I do wish I started doing Youtube sooner. I feel like I would be much further along to meeting my goals than where I am currently. I always thought I would feel silly and lacked the confidence to just jump in there and do it. I do think that comes from age and getting older. Getting older, I’m more inclined to jump into things I’m not necessarily comfortable with and YouTube was certainly that starting out. Now I look back and realize that I could have done it earlier but that’s the benefit of hindsight. People find the channel every day, and it’s awesome to see new people find it and reach out.

I started a Youtube channel called TomWasHere about 5 years ago. I didn’t go into it with any sort of expectation but it was more an excuse to get off the couch and go see things I always wanted to see. It’s since turned into a channel to explore all of my interests. I always try to find places to go but there is no set niche or theme to the videos. I may cover a sporting event, open up a mystery box, and walk through a haunted house in the same week. It’s now become a Youtube variety channel of my interests. YouTube generally wants you to follow a niche so it knows where to send your videos, but I have such a wide variety of interests that I don’t really have a niche. I just hope that you find the channel and a video I did covering a topic you like and stay for something you may not like. So every other person can have their own YouTube niche and I’ll be happy with my small corner of the internet.

When I started out, I really wasn’t sure how to get my Youtube channel off the ground so I shared it everywhere. I didn’t want to be shy about it, I wanted it known that this was what I was doing and was willing to commit to it. It’s always tough to put yourself out there and discouraging when you don’t do well out of the gate. My advice is to do what I did and stay with it. Keep trying new things, don’t be afraid of putting more content into the world. Don’t be discouraged by a lack of views and engagement because that is something that will come with time. If you decide to do start doing YouTube, you have to fully commit. It’s not just filming – that’s only part of it. You have to edit the video, make a good thumbnail, write out a description and add tags/hashtags for further engagement. It’s a longer process and it takes time.

When starting in Youtube, I really just pushed my stuff to my main pages on places like Facebook and Twitter. I really wasn’t sure where else to post stuff. Now I know that there are dedicated pages for almost every topic out there. There are Reddit and Facebook groups to almost every topic you may make a video on and it’s a good way to get like minded people to find your video. There are also pages like Patreon where you can ask your subscribers for support. You can use Google Ads and Facebook ads to promote your videos. There are a ton of different ways to push your video to as many eyeballs as possible beyond hoping that the Youtube algorithm will do that for you.