In the last Part I showed you a technique called News-jacking.

We went through how we can take a news story or industry update and quickly convert it into a script for a short video.

In this Part I’ll show you how to have infinite content ideas.

Also, big announcement - we’ve opened up a FREE community. You can discuss today’s newsletter and more in there. Here’s the link: join.

The last thing you want to be doing each day is wondering “what shall I make a video about?”

Making videos is hard enough - we don’t need excuses like what the content should be.

We need to be ready to go. No research. No faff.

We agree on the format of news-jacking. So now we need a steady stream of news stories to record short videos on. I’ll show you some solid sources.

First up the obvious one - industry blogs, newspapers and magazines.

Make sure to follow all the top sites in the niche. For example if you are in the tech niche you probably already read the Wired website / magazine. That’s a solid source.

The simplest way here is manually checking sites each day. They are probably ones you are going to anyway. Just start doing so with an eye for what would make a good video: what would be a good article to comment on and give a hot take?

If you want to get more fancy use an app like Feedly to curate your stream of content. You can add all the blogs you want to follow in one place and do through them quickly each day.

Google Alerts is also an amazing source here. You can give it keyphrases and it’ll alert you to content that will interest you.

Here’s a quick example which threw up an interesting article on a female led AI-based sewerage management startup! Interesting stuff!

Next, newsletters.

Make sure you are registered to the best newsletters in your niche. Newsletters do all the hard work of curating the best and more interesting news for you.

For example in the AI niche on the top newsletters is The Neuron.

Let’s say I open up an issue and see this:

Solid - there’s an excellent video that could be made from this.

Importantly don’t just make a video by screenshooting or green-screening the newsletter itself. This is their content - let them make videos using their content!

Instead you can click back to the original source of the article that that the newsletter gives you - in this case The Verge:

This gives you the original source for your to produce a short video script from. The newsletter has just done the job of curation the best and most interesting content for you already!

Third, be a detective. If you see someone else do a short video about a topic you want to cover you can also go find the original article.

This lets you i) cover that exact same article with your own take and ii) add that website as a new source moving forward.

For example on the left of this image is Brand Nat doing a piece on how the OpenAI employees stood behind Sam Altman during the attempted coup:

And on the right is the original article.

How to find? Simple - just copy the headline into Google and it’ll come up. It’s that simple. Don’t overcomplicate things!

These 3 methods will get you a tonne of potential content. Just keep note of stuff you want to cover (I use Notion) and run through your list to make the videos.

My favourite source

I’ve saved my favourite source just for you: Reddit.

Reddit is a content goldmine. Here’s an example from the AI subreddit:

All three of these could be the basis for a video.

Each of these points back to an article - you can see the link previews for Politico, the Whitehouse website and AsiaTimes in the above image. Those become your sources.

And we can be smart and filter by the most popular topics.

Notice here I’ve set to Top and Today:

If the topic is trending here on Reddit then it’s of interest to your niche. And therefore will be a great topic for a short video!

Head to reddit and find all the relevant subreddits for you niche - then simply keep an eye on what’s trending in those groups using Top/Today to get ideas for content that are definitely going to get you engagement.

Pulling it together

In the next Part we actually make our videos!

Why so late? Because we’re removing all the blocks that stop people from shooting the damn videos.

Tomorrow we’ll look at production which, after all this pre-production, is actually very simple!

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: Small but deadly. Why short form content works.

• Part 2: Format focus. What will we make videos about?

• Part 3: Content channels. How to get inspired for limitless ideas.

• Part 4: Rapid recording. How to create shorts easily and in volume.

• Part 5: Repurposing for fun and profit. Hitting multiple channels using short form.