This is the second part of a series on How To Build an Audience For A Web Show. It will be updated whenever I learn new stuff from making dumb mistakes. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to get the latest updates.

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.

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

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. 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.

Hilah (on stage) recruits donations for the first Mouth Party Cake Walk.

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

Since launching Hilah Cooking a little over 6 months ago, we’ve built up what I consider to be a pretty impressive audience. The numbers aren’t astronomical, but we definitely have a group of avid viewers who are very engaged in the show. They really do make the recipes at home and send the videos to their friends. The numbers are growing at a slow but steady pace. For our first few episodes we were happy if we just hit 100 views, but now 3,500 is our baseline for a successful episode and we are always inching that benchmark forward.

As our Facebook following and YouTube subscriber counts have started to grow, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about how to build an audience for their web series. Keep in mind, I’ve only been doing this for 6 months and definitely don’t consider myself an expert. In this post, I’ll be talking about web series and not one-off videos. Everybody still holds on to the dream of producing a video that’s so great that it quickly goes “viral,” but that’s outside the scope of what we’re talking about here.

2 Sure-Fire Ways To Get Views For Your Web Videos

1. If you have a lot of money, you can get a lot of views really quickly. You can buy ads, get press with major media outlets and even purchase “views.” But unless your show is amazing, unique and fills an existing need, your viewers won’t really have a connection to your show. It’s possible to buy “views” for really cheap and inflate the value of your show to potential advertisers, but in my opinion you’re looking at things really short term.
2. If you don’t have any money, you have to actually engage with your viewers and build your audience one person at a time. These people will start to tell their friends about your show and you will start to notice things growing exponentially. This will probably happen a LOT slower than you are prepared for. Sometimes it happens so slowly you don’t even notice it happening.

With Hilah Cooking, we had absolutely zero money starting out. When we decided to do the show, I didn’t have a job or even a place to live. So we were starting at ground zero. We tested a lot of different things. Some of them worked and some of them didn’t. This is what’s worked for us.

1. Be Human

With a television show, you can only broadcast. With a web show, you can communicate.

The web is about two way communication. If someone likes your show enough to send you an email or a comment, respond to them. Make it easy for your audience to interact with you. Don’t look at this as an annoyance, look at it as an opportunity. We are lucky that we have two people working on the project and that Hilah is really good at responding with great comments.

With Hilah Cooking, we are attempting to build a brand that encompasses more than just the show. So we aren’t looking for quick, short-term ways to boost traffic or views.

Be Human. Be Real. Treat your audience like they are human beings.

(This is going to be a long post, so I decided to put the most important thing first. You can stop reading here if you’re short on time.)

2. Start A Facebook Page

You can love it or hate it, but you can’t ignore Facebook.

We launched our Facebook page before we had a video or a website up. We didn’t do anything fancy, we just put up some basic information and a few photos. We both sent out invitations to our friends. We were ecstatic when we broke 100 fans and figured we were destined to be an overnight success. Our Facebook friends have grown slowly and steadily and we recently broke 1,000. This number may sound small, but based on our traffic, this group is very engaged. Our Facebook page is still one of the top 3 traffic sources for the website.

There are all kinds of cool things you can do with Facebook pages these days, and eventually we will probably enhance ours one of these days, but we’ve been too busy making episodes. Even a bare bones page is an amazing way to communicate with your audience and distribute your show. The majority of your viewers aren’t sitting around anxiously waiting for your next episode, so use your Facebook page to let them know when a new episode has dropped.

1. Invite your friends. And by friends, I mean people you actually know. If you’re creating something legitimate, your friends will compose a good part of your core fan base. And they will help you spread the word.
2. Don’t Be Annoying. Don’t invite everybody on your friends list. You might have 800 friends, but I can guarantee that not all of them are interested in your project. If they don’t seem like your target audience, just leave them alone.
3. Don’t Act Desperate. We’ve posted a few times asking for our fans to help us get our numbers up, and I have always regretted it. Even if you phrase it in a funny way, it conveys an unattractive air of desperation. Desperation isn’t cool. Be cool. It will happen.
4. Drive Traffic To Your Website. If you have a website (and you should), post a link to your site when a new video goes live. Don’t waste this opportunity by sending more traffic to YouTube. Embed the episode on your site and send your Facebook friends there. They might hang around and watch other episodes or post a comment or read your About page. Get your audience to your site as often as possible.
5. Experiment with timing. There are certain times when you will get a better response. At the moment Tuesday mornings is working nicely for us. Facebook users are deluged with a ton of information on their Wall. It’s easy to get lost in the stream of data. We usually post twice about each episode. The first time we post a link directly to our site – usually on a Tuesday morning. Then we will post a followup with an actual video embed – usually the following afternoon. We get responses from a totally different group of people.
6. Offer Added Value. If your page is just one promo link after another, then you might as well forget about it. If your fans leave comments, take a minute to respond to them. Use the Facebook page as a place to get feedback. Ask your fans what they’d like to see more of. Ask them what their favorite and least favorite things about your show are. Post links to content related to the subject of your show. Post behind the scenes stuff. The people who have “liked” you on Facebook have made a conscious decision to follow what you’re doing to one degree or another. So take advantage of this and think of ways to build the relationship. There’s a lot that you can do. It takes a little more time, but it’s worth it.

