Know Your Goals, And You Will Grow
How to block out hype and the shinies you find along the way.
All they wanted to do was to help me grow my channel.
I’m a small-time Youtuber at this point with the hopes of someday monetizing the channel. The only issue is that it’s a pretty long road for that to happen.
I need over 500 subscribers (which I have), upload 3 videos over the past 90 days (I’ll be on track with that for my upcoming video.)
And most importantly, I need 3,000 watch hours over the past year.
The watch hours is the big thing since my videos right now don’t get many views and the watch time is very low right now. Part of the problem might be due to the fact all my old videos have no tags and the description isn’t fully optimized.
That and probably the thumbnails could use some work too.
But in terms of getting those views up, I was recently approached by an SEO marketer who would help me with all that.
And then things started to get weirder.
I arranged for a meeting on Wednesday with her and her business partner and leading up to this meeting I made clear two things:
- First was that I had literally no budget at all for any marketing for my Youtube channel at this point. My goal right now is to be consistent in making videos.
- Second, I am not comfortable with giving anyone access to my channel.
It seemed like everything was pretty clear about all of this but the first weird thing was the fact the marketer I was chatting with the entire time, wasn’t able to send me an invite link to the meeting call.
There were multiple times when she told me she’d sent the link and I received nothing.
I even checked Zoom to see if somehow you get pop ups when you’re invited to meetings. I didn’t.
I had to arrange the meeting myself.
Once in the meeting, she had her business partner take over. From the meeting we basically covered two things:
- Pricing and budget.
- And how to give other users access to one’s Youtube channel.
It didn’t help much that I only pieced together about three quarters of what the business partner was saying. The accent barrier was strong and fast talking makes it worse.
But the whole experience was a trip.
There’s definitely some lessons in communication in there, along with a few business lessons. But what I want to be highlighting more is how this whole experience reinforces the value of goals, sticking to them, and grasping what they are.
Goals Are More Nuanced Than You Think
Goals is one of the obvious staples to self-help. It’s the obvious targets that we are looking to work towards and achieve. When we hit those targets, we grow as a person and elevate ourselves in a unique way from that.
My goal with Youtube is to be consistent in my content creation.
That marketer’s goal is to be making more money.
But there are far more nuances to it. I learned this many years ago when I learned having a “why” or reason for working towards that goal provides more motivation to achieve that goal.
What I didn’t realize back then is every aspect around a goal has something deeper to it. That story is an example of specific obstacles that check something specific about your goals:
How bendable is that goal of yours?
For a lot of us, our goals are similar. We all want to save up, have a comfortable and sustainable lifestyle and so on. But as I’ve noted plenty of times before, the means and justifications we each take to achieve that goal is different most of the time.
Some of us will take an easy path while others will take a harder path.
Some will determine a path based on their own values and beliefs.
Others will factor in life situations, and how they feel about the goal right now.
From our emotions to the difficulty, and what we believe in, goals are more nuanced when we communicate them and how we deal with distractions along the way.
That phone call for me was definitely a distraction. It was an easy route for me since the only criteria I was missing at this point is the watch time. That could easily be solved with a nice big marketing package to bolster my views from the double digits to high triple or quadruple digits.
But the issue here is that while that marketing agency sees my channel ripe for monetization, I see my channel as something effectively brand new. To me, my channel feels like I only have two videos. Not the 250+ that are there from years ago.
And so we had a conflict of goals.
Along our journey in growth, our goals will have these kinds of moments. It doesn’t always take the shape of a third party. Sometimes we face failure and doubt whether we’re making the right decision or not. Other times we just doubt ourselves and get lost in our head about something.
Sometimes we get stuck and aren’t sure what to do.
In a world where there are so many different methods and those methods having other alternatives to them, it can feel overwhelmed what is the best course of action.
But all of this comes back to how well do you know your goal.
How To Pick The “Best” Path
At the end of the day, we don’t fully know what is the best path to be taking for a goal. Considering I’ve now realized how (relatively) close I am to monetization, I can see why that marketing company reached out to me in the first place.
Either way, based on how the meeting was handled and leading up to it, I have no trust at all in them.
But at the same time, it reinforces a lot of what I’ve been mentioning in my recent articles. That I can do better on my channel and start changing my behaviour little by little. Much in the same way I was doing with encouraging myself to get back into video creation.
I can start adding tags, being more mindful of the description of the video, and make better titles and thumbnails.
Yeah it costs time, but I have a good bit of it. And with me not making as much money as I used to, throwing money at this issue doesn’t seem like a viable thing right now.
This decision all boils down to the goal I have in mind and how I ideally want to deal with it based on my current situation. To me Youtube is a hobby that I’d like to eventually turn into another stream of income. Youtube isn’t my main thing, but I’d like it to be somewhat viable for me in the future.
Trying to speed up that process by getting marketing help right now doesn’t feel like the right answer to my problem. Not when I can just learn how to do those things better.
What this allows is that we’re not skipping out on our own growth. That we’re doing things our own way and growing from the experiences. For sure, it’s not always the optimal route, but being able to walk away from an experience with more wisdom is valuable in its own way.
To know your goals is to know yourself and where you want to go. We need goals in our lives and knowing how we want to achieve it is just as important.
One of the core tenants for goal achieving is to be enjoying the process as well. And I think it’s essential to be centered on what your goal truly is to ensure you don’t get swooped up or distracted by something else.
Even if that something else will make achieving your goal easier and much faster, there is always a case for doing things your own way and sticking to your values.
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