Today we’re talking about your YouTube production and distribution checklist or publishing checklist, because there can be just a ton of things you need to do to get it right.
HOSTS: The Video Marketing Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden –Â VidAction.tv
– Gwen Miller –Â LinkedIn
– Shelly Saves The Day – Shelly.video
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
It is time for the Video Marketing Podcast. This is the podcast where we help you with all your video marketing. My name is Dane Golden from VidAction. I’m here with my friends, Shelly Saves The Day. Welcome, Shelly.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Hello everyone.
Dane Golden:
And Gwen Miller from Hearst. Welcome Gwen.
Gwen Miller:
Hi, Dane. Happy to be here.
Dane Golden:
And today we’re going to talk about your YouTube production and distribution checklist or publishing checklist, because there can be just a ton of things.
Sometimes you sort of internalize these things after doing ’em a lot. But we want to talk about the things that we do along the way to make sure you know that our videos go well. Yours may be different, and that’s okay. Shelly Saves The Day. What’s one of the things when you’re planning for a video, sort of pre-production that you have on your checklist?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, one thing that I would say is you would want to think about the sequence of events happening in your video. Because if there are certain moments, let’s say you are unboxing a camera and then you’re going to be talking about this camera, you’re going to want to make sure you have these shots already set up with a checklist, knowing these are the shots I need to get, maybe an overhead because you can only break that seal.
Once for it to actually be accurate. So you probably want to make sure you have those things already pre-planned out, or if you know you’re going to be inserting swatches of, let’s say, some sort of makeup item and you want to make sure that you have them and you’ve already then swatched them in your arm, you’re probably going to have a shot where it’s.
Beautiful and pristine. And then you’ll have a shot inserted where it’s you showing all of the colors on your arm, which means you have to know that you need to film that as well. So knowing the order of which you want things in the end as well as what order that you may need to shoot is definitely an item on my checklist.
Gwen Miller:
That is such a good point that coverage is, the thing that I think I probably struggle the most with producers a lot of the time is like they will just shoot it and then we’ll get back and we don’t have any, like the closeups, we need to illustrate anything. Right. And so if you don’t plan beforehand, That, Hey, I need to have time in my schedule to go in and get those close up and those really intimate shots of, say the product or, you know, the, you know, the before and after.
Like, I can really screw you up in, in publishing and post.
Shelly Saves The Day:
And what does coverage mean? Actually came up with that a lot too, with like cooking videos, right? Because you probably have all of this stuff that you’ve set up, but then no one is going to want to wait around in production for a half an hour for these cupcakes to bake.
So you’re going to have already needed to bake them. Mm-hmm. And cooled them to like bring them out and be like, okay, and here’s what they look like when they’re done. So you have to plan that ahead of time too. You have to know the sequence of events.
Gwen Miller:
It’s the pre-planning. It’s like, I would say 90% of the work happens in pre-production.
Dane Golden:
But But what does coverage mean though? That’s an important word.
Gwen Miller:
So coverage is a term we use in the entertainment industry. That means that you’re getting all the shots that you need. So like we might have, you know, a coverage might be, you might need a wide shot, then maybe you need a medium shot, and then you need your closeups, right?
We can often in digital, fall into complacency and just get a, you know, everything’s just at a medium shot. Uh, but it really helps, especially in a 10 minute video, and especially as Shelly brought up in like food videos is especially important. I’ve seen a lot of people shoot an entire food video just from front on and like, you can’t see inside the bowl.
Like people want to see what you’re doing, right? So being able to have coverage where you have the front shot and then you have, say, A shot that comes down from above. So you can see inside the pan or the bowl, you have all this coverage so that when you coverage, so when you go into post or the editing process, you have options where you can cut to to see something better and illustrate your video better.
Dane Golden:
One of the things that I do before I even shoot a video is I write sort of an outline and sometimes I actually have an assistant who writes a pre outline for me, and what I have her do is I say, listen, go around and research. Now she doesn’t, uh, necessarily do ai, but she could. Um, but I want to know actually some links that people are already talking about, the topic that I’m talking about.
So let’s say I’m talking about YouTube end screens and how to do those best. You know, find me like a couple of videos and a couple of blog posts that people are writing about and put those in there so I can see what other people are saying and then what’s my take on it. And so, She might write a draft about, you know what it’s done.
And then I’m like, okay. And this is no knock on her. She’s great. She’s a great writer. But she doesn’t, she’s not me. So then I do my take and I may entirely disregard what she’s done or she may know, uh, research the new feature in Google’s help docs. I didn’t know that, that they did, and I can throw that in there.
