This week, we’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled specializing programming because… We have a YouTube-versary to celebrate!
This week will mark the end of my first year on YouTube. It’s been an amazing, gratifying, comfort-zone-pushing experience.
In the spirit of sharing openly, I wanted to share with you my year of YouTube by the numbers.
So if you’ve been wondering…
How many views can someone really get as a brand new channel on YouTube?
How much time does it take to produce weekly content?
Let’s talk.
My Channel Stats
Totals for my year on YouTube as of the date of writing this post (Apr 19, 2017 – Apr 16, 2018)
- Subscribers: 126
- Minutes Watched: 6,658 (that’s 111 hours or 4.6 days!)
- Total Views: 2,973
- Video Likes: 129
- Video Dislikes: 1 (I’ll take it)
- Comments: 28
- Shares: 54
- Top Video: 001: Why I’m Specializing My Web Agency (the original!) – 492 views
- 2nd Most Watched Video: 010: My Review of Badass Your Brand By Pia Silva – 234 views
Other Cool Related Stats
- Personal Emails/Messages Received In Response to These Videos: 11 (I have truly loved the honesty and raw conversation)
- Podcast Interviews About Specializing: 6 (let’s be honest, never would have happened without creating consistent content on the topic)
- Masterminds Joined: 1 awesome one (invited after I posted my first video)
- Cameo Appearances By My Dog: at least 6
- Sponsorship Dollars: $0
Time Investment
Each video takes me about 2-3 hours to produce, edit, upload, and share. That means I’ve probably invested about 100 hours (yikes!) over the last year to this project. Here’s what goes into every video I make:
- Set up my tripod and camera
- Fiddle with camera to try to get the focus and exposure right (often failing—please forgive my fuzzy videos)
- Sit down and record my video (following the One Take Rule*!)
- Watch video to make sure everything worked
- Put away my camera and vow to edit the video later
- The night before I want to publish (usually Monday night), realize I need to edit my video and write my blog post
- Upload video to iMovie
- Edit lightly, trimming beginning and ends
- Export to flash drive
- Upload to YouTube
- While uploading, write accompanying blog post (what you’re reading right now)
- Upload blog post to sara-dunn.com
- Write YouTube description
- Find a screenshot from the video where I’m not making a weird face (possibly hardest step, I never knew how weird I looked when I talk)
- Create video thumbnail in Photoshop
- Publish or schedule YouTube video
- Embed YouTube video into blog post
- Share blog/video link via Twitter
- Create email in ActiveCampaign and email blog/video to cherished email subscribers
I rarely batch record or record in advance unless I’ll be traveling the following week, so I go through this process almost every week.
I can’t even imagine how long this would take if I was super concerned with perfect production quality. I made a commitment when I started this that my personal content would not take over my life or take too much time. Which leads me to…
*One Take Rule: Every video must be done in one take. No stopping, starting over, or re-recording. I have only once re-recorded a video, and that was only because I forgot to turn on my microphone and there was no audio. One. take. only.
So that’s my quick peek behind the scenes. To some of you, this probably sounds like a lot of work and a lot of views. To others it may sound like little work and not much return.
What do you think… do you think it was worth it? Should I keep going?
PS: If you’re into this YouTube thing, stay tuned. Next week, I’m sharing my Top Lessons Learned From My 1st Year on YouTube.
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