Last Sunday, I released my first YouTube video in over a year. It took quite a bit of work to get this video posted. Far more than I had originally thought it would. And now that it’s up, it has taken even more effort refining it once posted, and getting video number 2 up (which was originally intended to go up Thursday, and now I’ve delayed until Sunday). Now I realize that not posting in over a year, is a big no no on YouTube, but I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get back up and running! I mean, I had made more than 200 videos previously, and though it was varying degrees of quality, I had quite the groove going. I figured since I’m in this bit of YouTube re-discovery, I would share some of my experiences with everyone.
First of all, though I started with my subscriptions, I’m basically starting from scratch. I had previously used Vegas 12 to edit my videos, I moved to Vegas 14 for the first video and the second video is causing me issues so I am trying out Adobe Premiere. Even if I was able to stay with Vegas, I feel like I’m having to relearn how I did everything. My first video was extremely basic, no outtro, no real intro, no cards used, nothing. It was as barebones as I could make it, and I probably should have followed that for the second video, but I wanted to get my video quality at least back to where I was before (in fact, I was improving it in some cases). It’s amazing what you forget!
I also had many issues actually recording. I started recording last Friday evening and kept having to start over. I had always used Mirallis Action! As my recording studio of choice, but I recall towards the end of my previous youtube tenure, that I was having issues with it for some reason in one of the later releases. So I had bought an Elgato Capture Card in hopes of not only getting a device that worked, but also decreasing the amount of processor time used in capturing. Well unfortunately, for some reason the voice capture kept on glitching out in Elgato, so I would finish my recording job and load it, only to find it was ruined, and then have to start over. It wasn’t until a move to playing No Man’s Sky on the PC and a switch to using Audacity to record voice did I solve all my issues. Long term, I don’t like this solution and in the future I will have to re-dedicate some time to getting it better. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any method to hit record for both programs at the same time, so there is a little lag that I need to adjust for when editing.
Onto the bright side of life… it’s been a slow week at work this week. Why is that good? I have spent a lot of time this week researching how I can improve my channel. This has made me re-look at how I had been dealing with SEO on my channel and videos. Over the week I have been fine tuning everything and I think this has already gained me some returns, even though the changes didn’t begin being made until 3 or 4 days after I published the video. I went from around 10 random keywords that related to my videos and channels to about 20 in each and the new keywords are much much more refined than they used to be. I then went back and looked at my description and started fine tuning that as well to make it more keyword dense.
I have also discovered a couple of applications in TubeBuddy and VidIQ that I have found to be tremendously helpful. Both of these are freemium services and chrome extensions that you can sign up to that analyze your channel and give you reminders and suggestions on how to improve your channel. They have a ton of stuff hidden behind a pay wall, and their pay wall is pretty pricey (Starting at $10/month and goes up from there). I honestly can’t imagine paying for either one because I think they are so cost prohibitive, but I see what they have and I’m kind of tempted. Still, even without paying, they are extraordinarily helpful, especially the VidIO extension. I now can go to competitor’s channels and see who is linking to them, what keywords they use, how they are ranked in those keywords, and it even tells you subscriber counts in the comments for everyone. Very helpful stuff, have loved the added info and am using it where I can.
I still have a lot of work cut out for me, but I do feel like I’ve made progress. In episode 2, I am working on getting a decent intro up and running as well as a basic outro. Going forward, I want to get a better outro, and even refine my intro further, get better music for them both (right now I’m relying on Google’s music, but I think I’d be better off using free music from somewhere else), I also kind of want to improve my banner for my channel, though I’m not sure how, and I would like to get a better logo that can actually be used in the intro. On top of that, I want to refine my recording process to make that easier and figure out better ways to promote the channel to get the growth going (YouTube is kind of like a snowball, the more subs/views you get, the faster it grows, so early going it’s a struggle unless you push it).