While we started this project almost a year ago or so it has taken some turns and twists and a major change to the Business of Digital YouTube channel. While you might not be thinking about creating 120 or 150 videos for your podcast, you might use some of the thought process and lessons learned to apply to scaling your social media posts, content for your blog or even meta descriptions for 1,000 products.
In the end this episode is not really about just creating videos at scale but the processes and learnings from doing it once poorly and then doing a post-mortem and applying those learnings to doing it faster and better the next time.
So if you recently checked out our episode on starting a new content channel this episode is a great companion to that one.
If you are new to podcasting or video creating there are also some other resources in the form of past episodes that may also help you.
Video Editing Tools
While your usage may vary, these are the tools I use or looked at to create the process for taking our podcasts -> video for YouTube.
Not a case study really but maybe down the line a follow up will be interesting to compare bulk video vs one off and performance.
Full Transcript
Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt and Dave roar. Hey guys, extended to have you join us on another one of these business of digital podcasts. Um, we’re ready to go. How’s it going, Dave?
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:18] It is. It is. It is that’s. Yeah, that’s all I got.
Matt Siltala: [00:00:22] So what does one do during a pandemic when he has nothing but time?
Well, He has other stuff to do, but, uh, but uh, more
Dave Rohrer: [00:00:32] times did a couple months ago, technically
Matt Siltala: [00:00:37] when he has a project staring at it and, you know, staring down at him. And, uh, when, when, uh, and then I’ll be the first to admit it when my son wasn’t being fast enough. Um, We wanted to get a bunch of our podcasts on YouTube and this man and, and a bear says hi to everyone, you know, bark.
But, um, [00:01:00] you did it, you, you basically got a, I know you said you started a couple of months ago, but basically you got over a hundred of them done within the last week. And so, um, we’re going to talk about lessons learned from creating 150 YouTube videos and really. What a couple of weeks.
Dave Rohrer: [00:01:18] Well,
Matt Siltala: [00:01:18] I’m kind of bored.
Dave Rohrer: [00:01:20] So yeah, that’s one of the first lessons I learned was, um, batching. But if I go back even further, your son had started it, but he started it based on what I created. And I created like one or two and I was like, I was like, we should do this. And you were like, Oh, my son I’ll do it. And he did some. And then as I looked at them and what I’d given him in the direction,
Matt Siltala: [00:01:42] he didn’t like the direction
Dave Rohrer: [00:01:44] I didn’t.
Well, yeah. I looked at the, I looked at the, um, the placeholder image that we had and I was like, I really cheaped out on that. Like, that’s not. It’s not really good. Like we were just [00:02:00] going for, what is that Venn diagram? You can go fast, cheap or good, but you can’t
Matt Siltala: [00:02:04] have all three.
Dave Rohrer: [00:02:07] You can pick two. And so we were just going for cheap and fast, but it wasn’t really good.
So I was like, all right, well, what if we flip this and go good and cheap instead of fast? Well, yeah, he wasn’t moving fast, but I also didn’t like what was there? He’d done some, and I was like, This is going to be painful, that I’m going to wipe out what he’s done. But as I looked at it, I didn’t think it was good.
Matt Siltala: [00:02:31] So it was just my money to pay them. So it’s no big deal.
Dave Rohrer: [00:02:35] I
Matt Siltala: [00:02:35] know it’s
Dave Rohrer: [00:02:38] probably all your lunch or something. Um, well, sorry. I looked at it and then I started looking at what other people were doing because we are a podcast and we’re a podcast first, but I know a lot of people that listen to stuff on YouTube, kids and adults.
Like Joe Rogan. I don’t follow Joe Rogan’s podcast, but I do watch it on YouTube sometimes it’s background. [00:03:00] Yeah. And for us not to be a digital marketing related podcasts that you can’t watch on YouTube. I was like, well, I mean, we’re podcasts, but why not?
Matt Siltala: [00:03:13] One thing I don’t think we’ll ever do for you guys though, is live video or video of us.
Cause you know, that would mean we’d have to comb our hair, put clothes on, you know,
Dave Rohrer: [00:03:23] so. I have clothes on. I took a shower already this morning, like four hours ago, five hours
Matt Siltala: [00:03:29] ago,
Dave Rohrer: [00:03:31] to which Matt’s like, I just got out of bed like 25 minutes ago
Matt Siltala: [00:03:34] and nobody needs to see this hair.
