YouTube is addicting. I check out the new music video from my favourite band, and next thing, I’m learning how to make ice cream.
Creating content for a platform like YouTube is enjoyable, engaging, exciting, and it can be very edifying. It is also a lot of work. If you’ve never created content for a public platform, the amount of work it takes and the skill-up to do it can be overwhelming.
I’m writing this to tell you it isn’t scary, and you can do it. I’m going to tell you how.
A little up-front honesty
I don’t consider myself a stellar content creator. I struggle to keep deadlines I set for myself, I ramble when I try to ad-lib, and I almost always war with myself over whether any given piece is either too short or not long enough. I constantly rewrite or rerecord my material a half dozen times before I’m happy with it.
This tends to lead to a sporadic video release schedule, incoherent or poorly recorded videos, or articles that err on the side of lengthy just to be sure I’ve covered everything. I can count the number of videos I’ve posted with shorter than 10 min run-times on one hand and not use all the fingers. There are days I’m convinced my editor’s smile emoticons are just a thin veneer over murderous contempt.
That said, I am still by many measures a pretty productive content creator because I am always in the putting new content out there. At least once a month people can expect to see either a video, an article, a guide, wiki updates, or Reddit and Twitter activity from me. Usually it’s all of the above.
Some months are better than others. Sometimes I’m prodigious in my production, running off sprints of videos I’ve been working on by the side of my desk for weeks which have finally coalesced. Some nights I get into an ADHD hyperfocus which leave me feeling hollow when I’m done, but with a mound of new drafts to firm-up for the next release schedule.
Regardless of how inspiration strikes me or what the end product is, everything I do is constructed. It has to be, otherwise I’d never get anything done.
How you get it done will be different from how I do it, obviously, because you’re a different person. However, the broad strokes are the same.
This article is part one of a three-part series on how to get started as a content creator, and the art of getting it done.
Part one will cover the behaviours, methodology, and approach to production which will help you to get started and maintain that initial momentum.
Part two will cover the available tools and resources, where to start, and making use of collaborative tools.
Part three will get into pedagogical techniques, design, and will examine narration versus oration.
Let’s get started.
BEHAVIOURS
Ever Forward
Ever hear the platitude that ‘Attitude is everything’? You’ve probably seen it posted, black-bordered and glossy, in the picture frames of your company boardroom or your doctor’s office. Well, it’s a dirty lie. Attitude helps you to frame the context of your world and build your relationship to it, but action is what defines you.
It’s a favourite arguing point among philosophers whether moral ethics are defined by how good the person perceives themselves to be (Aristotle), or how others learn about that person through their good actions (Kant). Content creation is expressed in kind of the same way. Let’s look at writing, for example.
You might have the next great world bestseller in you, but unless you can get it out and into the right hands at the right time, you’re just another face with bright ideas. Even if you do get it out, the chances of you being the next Boris Pasternak or Emily Brontë are slim. One book wonders are rare. Don’t take ten years to write your book. No one cares about your great idea if it’s not out there.
The big names, the ones which stand out immediately in the mind? Prolific.
Stephen King has a list of published works and credits longer than my inseam. By his own account he writes, on average, 3,000 words every day. Reputedly, he’s got drawers and hard drives full of work he’s never published – unfinished ideas and stories that died on the vine.
Isaac Asimov? Sure, he’s well known for Foundation and I, Robot, but he’s got another five hundred credited works to his name. Robert Ludlum and Terry Brooks have published over fifty books each, and Jim Butcher has at least thirty.
Behaviours aren’t just the way you treat others, they’re the pattern of actions you habitually repeat. Do something often enough, and well enough, and people start to know you for it.
Do one thing every day. Whether that’s planning your next piece, spending time getting images and sound clips together, recording a video segment, typesetting, making props, or perfecting the fall of your green-screen. Whatever it is, always be moving forward. If you find yourself getting anxious, just focus on the next five minutes at a time, and only as far ahead as finishing your current milestone. Even if your progress is incremental, you’re still making progress. You can do it.
You’re the Boss
Being the boss can suck.
This is even more apparent when you’re also the only employee, because you have to wear a lot of hats. You’re sales, marketing, payroll, product design, development, operations, purchasing, and janitorial wrapped all into one person. You’re also the boss. At the end of the day, the success or failure of your entire venture rides on only one set of shoulders. Yours.
This isn’t meant as a scare tactic, this is legit. It’s up to you to set the pace, because without you it’s not getting done.
