7X Your Views with Titles That Trigger Clicks! with Jake Thomas

You can find Jake Thomas at:
Twitter: https://x.com/jthomas__
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-thomas-creator-hooks/

#ContentCreationTips
#AudienceEngagement
#KrisWard

Jake Thomas Podcast Transcription

[00:00:00] Kris Ward: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Win The Hour Win The Day, and I am your host, Kris Ward. And today in the house, we have Jake Thomas. Now, Jake Thomas describes himself as a YouTube title nerd, but hold on.

[00:00:13] If you are not putting videos out on YouTube, that’s fine. This is going to have a big impact on a lot of things from video to other content. So let’s dive right into it. Welcome to the show. Jake.

[00:00:26] Jake Thomas: Kris, thanks for having me. I’m excited.

[00:00:28] Kris Ward: Okay. All right. So your big passion and focus, and I understand why, although I couldn’t imagine doing this all day, every day, is about the title of videos or, and that lends itself to other content, but it is about the title and the headlines.

[00:00:44] Jake Thomas: Yeah. So I’m really passionate about psychology. I love the psychology of what gets people’s attention and what makes them click. The way it manifests itself the most is with YouTube titles, but but I’ve, by nerding out on all this psychology, it’s helped me rank number one on Google for certain searches it’s helped me build a big Twitter audience or a decent size Twitter audience.

[00:01:07] Same with LinkedIn. It’s helped me. Grab attention there. So it’s really just the psychology of what gets, what actually makes people stop scrolling and read your stuff.

[00:01:16] Kris Ward: Okay. So what makes people stop scrolling and read our stuff?

[00:01:20] Jake Thomas: So if you boil it down to like just three things, it’s the three click worthy emotions, curiosity, fear, and desire.

[00:01:27] And those emotions drive, pretty much all interesting clicks or attention and clicks. So you, most good titles, most good headlines or good kind of one lighter openings have at least one, maybe two, sometimes three of those emotions. And we can talk, we can get like super as tactical as you want into all those three.

[00:01:48] But it would just, when you’re, an easy kind of, a rule of thumb or trick to play with is that like, all right, if you are writing your titles or writing your headlines or email subject lines, does this spark curiosity, fear, or desire?

[00:02:03] Kris Ward: Okay. I think for so many of us, they’re, I have a love hate relationship with that because I go through stages of this is so important and they see it in the scroll and this has got to stop the scroll and all that stuff.

[00:02:14] And then other times you have to produce the content or, even if you’re writing a post and they think, Oh, now I need a good title. Oh, whatever. Like you just, you’re fatigued by the time you get to it.

[00:02:24] Jake Thomas: I am going to say something that’s totally opposite.

[00:02:28] Kris Ward: I know you’re going to say, and I know. What am I going to say? You’re going to tell me I should have the title first.

[00:02:35] Jake Thomas: Exactly.

[00:02:36] Kris Ward: So then that’s like back to being in high school or whatever, where you think, Oh, let me make the title page, but make it look pretty. And I haven’t written the essay. Let’s do that part first. So I know we’re supposed to make the title first, but it seems so hard.

[00:02:49] So then I go, okay, let me do the content and then I’ll come back and do that. And it’s of course the diet I’m never on. Okay. Tell me again. I’m willing, relapse is part of recovery. I’m willing to listen. Tell us why we need to be doing that first.

[00:03:03] Jake Thomas: All right. Okay. First off, nobody wants to be clickbaity, right?

[00:03:06] Yeah. And let’s say you have this content, right? Then you’re like, Ooh, wow. I don’t really know what to say. Oh, this is a good title. And you throw just like some random, it might be really, it might be a really good title, but if you throw it on there, And there’s some sort of disconnect between the title and the content.

[00:03:21] If the content doesn’t deliver on the promise that you make in the title, then that’s clickbait. You’re not giving your audience what they came for. And if you start with, okay, what is my audience going to click on? All right. It’s boom. It’s this, here’s my title. Here’s my kind of idea.

