How to do Vlogmas and survive it. I talk through my experience doing Vlogmas as a smaller creator for the first time. What I will change for next time, the mistakes and the good stuff that happened!
Vlogmas video ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkJUg6G0lUE
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🕒Timestamps🕒
00:00 Start
1:19 What is Vlogmas?
2:57 Celebrating you
3:17 Feeling the fatigue
3:51 25 videos done
4:25 Didn’t all go to plan
5:07 Have back ups so you can pivot
6:01 Things went wrong during the livestreams
8:25 Done was better than perfect
8:57 it was a challenge
10:04 Good data
11:53 survival tips
How to do Vlogmas on YouTube (and survive it!) – Video Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with us now, or if you are catching me on the replay. This is my final video for vlogmas 2020. And I’m going to be talking about how to survive vlogmas.
What my experience has been, things that I think that could help you, if you are considering doing vlogmas, any really by the time that you actually watch this video. And I’m just going to go through, you know, what it was like for me, what I’ve learned, you know, how it was, how it all kind of played out.
And I’m really excited. I’m really excited for this. As you can see, I’ve got the festive headphones on head thingy on at the moment. Let’s get into this. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I hope you build your business using video on social media with ease.
Now, whether you are live with us now, or if you are catching us on the replay, please drop a comment in the chat or on the comments and I’ll answer them at the end of the live stream or after the live stream. As usual everything, the timestamps, any new resources that I mentioned will be in the description.
Now let’s talk about vlogmas. What is vlogmas? How does it all work? Vlogmas is a Christmas challenge where the idea is that you release a video on YouTube every day in December up in and including Christmas.
You’ve got 25 videos that you release in Christmas or during the Christmas period. And it doesn’t have to necessarily be a vlog. It can also be a live stream. And I found that, you know, it’s quite, it’s not regulated. It’s just something that YouTube people do.
Am I? Like I’ve knocked the feed out. Can you still see me? This is hilarious. Okay. It looks like you can still see me, but that’s okay. Strange things happening on a live stream on the last live stream as usual. Okay. That’s okay.
The camera has stopped showing a feed, but it looks like I’m still live, I’m going to keep rocking it. Okay. As I said, vlogmas, it isn’t an official thing that, you know, is monitored or policed or managed by YouTube.
It’s a thing that we do kind of to push ourselves a little bit further for the last sprint of the year. Now, if you have done vlogmas, if you took up the challenge this year whether you’ve finished it or not, whether you are contemplating it, if you’re here, if you’re watching, I just want to take the moment to celebrate you and myself for getting through vlogmas however it ended up for you because it is a really tough challenge.
Let’s just say this now, 25 videos in 25 days is a lot of content. Now, what have been some of the lessons? Now, I think one of the things that was definitely, I felt, Oh, okay. Strange. One of the things that I felt during the challenge was that I felt a bit of fatigue.
I’m like 25 videos is a lot, right? And I think it was about midway through the challenge. After about the 10th, 12th ish video, I was like, I’m gonna be over it now, but I was really grateful for the opportunity to do it.
I think the upside of that is that I’m looking back now and I’ve got 25 videos done for the actual month that I probably wouldn’t have done. And to be honest, when I was planning out my videos, the 25 videos, they were videos that were on the list as you know, as it gets with YouTube. On the list for the whole year.
But there was always reasons why I couldn’t get to it. Other videos always got in the way so felt the fatigue, but got through it. And the upside is that, you know, 25 videos later, I believe that there’s a decent amount of content now on the channel.
What else happened? Everything didn’t go according to plan. I did a video at the beginning of vlogmas, where I showed this beautiful plan of, you know, I think I had 30, 25 to 30 videos.
And when it came to, you know, the grind of it, things happen. For example, I had planned to release a video. One of the videos was a brand deal. I got it ready.
It was ready to be released and the brand didn’t pull the deal but they asked me not to release it during this period because of a couple of things, which I had to respect, which also meant that the video that I’d worked on and plan to release could no longer be released for this period.
