Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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I Paid 5 Growth Experts To Create A Growth Playbook For The Same Community | Episode 408

 

Don’t guess your next title – get the proven ones for free: 👉 professorgame.com/YT-Title-Spreadsheet

Want your content to actually get seen? I paid five growth experts to reverse-engineer how to grow a community—without spending a cent on ads. In this episode, I reveals the three biggest levers.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
Are you wondering what is keeping your community from growing?

I paid five growth experts.

to build a playbook for the exact same community.

here are the three biggest levers I found to attract people into your community without ads.

Most creators spend hours on content. And yes, content has to be good. But no one will see your content if they don’t get to your content itself.

Every expert I reached out to had a different go to strategy for getting those people to see that content. So what actually makes people see your content, follow you and get into your community.

It’s the three things we’re going to be talking about. The first point might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised if you looked at your numbers, your data, that is the time you spend or you invest doing, nailing this one thing. It’s like creating a fantastic game for those game designers out there, but no one gets to the onboarding in gamification terms.

We would be thinking about this in the terms of the discovery phase.

So the first thing you need is, and no surprises here, What you need is a great title. And yes, I know, no big reveal, but hear me out. This is how do you create a title that actually works? Well, the first thing, and it’s also obvious until, well, once you think about it, and that is use what is already working. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You can do research on YouTube.

to see what other successful content creators are using the biggest ones, the ones that are doing great, those that are overperforming the rest of their videos within your niche within what you are creating is often based out of patterns or frameworks.

And talking about frameworks and patterns, you can get my freebie YouTube title spreadsheet. It’s built in a tool of proven frameworks that others created. And I have just synthesized for you. It’s free and linked below.

So just like any platform selling games, YouTube is crowded. People scroll past 90, probably 99 % of the videos, just like you would scroll through a page full of games without giving it even a second thought. Some experts focused on reaching out directly, others on where to promote. However, however, the native side is something that I found that works on all levels.

kinda already knew this and also instinctively knew that it would be important. But I was surprised about how to solve for it optimizing both for the end result and for the resources invested or spent in this activity.

So how do we get people to stop scrolling? And it is as simple as it sounds. It is having a strong thumbnail. So, yeah, great Rob, that sounds fantastic, but I’m not a designer, I’m not an expert on that. So how do I get a very strong thumbnail

that makes people stop scrolling. Well, you can always, of course, hire a thumbnail expert. This can get to be expensive, especially if you’re continually doing that, and it might be difficult to build into your workflow. But if you can do it, I definitely recommend going down that route. Another route is not hiring that person, but becoming that person. You can become an expert in thumbnail design by trying over and over again, designing, testing, designing, testing, testing, A/B, testing, trying out what is the best strategy that you

can reach through that. But there’s a middle ground, something that actually, it’s not even a middle ground. it is without investing in paying on somebody who’s an expert at doing that and without becoming the expert yourself, which takes probably a lot of time, something you can do fast. And that doesn’t require you to invest a lot of money, resources or difficulty. And it has to do with what we already revealed in step one. How do you find a great title?

you copy a title that’s working. How do you find a great thumbnail? Well, you found that title that works. You copy that thumbnail. It works. It works well with that title. Copy and use exactly just that.

And this final point, this third point, is about thinking how our brains are working nowadays in this era of social media, YouTube, and fast-paced content.

In game terms, this would be the transition where you go from discovery and you’re about to reach that onboarding stage. Since you don’t have to register or log in to watch a video, well, you probably want to do that on YouTube or not, but we as content creators, we really don’t care if people are signed in to YouTube or not. This is where the commitment has nothing to do with logging in. This is where it has to do with that emotional, that time commitment. When somebody sees this part,

and says, yes, I’m going in, I’m going to watch more. And that’s where you’re able to catch them. So once more, if you look at the data, this is something where we’re not investing half as much as we should. If you are not getting enough traction, if you’re not getting enough of the views you’re looking for, if your content is not performing as well as you want to, look at the title, look at the thumbnail, and definitely look at this point as well. We invest a lot of time in the content, the full content, the meat of the content, but we don’t…

Make sure that this content gets views as much as we can. Believe me, I’ve been there. In fact, I’m sure I still fall trap to this very, very often. For this one, experts used very different tricks do this year, optimize here, have this framework, do this plan, these steps, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what’s the difference between a drop off and somebody who ends up viewing the video?

after you got them to click with that thumbnail and that great title. So let’s recap what we know. Titles earn the click, thumbnails stop the scroll, and we need something to get the people to commit to view the rest of the content.

So what does that look like? This is what many call the hook. The hook is something that creates immediate tension or curiosity that people actually want to watch the rest of the video just to know what is inside.

It needs to be fast in framing the problem you want to solve. It’s those 10 seconds, 15 seconds maybe, at the start of the very video when people have clicked and then it’s maybe they have to watch the ad. their attention is already waning. Those first few seconds are where they decide whether they’re going to watch that video or they’re going to go back to search or look at the videos in the sidebar.

It’s like the first quest you get when you start a game. If it is not enticing, if it doesn’t get you hooked, you’re never gonna get to level two.

And if you don’t believe in how much I am telling you the importance of hooks you can watch this small video. I’m leaving you here from Alex Hormozi where he discusses in very quick. I think it’s two minutes where he discusses the importance of that hook and the kind of results that he’s gotten by optimizing the hook.

So that’s how you turn curious strangers on YouTube into members of your community. Of course, there is a final step which you might wanna research as well, which is the CTA, but that’s not a part of this video. We might make a video further on specifically about calls to action.

And remember, if you want help creating that title that makes people want to click, you can get my freebie, YouTube title spreadsheet. It’s built on a tool with proven frameworks others have created and I have just synthesized for you. It’s free, it’s linked below. It has things like the original title that the framework is taken from, how it worked, a generalized framework so you can use it to personalize it to your own situation, a score so you can pick from the best and link.

to a broader explanation of what that would look like from the original creators of this hook. However, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

 

End of transcription