How I Run a Crypto YouTube Channel (The Full Blueprint)

All right, everyone, I’m going to go through everything I do to create videos in my particular niche. And that’s the Cardano crypto blockchain. And I want to take this and show everyone that wants to start a particular YouTube channel or even wants to take the reins off what I’m doing at the moment and start your own channel around the crypto space. I’m going to talk about everything that I do.

So I’m going to cover my video ideas, where I get ideas from the script writing side of things, the thumbnails, the titles, the actual recording process and what software I use, and also the post production, how I edit the videos and how I optimise that particular part of the process. Then I’ll look at the post posting, post production of that, the posting. So all the social media posts that I do, the blog posts and SEO search engine optimization I do for the videos and for the blog posts, the repurposing of all the content, too. So there’s a lot to go through here.

So if you’re interested in becoming a YouTube content creator, hopefully this does help you guys. So let’s get into the details. The first thing I do is look and research for what I’m going to publish for that day. So I’ve got a particular content publishing schedule.

So Mondays, I might do a particular topic or or tutorial. Wednesday, I do interviews or a topic. And then Friday I do news stories for the week. So to get all that content, I usually crawl X on a daily basis to see what is going on, what stories are trending and what has a lot of velocity.

So if it’s a Monday or a Wednesday and I don’t have anything already scheduled, I’m looking for high velocity news stories. So these are news stories with lots of likes, lots of retweets, lots of quotes, tweets, lots of people talking about it, engaging with it, and also have third party news outlets outside of X also talking about it. So anything that has that type of indicators is a high velocity story and needs to be talked about and covered as soon as possible. So I get those type of news stories.

I usually use bookmarks within X itself and I collate them all. So anything I collate on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I gather them up for my big news summary for the end of the week. So I do a newsletter and a video summary at the end of the week. So that’s where all those news items come from.

So now I’ve got my high velocity news story. Let’s take that now over to the content production side of things. So I’ve got the news story. I need to verify and fact check everything and make sure I understand what’s actually being talked about.

So in the crypto space, some things get very technical. There’s lots of new terms, there’s lots of new partners, and you need to verify all that. So firstly, I’ve got to understand what the hell I’m talking about, make sure it’s something that I can actually communicate to people and educate people about. So that’s number one.

So if it’s something like Ouroboros LAOS, transaction finality, and all these other technical terms that you hear in the crypto space, I’ve got to understand that first, so I don’t look stupid when I’m talking to the camera. So that’s number one. Next off, if it’s a big partnership or something that’s being announced, I need to verify and fact check that. So there’s a lot of projects in the crypto space that talk big, that announce big things, but if you don’t hear it from the other side or get an understanding of what that announcement is, you’re just spouting shit.

So I’m sorry to say, but you need to fact check that stuff. So if there’s a big partnership announcement, and you can only see one side of the story, and you can’t find it anywhere else on the internet, other than from that one central point of source, the project that’s talking about it, I can’t verify that. So I don’t know if it’s something I should be talking about. So I try and avoid those types of stories.

If I see something that is a partnership announcement, and I see the announcement announced from both sides, the announcer and the partnership side of things, that’s a good indicator that it’s something decent to be talking about. So verifying your news stories here, if it’s something that you can’t verify, say that you can’t verify it, say you’re speculating rumors here and all that stuff, so that you don’t look stupid when you’re doing these type of videos. So that’s that side of things, the fact checking. Then comes the actual harder part here, and this is the thumbnail itself.

So the thumbnail is the number one thing that gets people clicking through to your video. So you know what you want to talk about, and you now need to think about how that thumbnail is going to be structured to get the user to click and watch your video. I know there’s a lot of clickbait stuff out there, I know a lot of people hate that, but if you don’t adopt some sort of methodology to leave intrigue, leave some mystery, leave the user wanting more to find out more, that video won’t ever be clicked. And if it’s never clicked, you won’t get the view, you won’t get that potential view.

So the thumbnail is something that I spent a lot of time on, about an hour even, just to try and work out what the thumbnail is going to be, and I designed that in Photoshop. So I fire up the Adobe suite, I get Photoshop out, and I start crafting something together. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don’t, actually a lot of times I don’t get it right. And you know, it’s just a learning process to find out what works for you, what’s trending in YouTube in general, and what works best.

