#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.