Video presentations are important to get right. Your aim should be to keep your viewers watching your video rather than clicking away part way through. Whilst there will always be people who don’t watch the entire video, you’ll be able to tell from your stats how long people watch for and can tweak your newer videos to help reduce the number of people who click away.

Grab attention fast

You know from the videos you watch that you need to get people’s attention fast. Our attention spans seem to be dropping by the minute and if we don’t get what we thought we’d clicked on, we’ll click the back button fast.

That means you can’t spend the first minute or two of your video waffling and generally beating around the bush. You need to have a brief introduction – I’ll typically say something like “Hi, this video is about” and then whatever the title of the video was.

Nothing more.

No long introductions – the equivalent of the polite sales call introductions of “how are you today” that you immediately recognise as being from someone who’s never spoken to you before in your life.

Make it personal

The closer you can get your video to being like a one-on-one conversation you’re having with a friend, the better.

This really is important!

Your personality will come across when you do this. Which means that you’ll either attract or repel people watching your video.

Don’t take that personally – we can’t be all things to all people, it’s just not possible.

Instead, you’ll get people who like your style and let you know that by subscribing to your YouTube channel, even if you don’t remind them that’s an option.

You may even get comments and YouTube allows you to moderate those. It also does quite a good job of filtering out the spam that pervades the internet.

Keep to the point

Videos aren’t the place to go off on a tangent.

Personally, I like to work from a slide show or at the very least a bullet pointed list.

That works for me and makes sure that I keep close to the original point I promised to talk about.

Don’t cover too much

It’s better to split your presentations into several shorter videos rather than trying to create an epic that covers everything.

This has two main advantages:

• It works with short attention spans
• It gives you more chances to appear in the search results

Most search results tend to drill down – people are getting wise to the fact that Google is relatively clueless if you only give it one or two words to work with and are using more words for their searches, often from the list of suggestions that show up as soon as you start typing.

Use the suggestions that show up as the basis for your titles.

Then answer the question that’s been raised in the search query.

Nothing else – just stick to the topic.

Of course, if you’ve promised 5 tips then you need to give 5 tips. That should go without saying – although without an editor overseeing you, it’s not uncommon for things to go astray even with something as basic as that.

I’ve done it on articles before now and been picked up by the editorial process.

But the chances are that you’ll be writer, presenter and producer of your video. So you need to be alert for that potential problem.

If you’d like more help, check out my video creation crash course here.