Template C6 · Content Creation · shared with Social Media
YouTube Channel Build Checklist.
A short guide to deciding whether a client should have a channel, and if so what it is for, what goes on it, and how often. The first section talks some readers out of it.
The decision this template protects
Whether this client should build a YouTube presence at all, and if so, what job it does.
Content Creation · shared with Social Media
Main Course Module 3 · Channel and format strategy
Version 1.0 · 19 August 2026
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Before you start, you need
What has to be true first.
- An honest read of the client's subject-matter supply and production capacity.
- Whether the buying decision involves research.
- A budget conversation that assumes twelve months, not three.
What this template will not do for you
Its stated limits.
- It will not make a channel grow. Nothing on paper does.
- It will stop you building one that was never going to work, which is worth considerably more than it feels like at the time.
- It does not cover production craft, editing, or paid promotion of video.
- Platform discovery behaviour changes. Check the review date on this document before relying on section two.
What is in it
5 sections, and what each one makes you write down.
01
Section zero · Should this client have a channel?
- Disqualifier
- Test
- Present?
02
One · The channel's job
- What success looks like
05
Four · The unglamorous eighty per cent
- For the next three videos, write the title first
06
Five · Format and cost floor
- Format
- Cost per video
- Sustainable at our cadence?
- Suits our job?
07
Six · Review gates
- Gate
- What we will look at
- Continue if
- Change if
- Stop if
Judgment prompts
Questions the template makes you answer.
- If the client's most knowledgeable person left tomorrow, does this channel survive?
- Is the chosen job the one the client wants, or the one you can measure?
- Are you recommending a channel because it is right, or because it is a large line item?
The defensible output
What you are left holding.
A go or no-go recommendation in writing, and if go, a one-page channel charter naming the job, the mix, the derived cadence and the stop condition.
Published open. Copy it, adapt it, use it on client work. If you pass it on, keep the attribution line on it.
More from the library
Sixty-five instruments, eighteen published open.
Each one names the decision it protects, states what it will not do, and ends in something you could defend six months later.