9 Tools I Use To Speed Up My YouTube Workflow

If you are wanting to start a YouTube channel or you are wanting to get more consistent with your YouTube channel so you can generate more leads and sales to your business, I get that YouTube can be super overwhelming. But since I've been doing this for about eight years now and I've posted weekly YouTube videos for just as long as that and have hundreds of videos, I really nailed down a process that allows me to stay consistent. And in that process, there are some of my favorite tools that I use every single video I produce on YouTube. So in this video, not only am I going to share with you what these tools are that are my favorite, but I'm going to show you what I actually do with these tools. So if you're looking to simplify your YouTube process so you can start being consistent on YouTube to help drive more leads to your business, more email subscribers, keep watching. Hey there. If you're new here, my name is Trina and I help online course creators, service providers and coaches use YouTube as a mechanism to get more people to their business. Once they get them to their business, I also help you build out the strategy to ensure they buy, making it clear on what they should buy, when they should buy it, and making sure you have all of your business systems simplified and in place to make consistent 10k months. If this is something that you'd be interested in working with me on one on one in my private coaching program, 10K on replay, I will leave the link to apply down below. Just fill that on out, send it on over to me. We work with people to help simplify their value ladder in their business, build their YouTube strategy with them, and help them launch their courses in services so they can get that consistent revenue and get the stress off of where their next paycheck is coming from. Now let's dive in to these tools. I would say my number one ride or die tool for basically my entire business is Google Drive. And specifically for my YouTube process, I create a folder for every single one of my YouTube videos. And within that folder I have my YouTube game plan. I also upload my raw footage, my B roll so that my video editor can easily access them there and then is able to upload the final file for our YouTube video and then we can get it onto YouTube. So a couple of things that I use in the Google suite is obviously Google Drive, Google Docs is how I write my script and we also use Google Sheets because this is how we track our videos. We look at analytics every 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days and 30 days out to determine how we can improve our videos based on the data that we get on YouTube. So by having this all nicely organized in Google Sheets and be able to look at this at the end of every week to determine our strategy for the next week and forward it just keeps it super organized and easy to read. This is the most important folder for when it comes to YouTube content. So you see we have all of these folders broken out by publish dates. So if we look in this particular folder, you will see that I have my script written here, I have my raw footage here, I have examples of imagery and any B roll that I want. And then my video editor then puts the final file right here too for us to access. Once we've downloaded, we will remove it from our folder so that we can save space here in Google Drive. So also I wanted to share, I said Google Docs. So this is the Google Doc that I use to write all of my content as well. It allows me to stay on track when I'm shooting my video, so I'm not taking a long time to shoot videos and ensures I'm covering everything that I want to. Now the other thing I use in Google Suite is this, Google Sheets. And this allows us to track out how our videos are doing. And so we can determine, all right, what made this video get higher impressions in the first 48 hours compared to this video. Then we would go in and determine was it the click through rate? Was the click through rate higher or lower? Was it the traffic? Did the traffic come from browse versus search? And so this again allows us to really determine what direction and what strategy to take moving forward in a super easy to follow kind of sheet. Right. My number two probably ride or die tool in my business and in YouTube is Asana. Now this is a product project management tool and this is how I keep everything organized. But specifically my YouTube process. So let me walk you through that real quick. So this is my YouTube Asana board. I use it for many other things as well, including our reels production, our marketing promotion calendar, our lead tracker. I also keep in here important team things like employee handbooks and processes to request time off in training. But specifically for YouTube, this is the process that I follow for every single video I have a template. So when I have an idea, I come in here and I will duplicate this task because it includes 46 checkpoints. That's every single checkpoint that I take to get a video out successfully. And so again, this just ensures that I don't skip any steps. It allows my team and I to collaborate together on this. Um, you'll see that I have my marketing director here, I have my video editor here, and then we also have a content team as well that helps us get out additional pieces of content from this YouTube video, like blogs and social media content. But again, you can just see how well super organized it is. And I'm making sure I'm not skipping any steps. Now, if you want this exact workflow in all of my checkpoints for what I do for every single video, and you want to learn how to use this workflow in your business and also grab my YouTube video game plan template, you can get all of that inside of my program going video. For now, it's just 37. If you head to trina little.com forward/going video, you can get this instantly. You can either download it for your asana and we also have it in a Google Doc format so you can plug it into ClickUp to air table Trello. Wherever your project management tool is, you can get the exact steps that we use for publishing our YouTube videos. All right, next up is a tool specifically for my YouTube research. So I use this tool before I even start creating content for YouTube. And that is Vid IQ. Let me show you how I use that. So this is Vidiq, and I really like to use it, first of all, for coming up with topics and kind of zoning in on the direction I want to take my topic. And then I love using it just to get some title ideas. So, for example, last week was my YouTube production process, like the complete way that I make YouTube videos. So what I did was I came in here and I wrote how to make YouTube videos. Right? Keyword opportunities. What is the best direction to take this? So what Vidiq tells me is, okay, good, this topic is searched 45,000 times a month, and the competition