The Ultimate YouTube Workflow Template (Behind-the-Scenes in My SmartSuite)

Not too long ago I produced a video here on the channel where I shared how SmartSuite may just be the ultimate tool for content creators or marketers to organize their work because it has this unique combination of tracking tasks and information. You're able to organize things like social media posts or YouTube videos or blog posts in these nice little chunks that are very visual, while also helping you keep track of all the repurposing you need to do and how they connect together. Since the time we filmed that video, sponsor SmartSuite has released a ton of new features and I've learned the tool a lot better and many of you have been as well. And because of that, we've received quite a few comments asking for a more advanced follow up tutorial on that old one to show you how we can turn things up to 11 and make that content repurposing structure template we built inside of SmartSuite more powerful. So in this video, what I want to do is take you inside a SmartSuite template, one that I've actually built out myself for my own use, and demonstrate how I'm organizing a more advanced custom content and YouTube marketing workflow directly inside of SmartSuite. My hope is that by the end of this, you'll have some inspiration of how you can organize your own YouTube or marketing pipelines. And if you feel the same way I do that SmartSuite is kind of the best tool when it comes to organizing content work. Maybe you'll also use our affiliate link in the description below, support the sponsor of today's video SmartSuite, and get your own SmartSuite account up and running. But introductions aside, I think it's time we dive inside this template and I'm going to start showing you around my own using YouTube organization structure. So here we are inside a SmartSuite solution called YouTube, and this is one that I've actually created in my personal time for fun, just because I'm actually chosen to use SmartSuite for my own personal projects because I just think the tool works so well. What I have here is a solution where I've organized all of my YouTube production stuff for this side channel I'm looking to create with my spouse. The solution name is up here at the top and that's also where we house all of the extra bonus features that I haven't really done a ton with yet. Inside this bonus account, however, you'll see that there's quite a few little tabby things across the top bar. These are our apps inside of SmartSuite. These apps are kind of our different databases or our collections of information and they allow me to organize different types of things side by side. Now, the first app we have in here is a general tasks app. I only have this in place because at the time of setting this up, I didn't have any other spot in SmartSuite where I was putting my general work. And so this is kind of just a basic task list, just like you'd have on a whiteboard, on a piece of paper or in your Trello account. That is my first app. Each of these different general tasks has. Let's just show an example here. It has fields like these. It has a task name, a status, due date, assignee priority, if I ever fill it in a place to write a description, and an optional checklist area where you can define what it is that you're actually doing during that step. If I flip over to another task in the same area, you can see that not all of them will have checklists. Sometimes it's just one big old thing I need to do. And there we go. Flipping over to another task in the same area, you can see the complete one editing session task is actually using a new feature in SmartSuite which was not around the last time I recorded a video on this. So just to Highlight it here, SmartSuite now allows you to have repeating tasks or repeating dates. When I give this a click, you can see what this looks like right here by clicking Repeating Task, I can now have tasks repeat based on a cadence I can set. This is in addition to automations and other ways to have tasks repeat in SmartSuite. So leave it to say if you need to repeat anything that you do. SmartSuite's got you covered to me actually was a huge feature that I was waiting on for a while before I started rolling out SmartSuite for personal use with my partner and I. But now that it's here, it's like, ugh, cannot do without it. We can see some of the dates we have in here. And this is kind of my general tasks area. I don't have anything fancy going on in this grid view. It's just a simple to do list, which, you know, just to be clear, maybe I'll even rename this to dos. Beyond this general tasks area, I also have two sections of apps inside this solution. You don't have a way to really section things off. So I'm just going to highlight them here visually and, and I'll go through each one. The first section are these two apps here. Both of These pipelines are areas where we have some kind of general container that is a mixture of both tasks and data combined together to work through a given process. I've got two different pipelines here for two different things that we're producing social posts and video posts, and that's kind of the first section. The second section of apps we have is the database section, and that's by far the biggest section, because I've got a lot of different types of information I want to track when it comes to this hobby channel, because I'm going to be working on this in my free time here and there over the next year or so, and I don't want to have to try to remember anything. I want everything to be clearly organized and logged somewhere, because my brain doesn't work that way. So I've built out these databases. The first of these databases is the playlist database. And in here it's exactly what you think it is. It's a list of all of the playlists that we'll have. Inside each of these, I've given a playlist name, a status that it would be in the playlist description, and then I can connect these to the videos we produce. The reason I have playlists here is because for this particular project, I'm going to be focused on YouTube to play around with things. And for YouTube, playlists make a lot of sense. If I was working on a blog, I'd probably have categories here. If it was on Instagram, I might have a highlights section. Whatever categories matter to you, you can track your own databases. But I've created playlists here for mine. I can create as many of them as I want and connect them to my videos. Beyond playlists, I also have an event and trip database. This. This is a spot for me to track the categories of footage I'm