How to Plan Winning YouTube Videos (Step-by-Step)

0:00We publish five long form videos a week across two different channels and have multiple creators all creating their own content. And the question our team gets asked super often by our clients and other creators is, "How do you guys plan your videos? How do you stay organized with all of the different concepts and

0:16creators juggling different ideas?" Well, in this video I'm going to give you a behind-the-scenes look of the exact planning process that we use on every single video we create here at Think Media. So, the software we use to plan our videos is something called Milanote. They're not a sponsor of this video or even a sponsor of the channel. We just love using the software. So, if you want to try it out for yourself, we'll link it down in the description below. So, this is what a Milanote board looks like and there's actually a template right here that we use every time we start a video. And I'm just

0:42going to walk you through the entire process of creating a Milanote for a new video about how to live stream on YouTube. So, if you already have a broad concept for the idea of your video, the first step that we always leverage is looking at our competition and doing a basic competitor analysis of the videos that are already live on YouTube that are competing with the idea that we actually have. Now, this is as easy as really just going over to YouTube and typing in the search bar a very similar title or search result that would pop up your concept that you're going to create. So, how to live stream on

1:16YouTube is a really basic and obvious search result for the kind of video we're creating today. So, right away you definitely want to pay attention to what some of the top search results bring up, like this video right here, How to live stream on YouTube with OBS, 400,000 views over 2 years ago, but it's still getting 50 views per hour. And how I'm seeing this little statistics right here is from a software called vidIQ. This is a plugin that you can add to your YouTube account to give you more robust analytics and ideas even about what kind of content you can make for your channel. They've been a long time

1:48partner of this channel and you can actually get started for as cheap as $1, which is kind of wild. So, if you want to try it out and get extra analytics and ideas for your content, we'll link it down in the description below. But, as I scan some of these search results, I can see there's videos doing 400,000 views, over a million views, 78,000 views with 18 views per hour. So, people are searching for how to live stream on YouTube. There's a verifiable demand here. Now, of course, you can also watch your competition and see what they're doing well and get some inspiration of how you could actually create your own

2:18video. But, additionally, what I love doing is actually going into the comment section and seeing what are the most common pain points or frequent comments that people are asking for additional clarifications or stuff that they wish the creator would have covered. You can learn a lot by analyzing the comment section of your competition, which is always a good thing to do. And rather than me having to search for this same result every single time to find these videos, what I like to do is actually bookmark them inside of my Melonote. So, we can take Justin Brown's video right here, click the three dots on the right,

2:48and hit share, and then we're going to copy the link, and then we're going to bring that back into the competition section of our Melonote. I will drag a link right into my Melonote, and then just paste that video, and then click off the screen. And now we've started a column of our competitor analysis if we

3:06want to reference these videos later. So, I'll go into YouTube and do this for a few more videos so I can build out my competitor analysis. Now, if we move over to our next column, we can see a column that says notes, ideas, and outlines, and this sounds exactly like it is titled. This is where we're going to curate some of our ideas, our concepts, our calls to action, maybe there's gear or specific affiliate links

3:28that we want to mention in the video. We're going to start curating all of that information in this column so that it's not scattered in a bunch of different places. Now, for our main CTA, this stands for a call to action, something that we are going to ask the viewer to do, a next step after they watch the video. But, the main call to action for this video is actually just a Riverside call to action because this video is going to be sponsored by Riverside. And we're going to show how to live-stream the best on YouTube with YouTube's native platform, but also with streaming software. And we love

3:58Riverside as our streaming software. So, Riverside will be the sponsor of this video, which is the main CTA. For the outline, of course, you could just start building a basic outline right here with this note. You can also drag in like a full document. If I wanted to drag in this right here, I could start typing inside of this document a full-on script. But, a lot of times our team actually uses Google Docs. So, I will actually put a link right below the outline, and I will paste a doc that I've already created for this video that features the entire script. So, now I have access to that doc. I can just

4:28click right into that and see my entire script for this video laid out, and even my calls to action. This next section right here is for gear that we might mention in any videos and affiliate links we want to include for the description of the video. So, we'll go in and create affiliate links in our Genius account or our Amazon account to paste those in. So, this is all organized in one place when it comes to time that YouTube description. And the same goes for brand deal information. If we have a brand deal that we're delivering on, like we do for this video, we'll go ahead and put the

4:58required video length, any mentions, the brief if there's one available, and all of these different assets and pieces that we need to know for our creators who are taking care of this brand deliverable. So, that's what this whole column is for, some of those logistics and details that, honestly, as a creator, aren't the most fun part of the planning process, but of course, it's really important and valuable to know that information and not have it scattered in emails and notes and documents. It can all just be in one location inside of your Milanote, where all of the rest of your project planning is located. Now, this next column that

5:28you see right here is titled title crew, and you might not know what that means, but that's just some internal Think Media team language that we use for this process where our crew or our team members get together, and we all brainstorm 30 to 50 different title ideas for for specific piece of content that we're making. So, I'll do is grab this little comment feature inside of Milanote. We'll drag that underneath the title crew column. And now what we are

5:54able to do is brainstorm title ideas. So, how to live stream on YouTube in 2026. That will be the first title idea. I like the exclamation point. That looks kind of nice. And what we'll do is I will go in and put ideas, and then Kyle, our content director, will also do that. And then Nate, our other content creator, will do it. And sometimes Sean, or our thumbnail designer Takashi, their own ideas as well. And the key here for this title crew process is we never stop at the first idea. A lot of creators we see, they have an idea for a video and a title, and they just run with the first