But what one of the, the troubles that I have with writing an outline is that it’s hard to start with a blank page. And when I feel I’m editing what someone else has done, that helps me. Now what we do with this outline eventually is not to say we stick with it with our YouTube video. It’s a framework that we’ll we’ll touch on a bit, but we actually can reformat that a bit as a blog post on the blog that contains.
The, uh, the video, so it, it works together. And so that’s one of the things is I just start to think about what’s in it, but I’m not going to read it as a script. Shelly, do you write scripts beforehand?
Shelly Saves The Day:
I am Team Anti-Script. I am team Bullet Point. I strongly believe in bullet points, but I feel like when we get too scripted, it becomes too robotic and too “person reading teleprompter poorly.”
Dane Golden:
Yeah.
Shelly Saves The Day:
When we’re trying to enunciate words correctly versus we all have our own in like intonation, inflection, and curiosity when it comes to like, going off on a side tangent about a story, but then bumper leaning ourselves back into, okay, and the next point is, and making sure that we still, um, flow.
Because if you don’t have any kind of guideline as, as well, then you can just get sidetracked by some story. I know I can. And then it’s, it’s off to the races about something, so I do strongly believe if you can walk through the process and with bullet points, have all of the points in order that you want to cover, that will be beneficial for a lot of people.
Dane Golden:
And Gwen, do you guys use scripts?
Gwen Miller:
So for, you know, it depends on type of content you are making. I do fully believe it really depends on the talent you’re working with, uh, and what their level of comfort is and what they’re with. Everything. Like I’ve worked with some talent who are just like the world’s best teleprompter readers and sound like they’re, like, they can read anything put in front of them and it sounds like they’re having a Sunday conversation.
But if you ask them to ad lib, they’re stumbling over themselves. That’s usually a minority. Uh, there’s some people who really do need some sort of structure, and there’s some people who literally you can just be like, here’s a vague topic. Talk about it for 10 minutes. Right. Uh, now when we talk about, say, a lot of the content I’m making now, which is really like, uh, celebrity interview style content, that’s really prepping questions.
Right. And that is really key. And a lot goes into the initial, you know, because when you’re talking about the celebrity interview type of content, we’ve seen these celebrities so many times, they’re asked so many questions. I always think about when we’re, we’re doing this stuff, I come back to like hot ones, which is, you know, the show mm-hmm.
Where they eat like, uh, spicy hot wings. But I think a lot of people missed. That a full 50% of the magic that show isn’t just that, Hey, you know, we have them eating hot wings, like there’s plenty of stunt shows out there. But what is really magical about that show is the interview questions they ask them while they’re eating those hot wings are very insightful.
They’re very deep cuts. They’re things you haven’t heard them talk. A talk about before. So yes, there’s this element of oh ha, haha, they’re eating something spicy and it makes it tougher. But then you just sit there and be like, that was a really good question. I want to hear the answer to that question. And that takes a lot of time to build and not just go for the easy wins of asking about the thing that everybody else asks them about.
So like it might sound easy, like, oh, all you’re doing to prep for this video is writing a bunch, like a list of 10 questions. But there really is a lot of work and art that goes into the art of interviewing.
Dane Golden:
And our list isn’t going to be complete today. There, you know, depending on what type of video you are and who you are, what type, what type of day it’s going to be.
There could be many different types of checklists and you know, how expensive your production is. One of the things that I am always very conscious of is what is my lighting going to be like? I struggle with my lighting for a number of reasons. One, I’m cheap. Two, I have a small area, and three, I’m often working remotely, either from the road or from a family’s house.
And I have to sort of reconstruct my lighting if I’m visiting with family for long, long, uh, term. So I’m always wondering, you know, how will my lighting work? And sometimes. I actually take lighting with me sometimes. I think about what can I do in a hotel room to change the lighting around just with the lamps they have there.
What types of things do you think about with the set Shelly when you are preparing to do a video?
Shelly Saves The Day:
So a few things, and one of the reasons why I like having a fixed set is because I know what is going to be behind me and like the variables, and I know where to keep the static lights. But if you are someone who is moving around or someone who is vlogging, um, there’s a few things you want to keep in mind.
One being who’s in your background, what’s in your background, and that’s going to be everything from if you’re in another room of the house. Do you have any documents that might have your address on it? Do you have any things like with your name that might be, um, personal information that you don’t want shared?
Do you have any photos in the background of family members you don’t want to talk about or have brought to the internet? So being aware of your surroundings, not only for a safety standpoint, but also then the aesthetic is also going to be, um, the second part, which is going to be people have a hard time trusting you as.
Let’s say an efficiency and cleaning expert. If you’re sitting in the middle of a closet and there’s like clothes everywhere and they’re like, you have not done very well for yourself. I don’t know. Um, so I dunno if I trust that. So the, the less distraction you can have in the background. To, uh, pull people away from what you’re saying can sometimes be to your detriment.