I was like, Oh, but on the upside, like I had backup videos. The whole thing with vlogmas, if you’re going to do vlogmas, if you’re going to do any video challenge, you need to have backup videos in terms of content that you can produce when something goes wrong, because it will go wrong.
You know, that was just one example of things, things going wrong. I also had the case where I plan to go live last week on Friday evening, and I got caught up in another project that I was working on. And by the time I finished that I was exhausted.
I didn’t have the brain capacity to be able to live stream, like live stream well, so I had to pull it. I had to make the call and go, I can’t do it, you know, this tonight. I’m going to have to make it up. And that’s what I did.
Having a plan for your videos, additional videos that you can do is really important. Particularly if you want to finish the actual challenge and not get frustrated with yourself and back out of it, you know? Things went wrong during the live streams all the time, like this one.
Something strange is happening. Like, and let me talk about all the things that went wrong during the live stream. There was one live stream where the camera feed went really strange for no reason. And my face was like warped and strange.
There was another live stream where I forgot to turn the microphone back on after switching between different microphones. The audio wasn’t great for about a minute. There was another live stream where I lost a scene.
With Ecamm Live I set up scenes and overlays, and I had this whole plan and then I went to click on it and it wasn’t there. I don’t know. Maybe I deleted it or something happened. Things go wrong all the time.
Or during this live stream where my camera did something weird and I can’t see the playback, but I can see the feed. Anyway, all weird stuff happened on a live stream. It is inevitable, but I think on the upside is that you learn to deal with it better.
And for the most part you kind of just, you kind of just go, okay, something, something happened. The way that I deal with it, and I think this has helped me a lot is that when things do go wrong I acknowledge it, I’m like, “okay, I did something weird with the sound, sorry”.
Or I’ll call it out. I’ll be like, “okay, I think something’s weird happening with the camera”. And I do that so that one, like it humanizes me. It’s like, guess what things, I’m human too.
And things don’t always go according to plan. And two, you know, if you address it then people will judge you less. I’ve read somewhere that, you know, particularly when it comes to job interviews or situations where people get nervous, if you’re in a job interview and you’re nervous and you say at the very beginning, oh I’m feeling quite nervous, then they will judge you apparently a little bit less harshly than if you didn’t.
Whereas if you were nervous and you didn’t say anything, they’ll scribble, judging you on their notes and at the end of it they’d go, “Oh, she was really nervous”. But if you say it upfront, then they’re like, “Oh yeah, she was nervous. But she did say so”.
I think just little things like that, I will acknowledge when something is not going wrong, blatantly wrong on a live stream. For the most part, if there are little things, like, I won’t say it, but when it’s like, okay, the camera feed is really weird or no, the sound didn’t come through.
I’m sorry. I’ll just, I’ll just acknowledge it. Things didn’t go to plan, but on the upside done was better than perfect. I think in our heads, things are always worse than what they really are.
There were lots of times during the challenge when I thought things are not going great and I was tempted to kill the broadcast but I kept going anyway. And then when I watched back on it, I was like, this wasn’t so bad. It felt really bad at the time, but it was probably worse for me than it actually was for you as the viewer.
Done is definitely better than perfect. And we are a lot harsher on ourselves than other people are in my view. I think in terms of vlogmas, it was definitely a challenge and put me out of my comfort zone.
Yes. I create videos. Yes, I do this a lot, but it put me out of my comfort zone in the sense that it was so much work. Right. And it was showing up constantly and it was showing up consistently. I think that’s a good in a bad thing, but it definitely was a push.
And, you know, the upside is that I got it done and it improved my workflow. I think in terms of my community and my audience, I have people who show up who had the opportunity to show up more during the live streams, because there were so many of them.
And I feel that I’m a little bit closer to the community and you know, a lot more people came forward and presented themselves as, Hey, you know, I watched your stuff. I really love it. Can you help me with this?
