How to Be a YouTuber and Writer without Family Support

Eff em.

My wife looked over at my title and blurb with peculiarity. Her eyebrows squinted, me unable to tell if she was annoyed, irritated, or curious.

Heck, maybe all three simultaneously.

“Hm. Whatever floats your boat.”

She said this with a smile, but I know what resides in her heart.

We’ve been here before. She respects the hustle as long as it does not interfere with family time.

Deal.

I never needed the cliched “loving support” of my wife. I just needed to produce results.

I have been YouTubing it up since 2016 without my spouse's approval or co-sign.

You don’t need it either. You need to believe in your heart of hearts that you will deliver results, and from there, you will make your spouse a believer.

I’m going to teach you how.

Ready, Aim, Equip

The following crotch-grabbing boldness will require the following:

• A smartphone
• Scripting abilities
• A teleprompter app
• Inshot or your preferred mobile video editor
• An eye for opportunity
• Sacrifice of your spare time

Unless you have Cal Newport aspirations of being a social media hermit, I will assume you have a smartphone handy (dating back by three years minimum).

Dee Nimmin had long ago popularized being a “mobile YouTuber” where the word mobile is binary in definition:

• Mobile, as in mobile phone
• Being on-the-go

What I’m preaching is not new news. It’s sage wisdom that’s even more relevant today than ever before.

Speed and optimization are the frameworks of content creation. Do you have systems in place to streamline your process? Have you gotten good at a few things to ensure your system operates like a well-oiled machine?

My life is on the go the majority of the time. Family, church, teaching terrific middle schoolers, and other responsibilities beckon my attention.

I remember being at my wife’s grandmama’s funeral in 2015. At the procession, I remember speaking to this kid, a 21-year-old, who was huge into fashion. He said he was making his living off Instagram.

I, a student of the 2008–2011 online marketing old guard, was flabbergasted by his come-up (especially since I was still “coming up).

Me: How are you making money off Instagram?

This kid: Oh, I post pictures of the clothes I make.

Me: That’s it?

This kid: Well, no. I network through Instagram as my fashion gets shared, and people with clout hit me up.

Me: How are you posting pics? Do you work from your desktop during the day or something?

This kid: No…I do everything from my iPhone.

I sounded like a boomer asking that desktop question. Of course, I had an iPhone in 2015, silly.

But me being a millennial in boomer mode, I did not see my phone as an adequate device to produce creativity (I was still treating my iPhone like a cingular wireless brick).

Here I am in my early thirties, acting like a technophobe when I wasn’t. Yet this interaction always stuck with me. It was time I became like the cool kids.

I needed to learn from them to harness the full potential of what makes a smartphone smart from a content creation standpoint.

It was practice, practice, practice from that point.

I took baby steps. I practiced filming on my iPhone, getting comfortable and confident speaking to the pixel camera of that time.

From this filming process, I learned a lot about myself.

Timers give me anxiety. The minute I see or know a clock is ticking, my performance suffers.

My words are rushed. My brain is scrambling to squeeze ideas or reach a goal under immense pressure.

This goes with filming. The minute that iCamera time starts to tick, the war is on.

I soon learned that I needed to write my videos rather than fly by the seat of my pants with a topic.

Yeah, I got comfortable filming, but I wasn’t improving. My videos were rambles. Points were getting lost or mixed up together. You can see the train of thought fall right off the rails.

Sorry, I’m not the “hit the record button and just go!” type of personality.

I needed to rely on the one skill that allowed me to structure my ideas in a cohesive, chronological order that would be engaging and entertaining.

That was my writing.

Cracks of Life

Writing articles and adapting them as video scripts have become foundational to manufacturing videos on the YouTube assembly line. You can learn how to convert online articles into videos effectively here:

Family and other external requirements rob me of the luxury of working at a traditional computer.