It can be one thing to have an interesting background where people are like, Ooh, I like the little thing on the shelf. And that definitely builds to her character. And it, it, it goes with her theme, but then it goes the opposite way of like, Why would I ever listen to this person if all they do is sit in filth all day?
So you want to definitely make sure, take a look, make sure the boxes aren’t stacked around. Just move them outside of the shot, just temporarily. Um, but that can, that can be a big thing. So people need to definitely take a minute and make sure they’re not scrambling at the last 30 seconds as their intro is going to, like, what’s in view, what can you see, and try and move it out.
Dane Golden:
And Gwen. Do you have any, uh, like lighting or visual things that you think about? Um, as you’re setting up,
Gwen Miller:
yeah, so we, um, shoot in a lot of what’s called junkets. So these are essentially press PR days that, uh, a movie or TV show will host with their celebrities where a whole bunch of like outlets come in and shoot.
With this talent. So that means that you’re always kinda shooting in a different place. You don’t have a lot of control of what that place is, and you have to set up and tear down really quickly. Uh, and, uh, you know, we have to keep a unified brand look throughout all of that, and that can be very difficult.
So one of the things we do is we show, shoot almost everything against what’s called a seamless, which is essentially it’s a non-reflective. Paper background and that non-reflective is very important. If you do anything with lights, you need things that aren’t going to bounce lights weirdly. So this allows us in pretty much any sort of environment to be able to take a background.
Each one of our, our, our brands essentially has a certain color seamless as kind of the, in the brand colors and maybe there’s three options per brand. And so then you’re able at any place, at some hotel in Beverly Hills, Like you can just pop up that seamless and suddenly you’re in, you know, the cosmos set essentially, and it has the right color, and you can, you can kind of control a little bit better about what that environment looks at besides having every single one of your videos for a show against whatever, like, Hotel background happens to be there, right?
Or against one of those, you know, the junket backgrounds I always have, which are plastered with like logos and the movie poster and stuff like that. So I think being able to control your environment no matter where you are, by having really easy things that can be taken down with like one fell swoop, uh, to kind of keep that control is really, really key.
Dane Golden:
And of course there’s audio and audio’s super important. And you may have a variety of different mics. You’ll be, may be working off your camera, mic some, some sort of mic connected to that. I happen to use, you know, a sort of a podcasting mic. Sometimes I use a mic that adds onto my phone. Uh, there’s a few different ways to do it, of course.
Uh, Shelly, what do you do as far as just checking to make sure your audio’s okay. This
Shelly Saves The Day:
is actually so important because this happened to me the other day where I assumed something was okay, but it wasn’t, and it was because I hadn’t tested it since. After there was a firmware update for some wireless microphones that I was using, and it turns out that I tried to use it.
I had used it with a phone. It worked fine. I used it with a US. B C, uh, iPad, a mini iPad, it did not work. And so that was the only instance in which it did not work. And lo and behold, that was the instance I was trying to do. So one thing that you should always do is test your audio before, like, um, and I would say this is also, even if you’re not live streaming and you’re working with video, can you take a, you know, 22nd clip, have some audio in it, have the video.
You know, and then you see what’s in frame Is your microphone working? I see so many posts of, I just recorded three videos in a row because I finally got, um, you know, told to do batch content and I did it, and the mic wasn’t all the way plugged in, or the mic wasn’t working, or the mic died halfway through or something, whatever.
And so it’s always good to just take the extra 30 seconds and then take out the card or download it to your computer, test that it’s working because the last thing you want to do is. Test while we’d say like in prod while the, while the bus is moving you, it’s a lot harder to change the tire, you know? So, um, if you can just take a couple minutes before it can really pay dividends in a lot of cases, and it would have for me.
Dane Golden:
And Gwen
Gwen Miller:
audio. I can’t beat that story, let me tell you. But I will say here, like audio I think is probably the number one thing you should be anal retentive about. Like it is from a kind of a data strategist perspective, it is kind of the number one thing that will just tank your retention right off.
Dane Golden:
Talk about that more. Talk about that more. Why bad audio tanks, retention. So we
Gwen Miller:
are really, you know, you, you know, you might say we’re visual creatures, but we’re even more auditorial creatures. And the key there also is that it’s much more subconscious for us. So we can be a little skeptical and look at, oh, like look at that.
Over the top production values, like this feels overly produced. Look at all that glitzing lamb. But we, what we can’t tell is, holy crap, this is world class audio. All we can hear is like, oh, this sounds beautiful. My head loves this. I want to listen more. So it, it, it. It’s something that we know viscerally in our brain is important, but we, we, we would never be able to articulate it.