However you prioritize, and no matter what your work schedule looks like, content creation is a lot of work. From planning to pre-production, to recording, edit, and post I spend – on average – eight to ten hours a week to get one thirty minute video. I’ve rewritten this article three times; the first draft was over twenty thousand words. Some people will find it easier than others, but no one finds it “easy”. We all struggle somewhere.
When morale is low or productivity slips, it’s up to the boss to take the reins and walk it across the finish line. An effective manager looks at the skills his team members have and puts them where their strengths will move the team farthest. When it’s just you this means being honest with yourself. Are you a procrastinator? Do you struggle with finding the right words to express yourself? Do you suffer from generalized anxiety or a fear of failure? That’s cool. So does everyone else.
Lean on others for support, but lead yourself. Recognizing your flaws helps you to identify those who don’t share the same weaknesses as you do; lean on them to help you make your product better. Just keep one thing in mind… Getting feedback is great, but you also have to be the one to make sure it gets done. It’s your voice and your direction. You make the calls.
When it comes to content creation – no matter what form that takes – there’s no way to do it but to do it.
Plan, prepare, and act.
Bite-sized Pieces
So you’ve got your idea, and you’ve pushed yourself over the confidence hump, and now you’re rolling towards getting it done. Then it hits you. It’s a lot of work. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, small, and insecure when you’re staring at Hobbes’ proverbial Leviathan.
Cut the beast in half, and then again. Keep going until the individual pieces are just big enough for you to manage.
Build on milestones. Take a piece of paper and write out each of the big things you need to get done; those items which, if they don’t get done, will stall everything else. These are your milestones.
Then break out the process of getting each of those things done. What is it going to take? What are the steps? How much time will it take? Do you have everything you need? (This is not an excuse to go to the local craft store and buy more stuff you don’t need.)
Anything which isn’t furthering the completion of your milestones is just more stuff in the way. If you don’t need to do it – if it doesn’t make your product better – don’t do it. Period.
Have a Plan
Having a plan will help you to stay on-message and on-track. For some of the videos and articles I’ve created that’s as simple as a bullet-point list of points I need to remember to hit. Most of the time it’s a hell of a lot more detailed than that. It depends on how comfortable I am with the subject material I’m covering.
Writing out a plan doesn’t need to be hard, but you need to do it. Start by taking a piece of paper (or several) and mapping out the high points of what you want to say, show, and/or teach. It might help you to cut the paper into pieces, or use index cards or Post-It Notes, that way you can re-arrange the order of your ideas into the flow that makes the most sense for what you’re trying to get across. I often bulk-rearrange as I’m planning, moving entire paragraphs or chapters in a text, or moving slides in a video presentation to where they best fit.
The following should be covered by your plan:
- Necessary milestones (discussed above)
- Your process of how you get it done
- An outline of the assets you’re going to use to illustrate your points
- A rough draft of the arc of your narration/oratory
- The conclusions or summary points you want to review before you’re done
Is this starting to sound like a school project, yet? Trust me, there are days it will feel that way. I hated school. I love this. The difference, I think for me, comes from the idea that I’m doing it for myself and to help others and not because I’m having to show my work for a school administrator. (If you’re in still in school, stay there, but remember to be nice to your teachers – they have bosses, too.)
Rehearse
Once you’ve got everything planned out, do a dry-run in your mind, or out loud, or freaking draw it with crayons and stick men if you need to. Just do it. No matter how methodical you are, you’ll find in the process of reviewing everything that there’s things you’ve overlooked something. There’s always something you’ll find sounded great in your head but is utter garbage when you say it out loud, or something which doesn’t fit where you thought it would, isn’t working how you thought it might, or just doesn’t fit the argument you’re trying to make.
Iron out the overlaps and folds in your product. This is the ideal time for those stubborn points to raise their heads, because everything’s still fluid. You haven’t started the process of recording, mixing, timing effects, writing the deep arguments, et cetera.
You’re still able to make accommodations for those late changes, which gets harder the deeper into your production process you go. I have had to re-record entire videos because I didn’t leave room in my planning to cover points I’d overlooked or forgotten to include.
It sucks. Learn from my fail.
Prioritize
If you really want to get into the habit of getting things done, do the hard things first. Tim Urban has a great piece on procrastination you should read. No, seriously, go read it right now, or open it in a new tab and read it when you’re done this. (You’ll thank me.) One of the things he talks about is the Eisenhower matrix.
