Releasing My First YouTube Video

This week, I achieved an ambition of launching my personal YouTube channel and releasing my first video, which you can find here.

After years of talking about launching a channel, it feels refreshing to have taken a first step forward. There is a long road ahead, but I am focusing on consistency and the creative process of releasing new content.

Today, I am going to talk about how I overcame the mental blocks needed to release my first video, and the current analytics after posting on YouTube.

🎬 How to Start

It feels like at least three years since I told my close family that I was going to launch a YouTube channel. But until now, it hasn’t happened, and this was down to negative questions I would ask myself:

• What if I embarrass myself?
• What if people make fun of me or my videos?
• What if my niche is wrong? (I can’t start on the wrong subject)

Thankfully, my journey attempting to build a faceless YouTube channel helped me to overcome these challenges.

From launching two faceless channels, I quickly learnt that long-form video views are hard to come by. They require dedication, skill, an understanding of your audience, and consistency of content release. As a result of this, I realised that my concerns around what other people think are somewhat diminished. If my videos gain an audience, there is a high probability that this is a result of them being good content.

Around the same time of working on my faceless channels, I realised that my underlying passion is in productivity, with a specific interest around activities that can help us to feel better and be more productive, as well as our relationship with technology. This is fairly wide as a niche, but knowing that I can hone in on the detail over time, gave me the confidence to start.

🧐Current Analytics

At the time of writing, my first video has been public for 4 days and 19 hours. The analytics are currently:

Views: 10

Watch Time: 1.1 hours

Impressions: 231

Impressions Click-Through Rate (CTR): 1.3%

There is nothing within these numbers currently that surprises me. It is still very early days to monitor the progress of my first video. One of my faceless channel's long-form videos spiked in views 12 to 14 days after posting.

My CTR will be a metric that I am keeping a close eye on to analyse how the channel is performing. A CTR of 1% to 5% is considered average, while a good CTR is 5% to 10%. High CTRs are those achieving 10%+, which will be the ambition for all of my videos.

📚What I’ve Just Read

Share Your Work by Austin Kleon

I would recommend this book to anyone hoping to find a creative spark, and most importantly, anyone wanting to begin exploring the release of their work.

Kleon provides 10 reasons, alongside fun illustrations, to gain the confidence to share what we create.

A highlight for me has been chapter 2, “Think process, not product”, which asks the reader to rethink the process and part of the content. People are interested in how you get to the final product, so sharing this recipe is increasingly part of the appeal for your brand. 

💭Closing Thoughts

This week has served as a reminder of how the previous journeys taken can have an influence on your future direction. While my faceless YouTube channels failed, they gave me a window into posting content online, which helped me to overcome an obstacle to post the first video on my personal channel.

If you are on a journey to launch your own YouTube channel, I would love to hear from you, so feel free to get in touch.

Over the weeks ahead, stay tuned for more information around the methods and processes that I develop to launch the channel.