Lessons Learned Building A YouTube Channel For Six Months

I launched a YouTube channel in January 2021. There are a couple of reasons driving the decision.

• I work in DevOps. Many of my clients face the same challenges implementing DevOps. I wanted to create content targeting developers and sysadmins to teach them the skills they need to implement DevOps.
• Many of my clients are also startups. Most startups struggle to find their audience and create products to meet the needs of their audience. I wanted to start at zero, build an audience, and create products that fit their needs.
• If I nailed building an audience, and could create products that meet their needs, I could turn that into a passive revenue stream, further decoupling my time from my income.

Performance & Metrics

Since I started with 0 subscribers, the metrics really had nowhere to go but up. In May, things were looking really strong. Unfortunately, the trajectory didn't continue. There were 2 variables at play here: the number of videos released, and the video content.

My goal is to produce 3 videos per week and I struggled in late May/ early June hitting that target. This affected the number of views, and I believe stunted the growth I had been seeing.

Content is the other factor: the videos I did produce during that time weren't as popular as some of the previous videos. 

I'm ok with that: it's a learning curve to determine what your audience wants. Not every video will be a success and the failures are much more visible on a small channel.

Audience

Roughly 70% of my traffic comes from non-subscribers. This seems to be common for most YouTube channels. The key takeaway here is to create videos for the YouTube algorithm, not for your subscriber base. This highlights the importance of choosing the correct title for your video along with a thumbnail that is irresistible when seen in the YouTube feed. (And, I gotta admit, I'm killing it in that game, thanks to my thumbnail guy)

Reach

Again, the Reach metrics are highlighting the importance of creating videos for the YouTube algorithm. Over 60% of my traffic comes from search and browse, and a whopping 45% comes from YouTube recommendations.

Click-through rate is an important metric here. It means that of all the recommendations made by YouTube, 5.9% of those led to someone clicking on the thumbnail to watch the video (again highlighting the importance of the thumbnail).

Engagement

Engagement is the one metric that I have a lot of control over. When someone clicks one of my videos, do they keep watching?

Only if I'm delivering what they are looking for.

I'll go into this into more detail below, but I can't emphasize enough: you have to deliver on what the video title says, be entertaining, and be engaging.

That has proven to be really hard. I can talk to someone all day long and I'm funny, relaxed, and personable. The very instant I look at a camera to talk, a different human appears. It's like Jeckyll and Hyde. Well, minus the violent part...

Monetization

I can't monetize the channel yet, I don't have enough subscribers or views. So, I can't really say much about this except that revenue from YouTube has never been a driving factor in building this channel.

Content Workflow

As the metrics above show, there is a direct relationship between consistent publishing and channel growth. During the weeks when I published less content, channel growth not only stalled, but took time to regain momentum once I published again. 

This drove home the concept that I need to publish regularly. For me, that meant 3 videos per week. Editing raw footage was a big, time-consuming challenge. I enjoy doing it a lot, but it's not my expertise and was preventing me from hitting my goals. I hired an editor on Upwork to do all my editing. I record the raw video, upload to Google Drive, and my editor takes over. After the first few videos, we've reached a sweet spot where he understands the style I like and I will include notes to him for editing directly in the video when recording.

Video Intent

One lesson learned is to ensure videos have only 1 intent. In the beginning, I created quite a few videos that began with comedy skits. Following the lessons learned above, it was a distraction. 

Each video should have a single purpose: educate, entertain, or take an action. The title should reflect what that purpose is, i.e. "How to use docker-compose" or "Unboxing the Macbook Pro". YouTube viewers have short attention spans, wandering off-topic has a steep penalty.

YouTube tracks the percentage of viewers still watching at the 0:30 mark. I've noticed that a lot of YouTubers either incorrectly title their videos, or ramble about things not related to the topic.

Take this video, for instance:

I recently bought the iPhone 12 Pro Max and wanted to learn more about the camera. This video seemed perfect, but it goes on for a full 2 minutes talking about other cameras before diving in to the iPhone 12.

This reminded me of a lesson Joel emphasized over and over when I created content for egghead.io: treat your videos like a James Bond movie. Every James Bond movie starts by diving right into the action: a car chase, a shootout, general ass-kickery. There's always time to "build the plot" later. Your YouTube videos should do the same. I saw this impacting many of my videos where I did a comedy skit at the intro before diving into the content.

I still love doing the comedy skits, but in the future they will either be stand-alone videos or inserted during the video in between scenes.

I'm also learning about framing, composition, and transitions with a goal of creating more scripted videos with defined actions, camera movements, and b-roll to try and create more engaging, professional, movie-quality YouTube videos. 

What's Next?

As it turns out, I really like creating videos so I'll definitely continue doing that. I also love the whole DevOps concept, so it seems like a good fit to make videos about DevOps.

🤯, right?

There are 2 other goals I had for this project too:

- DevOps evangelism (though growing up in the South, I do not like that word, so I'll have to work on that)

- Building a profitable business from scratch. After all, most of my clients are trying to do the same thing so it's a skill that will help me in the long run.

The DevOps evangelism (ugh... there it is again) will take care of itself through creation of more videos and interacting with the DevOps community that forms.

Making this thing profitable is another story: I'm currently running negative due to the expenses of editors, equipment, and time. I've got some ideas on how that will work out. Time will tell.

Take-aways

The overall challenge has been a blast. It feels great to start at zero and build something valuable over time. Key lessons learned are:

• publish consistently
• script videos with the viewer in mind
• jump right into the action
• outsource time-consuming tasks
• create focused videos