So it, it also has the, you know, it, it can be to our benefit in the fact of if we want to look down to earth, but still have a great production values. Hide it all in the audio, get the world’s best audio, but it works the other way, which someone comes into a video and they can’t hear it well, or it’s annoying to listen to, and it can just be the littlest thing.
It could be just the slightest pitch, or they’re just slightly far from the camera. So it sounds a bit echoy if it at all, makes it slightly. Uh, to listen to you see this, your, your retention graph does this immediately, and you just really can’t recover from that. It doesn’t matter how great the video is.
Like you can get away with a lot. Like, you could have a shaky camera. You could, you could even be slightly blurry at times, as long as it’s the most interesting video. But if it’s hard to listen to, I don’t care what it is, people will not stick around and listen to it, and this is universal. I’ve never seen a retention graph where this does not hold true.
Where if you, you started up and you’re like, Ooh, that audio’s going to be a problem. You go to the retention graph. It always shows this huge dip as people just piece out very, very quickly.
Dane Golden:
And there’s a few other things I do around my home studio. So, uh, I turn off heaters or fans. Um, I’m conscious about my own laptop because for some reason my laptop can, when recording video, have a fan on.
So I’m. Conscious is, you know, turning off other apps just so there’s not a lot of fan noise, and this sounds super simple, but if you have other people in the house, what I do is I just have a piece of paper that has some blue tape on it, and it’s usually on the inside of the door and it says, Um, recording, don’t knock.
Or, you know, if you’re walking by where I’m recording, please don’t shout. And when I’m recording, I just take it. I unstick it from one side of the door and I put it on the outside of the door and people know, oh, you know, maybe I can whisper. You know, or not knock on the door, not, not shout out Dane’s name.
You know, I’m busy. So that’s just one audio thing that’s just real nice. But I’m also, you know, I record a little clip each time I start and I. You know, frankly, I’m not always sure if my audio’s right or wrong, but, you know, am I too loud? Do people like it softer? You know, how does it sound? Is it peaking?
It’s an ongoing struggle, but it’s, I’m very conscious of it and I’m trying to get it right. So I, I record, I play back. I think about the levels, um, when I’m doing a live stream on this little thing. You know, how much is the gain, right? You know, things like that. So I’m constantly thinking about those things and sometimes I put pieces of tape or draw little markers as to, okay, this is exactly where it is.
And one thing, my top audio checklist item is actually even taped to my laptop, because I’ve done this wrong so many times. This mic here has a logo. It just says Talk to logo because. I am visual, so I always thought the MIC logo should be facing the camera because I’m a branding guy, but actually, almost always the logo is facing the speaker, and I actually always know that I’m, I’m on this particular mic, I, I turn it.
Um, 90 degrees, but if I can see the logo, I know I’m speaking to the right part of the mic. It sounds stupid, but it’s on my checklist, and that’s why, because I’ve done it wrong so many times.
Shelly Saves The Day:
You know, it’s funny that you say that because I cannot tell you how many times I see people talking into the Blue Yeti, which was the beginner mic for so many people, and they use it and it has this capsule on the top that looks like a little pill, and a lot of people talk into the top dome.
Part of it and it actually, that’s not where you’re supposed to talk into it. So it was maddening the number of people that I would see talking to it like that. Cause I feel like that’s not, and it is actually kind of, basically you’re talking to the logo and actually, um, almost forwards at it. So that is funny that you
Dane Golden:
mentioned that.
Uh, what about, so, uh, we have a lot of people who are not experts on camera. Is there anything on your checklist that says, Talk to the camera because I have a thing that says, talk to the camera. Sounds super basic. Do you guys have anything like that? I’ll tell you mine. Tell us yours. So what I have my customers and clients do is the same thing I always do.
And that is I point to the camera, the actual camera, and I, if I can’t see the edge of my finger, then I know I’m pointing to the wrong place. And I say verbally and they must say verbally. I am talking here. And the act of looking at that now, I’ve done live streams even, so I’m looking at you guys on, on my laptop here as we’re recording.
But even so, I’m trying to think in my head. I’m actually talking to the audience and my friends right here in this camera, and I try to visualize them through the camera eye. And the way I do that is by pointing and saying, I’m talking here, so I’m, even though you’re six inches below my camera, I’m actually visualizing you and not looking at you most of the time, unless I’m switching, which I’m not doing now.
And so I am acknowledging you, he acknowledging you here instead of acknowledging you there. Stupid little trick that’s on my checklist always. It’s on everyone’s checklist. You must look at the camera. And that is particularly a problem with people who record with iPhones. Yeah, so with with iPhones, yes.
