Creating more content and uploading videos on a daily basis can seem like a no-brainer for growing on YouTube, but it isn’t quite that clear-cut. In this article, we’re going to cover everything and answer the question, should you upload daily on YouTube?
In general, every YouTuber should try uploading daily, but only for a short time period to avoid burning out. If you’re brand new to YouTube, spending a month uploading daily can have major benefits in the long-term growth of your channel. If you have an established channel, it can help improve your proficiencies and springboard you to the next level.
But uploading daily is not for everyone.
There are many reasons why you should and why you should not upload daily on YouTube. In this article, we shall dive deeper into both, while looking at how you can upload more frequently and when uploading daily to YouTube makes the most sense.
6 Reasons Why You Should Upload Daily On YouTube
1. You can learn faster and become more efficient
The number one reason why you should upload videos daily to YouTube is so that you can learn the ins and outs of YouTube and the video creation process more quickly. This is especially important for brand new YouTubers as there is quite a lot for you to get to know.
Don’t expect perfection in this stage, it’s about getting videos out and growing your skillset fast. This is also great because you can make a lot of mistakes, but because you’re creating so much content, those mistakes don’t have to “haunt” you for too long as you move onto the next video and other videos can gain traction.
For YouTubers with an established channel, uploading daily can help make you more efficient so you can get more videos out than you currently are doing. This short burst of daily uploads can help get you from one video a week, to be able to comfortably manage two or more videos per week.
2. More ways for viewers to find you
If you have more content on your channel, you can target more keywords and potentially rank for more keywords, which means that viewers have a lot more ways of finding you.
For new YouTubers, this is important as you won’t have an audience to leverage, so being found more in search results can have a massive impact on your channel’s growth.
3. Your channel can grow faster
Speaking of channel growth, by uploading daily, you are creating more content. If that content is well optimized and focused on a specific topic, this can make your channel grow a lot faster.
This is because if your channel covers a specific topic, viewers are more likely to watch more of your content, which sends positive signals to YouTube’s algorithm which could then promote your video further to even more people.
4. Viewers can see what type of content you have already
As a new YouTuber, uploading daily can put a lot of content on your channel in only a couple of weeks or months. You could have 45 videos in under 2 months.
By having this much content, viewers will be able to clearly see what your channel is about. When your viewers can see what your channel is about, it’s more likely that they will subscribe to your, and/or watch more content.
And if they watch more content, it is more likely that YouTube will recommend more of your content to them in the future, so they could continue giving you views and helping promote your channel through their positive interaction of watching your videos, or they can subscribe at a later time, which is also positive.
5. YouTube can associate your channel with a topic quicker
YouTube’s algorithm is designed to recommend videos to users that will be most likely to watch the video. It does this through a number of methods, one of which is to match channel and video topics to the interests of users.
In practice, this means that if you have a fishing channel, by uploading daily, you can get more fishing-related videos onto your channel sooner than you would if you only did weekly uploads. This allows YouTube to recognize you are a fishing resource quicker and judging by users’ watching habits (amongst other things), YouTube can recommend your channel to people interested in fishing.
6. You won’t be bogged down by the analytics as much
This is something people don’t talk about enough when you are getting started on YouTube, or even as you’re growing a small to medium-sized YouTube channel. Once you upload a video it can be very difficult not to constantly check the analytics data to see how it’s performing.
Sometimes you could find yourself doing this multiple times per day or even every hour.
If a video doesn’t quite perform as well as you had hoped in the initial phase, which can happen even for the best creators, it can be quite disheartening and demotivating, even though you are aware that that very video could go viral a month or a couple of months after uploading.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad to check your analytics, but if you’re not doing it in a structured way, then you might as well not do it at all.
By uploading daily to YouTube you basically have no time to check out analytics as you have better things to do: create a new video. Also, the effect of uploading a video that doesn’t perform quite as well as you had hoped isn’t felt as hard. You have enough other content that could be performing (and may have had 2 weeks to find some momentum) so you won’t be as disheartened by a couple of videos that don’t immediately do well.
And an additional bonus is that you can learn from these after a couple of months and see what videos did well, to then create more of that content to grow your YouTube channel.
4 Reasons Why You Should NOT Upload Daily On YouTube
Uploading videos on a daily basis to YouTube is not all positives, there are quite a few reasons why you should not upload videos every day, or at least why you should not upload daily for an extended period of time.
You will have to see how susceptible you may be to each of these points below.