Dave Rohrer: [00:03:37] Um, but yeah, so I kind of looked at what we were doing and compared it, and I was like, this is.
Honestly kind of crap. Um, and then I realized if I’m going to do, and at the time I started, I think we had 120, like I think I started in December, like over Christmas, like really kind of go in and go digging in and going, wow, this is really not good. What can [00:04:00] we do? How can I do it? And I ended up figuring out, digging into the proper sizes for, of YouTube.
Matt Siltala: [00:04:09] Yeah, I’ll walk you through that process. How you figured it out.
Dave Rohrer: [00:04:11] Well, yeah, I started looking at, okay, what’s the, what’s the size of a placeholder image that people use. And I started looking for examples. I couldn’t actually find any really good examples. The best one I found was an ESPN one that was just ridiculously over the top.
Beautiful. But I’m like, there’s no way. And also our, our setup is nine times now. Eight times out of 10, it’s just you and I, so I’d have to have a template for us and then a template for when we have a guest every so often. And I did change it up a little bit, but I kept the same structure, but we also don’t have, you know, a story about the bears and then a story about the Cubs and then a story about Tom Brady.
It’s one topic. So the way they did it, I was like, it’s really pretty visually. And it’s a cool place holder [00:05:00] with time, like stamps, if like, if you want to just go to Tom Brady, which is all, you know, Matt would care about, he’d be like, I really don’t care about the bears. I don’t care about the Cubs. You know, I’ll just go to the 25 minute Mark.
Boom. We’re not set up for
Matt Siltala: [00:05:15] Brady again, when he retires a Patriot, I’ll put it
Dave Rohrer: [00:05:17] there. Well, that’s true. Yeah. That’s the that’s the first and last time that the rest of the season, you want to hear his name doing anything good.
Matt Siltala: [00:05:24] Yeah.
Dave Rohrer: [00:05:25] Um, but I was like, that’s not really our setup, but I like the visual, the cleanness of it.
So I was like, all right, I look for others. And then we have a small child.
Matt Siltala: [00:05:35] This is, this is the pandemic man. Small children are allowed.
Dave Rohrer: [00:05:39] Hi. Are you supposed to be in here? That’s a boss. Okay. Okay. DJ. You need to get out of my office,
tell mom she’s fired as bodyguard or security.
[00:06:00] They come, I made his lunch. And as I was doing that, I was like, I have to go record in two minutes. And he’s like, okay.
Matt Siltala: [00:06:13] Yeah.
Dave Rohrer: [00:06:15] And then he busts in here to show me some boss in from some video game. Cause that’s important.
Matt Siltala: [00:06:20] Yes. Yes.
Dave Rohrer: [00:06:23] So anyhow, I will probably cut some of this out or maybe not. We’ll see.
Matt Siltala: [00:06:28] Um, I mean, Hey, it’s depend demic.
Like we’re real. This is, this is a Corona time. This is,
Dave Rohrer: [00:06:33] this is why I usually try to record when the children are not home from school. Um,
Matt Siltala: [00:06:40] well, it just goes more to the, what we were talking about and lessons learned and you know, this is a, this is the equivalent to, you know, this, at least for us, it’s not like, uh, you know, I was reading, um, a, um, a what’s it called?
I think you should leave it because I was reading this a Facebook post from a friend of mine, and she’s like, I’ve been reading all this [00:07:00] stuff about things, been happening to Zim and, and, and it’s funny. And then, and tell your 23 year old daughter walks into your zoom meeting. I’m naked and she’s like, then it becomes all areas and, uh, anyway,
Dave Rohrer: [00:07:15] except for the daughter.
Matt Siltala: [00:07:16] Yeah. So anyway, it’s real. It’s, it’s just what’s happening now. I know that, uh, um, you know, it is, it is what it is so
Dave Rohrer: [00:07:25] completely sidetracked, so yeah. You don’t care about anything other than Tom Brady. Um, so yeah, I looked at a bunch of examples and then I ended up using, um, I think we’ve talked about it for, I looked at Canva.
And a relay that had a template and both of them had different templates and I’d looked at some other sources, but what I ended up figuring out was where can I go? That I can create a template that I scale. I can just keep swapping in, you know, whatever the guest images, the name of the show. And if you go to our YouTube, you’ll [00:08:00] see that there’s a very consistent look.
