The Biggest Mistake Aspiring YouTube Creators Make on their YouTube Channels with Sky from Sky Life: The YouTube Power Hour Podcast 323
“If people don’t click, they don’t watch”
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Sky Cowans is a video creator who explores the world of wellness, spirituality, and alternative lifestyle on her YouTube channel Sky Life. Through documentary-style videos, Sky follows her curiosity and shares what she learns along the way.
Sky has always had an interest in creating videos, and she’s been editing videos since high school, but it wasn’t until after she studied Broadcast Journalism and got a job at Buzzfeed making YouTube videos that she figured out you could have a career and make money on YouTube. In 2018, after a few other jobs where she worked as a content producer, she started her own channel. At the time, she was working full time and working on her channel at nights and on weekends, and while she was driven by her passion, balancing the two eventually began to burn her out. With YouTube being a full-time job in and of itself, she knew something had to give, so she decided to go all in on her channel. At the time, she had around 70k subscribers and she was getting some brand deals and making a little money off it, so she figured, if this was what she was able to accomplish while she was working full time, imagine where she could take her channel if she was able to leave her job and devote more time to her channel.
“I pride myself in making content you may not typically see on YouTube.”
Passion is Key
For Sky, the driving force behind her channel has always been her creative passion for creating content, and her videos are so unique and different to what you normally see on YouTube. There’s a cinematic element to them, and so Sky considers herself like a filmmaker. She is more driven by the type of content she creates and being aligned in her mission rather than numbers. She wants her channel to be successful, but she’s not motivated by how many subscribers or views she has. Her channel is very niche and focuses mainly on alternative lifestyles and spirituality. She’s never really had an interest in the viral trends, and the way she was trained at Buzzfeed is not the way she operates her channel because that’s not what she’s passionate about. All the years of training helped her be able to grow a channel and helped her learn the skills she needed, but as far as her content goes, Sky deviates heavily from the Buzzfeed videos she made as an employee there.
Knowing When to Outsource
Up until recently, Sky edited her own videos and since she’s done it for so long, she’s very good at it and has a very specific style. It was hard for her to let go of that and outsource and delegate her editing to someone else who could match her style and skill level, but with such a long, involved process to create her videos, she realized that she needed to, so she posted a video saying she was hiring an editor, and to find someone, she reviewed the applications, the applicants’ video submissions, she gave them a test project to edit, and even she even paid attention to how the applicants structured their emails and organized their projects. Luckily, she found her unicorn and now has an incredibly talented video editor on her team.
The Importance of Thumbnails and Titles
One of the biggest things Sky learned while working for Buzzfeed is how crucial titles and thumbnails are, so she prioritizes this a lot in her own channel. If people don’t click, they don’t watch, and the CTR is the first point of success for the video. If she doesn’t think the video will have a strong enough title and thumbnail, she probably won’t make it unless she feels like her heart needs to make it and that there’s a story that needs to be told. She takes things a step further and actually polls her instagram audience on her titles and thumbnails!
Knowing Your Why
So what’s the #1 mistake YouTubers make? A lot of creators make content without knowing why they’re creating it. They are creating content in an attempt to blow up on YouTube or Tiktok, or making content just to get views and build a following. There are a lot of creators out there who don’t know who they are as a creator, what their mission is, or who they are creating their content for. Thinking about your why and your mission should be the first step you take in the beginning of your YouTube journey. For Sky, it was her why that got her through all the times she wanted to quit, what empowered and emboldened her to keep going, and what makes the process of content creating a truly enjoyable one. When creators are aligned with their why, the content is higher quality, and everyone wins!
Don’t just upload for the sake of uploading
Sky spends upwards of an entire day shooting for one video. She posts 1 video a week, and stuck to that religiously for 2 years, but she found that while a lot of the videos were great, sometimes she was just throwing a video together that wasn’t as good just to fill a week for the sake of consistency, which overall hurt her channel. Sky prefers quality over quantity.
Final Thoughts
What Sky loves the most about YouTube is that it gives her the creative freedom to create whatever she wants to make, and even though that pesky algorithm is one that nobody can really seem to nail down, YouTube has been a place for Sky to create heart-centered content that she feels deeply passionate about, and where she has built a community where she feels really connected to her audience. She approaches every video she creates with openness and curiosity and she hopes to inspire that same curiosity in her viewers.
“Anything coming from your soul is going to speak to people.”
Mentioned in the Episode:
Why I still do the WIM HOF METHOD
Inside the dark world of Mexico’s Satanist King
This Woman Can Talk to Aliens (Light Language)
Connect with Sky:
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Creating Content During Crisis: How to Create Impactful Content During COVID-19 Pandemic
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- 4k Camera: Great for starting out and vlogging
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