1. Daily video uploads can burn you out
Uploading 7 videos every week is a lot of work, especially if you’re doing everything yourself. From researching and writing/planning the video outline to the actual filming, shooting, screen recording, and narration, to editing the video, and then uploading and optimizing the video for YouTube.
After a while, you can start feeling this workload putting a strain on you if you cannot manage the work efficiently, or if it is just plain too much. If you feel yourself suffering from burnout, then you should reduce your upload frequency to something more manageable.
You can also try outsourcing some aspects of your workload if you are in a financial position to do so, or reducing some aspects that could be unnecessary until you can increase your efficiencies in some other way.
2. Your quality can suffer
When you try to increase your efficiency the first thing that tends to suffer the most is the video quality. If you took a week before to finish one video, getting it done within one day can seem like an impossible task without having your video quality really suffer.
Some YouTube videos also require extensive research, planning, and production. If you have an established channel, this is something that you may not be able to sacrifice without damaging your audience or reputation.
In this case, I would recommend creating a second channel that is more forgiving and gives you more freedom to create easier/faster content.
3. You can become bored or disinterested
Uploading daily can also make you become bored or disinterested in a topic, especially if it’s not your ultimate passion that you can speak for hours about when asked. But even for those topics, you can become bored after a few weeks or months about essentially talking or creating content on a specific topic.
For this, you should have separate subtopics within your chosen niche. Let’s take the topic of fishing again, you could have subtopics covering your favorite gear, different types of fishing, out-in-the-field tips, how-to guides, mistakes beginners often make, and even trending events or activities but taken from the angle of fishing. I.e. During the Olympics videos on “Is fishing a sport?”, “When will fishing be in the Olympics?”, etc.
As you can see, it may be one topic, but it covers so many different aspects, you won’t become bored very easily.
Some people like to mix things up and do different subtopics at a time (I’m one of those people) while others like to focus on a specific subtopic and get it done and then move onto the next. It’s up to you whether you can maintain your interest for longer.
4. Your subscribers can become overwhelmed
The biggest reason why you should not upload videos daily if you have an established YouTube channel is your current subscriber and viewer base.
Many people do log onto YouTube daily to consume content, but at the same time, many people also only really consume YouTube videos once or twice a week and if they log on once a week and you have uploaded 7 videos since they were last on, the majority of them won’t watch all 7 videos.
This can cause those videos to then underperform as YouTube is seeing users not engaging with them.
If you are new to YouTube, this should not be a problem as you haven’t established that audience and viewing schedule as of yet. Additionally, if you are already uploading 3 or more times per week, the increase in content shouldn’t be a problem for your subscribers as they are already conditioned to watch multiple videos of yours per week.
If you only upload one video per week or two per month, then you should try slowly ramping it up to 2 videos per week to see how your audience reacts.
And you can still upload daily, but then put the other 5 videos on a separate channel for the viewers that are able to consume the increased amount of content.
How To Upload More Regularly To YouTube
We’ve covered some reasons why you should and why you should not try uploading videos daily, now let’s take a look at some things that can help you create videos quicker so that you don’t spend all your time making and uploading YouTube videos.
Create a content plan/hit list
The old saying goes, those that fail to plan are planning to fail, this is a category that a lot of these methods to speed up your video production ly, in planning.
The first of these is to create a hit list, a.k.a. A content plan. This is just a list of the different video topics you are going to cover. I like to research and make a list of at least 20 video topics and then do the keyword research for the main long-tail keyword to focus on, and formulate a good title. All of this in one go.
Once that is set, you don’t have to think about what type of video you’re going to make every day, you have a list of ideas that are ready to go and you have to make the content.
Establish SOPs
SOPs are your Standard Operating Procedures, most often found in corporate businesses, these can help you establish replicable workflows that can speed up your production.
These can be things like:
- An upload profile for your YouTube videos.
- A fixed location where you film.
- Order of how you edit your videos.
- How do you record your videos (i.e. screen recording and then voice-over, short sections you then cut together, etc.)
- How do you do your video research (here’s a guide on doing keyword research effectively)
- Outsourcing procedures if you have people that help you, etc.
Batch your video creation
Another way to manage uploading daily videos is to spread the work out into batches.
Your batching schedule could then look like this:
- Mondays: Planning and research.
- Tuesdays: Recording and filming.
- Wednesdays: Editing and effects.
- Thursday: Uploading and video optimization.
- Fridays: Analysis and ideation for the following week.