Yeah across it, other than maybe the guest photos being swapped in for the logo and the title always changing. But I think it’s
Matt Siltala: [00:08:14] just that that’s something we’ve always tried to do across all our channels. Try to be super consistent with look. So people know the same
Dave Rohrer: [00:08:21] color scheme. I use the same colors. I use the same imagery, um, for non.
Creative person. I thought I did a decent job.
Matt Siltala: [00:08:31] No, it is. Yeah.
Dave Rohrer: [00:08:33] Um, but so that was okay. I was like, alright, so I can scale that. I can do that. Well, it looks better. Um, and then I came up with. I’m doing some I’ve done. It’s been years since I’ve done any sort of SEO for YouTube. So I started digging into the basics of some YouTube things to at least try to optimize them.
I mean, when you’re optimizing that many pieces of content, you try to, I mean, whether you’re doing blog posts or [00:09:00] videos or anything, there’s that, like I said, there’s a balance between good scale and you know, everything else. Um, but I came up with. What’s that
Matt Siltala: [00:09:11] now is YouTube still, automatically translating all of these videos as well?
Dave Rohrer: [00:09:16] Um, no, but I could, well, I think they are to some extent, but I can upload now that we have a service, um, doing our transcriptions, which I don’t really clean up, but I could start uploading those as well, but I do not have those for all 150.
Matt Siltala: [00:09:35] And that’s what I was curious about. You know, at least those ones that we do have access to going back and.
Uploading. Cause I’ve always heard that the, uh, you know, the, the version that you get with YouTube is definitely not as good as like the version, if you do it yourself, or if you have a company that that’s what they do. And actually
Dave Rohrer: [00:09:53] I could probably go back and at least for the last 10, I know I for sure have, um, [00:10:00] and, but going forward, I will probably add that to my little, to do list when I’m doing it.
Um,
Matt Siltala: [00:10:05] Or, or what would be interesting that you could do on a couple of them? You know, just comparing. Yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, play, play with a couple of them on that, you know, the, for the SEO value and tweak this, that here. I mean, make another good case. The case study in a podcast episode,
Dave Rohrer: [00:10:22] I probably could do that.
Oh, I’ve got as I think about other, not to go off topic, but we do have at least the last 20 episodes have the transcript. On the page on our site. Yeah. So I have started to do that, so I could go back. Um, but I don’t have all 150, so I didn’t start that process, but that’s kind of what I did is I started looking at internal proximal processes or steps and templates.
So each of the, um, I use notepad plus plus you could use notepad [00:11:00] or, you know, whatever. Google sheet or over document, whatever your preference is. But I just had this one tab that I always opened up. And every time I started doing batches and uploading them, I had a process when I was creating the videos because it’s, I looked at, um, what’s I looked at movie maker on windows and I actually ended up figuring out how to use it.
It’s very simple. Um, I looked at. Very elaborate and over the top type of solutions online and offline. And I was going again that balance of scale and speed and good. We’re not doing tons of editing. We’re not doing tons of crazy, you know, splicing of stuff. It’s I just need the placeholder and I just needed the audio.
So I just needed something that would combine them in a high quality fashion and actually of all things. Movie maker on windows works really well.
Matt Siltala: [00:11:58] Hmm.
Dave Rohrer: [00:11:59] Interesting. [00:12:00] Um, the only problem I had was if you put up a placeholder image, I had to have an Excel open at all times, and I would calculate the number of seconds, total, not minutes and seconds but seconds.
So that, that little placeholder, if, if we were doing a 20 minute. Podcast. It would be up there for 20 times, 60 seconds. So 1200 and I would have to in the little software type in duration, 1200. So I was always calculating for each one. Like how many are there? It’s a weird, I think hack though the way I was using it.
Um, but again, I looked at two or three other offline and one or two online solutions and they were all like, Lots of money or overly complicated. And I’m like, I’m really trying to, to the most basic kind of video. Um, and it’s just a bit [00:13:00] of, you know, testing, seeing what, seeing what your use case is and figuring out what works.
Yeah. Um, so yeah, it was testing the, figuring out the process. And then when I actually went to publish the large, the thing that took the longest was usually. Waiting for it to crunch it on one of the computers, but really the slowest thing is uploading the darn thing to YouTube. Yeah. I’m like, that’s, you can go and do lots of other stuff around the house when you’re doing this many videos, but it’s like each one takes 15, 20 minutes.
