What I learned from Creating My First 50 YouTube Videos

In July 2019, I published the 50th video on my Self-help for Life YouTube channel. I want to share with you what I have learned from creating and publishing just over 50 YouTube videos. This is a chance for you to see me applying the success principles that I talk about quite a lot.

The Self Help for Life YouTube channel started in September 2017. Now in August 2019, it has about 275 subscribers and about 1,500 monthly views. The success principles I used to achieve that could be applied to almost any goal in life. Whatever your goal is at the moment, you can make use of the success principles I used to create my first 50 YouTube videos.

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Consistency is the Key

The first thing that made a massive difference to my YouTube channel was becoming consistent. For the first 15 months, I recorded only 21 videos. I was pretty inconsistent. There was a month when I did 1 video per week. But sometimes, a whole month would go by without a video. In the chart below, you can see my productivity and the results.

The little squares at the bottom of the chart show the time when I recorded and uploaded videos. Significant gaps represent the time I didn’t record and upload any videos. The spikes happened when I promoted those videos to my email list subscribers. I realized that when I was not promoting videos to my email list, nobody was really watching them.

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Have you ever set a goal, and after a year’s gone by, nothing much has changed? When you’re inconsistent with anything in life, it’s unrealistic to expect any long-term success or any real change.

From December 2018 up until now, I have been very consistent with recording and publishing 1 YouTube video per week. And that has added up to 34 videos. During that time, I missed only one week in April because I was on holiday. Let’s look at the chart now.

Again, spikes can be seen after the promotion of a new video to my email list. There are more spikes now because there are more videos to promote. But what you’ll start to notice from June onwards is that there’s an upward trend. That’s because people are also finding and watching my videos by other means. YouTube has started rewarding me because of my consistency by showing those videos to more people. And that’s why that growth has begun to increase.

Think about other goals you want to achieve in life. Let’s say you have a goal to build muscle. If you increase the number of trips to the gym, you’re going to start seeing longer-term muscle growth. So the key to being successful in anything is consistency!

Don’t Give Up If Results are Not Immediate

Between the time you start doing something, and the time you start seeing the results, there’s usually a delay. The key here is not to give up during that time.

Think about 2 people that both set a New Year’s resolution to get fit. The first person goes to the gym 3 times a week for the whole of January, then starts to drop off in February. By March he is going only once a week. The second person consistently goes 3 times a week in January, February, March, and for a whole year. Think about the results the second person is going to have over the first person. If the second person continues his 3 gym sessions per week routine for several years, the difference is going to be huge.

When mastering a sport or a musical instrument, the consistent practice is what will get you the results over time. When you are consistent for years, the results are going to be outstanding. In the case of my YouTube channel, I would say that 50% of my success came from being consistent.

Be Accountable to Someone

The next thing that made a significant change in my process of creating 50 YouTube videos was accountability. Back in November 2018, I hired a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant is someone that lives in another country and usually works from home. If you have an online business, hiring a virtual assistant can be very useful. They can help you with all kinds of tasks that you don’t have time for.

I hired Judy from the Philippines. Judy helps me with social media. She also creates the thumbnails for my videos and helps more people find my videos on YouTube. She also takes the audio from the video, adds an intro and an outro and turns it into a podcast episode.

I’m accountable to her now because if I don’t record a video, then she has less work to do. Since I’ve had Judy working for me, I’ve wanted to create a video every week. To some degree, she is earning a living from me. If I don’t give her enough work, that affects her, and I feel bad about that.

There are lots of different ways you can have accountability. You can be accountable to a good friend or on social media. Whatever your goal is, think about a way that you can be accountable. Accountability makes you more committed and more motivated to achieve your goal.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

One important thing I learned from creating 50 YouTube videos was how to expand my comfort zone.

Creating YouTube videos isn’t easy. Talking to a camera and not getting immediate feedback is quite hard. It feels like you’re talking to yourself at times. I’ve done some live presentations in the past. I could see if people were smiling, nodding their heads, and approving. I could also see if they were getting bored – falling asleep or looking at their phones. That allowed me to take immediate action to make the presentation more engaging.

It’s completely different when you make YouTube videos. You don’t see reactions, and you don’t get immediate feedback. There’s also a potential for rejection or criticism because people can leave negative comments. I haven’t had that experience yet, but I’m sure it will come at some point.

Very often, it’s when you go out of your comfort zone that you get the results faster. So think about what that could be for you. What is the one thing you could do that would take you out of your comfort zone and help you achieve your goals faster?

Have Patience

The next thing I learned from creating over 50 YouTube videos is that you’ve got to have incredible patience! Most people give up before they record and publish 50 videos. Why is that? Because they see no results or they see minimal progress. They come up with excuses or justifications, and they believe that they are the problem. In reality, they just didn’t give it enough time.

Let’s use affirmations as an example. A lot of people believe that affirmations don’t work. They repeat affirmations for 2, 3, or 4 weeks, and then give up. Think of affirmations as a bit like creating YouTube videos. What would it be like if you repeated affirmations daily for a whole year? I can pretty much guarantee that you would notice a significant change in your life.

The same goes for meditation. Let’s say you’re highly stressed and anxious. You want to give meditation a go. You meditate every day for 3 or 4 weeks, and you don’t see much benefit. Your stress levels are still quite high. Again, you’re not giving it enough time.

