Recently I’ve dusted off an idea I had 5 years ago and re-launched my YouTube channel, Young Career Pros. On the channel, I feature tutorials and career advice for — you guessed it — young career professionals! The concept of the channel is to dish out everything from fundamentals to advanced skills that will work together to help a person produce better work and ultimately advance in their respective jobs/career path.
So do you want to hear a story? Having a YouTube channel with less than 10 videos in 2021 hardly seems blogworthy, and I’m a pretty busy person, so why take on a YouTube project? Thinking back to when I first had the idea, in January 2016, I had been in business for myself for a little over a year and was not doing half bad. I had landed several well-paying consultant gigs. They were very rewarding, but also very short term, which means I had a fair amount of down time between gigs — which in all honesty means sometimes I was not sure what gig was next or when that would be. Little did I know a really good one was right around the corner (spoiler alert, it was NOT YouTube fame waiting in the wings). Regardless, I wanted to do something with my time that would build my skills, give something of value to others, and maybe become another business or income stream. I had already launched ginanairn.com and was creating content for that whenever I had time. One of my blog ideas was to create a tutorial for a certain topic in Word that really lended itself to video more than written instructions. So, that was the driver by which I launched Young Career Pros with a single video, a Microsoft Word tutorial on Heirarchical Numbering in Word.
Remember when I started this story that I said a really good gig was around the corner. I landed a consulting gig that was only supposed to last 6 months tops, and here I am still with that same customer today. Soooo… the blog and the YouTube channel quickly took a back seat. I did write a bit more here and there for ginanairn.com over the years, but not consistently. My “day job” was booming and that was plenty of blessing for me! Fast forward to 2020 when the world shut down… and suddenly we ALLLL had a lot more time on our hands. No judgement here, but I can only binge watch so much Netflix, so I was looking for things to do. I poured myself into family time and music and counted my blessings once again that everyone in my circle was healthy. One weekend afternoon I was hanging out with the kids (probably binge watching something on Netflix) and I noticed a notification on my phone: “so-and-so has subscribed to your YouTube channel.” I ignored it. But then I started noticing that I was getting several of these notifications every week. Sometimes it was every day. Honestly I had kind of forgotten I even had a channel. Finally curiosity got the best of me and I decided to check in on it. To my complete surprise, my one-video channel had almost 400 subscribers and that one video had nearly 100,000 views!
Those numbers are actually quite small by YouTube standards, but I was completely blown away. Based on what happened when I initially posted it (or should I say, what didn’t happen — no one watched it)… I really thought that the effort I had expended to create and edit that video had been kind of a waste of time. I started reading the comments and I could not believe it. There were hundreds of thank-yous and kudos and compliments on my “one dumb video.”
Needless to say, it sparked my interest, but I did not take immediate action. I decided to brainstorm and research a bit. I had a little bit of extra time given that the world was locked down. I love creating and editing video and I REALLY love teaching. So, in the fall of 2020, I started creating again, and the channel growth is starting to take off. In 2020 we doubled our subscriber count. At such small numbers that really isn’t saying much, but I am proud of the growth and I’ll be “throwing in” a little more in 2021 to keep it going.