Oh, wow. And we’re only talking 20 minute, you know, not large videos, but it uploads it and then it. Does whatever their backend system is. But I mean to their credit, how many minutes and hours and days worth of video is uploaded? Like what every hour or something.
Matt Siltala: [00:13:57] It’s going to be interesting to see this long [00:14:00] term too.
And see what, uh, the analytics saying, are there more people that are listening a, you know, via the AKA watching, but are there, you know, where are we getting the most views listens from whatever you want to call it? Is it going to be YouTube? Is it going to be Spotify? ITunes, Google play one of the other ones, you know, that’ll be interesting to see
Dave Rohrer: [00:14:19] overcast or any of the, you know, third party players.
And for me, it was just interesting, the looking at it and going, wow. And at the time I was like, you know, creating a one off YouTube video I’ve done in the past. And we used to have, you know, Our creative guy would create the intro. And then he would do lots of fine tuning and detailed I’m like, but we don’t have that.
So this is like a different process for a hundred videos, 150 videos.
Matt Siltala: [00:14:47] And you have a full, full, full blown legit YouTube channel with 150 videos on it. I
Dave Rohrer: [00:14:53] do. Now what I say to do that every time? No, but like, [00:15:00] as we just rolled out the a hundred and 50th episode, I wanted to be able to start catching up and actually pushing them out live.
But until I caught up, I felt weird pushing out new ones.
Matt Siltala: [00:15:15] Well, and it’ll, it’ll be nice to now that now that it’s caught up, like the one that’s with it can be pushed out, but we also, like what’s been done in the past how we push out, you know, old episodes that are relevant, but, but just going to the. To the, now it’ll be really nice to have those because you know, it’s across all channels across all podcast listener, you know, it’s all of the, you know, w w we have everything covered basically.
And it’s nice too, because I was thinking with the, the disc, you know, getting the transcript services and stuff done like that, I don’t know all that it takes to get your sites, you know, American disabilities. What is it compliant? Yeah, but, uh, you know, this is one of those [00:16:00] areas that helps cause it’s, you know, you could read it, you can listen to it.
It’s, it’s all there, no matter what you need. And so lots of different avenues. I don’t know. I just think it’s, it’ll be, it’ll be interesting to see if it helps to having them side by side and boosting those numbers. You love David. I know you’re going to love to see that.
Dave Rohrer: [00:16:19] I liked her though. Yup. Yeah. Well, and one of them just by, what was it the one last week or was it two weeks ago when the Google cork update happened?
We had that conversation before, like a couple of months ago with Casey. We had the video up there. So if you go and find that video with Casey, I know he shared it a week or two ago and we shared it some last week. Um, it’s got a few hundred views now and I literally had just put it up. We never promoted it.
Never did anything. Yeah. So there’s, some people would rather share that because you don’t [00:17:00] need a player. Yeah. You don’t need, and for us, it’s all about mix of the distribution to, um, for me, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do it. Move your podcast to YouTube. Um, Because why not people might find it? Yeah.
Matt Siltala: [00:17:17] It’s, it’s like with what, I mean, we’re practicing what we preach.
It’s what we tell, you know, it’s what we tell all of our clients. It’s just one more Avenue for you to be found, you know, if you’re doing so well. And again, I understand a lot of people, you know, and then not to get too far off the subject, but you know, you have those people that you meet and you get to, they’re like, I built this business on Instagram and, and that’s great and all, but.
Don’t you want to expand it and don’t you want to get it out further, you know, have a real website and the, anyway, it’s just a, it’s just part of that whole conversation that we’ve had a million times,
Dave Rohrer: [00:17:51] and it’s all about processes, really. If nothing else, even if you’re like, well, we don’t create content.
I don’t really give two hoots about YouTube. Dave, [00:18:00] think about your content creation. Think about any processes you have in your agency or in your, in your company or even for your own tasks. What is your process? How is it documented? How can you hand it off to someone? Okay. Well,
Matt Siltala: [00:18:15] yeah, like you were talking about earlier, before we started recording how, like, with my photographs, I just got back from Norway a few months ago, um, before the world shut down and, uh, I took thousands of photos and, you know, there’s, there’s obviously presets for certain types of, uh, photographs that I take, but, um, Over the years, the way that I’ve gone through those and process them, um, even to the extent of when you’re going through and you’re just starting ones, ones that you look, you know, that look good, and you’re just starting.