Can, you know, you create content with this. And I feel that without this challenge, the opportunity for us to connect more as, you know, create our own community wouldn’t have been as present. I’m really grateful for that.
I think in terms of the channel performance, this is an interesting one, right? I have a YouTube friend, Paul, who was on a live stream during this time with me as well. And I was talking to him weekly about how my channel was performing during this challenge, because pumping out a lot of videos, essentially, you know, seven videos a week, what does that do to your views?
What does that do to your watch time? What does that do to your subscribers? Everyone wants to know. What did it do for me? I found that I saw about a 20% increase in views.
I saw about a 20% increase in watch time where I’m like, Hmm, this is very interesting. In terms of subscribers, new subscribers, I didn’t see like a massive increase over the growth that I’ve had over the last three months. I don’t think it really made much of an impact in terms of getting me like more and more subscribers, more than the current trajectory of the channel, but that’s okay as well.
But I think the important thing was that got more watch time. And I think I got more watch time because I’m creating more content, for people to watch, right? That in my view is a positive thing.
I think watch time is more important than subscribers. And you know, it gave me more chance to connect with you guys. In terms of sales. Yeah. During this period, I made more sales as well.
Why? Because I’m showing up more and people see more of my content and they’re reminded that I’m here and that I have things to offer as well. And that is way more important than subscribers, right? How important is that over the count that you have on your actual channel?
Sales? Watch time? They’re the more important things. I’ve made more sales of my courses. And brand deals, you know? Absolutely for me, this challenge has been a win with that in mind. And then what are my tips?
This is a little bit big that wasn’t as big when I prepared it. One of my tips for surviving vlogmas if you are going to take on the challenge or whether you take on another video challenge, you know, sometime whether it’s the, I think they do video every day in April or August.
One of those ones. I think survival tip is definitely to leverage live streaming. I said it, when I did the first vlogmas video, I said, I cannot survive this. If I had it, if I had to edit 25 videos, I wouldn’t do it. I don’t have time for that.
And I don’t want to have time for that. I want to be able to do other things outside of just editing videos and just producing content. And, you know, I have a life outside of YouTube.
I keep saying this, I have a family, and I have other hobbies and I do sewing and I like to drink and all these things that I don’t want to be consumed by just editing videos. Take the opportunity to live stream to produce content that way. It is, it has been a saviour to me. Get a good moderator.
Dave Pearl is in the chat at the moment and he’s normally moderating on all of the live streams. I found that as I showed up more, for the most part, the community and people who’ve shown up has been great, but you also get those trolls and you get those spammers.
And having a good moderator makes the experience really good for me as a creator and also really good for the community who show up as well. Get a good moderator and thank you to Dave, my husband, for always moderating it, even though you have no real choice.
I think another tip plan your topics and have backup ideas. This is probably the biggest lesson. I always knew that the topics had to be flexible because things, things were going to happen, right? Life was just going to happen.
I didn’t know that the brand was going to, you know, push the video out like that wasn’t, we had agreed that it would go and then something happened and they said, please hold until the next month, which was fine. Also, the other things, like, I didn’t know that I was going to be caught up in another project and then have no capacity to actual live stream.
Without having additional content, I wouldn’t have survived the challenge. I would have probably halfway gone. This is too hard. But knowing that there was a bank of topics that I could choose from that made a huge, huge difference. And I think, I’d be clear to all of this, hence, the antlers— is to have fun with it.
I think people who do vlogmas and do it as a challenge to push themselves, do do it as a challenge to get better as a creator, to create more consistency, to practice the craft of creating content and producing and being on camera.
Those people do really well. It’s people who do vlogmas for the wrong reasons. It’s people who do vlogmas because they’re trying to get another hundred subscribers. They’re trying to get more views. If you do it for those reasons, those vanity reasons, I think for the most part, you’d be disappointed because vlogmas isn’t going to grow your channel and solve all of your problems.