[00:03:38] And then if you deliver on that. Promise that you make in your title, then that’s how you’re going to make content that people want to consume. And they’re excited to consume and they will stop and stop scrolling and watch right away. Because you’re leading with or you’re starting with, what is my, what does my audience want? Okay. Now, how can I deliver on that?

[00:03:58] Kris Ward: It does make sense when you say it. Like when I wrote my book I actually of course had the title first. Now I know some people do write books that don’t have the title first, but for me, the title of it framed the whole book.

[00:04:10] Jake Thomas: Exactly.

[00:04:11] Kris Ward: Yeah. All right. And if, if you’re not framing, your content, then it’s going to be hard.

[00:04:17] Jake Thomas: A lot of people will. They’ll come up with this, incredible content, but if nobody clicks on it and watches it and consumes it, then you just wasted a ton of time. Not to mention, you’re not going to get any benefits from that, from all that effort you put in and life is so much easier when you start with, okay, what does my audience want?

[00:04:37] What will make them click? Now, how do I deliver on that premise?

[00:04:42] Kris Ward: I hear you because you’re right. I think when you write the content or do the video and then you say, okay, fine, now I have to have a title. And then really what you’re trying to do is stuff a video into a title. This work, will that work?

[00:04:53] But it does. I, you do, I feel starting with the heart, I can, starting with the hardest part is a title. So why don’t you help us out there? How can we be producing and get as excited about subjects and titles or half as excited as you do?

[00:05:08] Jake Thomas: One is just understanding the importance, right? So I’ll give you two two quick examples. So I used to do some consulting for, it was a, is like a real estate investment company and we the content was pretty bad. All they did was, they the owner would go on a bunch of podcasts and they would just slice and dice all of his podcast appearances.

[00:05:30] And it was, it didn’t make for a good YouTube video, but they brought me in and I was trying to write the title after the fact. And it was very hard. However just by me, they used to get 500 views a video and then just by me writing a better title, they would get a thousand to 5, 000 views per video.

[00:05:47] Kris Ward: Wow. Okay.

[00:05:48] Jake Thomas: And so that was like, 10 X. And for real estate investment company, like if you are getting more traffic, that’s a ton of money. And then the same thing for another channel that I used to like a little experiment channel that I had, I made a very similar video to one of my competitors.

[00:06:03] I just had a different angle. I just, I had a new title and the video that I was basing mine off of had a million views and mine got 7 million views. So it was just just a kind of a better title and a better kind of angle and positioning. So that’s the power of just titles.

[00:06:20] Is that that you can, double to 7x your views just by 5 to 10 words, right? Just by changing the title. It’s not I’m not asking you to create a thumbnail or like a nice cover image or something that requires assets and Photoshop skills and Canvas skills and design skills. We’re just talking about five to 10 words.

[00:06:41] Kris Ward: Now, let me jump in for a sec, because I know titles, they are even more important in YouTube because that’s the title, that’s what you search and you see it and stuff. But this, as of course, translates to everything. I, Judd, oh, that’s his name, Judd Apatow, I think is the director.

[00:06:55] He’s done a bunch of movies that are all like 40 year old virgin and all that stuff, right? This is 40 and stuff. And I heard him on an interview once and he had so many hits. I don’t know his whole career, but I heard him on a podcast and he was talking about. This was hit. And then the five year engagement wasn’t, and I actually saw that movie.

[00:07:12] I liked it. And he believed to this day, he goes, if I just called it the engagement, he said, people were looking at that saying, oh, they’re going to sit through five years. So that was his one thing that flopped. And he felt it was totally because, he made people think they’re gonna have to endure this thing. So he blamed it solely on the title.

[00:07:32] Jake Thomas: Interesting. Yeah, I’ve heard a book called save the cat. Yeah, you read it. It’s a storytelling and like film book, but they like one of the first chapters is the log line. If the log line is just a one sentence description of the premise, and if you don’t have that, you don’t have a really.

