Are Short Form Videos An Efficient Way To Grow Your Email List? What I Learned Publishing 59 videos In 30 days

An experiment with clips on Youtube, Instagram, and Tiktok

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A little over a month ago I decided to run a 30 day experiment creating short form videos.

It’s abundantly clear that people’s attention spans are getting smaller and smaller and the way people learn and encounter new ideas is evolving. So if you have a message that you want to amplify to the greatest amount of people, you’ll need to learn to adapt to create things that align to how greater parts of our society are consuming new ideas.

Marketing 101 is all about understanding where your audience or buyers are, and then going there.

To be honest, I don’t really consume short form content. I don’t go on instagram really, never had a TikTok before this, and use Youtube more like a podcast player for audio than sitting there and watching videos. So in terms of the content experience itself, this was all very new for me.

My primary interests in running this experiment were the following:

1. I wanted to understand whether I like creating for this medium? Does it give me energy? Is it fun?

   1. If yes, how does this factor into a longer platform vision for myself as a creative entrepreneur who has messages he wants to put out in the world 

2. I want to find a channel outside of Substack’s organic growth engine to build my audience efficiently. Could video be the answer?

3. I wanted to understand the audience growth opportunities on these platforms. For example, I love podcasting. What would it take for my podcast to become “big” on something like Youtube?

4. How much time does all this take? Is there asymmetric value created to the investment of picking up your phone for 30 seconds relative to writing a blog post?

5. Does this form of media have a greater level of resonance and impact, than written content for the message of the richness of prioritizing expanding consciousness that I am trying to put out in the world?

Before we get into the learnings, I think it’s important to understand the big picture with content marketing.

Big Picture: Owned Vs. Rented Real Estate

To create long term value for yourself, you need to own the relationship with your customer or audience. This means that you have the ability to push a message to them directly for anything you create and there will be a high likelihood it will be seen.

The most common “owned” medium is email, but it could also be a text message or inviting someone to a private community like Discord or a whatsapp group. If you send someone an email they will likely read it or at least see the subject line if it doesn’t go to spam.

There’s some debate as to whether Substack truly is “owned” real estate since it’s on a platform vs. your own site which can accrue SEO benefits and you are in complete control of. However, because you can capture email addresses and engage people directly, I consider it mostly owned.

Then you have all these distribution platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and even LinkedIn. Lots of people spend lots of time trying to grow their audiences on these rented platforms, but at the end of the day you are at the mercy of these platforms. When you create content, you have to hope that the algorithm shows your followers whatever your creation is and play by their rules. You can’t message people directly in mass and if you did, it’s probably a bad look that might get you kicked off the platform.

There is certainly benefit to these distribution platforms, however they are not as valuable as being able to definitively communicate something to someone like an email can in most scenarios. However, the benefit of these platforms is that it is often much easier for new people to discover your work compared to writing on your blog or even substack. That’s why I like to think of their primary function as distribution and discovery. Substack is unique and compelling in that it allows you to do both which I why I prioritized it over going back to my wordpress site when I started writing again. Many other top publications like

The Generalist

have recently come up and done the same.

Therefore, the overall strategy for content is to leverage the distribution platforms to support developing a direct customer or audience relationship by capturing someone’s email.

If you’re not focused on building direct relationships with your audience vs. distribution platforms, you should be. Any of these platforms can change their algorithm over night and you could be totally screwed. 

My 30 Day Sprint On Short Form Videos 

Over the course of 30 days, I published 59 short videos across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. I also published 6 long form videos and podcasts on my Youtube channel.

The short form videos were a combination of video shorts an editor created from my podcast (example), cuts from long form videos I made for Youtube (example), and spur of the moment videos that I shot on my phone when I felt some inspiration (example).

Here are the metrics results:

There’s really not a lot to discuss here in terms of using video distribution to grow on Substack. The contribution to my email list is low. 

When it made sense, I almost always added links in the descriptions of the videos on Youtube driving to Substack and had my link in bio on the other platforms. 

I’m sure there are optimizations I could make to communicate in the video content itself to sign up for my email list “below” type thing, but my perception is that it wouldn’t really move the needle in a big way.

It should be noted that I made the decision to create a new instagram account for all this content which I discuss here versus using my old one. It seems like ½ of the instagram followers are people I already know and then ½ were generated from the platform.

Platform/Content Fit

When I look at the various platforms, it seems like I had the most success on Youtube which I measure in views and subscribers. This does not surprise me. I think an important thing to understand is content / platform audience fit. 

I got really excited about TikTok when my friend Nat shared his growth curve and I started to play with it. One of the things he recommended I do is to view what top content in your niche was in order to understand the psyche of your audience and get inspiration for your own content. When I did this for the spirituality and consciousness categories, I was incredibly underwhelmed. It was mostly people talking about tarot cards, aliens, paranormal phenomena, and not a ton of things related to earnestly pursuing more expanded consciousness. 

@scottbritton43What I learned from watching the top spiritual content on TikTok #higherconsciousness #consciousness #spirituality #spiritualtiktok #spiritualawakening #consciousmind #awakening #spiritualjourney #awakeningsouls

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As I’ve discussed in this post, the popularity of any content, product, or service is a reflection of the predominant level of consciousness of a given population. Even though TikTok makes it easier to “blow up” because the algorithm relies less on a follower base and more on engagement to surface videos, it seems like the TikTok spiritual audience might resonate less with my ideas that are more oriented towards people deep on the path.

