Being on YouTube A Year.
What We’ve Learnt So Far.
It’s official! We have been producing YouTube videos for over a year now, and this is what we’ve learnt:
- That honesty is key. Making a channel can pull you in many different directions, especially when you are a lot smaller and it’s easy to make content that ‘trends’ or is more clickable. Being honest has been an integral part of what we wanted to bring to YouTube and making content that we find to be of value is far more important than pleasing the masses.
- People will follow. Obviously being a very small channel means I can’t say I have a huge following that come to my channel, but all of my 176 subscribers are there to listen to my space of the internet; they are what’s made me continue, and I love that I can be apart of a group that follows the same moral and ethical conducts, we can share together very similar topics and it’s a great community.
- Camera shyness will not be around forever (unless your my husband). So Kevin and I feel very differently about being in front of a camera – I certainly have gotten used to it and actually enjoy speaking, whereas my husband struggles with it all the time. Because I lead the channel a lot of the time I’m always the main speaker and so I am almost 100% used to interacting in that way, and the shyness and silliness feeling has almost completely gone, even filming in public is a lot better now.
- You don’t need all the equipment. I still use my iPhone SE 2020 to film and even sometimes use the front camera – and for now it works. Depending on where we go I will attach a mic and that has also helped a lot with our production quality, but for the meantime it’s great just getting by with basic equipment, especially when you don’t know how long your YouTube journey will last. We also try and provide quality within the actual content over quality of sound and picture – but eventually if we feel the need to switch to a camera and a more professional set up, then we will.
- You get weird comments. It’s obviously going to come with the territory when we’re talking about being on the internet, and our channel is certainly no exception. From people just saying awkward one word remarks, to links to adult websites; it will happen eventually and it’s how we deal with it that determines the weight of our channels integrity. Obviously anything inappropriate will automatically lead to a delete and block, sarcasm is met with kindness and strange remarks we just throw in a like. It’s the interactive, and wonderful comments we do receive that make it worth carrying on, we rarely receive internet hate (for the meantime) and so we tend not to be too phased if the occasional weird one slips through.
- Analytics aren’t everything. Making money and having huge amounts of people viewing us was never the point in making content on YouTube. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in how much money top influencers are making, but for us the reason we decided to come onto YouTube in the first place was to document ourselves – for ourselves. Being able to look back at our growth as a family, and watching our kids grow up is so much more important to us, as well as finding like minded people to connect with. Sure, the money would be great as the amount of effort that’s required to make videos is a great deal, and so to be paid for that work would be awesome, but it’s not our priority.
Its certainly been one hell of a year, filming, editing and and reacting to the influence our little channel has had; it was a leap of faith in the beginning, we didn't know at times what or how we would do things but we kept on going regardless. If your looking at starting a channel my advice would be to go for it as long as its for the right reasons — because making money will take a lot of energy and time to get to, but you never know what possibilities are out there for you.
If you are interested in following our family journey from poverty to alternative living then search for Wistl Family Adventures on YouTube, and come check out our content!
