Successfully Starting Your YouTube Channel - An Interview with "Meant to be Lindsey B"

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Remote Jobs > Online Businesses > Successfully Starting Your YouTube Channel

Starting a YouTube channel can be intimidating. Where do you start? How do you grow your channel? What goals should you set out to achieve? As part of Eat Wander Explore’s Free Nomad Guide, we want to help make your foray into nomad life as easy as possible.

We interview current YouTubers at various stages in their journeys to help you get started on your own adventure into creating a YouTube channel.

This interview is with our friend, Lindsey B of “Meant to be Lindsey B”, whom has just made it though the tough first stage of starting a YouTube channel.

Her channel has around 1.4K subscribers as of this writing. To start earning money from a YouTube channel, you are required to reach 2 milestones: You must have at least 1,000 subscribers and, within the previous 12-month period, you must have at least 4,000 watch hours. Once you have met both milestones, YouTube will allow your channel to start “monetizing” - or earning money - through Google AdSense. Lindsey was able to reach this milestone in a little less than 2 years.

Since she just reached this stage in her YouTube journey a few months ago, we thought it would be a perfect time to interview her. In this interview: we find out how she started, how she got to where she is now, and what her goals are for the future. She also gives some great tips to those just starting to grow their channels. Read on for all the details!

Meant to Be Lindsey B. - YouTube Channel Interview

What is your channel about?

“A little more than half [of my videos] are disability / adaptive videos, plus beauty product reviews, and vlogs. I’ve [also] been letting my husband, Wes come in on my channel a little bit more. His videos are always a bit more popular than mine. [laughs]”

When did you start your channel and why?

“I started a little over two years ago after becoming Miss Wheelchair Tennessee 2018 and getting lots of questions about living on my own as a wheelchair user. My first video was [about] home adaptations.

It’s something that I love and from a personal standpoint it’s something I definitely needed to do for personal growth, but I have a lot more to learn… and I enjoy learning it though it was frustrating in the beginning, but now I’ve kind of gotten it to… ‘Here’s the next thing I need to focus on.’”

If someone were to start their channel today, do you have any advice for them?

“There’s not really a right or wrong way to start a channel.

One of the first things I did that helped me early on was that I joined Facebook groups that were for YouTubers. A lot of the groups, they focus on things like what your thumbnail looks like - which is definitely something I want to improve on my channel.

Find groups - subreddits on Reddit or Facebook groups. That’s helped me tremendously actually.

Pay attention to the comments if you do start to get regular comments and regular viewers, acknowledge them because they come back if you give them a shout out. People want to come back if they know that there’s somebody on the other side that cares and is willing to respond.

If you want to go the route of reviewing products, definitely tag those companies or products in your post.

In the beginning you kind of just trial and error and see what hits. It’s just challenging to find something that resonates with everyone.”

What equipment do you use/recommend?

“I recorded probably the first 100 videos on my channel with my phone. Sound was probably the thing that my channel suffered for the most in the beginning.

My goal for year two was to upgrade my equipment. So I just got to upgrade my camera in the past couple of months. I got very very lucky – Birchbox, it’s a makeup subscription company and every now and then they do a grant. Through that grant I was able to upgrade pretty much all of my equipment.

I upgraded my sound equipment. because people with low hearing abilities were having a hard time hearing me because I’m soft-spoken. So one of the things that really helped my channel was making sure that my closed captions were correct. And really making sure the audio and editing process is better and I’ve definitely seen an improvement since I’ve started doing those things

All of the stuff I’m using in my videos are in the description of my videos.”

YouTube video of Lindsey comparing cameras: Sony RX100 VII vs Canon G7 X Mark III

What tips do you have for YouTubers wanting to monetize their channel?

“Amazon associates from the beginning was probably one the best things I ever did. I try to review as much as I can and include links in the descriptions to affiliate links and I can make a little bit of money from that as well – that’s where I’ve been generating revenue pretty much the whole time.

Through my website I have a storefront- [a] shop where people can buy shirts and things like that.

A lot of the bigger YouTubers they have their Patreon account… that is one of my next big steps.

There are definitely places that will send you free stuff, and the more you review the more stuff they will send, and you know that’s another way to build your following. It may not make you any money in the beginning, but you never know.

Influenster is a resource that I use. I don’t get paid through them, but I get free products for reviews. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even sign up to review as much as I was in the beginning because I have so much stuff that I’ve gotten now that I’m kind of running out of room. But it’s still really awesome though that they just do that. I had no idea that that was even a thing when I first got started.”

What has helped you the most to grow your channel/subscribers?

“I do a lot of research on when the best time and day to post something is.