I found it essentially, I. Almost impossible to actually look in the right place if the screen is facing you. So I actually encourage them to face it the other direction so they can’t even see themselves. Right. And even so, they still need to point to the right place because if they can see themselves, they will never.
Unless they’re a pro look in the right place. Shelly, do you have anything like
Shelly Saves The Day:
this? Yeah, I do actually. So I encourage people to, uh, most of the time a lot of the cameras will have flip out screens and so people, I. You can always tell when someone is looking at themselves in one of those flip out screens because they’re just a little bit off center from where they actually need to be looking because they’re not looking down the lens, they’re looking at themselves.
Huge pet peeve of mine. So one of the things that I I say is actually have it out, but like turn it around so you can’t see anything. There’s actually a little mirror that you can put. On the back in the cold shoe mount of it, and then you can see at least like, are you in frame and you know, are you recording?
But, um, some people also, and I’ve told people because they just get afraid of the lens in the camera, if they’re staring down, it is to tape a tiny little like. Almost yearbook size photo of your friend, and you tape it right at the bottom, just out of frame. And you know that if you’re doing that, you should be smiling, you should be talking to your friend, and you should be there for more relaxed.
So that’s definitely a, a tip. And I’m so with you on the, the iPhone one because a. Especially the newer ones and you’re using the back camera. There are multiple lenses, sometimes two or three different cameras, or if you’re on a Samsung phone, there can be up to five cameras on a phone back. And so pointing to which one that you think you should actually be looking at, because you could be trying to make eye contact with one.
Turns out you’re on the wide instead of the telephoto, instead of the whatever one. So even having a test clip where you’re pointing at the the correct one, maybe you mark it in some sort of way. It can be a, a big game changer and then the little mirror, um, it’s such a, a huge help just to make sure that you’re not looking at that little screen.
Gwen,
Dane Golden:
what do you do?
Gwen Miller:
Uh, I, I mean, look, I will say, yeah, so during the, the pandemic, I had a lot of talent who shot from home, like, and we’re talking celebs. They just, they’re not, look, you’d say, oh, they do this for business, but they work with big cameras on. Right. You know, and they’re, they’re trained not to look at the camera.
Uh, so breaking that habit of you acknowledging the camera is there, acting like the camera is essentially the second person in the room and it’s your best friend, can be really diffic difficult psychologically for them, because I’ve just trained over years and years of career. To treat it like it’s not even there.
So, uh, and then when you, you then send them home in the middle of a pandemic and like, you’re going to shoot this on your iPhone and you know, everyone in Hollywood or, or slightly narcissistic, of course they’re going to stare up themselves. I do find that it’s slightly better if they’re, when they’re shooting in vertical, then in, in.
Horizontal just because the camera is more right there, like your face is closer to where the camera is than when you’re shooting horizontal. You’re usually in the center of the frame. There’s probably, you know, this much space, right, of extra stuff before you even get to the camera, which is now hanging out on the side of the phone.
Right? So your eye line is way off. So like we usually had less difficulty if we were shooting something vertical, but. 99% of the time we weren’t shooting anything vertical. I would say for the first couple months of the pandemic, 45% of the time, they’d still send us vertical anyways because not too many people are used to shooting on their phone, um, horizontally.
So we’d get all this footage vertical and we’re making 16 by nine videos. It, it was problematic. And you know, a lot of that was either a, some people we just had to end up sending them on a physical camera because it was like, which is actually like the great thing about the phone is they already know how to use it.
Right. And you send them something like, and then we had to do like training sessions and it was a whole thing. So you had to weigh your pros and cons of ease of use versus, okay, they’re not going to be tempted to narcissistically stare at themselves the entire time. If we shoot it this way. They are beautiful people.
Yeah, so there, you know, there wasn’t really any perfect solution, but a lot of it was, you know, over time you just train yours. You train yourself to do, and I say this as a person who’s terrible at it because I don’t spend as much time on camera, but for those who really were, you know, if you are starting to do this and, and week out, like over time it doesn’t feel as weird.
Dane Golden:
Uh, and, and, uh, one of the things I do, so I can see the other side of the iPhone is I actually have a security mirror. One of those round ones that you, that they have at the supermarket so you don’t steal anything. And so that’s how I actually look because it gives me a little bit of an angle, uh, and, and I don’t have to crane my neck too far to be able to see if I’m in frame.
Um, One of the other things that I do before recording is I sort of do vocal exercises and I exercise my mouth a lot. He does. You, you guys hear it. True. I, I, it’s a sort of, sometimes I clear my throat and it’s a bit. Ugi to hear. So you guys never hear that part of the recording except these two. Do I swish water in my mouth?