[00:07:48] Your content is not going to be good. Your video is not going to be good. Your, your Hollywood movie is not going to be good because if somebody can’t just envision, okay, this is what this is about. This is what I’m going to get. Now I’m interested and excited about it. If you can’t simply and clearly explain that, then it’s really, it’s not a good idea.

[00:08:06] Kris Ward: Okay. So if we’re not a title genius like yourself. Where do we start with these titles?

[00:08:11] Jake Thomas: A couple. All right. So the easiest thing I’ll give you an example. I used to work for a fishing channel and I was the channel manager. I was pretty much all marketing over there. And one thing I was doing was managing our fishing channel and I did not have managing our YouTube channel and I had no idea how to write a YouTube title. I was so bad I almost got fired that was like the main part of my job was writing YouTube titles because my boss was really good and he knew how important they were but this is my first time into YouTube. I had no idea. And so at first I would just try to like, all right, what would make a good title?

[00:08:46] Let’s try this and it would be something lame or not very clear Or wait, like way too click baity or hyperbolic. Just, it was horrible. And then the thing that kind of switched for me was I would look at a channel that was like an adjacent channel that I liked and I would say, all right, how do they write their titles?

[00:09:03] Now let me write the exact same title, except for my niche. And for a long time, I just, I never. wrote titles by myself. I always found an example. If we were doing, let’s say we’re doing a fishing reel review. So I would look up, I would search on YouTube vacuum review or so it would be like, let’s say the best vacuum for for moms in 2024, and I’d be like, okay, why don’t we do the best vacuum or the best fishing reel for for new fishermen in 2024.

[00:09:37] And I would just blank, find the framework. Okay. Best blank for specific audience in current year.

[00:09:42] Kris Ward: And you’re looking at a video that did well, obviously.

[00:09:45] Jake Thomas: Yes. Yeah. Ideally. So like an easy way to do that.

[00:09:48] Kris Ward: Yeah.

[00:09:49] Jake Thomas: Especially if you’re trying to rank in search you can see what are the top three videos or what are the top three titles that are like, top one, two, and three in the search terms.

[00:09:59] Okay. Those are probably good titles. Because they are, and especially this works really well for competitive niches. That’s cause if you’re doing some super obscure niche They could be ranking number one, they could be getting tons of views, but that’s because there’s no competition

[00:10:13] it doesn’t really matter. So if you look up like makeup, technology, marketing, fitness, health, all those big niches, those are competitive. So you know that, all right, these are good titles because they are successful in a competitive niche.

[00:10:26] Kris Ward: So in there, you could be saying, okay, five biggest mistakes.

[00:10:30] Whatever, aging women and makeup 2025, right? And then so you could take that and say, okay, five biggest mistakes for entrepreneurs. in burnout 2025. And I think that point is really good because you don’t, that line between swiping an idea and stealing an idea, with the best of intentions, you see something like, Oh, that was so good.

[00:10:53] Maybe you can change that word. And then I’m not stealing it. You don’t want to steal And it gets murky, but if you go to a completely different industry, then you can totally just borrow it and fill in the blanks and there’s no analyzing it, critiquing where one begins and where the other ends.

[00:11:07] Jake Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s, yes, that is, I love. And then, so like one way is to search terms for similar things for what you’re doing. Maybe it’s 10 mistakes whatever type of video you’re making. Another thing that I like to do is I would, I just want to find three channels that I really like, or, three channels or, or con or creators, just somebody who I really like, I love their style.

[00:11:32] I love the way they they do, maybe that’s their titles. Okay. How can I write titles like them? And that kind of that narrows it down a lot, right? Just find your three favorites and just pretend like you work for them and let me just steal their style and yeah for mine And, that’ll hopefully make things easier for you.

[00:11:51] Kind of a secret is that works for everything. Yeah. Works for titles, works for thumbnails, intros, lighting offers description. Right now I am I’m working on the sales page for my software company and I found three sales pages that I really that are in kind of adjacent niches.