Consider the things in your life that you have given up in the past. Did you think that you weren’t good enough? Or you thought it wouldn’t work for you? Ask yourself, if I kept doing this, if I had given it more time, could I have got a better result? And if that’s the case, I encourage you to give it another go.

Compounding Effect

Creating over 50 YouTube videos taught me about the compounding effect. You put in the same amount of work week after week, but over time the results or the benefits from that work start to grow.

In the above Excel spreadsheet, you can see some of my YouTube statistics. Look at the second row, that’s the monthly subscriber increase. In January, I gained 6 subscribers. In February, it was up to 10; in March, I gained another 14. It dropped a little bit in April, down to 8. In May, it was 16, then June – 22, and July – 31. So by July, I was getting 5 times the number of YouTube subscribers as I was getting in January.

The number of views almost tripled. Impressions, which is the number of times that YouTube displays my video, increased nearly 5 times. So the same amount of effort – 1 video a week – but a massive increase in subscriber growth, views, and video reach.

What the compounding effect also gives you is momentum. If I stopped recording videos for two or three weeks, those figures would likely continue to increase.

The same could apply to the goal of becoming fit. For example, you work out regularly for a year and get really fit. Then you take a break for two or three weeks. You’re still going to have all the benefits of that strength and a good looking body.

Another example of a compound effect could be earning someone’s trust. When you start working for a new boss, or you’re in a new relationship, you put a lot of effort into earning that person’s trust. Eventually, you get to a point where they trust you completely. Then you can relax. You don’t need to put as much effort into maintaining that trust as you did into building it. So the whole idea is to put the same amount of effort in but to get better results over time.

Focus on Continual Improvement

The next thing I learned from creating over 50 YouTube videos is to focus on continual improvement.

My first videos didn’t have good sound quality. I used the internal microphone on the camera, and I sounded a bit tinny. Over time, I realized I could improve that. Now I use a Rode SmartLav+ microphone, which is connected to my iPhone. I record the sound separately and then sync it to the video. This gives me far better sound quality.

Also, I feel that my videos are tighter and more concise now. Certain filler words that I used to say quite a lot, I don’t say anymore. I watched and listened to my older videos to work out how I could improve. I kept learning from experience, practice, and feedback from other people. So over time, my videos improved quite a lot.

Measure Your Progress

After creating over 50 YouTube videos, I realized how important it is to measure your progress. That means to check in on a weekly or a monthly basis, figuring out what is working and what is not working. I typically check in on YouTube once a month. I like to see which videos are performing the best. For example, the video called How to Hypnotize Yourself is doing much better than any other at the moment.

What if you have a goal that is a little bit harder to measure? Let’s say it’s reducing stress or anxiety. You decide you’re going to do a few different things. Maybe you’re going to repeat some affirmations or meditate for 10 or 15 minutes a day. When you check in weekly, you can see if the symptoms of anxiety are starting to reduce. If so, you know that the activities that you’re doing are helping. If there is no significant change, maybe you should give it a bit more time, as I mentioned earlier. After that, you can try a different approach.

Whatever your goal is, there is usually some way that you can measure your progress. I highly encourage you to do that.

Re-purposing

The next thing that I learned from creating over 50 YouTube videos is something called re-purposing. That means doing the work once and then using it for other purposes or benefits.

Before I record my videos, I do a certain amount of preparation. I create an outline of what I’m going to say. Sometimes I do some further research on the internet. I try some things out on myself first. I think about examples from my own life that I could share. Then I record, edit and publish the video. After that, Judy turns that video into a podcast.

So I have already used the same work for two purposes. Once that’s done, I get the video transcribed. and turn it into a blog article. I used to do this myself. However, now Irina (my Virtual Writer) does this for me. So, for the same amount of research and preparation, I now have a video, a podcast, and a blog article. The same amount of effort but 3 different types of content.

Think creatively about how you could do that in some aspects of your life. Maybe you’re training up a new staff member. You could record the training. Then the next time you have a new staff member, you can send them the recording. Then they can ask you any questions they have. Or you could create what’s called a Standard Operating Procedure ( SOP) that has all the steps that they need to do to learn the task. Once you do that, next time you train someone, it will be much easier.

Modeling Other People

The last thing I learned from creating over 50 YouTube videos is modeling other people.

I’ve watched many other YouTubers in a personal development niche. I’ve learned a lot from them, and I’ve incorporated some of the things I learned into my videos. Sometimes it’s their presentation style or the way they hold themselves. If I see some great content on another video, I share it on mine. By watching other You Tubers, I realized that I rarely provided examples from my own life in my videos. So I’m starting to do that more now.

I also learned how long my videos should be, how to promote them and how to get more people to see them. So it’s vital with any goal to see who you can model and who you can learn from. It’s great if you can find someone that has already achieved that goal or is further ahead than you. You can learn so much from them.

I hope you found this article about my experience of creating my first 50 YouTube videos useful. As you can see, it’s a little bit different from my other articles. I thought it would be interesting to give you a case study of how I apply the success principles to something quite specific. Hopefully, you can see how the things I covered in this article can be used for almost any goal you want to achieve.

Thank you for reading this article.  If you enjoyed it and found it useful, then please share it with other people, or on social media.

Hope you are having a wonderful day!

Paul