I use these 3 structure tricks to keep viewers watching

Last week, I showed you 3 visual tricks to keep your audience engaged.

Today, I'll show you how tweaking your script's structure will keep them watching even longer.

The good news? This is easy to implement in almost any niche.

Structuring information (so your audience doesn't get confused):

Visual cues help your audience understand your video's structure.

But you need to CREATE that structure first.

So let's look at 3 simple ways to organise information so your viewer knows what to expect.

(And never gets lost once the video starts.)

For fun, we're using past/present clients of mine to show you this in action! (N.B. I didn't personally contribute to examples 1 and 2)

#1 - Limited Categories (3, 5, 7)

Don't let your script become an endless list of topics.

Create categories.

Ali Abdaal does this in most of his videos to keep the information neatly packed into a finite number of discussion areas.

Unless you're making a video like "33 things I wish I'd known before age 33" where you're deliberately listing loads of things fast...

...limit the number of categories to 3, 5 or 7.

It's just easier for our brains to process.

And, by the way - here's what happened when I used 1of10 to generate some thumbnails about Ali's all-time favourite topic:

Deffo gonna send these to his WhatsApp (which he will absolutely not reply to).

#2 - Exponential Stakes

This is a classic for entertainment channels, but can be applied to education as well.

Once you have your categories, brainstorm whether you can arrange them to naturally increase tension as the video progresses.

Often, this will come down to increasing price, like Mike Shake's recent crossbow video:

Notice Mike also limiting the number of categories to 5 👀

But you can also ratchet up the tension in other ways.

• Gradually increase the complexity of the topic (education).
• Escalate the potential forefeit in case of failure (entertainment).
• Start with low-lift advice, end with life-changing advice (education).

Oh, and once again - here's what happened when I prompted 1of10 with a video I genuinely think Mike should make 😂

Might send these to Mike's WhatsApp as well. At this point, I am literally just flexing about who I've got on WhatsApp.

Soooo... about these thumbnails.

1of10 have just launched their title and thumbnail generator... and it's pretty sweet!

Here's a thumbnail it created for my podcast channel, Making It, based on the title: "YouTube Scriptwriter Reveals: My AI Writing Process"

Creepy? Yes. Cool? Also, yes.

It "understands" your channel's thumbnail style and creates ideas based on your previous content + outlier ideas from across YouTube.

So if you struggle to come up with ideas, titles and thumbnails for your channel, try 1of10 and let me know how you get on!

Try it here (aff link)!

#3 - Grouping

If you really can't reduce your categories to fewer than 7, you risk overwhelming your viewer.

But we can solve this with "grouping".

In a recent video I worked on with a software channel, we had 11 tool categories to cover.

This was too many to list one after the other.

Instead, we looked for commonalities between the 11 categories and divided them up into 3 groups - "Foundations", "Finance" and "Day-to-day".

Now, each group contained only 3/4 categories, and gave the video a distinct 3-act structure, which was cool.

(video is a 2/10, yay!)

So, if you have too many topics... try grouping them.

And, to finish, here's some AI thumbnail inspo generated by 1of10 for this channel:

Now I just need to figure out how to trap them inside a computer so we can make this.

That's all for this week.

Any questions? You can to reply to this email and I'll get back to you.

Speak soon,
George 👋