How to Get More Clicks on Your Next Video Without Copying Anyone

Hey,

When you're stuck on creating a thumbnail, there's a move almost everyone makes.

You open an outlier tool, find a video in your niche that did five times that channel's usual views, and make something that looks a lot like it.

Sometimes it works once. Then everyone else in your niche finds the same outlier, and a month later the feed is full of the same thumbnail and none of them stand out anymore.

I see this all the time with the coaches, consultants and experts I speak to on my free 15-minute calls. They're doing the research, and doing it properly, and still one video takes off and the next does a tenth of it, and they can't tell why.

Here's the thing. An outlier shows you that something worked, but it can't show you why, and the why is the only part you can take back to your own channel.

1. Why copying the design stops working

When I was Head of YouTube for Ali Abdaal, a big part of my week was studying the channels around us and working out why one video took off while the next one didn't.

What I kept finding is that the click happens in the viewer's head before it happens on the thumbnail.

A thumbnail earns the click because it promises something the viewer really wants, or holds back something they need to know, or lets them feel like the kind of person who clicks it. The face, the colours and the text are there to make that obvious in a split second.

So when you copy the design, you copy the part that only worked for that one video. When you copy the reason, you can use it on a video about anything, in any niche.

That's why one title idea we found on GrowVeg has now worked eleven times, for 7.5 million views between them. GrowVeg is a gardening channel I've worked with for four years, and it grew from about 400,000 subscribers to over a million in that time. You can read the full story behind that idea here, including how it gave a channel in a completely different niche its biggest video ever.

2. What I've been building

Since 2022 I've been collecting thumbnails that massively outperformed their channel and writing down why each one worked.

There are now over 4,700 of them, and every single one comes with a note on why it earned the click.

It's called the Thumbnail Vault, and it's free.

Outlier tools give you data, but The Vault teaches you to think like a YouTube strategist.

The idea is simple. You see why each thumbnail earned the click, then you use the reason, not the design, on your next video.

It's open now.

Browse the Thumbnail Vault here.

3. Try this on your next video

You can start thinking this way before you even open the Vault.

Next time you open an outlier for inspiration, read the title and look at the thumbnail, then write down answers to these before you think about the design.

1. What does the viewer get if they click?
2. What's being held back that they'll only find out by watching?
3. Who does the viewer get to be by clicking?

Then take one of those answers, not the layout, into the title and thumbnail for your next video.

That's the thinking the Vault has already done for every thumbnail in it, so you're not starting from scratch each time.

Jamie