How To Come Up With Great Content Ideas For Your YouTube Videos

YouTube is the second largest search platform on the internet and for that reason it is targeted by a lot of people. Marketers or even regular people all want to have their voices heard so they post videos and fight for the top position in their niche.

In order for you to stand a chance and be on the first page and even in the top spot, you will need to do some research before you make a video. This will ensure your effort is not wasted and you have the highest chance of success.

Yes, the numbers are scary to look at – “400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute”. You might think that there’s no way you can compete with that. However most people do it randomly, without much research or putting much thought into it. There’s also different niches, you can find your own niche that’s not that overcrowded or where you’re the only one doing it the right way. It can be doable, if not easy if you’re willing to put the extra work in it.

The first thing you need to do before starting to create videos is to brainstorm content ideas and then do some research to see what would work best. I’ll go with your step by step through this process so you do it right, and after you do it a few times you’ll see that it will start to come naturally to you.

You might already be familiar with the 80-20 rule. If not, what you should know is that usually 20% of the work yields 80% of the result, and of course, the rest of 80% of the work will yield 20% of the results. What you need to take from this is that by doing a minimal research and putting some thought before starting your work will help tremendously. On the other hand, you don’t need to go over-board with research, especially if you’re low on time.

OK, so let’s get this started and see how your can come up with the best content ideas for your YouTube videos.

1. Brainstorm 10 ideas

First, take a few minutes and think of 10 ideas in your niche. What are you interested in, what would you like to learn, know or do? If you’re just starting and don’t have a niche picked up already that’s a totally different subject and you should read about that first. However, if you know what you want to be doing, do this first. Pick 10 ideas and write them in a doc file or even on paper if you prefer that.

Ideally go for ideas that fall into one of these 3 types:

• teaching
• trends
• tips

Why these? Because they are the most sought after videos on YouTube. People want to learn something so they search for tutorials on that particular subject, they want to stay up to date so they watch everything that’s trending and lastly they like tips for things they are interested in.

If you’re having problems coming up with the 10 initial ideas, here’s are some tricks that will help you:

• Go to the channel or social media accounts of some of your competitors. Pick a few videos that were really popular and check their comments. You will notice frequently asked questions in the comments that will give you ideas about great topics to cover.
• If you already have some customers, listen to them and see what the frequently asked questions are. Build on them

2. Competitor research

Next, you’ll do some competitor research and see what content ideas are working for them. It doesn’t matter if someone else covered a topic if you can do it better. Also, this way you’ll take advantage of the related traffic coming from YouTube. As you probably know each video on YouTube shows a related videos section that are considered to be on the same subject and interesting to the viewers. Your aim is to get into that section so you get more free organic traffic.

So, first of all, in case you haven’t already done this you will need to identify your main competitors. To do this, go to YouTube, enter your niche/main keyword and press search. On the results page, you’ll notice a filter button, click that and choose “Channel”.

Now, you will see all the channels that are in the same niche as you on the results page. Click on the top few, see how many followers they have and check the ones with the most subscribers.

Now, check their videos and see what their most popular videos are. In order to do this click on a channel, then click on videos, next “sort by” and pick the most popular ones.

You will be presented with a page of their most popular videos. Now this is a goldmine of ideas that will definitely work. All the information that you need is on this page. You will notice that each video shows the number of views it got and when it was posted. These are very important metrics and along with the number of subscribers the channel has it will let you take some good decisions.

Here’s how to interpret the numbers:

• Check the views for a video vs the channel subscribers. If there are way more views than subscribers it means the video got a lot of free organic traffic, either through YouTube search or the related videos section. That is the ideal case, so make a note of such videos to see what they wrote in their title and description
• Check the time when the video was posted vs the total number of views. If the video is relatively new with a lot of views that’s a winner there. If the video is several years old, a higher number of views is not that impressive anymore and the topic might or might not be of interest anymore.

Pick the video topics that are under a year old, with the most number of view relative to how many subscribers the channel has. Make a list of those videos and the topic idea. Then, go through the comments on those videos and see what people asked for, what else they wanted to know and what their questions were. If you are to do a view on the same subject made sure to speak about those points as well.

3. Trending topics

This is another way to make sure your YouTube videos will be a hit. Talk about trending topics! It is a little trickier, as you’ll need to correctly identify a trend and also be among the first one to talk about it. If you manage to do this your video will be a hit. However, some smaller trends might be a bust and go nowhere, whereas if you’re not constantly on the lookout you might miss the actual big trend.

I am listing this so you know it as an alternative opportunity though. Here’s how to do your research to find trending topics. It’s not hard, because most social media sites nowadays have their own trending topics section. You you have half of the work done for you already, however it’s up to you to identify which one of these will work for your audience.

To see what’s trending right now the first and best tool you should check is Google trends. Click on more trending topics and you will see the topics that are trending on google right now.

You can also do searches about your keywords and see historical data on how many people are looking for that. Use this to gauge how good the new topic ideas that you came up with would work and if there’s interest there.

After you are finished with google trends you can check for Facebook trends and even Twitter trends, they will give you even more ideas on what is very popular at this particular time.

4. The search bar

This is one of the easiest and also most overlooked ways of finding new content ideas that would work great as they are sought after by many people. You just go to YouTube and enter part of your keywords in but don’t hit enter. They will give you a list of trending keywords that people want to know more about. See what comes up, add more words, remove some words, play around with the search ideas they offer you until you find your perfect content ideas.

After that, you can do the same with google, facebook and other big social media platforms.

Using all your newfound content ideas

By now you should have a pretty big list of new content ideas in your niche that will work well. All that’s left to do is pick the ones that are the best and that you should start with. Combine all the data that you’ve gathered and all the techniques I talked about and decide on which one would be the best and go for it. You now have 80% more chances of success than you did if you wouldn’t have researched first.

Except the trending topic ideas that should always be fresh, all the topic ideas on this list should be good to talk about for at least a couple of months, so you don’t need to go through this whole process for each and every video you create. Do this once, gather good ideas and after that spend your time creating the videos.

10 best types of YouTube Content that generally works well

To finish this off I will leave you with a short list of the 10 best types of YouTube content trending right now:

1. Video games walkthroughs
2. Product reviews
3. Funny animals
4. Guides and tutorials
5. Celebrity gossip videos
6. Shopping sprees / hauls
7. Educational videos
8. Unboxing videos
9. Pranks
10. Vlogs