My 1st Year on YouTube: Workflow, Gear, & Revenue (0 to 9K)

I cannot believe that the past year has been how it has been. And I'm not talking about COVID here. I'm talking about business. It's been a crazy year to be doing what we've been doing here at ProcessDriven. So in this kind of unusual episode of the YouTube channel, I want to go behind the scenes and give you guys a bit of a story of what it's taken us to go from zero to about 9,000 subscribers here on YouTube in about a year. To make the story a little bit easier to understand, I hope we're going to be going through four major chapters in the story. We're going to start in March 2020, go all the way up to present day in four major chunks of time. Each chunk is going to be kind of bookmarked by a major turning point in the story. So hopefully it'll be easy for you to follow along. And as we go through today, if you're enjoying this video, do like it. But if you're not into ClickUp and process and systemization stuff, don't worry about subscribing because this video is a little bit abnormal to what we normally post on the channel. All right, so let's start back the old days of March 2020. And this is when I really started posting on YouTube. Seriously, the backstory here is that at that point I was providing one on one ClickUp, setup and kind of tech implementation services. It was the right tech for you, helping people set up and systemize a portion of their customer journey. Then Covid hit and we had two clients get canceled right away. Wasn't the end of the world. So I was at 100% capacity. It bumped me down to about 6, 60% capacity. And honestly, I was kind of excited about it. I was pretty tired, pretty burnt out. And when we did lose those clients, I was scared about the revenue side of things. I mean, I definitely felt that. But I had enough work to keep me busy, and I decided to use that extra time to create a YouTube channel. And throughout that four weeks or so, on top of the client work, which was about half capacity, I produced about 30 YouTube videos just by using Loom and recording quick clips. So let's let me actually break down exactly what that looks like and we'll go through each of the categories here on the screen. So in terms of posting strategy during that period of time, which ranged, which started in March 2020, I had no posting strategy. I was literally just recording things I was going to record for a client. And rather than just sending it to that client. I made it anonymous in some way and posted it on YouTube in addition to sending it to the client. So I was posting some random tutorials and eventually started making some ClickUp tutorials because at the time there was a few people post. But I, I mean, I respect all the YouTube tutorial creators out there, but I wasn't really satisfied with the tutorials I was finding and I wanted something better for my clients so that I could actually send it to them. So that's kind of where it all started when it came to gear and equipment. At this point of time, I was using either loom with a webcam or even my old flip phone to record each video. And they look it right, like if you watch this, it's just terrible. I, I can't even watch them at this point. Um, my tools or equipment at that point was loom, a blue yet microphone which we picked up used. My husband had gotten it for some gaming thing. In terms of filming workflow, there wasn't one, right. I wasn't planning videos, I wasn't scripting videos. I literally, literally would have 20 minutes in between calls. I would turn on the camera and I would walk through some little feature that to me seemed obvious, but someone had just asked about in the previous call. And that's how I very quickly filmed my first 30 videos and booked out my first three months of content in just a few weeks. When it came to repurposing workflow once again, almost nothing. When I created the video, I instantly just scheduled it into the next slot on YouTube. No real plan there. And occasionally I would, you know, mention the link on YouTube if I would remember it. But for the most part it was just going on YouTube and just sitting there and I would cross my fingers. At this point in time, my revenue per month from YouTube was about $0. And also my indirect revenue from leads coming in from YouTube was also $0. And my team was pretty much me. At the start of this period, I was starting with around 25 subscribers on YouTub because I had made some video a year prior, totally random. But by the end of this chapter, which I would say is about May 2020, when this all started to shift, I was at 242 subscribers. I would call this whole chapter of the YouTube journey kind of like the whim, because I had no plan. I didn't even, you know, I had no goals really for YouTube. I thought maybe it could help me get some clients. And I was just kind of throwing things at the wall and seeing what would Stick. That all kind of changed in June 2020 when we left the whim period, the whim chapter, and went into the hustle chapter of my YouTube journey. The real shift that happened in June 2020 is that my client load went back to full, right? I had had a little bit of a lull because of COVID and I refilled those slots. I scheduled those people to start. And come June, I was again at a hundred or one hundred ten percent capacity on top of of filming videos. And this is where it really, I had a choice. I could keep doing videos and it would involve me working weekends and nights to get those out, or I could stop doing videos, focus on the client work and get back to YouTube later. I think the decision to work those evenings, film videos late at night was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life, period. So I would routinely be filming. I would have a full client day of trainings, of consulting, of setup work, and I would finish my workday around four or five o' clock and I would be filming from five to nine or so. @ this point, I did want to start editing my videos just to up that quality a little bit and that took a little bit longer. So at this point, videos went from taking 30 minutes or so to create to taking about two hours to create per video. And I was still trying to post twice a week, give or take, on top of a full client load, which was really draining from a posting strategy perspective. I started to finally have one. You see, I'd done one ClickUp tutorial in March 2020 and it had given me a much better result than any of the other videos I'd done, which were little hacks or tutorials for this, that and the other. And I realized, you know, as I started Learning more about YouTube, the reason why was because there was not a lot of competition. And ClickUp was this new and up and coming tool that not many people were covering. And even though the work I was doing was about process design, customer experience, mapping, I started to niche on the YouTube channel to be ClickUp for process, you know, because I really wanted to get that ClickUp as the keyword that people would find me for. And I was hoping they would stay for the process because my process videos, no one was searching for and they just didn't do very well, even though that was really what I was all about. So during this period of time, I'll be honest and just say it was really hard to stick to filming. It wasn't feeling very creative at this point. It was just exhausting. I was so tired. I really realized something needed to give in this process. And that's really what prompted me to go into that next chapter. But before we talk about that, let's talk about what gear and equipment and workflows were involved in this Chapter two, the Hustle Period. So in terms of gear and equipment, at this point, I had a webcam, a ring light, loom blue yeti microphone. And the big difference here was that I had all of these things already set up on my desk, which seems so obvious, but like you see right here, these ring light, which I still use here, I had all of these things just sitting on my desk at all times. So it made it a lot easier to start filming versus before I'd have to set things up on a tripod, get it all out. At this point, I did decide to just leave everything up at all times so it would have less work to just click record because I needed that efficiency when it came to the filming workflow. Once again, very, very simple, very minimal scripting. I would come up with a topic and that's just about it. Then I would ad lib and I would do some light editing with Premiere Rush, but nothing for.