My 3-Step Writing Workflow For Millions of Views

Breaking down the templates I've created to write scripts for successful YouTubers.

I’ve written YouTube videos which gained millions of views.

But what does it actually looks like to work with YouTubers to help craft their videos?

This week I want to whiz through my 3-step workflow:

🌍 1 - Build a Content Hub

When I was writing with Ali Abdaal we had a super-bespoke system built by Taha Khan.

Creators like Thomas Frank have created ridiculously integrated life+content management systems like ‘Ultimate Second Brain’

For the work I’m currently doing with Justin Moore, I’ve created my own thing.

In any of these systems, the user should be able to:

1. Capture new ideas

2. See all those ideas in one space

3. Visualise a calendar

4. Own their tasks

I’ll give a little glimpse of those bits within my system here:

Input Idea

This table is designed to send whatever the idea is to the right place in the hub. Works best when both the client and I are contributing.

New Ideas List

These are divided by content bucket, but you can divide them however you like.

Calendar

This view is (again) by bucket and is a custom built ‘zoomed out’ view to see things by week, rather than daily - an idea I got from Marie Poulin 🙌

Task Ownership

We can all see what we need to be aware of here.

📜 2/ Create A Script Template

Within my YouTube script template, I have:

1. Pre-Production

2. Script

3. Repurposing

Pre-Production

Firstly, title ideas.

After some initial market research. I use my ‘title length checker’ (grab it free here) to make sure they’re a good length, and aim to generate 10-15 per video.

It’s also useful to type those titles into search and see if anything comes up, what keywords are making videos do well, etc.

Secondly, thumbnail ideas.

Again, market research is key. See if successful videos have anything in common in their thumbnails. I also check to see which of the client’s thumbnails have done well before.

I also like to draft what the thumbnail might look like according to my brief. You might agree, based on the below, that I should stop doing this immediately 😂

Script

Here’s an idea of my scripting template.

I structure it using a condensed version of the HIVES framework, and colour code the text (as seen above).

There’s obviously SO MUCH to go into here, but this is to give you an idea of what the blank slate looks like before I start writing.

♻️ 3/ Basic Repurposing

The most basic level of content repurposing for YouTube scripts are:

1. Tweet Threads

2. Shorts/TikToks/Reels

Threads

I copy-paste pretty much the whole thing and divide it up every few lines, based on different points being made.

It takes a fair bit of concentration to shave a whole video down into 10(ish) short tweets, so don’t try and do this bit as an afterthought. Make sure you’ve got some focus left.

For a basic thread drafting tool, try Chirr. For a few more premium features, try Hypefury.

Shorts/TikToks/Reels

Much less editing is required than for Twitter repurposing.

I find videos naturally give rise to 5-10 passages which lend themselves to short-form.

We can talk about whether this is the best approach as compared to creating original short-form content, but in terms of repurposing, this is what I do:

Copy-paste pretty much the whole video (again), this time broken up into segments which are no longer than 1min (usually 30s tops).

Then see if there’s an opportunity to create a loop.

You want the last line of the video to flow back into the first. This way, more viewers are likely to watch your video twice or more, because they may not have even noticed the video is playing again until halfway through.

This means you may have to get the YouTuber to record a little extra line during filming the main video.

e.g. they say “THAT’S WHY”, which won’t be in the main video, but will be inserted as a bridge in the Short to make it loop back into the first line.

Once the video has been extracted, you can use it across any short-form platform.

Again, there are plenty of additional editing tricks you can pull with Shorts to make them more engaging, but that’s not really the purpose of this.

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Anything here you’d like more detail on? Hit reply and let me know!

I’ve been wanting to tidy up some of this system and give it away for free, but I haven’t had the time (moving house is a big pain lol).

But if there are any particular aspects of this workflow you’d like to have, let me know and I’ll aim to get it released.

Speak soon!

George 👋

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🎥 Watch This:

Mine and my friend’s TikTok passed 14,000 followers this week.

For anyone who remembers BBC’s ‘Merlin’, you might enjoy some of our recent content 😅