Um, sometimes I sing and, and I have a terrible singing voice, but I might be doing this for an hour before. I’ll say, you know, Do fa Faso, just, you know, keep doing that. Um, I brush my teeth again. I chew gum just to make sure that my mouth has, you know, enough saliva in it. And isn’t that disgusting? But, you know, not having a dry mouth is really helpful.
And then I make sure on a live stream that I have plenty of water. It’s not hot because it’s winter right now. But sometimes during a live stream I could go through two liters of water during just the, the thing. And I’m, and I, you guys will hear it as I set it down, but um, you know, generally I try to keep it quiet and sometimes I’ll put some sort of cloth down so it doesn’t, when I set the water down, it doesn’t go
But, uh, do you guys do any vocal exercises or anything before you record?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Before a live stream. If I am, um, yes. Sometimes I will do that. I like to brew tea and I will usually have that just off, uh, or some sort of beverage. I always have that with me. In fact, we’ve made it now into a game on like my live streams every week and I say, what’s in your cup?
because I share with them what’s in my cup. And, um, also for the dry mouth thing. Um, another trick that I have learned over the years is if you have apple slices before you go on, it also has a natural reaction with your body to help you produce more saliva as well. So it can be a good type of snack to have beforehand, to also make sure that you have enough saliva when you are, um, definitely talking for long periods of
Gwen Miller:
time.
Yeah, I think what we, uh, can kind of forget when we start shooting is that it is physically exhausting and it’s an exertion to shoot like you a, the lights can often be very hot, like you’re also not probably used to speaking nonstop. Quite so incessantly for such a length of time. You’re also keeping elevated levels of energy that entire time, more so than you would in almost any in-person situation.
So you’re just running at a high level of adrenaline, uh, under hot lights. With, you know, speaking so much, your, your mouth is drying out. Oftentimes you can find yourself lightheaded as you get along. So that’s why it can be really key to have something to drink there, and you maybe something with a little bit more bite to it, like tea or something with electrolytes, right?
You’ve just got to make sure you’re, treat it like you’re in a sport. You need to replenish those reserves. So especially if you’re doing a longer, for like a longer live stream, that you can actually make it all the way through without feeling like totally wasted by the end
Dane Golden:
of it. Do without saying any names, do your, you know, performance pros, do they ever sing songs or anything like that?
Do you ever have any pre-game rituals without saying who that you thought were interesting.
Gwen Miller:
Well, we, you know, like we have a format where it’s essentially that in, in game form we’re essentially, we give them a word and they have to sing a song based on that word. So a lot of the time, if you see our cold opens and a cold open would be some sort of fun clip that goes to the beginning of a video that really.
Pulls people in. Right. Oftentimes the cold open for that show will be them doing vocal warmups. Oh. Because they’re about to sing like on camera. And it’s just so fascinating to me to watch them because it, it usually takes this progress where like it’s a little, like these are often professional singers too, which is funny, but they’ll get really shy and they’ll just kind of mumble the first couple songs and then by the end of it they’re just belting out these songs because they get really exciting, really into it.
But it’s interesting to see that progression of. Them kind of warn me up their voices and kind of getting comfortable with the idea of, oh, I’m going to do this on camera. Like you can see that entire like, life cycle of emotions and progress in, in a single video, which is, which is always fun to see.
Dane Golden:
Now let’s jump right over.
We’re going to jump right over to the production. So there’s a whole bunch of things that go into the checklist of editing and producing a video. But let’s say now the video is produced and approved. Now let’s go to a checklist of publishing the video. So, What’s one of the first things you think about when you’re thinking about uploading or publishing?
What’s on your checklist? Shelly.
Shelly Saves The Day:
One thing that could be on my checklist is going to be, um, captions, music, um, accompaniments, because if that’s something that we need to do ahead of time, if it’s a longer video, are we sending that out to a service like Rev? Are we trying to upload our own? Are we adding translations?
Are we adding any kind of additional audio tracks eventually, you know, for this kind of audio dubbing for multi-language support. So that could be something. Um, and also the, the video processing time because a lot of people who think, oh, I’m just going to have a video go live as soon as it’s done uploading.
Think most of us know that when it goes on YouTube, it can take a while for it to reach appropriate levels of resolution. So if you don’t want to. Uh, release a video before it hits, let’s say 4k. You obviously don’t want to put that out at 360 and not have a good experience for your viewers. So baking in that time.
And then also, you know, what time of day are you going to publish it and you know, what kind of accompanying social media or. Posts are going to go with it. Are you going to tweet about it? Are you going to be putting that out on stories? Do you know what time and what geographic this is most going to appeal to? And are you going to look for a time that that’s going to be most appropriate?