capturing. The reason I'm doing it this way is because for this specific type of channel I'm looking to do, it's going to be a little bit more vlog style. I mean, not very much so, but a little bit. And so the date and location of where we're at when capturing footage matters a lot more than me just sitting here, you know, talking about this topic. When I produce videos here for ProcessDriven, I'm always focused on the. The video or the topic I'm recording on. For this personal channel I'm exploring, it's going to be a lot more based on the trip or adventure I'm. And so we created this event trip database to keep track of these major Milestones beyond events and trips. I also have built out a file database. Again, this is something I probably wouldn't have done for Process Driven videos, because with Process driven videos, I usually sit down and film them with an end goal in mind for this particular type of content I'm going to be doing, I'm going to be piecing together video clips from a bunch of different trips based on a bunch of different factors. In some videos, I might be just trying to get pictures of kickstands, and another series of videos I might be focused on every type of desert we've been in. So given that, I wanted a more sophisticated way to track what each file that we have is for, so I can slice and dice the files and footage together for a bunch of different videos. As opposed to in ProcessDriven, I'm usually here's the video I'm doing, here's the footage for that video. For this one, it might be a little bit more mix and match. Rather than just relying on File Explorer or Google Drive, where I can add names or tags or folders which are very much mutually exclusive in most situations, I wanted to build some kind of file database that allowed me to track things in a more structured way. So what I've done is inside this app, I have two different views, breaking my footage down by different groups. You can see these groups right here. They are grouped by the status of the file, whether I need to film them or they're filmed the event it was from, which is from that other app I just showed you, and the file type. So there's nested categories here. You can see an example of this right here. First we've got the uploaded file and then the event type. For many of these, it's unmatched. And for some of these, these are actually matched. When I go inside a particular group, such as this one here, I could see the types of footage I have inside each of these sections for each of these files. Rather than just naming the file, something that I hope I'll remember, I've added some fields in here as well. These include things like the Google Drive link, whether or not there's like main talking stuff happening, the status of that file, who is in the file, the recording date, the type of file it is. So it could be a lot of different things, which trip it was from, and any contents I have. The reason we have this kind of describe the content section is so we can easily grab moments or memories or timestamps later on. So if I'm looking for examples of cows in the road I could just search the word cow and I would know this video would show up. I'm also able to connect these to the videos that use a particular file in case that's helpful to me. The way I would go about that whole searching piece would be to do something like search for the word cow and I can toggle through the Results based on SmartSuite's filters here to find the file I'm looking for. And if you'd like to see a clip of Cow Frogger by the way, which is the clip mentioned here, I'll include that on the end screen for anyone who stays to the end because that was a funny moment. So anyway, that is the files database. I have the different file names. All of these guys here coming in automatically based on an automation I've set up over at Integromat AKA Make. In Make I have an automation that says every time a new file is uploaded to this folder, create a new record inside my SmartSuite app so I don't have to manually add in all of these file name things. They come in automatically anytime I upload a file, but I do need to at this point in time manually review each file to fill out the other fields for each piece. It is yet to be seen how scalable that's going to be, but because I'm really trying to focus on making my life easier later, assuming I'm going to be editing these videos long after after I'm filmed, I'm hoping the upfront work will be worth it. But I'll give you guys an update if things change. Beyond the files database, I've also created a database for calls to action, essentially desired actions. For example in this video I would love it if you guys would like and subscribe. Ha ha. So you get it. Call to action. Yeah, that. That's essentially what I'd like to do in all my videos on the other channel. When I was an early creator here on the ProcessDriven channel, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I would just record a video when I had time and I'd hope for for the best. And sometimes kind people would comment or subscribe or like. But I can't help but think had I actually done these things earlier on the channel would have grown a lot quicker versus me just slap dashing together videos and hoping people were just kind enough to click like and subscribe. So I built this database here from the jump for this new channel to make sure I have all of kind of my desired actions outlined so that way every time I film or plan a video, I. I have the desired call to actions connected together and I can track how many times did I do a certain call to action and what was the result from that. For example, here, like and subscribe. I'm probably going to do that on every video, but I can now connect this over to my YouTube videos I have planned, which I'll show you on the other side in a moment and track that these are videos that highlighted this particular desired action. Again, like and subscribe might be everyone, but maybe if we have a swag shop at some point, maybe the swag shop would be something I'd only promote. At every five videos, this becomes a linked record which allows me to connect all of my stuff together. We'll talk more about the video side of things shortly. Got one more database for you which is this key phrase database. Now keep this secret guys, because I don't want all my secrets coming out. But when I was really geeking out about getting this channel off the ground, I just took one afternoon and I did a shit ton of keyword research. I went into Google and YouTube and keywords everywhere and I started just playing around with the