Try This If Long-Form Videos Take Forever

What if you could make YouTube work for your business without spending all your time on content? I’ll show you how to batch four long-form videos in less time than it takes to post daily Instagram reels. Learn the secrets to efficient planning, recording, and editing with tools like Descript, plus get my tips for making your content an asset, not a chore. Let’s get you off the hamster wheel!

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

So what if you could create a month's worth of long form content for YouTube in the same amount of time it takes you or less to create your short form content for Instagram? You might think I'm crazy, you might think I'm totally off my rocker here. Meredith, how could it possibly take me less time to create longer videos than it does to create short videos? Well, we're gonna talk about that today. My name is Meredith, and I'm here to help solo business owners look good, feel good, and sound good. I said that backwards. Look good, sound good, and feel good on camera so that you can build your binge-worthy video brand, so that you can build your YouTube ecosystem, so that the work you do and you put your face on camera actually becomes an asset for you for your business, and you can get off of the content creation hamster wheel. And I can't tell you how many business owners I've met who have said, Meredith, I want to do YouTube, I really do. I just don't have time to create long videos. You know, I make my reels, I do my stories, I post my carousels. I just don't have time to sit down and make a long form piece of content every single week. And I completely understand the logic of thinking long form videos, they're longer. We're talking eight minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, however long you want to go, right? We're talking about a long video compared to a teeny tiny short video, 30 seconds, one minute. So logically, it seems like of course it's gonna take you more time to create the long form content. But here's why I think that's complete BS. And it's because if you follow best practices on Instagram specifically for reels for your short form content, you're not posting once a week. You're posting once a day or more than once a day in some cases. Like the more the better. And that's a kind of content hamster wheel that most of my clients don't want to be on. Like they're trying, they're actively trying to get off of. And if you're always only pumping out the daily short form content, then that becomes the machine that you create for your business. If that sounds exhausting, stick around. I want to help you create a much more sustainable machine. Now, there are three parts of this video, and part number one is the math. We can't have this conversation of short form versus long form if we're not comparing apples to apples here, right? And common practice on Instagram to kind of like keep up with the feed is to post once a day, right? I mean, I think we can all agree that's kind of the gist of Instagram. It's a daily social media feed. So I don't know if there's some combination or like recommended best practice combination of one reel a day or a reel in a carousel or a reel in a story or a story in a carousel, but let's just make it easy and say one-minute reel a day for 30 days would can be considered like a good practice on Instagram. So that's 30 minutes of finished video with one one-minute video a day. Now, I recently did an experiment where I posted a reel every day for I think I went to like 40 days, maybe 45 days. I might have missed one here and there. And one thing that I noticed about myself, and this is this is myself as somebody who, yes, I create long-form content. Yes, I like YouTube way better than Instagram, but I don't have a problem talking to the camera. I don't have a problem talking to the phone. I don't generally feel like weird about it. And I also don't feel like I have to script every single word-for-word thing. I also don't feel like I have to do my hair and makeup for every video either. So I don't have a lot of barriers to creating short form content. And yet it still took me four to five minutes of recording time for each of the reel that I posted. And I'm sure there are people out there who can hit record, not make a single mistake, not think to themselves, oh, I could have worded that better. Let me try again, and then they can just post it right then and there. Like I'm sure those people exist. I'm not one of those people. And I don't think that most people are that type of person. So if you're publishing one one-minute video a day, that's 30 minutes of runtime. And if it takes even as little as four minutes to actually record the reel, like set up your phone, hit record, say the things that you need to say, repeat the things that you messed up, that's 120 minutes of your time in recording. And if you're, again, following the common best practices on Instagram, you're doing a little bit of editing. Maybe you're trimming the beginning, trimming the end. You are putting uh visual hook text on the screen, you're adding captions. Like, even if you didn't have to edit out a whole bunch of mistakes like me, you're still doing a little bit of editing. For me, that can take as little as five minutes and as much as like 20, but let's go with five. And just think about yourself here. Like, how long does it take you to hit record and actually finish the video so that it can be edited for a reel? For me, it's about four minutes of recording and five minutes of editing per video. And then you have to write some type of a caption and then upload it. Instagram just recently improved their uploading process. There was a few days where it actually took longer than 10 minutes for me to upload a reel for whatever reason, even when I'm like on my home Wi-Fi, but it's gotten a lot faster recently. So let's say it takes one to two minutes to come up with a caption and hit publish. So if you're following along on the math, one reel a day at one minute per reel is four minutes of recording time, five minutes of editing. Like if you're fast, two-ish minutes of posting, again, if you're fast, if your internet is fast, if Instagram is feeling fast today, that's 300 minutes for the month, which is five hours per month posting one reel a day, a one-minute reel that you think takes you no time at all. Now, if you're anything like me, you know if you open Instagram to post something, you're there a lot longer than 10 to 12 minutes. You're like scrolling, you're replying to people, you're like, you're doing the social media thing. What if you spent 10 minutes a day creating your daily content? You're spending five hours a month creating content. Now, I don't know about you, but five hours a month creating content could easily equal long form content that is actually an asset for