It’s not a secret anymore that planning and scheduling YouTube videos in advance is essential for reaching success in the platform.
The reasons are straightforward: if you have a few backup videos ready ahead of time, you’ll rarely lose consistency in your upload schedule.
Furthermore, establishing a place to store all your ideas for future content will help you immensely. You’ll be able to make more efficient use of your time since you won’t have to come up with ideas in a rush before filming.
Lastly, we’re going to discuss content calendars and how to schedule content for each month.
Planning is essential for success. Ready to discover the main principles to plan, organize and schedule your videos to be ahead of the game?
Let’s begin!
Planning and Organizing YouTube Videos: Step by Step Process
Brainstorm
To initiate the brainstorming session, open a new document or your notes app (pen and paper if you are the analogic type!) and begin to jot down some ideas.
If you struggle to come up with ideas, think of 3-5 main keywords that describe your channel. Then, think of video ideas for each one.
Remember to keep your eyes open to ideas to film video series!
You can also search popular videos or channels in your niche and see what they’re doing.
By studying your competitors you’ll know their weaknesses (as well as their strengths) and therefore, you’ll also figure out how to make better videos that rank higher!
Lastly, you’ll want to refine that giant list of ideas. Remove the ideas without potential, and also erase the repetitive or too similar ones.
#Bonus tip: It’s important for SEO purposes that you run your ideas somewhere (TubeBuddy is a great tool, Google Trends, and YouTube search suggestions are some free alternatives) and tweak keywords in the video ideas for better rankings. You’ll want, if possible, to target low competition, high search volume keywords!
After all that hard work, you have now a list with a decent number of future video ideas.
Believe me when I say that a list like this will help your channel (and your sanity!) tremendously.
Make sure to keep an eye on your videos’ comment section for suggestions that come straight up from your audience (that’ll also help you to know them better!)
Since your ideas have to be things that people actually look for or want to see, doing keyword research and knowing your audience are awesome tools to get the best chances of increasing views and attract eyeballs.
This list of ideas can become very big and confusing, so, extra points if you organize it in a spreadsheet in different categories!
Plan the upcoming month
Now that you’re equipped with a solid list of ideas, you can start to properly plan.
The way you choose to organize your content is totally personal, but I’ll explain to you a simple system that works like a charm.
I love tools like Asana or Trello to organize content for YouTube, because you can move and drag things around, reorganizing them with huge flexibility. I generally keep a few lists to organize the content creation process. These are the ones I use:
- Video ideas
- June (or whatever month)
- Outline
- Film
- Edit
- Completed
Once you create these lists, transfer your video ideas to the “video ideas” list. Drag some of these ideas to the month list, according to the videos you want to film in that specific month.
Next, you’ll drag those videos to the other lists as you complete each task. When you outline a video, you move it to the “outline” list; once you filmed it, you drag it on the “film” list, and so on.
You can replicate this process in different Word documents or even in a spreadsheet if not a great fan of the tools I mentioned.
This system allows you to see at a glance where you are in the creative process, what it’s left to do, and what your progress looks like.
You can plan from a few weeks to 6 months ahead, it depends on your style and flexibility needs!
Maintain a few videos ready to publish will ensure that you can still upload even if you’ve had a bad week and were not able to film. Work on that consistency!
Schedule your videos and create a content calendar
For this step, you can use a calendar tool like Google Calendar, or simply create a content calendar in a spreadsheet.
The idea is to schedule, firstly, the day you are going to publish each video idea that you have in the “month” list.
#Bonus tip: schedule the specific hour you want to upload as well. In YouTube Studio, you can see your audience’s analytics and find out the best days and hours to publish your content (based on their activity). Schedule to upload just before the peak time for maximum effect!
Use color coding at your advantage: make the film, edit and publish days a different color, to see at a glance which activities you have to do each week to reach your goals.
I recommend filming and editing in bulk to be more focused and productive. In one single day, you can film 2-3 videos, and then another day edit them before the upload date. Our brains respond so much better to a single activity, rather than the pressure of switching tasks way too frequently.
Outline and script your video
Did you know that outlines are vital to increasing your watch time and audience retention?
A good video structure will prevent you from simply turn on the camera and start talking. If you do that every time you film a video, you’re risking being repetitive, slow, and scattered.
Because let’s be real, people don’t have time to watch someone talk for 30 min about something that can be said in 8 min.
Having a script or a simple outline will make your filming and editing much more efficient.
If you are talking to the camera directly I don’t recommend a full script, because it will sound unnatural, like you’re reading.
But a simple outline to follow along (with the content divided into different headers and a few key points below each) will ensure you don’t lose track while talking, keeping it straight and to the point.
Conclusion
Follow these steps and your channel’s consistency will be on-point. You’ll also be less stressed about meeting your deadlines if you have a few videos ready to publish beforehand.
Foresight and planning skills are a big key to success in any business. Treat your channel seriously, and you will get the results that you are looking for!
By the way, did you know the benefits of using YouTube for businesses?
I don’t want to end the blog post before saying that you have to acknowledge the fact that life is unpredictable. Several factors are playing at any moment! Don’t forget to allow room for flexibility in the plan you create.
Because it’s wonderful to have your content planned, but if you want to film something else or follow your inspiration, make sure to have the space to do it as well. Remember to have fun!
Hope this has helped :) Share in the comments: what planning strategy have you been using in your channel lately? I’ll love to read how you approach your business. Oh, and I almost forget: if you want to give your channel a real boost, see our packages and let us do the work!
