How to Write a YouTube Script

Creating videos for YouTube is something many businesses have approached. Especially after hearing statistics surrounding video marketing. And the importance of having a video presence online. To get views to your content, you need videos and YouTube represents one of the most prominent search engines for video content accounting for billions of views. Knowing how to write a YouTube script that is engaging and interesting for your audience is incredibly important. Fortunately, a killer short video script for YouTube is not too difficult to write. 

At Beverly Boy Productions, we specialize in YouTube video production and offer a variety of services to assist business owners in the creation of short marketing videos and engaging video content. 

Define Target Topic & Market

Before you write a YouTube video script you need to define your topic and the target market for your video. Knowing who you will write a script for is important as it will delineate key details regarding the problems, challenges, and aspirations that should be reflected in your content.

As you determine what your topic will be and how it will relate with your audience, consider brainstorming a variety of potential topics for your video. You can use this list for future videos, too.

Make sure you’ve got a strong topic. Validate your topic by coming up with several ideas that will support your topic. Add these ideas to your list and do some research to be sure that what you’re considering is important to your audience.

Check Google Trends and other search engine tools to determine whether there is keyword presence for your topic. If nobody is searching for the topic, you might want to change course and choose something else to cover.

Begin Drafting Your Script

Learning how to write a YouTube script is really all about establishing your topic, unpacking the ideas that you’ll include in the video, and drafting your script.

Consider the following as you write your script:

• The hook – this is what you’ll use to grab the attention of your audience in the first 15 seconds.
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• The intro – this is the opening context of your video, introduction of your topic and the driving force behind your content.
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• The body – this will be the longest part of your video and will include points that will support your topic. Three to five points will do.
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• The Call to Action – this will likely be included towards the end of your script and should directly tell your audience what you want them to do.

As you write your script, make sure that you have a conversational tone, strong paragraphs, and a logical flow. Every word counts!

How Long Should YouTube Scripts Be?

One of the key elements of learning how to write a YouTube script is to figure out how long your script should be. As a rule of thumb, each page of a script represents about 1 minute of finished video.

So, if you want a YouTube video to be 5 minutes long, you’ll have a script that is about five written pages in length. The optimal YouTube video, according to research, is between 6 and 12 minutes. Therefore, you should aim for a script that is between 6 and 12 pages long.