How to Come Up with YouTube Video Ideas: 7 Tactics to Find Proven Topics

paola August 1, 2021 0 Comments

No matter your niche, sometimes it can be difficult to come up with new content ideas for YouTube.

You feel like everything is already out there, and nothing you create can be original anymore. This is partially true, but what matters it’s not the originality of the idea, but the originality of the execution and the uniqueness of your point of view.

And to be honest, there is an unlimited amount of ideas to make videos about. You just have to find them.

In today’s post, we show you the most effective methods to research content ideas for your YouTube channel. Give this a try, and you will never run out of video ideas for YouTube!

The Right Mindset to (Strategically) Search Proven Topics for YouTube

It’s crucial that you enter onto this whole find video ideas thing with the right mindset.

To build a successful YouTube channel, you can’t simply press record and start filming whatever it’s on top of your head.

You have to plan, schedule, and outline your YouTube videos ahead of time.

Research allows you to increment views: simply because your channel’s videos will be strategic, featuring proven ideas that people are actually searching for.

Did you know that a billion hours of YouTube videos are watched per day? That’s a lot of video consumption!

If you don’t notice success on your channel just yet, then the problem probably isn’t that the market for your videos is non-existent or over-saturated.

The problem may be your videos’ topics.

You have to make the right videos and be talking about the right topics.

This is the only way to stand out. To come up with video ideas that actually get views is the only way to help you grow your YouTube channel.

So, the lesson is to make sure to research before you press record.

Ask yourself: Is this a good video idea for my audience, or not? Do my people care about this topic? These questions will help you to figure out what videos to make next.

Because in the end, those creators who understand their viewers better, win.

7 Tactics to Find Proven Topics for YouTube Videos

YouTube Autocomplete

The first method we are going to discuss can be found inside YouTube itself.

YouTube’s search bar has a huge (but subtle) superpower: it tells you exactly the topics people are searching for.

Try it right now! Start typing your channel’s niche or topic of interest in YouTube’s search bar. It will begin to show you searches related to that query.

Those are actual things humans are typing in the search bar to find YouTube videos, and because of that, they are proven topics.

#Bonus Tip: put extra spaces after your search terms to go deeper and find more video ideas. Let’s see an example: say we have a channel in the social media niche. We want to make a video about methods to grow an Instagram account. We can start typing ‘how to get Instagram followers’ and see what YouTube suggests to us:

Based on these results, we can assume that people are interested to know how to get Instagram followers ‘for free’, ‘fast’, ‘in 2021’, and also ‘how to get likes’.

All of those ideas appear from a simple search. Repeat this method with other topics related to your niche and see what you found.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is a tool that integrates with YouTube and offers an extensive list of features to help YouTube channels succeed.

This tool can assist you on all stages of your YouTube journey.

It has a keyword research tool to find video ideas, a feature to help you publish your videos quickly and effectively, an optimizer tool to ensure you get better rankings, and it also helps you with video promotion and even with A/B testing.

For our current purposes, we are going to focus on Keyword Explorer, TubeBuddy’s keyword research tool. Once you install the extension in your browser, go to YouTube Studio and click on the TubeBuddy icon on the top right corner. It will look something like this:

Now, click on ‘Keyword Explorer’ and type your desired topic to see all the data. We are going to type our search from earlier, ‘how to get Instagram followers’.

You can see here that the ‘Overall Score’ for our keyword is high. Below you can see why: it has high search volume and medium competition.

Make videos including keywords with a green Overall Score to have better chances to rank.

In the ‘Related Searches’ section, you can explore more keyword ideas. Click on each one to analyze them individually and make an informed decision on which ones to target.

Above that section, you will find four tabs. ‘YouTube’ and ‘Google’ show you how the interest in that keyword has changed over time.

On the other end, ‘Video Topics’ and ‘Common Tags’ provide you with even more keyword ideas to make videos about.

VidIQ

This is another YouTube-specific tool that also offers several features to improve your chances of success in YouTube.

VidIQ is a powerful ally to research keywords related to your channel’s niche. Once you have an account, you can find the Keyword Research Tool on the ‘Keywords’ tab.

#Bonus Tip: next to the ‘Keyword’ tab is the ‘Daily Ideas’ tab. Here you can find new video ideas every day, according to your channel’s niche.

Here we used, once again, our search term ‘how to get Instagram followers’. The tool provides related keywords, including their search volume and competition.

VidIQ gives you an ‘Overall Score’, the same as TubeBuddy, that tells you if it’s viable to target that keyword and rank for it.