your business and not just another like hamster wheel that you have to be on. So the question is what happens if you take that five hours a month and apply it to long-form content? Could you create four long-form videos in five hours a month? Yeah. Um, heck yeah. Let's talk about it. Now I work with content creators and solo business owners every day inside of Video Brand Academy and the channel launch lab. And what I notice is that the thing, the the one thing, it's not just one thing, but the thing that ends up costing people time in creating their long-form videos is the overdoing of everything that they're doing. Like every step is an opportunity to overthink, right? Over planning, over scripting, scripting word for word takes forever. Over-recording, trying to get everything perfect, perfect take, perfect words, over-polishing the edit, being all fancy with the edits, that takes a lot of time. Editing a regular, like rough cut talking head video can be pretty quick, but it's this polishing stuff and the graphics and the transitions and like all this fancy stuff that ends up eating away at all the time that it takes. So if you have created long-form content and you're like, dang, this takes forever, I'm never gonna make YouTube my like go-to platform, like Meredith says that I should. It might be that you've been overdoing every step. Plus, if you're new to it, then of course it's gonna take you more time. It takes time to like figure things out, get your own workflow. So let's talk about ways that you can make the workflow in less time so that YouTube doesn't just become a part-time job on top of your business. Now, I also recognize this could be a whole separate video, but I also want to point out that if you don't see creating content for your business as an investment of your time, like if you see it as something that costs you something rather than an investment, I invite you to look at the actual data behind what your content does for you. You probably already know my stance on short form content. It's hamster wheel content, it's not intentional, it's not the way to build connection and trust with an audience. And most people are scrolling social media on the toilet. So long form content is where people go to actually seek information, to find the guides like you to find somebody that they can trust to help solve a problem or get them to some desired result. And so the intentionality behind the person consuming the content is something to consider. And I bring this up when I talk about are you using content as an investment rather than a cost? Because the nature of YouTube being the powerful search engine and powerful interest algorithm that it is, when you create a long form piece of content on YouTube, it becomes an asset for you. People find it in a couple of weeks or a couple years from now. And if it's bringing leads to your business for you, that's an asset. And short form content doesn't do that. It just doesn't do that. It goes and then it stops going. And you have to keep creating more of it. So if you feel like creating content costs you time, I invite you to consider perhaps the type of content you're creating or the strategy that you're using isn't designed for it to become an asset for your business. And like this is what we work on inside of Video Brand Academy and the channel launch lab is creating content that becomes an asset for you. It doesn't cost you time. You're investing time into building assets that work for you. This is fun, right? If you're listening to this as an audio only podcast, I have a gigantic sticky note on the screen that I'm using to illustrate my points. So if I only had five hours to spend on my long form content, which is ironically just about the amount of time that I have been spending on my long-form content, I would do it like this. So we're talking about four long form videos a month, right? That's once a week. So take 30 minutes and figure out what are four videos that I could create that are part of a series. That way your brain's not like bouncing around from topic to topic. You're not doing like context switching and all of that kind of stuff. Now, if you're just starting a channel from scratch, I highly recommend the Magnificent 7 YouTube channel launch series. That's seven videos, but you know, you start with four. And inside Video Brand Academy, two of the proven growth strategies are the Save Me series and the Ultimate User Guide. By the way, the ultimate user guide is basically how my channel grew so quickly at the very beginning because I was literally going through a GoPro user manual and creating a video for every single thing in the manual. Like everything people were searching for that was also in the manual, that became the outline of my videos. Now you know, but it could be as simple as picking one topic or one keyword and then making four different videos on like four different angles around that one topic. And if you have a longer series going on your channel, then your next four videos just becomes as easy as like what are the next four videos in that series? By the way, if you're stuck on what to create and you think it's gonna take you more than 30 minutes to figure that out, go to the video brand toolkit visibility report. I'll put a link to that down in the description, and it'll just tell you what to create. It's really that simple. Now, when it comes to actually creating the content, I have here two and a half hours to batch record and go off script. I'm basically saying don't spend any amount of time scripting your content. I have some off script outlines that I can link to down in the description below as well. These are the outlines that I use, like the bullet points that I use to be able to show up on camera without scripting anything ahead of time. Now I know what I'm gonna say. Obviously, I know the topic and I know what I want to say about those topics, but I'm not scripting word for word. I'm not reading from a teleprompter, it's just me talking to you. So I'll link to those down below. Now, my experience and many of my clients' experiences, when you don't spend hours scripting your videos word for word, you can not only save the time that you would have spent scripting, but you also get better at talking to the camera. You get better at trusting what your mouth is going to say and what your brain is going to say. And that practice makes you a better communicator, which then makes you a better content creator, which then makes it easier for you to create your content, which makes it easier for people to show up and listen to you because you're sounding like a real human being and not an overly scripted word-for-word regurgitation of, you know, chat GPT or something. Now, does it take practice talking to the camera without a script? Yeah, it does. But it's a skill that once you learn it, you have