#3 Managing my first week of uploads

As soon as the first video of my main series went live on YouTube, I rushed to Facebook to share a status alerting my friends that I had started a gaming channel. My next step was to check the multiple groups on facebook that I had joined for networking with other gamers. I posted the video into each one of them and asked for any feedback to help structure my content in the future. I also made sure to try and engage with the community on posts other than mine so that I would not be what they refer to as a "link dropper." I wouldn't want to become a link dropper in the first place as it just feels disingenuous and that's not how I want to be or have others perceive me as. I had a decent enough response to the posts, though the groups are crowded with many link droppers and click-baited conversations that fill the feed. My next step was to look towards reddit and see if there were communities I could engage with there. After searching for an hour, I wasn't able to find a decent subreddit to join that contained similar creators and fostered growth. All of the pages I found were essentially pages with no interaction, just links being posted constantly.

My next step was to structure certain aspects about my videos that I had not considered until my video was publicly available. This included setting my language on my videos, optimizing an ending screen with my subscription button and link to another video, listing the game in the video information, creating links to content in the description of the videos, and establishing playlists. Once all of this was done, I looked for certain tools to help optimize my time when posting videos. This search led me to find an application called TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy is a fantastic tool that does many useful things for creators. It allows you to create lists for your tags instead of having to manually input them one by one as well as provides insight to search engine optimization and keywords that are used less often to give your video a way to stand out in searches. It has many analytics tools that show how your channel or any channel on YouTube performs by channel and by video. You can find how many views they have, the average watch time of the video, how often their videos show up in the average search for similar content, how often their tags appear in the video title or description, how often the channel or video was shared on facebook, twitter, and reddit, as well as giving a checklist of if the video has a high resolution thumbnail and which social media platforms it has been shared on. Hopefully this application will shorten the time it takes to post a video and I will be able to use its insights to further grow my channel.

#2 Getting my first video ready for publishing

I received my commissioned avatar from my friend and instantly jumped into branding my YouTube and Facebook pages. I spent some time looking up optimized picture dimensions for the social media platforms I planned to use and then went to Photoshop to begin creating banners and profile images.  My first log of videos that I had planned to work through were all from the same game which has a large cult following. Taking this knowledge, my girlfriend and I looked into multiple Facebook and Reddit groups to network with that contained members with similar tastes or were also looking to start and grow a gaming channel on YouTube. The groups look like traps where most members drop links to their channels without engaging with the community, but there may be some methods to encourage engagement with those members. My next step was looking into SEO for videos in the same category as my videos. I decided to use leading members of the community as an example for which tags to use and follower the format of the game title plus defining qualities for the type of video it was. YouTube normally hides this information, but I found an article through google that detailed how to use Google Chrome's inspect feature to discover which tags are used on a specific page.
Once I had figured out my methods for networking and defining my uploads, it was time to actually upload my videos. I decided my first week would be heavier in releases than others. I wanted to start off strong, so I uploaded 10 of the videos I had prepared and scheduled a video to be released every day for the first full week starting with Monday and then I would switch to a normal release schedule of one video every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. This schedule was catered towards allowing myself days off for school work that I will have in the upcoming summer and fall semesters. I did some research on what time to release videos for the best effect, but most of the tips only apply to channels with an established audience. Because I was just starting and I didn't have an established audience, I decided that 1PM eastern standard time would work fine until my channel grew. It is a time that works well for most of the US population, which I assume will be my main base of viewership.