Blog fam, blog fam. Hello and thank you all for tuning in as always!
Just wanted to take this space to talk about the last two weeks and the YouTube growth, milestones, and learnings I’ve had among the past two weeks. I’m sitting here at my kitchen table, beer in hand (Elephant Juice by EMBC, absolute gem of a beer), while listening to my bands first demo of our song, ‘Magic.’ These two weeks were insanely creative, and I can’t wait to share.
YouTube!
When we last spoke in the 29-March update, I had just posted a video that I was incredibly proud of, however I was frustrated. The video had little to no traction.
For six days, I saw nothing but typical results. Hardly any view time, retention was wavering between average and below average. I felt defeated! Looking back at my hour tracker, I had put 17 hours of work that week into this video.
I think this has been my biggest struggle with the process. I know I’m getting started and my skills are being tuned, but to have zero validation that what I was doing meant something hit me a bit hard.
That afternoon, something changed. Impressions started spiking and views, subscribers, and view time skyrocketed, making this by far the most viewed video on my channel.
As of today, 12-April 2023, this video is by far my strongest performer and continues to climb.
Look at the more than usual number. I was BAFFLED. My subscribers climbed. My views climbed. My watch time clibed.
The monetization mark by 2024 is in sight, and I can’t wait to touch it.
So What Did I Learn?
From a video perspective, I learned I need to not be so focused on analytics, especially while I am in these early stages. Once I hit 10k subs, then I can start, however until then the numbers eat me alive. What I’ve learned about myself is not following numbers is fucking hard. As a data engineer, I live and die by numbers. I found myself constantly refreshing pages to see when my subscriber count went up, and wincing whenever I noticed an unsubscribe. Realistically I shouldn’t even notice these because theyre super insignifiant at this level, however I was atune to every subscriber. At the end of days I found myself on a dopamine low, and needed an NSDR to recover (shoutout to Huberman Lab for the incredible practice). Realistically moving forward, I’m trying to only check my analytics three times a day, morning, lunch, and night.
YouTube Technique
Some of the more technical findings for me this week. In going through the PTYA lessons, a lot of interesting findings have come.
- Week 1 – April 3: Learned the value of the finding a niche. Currently I need to keep going through exercises to identify where I want to narrow my focus here. Niching down will help me grow, so the plan is to do this exercise this upcoming weekend.
- Week 2 – April 10: Learning the importance of title and thumbnail. I think im shit at this. The student supporters have helped me a bit in learning how to craft better titles, but I think I have a lot of room for improvement here. Biggest thing for me is learning how to draw an emotional response via a title, rather than telling what I’m going to say in a video.
Since the Tutorial video, I’ve pushed a long form video around Hobbies in Engineering and then a SHORT around what coding language an individual should start with. Both of these have performed averagely and gave me some subscribers, so I’m going to take that as an average progress and let the algorithm do it’s thing.
One final thing that I learned the value of doing today is batching. I filmed three SHORTS about completely different topics in one film session. I can immediately see the value in this, as I can edit each whenever and outsource if needed or keep editing on the fly.
If theres anything I’ve learned this past month, is that creating something by yourself, and for you, is an insane amount of work.
Although corny, I’ve recorded every hour dedicated to YouTube since March 8th to keep myself accountable. Skills get better in my eyes with either time or money. This tracks my time to prove to myself that I’m putting in the work.
Since March 8th, 34 days ago, I have put in 77 hours of work on YouTube. We are at 205 subscribers and 146 hours of watch time. Time to keep grinding.
Music
Oh yeah. TSB had an initial demo come out this week to the band and we scheduled a June show. The mix sounds incredible, with even more improvements to come. I can’t wait to share the full product with you all.
Commit To The Bit.
-Jon
A Day In The Life 
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