Lauren Bateman shares three mistakes she made starting her YouTube channel: posting inconsistently, ignoring YouTube's built-in tools like cards and end screens, and waiting too long to get help. She recommends uploading weekly, adding cards where viewers drop off, and taking courses early.
Hey, YouTubers. In this video, I'm going to talk about the biggest mistakes I made when I started my YouTube channel that I want to prevent you guys from making.
Now a huge factor for me that I think really slowed down the growth of my YouTube channel was just my overall consistency. Now I know when you have another job and you have a family and there's lots of stuff going on, it can be really, really hard to be consistent on YouTube. I did that myself. I would upload a bunch of videos, and then two months would go and I wouldn't upload any videos. And then all of a sudden I'd upload three or more videos, and then a few more months would go by. And as a result of that, I think I only got like 500 subscribers in my first year on YouTube. Now, if I have more consistency to my posting and my posting schedule, I feel like I would have grown my channel much faster. For consistency, I highly recommend at least uploading one video a week to show YouTube that you are consistent to the platform. And it will also help get to that 50 video goal of getting enough data into the YouTube system so that YouTube can start promoting your videos to your audience. Also, I would make sure that your audience knows when you post videos. If you're going to post every Saturday, make sure that people know on your channel art. Make sure they know that you're going to be posting videos every Saturday so that they come back with anticipation to for your next video. The second biggest mistake I made was not understanding how some of the YouTube features work. For example, YouTube has a lot of features to tell you what's going right in your videos, what your audience like, what your audience doesn't like. But it also has features that allow you to get more watch time. Now, the biggest thing I hear small YouTubers complain about is, you know, that 1,000 subscriber mark, 4,000 hours of watch time. I've got those just subscribers. But how do I get thousands of hours of watch time? One of the biggest things you can do is use cards in your video when you start seeing your viewership starting to drop. All right, so I'm over here in my YouTube channel. I'm under the analytics for a specific video. And what we're going to do is we're just going to scroll down on this overview. And you can see here, there's my audience retention graph. And this one's actually pretty good. It's pretty flatlined, so that's great. But you can notice some, like, dips here. Okay. And there's definitely a dip at the end. At that point, hopefully they're clicking on one of those end screens and going to watch one of my videos. But if you had like a big dip, maybe right about here I want to add a card that pops up that tells people like, hey, go watch this other video. So what I would do is I would say, hey, there seems to be a little bit of a dip here around 310. So I would go to my video details, I would come over here where it says cards and then I would add a card. You see, I have one here around 4:13 which recommends another one of my videos. But I could throw a card in here maybe at 305 before that dip comes in. Now this video, the retention was pretty good, but I've seen videos where the dip is much more severe and those are good falling off points to say, hey, if I'm losing these people already, maybe if I throw a card in here, I can at least get them to watch another one of my videos. Increasing watch time, increasing session time, and making YouTube more likely to show your videos to more people. The other thing I see people miss out on is end cards. I didn't even know what an end card was when I started. And making sure that you have end cards at the end that you're promoting them, hey, go check out another one of my videos. Or if you're interested in learning more about this topic, go check out this video and people will click on those end screens and get the click through on the end screen to get people over to another one of your videos. And I think the biggest mistake I made with YouTube, outside of consistency, outside of promoting my own videos on YouTube, was that I didn't get help sooner. Now I was like, you, you know, I went to YouTube, I started watching videos. I was consuming hours upon hours of content just to try to figure out like, why does the YouTube algorithm hate me? Turns out it didn't hate me. I just wasn't doing a lot of the stuff that YouTube likes. Finally decided to get some help, get some guidance. And what I've done is I actually put together a really quick Jumpstart course for you guys getting started on YouTube. If you're interested in learning some of the do's and don'ts when you're a smaller channel, put a link in the description below to my Jumpstart program. I'll be talking about, you know, thumbnails descriptions, important SEO stuff that you guys need to know about, how to research, research content appropriately. So go check that out. In the description below. And if you're interested in learning how I got my silver hundred thousand subscriber plaque, you can watch that video over there.
