I filmed 120 YouTube Shorts, which obviously can be shared to Instagram and all those other platforms, in just three and a half hours of real time. And yet, if I would have used that same time to film long form YouTube videos instead, it would have been a much better use of my time, because my long form videos can also turn into Shorts. But I get the most attention by just filming long form videos.
If you are a content creator and you're wondering what's the best way to do your content, short form video first sucks. You might be able to build followers. You might be able to get some views. But you're rarely going to do very well selling, at least not that much relative to how much time you have to put into it.
What I've found is that if I want to sell stuff — get people to go to my website at jerrybanfield.com, buy my content creator coaching package, pay to chat with me for life on my website, join my Skool — I need long form videos. Having someone watch a little YouTube Short where I talk for a couple of minutes at most about one little thing rarely gets the depth of connection that you need. Somebody being ready to spend money almost never happens off of that.
I've gotten millions and millions of views on TikTok, for example, and I had my Twitch linked in the bio, and only like five or ten people came over from TikTok on millions and millions of views. What you need is to be able to film long form content and then strip Shorts out of it.
The number one thing a content creator has to think about
I look at this like an experiment: what's the best use of my time? This, if you're a content creator, is the number one thing you need to think about. Again, if you are a content creator, the number one thing you need to think about is how do I most efficiently use my time? That means what's the best format to film your videos in?
And I say it's long form. You want to show up and do like a 10 to 15 minute video off the top of your head. Then you simply set up a system where you can clip Shorts out of that long form, and you put those out. The Shorts are the discovery mechanism, but the long form is the depth, the funnel, the conversion to serious buyers and serious viewers.
On X, I've been doing long form videos also, and those have been doing awesome. I've got a guy on jerrybanfield.com you can see on the leaderboard. He spent $327 with me in a single day after finding my long form videos on X and then going to my website. In my experience, long form videos are absolute magic for getting that effect. But short form videos are very good for getting people to discover my long form videos. And on TikTok, you can even put up a 10 minute video as well. While those might get a lot less views, if occasionally you can get one that gets some watch time, you can turn someone swiping and scrolling rapidly into a customer almost right away.
Three and a half hours, 120 Shorts, zero long form
So the way I look at it is, is it a better use of my time to spend three and a half hours filming 120 Shorts? And that is with an insanely fast system. Most of you would be lucky to film a handful of Shorts in three and a half hours and then get a few thousand views off of those Shorts. Now, I'm on pace to get around 100,000 views on the 120 Shorts I filmed. But the problem is, I got zero long form videos out of those three and a half hours.
So what I'm doing instead is I film my long form videos, and I take a 10 or 15 minute video and get like three Shorts out of it. In three and a half hours, I'm able to film like six to ten long form videos. That's 62 minutes to a little less than two hours of long form video, and those are fantastic for discovery on YouTube. Then for every single video, I get maybe an average of two or three Shorts out per video. So I get the long form content, plus I get all those Shorts cranked out with it.
I also found that filming 120 Shorts in three and a half hours left me feeling pretty exhausted afterwards, because I had to start and stop over and over. For me, once I get talking, I can just keep talking. I can do a six hour livestream straight sometimes before I run out of things to say. But what tends to be difficult is getting that initial hook out — all right, give me the hook, get the hook out there and start saying it. What I've noticed is that lots of times, the most interesting stuff I say just comes out randomly while I'm doing a longer video about something else.
It took a lot more preparation to have the AI go through all of my content and get 300 different Shorts ideas, and then scroll through those in the Word document and get 120 Shorts out of that. And it took a lot of energy to film every one of those Shorts, where all right, I'm starting a video, and then I'm going on and on about it, and then I stop, and then okay, here's the next one.
Plus I had to get all these different backgrounds so my Shorts don't all just look the same. What's easy is when I do my long form videos, I also generate the same background I do for the long form as a short form or vertical background behind it. So I film vertical and horizontal at the same time. That way there's no more than three of my videos with a very similar background, but this drastically shortens the time and makes each of my backgrounds much more individualized than doing a huge batch all at once. Plus, after filming 120 Shorts at once, I never want to do that again.
The limit on long form, and six channels a day
I love doing long form videos, and long form is working much better for me than short form for discovery on YouTube. But there is a limit with long form. I find I don't like putting out more than one long form video a day on YouTube — well, that's per channel. I have six channels. So I put out six long form videos a day and then like two Shorts per channel, and then grinding those out to other platforms is just a huge amount of discovery, and it only takes an hour or two of filming and then another hour or two of uploading all the videos and running everything through AI.
So if you look at three and a half hours as the 120 Shorts I filmed, then I'm looking at like five plus hours to actually upload all those Shorts, and I have no long form. The ideal formula is to make sure you get that long form first and foremost.
The beauty of all of this is that when you set up the system, then you can just run it. Whereas the hardest thing to do is kind of to see where to put your effort. A lot of people are just wasting so much effort getting these Shorts views that don't even go anywhere. But I was just doing long form before, and then I'm missing huge amounts of views that I could easily get with a system to take Shorts out of my longs.
Film the Shorts while you film the long form
The best way to do it is to film your Shorts while you're filming your longs, because what's inefficient is to film them separately. What is ideal is filming them both at the same time to reduce the amount of time I have to talk. I look at it that I basically spent three and a half extra hours talking to film those 120 Shorts, because in most cases, those Shorts were saying the same things I said in long form videos earlier. That's how I got all the ideas to do them.
Some of my best ideas, some of my most clippable moments, come when I'm just riffing off the top of my head in a long video, and then it's torture. It might be a bit dramatic, but it sucks to go repeat the same thing I said before for a Short separately, when I should have just grabbed it out of the long form video to begin with.
So if you can use OBS like I do to record vertical and horizontal at the same time, do it. I film Shorts and longs simultaneously. That way, when off the top of my head comes some amazing thing where I think I wish I would have clipped that, I've already got it down. But if you're just filming horizontal videos and trying to use AI to strip out vertical videos, that's inefficient too, because the AI gets stuck trying to get your face centered and then you've got to move it all around. (Meanwhile there's still something crawling around up there — I've got memes running through my head.)
What's efficient, if you want to film your Shorts, is to film them natively in the right format, and then the AI can just do its part. What I do is in Claude. The most efficient way to film your Shorts is to film them as a long and a Short, horizontal and vertical, at the same time. Then you take the long form vertical video, dump that into a folder, and let Claude Fable go through it and just pull out the best clips without having to chop stuff together. Literally just lift off the most interesting 10 to 50 second parts of the longer video, lift that off, put it into a separate video, and upload it.
Then all of my short form videos on YouTube are all tied to a long form video, so that if somebody liked that little clip, they can go get into watching the longs, and that will be in the feed.
So this is an experiment I did, filming 120 Shorts to see what would happen, because I've seen so many people grow so much off of Shorts, and Shorts look like most of the time they're not doing anything. But when you're trying to get to 1,000 subscribers, if you can get 100 of them with Shorts and 900 with longs, then the 100 from Shorts was helpful. And you can't even use platforms like Instagram or TikTok hardly at all with horizontal video. So you want to have horizontal and vertical video recorded raw for everything in the original format, chop it up, upload it, let's go. If you want to go deeper on how I approach all of this, I put everything I know about growing on the platform into my YouTube Coaching playlist.
If you enjoyed this, go to jerrybanfield.com and get that creator coaching I have for you. Get a month of it and talk with me on Zoom. I'll help you set up the most incredible system for content you've ever seen before.
You can also just chat with me and ask questions in the Jerry Banfield Family on Skool or in my chat. I'll be recording another video right after this.