So the thumbnails, the next big thing. Now, after that is the title of your video. You’ve got to come up with some ideas, some titles, so that it complements the thumbnail itself. So they’re the two things that are paired up to get you that click through.

Now, once you have that, you need to then think about the first 30 second intro of your video. It’s getting a little bit cumbersome here, isn’t it? So you’ve got to get the thumbnail right, you’ve got to get the title right, then you’ve got to get your first 30 seconds right. So that 30 second hook is what entices people to stay and watch your video.

So it’s one thing to get the person in for the click-through rate and the title, but then keeping the person there to watch the rest of the video is key. This is one of the biggest things there. So one trick that I’ve learned over the years is to make sure that your title and thumbnail flow into your first 30 second hook. So you could potentially write your first 30 second hook before the title and the thumbnail, so that the title and thumbnail all match up together.

But you need to deliver what the user is expecting in that first 30 seconds, so that they will stay and watch the rest of the video. So you notice with this video here, I talked about what the process is, what I’m going to do. I outlined what the video would cover so that you as a viewer are knowing what to expect and you can look at the chapters and everything else down below and then skip to those areas that you want. So that flow there, that first 30 seconds with the thumbnail and the title are absolutely crucial.

So you nail that, you’ll nail the video for sure. All right, so now that I’ve got that first 30 seconds down, I start scripting out the rest of the video script as well. So I’ve got a big outline of what I want to talk about. I’ve researched it, I’m more knowledgeable about it.

Now for some users, some video content creators, you might want to script out everything word for word. You might not be confident enough to talk about your topic in its entirety without a script and that’s totally fine. So I used to start like that as well. I used to have the entire script.

Sometimes I still do, I find it a little bit easier, but I have the entire script. I try and memorize as much as possible, but then I have it in the background as well so that I can start talking about it, reading through it, I should say, reading through it so that I can present it on screen. So it’s a bit of a process there. So that process alone of creating the thumbnail, the title, the first 30 second hook and the script can take me an hour, hour and a half.

Before it used to take me four hours just to get that right, you know, working out the terminology and doing all the research and getting understanding behind everything. So it did take a while, but I’m a little bit faster with that these days. So that’s the script writing side of things. Now, after the script writing side of things, you might want to practice it a few times so you get it right.

And once you get it right, it’s time to hit the record button. So with the recording side of things, I use OBS. OBS is a free open source piece of content. You could use anything.

You could use your mobile phone. So if this is all you have, use that. It’s a great piece of kit that you have everywhere. And, you know, the phone or video equipment, whatever you might have is only as good as if you use it.

So you can spend thousands of dollars on studio lighting and a video camera and all that stuff. But if you never use it, it’s kind of useless. If you have your phone and just fire it up and use it, invaluable. So whatever it is that you’re using to record, just use it.

Just hit the record button. OBS I like as a piece of software because it’s free, takes a little bit of time and knowledge to understand how to set it up. But once you get it set up and working, it’s pretty sweet. It’s you just I literally just hit the record button or create a video recording file for me that I can then take into post-production afterwards.

So I’ve got my awesome little mic here. I’ve got my webcam all firing through OBS. It’s quite flexible. You can buy a lot of plugins.

You can add in all these effects. You can use it for live stream as well if you want. So it’s very flexible piece of software. Again, it’s free.

It’s open source. Check it down in the links down below. Now, after that. After the recording is done for a 10 minute video, I might record 20 minutes worth of footage because I do fumble.

I do stuff up. So I do a lot of post-production edits afterwards. So if I don’t like a section, I’ll just stop it. I’ll record again.

If I have a coughing fit, I’ll record it again. So I usually record a lot more footage than I have that I output online. So that’s that side of things. So post-production.

So that post-production side of things, I take over to Adobe Premiere. So again, Adobe software. I’ve got the suite. I’ve paid for the subscription.

So I’ve got all the little bits and pieces. So that’s my ecosystem expertise and what I like to use. So I take it over to Adobe Premiere. But the first thing I do is actually extract the audio file and I clean that up.

So a long time ago, before I did the whole video content production for Cardano for the last five years, I used to do an audio only podcast, a weekly podcast about content management systems and website development. So in those years, I learned how to do audio production. So I use a lot of filters. I use a lot of compressors, audio gates and all these things to try and clean up the audio as much as possible.

