The 2020 Video Challenge

How I Produced 9 New YouTube Videos in Less Than 1 Hour

Spending two-thirds of your time planning can make your life a lot easier

How long does it take you to make a YouTube video? How often do you upload a new video for your channel?

Depending on your topic or style, maybe you answered, “Once per week.” Or, maybe you fancy yourself a very fast creator, and you can make a new video every day.

If you really sat down and worked at it, though, could you go faster? What if you totally stripped away all concerns about editing, scripting, planning, etc. and just hit the record button, over and over? Could you make a new video every hour? Every half hour?

How about every 2.33 minutes?

Speed Shooting

Sounds insane? Well, maybe a little. But that’s what I did on a recent video session for my home automation YouTube channel.

About a month ago, I wrote a piece called How I Come up With Great Ideas for YouTube Videos. I didn’t add in the “great” part — that came from my editor! I would say that “how I come up with mediocre but lucrative ideas for YouTube videos” is more accurate, but I do appreciate the vote of confidence!

In that article, I walked through my process for developing lots of new video ideas quickly. At the end of the article, I had a list of about 30 video ideas around the Dyson V7 vacuum. I swore that I would take you, my readers, through the process of actually creating those videos and analyzing their success.

Yesterday, I sat down at just past 8:37 a.m. with my list, my Dyson vacuum, and my camera phone. I started shooting videos with almost no pause in between. I did this until 9:00 a.m.

When I came up for air, I saw that I had produced nine new videos in the span of about 22 minutes. That means I made a new video every 2.33 minutes.

How do I make videos so fast? Let’s take a closer look.

Plan in Advance

I can’t stress this enough. There’s no way you can make videos this fast without planning your topics in advance.

As I walked through in the other articles, I comb the internet for questions about any new device I’m covering. I then make a simple list of video topics in question format. Crucially, I choose questions that I already know the answer to or can easily research in a few minutes.

I also choose questions where I can share a personal perspective (like “is this product worth it?”). These questions let me share personal, firsthand knowledge, which is often really helpful to viewers, and it has the added bonus of requiring no research at all (more on this later). You just need to have clear, well-developed opinions, and then you can crank these kinds of videos in advance.

Before you sit down to shoot, choose a few topics you can cover easily. Start with the low-hanging fruit. And don’t be afraid that a topic is too basic — if someone is asking it on the internet, they need the info, and it doesn’t matter if the concept feels obvious or “too easy" to you.

Do people really need a video about how to charge the Fitbit Flex fitness tracker? Apparently, they do. My 1.5-minute video on the topic has already amassed 9,200 views.

I choose the simplest, most straightforward questions first. I also choose questions I can answer without having to use more equipment, move to a new location, etc.

Once I have my questions ready, I can start to shoot.

Don’t Think, Just Shoot

Once you have your questions in place, get out your camera or phone, take a deep breath, and start shooting.

The key here is not to overthink your videos. Don’t pause or restart every time you say a wrong word, say “um," etc. Commit to continuing to shoot, no matter what.

I think of this like producing a live show, or being in a play. If you were on “SNL,” you couldn’t stop and have a redo every time you messed something up. The show includes whatever happened during the live taping, warts and all.

And that’s part of “SNL’s” appeal. Some of the funniest sketches of all time come about when the cast is having fun, making mistakes, etc.

Think about Jimmy Fallon barely making it through “More Cowbell” without cracking up while Christopher Walken remains perfectly composed and straight-faced. It’s a transcendent, perfect sketch. If they had done multiple takes until Fallon got it under control, the whole thing would have been a lot more ordinary and less hilarious.

Embrace the imperfections in your videos. Mess up and restart a sentence. Say the wrong stat and correct yourself. Your viewers really don’t care as long as you ultimately get to the right info.

In some ways, imperfection is actually a mark of quality on YouTube. It’s proof that you’re sharing your actual thoughts about a product, and you’re not some giant corporate entity churning out polished, inauthentic videos with a massive social media budget.

Opinions Are Free

Facts are time-consuming and require research. Opinions, again, are fast and free.

And ultimately, they’re what your viewers are after. They don’t need you to memorize and regurgitate the spec sheet for a product, the hours for a business you’re reviewing, etc. They can find that info through a simple Google search or a glance at an Amazon page.

They want to hear what you think about whatever topic you’re covering. What did you like about that restaurant? What bothered you? How did you use a product and did it work well?

That’s not to say that your videos should have no facts. It’s great to share a specific, factual piece of info. But remember that your opinions and perspectives are just as important — especially if you’re an expert in your field.