And for you “morning miracle,” people ready to hit me with the “Just wake up and write early” philosophy, I suggest you find a hole purposeful for fingers shoveling upward.

Nah. I’m a teacher. It’s a forty-yard dash every sunrise.

5:30 am is reserved for a shower, breakfast, child preparation, and sprinting out the door by 6:45 am.

While on my way to raising America’s next generation, I was listening to a Michael La Ronn podcast. He made this statement that I thought was profound.

As writers, we all have to learn how to write within the cracks of life.

Every spare moment is a writing moment.

If I can write from a desk or laptop, I will. However, I do not bank on it. It’s preferred.

This sentence is written as I stand in line for an internet-ordered pizza from Little Caesars.

Waiting in grocery lines equals writing time.

As your kids go to the restroom and you wait on them, it’s writing time.

Lunch breaks equal writing time.

Post-intimacy pillow talk equals writing time.

“Quiet time” is a fantasy for word warriors waiting on a muse. We live in chaos. City life “hustle and bustle” ambition permeates every facet of life thanks to online passive income pastors.

An eye for opportunity is critical to getting it in. Chipping away at the massive block of marble will eventually reveal a glorious statue.

Your approach to writing in the future has to be approached the same way.

When you train your eye to catch these very tight windows of opportunity, you don’t have to worry about missing family time.

The time will find you.

Publishing and Writing are Not the Same

I don’t publish on mobile.

When writing for intentions on publishing to multiple content areas, iNotes is my best friend.

I like to stay within my Apple ecosystem. Having a Mac Mini with an iPhone is a deadly combination.

I have several headlines and pieces ready to go through the Grammarly grinder.

But I do wait until I’m home on my desktop for this for numerous reasons.

Primarily because the mobile features are less robust and comprehensive than they are on the desktop, to the point where certain features still need to be added.

Most of the applications are “lite” versions of their desktop counterpart stripped down to their quick inputs.

This not only goes for Grammarly but the platforms themselves. Editing from a phone is a nightmare.

Even on Medium’s mobile app, it’s hard to determine the correct spacing when editing paragraphs.

“Is this a double space, or is their extra white space that somehow got here?” These are the types of questions I’m asking.

There have been times when I’ve lightly shaken my phone and accidentally undone all the written work.

Highlighting words with your index finger is a terrible way to shift and move around sentences that would belong better on other parts of a page.

No. We need tactile, kinesthetic equipment for this. A mouse and a physical keyboard are still the best for weed-whacking words choking the messaging from your work.

While writing is easier to be sneakier than filming a video, capturing footage is still achievable if you follow the methods below.

I like to film from my car a lot of times. I have my script already prepared via my Teleprompter app and a hand selfie stick I squeeze in between my armrest and passenger seat to steady the camera.

When no one is home, I have a small segment of my house ready for filming where I can easily crack into filming a 10-minute video in 15 minutes, factoring in a few takes when I mess up.

When you have the space, you want to film as many videos as possible and edit them later. If my kids are in the shower, I edit a video on the InShot app, which I initially thought was intended for Instagram reels but is a very comprehensive video editor for mobile. I’ve learned it like the back of my hand.

These systems allow me to have all this down to a science.

Publishing a YouTube video from the mobile app is also limiting. I lose access to adding end screens, my auto-tag generation using Tubebuddy (affiliate link), and other functions beneficial for ensuring my videos have a fighting chance to be found.

If I upload from my phone, I set the video to private and wait until I can finish polishing the technical details from a laptop or MacMini.

Create all the rough drafts you want on your smart device, but refine from more robust machines that give you full access to editing and publishing features.

All my systems are developed to produce videos. I am laying out a blueprint for you in my book, The YouTube Writer.

While this poignant prose may sound like a middle finger to my beloved better half, it’s a testament to how the marital circular object remains on the ring finger in the battleground of content creation.

Stretch your words beyond text. Become a YouTube Writer and learn how to utilize the platform to expedite your writing goals.