Free readability tool to increase content engagement
Transcription:
Hi, today I want to talk about a cool tool that I’ve found which can help you grow your audience and maybe cast a wider net as to the amount of people that can find and engage with your content.
So, one thing that I was looking at is that a lot of these top YouTubers use a tool for readability or for seeing at what grade level their content is at, so for instance somebody like Mr. Beast when you take a look at the text or the content of his videos and you put that in a readability score, you’ll see that it’s maybe around first or second grade but a lot of the experts are saying that you want to have a readability score that’s somewhere around sixth grade or lower.
So that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you’re in fifth or sixth grade that you’re not smart. In fact, it’s quite the contrary.
You know, I know a lot of smart fifth and sixth graders and a lot of smart two year olds. So really what it does mean is that a lot of people don’t really want to have to put a lot of thought into maybe content that’s a bit more concrete, complicated or uses a lot of longer words. You want to keep it simple. Explain something simply and plainly so that somebody gets the gist, they get the value and the information that they’re looking for out of your content. And they could move on and hopefully continue to look at content as you produce new videos and new blog posts and the like.
So, right here what we have is a video that I created today just kind of on the fly, improvised. And I uploaded it and if you take a look at any video in YouTube and click on the description you’re going to see that it’s got a little button here called show transcript.
If you click on that and you go to the right side of your screen it’s going to show the transcript.
If you toggle these three buttons which is for toggle time stamps it’s going to show you the transcript of your video automatically.
So what I do is I come in here and I copy the entire transcript from this video and mind you I didn’t write this I didn’t script it I just kind of talked you know on my phone.
I went to this website and this is what a lot of people use which is called readabilityformulas.com and if you go to the home page here you’re going to see it’s got a button called calculate text readability if you click on that.
And you paste in your transcript from your video and then it’s going to give you these options. You can select one or more of these options.
These are all the different or the most popular readability formulas. All built into this application. So if you click on, say, all of these and then you click on calculate, it’s going to give you your results.
It’s going to give you the individual results for each one of these indexes. But I think what you really to get the gist is you want to go for an average and it does show you the average here.
For instance, this index gave me, you know, second-grade levels. This one’s sixth-grade level, seventh-grade, third grade. Fourth grade, fifth grade, and so forth. So when you get down here to the average, it’s telling me fourth grade, which is what we’re shooting for.
We’re shooting for something that is in the sixth or fifth grade or lower. And what that does is it makes your content more accessible to more people. Whether they’re highly intelligent people, whether they’re kids, they’re people from other countries that maybe English isn’t their first language.
You’re casting a wider net with your content, you know, it doesn’t mean that your content is dumb or just dumb down per see. It just means that it’s more accessible. And it’s easier for somebody to grasp the concepts that you’re trying to explain quicker and they’re gonna get more value and enjoy your videos more.
I think is the main point there. So I highly advise doing this for each one of your blog posts. And the videos that you create and you know, I think a lot of the stuff that I talk about and that I write is at this level and I think that’s, you know, having a lot to do with being a parent of young kids, having to explain things a bit more plainly and simply. So they could understand and so I don’t have to repeat myself and also I’m working with clients because I deal with a lot of marketing technical issues and a lot of people really don’t get that and when you start to go into those technical issue you kind of lose people. So I just try to make it simple and make things as understandable as possible and that always really helps me. I just don’t want to lose anybody or have them, you know, kind of zone off. This really, really helps for that.
So I hope this helps. It’s you and like I said, this is going to really help you expand your audience if you give it a shot. Thanks!