It can be really hard to stay consistent on your YouTube channel when you have to juggle it with life, and school, and work, and family, and friends, and all the other demands on your time. Well, I am posting almost seven videos every single week, and I want to share with you guys how I balance all that with all those things.
One of you wrote and asked this,
“How do I make more videos in less time without compromising the quality of the videos? It’s tough to maintain YouTube consistently especially when you need to manage school at the same time.”
Great question. And I’m pretty sure every active YouTube creator has asked that at one point or another. I think there’s two parts to this. I’m going to answer them individually and bring it together. Number one is you’ve got to learn how to cut corners and how to sacrifice not the full quality of the video but be able to give up like 20% of the quality by putting in 80% of the work.
The 80/20 Rule
What I mean by that is the 80-20 rule that I subscribe to here is that I have found that I could put a lot of time into getting a video to 100%, but I’ve also often found that doing 20% of the work gets about 80% of the results, and then to get like the extra 20% of the results requires about 80% more work. So I’m not saying like make really junky videos, but after you do this for a while, you start to learn, you know what, I can just make a jump cut here and it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not professional, but whatever. You find out quicker ways to maybe keep a template for your video so you can quickly just change the text on ones here and there. Like you just find ways to take shortcuts and really speed up the process it takes to make a video. And you also start to learn what’s really important, what’s really not, what you can cut out, and what you can leave in, things like that.
Shoot Videos Ahead
The second part of my answer kind of wraps both of your elements together of your question, and that is I would highly recommend, if possible, shooting far ahead in advance. So like here at Video Creators, almost all the videos on this channel, I shoot them one a month at a time, usually around the first weekend of each month. I just plan out all the videos, and I shoot them, and they’re done, except for the Tuesday news videos because those are time sensitive. I have to do my research on those each week and I shoot those individually each week. But all the Q &A videos and all the tip videos, those are usually done by the beginning of the month, and then I can stay consistent even though my life is busy and crazy with everything else because I just took a chunk of time. I ripped off the Bandaid, so to speak, and I got all those video shot all at once. And now for the rest of the month, I can kind of chill and relax a little bit because they’re queued up, ready go on YouTube, and they’re just going to publish automatically on their own.
So I do highly recommend working pretty far ahead as I do or at least– this is what I used to do– just have like two or three videos that are set to private on your channel that are ready to go. During those times when something unexpected comes up and you just don’t have time to make a video that week, well you already got two or three ready go in the can, just set those to public and publish those instead.
So as long as you’re either working ahead or you have some backup videos ready to go, you should be able to stay fairly consistent. And work on your channel when you do have chunks of time to do it rather than trying to find time every single week or whatever your schedule is right now to make it work. But the cool thing about the Video Creators community is that I know there are going to be a lot of other people answering this question for you in the comments below. So if you are struggling right now with balancing everything, read the comment that other people are leaving because I know you are not alone, I am not alone, and the rest of this community will offer great input and advice in the comments below. I’m looking forward to reading all you guys have the say down there as well.