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!

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

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.

Canon 60D. Strangely enough, this is exactly the camera I had decided to start saving up for. It took me a little while to get comfortable with the transition from a camcorder to a DSLR, but I love it now and can’t imagine going back. The downside to this camera for a lot of our fellow YouTube NextChefs is that there is no autofocus and many of them shoot their video themselves. This can make things kind of tricky and some of them have gone back to using camcorders and only use the 60D for still photos.

Canon EF 17-55mm f/2.8 IS. I love this lens and it’s quickly become our primary lens for just about everything.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4. Another outstanding lens. I don’t use it much for video, but all the time for tabletop shots. It’s light years ahead of the thrifty/nifty fifty.

Manfrotto 701 HDV Tripod 701HDV head Nice and stable, incredibly smooth panning and tilting. We’d been using a lightweight tripod designed for still cameras until now, which meant we could never move the camera while filming. This is a nice change.

Rode VideoMic Pro. I’ve only used this a few times. For our particular show, the cheapo wired lavalier still performs better. If I’m running two cameras I will usually put this one the second camera, but rarely use any of the actual audio from it. For shooting cooking videos, I think some kind of lavalier set-up would have been a better choice for this package.

SanDisk Extreme 8GB Card. I’ve heard great things about these cards and have had absolutely zero problems with it. However, 8GB isn’t enough space and I ran out in the middle of a couple of shoots before remembering to buy additional cards.

Logitech HD Pro Webcam. This is still in the box as all our computers have built in cameras, but I guess this was a necessary inclusion since all the classes were conducted using Google Hangout.

MyStudio Tabletop Photo Studio Seamless Cyc Background. This is basically a huge white piece of plastic for doing tabletop photography. We use it for the close-ups of the finished and plated food. This has really come in handy, but it’s huge and doesn’t collapse down at all – so it’s taken up permanent residence in our living room.

Overall, it’s a pretty awesome kit. With the new gear we’ve been able to speed up our production and get a little closer to the look and feel we’re aiming for with the show. The plan from the very beginning has always been to produce new episodes on a consistent basis while incrementally increasing quality. So this gear has helped out a lot. Eventually, my plan is to add a Canon T3i as a second camera, a wireless lav and a few more lenses – but for now we are cranking along pretty well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about YouTube’s Starter Kit – as well as what kind of gear you’re currently using to produce your projects. Leave a comment below!

Next up: 7 Things We Learned from the YouTube Next Program.

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.

When we decided to start this project, I felt like we needed at least 100 episodes to decide whether or not the project had serious potential. I knew it would start out as something that was just fun to do on weekends – but would eventually start to feel like a lot of hard work. So I was committed to produce and release 100 episodes no matter what – and after that we would step back, evaluate whether it was working or not and either stop doing it or figure out how to proceed.

The Basics

While most of the feedback we’ve received about Hilah Cooking has been staggeringly positive, the few complaints we’ve received have been along the lines of:

“Why are you doing a video about cooking scrambled eggs? It’s so easy! Nobody needs to watch a video about this stuff.”

or

“Don’t you know how to cook anything more advanced? A 12 year old could make all this stuff!”

Well, that was the point.

Growing up, I never learned to cook and I wasn’t exposed to much cooking at home. I definitely wasn’t exposed to the type of cooking that we feature on the show. And I know I’m not alone in this. Through trial and error I eventually figured out how to cook for myself (on a very rudimentary level), but I felt like there were some fundamental building blocks that I was missing.

The truth is: Some people were never taught how to make scrambled eggs.

Those are the people that we set out to reach.

Phase One was always intended to be about learning to cook basic food using the best ingredients possible. We’ve now covered everything from seasoning a cast iron skillet to how to cook a steak. And we’ve received some of our most positive comments and highest views on the most basic videos.

The Book

We released Learn To Cook in June 2011. We worked incredibly hard on the book. Hilah wrote it. I designed it. Laurel styled it. Nadia shot the photos. James styled the hair. We called in just about every favor we could.

It clocks in at 230 pages (not counting the free bonuses) and features almost 150 recipes and 10 bonus videos. And since it’s a digital book, we were able to hyperlink to our videos where appropriate. It was designed to tie everything from the Phase One together and I think we pulled it off.

