The best way to make marketable YouTube videos is to restrict your videos to a single “theme”. That theme, whatever it is, does not have to be limited to a single action or item. It doesn’t have to be, “here’s one camping item I bought from Bass Pro Shop.” It can be, you know, “here are five things I bought from bass Pro Shop”, or, “here are ten things I bought for my van from various places”. Those are all themes.
This doesn’t just apply to YouTube videos. It applies to anything that needs to be easily marketed. In the entertainment industry, people commonly use “loglines” to describe things like books and movie scripts. A logline doesn’t have to explain every single detail of a film’s plot, but it contains just enough to give a person the gist of the story. There’s a formula (there’s always a formula) to writing a logline: it’s Protagonist + Inciting incident + Protagonist’s goal + Central conflict. Here’s a famous and very recognizable example of a logline: “When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Cape Cod, it’s up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.”
When it comes to themes, I always refer back to reality competition shows as examples because they are so structured and formula-based. Every year around Halloween I love watching those pumpkin-carving competition shows. Stop me if you saw this episode: three teams of competitors carved a pumpkin based on a common theme, which was ranked at the end of the show by a panel of judges. Of course, that’s every episode. There is no episode of “Pumpkin Wars” where the contestants say “screw it, this week we’re going skiing.”
All of this is tied into a bit of self-reflection. I am questioning if my latest video is any good — or, perhaps more importantly, marketable. If I were smart at marketing my own YouTube videos, and I don’t think I am, I wouldn’t make videos like this one. If I were smart I probably would have pulled the review of the baby monitor out of this video, because it’s hard to market a video called “in this video I camped in the snow, and went to a gas station, and tried out a baby monitor, and also talked about a No Buy Year.” It probably should have been three separate videos. If the video seemed a little disjointed toward the end it’s because I also reviewed a video game console I recently bought and it seemed so different from all the other footage that I ended up cutting it out.
I’m a pretty transparent guy and whatever’s on my mind at the moment often ends up in the videos. That can make things weird. I’ve often mentioned that I serve a lot of masters. I do multiple podcasts that have nothing to do with vanlife, run multiple blogs, and write all kinds of things that are outside the scope of Big Rob’s Van. The “No Buy Year” is a big thing for me at the moment and it made sense to mention it in the video. Afterwards, while editing, I was second guessing myself the entire time. Will anyone watching this video care about that? Should it have been in a separate video? Should it have been in a video at all? I’m still trying to decide.
Maybe it’s because I’m too close to the content, because when I watch other people’s “day in the life” vanlife videos they seem okay to me. When I do them, they seem like several disjointed video clips. I’ve got to figure out a way to get things to flow better in 2025.
Anyway, enjoy this week’s video. Heading out for a weekend camp is always an ordeal, what with all the packing and planning and, on top of that, filming. It seems like such a pain before leaving, and once I’m out there, there’s no place I would rather be.