So a really popular thing on YouTube are the monthly analytic reports where people dive
into their YouTube studio and they share their analytics for the previous month, how much
money they made, how many views they had.
But what I've noticed with a lot of the channels that do these is they recently blown up and
so they just have this explosive growth that they're able to share with you or they're
already massive channels to start with.
So I thought it would be interesting to share my monthly YouTube analytics as a small YouTuber,
someone who has less than 2000 subscribers was recently monetizes and is just starting
to see the initial momentum and traction in my channel.
So I'm going to break down the month of April, 2020 for you guys.
So I'm going to share some insights and some tips that hopefully other small YouTubers
can use so you can grow your channel as well.
So if you are nosy like me and you want to see how I did, then keep on watching.
All right, so here is how my channel did in April, 2020 so I had over 31,000 views, which
is incredible and nearly 2000 hours of watch time.
Now this is absolutely crazy to me because you know as a small YouTuber you are constantly
working towards your first 4,000 hours of watch time and I hit one of those big milestones
in April.
I hit my 4,000 hours and so it's actually kind of crazy to me that I did basically half
that in just April alone.
I was monetized, I believe I hit it on April 21st or 22nd.
Yeah, April 22nd is when ads went live, but it did take about a week or so for me to be
approved and I actually have a video all about that where I talk about the process and how
long it takes and a hack that I use.
And as soon as I did that hack, I got monetized four hours later.
So kind of crazy.
All right, so going back to the 2000 hours of watch time, normally your views and your
watch time will go hand in hand.
And so you can see that more or less, these graphs are the same.
So I had nearly 32,000 views in April and about 1900 hours of watch time on my channel.
And you could see at the beginning of April I was getting anywhere from 800 to 700 views
per day, which is incredible.
But then as the month went on, that really started increasing.
You can see right here was my first day that I had over 1000 views on a single day on my
channel and I wrote that milestone down because I was super pumped about that.
And then it just continued to pick up and by the end of the month I was getting around
1600 views.
So the views per day at the beginning of the month versus the end of the month basically
doubled.
So that is pretty exciting.
And you can see basically the same thing with watch time.
There was about 50 hours of watch time at the beginning and it got to around 100 so
that doubled as well.
So let's check out subscribers.
So I gained over 400 subscribers in April alone and I find subscriber growth kind of
funny because while they do for the most part reflect what's happening with your views,
it's not always the case.
You can have a spike in views but not necessarily a spike in subscribers.
But in this case, that is what I was seeing.
So you see right here, I was getting anywhere from six to 14, around 10 a day, five to 10
a day.
And by the end of the month that was climbing too.
I had 34 subscribers in a day, 25 30 so it definitely increased significantly, let's
say five to 10 a day to 30 to 25 a day.
So increased by two and a half to three times.
So that is actually really interesting to me because my subscribers increased at a higher
rate than my views did.
So that's really exciting for me because I feel like the first few months of my channel,
it was just a handful of subscribers a day and now it's finally starting to pick up and
getting a little bit more momentum.
So speaking of subscribers, that reminds me of another big milestone that I hit as a small
YouTuber and that is one a thousand subscribers.
Everyone is just chugging along trying to get their 4,000 hours, their 1000 subscribers.
And I hit those on the exact same day.
It was around the second week of April that I hit both of those things and my subscribers
just continued to grow since then.
So with those two things, I was finally able to be monetized because I hit 4,000 hours
of watch time and 1000 subscribers.
So on April 22nd was the day that I got approved for monetization and I texted everybody that
I knew.
I was so excited and I've done a video all about that process as well.
So definitely check that out cause I talk about my timeline and my experience with getting
monetized on YouTube.
So this $2.36, I texted my family, I'm like, okay guys, we are going to do a contest.
Who can guess how much money I'm going to make on my first day.
Now it's important to note that I got monetized around the afternoon and I had to set up a
few things and then I had to go and manually put all of the ads on my videos.
So this is really a partial days worth of monetization.
My first full day of monetization was basically double that I made $5 and 76 cents and it
continued to climb and go down from there with the highest day in April being $8 and
27 cents.
And no, I'm definitely not going to become a millionaire from $8 and 27 cents a day.
But the big thing is it's a start.
And now that my videos are monetized, I just feel so much more motivated to make videos.
It does take a lot of time to do these videos and to edit them.
And so just the fact that I'm getting a little bit of compensation from putting them on YouTube
is really rewarding and exciting to me.
And obviously you shouldn't be relying on AdSense as your main form of monetization.
I'm actually a business coach and the bulk of my income comes from my one on one coaching
clients.
I coach people on how to start, grow, and scale their businesses and I do focus on YouTube
with my clients as one of their main ways to gain an audience.
I also do YouTube channel audits where I will review someone's channel with them and give
them feedback as kind of a onetime coaching session.
So if you're interested in any of those services, I will include links down below so you can
learn more if you want to do one on one coaching with me or a YouTube audit definitely hit
me up because I really, really love doing that because that definitely pays more than
the $8 and 27 cents of ad revenue.
But again, like I said, it is just a start.
So let's scroll down and see what videos were the main contributors to the success in April.
So my very, very first video was this video that I knew would rank very well in search
because there just wasn't a lot of great videos on the topic and it's how to win Instagram
giveaways.
Now this video, it spiked in December and then went back down.
But then it's kind of continued to grow and grow and grow, which I think is really exciting.
And it got over 12,000 views in April, which I am really, really grateful for.
And then I had a few other videos that did over a thousand views, which again, as a small
YouTuber, I know some people do that in a day, like when they launch a video, they get
over a thousand views or 10,000 views or 50,000 views.
But for these to do this in a month is a really, really exciting for me.
