Behind the Scenes of Building a YouTube Channel for Business Growth

Good day. I'm Garik Goodell, and today I want to share with you what it's actually like trying to start a YouTube channel. And being two months in, I've been putting out a video a week, and I want to let you know how that's going. So if you're an entrepreneur considering starting a YouTube channel to help grow your business, watch this video and you will learn what's working for me, what's not working, and what I'm going to be doing different moving forward.

So let's dive in. I want to share with you first why I started a YouTube channel two months ago. I have a business, it's a web design company that also helps small businesses with content creation. And the way I do that is by harnessing the power of the internet and really helping them focus on momentum over perfection. Perfection gets in the way so much from us accomplishing what we want. And actually I'm going to share today with you how perfection's been holding me back. So I've been in business for over 10 years and I would say I run a pretty successful business. I definitely help my clients grow when their businesses flourish, and I have a great life where I get to flourish with my wife and my child and my dogs and go on adventures and do all sorts of fun stuff, but I want to grow even more.

I want to be able to help more people. And the easiest way it seems to me to do that is to create some courses. So I'm in the process of creating some courses, and I do know that for me to get my courses out to more people, I need to have a broader audience or a bigger audience. And YouTube felt like the best platform for me to grow that audience on. So that's why I'm here creating these videos. Number one, these videos are useful to my current clientele. It's been amazing when I'm having meetings with someone and we start talking about a certain subject and I'm like, here, let me send you the link to the video about that specific subject after the meeting so they can go dive deeper into it. So having that video library of great content is saving me time and helping my clients get a bigger perspective or dive deeper into subjects as well.

As I just know in the past, I've actually had previous clients share some of my old videos and they have because they've watched those videos reached out to me and have become some of my best clients I've ever had. So I know this works and I know this is the right path for me. I'm comfortable doing video. YouTube is a fantastic platform and I'm excited to see how it grows. That's why I'm doing this. I'm actually curious if you're watching this, you might be thinking about starting a YouTube channel yourself. Please throw down in the comments why you want to start a YouTube channel. And if you're willing, why are you scared to start it? Because if you weren't scared, you probably would've already started it. Let's talk about how it's going so far. Two months deep into YouTube. When I started, I had 16 subscribers.

That was a random accumulation of people over eight years of doing pretty much nothing including in their two years of putting out some videos that actually were in my subject or in my realm of expertise. But since then, today I'm up to 53 subscribers, which isn't crazy. It's not like, oh my gosh, I'm blowing up the YouTubes, but it is a good amount of growth and if I am working to be as positive as I possibly can be, if I stay on this trajectory by the end of May, I could hit one K, which is my goal one K by May,

DJ Horn. I know that sounds crazy, but I'm not a complete idiot. If it doubles every single month, I can get to one K by May. So I'm going to bring out a calculator just to make sure I get the math right and don't sound like a total idiot. So 15 times two, this is the month of December. I got to 30, 30 times two. This is the month of January. I got to 60 53, but we're going to call it 60. To stay really positive about my YouTube growth, I need the motivation. Okay, 60 times 2, 1 20. That's the goal for the month of February is to get to 120. Okay, one 20 times two, that's 240. That's the goal for March to get to 240, boom, two 40 times two, that's four 80. That's the goal for April four 80 in April. Four 80 times two is nine 60.

Nine 60 in May. Let's do it. Let's actually get to 1,016. That was my original goal, but I am pretty confident if I get up in the upward 900 area, that extra whatever it takes to get to a thousand or one K by May will happen. My growth isn't phenomenal. It's not mind blowing. I haven't gone viral, but it is progressing in a positive direction. I consistently get some new viewers. Speaking of that, let's dive into the specific analytics. I'll show you the backend of my YouTube. It doesn't look that amazing because I'm not a YouTube partner yet, but you can see just some of the numbers. And I want to do this every time I do one of these videos. So I have those analytics I can track and see and just keep track of how things are going. Okay, so let's dive into a little bit of the backend.

Google Analytics, or sorry, YouTube analytics data and give you a little bit of perspective. This also just show you some of the tools you can use if you don't have a YouTube channel to see how things are working. So let's go straight to the analytics bar. The main thing to note is this is all data regarding the past 28 days. So everything here is what happened in the last 28 days. So I got 153 views. It's pretty average for what I've been doing the whole time. My watch time is 10.2 hours, which is up, which is great, and that makes sense because I have more videos. So there's more things for people to watch and there's more videos for YouTube to promote in different categories. I have different subjects on my videos that I'm talking about so far. It says I'm up nine subscribers in the last 28 days, 31% less than the previous.

That doesn't match my data, but it's fine. I'm not going to question you. YouTube shows that I have 53 subscribers currently. I have had 21 views in the last 48 hours, which is interesting to see. And it shows me just kind of what my top content is in the past 28 days as well. So my most recent video of course, and then some of my older videos, which is kind of interesting, which is nice to see. I'm pretty proud of this call to action video and gets a pretty good watch time. So you can also see what's the average watch time people have on your videos. On average, no one finishes my video anyways. And then over to content. So 153 views over the past 28 days, 1.8 K impressions. I'm pretty sure what this means is these are how many people YouTube has shown my videos to see if they'll click actually here.

