The Challenges of Daily Vlogging

Hey friends,

So I started a new vlog, with videos every day Mon-Fri 🚀

It feels amazing to just chat to the camera without worrying about “providing value” every second, like I do on the main channel. I guess that pressure slowly crept up on me: it comes from having almost 3M subscribers, and a business of 20+ people whose jobs rely on my videos doing well.

The daily vlog lowers that bar for quality, so I can just get my creative juices flowing and not care too much about the outcome. It also encourages me to do more adventurous stuff (“come on, let’s do something cool for the vlog”).

Daily vlogging presents a few challenges though:

1. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Outsourcing. You can obviously go the Casey Neistat route and vlog yourself. But if you don’t have time to do all your own filming and editing, you have to outsource. Luckily my videographer Gordon is smashing it so far, and our editor Ken turns out videos in record time (usually by the next day).
2. 🤯 Losing Focus. Although it’s mainly Gordon figuring out the camera angles, B-Roll and audio, I still need to use some of my limited time + focus to think about what to say, and present the vlog in a semi-interesting way.
3. 🔍 Quality Control. Because the vlog’s a daily thing, we don’t really have time to get everything just right with cameras, audio, and concepts. It has to be quite run and gun. But that’s part of the appeal to be honest.

Anyway, I’ve committed to vlogging for a whole month, and if it feels useful / sustainable / fun, I’ll keep going. Here are some more ideas I had for vlog content:

1. ⏲️ Semi-Regular Segments: Mealtime Mondays, Tech Tuesdays, or Q&A Fridays. This would make the vlog less of a heavy lift each day with me thinking “crap what do I talk about today”.
2. 🦸 Team Introductions: Comic-book-esque freeze frames when team members are being introduced. Eg: Amber, Podcast Producer;Superpower: Singing, or something like that, so viewers get to know different characters over time.
3. 🪄 Learn with Me: Me teaching people something (like a magic trick, or how to spin a pen with one hand).
4. 👶 Throwback Vlogs: I’d review a bunch of old footage from my graduation, holiday, or something like that, to make a retrospective day in the life from 3-5 years ago. Or I could do “story time with Ali” where I break down a story from my past, like Casey Neistat used to do.
5. 📆 A Month in my Life: A monthly main channel video called “A Month in my Life” where I take the best bits from the vlog and turn them into a monthly highlight reel.

If you’ve got any more suggestions, send me an email. ❤️

Have a great week!

Ali xx

📸 AppSumo + My New Course

My friends at AppSumo (who are kindly sponsoring this newsletter) have just released a YouTube Starter Pack with some very cool tools for starting your own channel. 🥳 Including my new course YouTube For Beginners – How to Start & Grow Your YouTube Channel.

It’s about 4 hours long, and covers video scripting, cameras and lights, ideas for your channel, and how to speak confidently to camera. The course itself is normally $500, but AppSumo have it on sale now for just $149. And their starter pack also includes things like Noah Kagan’s YouTube growth hackings ebook, and a telepromoter app from BigVu. Check it out here.

The first 100 people to use the code ALIABDAAL20 get 20% off. 😉

♥️ My Favourite Things

📚 Book – The Art and Business of Writing Online, by Nicolas Cole. If you want to get better at writing online, this book is currently my no.1 recommendation. Nicolas also co-founded the writing course Ship 30 for 30 with Dickie Bush, so he’s partly responsible for the 🚢 emoji that’s everywhere on Twitter.

📝 Article – The Building Blocks of Motivation, by Piers Steel and Justin M Weinhardt. An in-depth look at what motivates us, and why we procrastinate. They sum up their ‘theory of motivation’ with this equation:

🎬 YouTube Video – How to Vlog Like Casey Neistat, by Casey Neistat. If you’re interested in vlogging, this is a decent place to start. Lots of good advice like: no one cares about your timelapses or drone shots. They’re good for transitions.

🛋️ Decoration – Blue-Eyes White Dragon Rug. I turned 28 this week, and my brother Taimur got me this Yu-Gi-Oh rug. My flatmate has mixed feelings.

✍️ Quote of the Week

What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.

From Four Thousand Weeks by David Burkeman. Resurfaced using Readwise.