Genuine question: Have you been trying for a while now to get your YouTube channel off the ground, getting views, getting monetized and you’re just not getting the results?
How do you know when you should pull the pin, be like frozen and let it go…or to keep persevering? I’m talking about that in today’s podcast episode.
Episode 15: How do you know if it’s time to push your YouTube channel through or to let go? – Podcast Transcript
Genuine question, have you been trying for a while now to get your YouTube channel off the ground, getting views, getting monetised and you’re kind of just not seeing results? How do you know when you should pull the pin, be like frozen and let it go or to keep persevering?
I’m talking about that in today’s podcast episode. Hey, Thrivers, I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of the Thriving Creator Academy, and I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving YouTube creator.
Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to be a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with the 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 honoured and grateful to have this opportunity to share this together with you right here on the Thriving Creator Podcast. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started. First of all, I want to really acknowledge that I understand how hard it is to grow a YouTube channel from scratch, especially if you don’t have a big following from another social media platform like Instagram or Facebook to leverage off, which most people don’t, by the way.
Or you don’t have friends who are big creators, big personalities, gurus who have massive followings who can help you get a boost through shout outs, through leveraging their networks. And what I want to say is that I know how discouraging it feels to also see people race past you, get more subscribers, get more views, especially if they’ve been at it at a shorter time than you.
I know what this is like because I’m in the trenches knee-deep, elbow-deep with you. And when I started my YouTube channel, I didn’t have a big following to leverage and I get that it sucks. Big time sucks. And I want you to know that it’s OK and perhaps even very wise to pause for a moment and to ask yourself whether or not this is something you need to dig your heels in and go for or not.
Secondly, I’ve got five questions you can ask yourself to find the answer to whether or not it’s time to move on or to keep hanging in there to see this whole YouTube thing through. Here they are. Question one, can you see yourself still being excited about this and doing the work in five years time?
And by this, I mean coming up with content, recording content, producing content, whether you edit it yourself or you get a video editor to do it with you and you follow them through the process because YouTube will take time for you to see momentum.
Question number two. Are there people out there doing what you do with your target market successfully? A mistake that I see some YouTube creators make is that they start YouTube as a form of creative outlet and this is completely fine.
The problem happens is when you want to make a liveable income from YouTube and the target market that you’re in is not sustainable. It’s either too niche and small or it’s just not profitable because people aren’t buying.
It’s so important to research and see there are actually people out there in the market who are successful doing what you want to do, because this is an indicator on whether or not you should keep going. I had a client many, many years ago that I was working with and he was in the online pain niche.
And I remember at that time when he said to me, there’s not many people doing it in this space. I feel that I’m going to get real cut through. But the problem was that this market was just not profitable. People who were seeking pain relief, immediate pain relief, were not looking online to get coaching, to get relief in this form.
And it was just not profitable. But the feeling of, hey, there’s not many people here, there’s a lot of people with pain, but the market itself was not profitable. I want you to really think about and really research – is your target market willing to buy?
Are there people who have gone before you? And not to think about whether or not the market is too saturated because it’s more of a problem when there’s no one there in the market. That’s an indicator that it probably wasn’t a very good market to start off with.
And people came so that it didn’t work and then exited. Question number three, is this going to be worth it in 12 to 18 months time? So, for example, if you went all in, got super focused and held that relentless focus and allowed YouTube to turn out the way that you’re hoping it will, the way that you visualised in your mind that it will, that will be worth pushing through now?
I’ve seen with creators that I’ve worked with and creators that I follow, that success really comes when you dig deep, when you stop allowing yourself to get distracted with all of the bright, shiny objects, all of the new features, all of the latest and greatest platforms that keep popping up. And you focus.
And if you take complete ownership where you don’t blame anyone else, you don’t blame the economy, you don’t blame the algorithm, you don’t blame technology, and you keep taking action. If you get stuck, you take the steps you need to get unstuck and you don’t let it phase you.
And if you do this consistently for 12 to 18 months, everything changes. You make success inevitable. Is it going to be worth it for you in 12 to 18 months to put that relentless focus in place so that you can make your success happen? Question number four.