3. Use YouTube Like a Social Network

Most people think that YouTube is only the biggest online video distribution site. But it’s a lot more. It’s a social network. There is a huge community of people who spend a lot of time on YouTube viewing, subscribing to and talking about the videos that they’re interested in. I wasn’t aware of how significant this was until our YouTube following started to grow. As a long-time Vimeo user, I always looked at YouTube as the ghetto of online video, but I was totally missing it.

1. Interact with your YouTube audience. The YouTube audience is … different. The commenting system is strange and the avid YouTubers seem to have their own unique shorthand. At first I totally ignored it, I just knew we had to be on YouTube. In fact, I remember telling Hilah not to worry too much about YouTube because I thought Twitter would be a more effective use of time. Then I noticed that she had completely ignored me and was responding to just about every comment. This was several months in and as soon as she joined in the conversation, our YouTube views started to grow. I had been proven totally wrong, yet again!
2. Interact with the community. Once things started getting interesting on YouTube, I began to spend a little more time on the site to see what other people were doing. I was particularly interested in the cooking niche. As I explored YouTube occasionally I found things I really liked, and I would post a response. Since we share the Hilah Cooking account, my comments were attributed to the show. Once again, we noticed an uptick in traffic, friends and subscribers. The “brand” was interacting with the community in an organic way.
3. Make Friends. This is the one technique that might seem a little shady. But, I actively look for people who have commented on cooking videos in the last week or so and I add them as a friend. If they have interesting videos, I will subscribe to their channel. Many times, they will accept the friend request and/or subscribe to our channel. You can only add a handful of friends per day, so I make a point of looking for people who are definitely interested in cooking and recipe videos. I never waste a friend request on someone who hasn’t expressed an interest (by commenting) on our subject.
4. Experiment with timing. Just like with Facebook, there are certain times that are better than others when it comes to launching videos. Chances are this will be a little different for every show, but I’ve found that the best time to drop episodes is around 7:00 on a weekday evening. I don’t have any official data on this, but there seems to be a big audience on YouTube during what was traditionally “prime time.” They’re watching YouTube videos instead of watching TV. So if you want to give your episodes a little jumpstart, I suggest launching them between Sunday and Thursday sometime in the early evening. The goal is to get a lot of people commenting on your video during the first 48 hours with the hopes that YouTube will feature your video.

This YouTube strategy may sound overly simple … and it is. There’s no trick here. We add a few dozen subscribers a month and views on YouTube consistently increase. Slow and Steady. And most importantly, the feedback we get on the show has been great.

4. Be Everywhere

There are dozens of video distribution sites out there. All of them have their own unique tribes. When you first start out, I suggest putting your video everywhere.

1. Distribute Widely. We started out using Tubemogul. Tubemogul allows you to upload your video once and then distribute to a bunch of different sites at one. I signed up for just about every site they offered. I spent lots of time looking at stats and trying to figure out things like “Why does Metacafe love our hummus video but hate our tabouli video?” You never know where your audience is until you test out the waters. Tubemogul lets you get your video pretty much everywhere without very much extra effort.
2. Link to your website in your video description. Even if you’re just distributing through YouTube, put a link to your website in the text description of your video. Look for every opportunity to get people back to your website. Also, the more inbound links you have, the better. You may have one viewer who watches your video on viddler and then clicks through to your site and becomes a superfan.
3. Look For Support Sites in Your Niche. Do some research and find some of the big sites that relate to your niche or subject. Since our subject is cooking, we pretty quickly found Foodbuzz and Foodgawker. Whenever we release a new episode, I post a new entry on each of those sites. It just takes a few minutes and sends a large amount of traffic. Both of these sites have large communities of readers interested in food, so it’s a simple way to get our show in front of new potential viewers. There are sites out there for everything, so spend a little time and find out which ones work for you.