On Youtube, there is a vast amount of rich content from great spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira, David Hawkins, and more. Obviously, you are competing for mindshare with all of these people who likely have a bigger following which makes growth more challenging, but I think you need to be honest with yourself about where your content/platform audience fit is.

I also think Youtube represents the best real opportunity to build a sustainable business or living amongst distribution platforms. There are even people on there building massive businesses. 

Youtube is on every smart TV out of the box. You will be able to watch the NFL on Youtube next year. It’s starting to capture podcast listeners because content is now being atomized to answer specific questions from 60 min+ episodes. 

Scott Britton @britton

Think more and more people are going to be consuming podcast content on youtube in the future. All these cuts that directly answer questions within long interviews that are now easily searchable and discoverable is very compelling. Content continues to become atomized.

All of these questions and shorts will be included in search results. And as far as driving people to “owned real estate” to capture email addresses, Youtube is the best for that too with their rich description section that allows for links…though that is obviously a nut I did not crack.

On the platform growth front, it also goes without saying that my content has massive room for improvement in terms of production and the actual content itself. I imagine with investments here, I would see better engagement and results over time.

How I Felt Creating

Overall, the things I really enjoyed about this experiment were:

• Picking up my phone and creating spur of the moment inspiring videos like this one. I love spontaneous creativity and feeling it flow out of me in all forms of media

• Picking uplifting music to add to the videos

• Getting more exposure for the podcast by having an editor repurpose the best parts

• Getting positive feedback from friends and listeners who enjoyed the video because they “aren’t big readers” and responding to these comments

• Finding my “video voice.” The more I recorded, the bolder, more confident, and authentic I got in front of the camera. It felt like I was learning to build my inspiration and charisma muscle

• Getting creative with how to grab someone’s attention with a ‘hook”. I didn't’ spend a lot of time on this, but started to recognize the importance and had some fun with it towards the end

Things I found draining were:

• Any form of editing, applying captions and uploading videos created from my phone

• Any form of pressure to “need to upload a video today” in order to thoroughly run this experiment. Any part of building a content machine that takes me out of creative flow and presence I generally don’t like

• QA’ing the videos from my editor 

• Writing headlines, descriptions, and applying tags on the platforms

• Looking at the analytics to see how things were performing

Overall, I like the “art” part of short form video content. I think it suits me and is fun to create spontaneously. 

What I don’t like is everything else.

The good news is that I can build systems around this with outsourcers to handle these things so I can just focus on what I’m good at and like over time.

One thing to note is that video is very orthogonal. Just because you are a good writer, doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good video creator. It’s like a skill that you can get better at with overtime, but I think there might be a tendency to associate being a good writer-creator to translate to a video-creator. I found that it’s not direct even when you’re used to speaking publicly or podcasting. So its important to manage your personal expectations. 

Is Short Form Video Worth Doing?

If you’re starting from 0 or low audience size on these platforms and your goal is to grow your email list, it seems like short form video is not the most efficient way to grow on Substack. At least that was the case for my topic on consciousness evolution and the nature of reality. Though it might be different depending upon what you’re talking about. Just look at my friend

Nat Eliason's Newsletter

who talks about books on TikTok. I’m sure there are people that are talking about making money online that are crushing it.

As I think about my own goals and vision for how I can contribute to the world, I will continue to do video. I think it’s where learning is going and more people will increasingly lose the attention span required to consume long form content with the exception of books which are a separate context than blog posts. Books are almost more like a relaxing form of productive leisure at this point. They’re just as much as way for people feel good about relaxing as they are a way for people to learn something. This is different than blogs which usually feel more like an active utilitarian exercise in my experience.

This is why in my opinion being a writer who builds the skill and systems to do video is a very compelling combo as we move into this new content age.

I also like doing videos because I like inspiring people and it's highly emotive.

So my current plan is to continue to outsource my EvolutionFM podcast shorts and work to build systems to offload everything else I don’t like doing. I will slow my roll on publishing 2x a day and kind of treat short form video like twitter. If a spontaneous and interesting idea emerges that I feel compelled to share, I’m going to shoot a video on the spot and then not think much about it.

My goal would be to text my VA the video and have them do everything else. And then maybe a week later or something I’ll log in and see how it performed. 

One thing is for sure, I am not going to stop creating content which includes video no matter where my career takes me. I just enjoy it too much and there’s asymmetric value creation for whatever you’re doing. 

Scott Britton @britton

One of my biggest regrets in my own founder journey is that I stopped creating media while doing my company. Like many other founders I know, I bought into the "burn your boats" dogma and cut off all activities that were not related to making my startup successful.

There are a lot more nuanced learnings on each of these platforms that I did not include here because they answer very specific questions that make more sense for dedicated posts. For example:

• Does it matter whether I publish from my phone or computer (Yes, it does)

• Are shorts a better bang for your buck then long form video? (Yes, they are)

• Which type of videos and elements do better on each platform. I.e. Does working with an editor perform better than just shooting one yourself? (This surprised me)

I plan on writing more about these when I get time.

As far as Substack growth goes, I am running some other experiment sprints that are very promising. 

I will make sure to share the results of those once I am done and get around to it. So make sure to subscribe to receive the results!

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If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