So what I'm able to do with these top videos is I can realize that this is what people
are liking.
So people are liking when I do these giveaway guides.
So I have a whole series and I'll include the playlist right here and it's how to run
an Instagram giveaway for your business.
And there's about seven different videos in there that run through all of the different
things that you need to do so that way you have a successful giveaway.
So you can see my videos on giveaways are actually the ones that are performing pretty
well and most likely it's because they're finishing the video and then they're being
recommended another one of the videos in the series.
And so that is something that's really important for you as a new YouTuber.
You need to connect the dots between your content so that way after someone watches
one video, they instantly want to watch the next one because it provides a part two or
a next step and you just create those little breadcrumbs where they can't help but watch
the next video.
Now I have a few other videos that they're kind of all over the place.
One that kind of started to take off was how to add line breaks in Instagram.
And I really liked this video because I provide three different ways that you can add line
breaks to your Instagram posts compared to just offering one solution because I know
one solution doesn't work for everyone.
So in that video I provide three different ways for people and that seems to be performing
really well.
I have a budgeting video and, you know, everyone was quarantine during this time, so I thought
it was a good opportunity to have a video on how to work from home with kids because
I am a mom and I have kids at home many times I am working when they are home.
So I wanted to create a video with my top tips because I worked with kids from home
in my corporate job and now as an entrepreneur.
And so that video actually did really well obviously because it was a hot trending topic
in April.
So if you want to dive down even more, you go to the "see more" button.
I can kind of guess what videos were starting to take off.
But this will break down the videos even more.
So you can see right here, it is breaking down all of the videos for April and these
colored lines, it's going to show you your top five performing for that metric.
So right now we're looking at views for video.
It is April 2020 and you can see the top video right here, the blue line, that is the how
to win Instagram giveaways video and that has always been a top performer video on my
channel.
But you can see towards the end of the month it really just started to explode and to do
very, very well for my channel.
These other videos for the most part, there wasn't a lot of growth in these other videos.
Um, maybe a little bit on the second one, which is the how to add line breaks and Instagram.
It was around 250 and 250 and under and it's definitely performing over 250 views a day.
But I wouldn't really characterize that as a smashing success or explosive growth while
the other one.
That is definitely something to pay attention to.
Now right here.
If I wanted to dig into some of these other videos and to see how they're performing,
maybe this one that shows up as number six and since it's not the top five there, I can't
see it at all and I can see, I can just click on that one or I can click maybe the ones,
you know if I wanted to see all of them except for that top video to kind of get a feel for
any sort of trends.
But if I want to see all of my videos in aggregate and just all of the data together, you just
click total and it will show everything all together.
But you can definitely see by clicking all of these, having my top five videos showing.
But then also the channel as a whole.
The top video really was the main contributor to the success of the channel during that
time.
So I actually want to dive into that video a little bit more.
So if I click on that, it's going to allow me to dive in deeper for each one of these
videos.
So right now we're looking just at the how to win Instagram giveaways video and you can
see the views, but let's say if I wanted to look at traffic source, so what exactly was
causing this video to outperform my other videos and why did it basically double its
traffic from the beginning of the month to the end?
So clicking here, it breaks out the top five traffic sources and you can see that this
top blue line, kind of mirrors the number of views that line that we saw just before.
And this is YouTube search.
So in the beginning I was getting views from YouTube search, maybe around 200 a day.
And by the end YouTube search was giving me around 550-600 a day.
So that is the main contributor.
Cause if you look at these other lines, there really wasn't anything that grew that would
have caused this.
So this wasn't necessarily picked up, um, in the YouTube algorithm per se.
It was in the search algorithm for sure, but it wasn't being shown to people on their home
pages or in browse features.
It was a little bit in suggested, but only 5.5% of the traffic was coming from suggested
videos.
So really the main bulk of it was because it was just performing very, very well in
search.
And this video always has performed well in search.
I have optimized the heck out of it.
I knew it was a space that has low competition and high search volume, which is definitely
what you're going for.
If you want to rank on YouTube and it just seems that either I'm ranking higher than
I previously or the number of searches for that had increased, but we can dig down a
little more on YouTube search.
So if you click on YouTube search, it's going to give you the different terms that people
were searching for.
So you can definitely see that "giveaway" is my top term and that is the number one
term that really is causing the success.
So people are literally typing "giveaway" into YouTube and my video is showing up.
So that really is the main reason for the success of this video.
You can see these other search terms, how to win giveaways on Instagram, how to win
Instagram giveaways.
They had a little bit of growth during this time, but it was nothing like this top search
term, just the good old giveaway.
All right, so there we have it.
That was April for my channel.
Really there were four main highlights that happened to my channel in April.
I hit my 4,000 hours of watch time.
I crossed 1000 subscribers.
I got monetized and on top of that one of my videos started performing really, really
well in YouTube search and was driving even more views to my channel towards the end of
the month.
So all in all, I am ecstatic.
I am pumped for these April results as a small YouTuber.
I really couldn't have asked for anything more and I'm really excited to see how that
momentum carries over into may.
All right, so I hope you liked peeking behind the curtain to see how my YouTube channel
did in April.
So if you like these types of videos, let me know in the comments below because I would
love to keep doing them for you month over month.
So that way you can really see how a small YouTuber grows from the very beginning.
Also, let me know in the comments below what aha moment you had and how you're going to
apply that to your channel.
Now to support my channel, be sure to give this video like subscribe and turn on that
notification bell so you can be notified as soon as I post new videos.
I post new videos every single Wednesday and I am in the comments for the first 30 minutes
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So you definitely want to have that notification bell on so you can be notified as soon as
my videos go live.
That is all that I have for you today.
I'm Morgan Stradling and I'll see you next time.