Is it seasonal? So there’s a lot to do with when do you release it, how do you release it, and how do you tell people that it’s out?
Dane Golden:
So what you’re saying about the uploading part of it is that when you upload a 4K video or something really big, It takes YouTube a while to make it 4k, make it viewable at 4k?
Yes. They’ll start with the lower resolution forms. It’s 360 or whatever it’s uploaded to YouTube. If you publish it now, a lot of people are going to see it and it’s going to be very grainy and even the audio quality is going to be bad. So it takes a little while. So you, you want to think ahead. Do you, does it need to be published right now or is it at some future point?
And, uh, Gwen, do you guys, do you guys upload videos when you do it? Do you do it as private, unlisted, public scheduled? What do you do?
Gwen Miller:
Uh, this is a classic question. So we usually do it as scheduled because we plan out, you know, we are dealing with such a volume content. We’re pretty planned out in terms of, uh, you know, scheduled out.
We know what time it needs to go off. Oftentimes our stuff are synced with print stories that are under our. Bark out. So that pretty much means, hey, we cannot talk about this before, this exact time on this exact day. So we have to make sure that it doesn’t get out there before that. So we’ll schedule it
Dane Golden:
pretty carefully.
Your checklist has what the, it’s, it’s, it’s in incredibly important that that schedule has the exact day in time and probably like timezone.
Gwen Miller:
Yes, yes, yes. We operate a pretty much because the parent company, Easts Coast, it’s just automatically East Coast. Yes. It’s very important that we’re synced up with every piece, and this is like, this is a lot of assets, like this is happening on, in the magazine.
This is happening on. The website, it’s happening on all the social platforms. We have a long form video going on. It’s a massive undertaking of, uh, of coordinating a ton of different projects to hit at the exact minute of the exact same day, uh, and not be delayed.
Dane Golden:
So what, what we do before, before publishing is we think about, um, uh, the video.
The text and the image, so the audio’s baked into the video there. We’re not distributing separately as audio unless it’s a video podcast. Uh, but let’s say it’s not. So there’s a thumbnail that goes with it, and then there’s a lot of things like title, description, captions, and, and then we will repurpose most videos, sometimes not all at the same time.
As blog posts or, yes, social, but, but, but sometimes even something like a LinkedIn, uh, blog post, you know, the long form articles we found is really good for business. Some people like to do something on a medium. Uh, or an external thing that’s not necessarily their own domain name type of blog post. And if you’re a fit like Gwen is, or other people, if you’re affiliated with some sort of online larger thing, like a search engine journal or something like that, you may publish something to your own blog and to their blog post at different times.
And so what we have is we have a spreadsheet that sort of checks off not just where it’s going to be, but what the URL of that thing that exact r l, and this really helps in a feed like a Facebook or a LinkedIn. So you can actually just click. After you’ve published it, you just click on that url, go directly to the Facebook or LinkedIn post, and you can, and you can go right in there as opposed to going into your feed trying to find it.
That is a real trick. So we do what the date that it’s expected to be published. And then when it is published, and then where, where exactly is the URL that it’s published. So those are the, some, some things we do. Uh, uh, Shelly, you have a, you have a business that is about repurposing and republishing content.
What do some people do when they pub? Do they just say at the same day, we’re going to do this long form here and it’s. Everywhere else. What’s the name of your business?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Thank you for that. Um, the name of my business is called Content Minis. So we create micro content and we repurpose from people’s longer videos or video podcasts or longer live streams.
Now, the thing that happens with a lot of people is once they put out a video, they stop. Doing anything with it except for an initial push. And if you’re lucky, maybe a recap email marketing a week later saying, Hey, we released this video last week. Did you see it? Did you catch it? Did you miss it? And.
There’s a lot of time, there’s opportunity. If you think about it. YouTube has even released the feature where you can go into existing long form videos and take a small range selection up to 60 seconds, and you can create a short from one of your longer videos. It’s going to just slice right down the middle, but um, only up to 60 seconds, but you’ll be able to pull a little snippet.
So if YouTube is actually creating this as a feature, They’re totally fine with this and encouraging you to create micro content from some of your existing, and so I think one of the things that happens is what if you have this little Golden nugget that would be so valuable to someone, but it’s buried inside of an hour long video?
Being able to pull it out and extract it and get it in front of the people who need to hear that message most is going to be so beneficial to you, your brand, your business, and to the person watching it. But a lot of people don’t. Go back and look for those things. So that’s what my company does, is we’re going in and with a fresh pair of eyes and looking for what is some little nugget that was interesting that would stand on its own that we could extract and pull out.