We  launched it fairly quietly with a video and an email to our mailing list. I will always remember launch day as one of my favorite days ever. Because it totally worked. The hard work was done and we were able to sit back and watch the sales come in.

To be honest, I was amazed.

And we continue to sell copies of the book even though we haven’t promoted it to anywhere near it’s full potential.

The Next Step 

During our first two years, we’ve turned down every offer from companies interested in direct advertising or sponsorships. There are a lot of reasons for this that I will go into in a future post. But the primary reason is that we have a long-term vision for this project. We wanted to build an audience and establish an actual relationship with our viewers and then figure out ways to create even more high quality content for that audience.

Our audience has continued to grow and has really exploded over the past few months – some of this is due to YouTube Next Chef but I think most of it is due to the fact that we have produced and released a TON of quality content on a consistent schedule.

We’re now producing two recipe videos a week along with a Q&A vlog. The amount of time we spend on this thing is getting kind of insane.

The good news is that it’s never stopped being fun. In fact, it’s more fun than ever.

But we’re also at the point where we have to take it more seriously and turn it into an actual business – without destroying what we’ve already built.

And that’s what Phase 2 will be all about.

We launched Hilah Cooking about a year and a half ago and we’re still going strong. In fact, we’re going stronger than ever. I thought this seemed like as good a time as any to update everybody on our progress and share a few more audience building tips that we’ve learned along the way.

When I wrote the first post in this series – we had about 400 YouTube subscribers, 1,000 Facebook fans and were happy anytime an episode hit 100 views in the first 24 hours. As I write this almost a year later, we are about to hit 4,000 subscribers, we have over 2,300 Facebook fans and reliably exceed 1,000 views in the first 24 hours. Our website traffic has tripled and subscriptions to our email newsletter have exploded.

These numbers might not blow your mind – but I am extremely proud of them. We started this show from ground zero – with little more than a second-hand camera, an ancient iMac and a used shower curtain. We also had no idea what we were doing. So I’m not only proud of what we have accomplished on a production level, but I’m proud of the audience that has grown around the project. These are not empty numbers generated by Spam or paid traffic. We have a very loyal, highly engaged audience that actively watches the show, responds to what we do, tries out the recipes and even sends us the photos to prove it.

I almost hate to refer to our viewers as an audience – because it’s really a community now. Using “audience” feels like a group of people who watch, rather than a group of people that are actively contributing. But I digress. It’s this community that gives us the energy to keep going when things get really, really sucky from time to time.

Now – here are a few more things we’ve learned since the last installment.

Be Prepared To Spend Some Time “Leveling Up”

The early days of launching andy kind of web project – whether it’s a series, a website or even a simple blog – can be pretty frustrating. The numbers are small and sometimes it feels like you’ll never have a good audience for your work.

This early phase reminds me of a videogame where you have to spend a bunch of time wandering around, fighting goblins and gathering gold so that your character gets powerful enough to do the fun stuff. You may be doing awesome work, but you’re not seeing the reward because the foundation just isn’t there yet.

If you don’t spend your time on the non-sexy stuff, you’ll be shooting your work out into a vacuum. The list of non-sexy stuff will vary depending on what your project it, but it includes things like: responding to comments, answering questions, search engine optimization, contributing to other sites & projects in your niche, promoting your project on forums, contributing to conversations on Twitter, etc.

Some of this stuff is fun, but it can become time-consuming and tedious when you are doing it day-in and day-out. However, this is the stuff that makes you a real person to your audience and builds a real sense of connection.

It gets easier.

Nylon Magazine article

Just like with a video game, once you have a certain foundation built, it gets easier.

On level 2, each one of your successes brings a greater reward. As soon as we came back from our summer hiatus, we immediately started getting featured in bigger publications and on bigger websites. We even were featured a tiny article in Nylon Magazine. We also won several big including Blog of The Year at the Austin Blogger Awards. None of this would have been possible in the first few months of the project. But all of these things happened during the first year.