Remember that a high Overall Score reflects low competition and high search volume, the best combination for ranking videos on YouTube. Anything over 40 is good.

In summary, the closer the Overall Score number is to 100, the higher the possibility to get views and rank for these key phrases.

Therefore, VidIQ not only gives you keyword ideas but also supplies the data to choose between the best.

The tool also shows you trending videos for the keywords you research, which gives you even more video ideas.

With the browser extension installed, you can search keywords directly from YouTube with VidIQ’s ‘Keyword Inspector’.

Sort this list by Overall Score to target the highest performing keywords.

Another useful feature is the ‘Trending’ tab you can find every time you visit a YouTube channel. It shows you the videos on that channel with the highest views per hour.

Next to ‘Trending’ is the ‘Stats’ tab, where you can see useful statistics about your competitor’s channels.

In this example, some videos were uploaded years ago, while others were uploaded months or even days ago.

The older and more viewed videos on this channel cover ‘how to get more views on YouTube’ and ‘YouTube SEO’, and are 3 and 4 years old, respectively.

What do older videos with higher views per hour tell you? Basically, that those videos are ranking well and discuss a topic that many people search for, even after years.

And people tend to prefer up-to-date videos, so they might favor a newer video over another that’s multiple years old (here’s an opportunity for you to take advantage of!).

By studying your competitors in this way, you can make a related, newer video on a proven topic you know people are actually searching for.

Although VidIQ’s features are pretty limited in the free version, it’s a nice tool to try.

Note that sometimes the results from VidIQ and TubeBuddy can differ a little bit (as with every SEO tool). It’s a good practice to run your ideas on multiple tools to make sure you are targeting the right keywords.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a platform that allows you to examine questions people make about topics related to your niche.

Besides giving you video ideas and related keywords, this tool can help you to outline your videos.

Introduce your niche or a related topic in the search bar. It will give you a graphic with questions related to those keywords, that will look something like this:

If we made a video on that topic, the outline can come naturally from these questions.

This will ensure our script cover topics people are interested in, and they will find our video very valuable and relevant if we answer what they need.

Below ‘Questions’, you also have graphics with ‘Prepositions’ and ‘Comparisons’ that come from the keywords you entered on the search bar earlier. On the bottom, you also have a section with related keywords to find even more content ideas.

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool (completely free to use) built into Google’s advertising system. To use it, first you need to have a Google Ads account.

Once you have it, log in. You can find Keyword Planner on the dashboard:

Similar to the tools we used earlier, Google shows you ‘Average Monthly Searches’ and ‘Competition’ data for the keywords you entered on the search bar, and for the additional related keywords.

Try to aim for keywords with at least 5,000-10,000 searches per month.

But it depends on the niche as well, so as a general rule, stick to keywords with low competition and high search volume.

You can sort the table of related keywords that Keyword Planner shows you by clicking on ‘Avg. Monthly Searches’ or on ‘Competition.

Here we sort it by Avg. Monthly Searches to view keywords with the highest search volume first:

This tool can help you not only to find new video ideas but also to validate your keywords by knowing if they are worth pursuing or not. This data comes from Google, not from YouTube. But many views on YouTube videos come from Google searches, and YouTube is owned by Google anyways.

Extra SEO tools

By now, you surely recognize this post’s main point: to find content ideas and proven topics (those that can get you the views required to exponentially grow your channel) it’s necessary to research first.

Basically, keyword research helps you to make videos that people will be searching for, without guessing involved.

There are many, many keyword research tools out there.

Some are completely free, like Keyword Tool.

And others have a limited free version, like Ubersuggest, SEMRush, and KWFinder.

AhRefs is an excellent option too and extremely well-known in the SEO world, but not even the trial it’s free.

All of these keyword research tools are similar to the options we discussed above.

You can input search terms relevant to your niche and the tools will tell you which keywords are performing better based on search volume and competition.

Another very useful feature of these tools is to analyze URLs from popular websites in your niche.

You can see the most visited pages or blog posts of those websites, giving you (hopefully) new video ideas and topics you can cover on your YouTube channel.

If you want to learn specific SEO techniques for YouTube, check out our blog post on YouTube SEO.

Conclusion

Now that you are loaded with several methods to find keywords and content ideas, you can begin to make videos non-stop for your YouTube channel.

Make sure to organize all of those ideas in a document to refer to later, so you don’t have to research every time you want to make a video.

And before writing down your ideas, analyze them. Look at the keywords with higher search volume and low competition and take notes. You can use them in your title, description, and tags to improve your ranking.