[00:12:09] And I’m like, okay, how do they do their testimonials? How do they write their headlines? What is the structure of that? So just modeling examples that you like is pretty much like the cheat code for everything.

[00:12:23] Kris Ward: That is such a good thing because we do get all caught up, I think, being human too.

[00:12:27] You go and you look at your competitors and then you, also you, yeah, you, then you don’t always know how well they’re doing it for starters. And then secondly, you either beat yourself up and thirdly, now you’re trying to go they did a really good job, but I don’t want to copy it. So it doesn’t have to be your industry at all.

[00:12:42] Just somebody successful in theirs. It just is an easier way to live and then you just go at it.

[00:12:48] Jake Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. That makes life a lot easier. I think,

[00:12:52] Kris Ward: I, part of me think I’ve, sometimes I say, I forgot I knew that cause I have seen that where I’ve seen some eye catching thing about whenever a celebrity or especially in the new year, there’ll be like the five biggest mistakes that will kill your diet.

[00:13:07] So you could be. Yeah. The five biggest mistakes that would kill your efficiency, entrepreneurs need to know, right? So I see stuff and I grab it, but I never thought, even though we’re all about strategies and processes, I never thought of, okay, just have these places that I visit regularly and emulate those.

[00:13:25] Jake Thomas: Yeah, that puts guardrails and make things a little bit easier when you yeah, these are my only three that I’m going to write and eventually you will if you do it often you’ll learn your own style like, you don’t have to be modeling very closely titles every single piece of content.

[00:13:42] But for your first hundred, yes and then you’ll eventually get your own voice. You’ll understand what works and what doesn’t. And then you’ll have a little bit more, more freedom and more fun with it. But if you don’t know where to start, then that’s the easiest way to do it.

[00:13:54] Kris Ward: Yeah. It beats looking at the ceiling and squinting.

[00:13:57] Jake Thomas: Yes.

[00:13:58] Kris Ward: Yeah.

[00:13:58] Jake Thomas: 100%.

[00:14:00] Kris Ward: Okay. That’s awesome. All right. So we’ve got that down pat. What do we need to do next?

[00:14:06] Jake Thomas: So probably, yeah. All right. So let’s say that you have these. Okay, you’re modeling titles like, Oh, sweet. I’m going to do, I’m going to try this. There are a couple of mistakes that people often make that and you have something to consider is that sometimes, specifically we’re talking about YouTube videos.

[00:14:26] Sometimes videos do well, despite not having a good title, right? If you model successful channels, you decrease that risk. Okay. But but if you know what the common mistakes are, you can further decrease that risk and take that to another level. So a couple of mistakes are talking about the wrong topic.

[00:14:44] Specifically for, really for any type of content, people, they follow you because for a specific reason, and if you don’t deliver on that reason, then they’re not going to consume your content. And it depends, I, we can.

[00:14:59] Kris Ward: Give me an example where I feel like, I feel like dancing on subject.

[00:15:02] Like you try not to break up with me, but you’re going to get to it.

[00:15:05] Jake Thomas: Okay. So I’m dancing around the subject cause there’s some nuance. So it depends on why somebody watches your channel. So if somebody watches for you, if somebody consumes your content because they like you, your story. Your your style, they pretty much just like everything you’re into.

[00:15:20] Then you have so much more freedom, right? But if they are following you because of the topics, because of what you do for them or, the benefits that they will get, then it’s very more topic driven. It’s a lot of people will be like, oh, mr. Beast or this person on YouTube can do this.

[00:15:35] It’s that’s because people love that creator. But for most educational channels, people love the topic that creator talks about.

[00:15:44] Kris Ward: Okay.

[00:15:45] Jake Thomas: Therefore.

[00:15:46] Kris Ward: That’s true. There’s different, like if I’ve got a new iPhone, I’ll just search and then first one comes up. I’m following the content. I’m not loyal to the person reviewing iPhones.

[00:15:55] I’m just like, okay, I got a new phone. I got to go in.