space I wanted to produce content in and figuring out, you know, what are topics people actually search for and what does well and what doesn't go well. And because like I said at the onset, I am planning on making this channel kind of a hobby, personal project and I'm going to just be doing it when I have spare time. I didn't want to rely on my memory to remember all of that keyword research. So. Key phrase database. So I've added each of the key phrases I had researched into this area and I've tracked, I believe it was the tubebuddy numbers based on each of these areas. Now these numbers aren't the best source of truth, but whatever, it's good enough for me at this point in time. So I would track kind of the rough score on the competitive landscape and the search volume and I would get the overall score here in a formula. This overall score gives me some kind of just gut check as to what keywords might be the best for a small channel like ours starting out to work on. I can also then connect these keywords or key phrases to videos that I want to use that focus on that key phrase, such as this one. For some reason maybe this would be a good fit. I could connect those here to track how many videos I have for each keyphrase or key phrase cluster. And then below This I have a YouTube search string, so I've essentially used a SmartSuite formula to automatically generate the URL I would need to search and recheck that keyword in the future. So say in six months, if I were to produce this video, I would go to that URL and see what videos were doing well in that space and at the time. Just to give myself some updated data on the above information and anything else I might want to add, such as the thumbnails are like this, or the types of creators are like that. Anything like that. Notice this URL is technically not very good because it has spaces in it. Fortunately though, YouTube will automatically correct those spaces and turn them into something understandable, so I don't have to worry about that at all. This works fabulously. That is how I'm tracking the key phrases for this new space and connecting it all together. So that's my key phrase area. All of these databases I just showed you are just places to store information. Think of them like spreadsheets, but on steroids. But the actual magic only happens in these two areas over here. So let me dive into those real quick. I say real quick. This video is probably already super long based on YouTube standards, so thank you for hanging with me. Remember, if you want to build this out for yourself, use our affiliate link in the description below to sign up for a SmartSuite, because all the stuff I'm showing you here is something I have built personally on the free plan in about an afternoon. So it's nothing crazy if you want to rebuild this for yourself. Anyway, bless you for still being with me. Let's go back to the video. Here we are inside the YouTube pipeline, the meat and potatoes area. And here you can see kind of the video production pipeline I'm relying on to track all of the videos that I want to work on. I've also got some other views inside this area, such as just showing video ideas based on the content category that I'm looking to do. You can see them right here. I also have a dedicated view just for the publishing schedule. So whenever I actually decide when these videos are going to go out, which I haven't yet decided, I've got one source of truth here. This is particularly nice because I'm going to be working on this channel with my partner and so being able to visually see what's going on and when will be a nice way for us to stay in sync. So enough about the views. Let me actually go inside one of the video records here and I'll show You how that is organized because that's really where everything comes together. Because videos are really the center of of our video orbit. Let me just go inside this one here. My first solo street ride. The very first field we have in here is the title of the video. Now, at this point, there is no title to this video because I haven't yet written it. But when there is stuff, here's how it'll be generated. It'll be generated based on the video number field, which I'll show you in a second, and the video title field, which I'll show you in a second. So let's just look at those. Video number is a field right here. This defaults to episode and then a blank because I need to actually fill it in. Next to that. I have the status for the overall video here with some key steps, a focus key phrase if I want to connect it to something. For search and my content categories, these are fields I have created using a dropdown field in SmartSuite with little subtitles to help me and my partner understand, you know, what is each going to be. We're still finalizing these, so don't judge, but trying to figure out a nice way to keep things broken into categories. Below this, I have a section. These intersections allow me to organize information just like I showed in the primer video. And my first section is a production info area. This is basically my sketch spot for filming and collecting files. Below the video concept, which is just some words and stream of consciousness of what I'm thinking. I've got the raw files area and here's where I'll connect the footage that we either need to film or we have already filmed to make a video. Next to that we've got the Google Drive file. Again, if I have a folder where I'm going to be keeping all of the working assets such as the editing file and other things, I would put that here. The script for the video, if there is a script for the video, would go here I watch next, meaning the next video someone should watch at the end would go here. And of course that call to action, just like we talked about before, would go right here with all of this production info. We also have a checklist at the bottom to make sure we don't miss anything. And this overall section is kind of the film stage of the journey. While filming for this particular side hobby is going to be a lot different than what I do here at ProcessDriven, I have definitely pulled from what I found, worked and didn't work in the processdriven arena to help build out kind of production info area that is really, really focused. Below production info we have publishing info. And this is also something I stole from us at ProcessDriven where we kind of break these out. I did the same here. Publishing is essentially where we track all of the public facing information that happens after the video is edited and created. This includes what date it'll be published on