it. So if you can set aside about two and a half hours, do your makeup, do your hair. I didn't really do my hair today, but get your YouTube setup, get your lights on, get your camera going, do what you got to do to block off just two and a half hours so that you can show up and hit record and record four long form videos in one setting, then most of the hard stuff is already done. And again, talking to a camera takes practice. So if it takes you longer because you're new to this, then let yourself be new to it. Like give yourself a chance. You know what I mean? If you only get two videos created in that amount of time, then you got two videos created in that amount of time. Heck yeah. Just roll with it. What I often find happens is when I sit down to create videos like batch record videos, I start coming up with new ideas like on the fly, and I'm already right there, hair done, makeup done, lights on, camera on. Why not just record another one while I'm right there? So typically, if I batch record my content, I end up batch recording more than what I had initially anticipated. Because once you're warmed up, you're warmed up. You're like, I'm firing on all synapses here. I've got ideas. I have something to say. You know, especially if you're very passionate about the topics that you're talking about, it can be really hard to pack all that into short form content. And then you hit record on a longer video, and all of a sudden you have hours worth of stuff that you feel like getting off your chest. And sometimes that just doesn't happen until you're like in the moment and in the environment where you're all warmed up and fired up. You know what I mean? Now, this last little bit is editing, and I use DScript to edit my videos. Their Underlord AI thing has come a really long way since I created a video criticizing the name Underlord. I still think it's a bad name, but it's a great tool. It's turned into a really great tool. So I want to explain how this works and why DScript is so fast at editing your videos. But I also want to mention that it's never been easier to hire someone to edit. 10 years ago, five years ago, even, if you wanted to outsource your video editing, you had to hire a video editor, which like makes logical sense, right? Nowadays we have CapCut, we have DScript, we have Tela, we have all these tools that don't require a trained video editor to use the fancy editing programs like Premiere Pro or DaVinci. So if you love the idea of hitting record and then sending that file off to someone else to deal with, it's never been easier or more affordable to be able to do that. Now, what I do is I use DScript and I record one video in one take. If I make mistakes or whatever, I keep rolling. My camera is connected to my computer. I record directly into my computer with Ecamm. So as soon as I'm done recording the files already on my computer, I upload it to DScript and then I open up Underlord. And you know what? I think I'll be able to put this prompt directly into the description of this video if it's not too long. But basically, I ask Underlord to remove silences and I give it some parameters on that around like anything longer than 0.8 seconds, trim it down to 0.2 seconds. This might be different for you because it really depends on your own natural speech patterns. I tell it not to remove any words, sentences, or intentional pauses that are part of the natural speech rhythm. And there's some other kind of parameters in there. I ask it to review any retake. So I make a lot of, a lot of mistakes in my video. I make a lot of mistakes in my videos, and I've always been super upfront and honest about that. What you see here has been edited. I edit out a whole bunch of BS, a whole bunch of mistakes, and a whole bunch of like restarts of sentences. And I've gotten a lot better over time about doing retakes and stuff like that. But Underlord can read the whole script. And so in the prompt, I say read all of the retakes and then figure out which one is actually good. Because it's not always the last retake that is the best. And then lastly, I have it apply studio sound. Sometimes I need studio sound, sometimes I don't. Today my air conditioner is off, so I may not need studio sound. But it's possible you heard the motorcycle go by the front of my house. So we'll see. But I take that whole entire prompt, the whole thing, copy it, and paste the whole thing into Underlord, and it's basically creating a rough cut for me much faster than I'd be able to create a rough cut myself. Now, is it perfect? No, that's why it's called a rough cut. It's like a rough draft. You still have to watch the video, like you still have to do a final run through. You could do it at 1.5 or 2x speed. You're not speeding up the video, you're speeding up the playback of the video. But you're gonna make sure that anything that it cut out is good. Your cuts are good. It's not leaving in any glaring mistakes that you thought it should have cut out. And so, no, it's not perfect, but it's a lot faster to tweak and fix some of the imperfections that Underlord created than it is to go through and edit the whole thing manually yourself. I have connected Claude to Descript now, so I don't even go to DScript, upload the video, and then put in the Underlord prompt. I just open Claude and tell Claude to do it. So if you want a tutorial on that, we can go there. Let me know in the comments. Now, if you follow my plan to create four long form videos per month, I think you can do it in five hours or less and actually come out with content that's an asset for your business and not just more hamster wheel content for social media. And obviously, I have no idea how long it takes you to do your reels or how long it's gonna take you to edit. But hopefully you can see if you're being honest with yourself, if you're being realistic and you're posting daily short form content and at the same time telling me that you don't have time to create long form content, just check your math. Just for fun, do a little time audit for yourself and see how it's working out for you. And if you want to make sure that the time you are investing into your YouTube content is going to pay off for you, go get your free YouTube visibility report. This is a software that I created. I'll put a link to it down below. It's completely free. You pop in your YouTube channel some little stuff about your business and what you do and who you serve, what you offer, and things like that. It reads your channel and tells you what you are showing up for and what opportunities you have to show up for. It tells you what to post on YouTube to get in front of your target audience and clients and grow your audience with your YouTube content. So start there, make a decision, seriesify your long form content, put a block in the calendar. This is when I'm gonna record, and then do it.