There are a lot of 28 day challenges around creating daily content; whether it’s a video, a social post, a blog or short-form content such as YouTube Shorts, Reels, TikToks etc. The premise is that dedicating some time to creating regular content will provide a significant boost in traffic/reach, and can give you some new momentum while also demonstrating the power of consistency.

I run a number of personal YouTube channels, but the one that’s most neglected is the one that bears my own name. Because it’s my personal brand, there is reluctance to hand over the reins or allow anyone else to manage or create content for it.

In 2024, I was probably averaging one YouTube Short every 4-6 weeks, and the last long form video I created was nearly 12 months ago. This is kind of embarrassing when you’re supposed to be a YouTube specialist. See below the channel activity from 1st June – 28th July 2024.

Despite the inactivity, the channel still averaged between 7,000,000 – 17,000,000 monthly views, but I knew it had the potential to do much more.

The results

When it comes to these types of challenges, it’s the results that people are most interested in, so I’ll get straight to it.

The first thing to mention is that I didn’t post every day as planned – so I guess I failed the challenge! For the first 14 days I was able to keep to my schedule, but this channel is secondary to client work. So as we got busy, keeping my daily schedule became more and more challenging.

At the end of 28 days, I had only posted 21 videos.

But even so, the work I put into the channel was a huge success, generating 62,000,000 views in 28 days, and just over 64,000,000 views in the month of August 2024.

As this is my personal channel, it created a lot of additional Ad Revenue for me, but also created some new brand deal opportunities as well as some creating new business leads for Falkon Digital. I didn’t seek these out, they arrived in my inbox and DMs.

At peak performance for the month, I had over 9,000,000 views within a 48 hour period, and was generating 250,000 views per hour just on YouTube alone. There were more on Instagram and TikTok too which you will see later in this post.

How I approached it

I’ve seen lots of creators attempt this challenge, and one thing I see a lot is the idea of spending a minimal amount of time on their content. So for example, they’ll say something like “this challenge takes just 10 minutes a day”. That might be true for someone creating a daily social media post, but video creation should probably take more time.

There are people that are extremely good on camera. They can lift up their smartphones, record a video off the cuff and deliver some content that performs very well. For the rest of the population, I would recommend a bit more planning and time for editing and delivery.

For context, I could spend 30-60 minutes planning and researching a particular topic, as well as reviewing the performance of my previous videos to see how I could improve or restructure my content. It would then take a similar amount of time to create a script and record it, with a further 2-3 hours for editing and publishing. Generally speaking, I’d estimate that I averaged 4 hours per Short. That’s a lot of time! But, the time investment is worth it if it means the video gets more traction.

If you approach video creation with a mindset of “this will only take 10 minutes”, then this almost feels like “throw away content”. You might get the occasional video that performs well, but generally I suspect they won’t get much traction at all unless you’re delivering some real value.

Video value proposition

A key consideration for any video is “the value you are providing to your audience” with your content. If you’re creating content for the sake of creating content, it’s unlikely to do well. But if you understand your audience and what they want or need, this makes it much easier to create.

The value you provide doesn’t always need to be the same with each video. Sometimes the value might be information, other times it could be inspiration… and it can simply be entertainment.

Core metrics that I focused on

With every Short I created, I would watch the real-time analytics immediately after publishing. This is really useful for identifying patterns, and seeing how your audience reacts to your content. When you’ve been doing this long enough, you can sometimes see very quickly how well a video will perform just by seeing the initial views and engagement a video gets.

Although there were lots of data points I analysed, there were 3 main metrics I tried to improve with each video.

• How many chose to view
• Average view duration
• Average view percentage

For “How many chose to view”, I always aim for a minimum of 90% in favour of choosing to view over choosing to swipe away. My best performing videos had close to view ratios of 99.2% vs 0.8% – my channel as a whole is approx 92% vs 8%.

Just like long form content, total watch time is the most important metric even with Shorts. As such, I always find it easier to create longer Shorts (around 50 seconds and above) to get the higher watch times. My average view duration was about 53 seconds for my best performing videos, and I use a number of retention strategies to maximise this as much as possible.

One technique is the use of “visual loops”, which extends the scope of this post, but I can share my insights on this in a future post if it’s of interest.

Finally it’s average view percentage, and for Shorts with a duration of 50 seconds and above, I aim for 90% or higher. Because Shorts loop when played, it’s possible to get an average view duration higher than 100%. So if you have videos less than 50 seconds, you should really be aiming for 100% and above if you want them to perform and get those big numbers.

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Using YouTube community posts

A quick win is to use Community posts to help get some extra reach. Community posts are a powerful tool that is massively under utilised by a majority of creators. For every video I posted, I created a supporting community post. A well crafted post might only take a few minutes to create, but can return a lot for the time investment. Every person that engages with a post is then more likely to get served my video content. These posts provided a traffic boost to the related video, as well as providing nearly 800 subscribers.

Within the same time period, 6.8M people saw my posts; the most popular had 153,000 engagements.

The double-down strategy

In order to save time, wherever possible I would try to be more efficient with my workflow. So for example, I might spend some time doing some research that covers several topics, and this allowed me to script and record 4-5 videos in one go, as opposed to doing them all individually.

At one point, I had 2-3 videos “in the bag” (edited and exported) and was able to schedule them in advance, which took the pressure off for those days where I might feel too busy. However, it also provided some flexibility so that I could be more reactive.

If one video or topic starts to do particularly well, doubling down on that topic while it’s hot can be a really good idea. I did this several times between the 4th – 9th August, and these were the times when I had the highest amount of daily views.

When I doubled down on a video topic, I would create a very similar video and form strong data relationships between them for maximum results. I would then move the scheduled video to later in the week.

There is some nuance to this that exceeds the scope of this post, but I can create a post about how to double-down effectively on YouTube content in the future.

Cross platform results (TikTok & Instagram)

For my personal brand, I really focus solely on YouTube, but I do have accounts set up for TikTok and Instagram. The only reason I post videos on these platforms is because if I don’t, a lot of people copy my content from YouTube and upload it onto their own accounts.

Instagram Reels brought in 5.5M views, and TikTok had 8.7M views for the same time period. A lot more could be done with these platforms if I wanted to develop them further, but across all 3 platforms, this is a total reach of 76.2M views.

One of the great things about YouTube Shorts, is that you can repurpose them cross platform without necessarily having to make any changes to the content. YouTube is the lowest common denominator in terms of format and duration; so typically, if it works for YouTube it will work for other platforms too.

Equally, the algorithms used for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are all becoming more and more similar as they get more sophisticated.

If this was a business brand, I would also have shared this on LinkedIn too.

Conclusion of the 28 day Shorts challenge

At the end of the 28 days, I felt a small sense of relief that I no longer had to create daily content. Trying to do this on the side of running an agency, while working on a number of other projects and channels was very challenging.

However, I was also thrilled with the results. It made me realise what a difference regular, and consistent posting can have on your channels, compared to a sporadic approach of just posting when you feel you have time.

Although it’s definitely not a competition or a fair comparison, when I compared my results to other creators that I’ve seen doing similar challenges, my results were far better. There are some strategic reasons why this is the case, but I think one of the biggest aspects is the amount of time they spent on their content creation (you do get out what you put in, to a degree!).

Moving forward, I’m going to increase my content creation output to something sustainable – 3 times per week / approx 12 videos per month would be realistic and should provide most of the benefits that you get from daily posting. If there are opportunities to cover trending popular topics and double-down on these, then I’ll definitely invest the time into these too.