Content Creation Hacks – Batch Content for YouTube

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Are you struggling to batch content for YouTube and wondering about content creation hacks you could use to make it easier? This post is for you! Keep reading to get my 5 phases of how I batch my YouTube video planning.

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Batch Planning for YouTube Videos

Content planning is an important first step for video content creators. Although the steps are straightforward, every small step that needs to be done can sometimes feel daunting to batch content for YouTube!

5 Phases of Batch Planning YouTube Videos

The result of having a good YouTube planning process is growth! That means more views, subscribers, watch time, and REVENUE. And who doesn’t want more of THAT?!

So if you’re facing some challenges with how to plan your YouTube videos and you’re interested in some content creation hacks, let’s dive in and batch content for YouTube together!

Phase 1: Notion Content Calendar

My YouTube content planner inside Notion

When I start to plan out my YouTube videos, I open up my YouTube planner in Notion. If you want the details about my content calendar inside Notion, you can find it in this post.

Related: Content Calendar with Notion

In my YouTube Planner, I store all my ideas and essential information I need for my video content. Other things I include in my YouTube Planner is tracking my progress, creating a list of tasks, keeping track of my blog, and so on.

Phase 2: Keyword Research to Pick the Right Topics

Picking an idea in my YouTube content planner

I pick a certain topic among the list of ideas that I have inside of my YouTube Planner. So in this case, I chose the “Tips to Look Good with Webcam and Zoom”. Currently, the Notion card for that topic doesn’t contain any information yet, but the idea is there.

TubeBuddy Keyword Explorer

I open the TubeBuddy Keyword Explorer, which is a Google Chrome extension that does many other things outside YouTube and Google. The best thing about this Keyword Explorer is the simplicity of doing keyword research and figure out what people are researching about the topic.

Keyword research is a very important process for content creators. It helps you to gain deep insight on what your audience wants e.g. frequently searched keywords, keywords ranking, keywords to use. Also, you can get the most out of the YouTube ‘s algorithm by finding out the topics that interest your target audience and what they are watching. You can use the information you find to help create the title of the content and optimize the SEO.

checking the SEO score of our topic in TubeBuddy

I input my chosen topic, ” Tips To Look Good with Webcam and Zoom,” into the TubeBuddy Keyword Explorer. Once I do this, they Keyword Explorer gives me information on the keyword I put. The original score is very good with a score of 67/100. The search volume score was fair. The competition is very good. The optimization strength is excellent. It also mentioned some common video tags such as Skype, how to look good on a webcam, how to look good on video etc. With all this information, you can easily gather audiences for your channel.

Phase 3: Optimizing Your Content for SEO

Optimizing your content using TubeBuddy

Once you have decided on a topic, we now move to the next phase which is the optimization. You can do that by clicking the blue “Action” button, then choosing “Optimize in SEO Studio”. The SEO Studio of TubeBuddy is a new feature that is still in Beta status, but I find it as a big time-saving feature.

If you’re not yet using TubeBuddy, you can get a 30-day free trial by clicking on the link in the video description. They have a free version, however, it has limited features.

Title and Description

Optimizing YouTube video content title and description

When we optimize our content, we get to know the target keywords that we should use, which can be included in the title of your video. If you want, you can also tweak the title and make it more enticing to increase the number of people that click on it.

For the YouTube description, you need to mention the target keywords given. Along with that, you should also use words that are relevant or related to your target keywords. My hack for this is to turn the target keywords into a question like the one I did in the image above.

Applying upload default in TubeBuddy

Moreover, TubeBuddy also has this very cool feature of letting me choose an upload default for my description. In the lower part of TubeBuddy, I can just select the upload default that I want. Then it will be added without erasing the description I’ve created.

Tags

Optimizing YouTube video content tags

For the next step in our optimization phase, we have the tags. All the tags that you can see in the image above was automatically added by TubeBuddy based on the selected upload default I’ve chosen in the description earlier.

There are actually some content creators who do not care much about the tags because they think that it’s not really relevant. However, it depends on who you ask. For me, I do not spend too much time on the tags; I make sure that they are there and relevant to my topic.

Thumbnails

Optimizing YouTube video content thumbnail

You can upload your video thumbnail and compare it to everyone else’s with the same topic as yours. If you haven’t created your thumbnail yet, this gives you an idea of what your competitors are doing and how to make your thumbnail more appealing. This is also a way for you to check out what your thumbnail looks like if it appeared in the search results.

For me, I haven’t yet created my own thumbnail, so what I would do is try to get an idea of how will I create my thumbnail based on the thumbnails of others.

Applying to Video

saving your YouTube video content optimization

The last step of our optimization in SEO Studio is figuring out if you want to either apply it to a video you are currently uploading or save it as a draft. Since I am still in the planning mode, I saved it as a draft.

Once you have saved it as a draft, it will show you the list of your other YouTube topic drafts. Once you have uploaded the video for that certain topic, you can simply select the draft you need, and it would be imported into the video.

Phase 4: Creating the Thumbnail for YouTube

my YouTube content thumbnail compilation in Canva

Now, I don’t always finish the thumbnail for my video before I shoot the actual video. That is because, sometimes, I need something from the actual video to complete the design of my thumbnail. In those cases, I’ll just start drafting the thumbnail.

For a couple of months, I’ve been using Canva to design my YouTube channel. I have a project template where I have the compilation of my previous thumbnails. Also, I can choose whether I would start from scratch or pick a thumbnail in that compilation, which I can use as a template and do a little tweaking. I need all these ideas to be ready ahead of time, so that once I shoot my video, I already have an idea on the things that I need to include in my shooting.

Phase 5: Scripting the YouTube Video

The last thing that I need to do in my 2021 YouTube video planning is to script them and figure out the things that I’m going to say. Before, I used to do a word-for-word script because that was the easiest way for me to create my video content. However, currently, I am more comfortable creating a bullet point type of script for my video.

The main key for me in this phase is to stick with a certain single process for each video that I create. With that, I avoid missing out some points, forgetting things that I should say, and lets me have a smooth transitioning in my video.

Plan Your 2021 YouTube Videos!

One last tip in planning your content is to work on a handful of topics on each phase that I’ve mentioned, so that it’s more efficient and easier for your brain to process all the workload.

Now that you already know my full workflow for planning my YouTube videos, you can already create your own content calendar so you can start planning out your YouTube videos this 2021.

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