Before people will take a risk on you, you need to have a proven track record. The only way to establish that reputation is to start grinding away. Make it as good as possible, but DON’T STOP.

Consistency Is Key

I can’t underestimate the value of releasing your content on a consistent schedule. Pick a consistent schedule that you can stick to and NEVER MISS. Other than our summer hiatus, we have only missed a single week and that was due to a broken camera combined with a major shit storm of personal chaos.

We definitely had a good excuse, BUT… people noticed.

Now that we know there are actually people out there who expect to see an episode on Monday night or Tuesday morning, we have even more determination to never miss a week.

Official Confirmation: At a YouTube Partners event during SXSW the issue of consistency was discussed as it relates to the YouTube and Google algorithms. The YouTube representative confirmed that consistency is important and does impact how your content is ranked in the search engines. To paraphrase, she said that “if you have 10 videos ready to go, it’s better to release them on a weekly basis rather than daily or all at once.”

Test Your Release Windows

I had always heard that Tuesdays were the best days to release new content. So that’s what we did in the beginning. But I’m the kind of person that likes to test everything. So while still sticking to our original schedule, we’ve also released episodes on other days of the week, mornings, afternoons, evening, etc.

Now we release a new episode to the video sites on Monday night. We publish it on the website on Tuesday morning and then promote it via the social networks throughout the day on Tuesday. This is what seems to be working best for us right now, but I am always experimenting.

If you use YouTube as one of your primary distribution channels, definitely experiment with releasing new videos during “prime time.” There is a huge potential audience of people who are watching YouTube videos instead of watching television and this is the perfect time to attract those people. Also, if your videos ramp up in views quickly, you are more likely to get featured by YouTube.

You Should Start A Mailing List Now

This definitely falls into the non-sexy category, but if you’re going to be in this thing for the long haul, you should start an e-mail list right away. Despite all the pundits who say that e-mail is totally over, it’s not. This is one of the most direct and effective ways to reach your audience.

For a bunch of boring legal reasons, you should sign up for a service that will handle all the delivery stuff. This ensures that you don’t get in trouble for spamming. Here are two options.

• Aweber – I use this and everybody says it is the best and has the best delivery rate. However it costs a little money. If you can afford it, start with Aweber, because if you ever decide to change services they will be required to re-opt in. And you will lose a huge chunk of your list.
• Mailchimp – This is what we use for all the Hilah Cooking stuff because when we started out we didn’t have enough money for Aweber. Mailchimp is free for your first 2,000 subscribers. That’s pretty huge if you are totally limited on cash. Also, Mailchimp is a pleasure to use (and I really love that fucking monkey.)

So since money is no obstacle, just lean into it and get a mailing list up and running.

Dirty Secret: We were extremely excited to win 3 awards at the Austin Blogger Awards including Best Blog of the Year. We didn’t have a big audience at the time, but we DID have a big group of people that regularly read our newsletter. So we asked them to vote. Blam!

Go Meta

I completely neglected this at the beginning, but over time gradually started to see improved traffic for videos if I spent time on the meta data. Once again: not. sexy.

These things are really important, particularly on YouTube: Title, Description, Tags.

Over time, I gradually increased the amount of content I was adding to these fields and search traffic did increase, but I didn’t know if the two things were even related. At the SXSW YouTube Partner event, it was officially confirmed. YouTube wants lots of data. The YouTube rep gave this video as an excellent example of a video with proper meta data.

So take some time and adequately fill out these fields. It’s definitely worth the extra work when it comes to long-tail views.

Dirty YouTube Secret: If you are targeting a keyword, make sure your video file includes the keyword before you upload it. For example, if you are targeting people looking for a “Fish Taco Recipe,” title your video “fish-taco-recipe.mov” or whatever file format you’re using.

Numbers Lie

Although I am writing a lot about audience size and increasing numbers here, it’s also important to remembers that numbers are not a completely accurate gauge for how successful your project is. It’s super-easy (and cheap) to artificially inflate video views and traffic numbers. If you are an independent producer, don’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to the big players in your field.

If your audience is growing, you will feel it. If you are cultivating a real community, you will know it deep down.

