YouTube – Editorial Plan Creation Tutorial

Creating an Editorial Plan

Creating an effective editorial plan is essential for the success of any YouTube channel.

It’s crucial because the positioning of your videos in YouTube’s algorithm and the audience’s engagement with your content (leading to more subscriptions) depend on it.

However, building an editorial plan can be quite complex and time-consuming, especially for beginners, due to the many analytical and creative tasks involved, which are not always straightforward.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the steps for anyone wanting to create their editorial plan:

  1. Research the Main Topics – It’s essential to define the main themes your channel will cover, aligned with your niche, to identify trends and topics that attract your target audience.
  2. Content Ideation – Based on the identified themes, you need to come up with engaging content that addresses the pain points of your target audience, increasing the video’s watch time and engagement.
  3. Script Creation – Using the chosen content, create the video’s structure, writing out every detail, including dialogues/voiceovers (if applicable), scene sequences, how to present key messages, and takeaways.
  4. Video Title Creation – Create a title that aligns with the video content, includes a captivating hook, and is optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This will help boost both clicks and visibility in YouTube’s search engine and algorithm.
  5. Video Description Writing – Craft an appealing summary of the content to give viewers a clear idea of what the video is about, aiming to increase watch time for your target audience and avoid wasting time for those outside your scope.
  6. Thumbnail Creation – Design an eye-catching thumbnail that includes a powerful hook to increase click-through rates.
  7. Publishing Schedule Setup – Define how frequently you’ll publish videos to stay optimized for YouTube’s algorithm.

As you can see from the tasks above, creating an editorial plan can be a long process, especially if you’re planning to scale up.

But there’s a way to make this process almost instant, taking just a few minutes, by using 42rows.

Creating a YouTube Editorial Plan with 42rows

Let’s say we want to create an editorial plan for a YouTube page about photography, aimed at beginner photographers.

Specifically, we want the plan to include 10 videos.

Considering all the tasks listed above, let’s go step-by-step to set up this use case on 42rows:

  1. Open the homepage at 42rows.com and, after logging in, click on the “File” tab.

  2. Click “New” and enter a Table name – this is the name you want to assign to the table (in our case, “Editorial Plan”) – and the number of columns you want to add, which corresponds to the number of tasks you want to automate (in our case, 7 – as listed above).Once the data is entered, click “Save.”
  3. A .csv file will be created with the name you entered in “Table name,” and a new table will open containing the number of columns you specified.
  4. Add the number of rows you want for each column by clicking the “Table” tab, followed by “Add” and then “Row”.
  5. In the window that opens, enter the number of rows (i.e., the number of instances) you want to display – in our case, we want to create 10 videos, so we’ll input the value 10.
  6. Add tasks for each column by clicking the three dots next to the header, then selecting “Set Prompt” and entering the prompt text to be sent to the AI model.
  7. In the pop-up window, perform the following actions:
    • Select the type of input you want to send to the model:
      • Prompt – to input text
      • Image – to input an image
      • Template – to input a template
      • Vision – to input a vision
    • Title – Enter the column title
    • Select model – Choose the AI model to which the prompt will be sent (for guidance on which model to select, click here)
    • Prompt – Enter the prompt to be sent to the AI
    • Generate content based on other cells – Specify whether content should be generated in relation to the information in the table.

    Specifically, generate content based on:

    • None – no other information
    • Row – information in the rows
    • Table – information across the entire table
    • Column – information in the columns
    • Select the column to set Prompts – Add references to other columns in the prompt. For example, in the “video title” column, you might include a reference to the video content to cross-reference research.

    For example, we can input for the first column:

    • Title – “Main Theme,” which is the first task from our list.
    • Select model – GPT-4O-MINI for optimal execution at a reasonable price.
    • Prompt – “Write a general theme related to photography for a YouTube video aimed at beginner photographers. Refer to current trends and address my audience’s pain points. Keep it concise, no longer than two lines.”
    • Generate content based on other cells – “None.”
    • Select the column to set Prompts – “None.”
  8. Repeat this process for all columns, selecting them from the sidebar, and click “Send all”.

After processing, you’ll have a populated table based on the prompts you entered.

Your editorial plan is now ready!

Download a .csv version of this example below

Piano editoriale