It’s, you know, you’ll get nice things out of it, but they’re not guaranteed. Like I was never guaranteed the sales. I was never guaranteed the views and the watch time, all I was guaranteed was that if I produce 25 videos in 25 days, I will have 25 videos.
Everything else that comes out of that is a bonus. I think it’s all about having fun, right? This whole YouTube thing, this whole ability to create content loses its power loses its effectiveness when it becomes a drag.
When, you know, you’re not having fun when you resent having to create that content. I think this challenge was great because I always had it in mind that this is meant to be fun. This is meant to be a way of for me to finish the year strong and get all of my content out.
And you know, I’ve said this in the last vlogmas video, how serious can this challenge be? It’s called vlogmas. You know, likehow serious can it be? I’m wearing antlers to emphasize that it’s meant to be fun.
It’s meant to be a way of you getting content out. However that looks like. And I think it’s also important to keep note that it’s not about being perfect. It’s about pushing yourself to get stuff out, and then seeing how far you’ve come at the end of it. That’s what it’s all about.
Those are my kind of survival tips for people looking to do vlogmas, because it has been fun. I’m looking back now as this is my last video and you know, I have to do the confetti thing again because I’m celebrating the end of vlogmas for me. And I’m celebrating you.
Thank you for everyone who’s, you know, watched and subscribed during the year and interacted and showing up to a live stream or commented, you know, it’s a journey. This is definitely a journey. And I really appreciate every single person. Let’s go to the comments now.
It’s David Pearl it’s my husband. And, thanks for always showing up because as I said, you really have no choice. Jason Allen says, “antlers! Yes!” I thought, well, the thing is I wanted to get a Santa hat, but then, it was a really long story and we couldn’t get any easily.
Antlers, I think did the trick for today. Gigi from GiGa Art, always great to have you here. Gigi is another person who, you know, I think out of a result of vlogmas surfaced and you know, someone within the community that I do a little bit of work with now, Gigi is a great graphic designer.
And thanks to vlogmas, I’ve been able to connect with her and you know, do some stuff. Jasmine. Jasmine, hello, Jasmine. Thanks for joining us, always great to have you on the live streams. Dave Pearl says, “Motivating you to make good content”.
I think that’s definitely been one of the things that has come out of vlogmas. It’s motivating me to create content, but also to create good content. And now that I’ve done these 25, I, you know, as we finish the year and look into January, I’m thinking about how it will be different or what I’ll keep.
And I’m excited for next year. I’m really excited for next year. Lots of stuff happening. Yeah, so I’m really excited to, you know, bring in the, bring in the year.
Dave Pearl says, “YouTube freaking out with the confetti”. I think that it can’t be vlogmas, it can’t be Christmas without some virtual confetti. I think I saw someone confetti on their live stream and I was like, I think we all need a little bit more confetti in our lives to just celebrate the moment.
And it’s not real confetti. If this was real confetti and I was on the floor, I’d be having a freak and go “Get the vacuum cleaner out right now. Look at the mess”. That’s right. But no, this is virtual confetti. That wraps up vlogmas.
That basically wraps up the live stream today as well. I hope that you found it useful, whether you are live with us now. Thanks for being here. Or if you’re catching the replay.
I hope you got some good insights into how to make vlogmas successful for you. Right? That’s, that’s what it’s all about. Regardless of how you finish it, regardless of if you finish it and regardless of what it looks like to you. Hope that this gave you some insight.
I learned a lot from it. I absolutely appreciated the opportunity to create content and to show up for you as well. If you’ve found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, where I do lots of tutorials on live streaming on social media, where I help you grow your business, using video with ease.
And if you haven’t got it already, make sure you grab up a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets. It’s a super simple guide to get you up in streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.
The links are in the description and I’ll also put a link to it on the screen. Thank you so much for joining me. I will see you on the next live stream and bye for now.
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