The longer you stay at it and the more consistent you can be and make sure that you’re checking your tags and things like that because that’s how people are finding you through keyword searches… the more time you can spend on that, that’s actually made the biggest difference.

There are also apps. . . There’s YT tracker, and there’s also TubeBuddy. [They] give suggestions on what tags to add and that helps you rank higher.

I don’t like to do trend videos necessarily, but if you can pay attention to what’s going on in the world and incorporate it into your videos that can be really beneficial.

You just want to pay attention to everything on your analytics too. It’ll show you, you can watch the trends, you can look at your channel specifically and see… in the YouTube Studio when the peak hours were that people were watching your videos and start using that information for when you want to post.

Just because the internet says, ‘Hey, Wednesday from 10-2 is the best time to post,’ that might not be true all year round. Right now a lot more people are on their phones and on YouTube because of what’s going on in the world [regarding Covid-19] so definitely pay attention to that.”

What would you say are some of the more challenging parts of being a YouTuber?

“Editing is definitely near the top and just finding new ways to spread awareness about your content. It’s kind of hard and I’ve just learned as I’ve gone along [as to] which communities would be interested. Sometimes a video just doesn’t hit, and if you’re not getting any sort of feedback then you don’t necessarily know where to improve.

I’ve been pretty active in some of the Facebook YouTuber groups that are out there that are just specifically for learning from each other and other people that are going through, trying to figure out the same stuff that you are. That’s actually really really helpful. It’s just good to post questions in those groups and get a feel for different peoples perspectives and it kind of helps you experiment.

Staying active is one of the harder things for me. I’m really active on Facebook but I’m honestly just getting started on posting more on Instagram. I would definitely say that if you can be active on more than one platform definitely do it. But it’s very time consuming.

You can make a list maybe on your phone of the groups [you] regularly need to post in. Set a schedule if you can. I tried it and it didn’t really work for me personally but I think my channel would probably do a lot better if I could. You definitely have to stay consistent on some level because even when you get into it, if you don’t post for a certain amount of time, YouTube will consider you inactive.

It is easy to get overwhelmed and want to give up in the very beginning and just be like, ‘Oh my gosh it’s just too much!’

But I think if it’s something that you’re really passionate about you should definitely do it, and if it’s meant to be - which is kind of my whole theme for my channel, like - it’ll work out however it’s supposed to.”

How do you handle haters/trolls?

“It’s hard if you don’t have a thick skin. It’s not for everyone. I did not have a thick skin when I got into this. I used to let one negative comment bother me when I had hundreds of other comments that weren’t negative.

You just have to learn to separate it and sometimes remind yourself that people forget that there are humans on the other side of the screen too. I think sometimes people, they forget, or they never think they’re going to run into that person or that that person is going to be upset by the criticism or whatever it is.

But I’ve just kind of learned how to figure that out and really [think], ‘Okay was that just constructive criticism or is that even somebody I even need to worry about.’ You just kind of have to learn to have your own life out of the YouTube thing too.”

What is the most rewarding part of making videos?

“You can potentially connect with your followers if they know you’re going to be in a certain area, I mean if that’s something that you want to do. It’s not necessarily for everyone but I’ve had two instances where I’ve been somewhere in the disability community and people have recognized me that I didn’t know before. I enjoy that. I enjoy people being excited enough to want to come up and approach me.

It’s nice when anyone makes a comment and thanks you for a video or maybe you’ve inspired or touched somebody’s life in some way. And at the end of the day, as long as it helped somebody then it’s worth it, so I think if you’re trying to grow, don’t lose sight of your mindset when you started and your why of it all – why is it that you’re creating what you’re creating.

I’ve [also] been very very lucky that because I am in the disability realm of it – I’ve had companies that have reached out to me and I’ve gotten to travel.

I went to Seattle a few weeks ago and got to be the focus for this conference. They’re called hackathons but basically these developers go out and they’re given a task – in this case it was ‘Making the flying process better for people with disabilities.’

If you had told me a year ago that Microsoft would be hosting a conference and having me come out to another state to be a part of their conference, I wouldn’t have believed it. It was all because I did a video on flying as a wheelchair user and now that’s leading to other opportunities with this company as well. So you just never know.”

What would you say your next goal is?

“I would love to see my channel continue to grow. I’ve put a lot of time and heart into it. I would really like to see my channel hit 5000 subscribers this year.

In a perfect world I would like to see it much higher, but realistically that’s my next big goal.”

Thank you, Lindsey B. for taking time to talk with Eat Wander Explore!

We hope that this interview will help and inspire you when starting your own YouTube channel. Please go check out Lindsey B.’s channel and subscribe!

Stay tuned for more Eat Wander Explore Nomad Guide interviews with YouTubers coming up soon!

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