Sometimes I get it wrong and I get in the YouTube comments, Pete, you got to do something about your audio. Give the audio to me. I’ll clean it up. And I appreciate that.

I’d love if you could. But I do these videos so quickly, I can’t give you an audio file and expect it back in four or five days for the stuff I do. So I just can’t work with that workflow. I do everything in one go.

But I clean up the audio. That’s the main thing. So once I’ve cleaned up the audio, then I can start editing the video. So I’ll go through the video itself.

I cut out all the bits that were wrong. I rearrange the video timeline sometimes so that it makes a little bit more sense, especially if I forget something and or a news item comes up during the recording session and I have to add it in. I do all that during that post-production side of things as well. So a lot of video editing.

Now, you notice with a lot of my videos also have the lower thirds coming in, have animations flying in on the side and all sorts of like magical things. If I can be bothered, I do all that. And usually I do. And there’s a secret to it and why you want to do that with a lot of videos.

Mr. Beast is probably the best at this, and they have that three second attention span click over. So every three seconds you need something changing. You need something swiping on the screen, beeping at you in your face so that it will keep your attention there.

So it’s that user retention thing that they do. And because of our lack of attention these days, that’s diminishing because of the type of media we’re consuming. You need that flashing thing across your face and beeping things that are constantly there to keep your attention. Kids cartoons are notoriously bad for this.

If you look at some ratings on how some of these kids cartoons are made, it is really bad. And you can understand why younger generations have less of an attention span. Well, a total segue here, but let me just explain it to you. So when they produce a video for a child, they’ll sit the child in front of it.

They’ll play the video. And as soon as the child loses attention from the screen, the video production people know, ah, we got to change that part of the video and change that sequence so that it keeps the user, the child, attention on the screen. So they watch this and they know as soon as that child or person turns away, they need to change and edit that video to keep that user’s retention, attention retained. Yeah, it’s bad.

It’s really bad. And then that person, that child gets trained to stare at the screen and expect attention and bombarding things on the screen. So that’s why we have such short attention spans these days, because generations are growing up, are having media changed for them in a psychological way to diminish their attention, attention spans, and keep their attention retained just for profits of advertisers. Okay.

But if you want to be a really good YouTuber, you got to take advantage of that, unfortunately. So a lot of video post production editing, um, if I can be bothered, it takes an enormous amount of time. Other video content creators outsource this and they, they pay hundreds of dollars to get it all done. My videos, if I’m lucky, make $10 per video.

So I’m not outsourcing anything. I cannot afford to, it doesn’t work within the budget. So if you can, if you have the time, if you have the effort, you have the means, by all means, go ahead and do it. It’s worthwhile.

Video retention is really important. All right, so we’ve got the post-production side of things. Next is you need to upload the video to YouTube or wherever you’re going to upload it to. So that’s a given, that’s an easy part.

You drag, drop it, all done. What you might forget, you’ve got to optimise your video for search. The search engine optimisation side of things. So you’ve got your title, that’s great.

You’ve got your thumbnail, you’ve got your click-throughs, you’ve got the first 30 seconds of your video. What about the metadata description? What about the hashtags? What about all those things?

So you’ve got to make sure that your meta description matches everything, it’s not just generic. You see a lot of YouTube videos, they just have follow me on Patreon, follow me on this, blah, blah, blah. And they have a list of things. This is not financial advice, blah, blah, blah.

So all that stuff is just boilerplate things and there’s nothing related directly to the video. That diminishes the search engine result for your video. The video is basically dumb. Google search engine is dumb.

It doesn’t know what’s in your video. It’s getting better these days. Of course, it’s got text transcripts and it has a lot more context. But you need that metadata description there to give it more context and understanding about what your video is about.

Giving that more context will get better search results for your video. Better search results mean more views, more views, more ad revenue. So the metadata is really important. Other thing that to add there is chapters.

Chapters are really important as well. Chapters, I’ve found really interesting techniques here, but you can keyword stuff your chapters and that will come up in the search engine results of your videos. All your videos. So if you’re doing something like a staking ADA on your ROI and you’ve got a video about staking general, you can have one chapter there that says staking ADA on your ROI and that will come up in the search engine results.

So that’s a little bit of a tip for you guys. So you can optimise your chapters there as well along with your metadata and all those other things. So video metadata description is really important. Now I do this on audio and on the video as well.