[00:15:57] Jake Thomas: Yes. But if they are and entertainment channel, then you’d be like, Oh, I like this, probably not going to be ranking on search, a different beast. But but there are some people where you don’t care what they talk about.

[00:16:07] You just want to hear them talk. So anyway so yeah so talk, knowing why your audience watches or consumes your content is a, will help you make, have less failure, less, failure pieces of content.

[00:16:19] Kris Ward: And so how do we know? I guess we’re just trying with different videos.

[00:16:22] Jake Thomas: Trying with different videos the hard answer is talking to them getting on the phone, talking with your best customers, identifying who your best customers are, talking to them getting to, getting to know them second kind of below that is is reading comments and then below that is like looking at trends on your content.

[00:16:37] What does well oh, like this, these types of ideas, these work well and these types of ideas. Don’t work well. So yeah, so it’s experience, largely experience.

[00:16:47] Kris Ward: Okay.

[00:16:49] Jake Thomas: So yeah, it’s the wrong time.

[00:16:49] Kris Ward: And in order to do that, we need to make videos. We need to title them. So we can’t just put out a video and say that didn’t work and they don’t like it.

[00:16:55] And so I’ll just go back to wherever. So just keep, we just have to keep producing in order to get some experience in there for education.

[00:17:05] Jake Thomas: Yeah. My, the thing that I, that has helped me the most is by teach or treating content, like an experiment, like a research project, so it makes it fun for me where.

[00:17:16] Okay, this video doesn’t do well. It didn’t, I didn’t fail, but I learned something really interesting. It’s Oh, my theory was that my hypothesis was that this idea, this type of content would work well. It did not. All right, let’s revise hypothesis. Let’s have a new one and let’s try it again. And

[00:17:32] Kris Ward: that’s a positive way of looking at it.

[00:17:33] Now, I do try to be positive, but that Dyson guy where he tells you, I don’t know, I think it’s 5, 000 times he failed in that vacuum. I would have been in the garage wrapped around the vacuum cleaner, weeping openly and be like, I just gave up whatever, how many years it took to do 5, 000 tries. That does take some stamina.

[00:17:50] Cause especially when you know, that’s not what we do. We all have businesses and we’re running around trying to, a lot of my clients just trying to keep up and get past the next thing and they just think they need more time, but they need streamline processes. Don’t get me started. All this other stuff in a VA, right?

[00:18:05] Fine. In that hot mess, now we’re trying to do videos and then you throw it out there and it doesn’t work and you think, ah, I can’t do this. Bak. Okay, I’ll come back later and do that. So it’s really important to understand that is something it, you just can’t get around video anymore. You have to put it out there and if we’re gonna have to do it, then we might as well do it.

[00:18:26] And of course correct and adjust and put as much into that as everything else we do.

[00:18:31] Jake Thomas: I will say I am a big fan of one channel, one audience, one offer. So yeah, it’s a lot it’s a lot of effort to do well on YouTube, right? You don’t just, Oh yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to hire out a VA and they’re going to, and they’re going to do, it’s a lot of effort.

[00:18:49] It’s a ton of reward. It’s evergreen content. Your stuff lives forever on YouTube and you can, get views while you’re sleeping and it’s not like Twitter, Instagram, where like a post will be dead in a couple of days. You might be getting views on a video for three, four, five years.

[00:19:04] So it’s the, and the possibilities of the law, big numbers is very real on YouTube. So it’s a high effort, high reward platform. But, but, so I’m a big fan of choosing one or, very narrow and just nailing it. And if it’s not YouTube, that’s totally fine.

[00:19:22] Yeah. You couldn’t. Most people could have all the success in business that they wanted if they just really nailed one platform.

[00:19:30] Kris Ward: Yeah

[00:19:31] Jake Thomas: And also it’s a little bit less stressful a little bit more fun Yeah, because you are you know, you’re really good at one thing and that’s what people know you for

[00:19:39] Kris Ward: and bringing it back again I want to say this again and again that whole psychology of a good title or a good headline translates everything, movies, books, contents, blogs, whatever. So you do happen to focus on YouTube but that is not, exclusive to that.

