Hello, and welcome to this episode. Starting more than 1 YouTube channel at the same time is a huge mistake that’s hurting your growth. I’m talking about why and what it’s really costing you in today’s episode.
Episode 13: Don’t waste your time with this (it’s hurting your YouTube channel)
Starting more than one YouTube channel at a time is huge mistake that’s hurting your growth. I’m talking about why this is and what it’s really costing you in today’s episode.
Hey, Thrivers, I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of Thrive Video Academy, and I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving creator. Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to become a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with people you love or downtime for yourself.
You’ll hear about the hard lessons I’ve gone through so you can avoid making the same slow and costly mistakes on your journey, as well as my secret weapons to help you dig deep and do the work it takes. I’m so honoured and grateful to have the opportunity to share this together with you right here on the Thriving Creator Podcast.
I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started. Maybe you’ve started a YouTube channel in one niche and you have this burning desire to create video content in a totally different niche, and it’s not possible to merge the two in your mind or maybe you haven’t started on YouTube yet and you have two different channel ideas and you’re wondering, should I do this?
I really want to do both, but what is it going to look like and what will the impact be? Maybe you’re afraid that if you stick to one niche only that you don’t get the creative variety that your heart desires.
Oh, my fellow creator, if I had a dollar for every time a student or a client asked me whether or not they should start two channels. I understand the temptation and the lure of having two channels.
You get to create content in two different areas that you’re excited about. You get to build two different audiences. All in all, I can see how your brain is feeling, all the feelings of excitement right now at this idea.
But I want you to consider the impact of having multiple channels at the same time and the true cost of splitting your focus. In working with YouTube creators, and in my own YouTube journey, I’ve seen that in order to grow a channel successfully that makes you a liveable income there are five things that you need to have in place.
You need to have one target audience, one product to sell, one conversion tool, so how you pitch to people, whether this is a webinar funnel, a landing page, sales video, one traffic source, which is YouTube, and this will take you a year.
And if you start targeting two or more different audiences or niches, you’ve already made things too complex. It becomes really hard to scale your income and your business. Think of it like this.
If you have two audiences, this means you will need to have at least two products to sell, two conversions tools, and you’ll be splitting the traffic that you’d possibly get from YouTube. And you’re also increasing the time that it would take for you to reach your YouTube and your business milestones.
You’ve given yourself a ton of different things to focus on at the same time, when you really need to dedicate yourself to scaling your one channel. Your channel and your business is probably not ready at this level to take on multiple audiences and multiple offers.
Let’s say that each week you have ten hours to spend on YouTube, and that’s including you doing all of the research for a video, filming it, editing it, optimising it, publishing it, promoting it. And this is assuming that you’re not outsourcing any of the work.
If it takes you 10 hours to produce one video, which is pretty standard for your channel, and then you try to create a second video for your second channel, that’s going to take you another 10 hours. Let’s say that you have these 20 hours a week to create the two videos, one for each channel, which is a huge effort.
The growth on both of your channels will be slower, releasing one video per week than if you were able to release two videos per week on a single channel. Having two channels means you split your focus, you split your time and you split your results.
It takes an insane amount of effort to generate momentum and to grow your channel. And if you decide to split the time across two channels, you will see that it will take you longer to grow than if you were to focus on one channel first.
If you are serious about making money on YouTube, you cannot rely on Google AdSense alone. You need to create multiple income streams. Therefore, you need to be creating programmes, products and services to sell in addition to the marketing funnels to help bury people from your YouTube videos into your sales mechanism.
And you need to be creating these offers across two business niches, if you split your focus. Splitting your attention and your energy in two areas doesn’t double your income, it means that it will take you much longer to get to business sides off the ground.
Creating two YouTube channels at the same time is exactly like the analogy of you being a pilot of two planes, you will find it very hard to get both of these planes off the ground at the same time, because you’re starting one plane make progress on the runway, then you need to go back to that second plane and get that one moving so it can catch up to where the first plane is.
And it’s exhausting and incredibly difficult to have two planes in the air at the same time without an insane amount of energy and resources to financially do so, you’re going to burn out. In my view and experience of being on YouTube and working with creators and clients on the platform, having two channels does not end up being double the fun.
It’s double the time and it’s double the stress. And this is why many YouTube creators and many coaches keep stumbling and are unable to make a liveable income from their videos. You need to keep things simple and you need to focus so that you can now your first channel, so that you have the leverage and the momentum to start a second channel later, as opposed to trying to start them both at the beginning at the same time.
A YouTube creator I was coaching about this, about not splitting his focus, said to me, “but if I create more products for different audiences. Doesn’t that mean I’ll make more money?” and the answer is no. No, it doesn’t.
Especially not in the early stages when you’re establishing yourself on YouTube. It will mean that you make less money because of the time it will take you. Every single creator that I know who has done it has regretted it for all the reasons I’ve talked about today, the split in focus, the split in energy and resources and the split in the results.
It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make that slows your growth on YouTube. Keeping things simple at the start allows you to create a foundation for your YouTube channel that truly generates a liveable income that you can scale.
Once you have this foundation in place, you’ll be ready to build and branch out into different niches, different audiences with more products. So, fellow creator, my advice to you is that you want to start two YouTube channels at the same time to avoid it.
Don’t do it. Don’t get excited about it, but get excited to focus on the one channel first, allow that to grow and then start the second channel after you have seen the momentum and the results from the first channel. If you do this, you’ll be able to hit your YouTube and your business milestones faster than if you were to try and to split your focus and your energy.
One last thing before I go, I created this podcast as a reminder that you are not alone in this. Growing with video is hard and I want to be here to help and guide you and others through it. If you found this podcast episode helpful, please leave a review.
This helps Apple and the algorithms for my podcast in front of more people just like you. I’d be incredibly grateful. Thanks for listening.
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