This Piano Teacher Made $1,000,000 From YouTube, Here’s His Top Tips!

Zach Evans isn’t your ordinary piano teacher. He took his passion for teaching piano online. And it’s paid off handsomely.

In a few short years, he went from broke piano teacher to YouTube sensation, amassing over 100,000 subscribers.

His piano course, Become a Piano Superhuman, has taught over 200,000 students how to play the piano from the comfort of their own home. And in the process, he’s earned a cool million dollars.

Recently, he sat down with me and gave me his top tips for YouTube Success.

Step 1: Choosing a Great Title
Zach doesn’t just choose a title. He writes a minimum of 10 titles and chooses the best.

“It’s not about thinking of one great title. It’s about creating a whole ton of them and then choosing the best one. My best ideas don’t usually come until I get the first 5 or 6 titles out of the way.”

To help him brainstorm, Zach uses a few different online title generators. He also browses sites like Buzzfeed and Mashable to get his creative juices flowing.

“You never want to copy someone else’s title. But sometimes you see a word or two in there, and you’re like ‘oh, I could apply this to piano’, and you go from there.”

Once Zach has a title, he moves onto crafting the perfect thumbnail.

Step 2: Creating a Great Thumbnail
Many people spend hours, days, even weeks crafting the perfect video. Then they just choose one of the auto-generated thumbnails.

“I think lack of attention to the thumbnail is the single biggest mistake people make on YouTube. The thumbnail becomes an afterthought, instead of a priority. Nobody’s going to see your video if they don’t click the thumbnail!”

Zach spends anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, creating a great thumbnail. First, he’ll draw inspiration from other YouTube videos, usually outside his niche. Next, he screenshots the best part of the video to use as the background.

“I’ve found having my face in the thumbnail is a huge plus. Especially if I’m making a face with strong emotion, whether it’s happiness, frustration, anger, or surprise. I think as human beings we’re drawn to emotion, and we’re drawn to faces.”

Finally, he ads text and graphics to the thumbnail to make it pop. For text, he advocates using a small number of words in big, bold font to grab attention. People aren’t going to be able to read a lot of small fonts anyway.

Often times, the first draft isn’t the one that ends up being uploaded. Sometimes the second, third, or fourth try is the charm. But it’s well worth it to have a very clickable thumbnail.

Step 3: Optimizing for Video Retention
Video retention is the most significant factor in how YouTube ranks your video.

In other words, if someone clicks your video and watches the entire thing, YouTube deems this as a “good video” and ranks it higher. On the other hand, if someone clicks off your video after 10 seconds, YouTube deems it as a “bad video” and ranks it lower.

“As I’m recording, I’m constantly aware of parts of the video that get too boring, or not relevant. I’m paranoid about when people are going to click off to something else.”

The structure is essential here. If you go off on too many tangents, your audience isn’t going to find it relevant and is going to look for a quicker solution. Entertainment value is also good. Injecting your video with humour from time to time gives viewers a quick payoff, and they’ll continue to watch.

But at the end of the day, delivery is still the biggest key for Zach.

“There are some people, where, no matter what they say, you’re just going to listen. They just captivate you with how they talk. I do my best to emulate that. I have a very high-energy style. I get genuinely excited about this stuff, and I don’t hold it back. And I think that enthusiasm is contagious.”

Delivery is hard to teach. Everyone has a unique personality, and a unique conversational style. And while Zach doesn’t advocate everyone to copy his style, he thinks it’s essential to find a captivating voice that works for each individual person.

And there’s one more big benefit to creating strong YouTube videos.
“Once I have a good video, I can repurpose it to a TON of different platforms – podcast episodes, blog posts, social media, ads – so one great piece of content is worth its weight in gold.”

At the end of the day, whatever media platform you’re optimizing for, content is still king.