So when I record the video, I split off to an MP3 only and that gets put onto the Spreaker network. Now Spreaker is an audio podcasting publishing platform. They syndicate it out to all of the other podcasting platforms out there. So Apple Podcasts, Spotify, you know, all those awesome things and even ones that you’ve never even heard of.

So you need to do all the metadata descriptions for that as well. You can have them as the same and when I get lazy, I do keep them the same but they’re different audiences. So you got to think about the best metadata description and titles for either platform. So you get different click-through rates for different platforms.

So it’s something you need to think about there as well if you want to put in all of the effort for it. Okay, so video post-production, put the video online. I’ve got the audio version online as well. I’ve got the metadata descriptions.

I’ve got the titles. I’ve got everything done there. Now, if you just step back one moment on the YouTube side of things, YouTube, once you get to a certain point, you have split A B testing of your video titles and your thumbnails too. So with that, you have the opportunity to trial different thumbnails and different titles and combine them in different combinations to see what works best.

So you know how before I said you got to get that title and that thumbnail right? Yeah, you do. But you have to do that three times. So you have to try three different variations, three different ideas to see what will work best.

That all needs to flow through your first 30 seconds and so on. So little subtle differences like moving the title text from the top to the bottom, put your face on the left to the right. They all make a difference in the thumbnail. So trial and error really helps and with that split A B testing, you can see what works best.

Okay, so I think that covers all of the posting side of things on the main media channels. I think that’s everything. So after this, you got your YouTube channel, you got your video up on there. That’s great, fantastic.

When do you post? This is something really crucial. And once you’ve posted a lot of videos and a lot of people have seen it, so maybe a thousand subscribers, you’ll gain some really invaluable analytic data and that analytics will tell you when your viewership is online. And for me, it’s 9 p.m.

Eastern, Australian Eastern Standard Time. So that’s when Europe, Africa is online, Asia is still online and the US is just waking up. So that’s my best time when the US is waking up. They’re logging on to YouTube.

They’re seeing the videos and it’s creating velocity behind the video in general. So the timing of your video is crucial. The first hour, absolutely crucial. If you get a lot of views in that first hour, the YouTube will promote that video onto the YouTube homepage of all your users and their networks so that the video potentially get more views.

The second most important time is the second hour. If the second hour also gets that velocity, then fantastic. You will see a extra boost and longevity of your video as it launches. Now to help with this, there’s a lot of social posting that you can do.

So I post all my videos onto X. I used to link them off to YouTube. It’s trying to gain that traction and it’s a balance between growing X and growing YouTube. So if your main focus is YouTube, then try and push it off to that YouTube platform.

But I don’t just post on X. I post on X, Facebook, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Twitter, X, not X, that’s a platform, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, LinkedIn. So lots of different social media platforms all at the same time to try and gain that velocity all into YouTube. And if you gain that extra velocity, extra views, extra clicks, you gain more views in the first and second hour and they’re all crucial.

So timing is absolutely perfect, is crucial, not perfect. Get that timing perfect. It was crucial for your video. That’s what I’m supposed to say.

So that’s that side of things. So there’s a lot of work with all your social posting. So you got to hammer that all through, get that all prepped. So hopefully if you’re starting a video now at 9 a.m., let’s say your 9 a.m.

video production, you spent your morning doing your research, you’ve done your script, it’s about lunchtime now. From lunchtime to about 2 or 3, you start doing all of your recording. You start your post-production around 2 o’clock to about 4 o’clock. That two-hour period, you should have all your video and audio done.

You start uploading between 4 and 5 o’clock. Get all that done, get your metadata, start scripting all your social media posts, have that all scheduled up. So now you can have a break, have dinner, and then start posting out by 9 p.m. That’s literally what some of my days look like when I’m doing a video.

So that’s the whole day, the whole cycle of that. What else did I want to talk about here? There were some more things. Ah, yes, that’s right.

So the social media side of things. After that, I’ll also do a blog post. You guys are like, Christ, Pete, what are you doing here? I’ll also do a blog post for the content too.

So people consume content in different ways. They consume media in different ways. So I do the video for people that like video, do the audio for audio listeners, if you learn by audio, and then the readers as well. So people like to consume content in different ways.

