How To Make a Web Series (An Experiment)

How To Make A Web Series

I’m excited to announce that tomorrow I start production on my second web series.

It’s been in the works for awhile, but the timing hasn’t been right until now. I’m going to keep the details fairly low-key, but I will say that it’s another unscripted/non-fiction series.

My goal is to use all the stuff I learned from over two years of Hilah Cooking to see if I can ramp this one up fast. It might be a colossal and embarrassing FAILURE, but I have a feeling it’s going quickly find its audience.

I won’t be writing about the project here on the site until it actually launches. I like to keep the content here focused on that I’ve extensively tested – things I know definitely work.

But if you’re interested in following along behind-the-scenes as we create a web show from scratch, I’m going to write about the whole experience in a series of free weekly e-mails. I’ll be writing everything I’m doing to build the show as it’s happening.

The reason I’m doing the How To Make a Web Series project via e-mail is that I probably won’t want it to exist in a permanent archive. This is an experiment. You’ll get to read about all the failures as well as the successes.

The series will go into into excruciating details about nerdy things like: production, post-production, branding, search engine optimization, niche selection, distribution, monetization, partnerships and a bunch of other stuff. I’ll try to make it as interesting as possible.

If you’re interested in following along as we create a web series from scratch, sign up using the form below. The email series starts next week!

Click Here to Subscribe!

7 Ways to Increase YouTube Views (Lessons We Learned from the YouTube NextUp program)

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When we first started up Hilah Cooking, I really hated YouTube.

There were many reasons for my hatred. The quality was terrible. The commenters were idiots. The interface was ugly. And particularly insulting to me: we didn’t get very many views. For all of these reasons, I spent very little time optimizing our YouTube videos and at the end of the first season we decided to ignore it altogether and just use it as one of our many upload destinations.

But during our summer break between season 1 and 2, I started to look at YouTube a little differently. Slowly but surely our videos had started to gain some traction and the comments were actually improving. Instead of just dropping by and writing “NICE TITZ” we started to get some very helpful feedback and questions from people genuinely interested in how to make the recipes in the videos. Even better, we started getting a lot of traffic from YouTube to our main site. Starting with Season 2, we decided to rethink our YouTube approach, ignore my initial prejudices and invest some time into it.

Once we started looking at YouTube as a social networking site based around video, everything changed. We began to attract new subscribers on a consistent basis, our views steadily increased and once I figured out the advertising system – it became a significant income stream. This all led to us winning one of the slots in the YouTube Next Chef program. In addition to getting a bunch of great new gear and meeting some amazing people, the YouTube Next Chef program hosted a series of online workshops about how to take our channel to the next level. These workshops were eye-opening and incredibly helpful and after implementing the things we learned our channel has consistently grown.

Here are the 7 most valuable lessons I learned about how to increase YouTube views and how to build a profitable YouTube Channel.

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YouTube Next – The Gear

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One of the highlights of 2011 was being selected as one of the winners of the YouTube Next Chef program.

The Next Chef program evolved out of YouTube’s NextUp Program. Basically, the idea is to cultivate the next wave of up and coming talent on YouTube. The original program was not focused on a specific content niche. The second wave focused on cooking and fitness. The goal of the program is to help content creators take things to the “next” level and ultimately make a full-time living via YouTube.

As part of the program, winners received $5,000 worth of gear, training sessions conducted via Google Hangout and $10,000 in YouTube advertising.

The eagerly awaited box of gear from YouTube

Since I am a geek, I was most excited about the new gear. We shot for a year and a half on very low-end gear. It was an intentional decision to work with what we had and it worked for us for almost 100 episodes.

But, I was starting to get a little restless. After hanging out with some shooters for the Food Network (and ogling their gear), I really wanted to make the transition to shooting with DSLRs. When we heard that we would be getting $5,000 of gear from YouTube, I decided to just wait and see. The gear was selected by YouTube and we didn’t know what we would be getting until the boxes from B&H Photo arrived. My fingers were crossed that a DLSR would be in the mix.

Here’s an overview of what was in the first box to give you an idea of what YouTube apparently thinks is a good starter kit.

Some of their choices were kind of interesting.

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The End of Phase One

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We recently hit two important milestones with Hilah Cooking.

#1. We released Learn to Cook – our first digital book.

#2. We released our 100th episode. We’ve produced a new episode pretty much every Tuesday (except during our summer vacation).

With these two milestones, we’ve completed Phase one of our initial plan.

The Halloween episode in post-production.

Yes, there has actually been a plan all along.

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Reboot

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We spent the New Years holiday on the beach at Port Aransas.

This was my first visit to the “Texas Riviera” and even though the weather was cool and mostly overcast, it did not disappoint. It may sound like a strange choice for a vacation destination, but we needed to get the hell out of town. We found a great condo with a kitchen right on the beach. And it was dog-friendly so we didn’t have to leave Daisy at home.

It was a very low-key few days – a rarity for us. We spent most of the time like total nerds – writing screenplays on the deck while drinking margaritas. We ate a lot of seafood and made a wicked beach fire, but spent New Years Eve itself watching TV with the dog. In fact, this is the first New Years Day I can remember that I wasn’t totally hung over. It was actually pretty awesome.

Port Aransas Beach

For me the trip was a complete mental “re-boot.”

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