How I Launched a YouTube Channel in a Day: Motivation and Content Plan

Last week, I launched my YouTube channel.

I did it in a day.

I thought I’d give you a peek behind the scenes at how I did it.

Throughout this week, I’ll put up an article a day, each outlining a key component of the launch process. It wasn’t NEARLY as hard as I thought it would be, so come along for the ride and I’ll show you how I made it happen.

But first… the Harassment List

The IttyBiz community has been INSANELY supportive of this admittedly weird and wild endeavor. THANK YOU. YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. SO AMAZING THAT I CAN’T TURN MY CAPS LOCK OFF.

I’ve also received a lot of offers of help.

If you would like to help me, I would be so grateful.

I’ve set up a little list (affectionately referred to by the Write a Book With Me folks as The Harassment List) that you can get on to help my little baby YouTube channel grow.

What happens when you get on it?

I’ll send you an email each time a new video goes live so we can get early views, which is super important to the Algorithm Gods. And I’ll ask you questions. We’re going to do giveaways and reviews and things, and I’ll let you know first so that you can be among the very first to join the community.

(Also, I’ll probably bribe you. I get a lot of free stuff that needs a good home.)

If you would like to join the small army, please put your name in this box. I would be ABSURDLY grateful.

My YouTube Channel – My Two Whys

If you’re in Write a Book With Me, you’ll remember that one of the first things we talked about when we embarked on the project was having a solid understanding of your whys. Why are you doing this in the first place?

Your project is going to have two whys.

There’s YOUR why.

And there’s your CONSUMER’S why.

YOUR why is what you’re going to get out of it. Fame? Fortune? Legacy? Relief from the crushing boredom of human existence? That’s what’s in it for YOU.

Your CONSUMER’S why is what they’re going to get out of it. Are they there to learn something? To be inspired? To be entertained?

There are tons and tons of whys that we have, both as creators and as consumers, but at the beginning of a big project, it’s important to ascertain the primary whys – yours and the consumer’s.

My why for my YouTube Channel:

In short? Self-expression. In particular, the pink, girly, fluffy, gold-dipped part of myself that doesn’t get to come out and play nearly as much as I want her to.

Can I tell you a secret? When I launched IttyBiz, I SHAVED MY HEAD so I could have more time, attention and focus for work. I thought to myself, “If I took all the time I spent thinking about my hair, and spent it thinking about business? I could have one hell of a business.”

That’s how low-maintenance I was willing to go.

The problem was, a little bit of low maintenance here and a little bit of low maintenance there, and ten years later, I found myself unwittingly androgynous. Not cool, deliberate, rocking-it androgynous. Just completely devoid of the girliness within.

I saw these beauty YouTubers playing with makeup all day and I wanted in. I wanted to stop buying makeup and start wearing makeup. I wanted to stop consuming and start creating.

My consumer’s why for my YouTube channel:

Now, that’s why I’m making videos. Why is anybody watching them?

Here’s the thing about beauty YouTubers.

They’re young.

Like, really young.

Not all of them, sure. But a lot of them. And as you get a little older, it becomes harder and harder to identify with them. They have different needs, different beauty concerns, different wants, and different budgets.

It’s hard to watch 17-year-olds put six colors of glitter on their eyelids and see how that might apply to you.

At the same time, once you reach a certain age, the time gap between when you learned to put on makeup and now starts to seriously widen. Now makeup has tech. It can blur you. It can refine you. It can hide things. It can highlight things. It can do things it couldn’t do when we were learning to put makeup on.

So someone like me, or my mother, or my aunts, or my cousins – if we don’t have someone we can trust and identify with to teach us, we’re going to go into Sephora and be completely overwhelmed.

We’re going to buy the wrong stuff.

We’re going to buy nothing at all.

Or we’re going to buy the same damn stuff we’ve been buying since we were 21.

So I created Summer Hen. Because we’re not all spring chickens anymore.

Summer Hen is designed to be an inclusive beauty community – young enough (or young at heart enough) to have fun, to play, to enjoy what modern technology has to offer, but with new concerns. We don’t necessarily recognize this face we’ve ended up with, and we want to make the most of what we can. We want to be beautiful at any age.

(So far, my youngest viewer is 10 and my oldest is 71. How freaking cool is THAT?!)

So that’s my why for the consumer – making this new world of makeup accessible for those of us who aren’t 17 anymore.

Wanna see today’s video?

Yes, but why now?

My plan was to launch my YouTube channel some time in the next few weeks. But I really wanted to get an astrologer to help me find the most auspicious time and day to launch. (If you came to the Business Astro 2018 webinar, you’ll remember that Mars retrograde is approaching, and that’s not really a great time to start anything.)

So I got an astrologer, and was all set to have her take a few days to give me my auspicious options. She came back to me right away, on Tuesday of last week.

She gave me an amazing report (nearly all of which was above my head) and said the best time IN THE ENTIRE YEAR to launch was…

… the next day. Around noon.

Well, I didn’t shell out a bunch of money to a complete stranger to just ignore what they said because the timing was inconvenient. If the best day was Wednesday, we were launching on Wednesday.

(I’ll tell you more about how we brought it all together over the rest of this series.)

My YouTube Channel – The Content Plan

In my line of work, I frequently get asked how many blog posts you need before you launch your blog. I usually answer 10. (You can get away with 5. Twenty is awesome. But in general, you want to launch with 10.)

Ten blog posts gives people enough stuff to click on that they can get a feel for the place, and it doesn’t feel crazy new or crazy ghost town.

But!

How does that apply to a new YouTube channel?

I have no idea. My Google Fu came up empty. (Where is the ME of the YouTube world, someone willing to be bossy and just tell you what to do? I don’t know.)

My random, made up, pulled out of thin air plan was to launch with five videos, but I launched with three – it’s all I could get through post-production in time for launch.

I have heard from enough people that frequent posting is key to growing your YouTube channel, so I’m posting short videos every weekday. I used The One-Hour Content Plan to make a plan for what I could make videos about, and I came up with a list of about 100 possibilities.

I had a BEAST of a time figuring out what to start with. Some videos take a lot longer to create than others, and I didn’t have a lot of time. Also, I didn’t want to lead with all one type of video because that could get really boring for a new viewer. Since everybody’s a new viewer at this point, that was a real risk.

So the content plan is evolving as I go at this point. I have a few series I’m thinking of creating – What I learned about beauty this month, Should You Buy This, drugstore danceoffs, and tutorials for total noobs. But at this point, I’m just trying to create what I can based on the fact that I started… pretty quickly.

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about the tech – how I got the videos to look halfway decent, and the (legitimately) harrowing tale of how we got there. (You can read that post right over here!)

And again, if you'd like to help, join The Harassment List

If you would like to join our small army, to help create and grow the channel and (also get free stuff!) please put your name in this box. THANK YOU FOR HELPING MY DREAMS COME TRUE!!!

xx
ND

Naomi founded IttyBiz in 2006. You can find her IttyBiz business products in the Karma Store.