As an example, one of my questions from research was, “Do you have to hold the trigger on the Dyson V7?” In my video, I didn’t just share the factual answer (“Yes"). I also talked about why I actually liked that feature (it allows you to save battery, it makes you feel like some kind of dirt murdering Xbox character, etc.).

I still got the info in there, but I shared some opinions that give the video a personal perspective and will likely resonate with my audience.

And the best part? Personal opinions are free and irrefutable. You don’t have to spend time researching them. And you can’t get them wrong.

If I make a video about the V7’s voltage, I’d better get that fact correct. If I get it wrong, someone is bound to call me out on it, and I’ll be sharing unreliable info.

But my opinion about whether the V7 is worth buying? That’s my own and it’s not subject to debate. No one can come along and argue that I don’t think the V7 is a good deal, that I don’t find it helpful for vacuuming out a car seat, etc.

When you’re shooting quickly, try to center your video around one to two easy to research facts. Then, focus the rest of your time on sharing your own perspectives and opinions around that fact.

That ensures that you’re providing viewers both with valuable info and with equally (often more) valuable opinions from an actual expert, product user, customer, etc. The facts add research time, but the opinions don’t.

Adding in lots of your own perspective personalizes your videos, connects you with your viewers, and shifts the balance of your shoots away from research and toward producing more content quicker.

How Good Are These, Really?

So I produced my videos very quickly, but are they any good?

I don’t know. And you don’t either.

Ultimately, only the market can tell us if my nine videos are actually helpful. Only time will tell whether they’ll rack up a healthy view count (indicating value and earning me money), or if they’ll sit unviewed and unloved and we’ll know they weren’t worthy of an audience.

No quality metric is going to tell you or me in advance. Production quality certainly won’t. Heck, one of the videos is sideways. My phone failed to auto-rotate it. But it still shares good info, and so I’m not going to bother reshooting it.

Likewise, viewers themselves can’t tell us about the videos' quality through their likes/dislikes or their comments. Only their actions will reveal their true opinions — if they view the videos (and watch through the end), then the videos were helpful to them.

I can practically guarantee that someone will have something negative to say about these videos. And yours, too, if you shoot them quickly — and even if you don’t. It really doesn’t matter — if viewers spend time engaging with them, that’s a much more reliable indicator of the videos' value than people's subjective opinions.

How Much Will I Make?

In the end, these nine videos took 22 minutes to shoot. But they also took a bit less than 30 minutes to research and about 10 minutes to caption and upload. That means the whole package of producing and publishing them took about one hour of my time.

How much can I expect to make from that hour? What’s my effective hourly rate?

Here’s the cool thing — it’s not predetermined in any way, nor is it fixed. I’ve already spent that hour to produce the videos — it’s “invested.” At the moment, my hourly rate is $0. But anything I make on the videos from here to eternity is just going to increase that hourly rate.

These videos could earn me little bits of money for years — at least at long as the Dyson V7 is a viable product — and likely longer. I have videos that I shot in 2015 about Fitbit products that no longer exist, and they still earn me a little money each month.

One of these videos could take off, too, through some quirk of YouTube’s algorithms. Or, they could sit unwatched for months, and then suddenly explode next Christmas season on a day that Amazon happens to have a sale on the V7.

The hour spent producing them is a sunk cost. Anything they make from here on out is purely passive income. And each cent is just going to increase my effective rate for that one “invested” hour of my time.

What will my hourly rate ultimately be? It could be zero — certainly, I have videos that never take off and never earn much of anything. Or, it could be $500+; I’ve had videos that took a few minutes to produce and went on to earn hundreds of dollars.

I don’t know yet how these will do. But let’s find out.

I’ll track this set of videos over the next year and see how they earn — and what my effective hourly rate ends up being. I’ll report on this as part of my ongoing 2,020 Video Challenge. Let’s find out together how these do.

Could you make a YouTube video every 2.33 minutes? Why not find out?

Do some background research using my methods or your own. Come up with a list of at least 10 questions, each of which could become videos.

Then, grab your smartphone and start shooting. Don’t stop, and don’t correct yourself. Pretend you’re doing a play or taping a live show, and just keep recording, no matter what. Recognize that flaws and imperfections might make your video even more valuable and relatable to your audience.

Try to share a solid fact in each video. But otherwise, fill them in with your own opinions and perspectives. Viewers can Google facts — they want to get firsthand info from a real product user, customer, expert, etc. And that’s you.

Once you have your videos, don’t try to guess about their quality. Put them online and see what the market thinks. Ignore the haters and watch your metrics. If people are viewing your videos (and especially if you’re earning from them), they’re valuable — congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Making a video every day is a great start. Making nine in half an hour is a genuine challenge, and one worth taking on. Try it out, and see if you can create a video every two to three minutes!