5. Focus Your Resources

After you’ve spent a few months experimenting and gathering data, it’s time to scale back. You only have so much time and energy, so it’s important to invest it intelligently. Identify the areas you are getting the best results and focus on those areas. Where are people interacting with you? Where are you getting the most traffic? Cut out all the stuff that isn’t showing results.

For us, that meant focusing almost exclusively on our Website, Facebook, YouTube and our mailing list. There are things we know we should be doing more of (like Twitter), but we have to concentrate our limited resources on the stuff that is working right now.

What Are You Doing?

Now you have a pretty good overview of what we do. I am going to leave the comments open on this entry because I know there are a million things that I’ve left out or haven’t figured out yet. Use the comments to ask questions, give feedback and share your “tricks” for building an audience online.

The #1 question people ask me about Hilah Cooking is what kind of gear we use. Since I am a behind-the-scenes guy, I get all the tech questions from camera and filmmaker geeks. (Hilah gets the fun questions about food and cocktails and girl stuff.)

Usually, I hesitate to go into too much detail about our gear because our setup is so low-budget, but also because I am a huge believer in using what you can get your hands on. Filmmakers and photographers are notoriously geeky when it comes to gear. It’s easy to waste incredible amounts of time reading camera forums instead of actually producing anything. I have been personally guilty of this. But, if I’m going to do a series on how to make a web show, I should probably start with the gear.

When we conceived the idea for Hilah Cooking, I was unemployed and almost homeless and neither of us had any cash to invest in the show. We decided to scrape together whatever we could and start producing episodes as soon as we could. I refused to let lack of gear be a factor. I have often fallen into the psychological trap of waiting for perfection instead of getting it done. That wasn’t an option in this situation.

Our Production Setup

Here’s an overview of our production setup. This is the gear we started with and we are still using it today. The only thing we didn’t have at the beginning was the floor lamp. The photo above gives you an idea of what things look like behind-the-scenes. It’s pretty ghetto.

The Camera: I use a Canon HV30. This is actually a great little camera. You can find a used one for around $500. It shoots 1080p HD and has the option 24P and 30P options. Since I know this is headed for the web, I shoot in 30P. The camera is small and easy to operate. I basically just turn it on, use one of the white balance presets and leave everything else on Auto. The only real downside to the camera is that the menus are a hassle. If you want a lot of manual control you will drive yourself crazy. It also records to tape instead of SD cards, but this isn’t a problem for my workflow.

Wide Angle Adapter: I wouldn’t recommend using a wide angle adapter unless you absolutely have to. Since we are shooting in a tight space, I need it to fit everything into the frame. But it’s easy to get vignetting if you’re not careful and it softens up the edges of the image more than I would like.

Tripod: I use a really cheap photography tripod. I don’t know the exact model but you could probably get a better one for around $30. This tripod drives me crazy because it is rickety and you can’t pan or tilt with it. But, it gets the job done for now. IMPORTANT: You should use some kind of tripod even if it really sucks.

Lights: Our key-light is a three light floor lamp that I bought at Target for around $20. We have a fill light on the other side of the camera, which is a work-light that is clamped to a chair. The fill light is the next thing on my list of things to improve. I’m thinking about building one of these $5 light stands. We also take advantage of the kitchen’s large built-in fluorescent light which is directly above our “set”.

Shower Curtain: That clear plastic is actually a shower curtain that Hilah had in her garage. We thumbtack that up and shoot the light through it to diffuse it a little bit.

Microphone: For audio, we use an Audio Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional Condenser Microphone. This mic sells for around $20 and I’m really pleased with the quality. It’s not wireless so that means Hilah is connected to the camera at all times. Since we primarily shoot in her kitchen, this isn’t a big problem. The fact that it’s wired makes it really quick and easy to use. We just plug it in and go. It’s powerful enough that it can also pick up a second voice when we have guests.

Don’t Get Hung Up On Gear!

When it comes to making a web series, the Gear Does Not Matter. At least not in the beginning. There are popular web shows that are shot with Flip cameras, camera phones and built-in laptop webcams. Use whatever you can get your hands on and start making episodes.
Ask yourself three questions:

• Can I see what’s happening?
• Can I hear what they’re saying?
• Is it in focus?

Once you’ve got these areas mastered, challenge yourself to start improving other areas and to get a little better with each episode. And remember…

The perfect is the enemy of the good. -Voltaire

This is the first part of a series I’m calling How To Make A Web Show. I’m not claiming to be an expert on the subject of web shows. I’ve only been doing this for a few months. I am figuring this out as I go and I make a lot of mistakes. But, that’s my favorite way to learn. I’m actually hoping to get a lot of feedback and actually implement some of it to make the show better. So, please feel free to make liberal use of the comments section below.