- Saturday: Relax on the beach (or lake, or mountain, or couch).
- Sunday: Relax some more.
Now that is just an example, you can spend two or three days on recording or editing to get all of the videos up to scratch, and then you can schedule them out daily.
P.s. to increase the speed of your research and optimization phase I recommend TubeBuddy (free extension) and these other YouTube keyword optimization tools.
Have your gear set up and ready
The next tip to increase your video production is to have your gear already set up and ready to go whenever you want to make a video.
If you need to get your camera out, change the batteries, get the tripod, find a good angle for light, move chairs and things in the background away, etc. it might only take 15 minutes, but those 15 minutes can play a big part in your motivation to actually get started.
When your gear, whatever you are using, is set up and all you need is to turn some things on and hit the record button, you’re reducing a lot of the excuses in your head as to why you should not make a video today or right now.
The biggest hurdle is often just getting started and this can help a lot in that regard.
Done is better than perfect
YouTube does not have to look like a featured film, and most of the little perfections that you may spend hours working on will be missed by 99% of the people that watch your video.
When you’re uploading daily, or frequently, on YouTube, done is very often better than perfect.
If you can get your message and the value in your message across in a video, then you can be done and move on to the next, or give yourself a break so you can get started with the next video refreshed and good to go.
Who Should Upload Daily To YouTube
Daily uploads are not for everyone and some channels with existing audiences that are accustomed to videos that take a lot of work behind the scenes will probably not benefit directly from daily uploads.
So, in this section, let’s look at what type of YouTube channels people should upload daily to YouTube.
New YouTube Channels
When you’re starting a new YouTube channel, you need to frontload your video productivity so that you can build topical awareness of what your channel is about quickly, as well as spread your content to a bunch of different keywords to be found by viewers to get that initial ball rolling.
If you can upload a video daily for a month or two, you will have established a library of videos that can gain views and users to your channel while you sleep and work on future content at a more sustainable rate.
When you’re completely new to YouTube, this can also help you get over the initial learning curve, or at least towards the upper 90% of it, a lot quicker.
Gaming Channels on YouTube
Gaming is a niche on YouTube where viewers are accustomed to daily uploads and if you’re doing gameplays and walkthroughs, these can be easier to plan and produce regularly without burning yourself out.
If you have a gaming channel doing gameplay walkthroughs, then you can create the content in a logical order and try to cater to trends and searchable aspects of the niche or specific game when you are starting out, to build momentum.
People that naturally can talk in detail on a subject
If you are knowledgeable about your channel niche and can naturally talk about the subtopics in detail without having to do a lot of additional research beforehand, then you can probably manage to upload daily videos to YouTube as you’re bypassing a large factor that can take up a lot of time.
This doesn’t mean you should not do research, it just means that you can take a quick note for specifics, but the majority of the topic and what you’re talking about is already familiar to you. You only need the exact specifics to fill in the blanks for the sake of accuracy.
YouTubers that want to increase their video efficiency
Other channels that should upload daily are YouTubers that want to increase the number of videos they produce per week or month, or YouTubers that want to create videos faster so they can work on other projects or have more free time.
If you upload a video every week for example, by spending 4 weeks uploading daily (either on your own channel if your audience reacts well, or on a different channel) you can rapidly become faster at doing research, delivering your message more effectively, and editing and optimizing your final video for YouTube.
After the 4 week phase of daily uploads, you can then reduce it to a more healthy schedule depending on what your goals are.
YouTube Channels targeting mostly Search Intent
Lastly, channels that stand to get the most out of daily uploads can actually be videos that get the majority of their views from search results. These are channels that don’t really have an audience, even if they have a large subscriber base, but people find their videos when they search for a problem or are looking for inspiration on YouTube.
How-to channels for example are a great example of this. Most of the channel subscribers may not be very interested in how to clean a shower drain, but the people that have a clogged drain and put that search term into YouTube or Google will be very interested and they don’t care when you upload it.
Final Thoughts on Uploading Daily To YouTube
Every YouTuber should try uploading daily for a limited period of time, especially new channels, as daily uploads can help you learn things a lot faster, and you can build momentum quicker. It’s not for everyone, and after a couple of months, I suggest reducing the upload frequency to something more manageable, like 3-4 videos per week for most YouTube channels.
I’ve already outlined some cases where you probably shouldn’t upload daily, in which case, you can either increase your video output slightly or try daily uploading on a different channel that would be more fitting.