I mean, you filter out a thousand to a couple hundred and then you take those couple of hundred to, you know, the top 20 [00:19:00] or 30 that you like. And then those are the ones that you work on and then you apply your filters to, or your presets. And so. Again, you know, getting to that point, took a process and it’s just what you’re saying.
So no matter whether it’s this or whether it’s that just have that process is I think what your point is.
Dave Rohrer: [00:19:16] Well, and when we handed this off to your son, I, as I look back, I’m like, I did not give him enough direction. Like he had some stuff and he was adding some stuff. But as I looked in and did some more research on the SEO side of it, I was like, W I’m, we’re going to need to go back and add more content.
There’s really? No, like now if you go to our videos, there’s links to each of the videos or each of the full, um, pages that corresponds with that video. So you can listen to it. You can subscribe to it. Um, the transcript, you know, if you want the full transcript it’s on our site. So I link over to that. I link over to our Spotify, you know, any of the places that people might subscribe to the podcast.
So for [00:20:00] us, if we get a couple people each week finding those videos and a couple of them subscribing over the course of the next couple of months, it can add up when it
Matt Siltala: [00:20:11] goes back to what you have been preaching on this podcast forever, how we started and. Just always getting better. Like that’s, that’s what it comes down to.
You know, I,
Dave Rohrer: [00:20:19] I can’t think of a client or another excuse in many, many years where I’ve had, um, was it 2006, 2007 was the last time that I created like, you know, 50 videos for YouTube and uploaded them and tried to optimize them at scale. So, you know, once every 10, 10, 15 years, I suppose, um, you know, this process will come in handy again.
Um, But yeah, I think whether it’s, you know, you’re scaling or trying to scale, and I think people look at scaling as a bad thing, but it’s just trying to optimize your processes, trying to optimize things. So rather than spending two hours, 10 times on something, what if you spend [00:21:00] 20 minutes, 20 times?
Matt Siltala: [00:21:02] Well, and something else that I think maybe you’re forgetting to think about too, is think about all the people that are starting podcasts lately and have started them over the last year, six months.
Especially during this pandemic, um, there’s been a lot of podcasts and things like that started. These people are going to eventually come to you or me or some other agency. And we’re going to notice, Hey, you guys have had this podcast, you have 20 episodes and, you know, have you done this and this with it?
Or have you done that with it? And this can be one of those areas where you can bring value to it. And you might actually end up doing this more than you think that you’re going to be doing it. So.
Dave Rohrer: [00:21:35] Well, even if, you know, say we do we’re at one 50 now say we do 300 and then we’re like, alright, 300 is our magic number.
We’re done. You know, life, life, life, life comes at you quick. We decided to do something else. We’ll have 300 still up. Yeah. Even if we don’t keep the site up. Yeah. We’ll have 300 of them on YouTube. So years down the line. We’ll still have that content out [00:22:00] there is another way I look at it too.
Matt Siltala: [00:22:01] It’s great for branding.
Great. For names. Great. For reputation. Everything. Yeah. Well, um, any final thoughts on this?
Dave Rohrer: [00:22:09] Nope. I, I mean, this is supposed to be kind of a lessons learned about YouTube and I talked a little bit of a couple tools, but really. If you’re going to do anything, look at, not just, even if you’re not scaling, look at your processes, look at ways to improve it.
You know, we just talked about doing a postmortem before. Um, I kind of did one after his son started to look at or started to do it. And I was like, okay, if I’m going to do this, here’s the issues I saw with how I, what I told him to do, how he was doing it, you know, the direction really w what the.
Collateral that I gave him. I basically audited my own hand off to him and went, if I was going to hand it off to myself, what would I need? And I ripped it all apart, started over. And now I think I have, after doing multiple batches, been able to improve it pretty quickly. Now of course, now that I’m done, I’ve got it down pretty [00:23:00] good, but hopefully you can, you know, figure out your own processes.
Matt Siltala: [00:23:06] Well, and as always reach out to us, let us know if there’s anything that we can help you with. And, uh, just a gentle reminder. We’re on iTunes guys, everybody go there and give us a five star review. We’d be grateful for that. Hopefully we’ve been giving you information over these years that, uh, are, are worthy and warrant that.
And so, uh, for, uh, Dave Roth, Northside metrics, I met Sophia with avalanche media and thank you guys for joining us. Bye bye.
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