498-Creating For Youtube....Again, My Plans and What To Expect

I’m a Youtube creator and have been since 2006 if you can believe it. In fact, I was sitting in Florida with a friend and he showed me this new site in the middle of 2005 called Youtube. The trouble was every 4th or 5th video was some sort of pornography. we could not believe that this type of content was freely available to anyone, anytime especially since we both had young children at that time.

At the beginning of 2006, I was shooting my barn apartment and posting videos on Youtube made with a Flipcam and some halogen construction lights from home depot. the oldest video sitting on my channel is attached in the show notes and it’s 16 years old.

The platform was new but I gained a following pretty quickly and in 2007 Youtube contacted me by phone and invited me to be part of the new partner program. I was one of 100 partners invited and we were just people who had done some basic branding and tried to make real videos.

The guy was named Ben Smith and he said as a partner I’d have access to new features and even some money-making opportunities as they rolled these features out. A few months later he invited me to get a new email address on a service they were launching called Gmail, so I registered my name, and my address is keithsnw@gmail dot com.

As weeks went by I just started shooting videos and posting videos. Eventually, I hired some local guys to help edit and eventually shoot the videos and one thing led to another. Along the way, they started rolling ads and some payments were coming my way, but honestly, Youtube was just a place we published videos after they went on Harvest Eating.com to my subscribers.

We just made a basic title, “How to make chicken soup” for example, and added a link back to my website. Eventually, they started sending monthly checks and I remember when I thought, wow, this is a good side income. Around 2012 or so, but can’t remember the exact time, they changed the algorithm and focused on new metrics and stopped paying me and I lost the ability to monetize the videos.

Occasionally over the years I started adding a few videos here and there but never focused on them too much as I was busy with TV shows, podcasts, consulting, and other stuff. But I recently have decided to start becoming an official creator again with regular new content posts and trying to learn how the system actually works and how it can become more of a career than just a hobby.

One thing I know for sure, you good people out there want to hear from me regarding food and cooking and homesteading, etc. So why not take part in the biggest publishing platform on planet Earth? Heck, I have seen and even coached and encouraged other new publishers in the food and other genres and seen them take off huge in a matter of 2-3 years, from scratch.

One guy went from 1,900 subscribers in 2020 to 985,000 today. So I’d like to take part in this new platform myself and be able to share my love of food with you all again.

I’m having to reteach myself how to shoot Youtube videos and also how to edit videos again. I made a lot of videos from 2016-2019 for Food Storage Feast, but I used a cheap, old camera that only shot in 720p which is barely HD. Now I have purchased a nice Canon camera with a nifty macro lens and some other equipment to make the shoot more professional.

I am even considering doing on-cam work again too, although that complicated things immensely. I am working a bit with my son to have these videos edited as he learned a bit in school and is a serious computer user and gamer so I hope t take advantage of his skills and pay him to help at least edit and possibly shoot too. I have shot the first video, a sweet chili sauce, a link will be added to these show notes once I publish that and a second video is under production, we were shooting yesterday afternoon when the battery I just charged, quit. Lesson learned, buy backup batteries. I purchased two more batteries and those arrive today or tomorrow.

So I just wanted to chat about what goes into shooting a video and how working with the Youtube algorithm is the key to making this succeed. I am learning as much as I can and let me tell you, the platform has changed a lot since I started using it, and even since 2019 it’s changed a lot.

I’ll be honest, creating videos for a platform that regularly censors people is hard to take personally, but with the move to a homestead in my future, I want to be able to have a nice side income while I work on the farm, if the economy makes it that long.

Even though it does censor it’s still such a great tool for learning, education and even making a living it’s hard to ignore. The other platforms like Rumble, Brighteon, etc. are promising, but they are a drop in the ocean compared to Youtube. I plan to use Youtube to help sell my course, my coffee, my spices, and hopefully my farm property food offerings. We will see where this whole thing goes.

So in closing, I ask humbly you to help support me in this mission by subscribing to my channel and watching videos to help my metrics.