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How to Add Chapters to YouTube Videos Using Timestamps
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Jun 3, 2024
Learn how to enhance viewer engagement with YouTube video chapters! This tutorial guides you through the process of adding timestamps to your video description, allowing viewers to navigate through different sections easily. Discover how to create timestamps, improve video accessibility, and boost viewer retention. Perfect for content creators looking to organize their videos and provide a better viewing experience on YouTube!
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0:00
Today I'll show you how to create YouTube chapters using timestamps
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So timestamps are something that have existed on YouTube for quite some time. So if you put the time, a specific time in your video in the description or in a comment
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you can basically click on that number and then it takes you to that point in the video. So here's essentially how this works
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If you look at our video on how to build an email list with YouTube, you can scroll down here
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And you see down below I added 048. If I click on this, you're going to see it takes me exactly to that point in the video
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That's great if you put something down. there someone can skip around the thing is not everyone is going to actually
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open up the description find that click on it and go to the point that they're
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looking for so YouTube and Google are obviously trying to give the best possible experience for the viewer and so this video is five minutes long we
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have videos that are over a half hour and if someone just starts watching it they don't know what's at minute 20 or minute 25 or whatever it is and so by splitting
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up the videos in smaller parts people can see if what they're looking for within a
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specific videos there or not so YouTube and Google are going to try to figure this out on their own
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It's much better if you tell them what's actually in your video. Let me show you why. So you can see here, I search for a Squarespace tutorial
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There's an ad from Squarespace. There's this tutorial video. And then you can see down below is one of my videos
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Right here, you see these 10 key moments. And what I can tell you here for this video
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as well as for my video, that neither of us created these key moments
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YouTube and Google with their AI algorithm whatever technology they have are trying to understand the video and creating the key moments So if we look at the key moments for this Squarespace tutorial video for example
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it says that the site header is at 454, and then there's basically
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I talk about that for seven minutes, and then at 1214, it's about uploading a thumbnail image
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Those aren't the main points of this video. So I should go back to this video that I created in June, add real timestamps
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so that people can find the right moments and to be able to skip around in the video
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So let me show you how it looks like if you actually do it correctly. Okay, so here's the video on how did that videos for YouTube and Imovie tutorial
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So what you can see very clearly here is the basically these little black lines that kind of split up the content in sections
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You can see the first one says intro iMovie tutorial. There's create a new project
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If we scroll out further, it's add a video on top of an image, picture on a picture, jump cuts, Ken Burns
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text, you know, color balance. So there's all these different sections in a video
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And if I basically tell people, here's what's in it, they can find what they're looking for
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So if someone wants to know, does he talk about how to use green and blue screens in this video
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They can essentially scroll through the chapters and figure out if it's there. So you can actually scroll across like this
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or if you click on one of the titles like so, you're gonna notice along the side
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that all the chapters come up like so. Very similar experience if you're using this
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on your phone as well in the YouTube app. So how do you create these chapters
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It's really, really easy, let me show you. So if we scroll down to this description of the video you gonna see the timestamps right here So there a couple things that keep in mind when creating timestamps The very first thing is to have the timestamps work like this and create chapters
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You need to start at time point zero. So you need to put in zero colon zero and then put a title for that and then put all the other points in the video
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If that's not there, the chapters aren't going to show up. After that, you need to have at least three section
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The titles of the sections need to have at least three characters. So three and three
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Then the next thing is the sections themselves need to be at least 10 seconds in length
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So you can't have a section or chapter that's three or five or whatever seconds
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It needs to be at least 10 seconds long. Also, the timestamp should be in order or it's not going to work
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If you follow all those things, you're going to have the chapter show up in your video
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You might be a little concerned of, hey, if I actually tell people the small sections, they're just going to skip ahead, see the parts they want, and leave the video
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Yeah, that's a risk, I guess. So an example I would give you is let's say someone starts watching our iMovie tutorial
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They actually want to know how do I add text to the videos. So if there's the chapters here, they can obviously scroll through
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If you look towards the end, you have add text to video. It's about two minutes in length
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If someone doesn't have the patience to get to that point, they're probably going to leave the video
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Maybe they go up to the search bar up above and they type how to add text to video in iMovie
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So they could look for that specific video. Or if they realize, hey, I'm going to talk about it on this video
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just skip ahead or watch the video and I get to it a little bit later on So I would argue you actually going to get more watch time of people that would probably have left the video to do something else They going to stick around for longer and at least watch the section that they were looking for if not watch more of the video
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Also, what YouTube and Google are starting to do is actually show sections of videos and search results
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So on Google search, sometimes you put in a certain search phrase and what will happen is it'll highlight a section of a video and you can click on it and watch that specific section
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So again, you may not have a video that's about that whole general topic, but it's just going to take you
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you write to the specific point in your video, and the viewer can start watching from there
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So it's really important as you're creating timestamps to think about actual keywords. So this Imovie tutorial, there's a bunch of little chunks
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of content that I think people are probably searching for on Google, on YouTube, and so by adding chapters
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someone can easily find that content through search, or if they're watching the video, they can find what they're looking for
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So if you have a video already up live on YouTube that you want to edit, you can actually
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while you're viewing the video, click on edit video right here and get there
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Or if you're in the content, of YouTube Studio, you can just click on the little pencil icon here and then go down and
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you can see this video has the timestamps already. So if you're looking to run YouTube
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in 2021, I encourage you to sign up for a YouTube masterclass. It's a free one hour training
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where we teach you a ton of tips how to grow your YouTube channel. If you're interested
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in signing up, there's a link down below in the description. There you go. Hopefully that motivates you to create chapters for YouTube videos. If you're looking to grow your YouTube
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channel this year, definitely check out all the videos we have related to YouTube. a link to our playlist along the side right here
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Hope to see you in another video. Bye-bye
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