which of those playlists we talked about earlier that it'll connect to. We have the video title here, the video description and a spot to put our thumbnails. These are uploaded files we have done using an attachment field inside of SmartSuite and if we go back to the overall area you can these images being featured as the COVID image for the particular record. You don't need to do any of this stuff by the way. I just think it looks nice. So that is our publishing area. Publishing info right here. Now just like our production area, publishing has its own checklist of all the steps that need to be done. And in this case I don't have any forced order because this is more of a casual thing. But you may want to have an order of operations if this was for a company. So publishing checklist right there. And that is that. That is our overall publishing, you know, releasing to the world stage of the process. After this we get to blog repurposing. Woohoo. Are you noticing a theme here? This blog repurposing is where we'll be writing the blogs. So the blog post will go right here and we have a checklist for repurposing as a blog right there. This blog repurposing area is actually kept very simple, just like what I showed you in the last video. Because for my personal projects here, I'm not going to be spending a ton of time making blog posts. It's just not worth it for me. But it's here in case we want to. This is also a smart doc field so I have the ability to add formatting and heading and all sorts of good things that I can then copy and paste onto the website when we are ready to publish stuff. So good stuff there. That's the blog repurposing. Now the next one is social post repurposing. Here is where we take it up a notch from the basic template in this hypothetical world. I am not yet sure if I want to do any social media. I don't know if you guys have gathered, but I'm not much of a social lady. Well in multiple ways. But when it comes to social medias Particularly I'm not big on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I don't use them personally. And so when I'm thinking of this side hustle, I'm not sure if this is something I want to invest in. So to give myself the space to scale up or scale scaled down as I kind of feel it out, I've decided to take social post repurposing and move it out of this overall record. Unlike the blog where it's all right here, I have taken social posts and moved them into their own app. So I have a lot of flexibility as to what I do. I'm going to click save here and just show you what that looks like. The connection I have between videos and social connects over to this social pipeline. In the social pipeline, I basically have my own dedicated record per social social post and it has different spaces to expand upon and its own checklist here as well. By having this in its own area, I can choose to have four social posts for video or zero social posts for video, or 300 social posts for video and connect them independently. I'm not locked into a one to one ratio like I am with the blog repurposing. The way this works is very similar to the other areas you've seen, although I am using some features I might have not highlighted on the channel before, such as having a character limit for certain fields, such as what I have for this Twitter field right here. And in this area I also have my checklist kind of overview area visible from my overall view. So in this case you can see fields to display my social pipeline checklist. The thing that was inside the record, I have that showing up on the summary just like in the video area, so I can see at a glance where things actually stand if they're in process. The way I've kind of promoted my style social media stuff here, from being a area inside a record to being its own record, is a good example of how you can kind of beef up smartsuite whenever you have an area of your own workflow that is particularly sophisticated or you just want a bit more flexibility. There is so much more I can and will be doing to kind of take this up a notch. Inside of SmartSuite. One of the big ones is I really want to make sure we have an email digest set up because I know both me and my partner are super busy, but we want to do this because it's going to be fun. So what I'd like to do is have an email automation like this one that sends to both me and my partner to let us know kind of the state of affairs when it comes to videos in process, videos that are scheduled and so on. If I was working with a team, I might have a project manager do this, but the beauty of work management software today is that you can really have a work management software be your project manager to an extent, especially for simple projects, by setting up automations like this to get your button gear and make sure you don't forget things, things like that. I still have to set up to really get this to the next level that I want it to be at, to make it super on autopilot, but this is essentially the YouTube workflow template that I'm going to be using to launch my secondary channel for a personal project. It's also very similar to what we use here at ProcessDriven, but honestly probably a bit more advanced because here at ProcessDriven we're still using another platform that makes it a little bit harder to do some of the things I've shown you here. Now if I've done my job by the end of this video, you now know how to organize your YouTube workflow template inside of SmartSuite. Maybe you've gotten some insights inspiration from my process here, but there's so much more you can organize inside of SmartSuite. Instead of just YouTube videos or just marketing or just tasks, there is so much more you can do. And if you'd like to learn more about these other SmartSuite use cases to become a user yourself, check out the playlist above where we go through all of our SmartSuite tutorials. Or go to the description below and check out our how to smartsuite mini course that will get you smartsuiteing in one day or less. Still not convinced that smartsuite will work for your unique workflow? Well, I actually have a video on that which we'll link at the end screen here where you can learn how to put your unique process into SmartSuite by following a few simple steps. Oh, and for those of you who have stayed till the end, please do like and subscribe. And in exchange I would like to share with you the aforementioned clip of us playing Cow Frogger on the highway the other day. So let me play that clip here. Thanks so much for watching and enjoy the process and the cows. Sorry guys. Oh thank gosh. Okay, we're out.