Does this bring you joy? Yes, I am channelling my inner Marie Kondo because it applies here. I know a creator who started an English as a second language channel, an ESL channel, and together we created 50 YouTube videos, 50.
That’s a lot of content. That’s a lot of production. That’s a lot of, you know, blood, sweat and tears. And during the whole process, he absolutely loathed every single part of it. And it did not bring him any joy, creating the content, developing it, coming up with the ideas.
And for me, I love content. I’m like Oprah. I love it. I love bread. I do love bread, but I love content. I love the concept of taking an idea from your brain, working on it and ending up with the video, the whole thing, developing the content, developing the framework, editing the video, whether it’s editing myself or working with a video editor.
I love it. I love it all. It brings me great joy. But for this other creator that I worked with, he loathed the whole thing. None of it brought him joy, didn’t give him any of the feels. So it’s really important to ask yourself.
You may have had this great idea for the channel, but does it make you miserable or does it really bring you happiness? Do you really love this creative process or not? And lastly, a question five. Ask yourself, am I willing to be the type of person it takes in order to succeed on YouTube?
And this is different to being the person who does the work, because in order to have a YouTube channel that is successful in terms of bringing new leads, making sales for you, growing your authority and opening up all the opportunities that it can for you, you need to be disciplined.
You need to be relentless and you need to be courageous. You need to be resilient, and you need to be forgiving of yourself and all of the things that are successful, thriving YouTube creator is. You have to be this person, not just do the work.
If you’ve said yes to all of these five things, then you kind of just need to sit with YouTube for a moment, deal with the crappy parts, get the support, find the help you need, find the community, the coaching that you need and to keep going.
But if you’ve got some NOs in these five questions and or you’ve got this feeling that maybe you’re sticking around and sucking it up with YouTube because you’re just kind of embarrassed to stop because you’ve told people that you started a channel and you don’t want to tell people that you’re not doing it anymore because you feel like you’ve failed or you feel like you’ve given up, then I encourage you to do the brave thing and to think about walking away, because I promise you that there will be other ideas down the track and many more opportunities down the track that you can say yes to.
And I don’t want you to miss out on those opportunities because you’re hanging on now to YouTube to save face. And honestly, this is a waste of your time, especially if YouTube is making you miserable, right?
Ten years ago, I walked away from a business partnership because it was physically, emotionally and just financially draining me to the point I couldn’t carry on anymore. I had started a business in the health niche with a group of other people, and there were so many problems.
And I stayed in this bad business relationship for much longer than I should have because I was listening to the wrong people and the wrong advice. People who kept saying I should stick it out, even though when I look at the five questions of was I excited about this anymore?
Did I see myself doing this in five years? Were other people successful? Or there were, question three, you know, was it going to be worth giving it this relentless focus for 12 to 18 months?
Did it bring me joy? No, it didn’t. And it was really, really hard. But I stuck in it because I was afraid of losing face. And the biggest regret that I had after I left was that I didn’t walk away sooner because I was afraid of losing face, and the money that I lost was nothing compared to the toll that it took on my emotional and mental health.
And after I walked away, that’s when I went into business for myself. I started my own social media consultancy and hence began my journey on YouTube. But that wouldn’t have been possible if I had kept going with that business partnership that was destroying my soul.
There was no way that I had the bandwidth or just the energy to start YouTube with this business that I was in that was sucking the life out of me. One of the things I’ve learnt with all of the craziness that’s happened in the last few years is that life is the greatest gift.
Don’t waste it. There’s still so much ahead for you. I hope that this episode has given you some questions to mull over and some thoughts to mull over and helped you to get some direction on what you should do with YouTube. The episode is over, but it doesn’t have to end.
Head on over to thrivingcreatormasterclass.com the link is also in the show notes. If you’re ready to go from confusion to clarity and to finally ditch that self-doubt so you can build the profitable YouTube channel, you know, deep down you’re always meant to create.
Then join me inside my signature programme, The Thriving Creator Academy, where you get the content coaching and community you need to successfully implement my proprietary system so you can start reaping the rewards of running a thriving YouTube channel.
Thriving Creator Academy is a coaching programme for creators who are ready to transform their creative ideas into thriving YouTube channels. Sign up to the masterclass now to learn more at thrivingcreatormasterclass.com.