[00:19:54] Jake Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. A hundred percent. So yeah, I think it’s much better to be really good at one channel as opposed to being mediocre at five.

[00:20:01] Kris Ward: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t think most people. I think I would assume that many people agree, but I see so many people trying to do everything.

[00:20:12] Yeah. I know it’s not good for me, but let me try to do it. Okay. One thing you say too, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. How to leverage negativity without feeling icky. Cause that’s my big thing is I don’t want, I’m just, I’m all about just being positive. Let’s move forward. It’s just not something that it does.

[00:20:26] It feels icky. It’s right. So how are we to be focusing on that without just sounding like you’re in the mud wrestling.

[00:20:37] Jake Thomas: Yeah. So negativity is so powerful. There’s a reason that the news is full of negativity, right? There’s a reason for that. We’re biologically wired to listen to negativity.

[00:20:48] If, if we’re in the caveman days, if I’m like, you and I are in a cave and I’m like, Hey, Kris, there’s some berries outside, go pick them. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But if I’m like, Hey, Kris, there’s a saber tooth tiger outside. Don’t go outside. You’re 100 percent going to listen to me because if you don’t, you’re going to die.

[00:21:04] So we are literally biologically wired to listen to negativity. So when you’re not, doing negativity, it’s just, it’s a little harder. It’s certainly possible. That’s where desire and curiosity come in. But that’s why negativity works so well. And my kind of just a simple way that. I think about it is to tell your own story.

[00:21:24] First, all right. The 10 biggest regrets you, you will regret doing this in your business. I regret doing this in my business. It just feels a little bit less icky when you say I versus you the 10 biggest mistakes you will make in 2025 or, the 10 biggest mistakes I made in my business as a beginner.

[00:21:41] It just. It just feels a little bit less aggressive, a little bit less icky. And you’re still leveraging that incredibly powerful emotion of negativity, but you’re you’re less aggressive and pushy and fear mongering. You’re just telling your own story.

[00:21:55] Kris Ward: That’s interesting because I, that’s fair and I guess it’s negative, but I don’t see that as negative as where I thought you would take us.

[00:22:02] Like how do we be over here? And I didn’t want to bash other people or get click bait or all that other stuff. So that’s a good reframe. I could like, yeah, the 10 biggest mistakes I made in my business, really, I don’t actually see that as negative because I’m like, Oh, if I can help you boil boy, I suffered through some of these unnecessarily long.

[00:22:20] That’s a really good example of reframing negativity in my eyes.

[00:22:25] Jake Thomas: Yeah. And nobody wants to make mistakes. There’s a ton of, loss aversion there. Yeah. And many people know about loss aversion. It’s just a very powerful psychological trigger. And telling your own story is a kind of a simpler way to harness that.

[00:22:38] Kris Ward: Okay. I’ve done that. I’ve done like the three biggest mistakes in hiring a virtual assistant, that kind of stuff. Okay. Fantastic. All right. I’m assuming we can find you on YouTube. Where can people find more of your brilliance, Jake?

[00:22:49] Jake Thomas: So it’s, I am a writer. I am so I’m on Twitter and I have a newsletter.

[00:22:54] I been a behind the scenes guy for for YouTube, but yeah on Twitter or X just Jake Thomas, also on LinkedIn just search Jake Thomas. Twitter or LinkedIn or Twitter. You’ll see a guy with a beard and a very handsome golden retriever. That’ll be me. And yeah, follow along there.

[00:23:11] Kris Ward: Okay. We will make sure to put all that in the show notes and everyone, please hand this, send this show to a business buddy. My gosh, there’s some valuable content here and some of it I forgot I knew and others like just a brand new refreshing look at it. So share that with everybody needs to know this stuff.

[00:23:26] And we will see you in the next episode. again, Jake.

[00:23:30] Jake Thomas: Thank you, Kris.