YouTube Update: Month 3

Well, here we are at the end of my third month on YouTube with my monthly check-in and look at analytics. First off, if you’re just reading this series for the first time, my YouTube channel is here, and last month’s check-in is here.

Content

My goal, when starting this challenge, was to create one new video per week for three months. I started at the beginning of April, so my goal was to make 12 videos by now, and I have actually made 16, as I did a couple extra (while playing with YT’s Livestreaming tool). So, go me.

This month was an interesting one in terms of content. In an attempt to streamline, instead of putting aside time each week to create a video, I instead shot all my videos for the month in one day. This has bot positives and negatives. It was great to get it done and out of the way. I just had to edit that week’s video and post it. But the problem ended up being that any mistakes I made were then repeated for the rest of the month–I didn’t have any way of fixing them.

My experiment this month was to do videos with other people. I knew, in theory, this was a good idea. Including someone in your video gives it twice the marketing power, and that’s always a great idea. However, the problem with doing collaborative videos is that it also makes your video twice as long. Each one I shot ended up being nearly 30 minutes. I was able to cut them down to 10 or so, but I’m still not super happy with that.

Here’s an example of the type of video I made this month:

We all know that people don’t have long attention spans in today’s world. In my head, my goal for my videos is to hit somewhere between the 5-6 minute mark, and many of the videos I produced this past month were twice as long as that.

Lots of people tell me “if the video is engaging, people will watch it,” and I’m sure that’s true. But I, personally, tend to shy away from videos longer than 8 minutes, and additionally, looking at my watch times, people are only watching for, on average, 2 minutes.

Analytics

My subscriber numbers are growing very slowly, but they are growing… Watch time and views were both up over the last two months, which is nice, but engagements were slightly down.

Takeaways

• Even after three months, I’m still searching for my format. For the thing that works for me. I do know more than I knew before; for example that I need to keep my videos shorter, and maybe doing the “cooking with a friend” format isn’t going to work all the time. In the future, I may need to modify this format, maybe by just having the friend top and tail the video, but with me doing the actual cooking in between?
• I’m surprised to learn I really enjoy doing vlog format videos, but I’ve literally done 2, so I need to do more of those for sure.
• I need some technical help. First off, my sound is shite. I need to do research and figure out how to make it better. Secondly, I need to figure out how to get additional camera angles into my videos, cutaways and closeups of the food, mostly.
• Over the last three months, I’ve really just been trying to give myself permission to get in there, make mistakes, and learn. I was trying not to look so hard at the numbers (because whenever I do, I feel really discouraged), but to take a more philosophical approach.

I’m going to continue to create video for a little while longer. I feel like three months wasn’t quite enough for me to get my groove on and figure out all the things I needed to figure out, especially with such a complex medium like YouTube.

I may, however, take a bit of a hiatus from the once-a-week publication while I do some research, gear up, and reset.

PS. Big shoutout to Rob, Ronin, Farzana and Josh who all came out to be a part of my videos this month. And a huge shoutout to Pacific Specialty Brands, who let me shoot in their beautiful kitchen.

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