It has now been 3 months since I started my You Tube game channel with the hopes of building an audience that would not only allow me to become monetized on You Tube but might also cross over and purchase some items from my Etsy shop. I wish I could say that at the 3 month mark I have thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of views. Having come across a course about creating a You Tube brain game channel where the person gained 1,600 subscribers and 200,000 views in only a month, I would love to be able to say that I at least got the 500 subs and 3000 watch hours required to start monetizing my channel.
Sadly, I am still a far away from that goal. But amazingly, in spite of having a severe flare up of my autoimmune that I am still recovering from and that put at least a 3 week pause on my iron infusions, I somehow managed to get 120 subscribers. This might not be a big deal for a healthy person, but when I consider that my poetry channel which I have had for a good 8 years only has 270 subscribers, getting 120 subs in 3 months suddenly feels like a really big deal. So finally, in spite of enduring a major setback, I actually managed to take a small step forward.
Hopefully, by the grace of God who has blessed me with a much-needed extra large portion of determination, I will reach not only the first level of monetization, but push through and not only get fully monetized, but maybe even earn a You Tube plaque.
Today my dream of making my You Tube channel and Etsy shop a success seems impossible, but for the longest time the idea of getting 120 subs in 3 months seemed like an impossible dream too. At least now I have a little bit of hope that if I keep trying, I might be able to make something of my dream finally come true.
My experiment with creating a brain game channel continues. My hope is that I will not only build an audience that will eventually allow me to qualify for You Tube monetization but will also lead to increase sales of my brain games in my Etsy shop and activity books on Amazon.
The first challenge will be to gain an audience. I am doing my best to be consistent in posting in spite of my chronic health issues. And thankfully I have enjoyed a little blimp of modest growth. Over the course of 2 weeks, I went from 15 subscribers to over 50. Those few days were really encouraging, but for the past few days that growth has slowed down and stalled out. Thankfully I am still enjoying a small bump in views, but the amount is probably 1/4 of what it was a week ago which is very disheartening.
Still, I am trying to keep up hope. I have taken a look at some of the game channels out there and I know that there is an audience for brain games. I mean some videos are only 11 months old and have over 664,000 views. There are even some videos that are less than a year old with over a million views. Then of course there some channels like mine where most long form videos are lucky to reach 50 views and a breakaway short gets four or five hundred views.
But at least since some channels in my niche are getting hundreds, thousands, and even millions of views there is some hope that over time my channel might grow and at least get a few thousand views here and there, even if it never reaches the dream of being one of the fortunate ones to get millions of views.
Unfortunately, outside of the struggle to grow made far worse by the interruptions caused by chronic health issues like anemia, there is one thing that I did not consider. And that is how will I know if my efforts are paying off?
Thanks to You Tube metrics I can see if my videos are getting likes and views. I can see if my channel is growing and getting new subscribers. Thankfully at least for now I have that bit of information. But what I did not consider is how will I be able to tell if after watching one of my videos, someone decides to buy a book or activity pack. With KDP you can tell which keyword brough in a sale using their paid add. But outside of using their add platform you have no way of knowing what led to a sale. They do not share any of that data with you so you have no way of knowing if that sudden bump in sales was due to the video you put on you tube, the post you created on Word Press, or just mere coincidence.
And unfortunately, it is not so easy to tell in Etsy what brought you a sale either. Over the past couple of years since I started on Etsy they have cut down the amount of information that they share with you. You can go to their metrics and see if someone came over from Facebook or Pinterest. If you want to know if someone came from a link on your Word Press or You Tube channel you can go to a spot and see if the web address appears. If you find the web address you can see how many views you got from there, but if they tell you any more than that, they have done a good job hiding that information.
Which I think is a big mistake. While I know that they want to encourage you to stay on their platform and not move over to your own platform the moment you make a few sales. But still, it is a bit short sided to hide all the information on what key words are working, which links from sites like You Tube and Pinterest are bringing in sales, because it prevents shops from knowing what is working and what is not working. They might wrongly think that the sudden boost in sales was due to the post they made on Pinterest and put all their effort into increasing their Pinterest presence, when instead it might be that a video talking about some of their products that are perfect for Mother’s Day got some traction and the boost came from that. Sadly, without easy to access stats, it makes it really hard to know if what you are doing is working, or it is just as useful as moving a pile of rocks from spot A to spot B, and back again.
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