But I feel like a lot of businesses and owners, they’re not doing this. They’re not looking for, gosh, this was a really cool thing in a Q and a that could stand alone in its own video. We should do, and it’s always a We should do that. I would like to do that. But they don’t do that. And I, I would encourage people to look at, there’s a lot of great content out there, but sometimes it’s just buried inside of other videos that are labeled other things.
It’s just you went on a side tangent during a live stream or a q and a or something and you had something that was really valuable, but just people won’t find it.
Dane Golden:
And, and Gwen Miller. When we are finished with a YouTube video, should we do one of these things? Should we go on every single social media and put a link to the YouTube video?
Should we take the entire video and upload it natively to every single platform at once? What should we do?
Gwen Miller:
Look, I, I think that can be very dependent on a, what your bandwidth is. So like, you know, look, there’s no foul. If you’re like, I really just have the energy for YouTube, I’m just going to throw a link up on Facebook and Twitter, you know, is it going to give you a lot of bang for your buck?
Not really like, but you know, it’s, it’s going to be more than not taking the. 30 seconds to put it on the platform. But there really is usually more of a benefit to put things natively on these platforms. Especially if you, like you’re part of the Facebook monetization program, you can make some money off the stuff that’s going up there.
And if you’ve already made the content, and maybe you’re going to need to go in and do a couple things to your content to make it better for another platform. Like maybe you have to take up, you have to take up that end card because, Uh, these other platforms don’t have end cards. Like then it could be like, do you want to make a cut down to make a shorter version that you could use on shorts and then you can use on like these other platforms.
You just have to kind of think through. It’s incremental, right? So it’s less work. To making more content. So you’ve already done the work on that content, but there’s just an infinite amount of platforms. I usually encourage people to not, you know, I think for so many years we, as an industry thought there was, there was this myth that you have to be the first on a platform that is not true.
Like 90% of these new platforms come and go within like six months. And if you put all, you put all this time and attention over there. But let me not, let me tell you for like the couple that have survived, if you look, you know, say three years down the line, like. Was it the person who was six months ahead of this other person who’s somehow doing better than them?
Rarely. Like, so I always encourage people strategically pick your platforms. Like use as many parts of the cow as you can because you put a lot of energy in making that content and you should ha live its best life everywhere you can make, make money off of it. Um, but like, don’t think that you’re going to do 20 platforms equally well.
Like pick the ones that are going to be more, most strategic for you in terms of time put into them. And also very importantly, are aligned with your target audience. Cause I see a lot of companies who just feel like they have to be on certain platforms and I’m like, why? Like, your audience is woman over 35.
Why you out on Snapchat? Like they’re not there. Like, go wear your audience in same thing when you have some of these like, you know, kids brands and they’re like, oh, we’ve got to maintain this Facebook presence. I’m like, why? Like your audience is not there. Be strategic about it, but also understand your content is valuable and you can, uh, do incremental things to, to get more money out of the, squeeze the lemon a little bit more.
Dane Golden:
Um, there, there’s one thing that we do that most other channels businesses don’t do, and we do this for our clients. We have a option to run a video as an ad, and a lot of people when they say, oh yeah, I could run a video as an ad, and it’ll get more views, that’s not why we run it. If you’re trying to run a video just to get more views, you’re doing it wrong.
But if you’re a business, and let’s say you’re a local, uh, automotive mechanic, and you make a video, that is how of, it’s called how often, how long should you wait before you get your oil changed? Right? Now, if people are looking up that topic and they’re looking it up on YouTube, for instance, in your area, why wouldn’t you want to be the first result?
The ad. That comes up at the very top of that search for anyone who’s searching in your area. And then when they search, how long before I need a new oil change, you are the one that comes up. And then to, and then you say, and by the way, here we are in your neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, and why don’t you come and visit us.
There is nothing wrong with doing it. It’s not designed to get you views. It is designed to get you sales and you just put a few dollars behind that a week because there’s not going to be a ton of people doing that. But why not use that asset you’ve made to get more sales? It’s a slam dunk and it’s really easy to do.
Uh, we’re out of time. I don’t want to keep you guys. I know you have busy schedules, so until next week, Shelly Saves, The Day, how can people find you?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Please come find me on YouTube under Shelly Saves The Day. Or on my website, same.
Dane Golden:
And Gwen Miller. How can people find you?
Gwen Miller:
Come hang out with me on Twitter.
I’m @gwenim. And then just check me out on LinkedIn. I’m Gwen Miller and I uh, post somewhat regularly there as well.
Dane Golden:
And my name’s Dane Golden from VidAction.tv where we help you up up your game with video and super scale your sales. With YouTube ads, you can also find me at TalkToDane.Today.
Until next week, here’s the helping you help your customers through video.