Well, here we are, 6 months into the adventure!
It’s been a steep learning curve. I have to say, of all the social networks out there, YouTube has been the most challenging to learn. I do feel like I’m starting to finally make some progress, I am happy to report!
6 months ago, I started with less than 20 subscribers on my channel. Today, I’m at nearly 200, and in fact, I’m going to set for myself as a goal to have 200 by this time next month. The other day, I posted a video and it got 14 views without be doing anything–no posting to Facebook, Twitter or anything else. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it really gave me a thrill to know that 14 complete strangers watched my video.
I’ve now monetized my channel and I’ve made a quarter, you guys!!! OMG I’m so rich. Where should I take my big vacation???
Seriously, though, I know that stuff doesn’t happen overnight, so I’m excited for every little bit. It’s a process and it takes time.
There’s one thing that’s emerging very clearly from the analytics: the more you post, the higher your traffic. I know this isn’t ground-breaking in any way, I’ve been a blogger for 10 years, and it’s the same on the blog. But if you look at August, where I was traveling and posting a lot more videos, you’ll see my traffic was higher that month. The last two months, I’ve only put out 3 videos per month. I would like to do more, but I am still facing some pretty significant challenges, which I’ll share with you in a sec.
Cooking By Laptop YouTube channel analytics:
| Subscribers | Watch time | Views | Average View Duration | Likes | Dislikes | Comments | Shares | # of videos | |
| Mar-17 | 22 | 1126 | 483 | 2.19 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 2 | |
| Apr-17 | 83 | 2074 | 1221 | 1.41 | 22 | 2 | 7 | 14 | 5 |
| May 17 | 117 | 2024 | 1040 | 1.56 | 21 | 0 | 22 | 35 | 6 |
| Jun 17 | 130 | 2342 | 1207 | 1.56 | 32 | 0 | 13 | 7 | 5 |
| July 17 | 136 | 2355 | 1361 | 1.43 | 14 | 0 | 4 | 10 | 4 |
| Aug 17 | 155 | 3226 | 1919 | 1.4 | 27 | 1 | 8 | 18 | 6 |
| Sept 17 | 170 | 2538 | 1504 | 1.4 | 27 | 0 | 3 | 12 | 3 |
| Oct 17 | 182 | 2524 | 1552 | 1.37 | 16 | 4 | 5 | 16 | 3 |
Watch time and views have really not changed at all over the last 2 months, but that’s likely because I only put out 3 videos.
Challenges:
- I had set for a goal for myself to have made a new YouTube channel trailer by now, and I have not been successful at that. It’s a time-consuming process of going through older videos and pulling out clips, and it’s taking quite a bit of time.
- My main challenge is still simply finding a good location. My own kitchen won’t work, I’ve tried various locations in my apartment, and some of them okay, but nothing that works really well. Ideally, I need a kitchen to shoot in.
- Format: I’m still playing with different formats and subjects, ranging from travel to cooking demos. I’m experimenting, and that’s good, but I still haven’t hit on the magic formula yet, and that’s too bad.
Goals for November:
- Publish at minimum of 4 videos
- Get the Channel trailer finished
- Get my subscriber count to over 200
- Generate tweets for my evergreen videos so that I have at least one tweet per day pointing back to my youtube channel