The one thing your video needs to succeed

Also, learning to fix home appliances

Hello! My dryer broke last year and I learned a lot about videos when trying to fix it.

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Photo by Theme Photos on Unsplash

What's the one thing your video needs to succeed?

It’s not an expensive camera or lights or microphones. It’s not music or amazing graphics or a fancy studio. 

It has to help answer someone's question.

How do I know this?  

For one, when the heating element on our dryer went out and needed to be replaced, I did what I always do: Googled it until I found someone with an identical problem, and then copied what they did to fix it. Usually, there’s a youtube video. In this case, it was this video that guided me through the steps to replace it:

A few months later, when my laptop keyboard kept locking up, this video pointed me in the right direction.

Now, I doubt I’m the first person to shout the praises of Google and Youtube for finding ways to fix my broken appliances.

“Here, let me google that for you” is a cliche for a reason. It’s the number one search engine in the world.

BUT(!), did you know that Youtube is the 2nd largest search engines in the world?

According to Global Reach, Youtube is larger than Bing, AOL, Ask, and Yahoo combined. Second, thanks to Google, every time you search for something, there's usually a video, and that video has A LOT of views, even if the production value isn't great.

There's no way the creators of the dryer video and the Toshiba keyboard video looked at research to optimize their Search Engine Optimization. There’s no way they thought, “What type of content will get me the most views?”

Those two guys had broken dryers and broken keyboards. They figured out how to fix it and then made a video sharing their expertise.

Thanks to these two videos, my problem got solved. Since both have 15k+ views, it's easy to deduce that they solved other people's problems too.

There was also this comment in one of the videos:

This could be you! This comment gets at the point of most successful “how-to” videos.

1. It answers the user’s question.

2. It answers the user’s question in a fast and simplistic way and “gets to the point”.

If more videos started with the idea that a viewer will save “a lot of time and money”, then…maybe we’d all be better off, instead of videos trying to hold your attention with click-bait or long intros or “click that like and subscribe button” endings. You know, like this:

Just kidding. Also this: