My Watch Time Hours Aren't Good! Here is 6 Reasons Why!

Hello, welcome to the podcast. So this episode I'm going to move away from cars and trucks for a minute and talk about YouTube channels, creating a channel and explain to you why my channel sucks and why I don't have very many watch time hours. So I've had this channel for about two years and in that time I've gotten over 1,500 subscribers. I've got just a little over 1,600 watch hours in the last year. You need 4,000 watch hours to get monetized by YouTube and start earning revenue from your videos. So earning revenue was never my main goal, but it was something that I hoped to achieve eventually. My main goal was just to have fun posting videos, which I have. But after taking a hard look at it, I've come to six reasons why my watch time sucks. I thought that it would be good to hear from another creator who's not part of a search engine optimization group, a marketing group. I'm not going to try to sell you anything. There's not going to be any links at the end of this video for you to click on and pay $300 to get 1,000 subscribers, none of that. Just me telling you what I've seen from what has not worked for me and what has and what I think if I could go back and do it over from the beginning, what would have me in a better spot than I am right now. And I think that will help other small creators out there get to that point. So the first thing I did wrong, the first reason why my watch hour stuck, attention spans are short. So this video has gone on one minute and 44 seconds as of right now. That means that a lot of people have already tuned out of this video. People will scroll through YouTube, they watch something for a short period of time, and if it doesn't snag their attention immediately, they move on to something else. Hopefully you're watching this video still because it means you want to know what I've done wrong. One of the things I did wrong early on the channel is I tried to make it all flashy, right? So I had these big five, 10 second intros and music and animation and stuff like that. That's the quickest way to lose people. So when I stopped doing that, my retention time increased, right? So those videos where I have the little Charlie's Garage with the music and stuff, the tape are off. Right after the first two or three seconds, people stop watching because they don't want to watch a stupid video. They want to hear what you have to say or see what you want to show them and that's it, right? So that's the first thing. Get rid of the intro stuff. Have a good thumbnail, but when someone clicks on that video, it needs to start right away with you telling them what this video is about, what it's going to accomplish for them and why they should continue watching it, right? So that's the first thing I did wrong. I got too flashy with intros, right? Second thing I did wrong, I was all over the place, right? So I started out thinking I'm just going to do a YouTube channel where I document playing around with the Mustang in the garage and show people some of the things I've been doing to it or plan on doing to it and stuff like that. And it was going to be solely the focus. It's just me messing around with the Mustang, right? So I also worked in education for a while, right? So I was at a trade school. It was really hard to have that many toys to make videos with and not produce a video. So then in addition to the classic car stuff, I also started to produce training videos for diesels and engines and tune-ups and stuff like that. And those were really popular and successful, but it veered away from what my original purpose was, right? And so if you go into my channel, it seems to weave around between diesel engine, back to the old Mustang, back and forth. And there was no focus there, right? And then of course I have a lot of animals and they're super cute. And sometimes they do really cute and adorable things and I have to take a video of it. And then I think, well, other people are going to want to see this. And then that goes on the channel. So now you've got classic cars, you've got diesel training, and then you've got some funny animal videos, right? So that's the second thing I did wrong, right? As I went all over the place and I didn't stick to my niche and drive it home, right? So stick to your vision, produce stuff related to that vision and create more content based off of that vision. People who like that vision are going to watch that vision. If they like what you produce, they're going to subscribe. They're going to come back to watch more about that vision. But if they subscribe and then they start getting alerts about animal videos, and you were doing one about doing a tune-up in a Volkswagen before, and next thing you know, it's kittens. They're not, they're going to be like, what is this? Right? Unless they're weird like me and they like kittens and diesels, you know? So stay focused. Number three, shorts. I did not take advantage of shorts when they first came out. Shorts are very, very popular because going back to number one, people's attention spans are short. So they watch the short speed and they scroll through videos. And if in my case, they're a car guy, they might stop to see one of my videos or one of my shorts. And if they like that short, that short can drive traffic to your main YouTube channel and get views on your longer videos. I cannot stress enough how many subscriptions and watch time hours I've gotten off of just putting stuff on shorts, driving traffic to my channel. The only thing I've done wrong with shorts is again, the focus issue. I haven't been making shorts just based on diesels, cars, trucks. It's been a mix match of different stuff, but it does drive traffic. So keep your focus and produce shorts based on that focus and drive that traffic into your arena, into your channel. The fifth thing I did was watch time hours are hard to get. They're really hard to get because people may, you may get a lot of views, but you may not get a lot of watch time hours. And a lot of places will tell you that the way to get around that is to make longer videos. So people watch more content. Average retention is there's very few people sticking around to an end of a video. They are watching the first three minutes, four minutes. And by the time you get to the end of a 10 minute video, you have maybe 15, 20% of the original viewer still watching that video. So a five, six minute video that's full of really good, engaging content will get you more watch hours than a 10 minute video that's drawn out and kind of boring. So the best thing you can do is use the analytics on YouTube and look at the time and the viewer and see the drop off, right? You'll learn by watching those and comparing the video to that graph when people lose interest and when people start watching. So what I didn't do right at the beginning was I didn't use my analytics to my advantage. You can learn a lot by reviewing the analytics and recreating what you got right that kept people watching and then avoiding what you did wrong. The things that caused the nosedive in people staying on the video. So I, so that was number five. Use your analytics. Number six, collaborate, right? Find like-minded creators out there that maybe are also doing a YouTube startup in the same genre as you. Maybe you're doing diesel videos, but you have a friend that's wanting to do auto videos and maybe the two of you can do collaborations where you post links to each other's videos and you sometimes do a co-host video or a podcast together. Driving traffic between different creators really helps to build both brands, right? So there's a couple people out there that I've met through LinkedIn that I'm wanting to try and develop relationships with and do collaborations with that I think will help drive traffic to my channel and hopefully some of my viewers will be engaged by them and it'll drive traffic to their channel. So just to recap, those are the six things, right? Get rid of the intro stuff. Keep your message short and simple. Get straight to the video and the point you're trying to make with the video. Stay in your niche, you know, don't be all over the map unless of course your channel is purely for fun, then do whatever the hell you want. Shorts, utilize them, right? Take some of your videos, cut them into shorts, right? You can do that. There's all kinds of stuff on Google. You can go out there and learn how to take one of your normal videos and edit it and create a short out of some of that video footage that you have and then that short will help drive traffic to your page, right? Analytics. Analytics are boring. I know graphs, stuff like that, you know, use them. They're very valuable tools and they really, really help you learn what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong and like I can't wait to see the analytics to this video to see how many of you guys have stayed around to this point, right? Where did I lose you guys during this video? That's going to be important for future videos and find collaborators. If there's anybody out there that has a channel like mine and wants to do a collaboration, reach out to me. I'm willing to help and I'm willing to get help. So, we're a community that needs to support each other. So, I hope the things that I just discussed that help you guys out and I'm going to start trying to apply some of them to myself and see what happens over the next few months and see if I can't get to that 4,000 watch hours. So, thank you for watching. Please like and subscribe and take it easy.