“Ike” Eisenhower was a notoriously organized man, as a former general, politician, and later President of the United States. He was a man who knew how to Get S#*t Done. He created a system whereby all his work got separated into four boxes based on urgency and importance; things which were urgent and important got done first. Everything else was secondary and addressed based on where it fit in that matrix.
It sounds stupidly simple, and it is, but you’d be surprised how often people let an inflated sense of urgency on a low-priority task override their ability to get truly important things done, whether that extra priority task is their own or someone else’s.
Do the hard thing first. Before you go any further, let me give you this potentially relationship-saving piece of advice: Do the dishes. Vacuum. Clean out the cat litter. Walk the dog. Fold the laundry. Read the kids a bedtime story. Spend one night a week with your spouse or partner. These count for more than your creative effort, and putting the effort in where it matters means you’re less likely to get flack from anyone about spending six hours editing video or rewriting an article.
(If you’re ADHD like me, having them done before you go to create will mean a lot fewer distracting “maybe I should go” things when you’re struggling to build or maintain momentum.)
On the other hand, maybe you don’t have a family of your own. Even if you’re single with no kids, how good will you feel when you’re trying to build up the gumption to produce content when there’s a stack of dishes in your sink and the fruit flies are breeding?
When it comes to sitting down and actually getting your work done, do the hard thing first. Do the thing you least want to do.
Get the hardest pieces out of the way, as they’re where you’re likely to spend most of your time. I’m not talking about the dishes anymore, I mean the parts of the above approach that you don’t want to do. Do the planning. Do the project outlines, the video segments, the instructional PowerPoint slides; whatever is your specific flavour of pain-in-the-neck. Practice, rehearse, and massage these things until you’re comfortable with the product. Everything else will seem more manageable from there and you’ll make better progress than if you leave those things for last. Also, because content creation isn’t a strictly linear process, you don’t need to do your work in the same order every time.
Once you’ve got the above behaviours down, and you’ve internalized them – made them a part of your flow – you’ll find that addressing questions of methodology become a largely academic exercise. One which, really, is entirely at your leisure but which will benefit from the confidence you’ll gain in establishing positive, rewarding behaviours.
METHODOLOGY
This section is going to cover elements of the methodology you should start with. That’s not to say you have to go this route. Everyone works a little differently. I have spoken with a lot of other content creators, though, and a lot of them will agree with these points.
This is not an exhaustive list, as there are methodologies for everything and I don’t want to get too far into the weeds. You can make these your own by getting really granular and detail specific, or you can just as easily keep it chill by taking a relaxed approach to these. You will eventually sort out what works for you, this is just a recommended starting point.
What’s your Message?
When it comes to the methodology of being an effective content creator, the first thing you need to do is to identify how you arrive at what exactly it is you’re going to do, and why you think it will be successful. Identifying and coalescing your message into something cogent, repeatable, and engaging is the hardest part of getting started – and it’s a fluid state, because you can change it later, but not too drastically or you may risk alienating any following you’ve developed.
It doesn’t matter if you’re planning to stream game-play and commentary of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, teach people glass bottle flintknapping, or expound on the philosophical failings of Nietzsche. How did you decide to do that, and what do you bring to it? What sets you apart from other content creators who are covering the same material? Even well-known YouTubers with large followings – who are covering the same material – have distinctive differences in what it is they bring to the table that set them apart.
Example: delonewolf is one of the earliest EVE YouTubers and he covers a lot of PvE, industry, and industry-related market data. However, what he started with EVE Talk, EVE Prosper perfected by offering more regular updates and a deeper dive into the market data and offering projections. A lot of which was due to the contribution of community members and their volunteer work, particularly individuals like Christopher Mellen of Miner Metrics. They’re all covering pretty much the same content, and many are collaborating. It’s truly a YouTube community, but they’re also each taking their own approach and each brings something unique to the fore.
Ask yourself these questions before you start:
- What subject material (content) are you going to cover? – It doesn’t matter if it’s video games, basket weaving, ice-cream making, etc
- Are you a subject matter expert (SME) on that topic, or can you become one along the way? – Are you offering opinion or knowledge? How do you legitimize your position.
- What are you offering to the subscriber base? – What is unique about your take? Are you more detailed, engaging, investigative, critical, educational? What makes you different?
- What is the tone/voice of your channel? – Is your approach humorous, serious, pedagogic, inquisitive, reflective, or expansive?
