Welcome to the UnCloned® Insider audio newsletter. My name is Audria Richmond, and I am your marketing and launch strategist. I work directly with my clients to show them how to build uncloned brands and launch profitable marketing campaigns. We are the brand that you come to when you want to become or remain the obvious choice of your industry. Hey, y'all.

What's going on? I wanna talk to you all today about a major milestone that we've been working towards. And if you have been coming to all of our Wednesday YouTube videos, you are a part of this celebration. Y'all, we are now monetized on YouTube. Okay?

Now there's 2 types of monetization. The first one is, like, your first 3000 hours, and then there's 4000 hours. What's the difference between the 2? When you hit your 3000 hour milestone, you can start asking for people to, you know, buy stickers when you're live. People can shop your videos.

They can also, I wanna say they can shop your videos, they can buy you stickers, and then I believe you can offer membership to your YouTube subscribers. But nevertheless, I'm so excited because we just hit the first official milestone. Now the second milestone is 4000 hours, and, essentially, that unlocks you being able to make money through the you know, how you know, do you put ads on people's videos? You get paid through that. Okay?

Now if you're a YouTube guru, don't come for me. I'm just kinda speaking to it the best way I know how. Right? Now one of the things I really wanna get into is, like, how long did it take to get monetized with my YouTube channel? And if this is something that you are pursuing this year, I just kinda wanna give you context in case you all want some pointers on how we went about doing it.

The first thing I would like to say before I get into, like, you know, how long did it take and, like, what do we do? I think the first thing to really bring attention to is the fact that we finally got serious about it. And I talked about this in my last audio newsletter about being consistent, but we just made a decision that we were going to do this. And I think that when you think about, like, oh, well, you know, how long does it take? And really when I think about anything besides just this YouTube channel monetization.

When you think about like, quote unquote, what it takes, it takes making the decision. That's number 1. And number 2, it takes being consistent and showing up on the times you said you was gonna show up, like today. Today is our audio newsletter and I'm I'm I feel like I wanna get some more sleep. I feel like I didn't get enough sleep today.

But guess what? I'm up recording this audio newsletter. And so I think it's important to show up even when you don't feel like it. Show up even when you're thinking about like, okay, what does this what what all does this take? And it takes the commitment to show up even when you don't feel like it.

I think, you know, a lot of the times when people talk about be consistent, be consistent, I think it's even more important to be consistent when you wanna quit, when you don't wanna do it. So I think that's one of the things that really contribute to us, you know, hitting this first milestone. We still gotta get to 5000 I mean, 4000 hours. But to hit 3000 hours, you know, with, you know, pacing ourselves at a pace that makes sense for us has been totally dope. Right?

So just to kinda give you a backstory real quick is that we decided that we were gonna officially start uploading on YouTube every single Wednesday starting on May 1, 2024. Now on May 1, 2024, we had accumulated 15,000 well, 1,515, hours. Okay? That's 1,515 hours. And so the goal was to get to 3000 hours.

And as of today, at the time of this recording is August 12th. So today is the day we got, like, you know, the notification that, hey. You can apply. You know, go ahead and get your account set up, so on and so forth. So from May 1, 2024 to August 12, 2024, that should give you context, right, of how long it took.

And so what are some of the things that we did to really get there? Number 1, we actually went back and uploaded, new thumbnails for all of our videos. We had, you know, it was so many videos over a 100 that we had to go and put a YouTube thumbnail on. It was a lot. And so we updated all of that.

The other thing we did is we started to go back and, like, rework some of the titles, hide some of the videos that probably didn't make sense, Kind of cleaned up, rearranged some videos, went back, add some hashtags, not hashtags, but, yeah, hashtags on the actual keywords and whatnot. So the keywords and, updated the the description of a lot of the different videos and, you know, we still learning this thing. Right? But that was like the first couple of things we did. The next thing we did was we updated the banner.

