For the third time ever, I decided to do a video a day on one of my YouTube channels. This is the 2nd time I’ve done it on my channel related to “stuff”; the other one was via my business channel. I actually wrote about doing this video challenge on my business channel back in 2014, which you can check out if you’re interested in how that one went.

This time around I have 7 different lessons I learned while doing it, because the circumstances changed from the previous two times. The previous two times I was alone; for the business channel I was in a hotel room out of town and for my other channel I was home while my wife was working out of town. Still, I got it done and I’m happy about that, and now I’m ready to talk about it via these 7 lessons… and not all of the lessons are good ones.

1. Smartphones can be a wonderful thing for shooting videos

The majority of videos were done from my home office space, but I thought that would get boring after a while. Using my smartphone allowed me to move around the house, go outside and even do a couple of them in my new car. I can’t say those were perfect in any way but it changed the dynamic of the videos. A couple of them weren’t great because of lighting but the messages were still clear.

2. A video a day gives you mixed viewer results

The most views any of my videos got during the entire process was 25, though I have to preface that the last one hasn’t been seen at the time this article goes live (the last video will go live 2 hours after this article). However, since I’m not expecting that one to produce lots of views either, I’ll stick with the 25. Those aren’t great numbers by any means and even showed a small drop per video. Yet, the month had more views than any month since the last challenge.

3. I gained some new and consistent subscribers

This one was unexpected, but there were a few people who have watched every single video; that’s kind of cool. One guy’s said something on every one of them, while a few others have commented on the majority. If you remember the rule of 100 true fans, this is a good thing for me. I hope I can keep them while getting more consistently viewing fans once I create videos at my normal pace after my last one for this month.

4. Almost all the videos from my office were done really late at night

By now my regular readers know my mother lives with me, and that my wife’s basically working locally these days. I can’t shoot video during the day because once I start using my video voice, which is louder than my normal voice (unless you ask my friends Scott and Kelvin lol), Mom hears me and starts calling my name, worried that something’s wrong with me or that I’m talking to her.

tired…

This means I have to shoot almost all those videos late at night when both of them have gone to bed and hopefully to sleep. My wife crashes early but sometimes the sleeping pill takes a while to put Mom down, which means all those videos were shot between 11:30 and midnight. It’s hard to project freshness at that time of night, but I think I pulled it off. Luckily, those with me on the move and a few I got to do during the day when Mom wasn’t here came out pretty well.

5. You can’t do it all but you can do a lot

Let’s see… I did 29 videos (I forgot to post one of the videos on the day it was supposed to go live so I ended up missing a day; c’est la vie!) for one channel, 3 for another channel, an article three weeks for this blog and for my business blog, an article for my finance blog, an article for my medical billing blog, an article for my accountant’s blog and one for my consulting group. I also kept up with all my marketing and prospecting efforts. In other words, I didn’t reduce any of my normal production all that much. The week I didn’t write a new post here and on my business blog was addressed in this post.

6. It’s always better to do a lot of videos ahead of time than the day of or the day before

The last couple of times I did this I recorded a bunch of videos way ahead of time so I could publicize them properly and make sure I completed the task easily. This time around I only got ahead of the game twice, which includes the video that’s going live today. I found that I didn’t have the energy to do two videos in one night all that often, so I was often left to set up my marketing at the last minute rather than working towards being proactive. If I do this again that’s something I’m going to have to conquer.

7. Because of #6, I didn’t plan them out like I normally do

I decided I was going to challenge myself to doing a video a day two days before the beginning of the month. Instead of sitting down and planning out what I was going to try to do beforehand as I’ve done in the past, this time I came up with the idea just before I shot the video.

Because of this, the topics I covered were all over the place. Even though that’s not a bad thing for that channel, but most of the time I try to cover the same types of topics I cover here. Instead, the topics I covered the most were:

Motivation – 10
Personal – 4
Health – 3
Social Media – 3

In all I touched upon 11 different topics, including a brief movie review of Avengers: Infinity War (no spoilers, but I loved it lol). I guess you could say there was something for everyone, but it wasn’t quite targeted content.

Still, I got through it, and now my buddy Evelyn Parham is thinking about taking a shot at it later this year. She also took on the challenge of writing a blog post every day in April, something I challenged y’all to do in January as I did that on my local blog. Glad to see someone gave it a shot; I don’t feel so lonely anymore. 🙂

There you go; 7 lessons, not all of them great lessons but lessons nonetheless. I wonder who’ll try it next…