My YouTube content tracker is officially a mess, and I’m weirdly okay with that. I spent a good chunk of the weekend tearing apart what I thought was a nearly finished spreadsheet and realizing it was maybe 15% of the way there. The goal is to build something I can actually use to spot trends, figure out which types of videos are worth making again, and stop flying blind on content decisions. I’m not there yet, but the bones are solid.
I also need to catch you up on some other things going on behind the scenes, because it has been a hectic stretch on a few different fronts. Between work, the channel, and a separate business I run on the side, I’ve been running pretty thin. Something had to give, and unfortunately it was the podcast editing schedule.
Table of Contents
The Podcast Is Running on Fumes
I run a cigar podcast separate from Walt in PA called Smoke and Steel
. At one point we were sitting six to eight weeks ahead on edited episodes. That cushion felt bulletproof. Then it got used up faster than I expected, and now we’re essentially week to week.
The main culprit was guest episodes. When a guest comes on, you don’t make them wait six weeks to see their episode go live. So those episodes get bumped to the front of the line, which effectively doubles the workload for that stretch. Add in the general chaos of life, and the cushion evaporated.
On the bright side, I did get the most recent episode edited and published, and we did a fan appreciation night with call-in guests that turned out to be a lot of fun. For that episode I used a service called Riverside, which handled most of the editing automatically. The whole thing took about 20 minutes instead of the usual grind.
Why I Might Start Using Riverside More Often
The speed is hard to argue with. Twenty minutes versus several hours is a real difference when you’re trying to stay ahead.
The tradeoff is video quality. For normal podcast episodes, I record using a 360 camera in the middle of the table and export individual views of each host. You get a solid, professional looking shot of everyone sitting around the table. Riverside uses a single overhead camera and the result just doesn’t look as polished.
It’s not bad. It’s just not the same. So I’m weighing whether the time savings are worth the quality dip on certain episodes. My thinking right now is to sprinkle in more Riverside sessions strategically to rebuild a cushion without completely changing what the show looks like on a normal week.
Building My YouTube Content Tracker
This is actually the piece I feel best about, even though the spreadsheet is nowhere near done.
The original version of the tracker was pulling data from this website, and I thought I was close to finished. Then I started doing a side-by-side comparison between the site and my YouTube channel and found a gap of roughly a year. There was a stretch where I was uploading videos consistently but not publishing companion blog posts. So those videos existed on YouTube but never made it into my content tracker.
Going back and filling in all that missing data was tedious. I used AI to help process large chunks of it, but since I’m not paying for any AI services, I kept hitting usage limits. I’d work through a batch, hit a wall, wait a few hours, and start again. It took multiple sessions to get through it all.
The YouTube content tracker I have now is far more comprehensive than what I started with. When it’s fully populated, the idea is to look for patterns. Which video types get traction? Which ones consistently underperform? What topics seem to resonate with riders versus topics that maybe I just found interesting but nobody else cared about? That kind of analysis should help me make better decisions about what to produce next.
I’m a long way from having clean data across the board, but the structure is there and that’s the hard part.
Why This Kind of Work Matters
It’s easy to overlook the behind-the-scenes infrastructure stuff when you’re a small creator. The visible output is the videos and the blog posts. But the spreadsheet, the tracking, the content decisions behind the scenes, all of that shapes what you end up making.
Getting a handle on my YouTube content tracker means fewer random swings at topics and more intentional decisions. That should mean better content over time, which means more value for people actually watching and reading. That’s the whole point.
It’s not glamorous work. Spending a weekend rebuilding a spreadsheet doesn’t make for a great thumbnail. But I think it’s going to pay off, and I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing what the data shows once everything is filled in.
Ride With Me
If you want to keep up with what’s happening on the channel, subscribe to the WaltInPA YouTube channel for more riding content. When something’s useful, share this post with a friend who rides. And if you want to talk motorcycles (or commiserate about content spreadsheets) with other riders, come hang out in the WaltInPA Discord where good people talk about riding.
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