I’ve been planning to start a YouTube membership at the beginning of next year. The start of the year tends to be a good time for an exercise channel, and I believe views and engagement will likely increase then. I haven’t made a final decision yet, but a few messages and comments have strengthened the idea. A few weeks ago, one viewer even sent me an email asking for my affiliate links so they could order something and make sure I’d get a commission. And today, one enthusiastic subscriber asked for my bank account number so they could send a monthly payment to support my work. Even though it’s just two people, it really made me feel that when you offer people something valuable, they’re willing to support it (even though they could access it for free). Today I published a video where I talked a bit about money. I used to run these remote workouts as a paid service, but partly because of financial challenges, I ended that paid service—it wasn’t profitable—and started the YouTube channel instead. In today’s video, I talked about that time period. In an upcoming video, I’ll be summarizing my first two years on YouTube, and I’ll probably discuss the amount of work involved and such. And if I do launch the channel membership, I’ll likely mention it in that video as well. We also talked about YouTube memberships in this week’s call, so I’d be happy to hear if anyone has experience with it. I’ve personally built member pages on a WordPress website before, so I know the challenges, workload, and costs involved. That’s why, in this case, I’d gladly pay YouTube 30% of the income—since they’ll have a shared interest in making the membership work and generate revenue. And once I finally get my 70+ audience to become YouTube users, I definitely don’t want to confuse them by sending them off to some other platform. And since my audience is also Finnish-speaking, not all platforms would even work well for them. 😅

Here are the goals you all posted at the beginning of September - Anyone complete them?!? Share your wins below!

I've been working with Lori for about a month now, and she had a major breakthrough with her most recent video. Not in views yet, but in delivery and creating connection with the viewer. It made me cry and smile all at the same time. I’ll place the video below if you want to watch it, but the point I want to make is this — I remembered practically every bit of her story in the video, down to the comment about the feeling inside the hospital. She connected to my heart and my emotions, and that made me remember, learn, and hear her teachings. Yet I could watch a listicle video and not remember a single thing. THIS is the power of story. THIS is what separates one YouTuber from the next. Everyone can ask ChatGPT to make a script and read it to the camera, but NO ONE can speak your story or your experiences for you. And when you tap into your essence and share that through YouTube, you become unstoppable. I know not everyone wants to share personal stories — and that’s not entirely the point. Share what you want and what you feel comfortable with, but what I am saying is: learn how to tell stories. Commonly, I hear people describe things void of any emotion, such as: “I went to the store and I tried to buy my kids food, but I realized I didn’t have enough money, so we left the store. It was embarrassing.” Versus: “We walked into the store starving. My kids hadn’t had a proper meal in days. We found some cheap, day-old buns and could already taste the sweetness before getting to the cashier counter. But when the cashier scanned the items, my heart sank — they were priced wrong. We couldn’t afford them. Not even one of them. I was so ashamed, I tried to play it off like I forgot my wallet, but my children knew I had it with me. They pleaded at me with their eyes, please mommy, buy them, and it was then, in that moment, that I knew…” Can you see the difference? Feel the difference? One story is forgettable. The other is unforgettable. Here is her video and by the way her retention for this video was THROUGH THE ROOF! Power of story. Learn this skill and you will thrive on youtube.

Since I joined this group the day before I actually launched my channel it seems appropriate to share this here and to thank @Alexa Saarenoja for all of her encouragement and insights in the early days of my channel. Subscribers are only one metric of a channel, but I am pretty excited at hitting 30,000 subscribers. Especially since I started my channel at 80 years old and I only do this part time, with a total of 61 videos and six of them are shorts. Actually, I am more excited about the comments and the shares. The shares, especially indicate word-of-mouth which there is no way you could buy this advertising. It is the secret sauce of a channel’s growth.

I was laid off, had three kids at home, and YouTube felt like a crazy idea. But one thought shifted everything: “What if this works?” What if this channel could be your way out? What if it helps thousands of people? What if you never have to ask for permission again? You don’t need to go viral. You just need to go all in. Be scared. Be imperfect.But FULLY believe in yourself. YOU CAN DO THIS! xoxo