is kind of high. But I don't really let that, you know, deter me. What I then do is I look at what is the direction that I want to take this video, how do I want to market it? Basically, so I will use things like key related keywords to determine if there's a topic or a direction that I want to make. Like, maybe I want it to be how to make a YouTube video for beginners. Maybe it's just how I edit my YouTube videos, right? And this tells me, you know, this is searched 5,300 times a month. So this just helps me figure out the direction or the topic that I want to do on YouTube and ensures that people are actually Searching for this. Now, let's say it is how I edit my videos. I'll come back to my dashboard and we can type in how I edit my YouTube videos. Now, this is going to be AI recommended, so you may have to juice it up a bit. But what this allows you to do is come up with some ideas, some. Some titles. Now, I, like, have my title determined before I write any content for my YouTube video. So this editing trick made my videos go viral? Probably not for me. Editing made easy. Here's how I do it. That may be a topic that feels good for me. So now that I have that title, then I'm going to craft my content around delivering on how I make video editing easy instead of just how I edit my YouTube videos, right? So that's what I really use Vidiq for. Next up, everything hangs on your, your thumbnail and your title. So if your thumbnail imagery doesn't get people to stop the scroll and want to read the title, you're kind of dead in the water. So this next tool that I use is actually a YouTube thumbnail agency called Custom Thumbnails. Now, the reason why I like this is because you can get started with just about $100 a month and have all your weekly YouTube videos for the month basically covered. And let me just show you what it looks like inside. So inside custom thumbnails, you really need to give them the direction for what you're looking for with your thumbnails. So what you can do is you can place an order, then you're going to give them the design that you want, and it's going to be designed in progress, and then they're going to wait for your approval. So basically, this is what we do. We tell them the text that we want on the thumbnail, we tell them kind of the direction that we want this to go. Kind of like giving them an example. So we saw Vanessa's thumbnail. We thought that was really good. And we want to put our own spin on that particular thumbnail. So we gave them a description on how we wanted it. And then this is the thumbnail that they then created for us. And again, we can go back and forth and say maybe remove the YouTube image or maybe change the text. But I just love doing this because it creates better thumbnails that than we could. And you can notice all of my thumbnails in the past year have all been created through Custom Thumbnails, the next tool I also use a lot in my business as well, so I can use it in YouTube and my business is a graphic design tool called Canva. And if you don't want to pay for an agency like custom thumbnails to do your thumbnails, you could also use Canva. They already have some templates in there that are pretty decent. But you could also create your own templates inside of Canva and then reuse them so they don't look similar to other people. You can also create inside of Canva end screens because end screens are so important at the end of your videos, so you can get people to take that next step with you, whether that is to watch the next video you want them to watch or to go sign up for your webinar or get on your email list. It is really important to have these end screens because you can have this clickable links the last 20 seconds of your videos. So let me just walk you through Canva real quick. So like I said, I use Canva for a lot. You can see we have Instagram posts in here, we have slide decks in here, we have mood boards in here. But when we're talking about YouTube, if you come up here and search YouTube, it's going to give you templates already. Everything from a YouTube banner to channel logos. But particularly we're going to talk about thumbnails. And like I said, so many different options to choose from. What I would do when I come in here, obviously you need to switch this out with your face and you need to switch this out with your color. So just clicking on here, customizing this template, changing it to your colors will really make it stand out. The other thing I mentioned was end screens. So if we go into end screens, you'll see there are already templates created as well. Same thing. You'll want to pick one that works for you. And the best part about end screens is you can reuse this over and over and over again. You can check out my end screens and see how we use the exact same one over and over again. But again it just allows you to have a very clear call to action for your people on what to do next. So like, for example, you could have watch more here or maybe you could have get the download here and you could add, you know, the end screen click to a link. So again, it just makes it very clear for the viewer on what they should be doing next to help increase your end screen click through rates. Now, I think one of the most important parts of your YouTube process is obviously thumbnails. I mean, I've talked about it for the last two tools, but I Also think it is very important to have your face or a photo of you on your thumbnail so people can have that human connection. And in fact, studies have showed that people are more likely to click on a thumbnail when they can see the whites of the eyes from somebody. So this tool I use to put a filter or put a preset on all of the photos I take for my thumbnails. This is called Lightroom. It's a really simple app that I use on my phone. And when I take my thumbnails on my camera, I can easily airdrop them to my phone, put this quick preset over the photo so all of my photos look the same. So you can kind of see the difference between no preset with the preset. And again, it just creates consistency with my thumbnails. And it literally takes me about less than five minutes to do this. Then when I have the photo, that's when I will send it to custom thumbnails to put the graphics on it. Or I would put it into Canva to then put the graphics on it. The next tool I use, again, I use this in my business a lot. So a lot of these tools that I'm sharing with you can be used for more than just YouTube, which is really important when you're thinking about investing in any of them. But LOOM allows me to screen record things I want to show you here on this video or any video. So all of the screen videos that I have shown throughout out this video where I'm showing you behind the scenes of Canva and Vid iq, I'm using Loom and it allows me to have my face down in the bottom corner. And it makes it incredibly easy to get