We were asked online recently, “Can you resurrect a stagnant channel or do you have to change your identity and start over?”

This is something we’re working on ourselves here at Video Creators. For personal reasons, I had to stop making videos and now we’re getting back to resurrecting the channel. So how are we going get back to doing millions of views per month after taking a break for a while? Let’s talk about that today.

CREATOR SPOTLIGHT

But first, I want to introduce you to Robyn. She pivoted from one niche into another and did so successfully. Pivoting is really a scary thing for people. But she has done it once and is doing it again. Robyn has a passion for helping moms eliminate chaos in their lives. When she started her channel, she focused completely on gardening, but since then, she has changed her focus to cleaning and she might shift again to meal planning. She can do this successfully because instead of focusing on the “what” the channel is about, she has kept in view the broader picture of ‘WHY” it matters. And since it all fits under the over-arching idea of eliminating chaos, it works! If you’re wanting some one-on-one guidance on how to do this on your channel, we are here to help.

But now, let me bring you back to 2020. I was STRESSED. The business was booming, which is good, but I had no idea what I was doing and was just working insane hours to try to keep up. That combined with some personal trials and I woke up in the worst pain of my life. I felt like my stomach was clamping down on a double edged sword and it turns out it was all due to stress. Something had to give and it ended up being creating content for our YouTube Channel. It had done its job of bringing in clients and so we just stepped away.

Today we are in a totally different place. We have several strategists on our team, multiple admin assistants, and a producer and we need to get back in the grove of making videos. Our videos once had close to millions of views and now we have more like 100,000 views. So we need to resurrect this channel. But how?

Create a New Goal

Don’t worry about sticking to a strict posting schedule. Give yourself space to figure that out and get back in the rhythm of creating videos again. Assess what worked for you and what didn’t the first time around. Learn from your mistakes and move forward with this information in mind.

Create a New Strategy

Focus on making highly discoverable videos. Normally, we would recommend using the three bucket strategy of discoverable, community and sales videos. The discoverable videos have the goal of reaching out to people who don’t already watch your content. This is where you need to focus at this time. Don’t try to sell them anything or try to send them off the platform. Focus on videos that are shorter, more visual and easier to consume.

Track your progress

You need to measure yourself to see if you’re going in the right direction. Track where you are right now: Average views, uploads watch time, click-through rates, etc. Then, measure yourself at least monthly. Click on your advanced analytics and only look at the videos that were just published this last month or last week. This will give you the most accurate information on your new content and not take your old stuff into consideration.

Work through the Hiccups

You have to give yourself some grace. You’re going to have some thing go wrong. You are going to have some things break in the process and that’s ok. On our channel, we dealing with several hands being responsible for each video. But for you it might be a series that isn’t working or problems with equipment, etc. No matter what it is, don’t give up. Work through it. Expect to have problems and people that don’t like what you’re doing. Don’t let it drag you down.

People often ask, if my channel is dead, should I just start a new channel or try to resurrect an old one? I would say, don’t start from scratch. You have some audience there so use it. If you’re going in a completely different direction, make a super short video explaining that and then go for it. You might get quite a bit of unsubscribes at first, but that’s to be expected. You also might have quite a few people who like the change and will cheer you on.

POWER TIP

Perhaps you want to let the kids watch some videos, or you need to research something that you don’t want to muddy up your recommendations—for these and other reasons, YouTube on mobile has an incognito mode that you can enable by tapping your profile picture (top right) on the main Home screen, and then choosing “Turn on Incognito.”

Incognito mode works exactly as you might expect. Your viewing history won’t be stored, and the videos you watch won’t interfere with your recommendations. Tap the incognito button (top right) to turn it off again. There’s no similar option on the web interface, but you can just use a browser window in incognito mode for the same job.

Have a comment, reaction, question or just want to say hi? Leave a voice message for us and we may use it in an upcoming podcast episode. Until then…

Keep Changing Lives!

Tim Schmoyer