So I produce that content in all those different variations. So I do a blog post. So I write up all my notes in the blog post. I do a summary of the blog, the video itself.

I have links to the video. I have links to the audio on Spotify. And you can see all that on my website, learncadano.io. Just click on episodes and you’ll see all the ways that I do this.

I also have the text transcript on there too. Now, this is all important because of search engine optimization. Again, if you’re producing one piece of content, and it’s a good piece of content, you want to make sure it’s covered and captured in every different way. So search engine optimization for your blog post is really crucial.

Make sure you get that title right, metadata right. Make sure you got a lot enough text in there and context and links from other websites and all different types of things. So the blog post I think is really crucial. Now with all this, I don’t do all of it all the time because I get lazy.

I have time constraints. I can’t spend a full day doing this type of production. It’s just not worth it sometimes, especially if I’m doing a tiny little video about some product or something that no one’s ever heard of and 20 people use. What is the point of doing that whole entire thing?

Maybe it’s to promote them. Maybe they want to try and gain traction. So if that’s the case, then, you know, you do the whole thing. Otherwise, there’s absolutely no point.

So I try and do it if I can, if I have the time. If you see me posting all the way to the blog post side of things, I’ve gone through that whole cycle. Now after the blog post, there’s one last thing. It doesn’t end.

It’s the shorts. Now shorts have gained massive amount of popularity these days on TikTok, on Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts. You need to start making videos and posting off to those platforms too. So in OBS here, I’ve got recording.

I’ve got a vertical recording as well that I do sometimes. So I record in landscape format, vertical format for the same video. So that way I can just edit it and then push that off to those particular platforms when I create the shorts from my videos. So really important that you do.

For a lot of videos and projects that I work with, I do the shorts as well. So that’s probably a crucial thing and they all push video views back to your main video. So don’t push the shorts out or publish the shorts really until you have the main video out. So that way they get redirected all to that main video where you get most of your views.

Okay. Now that’s my whole entire video content production process. Let me just check. There’s got to be something else here.

Yes. Okay, slightly different thing here. So I also do video interviews and they have a slightly different workflow. Usually I have to do an interview a week or two weeks beforehand.

I have to research about that particular project. I have to research who I’m interviewing as well. You don’t want to look stupid when you’re doing the interview and scheduling sometimes is a little bit difficult, especially for me here in Australia where it’s midnight or 5 a.m. for me when I’m doing the interview and the other person’s, you know, just their afternoon.

It’s just another thing. So you got to make sure that you’re prepared and you’re sharp for all these interviews that you do. So that’s the major difference when it comes to interviews. The rest of production side of things pretty much the same.

Now, can you use AI for all of this? Yes, you can. So you can definitely use AI for your video preparation, your content research, your script writing and title thumbnails and 30 second intro thing. Definitely can use AI for that.

I have experimented with some AI scripts and whatnot and you can tell the difference. You can tell if it’s AI scripted and I feel a lot of people can as well. So do be cautious with that. The other side of the AI thing is the whole AI production side of things and that’s turning me into an AI talking head and you can do that as well.

There’s lots of tools out there. It does cost for the longer the video is. So I’ve been recording here for almost 30 minutes. And if you’re doing that with AI, it will cost you an absolute fortune.

So cost benefit there. The other con for doing AI talking head videos is that YouTube is now penalizing AI slop. So if you are creating terrible and copycat AI videos, you’ll get penalized for it and your video won’t ever see the light of day. So they’re clamping down on that quite a lot and I’m seeing less and less AI slop thankfully, but you have to take the good with the bad there.

AI might get really good and might be very beneficial to actually do more AI videos, but I don’t know. At this point in time, it’s not. People build a connection with a human and as soon as they start seeing the AI side of things, they get turned off, they get switched off and probably stop following you as well. So diminishing returns if you implement AI on all aspects of your content creation.

So do think about that too. All right. So I’ve spoken about everything. If you want a quick summary, I’m not going to give you one because there’s too much to go through here.

Just go through the video again and you’ll get an idea of where you may need to concentrate your efforts on. But hopefully this video has helped you in your video content creation process and gives everyone an idea in the space of what I do in general when I create a video. So if I ever disappear, anyone else that is interested can pick up the reins here and start creating content for the Kodano ecosystem or any niche that you’re interested in. Okay, that’s all I got for this video.

I’ll see you in the next one.