Why You Should STOP Posting Short Form Content & Do THIS Instead

If you're a solopreneur and you are focusing a lot of time and energy on posting shorts and reels, you are wasting your time. You really need to focus on the one thing that helps you build relationships with your ideal client. And that, my friend, is long form content. And that's why I love YouTube as a platform so much. I built a, an entire guitar teaching enterprise here on YouTube. My other channel has over 500,000 subscribers and it helps me sell my products and services so that I can make, you know, enough money to have the time and freedom and live the life that I want to. Okay. It's pretty amazing. And you can't do that with short form. Okay, Short form content is great if you are feeling crunched for time and you just want to get something out for 30 seconds. But I can't build a relationship with someone in 30 seconds. Okay, but sitting on a video for 5, 10, 15 minutes and you help someone, you help someone solve a problem, guess what? They're really gonna like you. Okay. My brain doesn't work in 30 or 60 second snippets. And I know shorts can bring awareness to a brand and I do think that's important. But I also think we have to think of the audience we're attracting with these different video formats. So I think of the way I use short form content or the way I use reels or shorts or TikTok primarily, it, it's for entertainment. Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Primarily? Okay. And, and yes. Can you, you know, on Instagram you post reels and you can get brand deals and stuff. And it's like, I'm sure there's a way to do it, there's a way to be successful on every platform. But if you were trying to build a long term business that doesn't require you to grind out content 24 7, then you might want to rethink your strategy and start focusing on long form content. So I told you, I have another brand right here. Lauren Bateman, Guitar. So I am a guitar teacher over here on YouTube. I started teaching in 2017. I started by uploading video lessons that helped retirees learn how to play guitar older in life, particularly absolute beginners or people who, you know, been trying to start and stop and learn to play guitar. And I posted a lot of long form content and what I would do is I would post consistently enough. At one time I was posting two long form videos a week, which, which was a lot of work, I will admit. It was a lot of work. And recently we have dropped down to one long form video a week, which I think is the perfect consistency for getting content out. And if you check out this channel, my business channel, you will see we post one video every week to get content out, to be consistent, to build a brand, to connect with my audience. And I believe that long form content is still king. Okay? Because just like I was saying, 10, 15 minutes, you can really learn about who I am, how I can help you, and maybe I can even give you a win in this video. I can give you a little aha. Where you're like, wow, this is awesome. Like, this was great. Let me go watch another video. Let me see what's. What else can I learn from this person? All right, so if you have a skill, all right, if you're an educator, you're a teacher, maybe you're a plumber, maybe you're a mechanic. If you have a skill that you can help people do something or you can create a transformation, that's where the real money is made, is by creating transformations in people's lives. So what do I do? Okay, on the guitar channel, I transform people by helping them go from not playing the guitar to playing the songs they know and love on the guitar and entertaining family. That's the transition. Being able to create memories with your family. Here, it's helping people build a business. Build a business around YouTube specifically so that they can leverage their time and. And they can make money and maybe go on vacation for a week or two weeks. Or maybe like me and you go, go to Europe for a month. You could. You could literally, With a successful YouTube channel, you could literally go on vacation for a month, take an entire month off, and your business would not fall apart. Okay? Most small businesses cannot say that. And I have brick and mortar businesses, too, so I own some music schools. And in the beginning, I could never, ever dream of taking a month off, especially when I worked for myself and I was the one who was teaching all the clients. I just did one one guitar lessons with people. If I took a month off, I'd be broke, okay? I'd be broke, and I would be. While I'm sleeping, I need to find something where I do the work once and it cares to come. I have videos that I filmed five, six, seven years ago that are still getting hundreds of views a day for me and my brand. You can't say that with any other platform, okay? You can't say that with a short, okay? You do a short, it's gone in, like, 24, 48 hours, okay? Maybe every once in a while. I've seen some instances recently where they will pop back up, but then they pop back down. Okay. I think of shorts and reels and short form content as like the newest trend, the newest fad. Okay. Long form content is not trendy. Okay. So if I put out a video on how to play C chord, that doesn't change. Like, that's the same thing. If I put out a video on how to use YouTube correctly or the top mistakes that I made on YouTube, that stuff is not trendy. It continues to exist and it continues to work for people consistently. All right? I'm not trying to figure out which sound bite is the right sound bite to use this week. No, what I'm trying to do at long form content is I'm trying to figure out what content can I put out that helps my ideal client. Okay, what can I put out in the business world that is going to help someone who wants to create a YouTube channel? All right. Wants to create a YouTube channel and actually leverage YouTube to sell their products and services so that they can stop selling their time for money all