Anyone who has followed my Solo Club YouTube channel will know that the content hasn’t been what one would call “consistent”.
In fact, to put no finer point on it, the stuff I’ve been churning out over there has been all over the place, which is rather ironic for a channel whose main aim is to educate anyone who wants to get into the content creation game.
The only thing that has stuck has been the live streams (which are now bi-weekly, in case you were wondering).
Thankfully, we appear to have found an approach that works, and I’m absolutely loving it. The audience seems to be pretty keen, too.
The big question is: will it stick?
Running two YouTube channels is hard work, even when it’s your full-time job. Arguably, that makes it harder, because everything you do needs to be attached to some form of strategy that takes into account the fact that money needs to be made in order to grow the business. That level of pressure means secondary channels are often given a comparatively small window of opportunity to perform - before they get ditched.
That’s daft. We all know that YouTube channels need time - a long time - to get going and prove their worth. It’s why I haven’t shut down my secondary channel; I want it to succeed. We just needed to find something that offered the same promise I saw during the early days of Mark Ellis Reviews.
We started this process by renaming the channel. It is now called The Mark Ellis Creator Diary, which hopefully indicates the new direction for the content that’s destined for that location.
Next, we set about looking for ways to create YouTube videos regularly, beyond the livestreams. There were strict rules: these videos needed to be easy to make, fun to produce, and deliver value for the audience. That’s a tough ask when the channel in question isn’t your main gig, but it was clear there was an opportunity within the vlogging realm. The whole point of this secondary brand is, after all, to offer a glimpse into the inner workings of a content business and inspire people to follow in my footsteps. The ultimate goal, as far as revenue is concerned, is to convert a portion of the audience into paying customers for our digital products and academy memberships.
The only way to build that kind of loyalty and deliver on the promise of ushering people behind the scenes is to show exactly what I get up to each day as a content creator. And the only way to do that is to publish vlog-style videos.
The problem with vlog-style videos is that they are bloody hard work. I’ve tried them on multiple occasions; I had a run of videos that were made for Mark Ellis Reviews patrons, and we dabbled with a few episodes on the Creator Diary channel when it was still Solo Club. The reason they’re tough is because it’s all to easy to get carried away and go all-in with the production. You start carrying around a big camera and mic. You think about every shot. You spend significant time faffing about with composition and technical details like apertures and ND filters. That’s before you eventually head into the edit suite, where you inevitably set to work creating a Casey Neistat-inspired masterpiece where every cut is timed perfectly to the beat and the drone footage you spent an hour gathering earlier that day is neatly inserted as transitional elements of the story.
Exhausted reading that? Imagine doing it, regularly. Unless it’s your main thing, it just isn’t possible.
A few weeks ago, while trawling through my YouTube home feed, I came across a couple of YouTubers who were vlogging their daily lives. It struck me immediately: they’d nailed it. Neither of them had fallen into any of the traps mentioned above, yet their videos were still engaging and highly entertaining for the right audience. More importantly, as a viewer, I wanted more. I wanted to know what was going to happen in the next episode. They had me, big time, and judging by the numbers they were pulling in, I wasn’t alone.
Both of these creators were simply walking around with action cameras. No big DSLR. No shotgun mic (not even a lav mic - they appeared to be relying on their action camera mics). No fancy edits, either - just clips shot throughout their day, lazily stitched together without a single flourish. There was wind noise, poor framing, sloppy edits, and long passages where nothing particularly interesting appeared to be happening. Yet, people seemed to love it - including me.
I was inspired. So, the next day, I grabbed my action camera and filmed stuff throughout the day. I then threw all of that footage over to my General Manager and editing whizz, Niall, with the simple instruction: stitch all of these clips together, top and tail any fat and just hit publish. Which is what he did.
To date, we’ve published eight vlogs, and this is what has happened to the channel:
Before this new vlogging strategy, the channel was practically dormant, bar the odd spike whenever the live stream took place. Now, we’re starting to see growth. New subscribers are coming in. Watch time is increasing. Views are picking up and, while still relatively low, those numbers are quickly heading into the hundreds once a video has been published.
More importantly, comments are starting to come in, and they’re all positive. People seem to enjoy this form of vlogging. They want more. They enjoy seeing what I get up to. Some find it “strangely relaxing”. Others say they always look forward to the next episode dropping into their feed.
This strategy was a risk, like any new content strategy. The vlogs we’re publishing on the Creator Diary channel are long (each episode clocks in at 20 minutes or more), rough and ready, rambling, and feature long stretches of me either walking around, making coffee, or throwing stuff into the boot of my car. There are even a few uncomfortably long (for me, at least) gym sessions thrown in.
The content itself is also completely off-the-cuff. I simply turn on the camera when I have a mildly interesting thought, or when I fancy showing how I do something.
If, by now, you’re desperate to see an example of what I’m talking about, this episode will give you an idea of how the vlog plays out.
As I keep saying in the vlogs, the more people like, share, and comment on these videos, the more likely they are to become a full-time thing. For that to happen, we need to see audience growth, and opportunities for monetisation, which I’m more than happy to wait for, providing the numbers continue to stack up. The good news is that they’re already doing that during these early days, and my experience tells me that we are onto something.
More importantly, we’re really enjoying making them. It doesn’t feel like an effort, and it doesn’t get in the way of the rest of the business; the way the vlog is filmed means I can easily slot the little clips into my day. The only additional overhead is the editing time, but even that is a relatively minor hit on the rest of the business, and as time draws on, will become an even faster routine.
Will it stick? If you guys keep watching and enjoying the vlogs - absolutely. And on that note, thank you if you’re already fully locked in; your views and comments mean the world to us and spur us on.