Templates, published whole

Every template is on its page, whole

No email wall, no signup for the second half. A gated template ranks worse, because the thing being searched for is not on the page, and reads worse, because a wall sits exactly where the answer should be. Half a template with a form for the rest is the same wall wearing a different hat.

What a template is and is not

These are structures, not scripts you can publish. A skeleton tells you which beats a piece needs and in what order; it cannot tell you whether your subject is worth forty seconds of somebody's attention. Each page ends by naming what its template will not fix, because that is usually the part that actually decides whether the video works.

How to use one without sounding like everyone who used it

A template's failure mode is not that it is wrong, it is that it is recognisable. Fill one in exactly and you produce something that reads as filled in. The way out is to decide the specific thing your piece knows that nobody else's does, then let the structure carry it rather than the other way round: the beats hold the shape, the fact does the work.

Two habits help. Change one beat deliberately, so the shape is not the one the reader has already seen this week. And write the closing line before the opening one, because a template's ending is the beat most people leave on autopilot and the reader remembers it longest.

Where each one came from

Every checklist here is the list somebody actually works through, not a list assembled to fill a page. The niche worksheet asks the questions the keyword measurements answer; the pre-publish checklist is the pass made before a render is accepted. Where a template refers to a figure, that figure is measured and dated on the page it came from rather than reproduced here as a rule of thumb.