Early learnings about our YouTube channel

It was almost four years ago that my husband Steve and I decided to start a little YouTube channel to share some stories from our adventures in our caravan.

We first got a caravan in 2012 as our children got older (four children between us) and it became increasingly expensive to take a holiday. This meant one holiday a year for six was all we could afford and – when you run your own business – you do need more breaks than that. It’s very hard to switch off when you run your own show.

Never in a million years did I imagine having a caravan. We did static caravan holidays when I was a child and my memories of the practicalities were not all good. Often, in the 70s, there were no toilets so you had to take your loo roll and a bottle of Dettol and head to the loos and that was not fun at night.

Sometimes they were damp and cold and they smelled musty and you had to stay in them for a whole week. The mere thought of having a touring caravan was awful to me however it was, in my view, better than camping!

Now over a decade later, we are on our third caravan and I still hate lugging the damn thing about – yet the joy and experiences it’s allowed us to have are astonishing. Our YouTube channel charts some of that and also allows Steve to show his techie, geeky side as he talks about gadgets a lot!

Initially we did a film a week, then down to two films a month. When we’d uploaded 100 films, ads started to be put on to them and we saw your modest number of subscribers start to rise more rapidly.

Recently we’ve hit a magic number – 1000 subscribers and, coupled with 4,000 hours of viewing over the last 12 months, we’ve started to be paid a small amount of that ad revenue.

Tip 1 for YouTube then – most of us don’t get millions of subscribers overnight it takes effort and hard work to even hit the milestone needed to earn anything from the platform and it also depends on how high your profile is elsewhere.

On being paid, it was interesting to see the process. There’s a whole process to verify that you are who you say you are and this takes a few weeks. You are given a predicted earning figure and in the first month for us it was the grand sum of £8.

What we did notice though almost immediately is that the two films we uploaded during that first ‘paid’ month attracted over 1,000 views within a week. That had never happened before so it’s inevitable that the platform is showing us to more people. This meant our predicted earnings rose to £30.

Another thing we didn’t expect was that you can choose if a viewer can ‘skip ads’ or has to watch all of an ‘ad’ to continue watching your film and you earn more if you choose the latter. So it’s tempting. However it’s all about your viewers and what they want. Therefore we chose to let them skip ads.

Tip 2 – always keep your viewers front of mind on YouTube, making their viewing experience better will keep them aligned to you for longer.

A third thing is the snowball effect – obvious if you give it some thought. Your views of all of your other films will also rise when you get more subscribers. People tend to binge watch on subjects which interest them. In our case, a film about a holiday to Cornwall had been our top film at about 10,000 views for almost two years. Now it’s not. Another film about a gadget – the Truma water inlet – has overtaken it with over 13,000 views.

Tip 3 – when you do start to see more growth on your channel, new engaged viewers will ‘catch up’ on your old stuff too.

We are still learning on this journey and we won’t be paid any money until our pot reaches £60 – which I thought on initial predictions would be about six months – it now turns out it will be just two.

My final tip is that YouTube requires time, effort, patience and resilience. We don’t have the advantage of fame in other areas and it doesn’t relate to my business – it’s a personal channel – so it’s taken a lot of hard work. We weren’t in it for the money though every pound is a bonus.

If you’d like to see our channel – it’s here https://www.youtube.com/@beyondthatbluedoor

And the picture relates to our recent caravan holiday in France and those adventures will be shared on our channel in the coming weeks.