- How do you cover the subject in delivery? – Is your channel meant to be educational, entertaining, provocative, challenging, or helpful? For the difference between education and helpful; are you teaching a skill or offering pro tips?
All of the above will help you to crystallize the message of your channel and help you to stay on-message and on-track. Without the above you run the risk of the wet noodle approach – firing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. That’s not a recipe for success.
How much is too much?
“Sometimes, the experts forget they were once beginners. You must be gentle with beginners; they have great potential to be experts.”
– Lilah Gifty Akita, Author
Whenever you’re creating content for public consumption you have to keep the audience in mind for the type of content you’re creating. There’s a natural tendency to want to “say it all” or to “get everything important in” with the videos you create. But how much is too much?
At some point you’re going to run the risk of of overrunning your audience’s patience, stamina, attention span, and/or interest. Do your best to remain cognizant of subject overrun when you’re setting out your content plan. Some things may necessitate having a longer video, but there is a point at which it is almost always better to break a video into multiple segments. Some topics, as well, will run above the capacity of some of your base to follow unless your prior content has raised them to the point of understanding.
Keeping content length and complexity in mind is important for these reasons:
- You need to align the size of the audience you want with the size of audience which can follow your content – The size of the audience for videos of people who are apt to say, “Hold my beer” is just frigging gigantic. The size of the audience for “Çatalhöyük Excavations & Its Impact on the Cultural Heritage Road of Anatolia” is miniscule. No matter how interesting your content may be to you, how interesting will it be to the world – and how can you make it interesting? If you want a gigantic userbase, produce content for that market. If you want the camaraderie and engagement of a tiny community of fiercely interested and devoted people, produce content for them. You can’t have it both ways, unless you start simple (at the mass market level of consumption) and you slowly raise their level of interest and understanding until they can “dig the heavy”.
- Video duration is going to decide at least 50% or more of your subscriber base for you – There’s a magic number scale for mass-market appeal when it comes to content creation. I call it the Mercedes scale. Why? Because it divides an analog clock (with numbers and hands) into thirds, like the Mercedes logo. 20/40/60. We live in a world where Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR) is a ubiquitous response to emails, texts, and pretty much anything else. There are people who stopped reading this article two sections ago.
- Videos of shorter than 20 minute length most people will watch, because – and this is putting it politely – if you were in their shoes you’re probably also thinking, “Twenty minutes? Okay. I can lose that much time if you suck.”
- Videos of up to 40 minutes an engaged and existing follower-base will watch. People who have had time to grow to like you will watch videos 40 minutes long. This is why a lot of podcasts will end after the 40 minute mark; because it keeps the audience engaged. It’s long enough to listen to on the drive or transit to work. It’s long enough to enjoy on a lunch break or a break between classes at university or college. It’s about the same length as a high school class. Just enough, but only if people like you.
- Videos of 60 minutes or longer should be reserved for the really important or in-depth videos that cover the kinds of things you might cover in a university lecture. In all honesty, most videos of this length should probably be broken into two smaller videos – in the same way I’ve broken this article into three releases. Videos of this length are a lot of content to cover, and it will exhaust the patience of anyone who has less than a solid attention span. Expect that multiple viewings will be required; either because of pause-and-restart viewing because it’ll take multiple interested viewings for the subscriber to absorb. Videos of this length are wholly reserved for people who want to be there watching it.
- Multiple shorter videos, covering A TOPIC each, gives people a reason to keep watching
If you need a litmus test for deciding if you’re covering too much for the average person, as yourself, “Would my grandparents understand this?”
If you need a litmus test for deciding how much is too much, ask yourself, “Am I wasting their time?”
Alternate between depth and breadth
Alternating between videos offering a breadth of shallow content, and videos which delve into the details, can really provide subscribers a breath of fresh air. Especially if you post regularly and reliably. Three weeks of one hour videos with deep, heavy detail and subject matter are going to wear people out. You’ll lose attention after week two, like kids in university, it’ll become a slog to get through it all.
Breaking up the depth of the content – regardless of your subject, approach, and message – will actually make it easier for more people to subscribe to you.
The opposite is also true. If you’re someone who mostly posts short, lighthearted, easy videos covering a short topic, hints or tips, or humorous anecdotes your users may find the longer, deeper, more detailed videos a hearty meal after a repast of salad. Salad’s great, but no one wants just lettuce all the time.
Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel offer great examples of this approach; their shows are full of fun bits like duets with Justin Timberlake, stars like Gal Gadot playing guessing-games, videos of Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon, or Daniel Radcliffe singing Alphabet Aerobics. However, they both periodically take a solemn stance when reflecting on situations of the day, like when Kimmel’s son was born with heart disease, or when Jimmy Fallon responded to the events in Charlottesville (those videos have a cumulative 16M+ views).
Create a content stream
Setting up a content stream for yourself will help you to map out what it is you should be making, and when, and in what order.
It’s as simple as that.
Decide for yourself, relative to the subject you’re covering, what you’re going to make and what has priority. You don’t have to plan out your entire content stream – just start with the first three weeks or three months – depending on how often you plan to release. Just keep in mind that if your videos tend on the heavy side for duration you can get away with longer gaps between your videos; some people will still be watching your last one by the time you’re ready to release the next. With shorter videos, the audience will be less forgiving.
You may find it useful to adopt a content management tool like Asana or Trello to keep track of your ideas and topics. I’ll cover these and other tools in part two.
Sourcing audio
Don’t use copyrighted music without asking the artist, first. Period.
There are enough public domain sites for you to search that you should never have to reach to a top-40 hit or a well-known underground artist for soundtrack.
Public domain music, sound tracks, stings, and audio effects are often free to use with attribution, and have enough artists regularly contributing to them that you should never run out of available tracks to use, sample, and reference.
Further, using copyrighted music comes with a lot of other hang-ups. It can, and will often, get your video muted. Which means you lose all the audio from your video, until you upload a version without the offending audio. Which means a lot of other work. It’s also a black mark against your subscription. YouTube keeps track of how many times someone raises a usage-rights dispute against you. Too many strikes and you’re out.
Further, paying copyright signing organizations like SOCAN, Re:Sound, and other music licensing companies for the use of copyrighted music almost never means the artist gets paid. I have seen videos pulled down because the artist reached out to YouTube and said, “That’s my music, they can’t use that.”
When the decision was appealed, “We paid a licensing company for the use of the music,” the response from the artist was, “It doesn’t matter, because they didn’t pay me.”
There are a lot of music licensing agencies that never pay artists a dime. Trust me, if you contact the artist directly and make an arrangement, even if it’s $100 for the use of a song, you’re way farther ahead. Also, you’ll have created a chance for yourself to make friends with an artist, maybe even have them refer people to your sites.
Don’t ask artists to refer people to you. That’s a douche move. Also, don’t ask to use their music ‘for the exposure’. That’s an even bigger dick move. If you want to use their intellectual property for your content, pay them.
File/Asset naming and descriptions are critical
I can’t begin to explain how important this is. I really should, and I really want to, but I can’t get into all the reasons in the length this article will allow to convey to you all the reasons why it’s important. That’s an entire series of articles to itself.
Let me simplify it to this:
The more organized, clearly named, and identifiable your media files are the easier your job will be.
There are some inherent, tangible benefits as well, including the fact that file names are parsed by Google, meaning if your files are relevantly named you’ll show up more frequently in search. (This is mostly true for web content, like this article.) For videos, it’s the video description and meta-data.
I’ll get into these in a little more depth in part two.
APPROACH TO PRODUCTION
In addition to the production framework methodologies covered above, there are also production approaches you should consider for the creation of content. These come in when you think about who is doing all the work. The bigger your big, hairy, audacious goal is, the more help you’re going to need and the more structured you’re going to need to be in producing content on the long run.
Collaboration vs Delegation
Are you an individual or a team?
If it’s just you, you can’t really delegate to yourself if you’ve got a lot of work to do. There’s just you, and you’ve got to get it done, but you can make it easier for yourself by relying on the help of collaborators. Collaborators can take any number of forms, from beta-readers (if you’re writing) to draft viewers who proof your videos for ease of watching, inaccuracies, or gaps. Collaborators may also be your editor, guests on your show, and regular viewers who suggest new topics and avenues to explore.
Let the builders build, and the painters paint.
If you are part of a team, don’t try to get it all done yourself. Delegate. If someone else on the team has a gift for video editing, where you find it a struggle, ask for their help or ask if they’d mind doing it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to grow your skill set along the way, but delegation can save you valuable time in the production process, and if your skills are focused elsewhere, you’ll get more done doing that thing you do well and quickly, rather than trying to ham-fist your way though something you understand only poorly.
Schedule vs Scheduling
There are two things you’ll definitely need to adjust as you go, probably several times: Release schedule and Content scheduling.
