Starting a YouTube Channel, Part 1: Planning Your Content

A few weeks ago, I wrote about revisiting my plans to start a YouTube channel. I have started this creative pursuit a few times in the past, but always found myself hindered by overwhelming technical roadblocks. Recently, I decided to do some free training through the YouTube Creator Academy to reinvigorate my efforts.

Well, I am proud to announce that today, I launched my YouTube channel, Ke Aloha no Hawai‘i! My channel will focus on Hawaiian language lessons and will be a place where I can also document my journey learning the language.

Over the next few weeks, I will give you all a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating a YouTube channel. This week, we’ll look at planning your content.

It’s start with an idea

The first step to creating a YouTube channel is asking yourself: what is my channel going to be about?

As I learned from the YouTube Creator Academy, it’s a good idea to create videos centered on something you’re passionate about. That’s one of the easiest ways to guarantee that you’ll have plenty of content ideas.

There are a lot of things that I’m really interested in, so the question was — how do I choose the best topic out of my many interests? Well, another good tip is to focus on what type of videos will be easy enough to make that you can create them regularly. So, for example, while I love DIY projects, those can be a little long to film with all of the camera angles, supplies and space needed. Instead, I focused on ideas that would allow me to create simple single-shot videos.

This left me with a few contenders:

• Comedy videos where I would talk about the latest pop culture phenomena
• Comedy videos featuring one of my original characters reviewing the latest TV shows and movies
• Educational videos focused on the Hawaiian language

I decided I would work on a spec script for each idea to see if one idea was easier to write and plan compared to the others.

And this is where I was surprised. The Hawaiian educational video took the longest to write (as I needed to confirm I was getting all of the content correct), but it ended up being the topic I was most energized to work on.

So, I had my winner!

Planning the videos

I knew I wanted my channel to focus on Hawaiian language lessons, but where should I start? 

Well, I looked online to see what was already out there. While on YouTube and other websites, you can find a lot of lessons teaching common phrases and vocabulary, it was hard to find a simple, straightforward resource on the basics of the Hawaiian grammar.  

One of the recommendations from the YouTube Creator Academy was to try to fulfill a need or speak to a niche audience that is underserved on YouTube. Since I didn’t see that many grammar resources, I thought this would be a great thing to focus on and help me stand apart from other channels that teach the Hawaiian language.

Figuring I could release 1-2 lesson videos a week, I start plotting out my lesson outlines.

From here, it was time to write my content.

Writing my scripts

Starting with an outline for each video made the script-writing process very easy.

Because these are educational videos, this writing phase included a lot of research, as I needed to verify that I was explaining the concepts correctly. In fact, I took an entire week to pore over grammar textbooks and other documents before I even started writing my first script.

It was also during this phase that I thought a lot about what the tone of my videos will be. I knew I wanted them to be positive, encouraging and accessible to people of all levels.

And during the writing process, I was already thinking about how the videos would be shot, as this would affect my scripts. I knew I wanted to do videos where I am talking to the camera, with text overlaid to help illustrate the lessons. For some lessons, I would also want to cut in screenshare shots from my computer.

The writing process was interesting because in some cases I realized that a topic I had initially planned to be a single video really needed to be split up into two videos.

With my initial scripts written, it was time to shoot the videos. Be sure to check out my blog next week, where I will go through the filming process.