People say that if you like what you do, time flies. It’s certainly true for my YouTube journey so far. I cannot believe that it’s already six months since I uploaded my first video back in December 2018.
Also, I remember how much work I put into my videos and how many times I wondered if my video was good enough and if people would watch it.
Passing the 6 months milestone, I want to take the opportunity to look back at what I accomplished in said period and what my thoughts about YouTube are in general.
10 Videos uploaded
When I started, I wanted to commit to uploading once every other week. In the beginning, it worked quite well. After 7 videos, I slowed down to one video per month. In March, April, May, and June, I only uploaded a single video each month.
I cannot say I am satisfied with the result, I’d love to have created more videos, but the truth is that life happens and I had a lot going on in my day job, with family and friends and it was not possible to create more videos.
Of course, I have to sacrifice some free time if I want to continue the journey, but I was not willing to disappoint other people around me by canceling appointments, etc. I’ll need to think about how to open up more time to create more videos in the future.
That’s something I want to work on in the next few weeks.
All in all, I am happy to say that I published 10 videos to my channel in my first six months on YouTube.
9100 views and 200+ subscribers
Those 10 videos brought me 9100+ views and 217 subscribers. I am quite happy with those results. On average, this means close to 1000 views per video, and about 2.3% of the views resulted in a subscription to my channel.
I had one video about the new features of Visual Studio 2019 that brought in the most views, view time and subscriptions.
I want to take time to analyze what people like and where I need to improve to make it an overall great experience to consume my videos.
Not much feedback received
I did not have a lot of engagement on my videos. That’s something I want to work on more. Maybe my videos need to be watched more, or my content is not engaging enough. I think the truth is both of them apply.
I received a detailed comment on one of my videos that I really liked, although the comment is on the negative side.
People like this motivate me. They show me how to improve, and they tell me where I need to put in more work. It’s crucial to receive feedback like this.
If you’re watching my videos, I highly encourage you to leave a comment. Just write down the real truth. Was it helpful? Was it a bad experience? Tell me what you think; let me know how you feel. Only with this communication, I can work on the things that need to be improved.
Consistently improving
I switched my video editing software; I tried different background music; I attempted to remove the background music; I tried different teaching styles; I tried a lot.
My secret goal is to improve in a specific area with every video I publish. I am sure that when I have reached 100 videos, I’ll be making much better videos because I had time to gain experience in many areas of video creation.
Video creation resources
Although I am making screencast videos, for now, I try to learn from the best in the industry. I want to share a few channels that help you get started and to grow your channel once you’re started – just in case you want to learn from successful people when building your own channel.
All of those channels offer ideas, resources, and coaching on their channel for free. Most of them have premium content or paid-coaching if that is something for you.
Conclusion
Creating content for YouTube is hard. You need to create a compelling video for the right keywords at the right time. You need to master several tools, and techniques to provide the viewers with a high-quality viewing experience.
What once was a platform for simple webcam videos has turned into a platform where mediocre content will be hidden, and the YouTube algorithm will push the best videos.
Although the hard work, it’s still fun to create those videos and I am happy with the success I had so far. I want to invest a lot more in my production process so that I become able to create more content in a shorter period.
I set the goal to reach YouTube monetization by having at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours watch time on my channel by the end of 2019. It will be hard to achieve that goal, but I will try it.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Otherwise, I’ll bother you again about my YouTube journey when my first year concludes in December 2019.
