I posted a video every day for a month. Here’s what I learnt

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

— Linus Pauling (an American chemist and peace activist)

Throughout January I posted a short video every day.

The same video, shared across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. No fancy editing. No big strategy document. Just one idea, recorded once, and published everywhere.

I didn’t do this to chase virality. I did it because everywhere you look, someone is saying: you have to be doing short-form video. I wanted to understand why… What’s real, what’s noise, and how did any of it fit into a marketing system that actually works?

Post every day… how hard could it be?!

A month of lessons

A few things jumped out at me pretty quickly:

Distribution isn’t dictated by quality

But only up to a point. I never wanted to share anything that was utter drivel. My guiding light with every video was “do something positive for the viewer” — sometimes it was to entertain, sometimes to educate, sometimes to motivate.

Same content, different results

The same video can flop on one platform and go crazy on another, with no obvious reason. It’s exciting, but often makes you question “what did I do wrong?!” You quickly realise how little control you have, and how dangerous it is to tie your motivation to views.

Short-form attention is rented

Spikes happen. Then they disappear. Even when a video does “well”, very little carries over to the next day. You don’t really build momentum — you restart, over and over again.

Consistency beats confidence

The videos I felt best about weren’t always the ones that landed. Posting mattered more than second-guessing. That’s useful to learn — but also slightly exhausting!

Shooting video outside is fun

We’ve had a rule for a while at EcoSend: record our videos in nature.

Don’t sit at your desk all day — get out and be at one with nature whenever you can.

For me, this meant not only recording a video every day, but recording a video outside every day. In the UK in January. That is an unpredictable task. My baseball cap keeps a lot of rain off me and my microphone!

So you were mindlessly posting… or was there a system?

A huge part of this was about experimentation. A willingness to fall flat on my face (as long as someone catches it on video…)

What we wanted to find out:

• 📈 How hard is it to gain views?
• 🌍 How quickly will we expand our reach?
• 🤓 Will people choose to learn more about us after seeing a video?
• 🥵 Will this all be so time consuming we give up after two weeks?

A big realisation, though, wasn’t about video at all.

It was about where everything leads.

Short-form is brilliant for surface area. It helps people discover you. It gives you excuses to show up. It starts conversations. But without somewhere for that attention to land, it just evaporates.

By the end of January we started to realise: we need to drive a clearer call to action with our videos.

And for us, email is the perfect place:

🕵️‍♂️ Social is somewhere people find us.

🏡 Email is where they stay.

Videos introduce ideas. Our newsletter can develop them. Social sparks interest. Email builds memory and trust. One is fast and fleeting. The other compounds over time.

That’s why, even while posting everywhere else, email still forms the bedrock of our marketing.

It’s the one channel we fully own. It’s an obvious place where showing up consistently is actually rewarding.

Short-form video doesn’t replace that. It feeds it.

Crafting an ecosystem of growth

I’ve found it much healthier to think of short-form as the edges of the system — useful, optional, imperfect — and email as the centre of gravity. One clear place everything points back to. One rhythm that survives busy weeks, low energy, and changing algorithms.

If you’re experimenting with your marketing efforts and feeling behind, you’re probably not. You just need to decide what role each part plays — and where your real relationship with your audience lives.

If you’ve enjoyed any of our videos in the last month, our newsletter is where it all slows down, in a good way. This is where we go deeper, reflect more, and build something that lasts.

Did you try experimenting with anything new in January? I’d love to hear how it went!

James

Co-founder, EcoSend

P.S. The EcoSend Weekly newsletter is becoming one of my favourite projects to work on each week. My goal is to grow it to 1,000 subscribers so that we can invest even more time and energy into it. Is there anyone you think might benefit from receiving it? Please could you do me a HUGE favour? Send this on to them and encourage them to sign up. You’ll be my #1 favourite person.