It’s easy to feel burnout as a YouTube creator when you don’t see the growth you want from your videos or if you’ve just overextended yourself with too much work. It’s common for creators to go through phases of feeling like they lost the passion they once had for their YouTube channel. How do you beat the discouragement and frustration and get the passion back so you can continue to publish new videos that serve your viewers well? I’ll give you 5 ideas for that here in this video.

The great question from Elizabeth Cooper from a private Facebook group that I am a part of, asks: After spending a ton of time and effort over the past 6 months on my channel, I can feel burnout starting to set in. I’ve been putting out two videos a week this year, and suddenly I find myself at a point where all the motivation and excitement has vanished. I need to film a video today so I can stick to my schedule and post tomorrow, but I’d seriously rather scrub toilets or have a root canal. So what do I do? Anyone else struggle with this in regard to their channel? How do you push through it? Take a break? I’m not sure how to do that without disappointing people who are waiting for the next video. Any advice would be much appreciated. Tim, I love your take since you’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m sure you must have dealt with burnout a time or two. Thanks.

  • “After spending a ton of time and effort over the past 6 months on my channel, I can feel burnout starting to set in. I’ve been putting out two videos a week this year, and suddenly I find myself at a point where all the motivation and excitement has vanished. I need to film a video today so I can stick to my schedule and post tomorrow, but I’d seriously rather scrub toilets or have a root canal. So what do I do? Anyone else struggle with this in regard to their channel? How do you push through it? Take a break? I’m not sure how to do that without disappointing people who are waiting for the next video. Any advice would be much appreciated. Tim, I love your take since you’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m sure you must have dealt with burnout a time or two. Thanks. “

Yes, I certainly have. In fact, last year we had a few videos talking about the dip on YouTube, and how do you push through that and everything. So go check those videos out. Links are below.
Let me give you five ideas for your specific situation, Elizabeth, that might help you push through that.

1 – Give Yourself a Break

Maybe just make a quick video update, post it to your channel, letting people know that you are taking a break, you’re taking some time off, but that you’ll be back. I would say probably take no longer than a month or so, and use it as an opportunity to maybe push people to follow you in your other social profiles like Instagram and Snapchat, or maybe your Facebook page or whatever the case may be, where it is easier for you to interact. You’re doing that more naturally throughout the week anyway.

2 – Shoot & Edit in Batches

Shoot and edit all of your videos in batch. This is what I do here on Video Creators, actually. So instead of sitting down multiple times a week and shooting and editing, just sit down once, draft ideas for all your content for the month, then sit down and shoot all them for the month in front of the camera. Then sit down and edit all of them. And so rather than just taking a couple hours throughout the week, just sit down, maybe take a day or two every month, and just crank it all out. Then you can upload all those videos, schedule them to publish at the appropriate time on YouTube, and then just check back, in reply to comments, and promote the videos and do all those types of things.

3 – Consider Reducing Your Posting Frequency

Instead of publishing two videos a week as you’re currently doing, Elizabeth, consider just doing one video week if that would be more manageable for you going forward with your channel. I know for me at Video Creators a year or two ago, I was publishing three videos every week, but as fun as that was, as much as I loved the creative side, the interaction and all that, it ultimately became unsustainable for the channel because I didn’t then have the time I needed to develop the business side of this channel that ultimately would make the three videos a week sustainable in the first place.

So here, I’ve since cut back to one video, sometimes two. I’ll throw an extra one in once in a while.

4 – Consider Cutting Back on Production Time

Also consider cutting back on some of the production side of your videos. So for example, right here I have a place that’s just set up, which I’ve given a behind the scenes look at all this for my patrons, a total behind the scenes tour. Thank you, guys, who are supporting this on Patreon and making all this happen.

Have a setup that you can just come, sit down, shoot, and be done. Like, you don’t have to set up lights and cameras and microphones and backdrops and everything over and over again. Figure out a system you can put in place that makes it easy for you to just be able to quickly crank out content.

Maybe another idea for that would be if you’re doing a lot of highly produced stuff, or you’re just doing a lot of takes, you’re doing a lot of cuts and stuff, like, you’ve already seen me leave a few of my mistakes in this video. I go back and change my words a little bit. That’s fine. You guys didn’t think anything of that. In fact, it makes you feel like a little bit more human.

Or maybe instead of doing lots of cuts, maybe just do, like, one take, you know? Instead of setting up all these different camera angles and stuff, just one take and do it blog style, and that’s what I got time for today. So your audience is probably very forgiving of that assuming that you’re still delivering the same type of value. The overall goal of that is to spend less time setting up, editing, tearing down, cutting cameras together, editing– everything. Just find ways to streamline your process.

5 – Keep a Backlog of Videos Ready to Go

And number five, consider keeping a few videos ready to go on your channel, just keeping them private there for that time when you just have a crazy week and you still want to be consistent on your schedule, on your channel, but you just don’t have the time to publish something. If you have a few videos all ready to go as backups in the can, private on your Facebook and channel, then when that time comes, all you have to do is just pull one of those out of your back pocket so to speak, and set it to public, and give yourself some breathing room.

So work with some buffer. Don’t just always work up to the deadline for every single video. Maybe try to stay, like, two or three videos ahead so you have more wiggle room there.

What are your thoughts? Comment below and let us know!

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