We updated my profile picture. That was another thing that we did. And then we just started uploading videos. So on May 1st, I wanna say I had about 5 videos that I had downloaded from my Instagram that will that I knew would be great on YouTube. And that was another thing we noticed too that people actually will watch a replay video, from YouTube not YouTube, but Instagram or whatever.

We tend to just brand ours and put them up, but that should give you a little context as well. Now what do we end up doing? So every Wednesday, we pretty much went live. The first, I think on May 1st was the day where we kinda had a lot of these premieres going out. And then that following, you know, Wednesday, I wanna say.

So let me look at my calendar so I can give you all some accurate dates. So May 1st let me go back on my calendar a little bit. Okay. So May 1st was the first Wednesday, and then officially on May 8th, and on and on down the road, we pretty much went live. And it worked out because one thing I learned about when you go live is that if somebody is attending a live stream and let's say that it's 30 minutes, 40 minutes, they're staying for the whole 30, 40 minutes.

And so you're instantly getting your watch time up, which I think has really contribute to us getting those the rest of those, 1500 watch hours that we needed. And so, that's something that I believe really helped too is going live. And so we're now at, 3,056 watch hours that's far that's a part of our monetization. We accumulated 471 new subscribers. We did get booked sales as well as 2 unclown lunch circle members from the time we've done it to now.

So can I say this is something that we continue to do? Absolutely. Because one thing we were seeing every month is that our YouTube channel is still growing every single month. So that's been a huge win. The other thing is, what did I learn?

1, be consistent with your uploads. We upload every single Wednesday or go live every single Wednesday. So either we gonna be upload or we gonna be going live, but we doing some every single Wednesday. And, you know, I would say pick a day that works for you that you know you can show up for. You know, I just pick Wednesdays because we already sent out something on Mondays, and then I want that to compete with the, you know, the YouTube.

So I kinda wanted YouTube to have its own day. The audio newsletter have its own day, and I didn't necessarily want them to compete with each other. I am going to get to the end of the year and decide if I wanna continue to do this audio newsletter, if you all are loving it or or not. And then kinda weigh the 2. Like, was YouTube more effective than this audio newsletter?

Did you all like both? Also, if you are part of the community, inside of our free Facebook group, come and let me know. Do you all like, you know, being able to come to the YouTube video on Wednesdays and listen to the audio on Mondays? Even though they're not shared conversation, we still talk about the same things that all leads to building an uncloned brand. Okay?

But I would love to know what you all think. The other thing is, what else did I learn? Both audio and video works for my audience. So there's days when I'm on camera and it works well, and there's days when I'm off camera and that works well as well. So we did notice that.

Let's see. Make sure all your videos have a YouTube thumbnail. We kinda got in the habit of making the thumbnails right around the time we make the video. That way it's like soon as the video is done or even before the video is live, we got the thumbnail already ready. So that helped as well.

Things that we're still gonna continue to work on is getting more views. I would love to see us start to have, I would say, a consistent, you know, 500 to a 1000 views, starting off. I do know that this is a fairly new channel that's getting cooked up, so I want us to spend more time with the with the views, the keywords, maybe the titles, things like that. We do need to start adding commercial breaks to our videos because people are watching the videos. So, you know, there's no need to not not have a way to have some type of commercial break within the content.

So that's something we're gonna start doing. But so far, so good. And this what I will say, it has been totally worth it. And if you're thinking about doing it, totally do it. Right?

Now I wanna know what is your biggest takeaway from this conversation? And I wanna know, do you have a YouTube channel? Is that something you're working on? Was this helpful? And I just wanna say thank y'all for watching any of the videos.

We're at Arjira Richmond on YouTube. So if you've ever watched any video, if you liked the video, if you came to a live video, if you left a comment, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for helping us, hit this first milestone. And we're gonna continue to keep uploading till we hit the 4000 watch hours.

So you all dress you all really drastically helped us do this. Right? So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I appreciate you for, like, so much for watching the videos and showing up for it. Alright? So until next time y'all, let's go live an UnCloned® life and build an UnCloned® brand. Bye y'all.