Introduction
Welcome to the second episode of My Small Channel Monetization Journey! I’m Amber, and I typically create content about slow and simple homemaking and living. But, about four months ago, I decided to finally focus on monetizing my small channel, after years of being primarily a hobby YouTube content creator.
I’m working toward monetization so I can continue pursuing my passions for homemaking and content creation as a homeschooling mother of three. If I don’t make this work, I’ll need to start looking for another job, because we’ve been struggling financially since I lost my last job in March. While I know AdSense revenue isn’t huge, any contribution will help support our family of six (including our 17-month-old German Shepherd, Bear).
I’ve just finished my 16th week and am beginning my 17th week of committing to monetizing my channel. Initially, I wasn’t planning to share this journey publicly, which is why this is only the second episode, even though it’s the 17th report if you count my preliminary one. But I realized that sharing my journey could help me stay accountable and hopefully encourage other small creators.
But, basically every Saturday morning for the past 17 weeks, I’ve been creating a weekly report that outlines the improvements and progress I made over the past week, basic analytics, and improvements to make for the upcoming week based on my vidIQ channel audit. So, every Sunday morning, I’m sharing those reports with y’all.
Progress & Improvements Made Last Week (October 12th-18th)
Let’s start with the progress and improvements I made over the past week:
- I published one video yesterday. I optimized it with a clear title, custom thumbnail, clear description, added it to the appropriate playlist, added tags (even though they’re mostly used for common misspellings), ensured the category was correct (mine is “HowTo & Style”), and added endscreens.
- I also edited the first episode of my monetization journey and scheduled it for tomorrow. Since I decided that I wanted to start publishing three videos per week instead of one, I completed Friday’s video and scheduled it early on in the week, by Monday the 14th, so that I could start editing my first YouTube monetization episode. (Since I didn’t decide to share my YouTube monetization journey publicly on YouTube until just after completing my last report, which was Saturday the 12th, I knew that there was no way that I’d be able to have that first episode edited and uploaded by the next day, so y’all are seeing my weekly updates a week after I record them.)
- Additionally, I planned next week’s content in Notion, which will be my first official week of publishing three videos; so, I adjusted my content creation template to incorporate three videos instead of one.
Basic Analytics
Now, let’s take a look at my analytics for the week:
- Last week, I had 631 lifetime subscribers. This week, I’ve gained three more, bringing my total to 634 subscribers!
- For watch time hours over the last 365 days, I had 362.7 hours last week and now have 371.9 hours this week, which is an increase but it’s also about average for me.
- As for the last 7 days’ analytics overview, I only had 586 views, 12.4 hours of watch time, and gained 3 subscribers compared to the previous week’s 866 views, 25.4 hours of watch time, and 13 subscribers. I think that the drop in numbers is basically because I shared a morning routine video the previous week, which tends to be more popular overall; but, I shared an afternoon/evening routine the week after that. (Additionally, since I haven’t been publishing until Friday and creating my reports the next day, my latest video doesn’t have enough time to affect the metrics when I check in.)
vidIQ Channel Audit: Improvements to Make This Week
For my vidIQ 30-day channel audits, I typically focus on the bottom two sections, Average Metrics Over the Last 30 Days and Items to Improve Upon.
- Tag Length: It always says my tag lengths are too short, but tags are mostly redundant; even YouTube says they’re mostly used for common mispellings and they play a minimal role in helping viewers find your videos. But, I do add simple tags like “slow living” and “simple living,” just for the sake of boosting my vidIQ score a bit.
- Playlists: vidIQ recommends having each video in at least two playlists, but I have a minimal number of playlists and feel that not every video needs to be in two. All of mine are in at least one playlist, and a couple are in two, and that works for me.
- Actionable SEO Score: The actionable SEO score is optimizing your video titles, tags and descriptions to ensure your content has the maximum potential for audience reach. vidIQ recommends an actionable SEO score of 40 or higher, while mine has been as low as 14, if you don’t count the first few weeks when it was 0, and as high as 38. (I’m not sure how they calculate this, but my individual video Optimize Scores are always over 70, so I’ll have to look into that more.)
- Interactive Cards: Currently, I don’t add cards to my videos, and I’m okay with that for now. It’s whatever.
- Endscreens: Although I add endscreens to every video, my channel audits have been saying that I’m missing endscreens for about the past couple of months. I’m not quite sure why it’s displaying that data inaccurately; but, I suspect this might be because I haven’t been adding endscreens until going through the entire uploading interface and then going back to add the endscreens last, and it’s just not registering in vidIQ. I’ll need to investigate this further, because the audits were accurate before I started unintentionally doing that.
- Posting Schedule: The audit flags my schedule as inconsistent because I missed a week in late September due to Hurricane Helene, which knocked out our power for a few days, so I was unable to finish editing and posting the video I was working on until the next week. This should resolve by next week, I believe, once it’s gone through the 30 days after consistently posting again.
- The rest of my data is looking good!
Conclusion: Let’s Grow Together!
That wraps up this week’s progress! I’m excited to start my new schedule of posting three times a week – every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday – and see how that impacts my channel’s growth. I’ll keep optimizing my videos and sticking to the plan while also staying mindful of burnout. If you found this video helpful, please be sure to subscribe and follow along as I continue this journey to monetization. Thanks for joining me, and please stay tuned every Sunday morning for more updates!
Simply Amber Marie 