Twenty articles of craft compress into one page you can actually run. This is that page: every step from topic validation to the week-one review, timed, ordered and linked to its full guide.
Print it, pin it, run it until it becomes reflex.
Phase 1: before filming (20 minutes)
| Check | The bar | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Topic validated | Autocomplete presence + views + the small-channel test | Topic research |
| Format matches intent | The search's shape decides the video's shape | Intent table |
| Chapter outline drafted | The script's spine, named like sub-questions | Chapters |
| Topic phrasing scripted aloud | Said naturally in the first 30 seconds | Captions |
This phase exists to prevent the expensive mistake: production spent on demand that was never checked, for a format the searchers never wanted.
Phase 2: packaging (the honest hour)
| Check | The bar | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Five title candidates | Proven skeletons, promise front-loaded in 50 chars | Titles |
| Thumbnail built | One subject, three elements max, honest emotion | Thumbnails and CTR |
| Division of labor | Thumbnail carries emotion, title carries the claim, no repeats | The split |
| The promise test | The video fully delivers what the packaging claims | The quadrant's debt |
The hour is deliberate: packaging decides whether anything downstream gets seen, and the fourth row is the loan officer, because the per-query record always collects on overpromises.
Phase 3: the ten-minute metadata pass
The details per box: the three-zone description with its 125-character hook, the 5-to-8 tag set from a grounded generator, the broad-niche-brand hashtags, the named chapters, the series playlist at the right position, and the specific handoff in the outro.
For money videos, one addition: the ten-minute caption edit, fixing the names and numbers auto-transcription mangles.
Phase 4: after publish
| When | Do | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Week one | The four-dial read: CTR, retention shape, sources, one experiment queued | Analytics |
| Quarterly | Quadrant the catalog, revive the packaging problems | Revivals |
| Quarterly | Playlist maintenance, series gaps noted | Playlists |
| Ongoing | Winners studied for skeletons, never for their tag sets | The copy trap |
For Shorts, run the compressed version: validated topic, first-second hook, searchable title, hashtags, topic spoken aloud. The channel-level fields, keywords and the About page, get their ten minutes and their hour once, outside any single video's checklist.
The philosophy, in one paragraph
Twenty articles reduce to one sentence of proportion: research prevents wasted videos, packaging decides reach, metadata is fast hygiene, and satisfaction compounds everything. Spend accordingly, twenty minutes, an hour, ten minutes, and the rest of your effort where it always belonged: making the video worth the click it earned.
The one-line takeaway: validate before filming, spend the honest hour on packaging, run the ten-minute metadata pass, read the four dials a week later. The checklist is the whole series; the proportions are the point.