6:27title. And oftentimes it's like the 30th title that we have in a title crew session that ends up being the title that we like the most and actually performs the best during our AB testing. So, never stop at the first title idea. Always brainstorm multiple titles if you can, and bounce those ideas off of other people. If you have people you work with, or at the very least you could chat GBT or Claude to get some feedback on your titles. Now, the next step in our planning process is what we call thumbnail inspiration. And what we do is we go on the YouTube platform and find

6:56either related videos or even videos that are completely unrelated to the type of video we're making, but are a really cool thumbnail concept that we think we could implement a variation of for our own video. So, this honestly is pretty simple. You just scroll through YouTube and look for thumbnails that catch your eye, and also ones that are proven to have views. I think it's important not to just screenshot videos

7:16that only have like a thousand views. That didn't get very many views, but like this one right here, again from Pimp My Video, did 200 plus thousand views. So, this shows you that the thumbnail at the very least is getting people to click on and interested in that video. This thumbnail here from Sun Pies a little bit different, too. I like the different sort of framing, and the background just looks a little bit different. So, we'll screenshot that one as well. So, by the end of this process, you see we have a bunch of different thumbnails we can reference for ideas when it comes time to [music] actually

7:42create our distinct concepts. Some of them are actually stuff we've done before on the channel that we can repurpose in different ways. And then of course, we have other ideas from other creators that we think might actually do well. So then comes time to actually lock in our thumbnail ideas for our designer Takashi to create those thumbnail concepts. And what we do is always test three different thumbnail concepts at least to see which one gets the most clicks. One of the most important metrics on YouTube is your click-through rate, which means anybody who comes across your video who has the opportunity to click, how many actually

8:13decide, "Yes, I want to click on that video." You want that percentage to be as high as possible and having a quality thumbnail with different thumbnail options as well can ensure you that you're actually choosing the best package for your videos, which is why we always test at least three options. So what I just did is mapped out three different sorts of concepts that I enjoy. I like this shot right here that we used in the past of me going live on YouTube. We had a smartphone here and a microphone, me on a laptop screen with a big live logo. I think we can do something similar for this concept, but

8:43put a camera instead of the smartphone and then have the live on the screen as well. So just a different variation is what I'm telling Takashi to do here for the first concept. For our second concept, I'm just giving him a clean screenshot of the video and then I want him to kind of turn that into a thumbnail design. Maybe put a YouTube logo on there and throw me on the laptop screen. Could be a second variation. And then the third, I screenshotted this Senpai Gaming. I kind of liked how he's large over on the left side of the frame. And then I used Chat GPT to

9:12render this sort of visual of how it could look on the right side of the frame, how to live stream really big with a YouTube logo. And then he could maybe put my face from this video or this little screenshot over here. He could cut it out and put it over on the left side. So this is kind of just providing some creative direction for our thumbnail designer, so he sort of understands the vision that I have for this specific video. But all of our creators do this for our thumbnail designer, so he's not always just starting from scratch. So, when Takashi is finished with his thumbnail concepts,

9:40we drag them into Milanote. So, these are all of his ideas that he had right here. I will drag them in under Tox's thumbnails. These are Takashi's final thumbnail results that he had, and then we will choose our top three to run as our first AB test inside of YouTube. So, I think my favorite thumbnails out of all of these here would be this top one right here. I like that it's just a nice full screenshot of myself with the word live. I like the background, it looks good. Then, I think my second would be this one. I like the how to live stream, the big font over on the left side. It's

10:10creative, it also has like the chat window with the live feed, which I think is kind of cool. And then for the third one, I probably would actually choose this one because it's the most different from the first two. And what's really important about when you're doing AB testing for your videos is to try to vary your thumbnails, and if you're also doing title testing, vary those as much as possible because the more different they are, the more confidence that you're going to have that you actually chose the best package for your specific video. Like if I were to just choose this thumbnail right over here and then

10:41this one right here, they're so similar that they're probably going to perform almost exactly the same. And we often see creators do this where they will have three thumbnails that are just like they change one word maybe in the thumbnail, and then your percentages are like 31%, 32%, 33% average watch time between all three of those thumbnails. And ideally, we want one that really outperforms and does like 48% of the total watch time because that is the strongest package by far, and then you can send that to a second round of AB

11:10testing, which would be our next phase. So, ironically, after we ran the AB test for this video, they actually all performed really similarly. So, this is often what you'll see if packages aren't different enough, they'll be really similar. So, what we decided to do after the first round, so this is round one, this one technically did the best 33.8%, but it was very marginal. So, what we decided to do is actually try an AB test for the title as well. So, then we ran a second round of title testing that we did right here, which this was the results of those tests. How to live stream on YouTube in 2026 did the least

11:40amount of watch time with 29%. The second place was how to live stream on YouTube in 2026 complete guide, and then the third was how to go live on YouTube in 2026 step-by-step. That was 39%, so that's what we chose to be the final title for this video. And oftentimes we'll actually do two to three rounds of AB testing for different title and thumbnail variations we can really just

12:01find the best package for our videos. So, if we just zoom out a little bit and take a look at our Milanote, we can see how much we did here for this specific video. It started just as a blank template, but now it has all of these different ideas and outlines and thumbnail concepts and even potential titles if we wanted to do like a different video or a spin-off down the

12:21road if this video performs really well. We even have other titles that we could explore or different thumbnail concepts that we could use down the line. So, as you can see there's a lot of work that goes into planning videos here at Think Media, but we find that this is a great and repeatable process that all of our

12:34creators can do here at Think Media. Now, if you want to see my favorite tips and strategies for growing a successful YouTube channel this year, you can click or tap the screen right here to watch that video, and I'll see you in the next one.