the time. Okay, how do I do that? What content do I need to put out there? Well, I have to tell you, like, you know, how do you go about creating a course? Do you need a funnel? Do you need a webinar? Okay. Do you need a website? Yes. And if you don't have a website in your business, you still need one. I know it's 2025 and people claim that websites are dead. They are not dead, okay? I get over a hundred thousand unique visitors every month to my guitar teaching website. It just goes to show you, websites are not dead. They're actually still very, very valuable tools. So don't knock them. All right? If you don't have a website and you're a business person, you need one. Okay? You do need one. Because if you are going to build a YouTube channel and you're going to dive in on this long form content that helps you build relationships with people, at some point I have to get them off of YouTube over to a website. All right? So like these videos, I tend to send people over to my website, the creator launchpad, where I have, you know, free YouTube crash course. I have other course offerings. You can work with me as a coach or a mentor. If you need more one on one help getting your business going or building the foundation and getting yourself on the right track. That's the creator launchpad for the guitar channel. I send people over to laurenbatement.com. because that is my guitar teaching website. And I say, hey, if you need help, there's a free crash course over there. If you're just getting started, go give it a try. And the goal is to put out long form content that people watch, they really enjoy, and they like you. Okay? And listen, let me talk about haters very briefly. You're not going to make everyone happy, okay? When you put out content, there's going to be someone who gives you a thumbs down. There's going to be someone who comments something stupid in the comments. Don't let those people hold you back from putting out content. All right? Don't worry about being wrong. You know, I have a lot of clients and they struggle with imposter syndrome. And it's a really real thing. Like, I'm really scared that, you know, people are going to tell me I'm wrong or what I'm saying is wrong. And it's like, okay, well, let them. Let them say you're wrong. People tell me I'm wrong all the time on my guitar channel. They're like, you can't do that. You can't teach people that that's not right. And it's like, it seems to be working for my clients, so I think it's right for me and my clients. Maybe you don't want to teach that to your clients, but this is how I do it, and it seems to be working pretty good. So be conf. Confident in yourself and your skills and your abilities. Even for me as a business coach, I was like, I don't know. I don't know if people would really listen to me. I don't know if people really pay attention to me. And, you know, I'm like, I have brick and mortar businesses. I've hired employers. I've fired employees. I've had toxic employees who've stabbed me behind my back. I've had accountants who've stolen money from me. You know, so I've had brick and mortar business. I've had online business. I've had online businesses that completely failed. Okay? I had a business that the bottom completely fell out of. And these aren't my first businesses. So I've had success in business, I've had failures in business. I'm like, I actually know a lot about business, and I should really be confident in my skills and that I can come here on YouTube and share that information with people and maybe give them a little bit of a different perspective, you know, because there's so many people out there right now who are like, Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. And if you're doing short form content, I did short form content. I hired someone last year and we did short form content. We released a video every day. It wasn't a lot of work. I went down to a studio, okay, because it's the other thing. I had money to hire someone to do a lot of the back end work. I went down to a studio, we filmed for two days straight. I filmed almost like 300 pieces of content in two days. All right. Really busted it out. And then they did all the editing, they did all the uploading. So it wasn't a lot of work for me because I had the money to pay someone thousands of dollars every month to do it for me. If you're a solopreneur, you might not have the thousands of dollars to invest in paying someone else yet. So you're the one that's going to have to record the short form content, you're going to have to edit it, you're going to have to put the captions on and it takes time. The best bang for your buck is to put that time and energy into long form content where you can help people in and where you can sell a product in service. Because the money you make here on YouTube shorts, you need like a video to get a million views to make like $10. It's, it's really tiny the amount of money you make. And you know, I think in December of this year I had, I think it was like 1.2 million views on my channel and I think I made like $10,000, which is, which is a great amount of money. But if you had that same number of views and shorts, it'd probably be like a hundred bucks.

So it's not really the best financial if you're going after like YouTube ad revenue, but I never recommend that either. Have a course, have a product and service that you can sell. But if you are someone who wants to build a business here on YouTube, you have to stop going after the short form content because it's really, the long form content is where it's at. Now. If you're someone that's really interested in YouTube and you're like Lauren, I do want to dive into the long form content, but you know, I have a full time job. It's very hard for me to be consistent and have the schedule to, to make content. Why don't you go watch this video over here where I'm going to share with you what I would do if I had to start YouTube all over while working a full time job.