I’m confident that the Mark Ellis Reviews YouTube channel wouldn’t have experienced such early success if it wasn’t for my blogging routine.

I’m a blogger by trade. It’s something I’ve done for many years both personally and professionally. And when I began planning my YouTube business, I knew that it had to play a central role.

Nearly every video on my channel starts its life as a blog. There are some outliers, but on the whole, my video creation process begins with me publishing several hundred words through my website and Medium.

This might sound counterintuitive. It might suggest that I’m creating far more work for myself than necessary.

But my blogging routine has enabled me to stick to a consistent YouTube publishing schedule and create a brand that is instantly recognisable. It also saves me a whole bunch of time.

If you’re serious about YouTube, you need to get serious about blogging.

It all starts with the blog

You’ve got two options when scripting a video:

  • sit there with a blank page and attempt to write down the perfect beginning, middle, and end; or
  • sit there with a blank page and write a blog post.

Technically, you’re doing the same thing with either option. But the former can feel like standing at the foot of a mountain with a ball and chain tied to your left leg. Where and how do you start? How long will you last before you get bored or tired?

Blogging is an entirely different process. You can write freely, proofread, polish, and publish. Trust me – it’s a much quicker process than scripting a video from scratch.

What’s more, if you follow my blogging strategy (come up with a title, list out the potential subheadings and then start writing), you’ll break free of that ball and chain and begin tackling the mountain in manageable chunks.

Once the blog is published, you have the formation of your video. Those headings become chapters, and the words within each of them can be quickly turned into bullet points to draw out the most video-friendly stuff.

Oh, and while you’re shooting your video, that blog post will be working hard (without any further effort from you) to spread the word about your brand.

Neat, right?

The importance of multi-channel content

I’ve been running my own business since 2015, and right from the start, I’ve been obsessed with finding multiple income streams.

Relying on just one source of revenue is setting yourself up for imminent failure. What if that source disappears? What if you get bored of it? What if something happens that’s entirely out of your control and which means you can no longer legitimately earn money from that source?

This stuff happens. Indeed, it’s happened to me on numerous occasions. Thankfully, I’ve always had other sources of income to fall back on when another disappears.

The same goes for your content. If you’re simply publishing everything through YouTube, you’re vastly limiting your earning potential and maintaining just one point of failure.

By adding a blog to your YouTube strategy, you’ll not only create a brilliant hub and starting point for all of your ideas, you’ll also gain another potential source of revenue. What’s more, you’ll have the perfect place from which to build your own email list – and that’s the only audience you’ll truly own.

How to start a blog for your YouTube channel

Don’t worry – it’s super easy.

I’d recommend firstly building a website with WordPress. They’ll host it for you (you can get fancy with your own domain and hosting later), and it’s very easy to use if you invest a bit of time in learning the basics.

Then, create an account with Medium (which is one of the world’s largest blogging platforms).

Finally, follow my blog-to-video process, below.

My blog-to-video process

Although I’m always tinkering and refining it, my blog-to-video process runs like a well-oiled machine. I rely on it every single week to remain a consistent content creator.

Once you’ve created your WordPress blog and Medium account, you can follow this process, too.

  • Step 1: Write your blog post (I use Ulysses, but Word, or even writing directly into WordPress is fine).
  • Step 2: Publish your blog post on your WordPress website.
  • Step 3: Grab the URL from your published blog, head into your Medium account, click the ‘Stories’ button on the left-hand side and choose ‘Import a story’.
  • Step 4: Paste your URL when prompted and format the resulting blog so that it looks ok in Medium.
  • Step 5: Publish the blog on Medium (by following steps 3 and 4 above, your website will retain all of the SEO goodness for Google, therefore you have nothing to worry about in terms of duplicate content!),
  • Step 6: Open a blank document in your writing tool of choice and call up your freshly published blog.
  • Step 7: Go through the blog post and copy/paste your headings into your new document to signal each new chapter for the video. Beneath those chapters, bullet point the key sentences from your blog to make them easy to read out when shooting your a-roll.

That’s it! Once you’re finished with step 7, you’ll have a rough script from which you can read after hitting the ‘record’ button on your camera.

This process will take a while to bed in, but if you stick with it, you’ll find that your video process begins to run like the well-oiled machine I mentioned earlier.

What’s more, you’ll be creating multi-channel content, and building three separate audiences and methods for generating revenue (your website, Medium, and YouTube).

Never again will you feel helpless at the bottom of that mountain!

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