How My Channel Is Growing Organically.
In August of 2019 I decided to finally invest my time more wisely by starting to make YouTube videos. Both my husband and I were experiencing financial struggles; we were sinking below the poverty line, and a lot was going on that meant life was hard to live. We still always managed to maintain a sense of wanderlust, we wanted the good life and often sat together having conversations that would stretch on for hours about how much we wanted to live an alternative lifestyle. Quite naturally when you have a great idea, you want to share it with the world, and we thought being from one extreme background of debt, anxiety, stress and poverty issues to a more natural, holistic lifestyle — we were after the nomadic dream, would be a pretty cool story to document.
And so the beginning of my YouTube channel began, I had my phone and I actually held it the entire time I filmed as quite obviously, I couldn’t afford even basic equipment. I used a mirror to see if I was in frame, because ‘real YouTubers’ don't film with the front cameras and so I was determined to make 4K work for me, and I just talked about our situation, about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go from there. One house move later and we were heading on our way to making great video productions of all the adventures we wanted to get up to throughout the rest of our lives.
But it kind of hasn’t really turned out like that. Filming, as much as I love it, takes at least two days to complete as well as edit, get the music right and go over the details with a fine tooth comb so that you haven’t fluffed up or said um fifth teen thousand times. Our videos are mainly vlogs with some sit down videos scattered in between to establish a connection with the audience as well as containing searchable content too. At the moment we are living with my parents to give us a chance to figure out what we want to do; 8 months down the line and we are still here, and we still don’t know what to do, when your channel is based on progression towards a dream or certain goal, and your not moving at a fast enough pace to engage an audience with, video ideas become more and more difficult to produce, through lack of direction.
After my first year of doing YouTube, I have exactly 162 subscribers. It’s not quite the 1000 I need to start making my hobby more profitable, no video I’ve made has gone viral, the view count hasn’t even hit 10000. My total watch time is 1163 hours, and I’m okay with that — because I know what I’m doing wrong.
My channel hasn’t increased in the way i thought it would by year 1, and I think I know why; firstly I do not have any other social medias linked to this particular channel, we film all together, and that includes my 3 young children, and I don’t like the idea of trying to fill up there days with picture taking, filming and basically taking time away from being a family. Secondly I am not comfortable with setting up scenes to photograph for social medias like Instagram or Facebook — I have always wanted to remain as raw and candid as possible in our vlogs, but there wouldn’t be many truly amazing things to capture throughout our day, we are just a normal family of 5, and like my channel, i can imagine that those handles too would struggle to gain traction.
Another big reason I feel like my channel is lacking in engagement is direction. I have tried very hard to keep our channel as focused as possible, we like to talk about minimalism, and money. We love exploring new places and eventually we want people to follow our journey when we finally decide which direction we are headed. Because we aren’t quite at the stage of making sporadic decisions or crazy content that baits people in, it’s definitely harder to build a channel this way; being authentic and taking people through a journey that isn’t just one upward line of success and correct choices isn’t what the people want to see very often. A channel like mine will take an enormous amount of effort and more importantly time to get right and see numbers growing in a more consistent way. Growing a channel means you have to embrace growing yourself along with it. Production won’t be perfect, people won’t be loyal, it’s up to you to keep pushing through until you find a sweet spot; the corner of the internet where you do belong, and people will follow.
So why am I still pursuing it?
Well, firstly I always knew that YouTube and building subscribers would take a lot of time, any length of time I thought it could be, was doubled and so in my mind 2 years to get to the baseline 1000 subs was roughly where I put myself. Eventually I know deep down my channel will find its niche, and I will find more people interested in watching my content. I have also started a second channel based purely on art making, and all things creative and I know again it will take a lot of work and time to just keep on going, it’s all about trusting the process, as well as knowing when to make financial leaps to make what I’m doing more professional eventually. I believe in taking those risks, and hopefully one day it’ll pay off.
If you’re interested in checking my channel out then head over to Wistl Family Adventures on YouTube.