What does this say? I could just read what it says. How many times your video thumbnails were shown to viewers, including only impressions on YouTube, not external sites or apps. That's exactly what I thought it was. And that makes total sense. It has shown it to about 1,800 people over the past 28 days. And over that 28 days, 3.6 percentage of the people have actually clicked my videos. So this is views per impression shown this measure, if I could speak this measures how often viewers watched a video after seeing an impression, wondering whether your impression click through rate is high or low, learn more. And actually, let's just click this. I did a little bit of research the other day, and I think I read that it was between two and 10%. This is going to be too much of a digression, but when I did some research the other day, they said average YouTube between two and 10%.

So I'm kind of in the middle. I'm a little bit on the low end. I don't know if that's due with my thumbnails or what, but that's all things for me to learn and improve. And then average view duration is 3.58 minutes, which is fine. It's not amazing, but it's fine. And then audience is the last thing we want to look at. So my returning viewers is 30 that's processing over the past two days. My unique viewers is 77, so that's 77 people that haven't looked at my channel before that came to it, which is pretty cool. And then I've again added that nine subscribers. So that's just the brief data I wanted to check out and show you here and share with you so you could see some of the information YouTube gives you. There you go. Those were the numbers. Pretty reasonable, not too bad, kind of average ish in some areas, but definitely things are trending up in the right direction and that's what matters.

They're not sitting stagnant. I'm consistently getting new followers and things are going in the right direction. And I'm going to stick to this last video I did on this. I talked a little bit about how I'm marketing this, and it really hasn't changed much. I am just doing my email that I do out to about 70 past clients and colleagues, and I am sharing this in my business networking group, and that's been super helpful and I'm just trusting the YouTube algorithm to show it to people. And I have been putting, MailChimp actually allows you to do a post to your social media channel, Facebook only Facebook I think, and I'm doing that as well. But I realized that my very last post was the first time I did it right, and I actually attached an image with that. So there'd be an image associated with that Facebook post, and I definitely noticed an improvement from that.

So that'll be getting better moving forward. What am I not doing and what am I going to do different moving forward to really help this growth? Well, let me share a little story with you. I've had a few colleagues and clients who appreciate my content and get value from it, ask if they want me to share it with other people. And honestly, I've been hesitant. I've been like, no, not yet. Not yet. I'm waiting for the right video. There's going to be a video I create and I'm going to be really proud of it. And when I create that video, then I'm going to let you know. Let's put it out into the world. I also haven't been sharing it on my personal Facebook. I haven't been taking the extra time to put it even on my business Instagram or on my personal Instagram. So I have been holding things back because I'm waiting for that perfect video.

And this morning I was having a meeting with a couple colleagues and we meet once a month to talk about our businesses and what each other need and so on and so forth. And I was kind of sharing, to be honest, being a little discouraged that my YouTube growth hasn't been a little bit stronger than it has. And one of them asked me, she was like, oh, do you want me to share it on any of my social media channels or with anyone? And I was like, no, no, I'm waiting for the right video. And she's like, why? And I was like, well, she's like, you know what? It sounds like, oh man. And she hit this analogy right on the head. And if you're a parent, you totally understand this analogy, like it sounds like you're treating this like a young couple treats, not having a baby, waiting for them to make the right amount of money before they have a child.

Boom, mic drop. Perfect analogy. And this is something I focus on in my business, momentum over perfection, and I was doing the same thing. I'm waiting for the perfect video instead of getting the momentum. So I really appreciated that talk and that conversation. And if you're a parent, you understand, you don't wait for the money, you don't wait for the perfect home. You don't wait for the perfect job. If you want to have a kid, you do it and you figure it out. If I want to grow this YouTube channel, I put it out there and I figure it out, and I focus on having that momentum over waiting for that perfect video to them be like, okay, perfect video. Let's put it out to the world. No, just put it out to the world now, and the right people will see it, and the right people will start following, and the right people will support me and will want to see what I produce next.

So that's my lesson today that I relearned and got from a different angle and heard it. So if you needed to hear that, I hope you did. Don't hold yourself back. Just put it out there. Move forward, do your best and good things will come of that. So I hope you got value from this video. I appreciate if you stayed this long. I really want to encourage you to just do what it is that you are thinking about doing. Start, start today, start tomorrow. Plan a day to start and start. Don't hold back, move forward. It doesn't need to be perfect. We'll always learn from what we do and then get better. So it's better to do and learn than it is to wait to be perfect. If you like this video, please share it with someone because now I'm really encouraging people to do that. Also, if you like this video, please like and subscribe, and please help me get to one K by May. I hope you have a great day and great success. I'm in serious deja vu right now. Whoa, okay. This is going to be good. Here we go. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Let's go. Let's get this. It's going to be a good video. Feeling good about it, feeling stoked, genuine, real, all the stuff.