G’day warriors, 🤝⚔️

A question I get A LOT is what tools I use to do my work and make videos that do serious numbers for my clients.

And to be honest, quite a bit has changed in the past few months in what tools I use and which I don’t.

So, in today’s issue, I will share my favorite tools, which I use at least once a week and which help me gain hundreds of thousands of views.

DISCLAIMER: I have an affiliate link for these tools. If you sign up through my link, I will receive a cut. Please note that I do not promote anything I don’t use myself, and I stand by the tools I promote 100%.

1of10.com

1of10 is a tool that honestly has become a daily tool for me. It helps me find outlier patterns and trends and, more importantly, helps me validate video ideas on a consistent basis.

Besides that, I use it daily for at least 15 minutes to keep myself refreshed on titles and thumbnails that have worked in the past. Because keep in mind: success on YouTube means doing what already worked before!

Pros

✅Helps find trends/outliers easily in a quick-to-navigate UI

✅They have a solid Chrome extension (also good for testing thumbnails)

✅The filter system is robust and helps zoom in on what you want to find and in what timeframe

Cons

❌ It doesn't have all YouTube videos indexed on their platform

❌ Sometimes the keyword searches go off the rails, and you’ll find more and more unrelated videos

Thumbnailtest.com

Thumbnailtest is a SaaS for creators who are a bit more advanced in experience, in my opinion. The more significant creators I work with tend to test different thumbnail concepts for the same video. Doing this consistently will help you understand what makes your audience tick and what concepts are safer bets in the future.

Sometimes we even go as far as building a database of winning words that we can reuse based on the performance of different wording in the same thumbnail concept.

Anyways, if you are a creator that wants to always optimize for views, thumbnailtest is pretty unrivaled, even by the core feature of A/B testing that YouTube is rolling out themselves right now simply because there is more data to look at.

Pros

✅ Feeds you a lot of data to look at after testing

✅ Different cycling methods available (smaller channels should do 24-hour changes, not hourly, for example)

✅ Easy to understand after the first use

Cons

❌ Their main metric isn’t something I agree with fully (AVD*CTR). Always keep an eye on AVD and impressions. Sometimes, 1000 impressions of new viewers can skew their main metric by quite a bit

❌ They recently got acquired by another company, and subscriptions got more expensive

Subscribr.ai

If scriptwriting is a bottleneck in your creative process, you might want to keep a close eye on Subscribr.

I’ve recently used it for a new sandbox channel I am personally starting (more on that in due time), and it has cut my scriptwriting time by at least half. Subscribr uses AI to create scripts based on channel tone of voice. You could, for example, use a channel whose tone of voice you want to replicate and feed it all the data it needs to spit out a good first version of a script for your video.

I talked to the founder quite a bit, and I know he’s working on some cool stuff in the background that will help anyone who wants to write more scripts in less time.

Pros

✅ Cuts scriptwriting time/costs in half if used properly

✅ Easy to understand step-by-step process

✅ Huge potential if developments keeps ramping up

Cons

❌ Won’t create 100% great scripts just yet; still needs touching up and finishing

❌ Can go off the rails sometimes in terms of tone of voice, and needs guidance/redoing sometimes

And that’s it! These are the only tools I use consistently to make my life easier and come up with more 1/10 ideas.

You might wonder why I don’t use something like VidIQ, and I can give you a simple explanation:

It doesn’t really work.

I respect the people who work on this tool daily and try to make it better, but besides extreme beginners, no one should use VidIQ, in my opinion. It doesn’t help you get better at the fundamentals of success on YouTube:

• Ideation skills

• Scriptwriting skills

• Packaging skills

If you master the above three things, you will never need a tool like VidIQ.

It’s easy for me to become an affiliate for them and shill it, but like I said, I only promote products I truly use and think are beneficial for most creators.

The same goes for a tool like Nexlev, although I do think that it is an excellent tool.

This is especially true if you are looking to set up multiple channels in profitable niches and become a YouTube faceless tycoon (very hard; please don’t try this as a beginner). I just don’t use Nexlev weekly, so I can’t promote it to my readers and followers without sounding like a sales pitch.

I hope this was valuable, and I can’t wait to hear some of your reviews on the tools I use weekly.

One more thing from my end:

In the coming 10 minutes after you are done reading this, I want you to do this:

Brainstorm 3 video concepts for your channel, and validate if they are a good idea or not before you go do anything else again.

IDEATE AND CONQUER, ⚔️🤝

Leroy