To summarize without all the tech stuff…

• Keep producing content.
• Always strive to improve the quality.
• Consistently release it on a regular basis.
• Listen and communicate with the people who love your stuff.
• Spend time and energy cultivating a real community around your work.
• Don’t stop.

More to come.

Please leave a comment below and let me know if you have any questions or I have made any egregious errors in this post. I would also love to hear tips and tricks that you have learned.

This post is about 2 months late, but the launch of Season 2 of Hilah Cooking has completely overwhelmed my world. Things are going really well with the show and as we approach our one-year anniversary we have managed to hit all the milestones I put into the original crazy “business plan.” From the very beginning, I wanted to do some kind of “live” event.

The Mouth Party Bar: sponsored by Tito's Vodka, Deep Eddy Sweet Tea and El Gran Jubileo Tequila

There were a few reasons for this:

• We wanted to thank our viewers. We have a seriously awesome audience and we thought a cool party with free food and drink would be a great way to say thanks for supporting what we’re doing. But even more than that, we wanted to meet some of the people we’ve been corresponding with via email and blog comments.
• Real world event = added legitimacy. When everything is on a computer screen, it’s easy to forget that a web project is something real. We saw the event as a way of publicly telling everybody that we are serious about what we do and we’re only getting started.
• An opportunity to give back to the community. This was a not-for-profit event designed to raise money for the Sustainable Food Center. The SFC is a great organization with a mission to strengthen the local food system and provide access to nutritious affordable food.

I don't know who this is, but the food is from Zandunga Mexican Bistro (awesome) and the beverage looks like it consists primarily of Deep Eddy Sweet Tea (also awesome!)

We spent most of our summer break working on the event which we decided to call MOUTH PARTY! It turns out that putting together a live event is a lot more difficult than producing a web series – especially when you’ve never done it before. We found a great location (United States Art Authority) and started hitting up restaurants and other food companies to come on as sponsors.

Luckily, Jessie Tilton came on board to help us plan the event and really knocked it out of the park. We seriously couldn’t have done it without her. She signed up some amazing food and drink sponsors – and the drinks flowed all night. (The next day Craig said we should have called it LIVER PARTY instead of MOUTH PARTY.)

Hilah hands over a cake to the first winner of the Mouth Party cakewalk. This cake was donated by Central Market and customized at the last minute by La Pham Nikita.

As is usually the case with my projects, I had some pretty grandiose ambitions for the event – and some of the things just didn’t come together. The big disappointment was that we had planned on shooting an episode of Hilah Cooking during the event. I thought an episode in front of a live audience would be killer, but due to logistics we couldn’t pull it off. We were able to livestream a few hours of the show using my iPhone and the justin.tv app, but it wasn’t quite the same. Next time, I am determined to shoot a live episode no matter what.

However, there was still plenty of great entertainment including a great set by The Lost Soul Revue and three cake walks that got progressively more entertaining as the cake-walkers got progressively more intoxicated. Also, most importantly, we got to meet and hang out with a bunch of regular viewers. This alone made the whole event totally worth the time and energy we had put into planning it.

It was an awesome night and I’m really happy with it considering it was our first ever “live” event. I’m also happy to announce that we raised $1,100 for Sustainable Food Center.

If you’re producing a web series (or even a regular blog), I would really recommend that you explore the idea of a real world event. Even something as simple as a more casual meet-up is a great way to connect with your audience and get some amazing feedback. Plus, it’s just FUN. If you’re a web creator, you already spend way too much time sitting in front of a computer and communicating via various electronic means. All of this is great, but it simply can’t compare with talking in person to someone who follows your work.

Photos by Mimibug Photography. For more photos, check out the Hilah Cooking Facebook Page.

I want to once again thank our awesome sponsors who made this event possible

• United States Art Authority
• SpiderHouse Cafe
• Deep Eddy Sweet Tea Vodka
• El Gran Jubileo Tequila
• Cote Catering
• Natural Nectars Artisan Aguas Frescas
• Hot Mama’s Cafe/Ararat
• Zandunga Mexican Bistro
• Let’sGoGreen.biz
• Tito’s Handmade Vodka
• Central Market
• Blue Note Bakery