this footage. I can just simply download it, send it to my video editor, and we can plop it in these videos. But I also use these as well for my courses. I use this as well with my employees. If I'm trying to explain something, I can send them a quick LOOM video. And we don't need to jump on a quick call and wait, you know, 10, 15 minutes to discuss it. I can show them the tutorial. So you've been basically watching me on Loom here, but you can see this is what people then watch when I send them the LOOM link because I use it in my business. But we can easily go up here to share and we can go to download so that I can use this video in my YouTube video. Currently, this next tool is how I promote my YouTube videos every single week. And it is my Email service provider which is through FG Funnels. Now I love FG Funnels and I could go into a full video about everything FG Funnels does in my business. If you would like to see me do a full detailed video on what I love about FG Funnels and what it can do, go ahead in the comments and type F G Funnels and I'll get that on my content calendar. But I will go in every week and create a newsletter that talks about whatever it is I'm talking about on my weekly YouTube video. And since I have over 20,000 people on my email list, I want to keep in touch touch with them. So I do these videos. I then write up a summary and why it is super important to watch today's video, what you're going to get out of it. And then when my video goes live every Wednesday morning, I also have an accompanying email that goes out as well that pushes people to come watch the YouTube video. Now what this does is one YouTube doesn't always push notifications to your subscribers. You basically have to prove to YouTube people are watching your videos before it's going to push your content to people. So what this allows, allows me to do is a backup. I can send this newsletter and get people to my video when it goes live. And by getting these people to my video, the algorithm says, oh hey, people are watching this. Maybe we should push it to more people, maybe we should send those notifications. It also allows me to stay in touch with my email list. Now if you're planning on selling any one on one services or courses to an audience, you have got to have an email list. And you can't just have them on this list and not say anything to them. You've got to continue building this relationship and giving them value. And when I do my weekly YouTube videos, this also serves as my weekly value to those people have get who have given me their email address. And I just say top of mind for them every single week. All right. FG Funnels has a lot. Everything from landing pages to sales funnels to client management to just a lot. And I don't have time to cover that all. But particularly I want to cover how I send emails out. And FG Funnel, this is our folder for weekly newsletters. See we have a template that we will just come in here and we will clone and use this when we send out our weekly newsletter. We can look at this one for example if we go in here, actually I think we can just view it here. This was the email that I sent out to get people to watch this particular video. And you can see how I'm really encouraged them and driving curiosity on why they need to watch this particular video. And then I link it here so they can go directly to the video and watch. And then I link the thumbnail as well directly to the YouTube video to help increase viewership on this video as soon as it's published. Now this next tool is quintessential for any type of success on YouTube and it's 100% free. It is your YouTube studio. This is where YouTube gives you all the analytics that you need to understand to create better content. So the top three data points basically that I'm looking at for every single video and then I'm looking at, at the end of every single month when I do my monthly, monthly audit, I'm looking at click through rates. Am I getting better? Click through rates. Did the title that I use or the thumbnail that I use create people or cause people to want to click on that video? Was my monthly average higher or lower? Why was that? Is it the topics? Is it a different style that we did? So this just really helps us make sure when we put a video out there, people click on it. The other thing I'm looking at all the time as well is audience retention. If you are posting content on YouTube and it's not taking off, these are the two things that are going to be the reason it's not taking off. Click through rate is terrible and audience retention is terrible. So I will go into my videos after I get this data, which is usually about 48 hours after the video is posted, and try to figure out why audience retention wasn't better if I had one that had higher than average. I try to figure out what did I do in this video, how did I open it, what did the title say? The hook? How did I get this, this high of an audience retention rate? How can I do that again? I also use this graph when I'm doing a new video on a similar topic and trying to figure out where people were most interested. So where audience retention was the highest on those graphs and where people tended to drop off and what was I talking about? So I don't do that in the next video. Now the third metric that I think is really important as well inside of YouTube studio is your end screen click through rates for every single video because of two things. One, A, if you are trying to get YouTube to push your content to more people, you need to be creating binge sessions on YouTube. So if people watch your video and then watch another one and another one and another one. That content is going to become more valuable to YouTube because you're keeping people on the platform and it's going to push that content to more people. Now YouTube is very important to my business is how I get applicants to my 10 count replay coaching program. It's how I get sales through going video which I mentioned earlier. So I'm also looking at click through rates to my sales page to my application page because my YouTube is my main source of traffic to sales in leads in my business. So that's why it is very important to be looking at how well your calls to action are getting people to actually take action. Just a quick reminder here. If you want to get my entire YouTube workflow, make sure you go to trina little.com forward/going video. You can buy it and learn it directly from me. There's training videos on how I use it. Also if you want to work with me one on one in my coaching program to make sure YouTube is set up to drive you leads and your business is set up to convert those leads, go ahead and apply at treanalittle.com forward/10k. And if you want to see a full in depth detail of my entire process for creating a YouTube video from ideation to promotion, click the video that is on your screen right now.