Your release schedule is when you plan to put your content out in the wild. It’s really just that. However it’s critically important to stand by what you say will be your release schedule. This is why most successful podcasts and web-comics always release on the same day. If they’re weekly producers it might be every Wednesday. Others always release on the same day of the month, even if they release several videos/articles on the same day.
You can either release content as you finish it, or you can create a release schedule and hold stuff for a later date as you run past deadlines. If it doesn’t make this week’s release, hold it for next with the other videos/content you’re producing.
This is not an excuse to procrastinate.
Your content schedule is when you schedule the important production steps to happen. This is exceedingly important for scheduling of guests, recordings, and planning around vacations, holidays, blackout dates, and other events. It’s going to be next to impossible to schedule a guest star on Superbowl Sunday if your guest is a football fan. Some dates are obvious blackouts (New Years, Christmas, etc. Go outside and get yourself to a social event, you goblin.)
Other dates and times are more fluid and dependent on when your guests are available. If the subject matter expert you want to guest-star on your show is a world-famous anthropologist you may need to tie them in via Skype from Africa. If your guest is a government employee, you may have to catch them in the 30 minutes of their lunch break, or ask them to book a time to be free. The more in-demand someone is, the less time they have for you.
It’s also a matter of when do you make time to produce? I usually find time on Sundays, or squeeze it in late at night after my wife’s gone to bed. Sometimes my insomnia kicks in and I work all night. Maybe you’re the type who needs to set aside two hours every Tuesday and Thursday night, like homework, and just get it done. Whatever your schedule looks like, you need to make time to make it happen, or it won’t.
Hit record
Pre-recording for scheduled releases is a complete life-saver. Don’t be afraid to mix up your schedule to accommodate a special guest or a special event, and to stay on your regular release schedule – even if it is Superbowl Sunday. Just record it and edit it in advance and schedule the release to go public on the day that you need to make it visible. There are tons of tools for content scheduling, and I’ll cover a few of those in part two.
Pre-recording is also important for your content stream if you’re making video. Because you’re the editor, or maybe because you have an editor, you can record the important pieces in whatever order pleases you or is convenient. It doesn’t need to be shot from A-to-Z. You can shoot W first, and then edit for B while prepping G for sound. This is how big-budget movies are filmed; by multiple teams in multiple places with dozens of layers of complexity, with everyone reporting to project managers who have the grand Gantt chart laying out how everything’s supposed to come together.
Don’t try to get it all in one shot
Just like you can record things in any order, keep in mind that half of the magic of editing means you can also record one piece in many segments. Most successful YouTubers will record one long stream of video and edit until they have the effect, content, and takes that they want to make the video they intended to create. Great examples of editing for effect are Nerdwriter, Buzzfeed’s The Try Guys, and Beckie Jane Brown.
Depending on the content of your videos, you may find it difficult to get it all out in one shot. You might be tackling something very personal, or very difficult, or a highly volatile subject which requires a lot of thought and effort to master and express succinctly. These are times when just getting it all out on camera can really help you, by not trying to get it perfect in one shot. It can save you, because everything you diatribe on you can fix it in post. Just cut whatever doesn’t add to your message.
Other times, you’ll repeat a vicious and self-destructive cycle of trying to say it perfectly, and record it perfectly, or do it perfectly in one go. That’s both impractical and unfair. You’re not a machine. If you’re having trouble saying something in a take, use a script or a teleprompter (they’re easy to make). If you’re having difficulty recording something perfectly you probably need to stop overthinking it or take some time away and come back fresh. If you’re having difficulty showing something in the way you want, think about how to approach it with a different method, a different camera angle, or a different approach altogether.
Allow yourself to fail to make a better product. People don’t keep watching YouTubers who produce like soulless automatons. The occasional flubbed line, aside, personal commentary, or show of vulnerability will actually endear people to you more. However, don’t let that extra attention and loyalty lull you into a false sense of security and make you feel you can get away with saying whatever’s in the back corner of your brain or force a joke you shouldn’t have told in the first place.
You don’t want to end up like Pew Die Pie.
WRAP UP
If you’re still reading, I hope you’ve found the above useful. It is fully my intent to write a response to my own article part-one, in reply to any questions you may raise in the comments. If you have questions or feedback I suggest you post them there, below. But do keep in mind the guidelines I laid out in my previous post – you’re more likely to get a response if you’re clear, succinct, and polite.
In part two I will cover the open-source tools and software I use, collaborative tools and approaches, and how to get started and what equipment you’ll need.
Stay tuned.
