What I learned from starting a YouTube channel

CreateBonds my YouTube Channel on Relationships

How it began

At the beginning of this year I made it a goal to launch a YouTube channel called CreateBonds focused on relationships. I bought some online courses to learn the basics of how to do it, listen to podcasts and eventually launched it halfway through the year with a goal of making 26 videos which represents a video a week for the remaining half of the year.

Here are the key lessons that I learned from starting a YouTube channel.

Basic online marketing skills

I learned basic marketing skills such as how to run Facebook ads, Facebook Fan page strategies, how to understand your YouTube analytics results and title/keyword/tags for YouTube. Definitely would not say I’m an expert in any of it but at the very least I have some experience and know the basics for how it all works.

Either way the experience/skills are all very transferable to most industries.

One great free resource for helping me develop my overall youtube strategy has been Video Creators by Tim. If you need a starting point he provides amazing free content on the topic.

If your interested, I purchased e-courses from udemy on how to grow a YouTube channel, run Facebook ads and manage/grow a Facebook fan page.

Creativity is refreshingly fun!

From diving into video editing and image editing, it was fun being able to tap into my creative skills again. I did most of the branding and design for everything on my channel and I personally feel it’s pretty good. How approach things is first envisioning what I want to make and then breaking it down into problems to solve one by one until I get my desired results.

I could probably improve everything if I spent more time on trying to create the best pieces that I can but I didn’t prioritized that and instead focused on launching and keeping the forward momentum and progress going. 

However, my Createbonds logo wasn’t created by me but instead outsourced through Fiverr. If I had more capital I would probably instead use 99designs or some other large design crowdsourcing platform. Mainly because I feel your chances are better with finding a design that you really like with the number of submissions you get from crowdsourcing as well as access to higher quality designers with the increased capital with more revisions.

In the future if it grew big enough I would outsource more of the design elements.

Lastly, by being in charge of creating my own marketing/branding it has really changed my view and opened up my eyes to how marketing and branding is so prevalent in the world. I find myself more aware in my day to day about the influence of design, colors and etc.

Videos are easier than blogging

My Easy Virtual Reality Gift video

It might be because I’m more of a visual learner but I find making videos to be far easier than writing a blog. It also takes me far less time to do it as well strangely even considering all the different steps I need to take to make a video such as writing a script, recording, video/sound/image editing and etc.

Learning and Applying

Lastly what has been the key learning in all of this for myself personally is that I really like learning something and then applying it right away. The combination of the two synergize very well and I find that once I start applying what’s recommended it opens up new dimensions to what I’m learning that I wouldn’t be aware of.

Goals and Milestones

2015 has been a good year and I’m proud to say that I hit my goal of making 26 videos and creating both a facebook fanpage and youtube channel that has been consistently growing month to month. I have people watching my videos everyday and even have a video with over a thousand views as well ! All of these experiences  has helped me build confidence in what I can create digitally and that I can find/develop an audience for my digital content.