questions that the viewers wanted answers to how many of them said they wanted to learn how to set up a print on demand store none of them yeah what Joshua's stories did so well was sell the viewers the dream that built up their confidence that maybe they could take on the side Hustle but then after he gave them a really detailed rundown of how to set them all up and it not that confidence and went from sounding like something that was quite achievable and easy to something that was actually going to take up a lot of time and skill and there's more work than they'd expected by providing a better service he actually gave them a little bit too much chocolate and potentially caused a feeling of overwhelm that scared some viewers away let me let me ask you a question my fear is that I cut out all of that sort of more detailed nitty-gritty stuff and over time people just kind of stopped like losing interest because I'm um I'm not providing enough about you and that is exactly the right question to ask but really I think there is no set right or wrong definitive answer here of course Joshua has to provide some level of detail here and the video was an absolute Banger either way but it's something you as a Creator have to work out for yourself how deep do you go but I will say one thing as Maya Angelou once said people won't remember the words you said but they'll remember the way you make them feel if you want to learn to come up with some strong hooks for your videos just like Joshua then watch this video next to learn how the top query is in the world do just that