Today’s article might be a little different. I dive into my own goals and processes to find my way. Follow along and see if this line of thinking can be valuable to you, as you work towards your goals as well.
For this topic, I’ve been I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, who cares about me? I’m not talking about whether someone should care about you as a person, just in the goals you’re working towards selling them on.
For over ten years now, I’ve been learning how to write novels and make movies. It’s my dream job. But with so much entertainment out there in the book and video world, how is anyone going to find me, let alone want the art I’m creating?
As I get started into this new career, I’ve been taking 2025 as a transitional period. I’ve been stepping back from my construction job a little, and been focusing more on my writing and film making.
Granted, I’ve also been getting two major foot surgeries this year, one in April, and one in September, which have prevented me from being terribly mobile. So aside from my writing, I’ve bee working on building a YouTube Platform.
If you’ve ever done anything like this, you probably know, it can be a little disheartening. Lets talk about it.
- Getting Noticed Amidst All The Noise
When I first started self publishing my books, I was doing so under the pen name of B.C. Crow. This was because they were my first books, and I felt they weren’t going to be up to the standard that I wanted to write at. So I chose to publish them, in hopes of recouping some money. I was able to sell several copies, though I quickly lost ambition to sell more, because I felt they needed to be better, and I didn’t want somebody to pay good money for less than stellar storytelling.
Flash forward to today, my writing has improved markedly. But did I spend a lot of time promoting my last book? No. In fact, I almost published it silently, hoping instead for a slow and steady buildup of momentum, because I didn’t want to sink a lot of marketing into that book, only to have it go wasted for my readers by not having another good book published and waiting for them.
I am getting closer to having that next book ready for publication, and will thus be starting a larger marketing push, however there’s still that nagging fear in the back of my mind, will anyone buy it?
This is the same with my YouTube channel. I’ve been pretty steady about posting content that I think would be helpful for someone wanting to follow in my same footsteps. However, starting out from nothing, hoping it turns into something is tough.
I often ask myself, am I doing something wrong, right, or does it just take time to get noticed? Will it ever get noticed?
These doubts can easily get a person down if they’re not careful.
- How To Keep On Keeping On
There’s a couple of thought I have on this. First is that you need to make sure that what you’re doing is relevant, that it solves a need that someone else has. The question is, how do you know what their needs are?
I often feel like most marketing advice is telling me to read my audiences mind, when in fact, I barely even know who my audience is. In fact, I feel I have two separate audiences. One that should be interested in my style of fiction, both literary and visual, and then there’s the people like me, who were enjoying their jobs, life, etc, but then got addicted to writing and film-making, and wanted to someday make a career out of it.
What I don’t know, is how many people out there are there like that? Also how many of them are willing to test out my works of fiction? I don’t know.
I can guess there’s a healthy amount, because some of the places I’ve learned from or been inspired by on YouTube, have had decent sized audiences, but are they all tapped out? Will they find my content valuable?
A lot of marketing advice seems centered around people who already have some track record, not those who are starting from scratch.
My other thoughts on figuring this all out, is to ignore all the noise and do what you’re passionate about. Passion often creates its own momentum. The problem with this line of thinking is that you could get trapped in a long-term play that never pans out.
The passion project though, does merit some consideration. By enlarge, despite diversified tastes, a lot of people are more similar than you might think. We all face many similar challenges with work, money, family, health, and confidence. If there’s something you’re passionate about, chances aren’t too far off that there are others with similar tastes, even if they don’t know it yet.
I think finding a marriage between knowing and catering to your audience, combined with following your passion is helpful. The trick is, doing what you’re passionate about, then finding your audience and guiding them to see why your perspective is relevant to them.
- Using The Tools Available
YouTube is not the endgame for most of us, its a tool. All the marketing subscriptions to help leverage your YouTube Channel are tools as well. Blogs and Facebook and so many other things out there will likely never be your endgame, they just help you find and understand your audience.
So for me, and maybe for you, the game isn’t about having the biggest social media following. The goal is to know who I can provide value to, and then to supply them with that special brand of value that I’m so passionate about creating, without wasting tons of money and effort chasing down the wrong audience.
Getting monetized on YouTube is not what I want to pay my bills with. Getting monetized on that platform would for me, serve only to justify that I’ve found my market, and to help support my development of that audience.
So as I evaluate my current strategy on YouTube, I realize that since I want to make my career from writing books and making movies, that the content I create on YouTube might not develop that type of audience, since my content is just trying to help the people on my same journey.
Perhaps some of them will appreciate my stories as well, but there is a disconnect. So would it be smart of me to change my tactics?
Probably.
Could I pursue both at this time?
Sure, but it won’t likely forward my end goal.
So what should I do?
I’m conflicted here. I know what I should do, I should harmonize my content that I put out there, with the fiction I want to be writing. At the same time, there’s a lot of important lessons that I want to produce content over, for no other reason than the fact that my family has expressed an interest in learning what I know about finance and other things that could help them in their lives.
Whenever I’ve tried to teach them about the things they want to know, the lessons get long and they get overwhelmed. So breaking them down into 10-15 minute YouTube videos, with some fun skits mingled in, is an easily digestible way of teaching them.
So yes, I want to keep producing the YouTube content and Blogs that I want them to learn from, but at the same time, I need to find a better connection with my audience.
I—in fact, had not come to this conclusion prior to starting this article. You have just witnessed my self-revelation in the making. So the next step for me, if I choose not to foolishly ignore my own advice, would be to find ways to change my approach.
Can I still make content for my family and storytellers like me?
Yes, I believe so, but I need to be more strategic about how I do this. The first thought that comes to mind, would be to lean more into my skits, and less into my lectures at the end of the skits. Kind of like when you watch a movie, then stick around to hear the commentary or behind the scenes that went with that.
This creates another problem, finding the time and budget to make skits that are more than 1 or 2 minutes long is hard. At some point, I’ll have to start hiring someone to help me, rather than just doing them all myself, with the occasional help from my wife.
That or I can take another approach, and forget about my plans to teach my family and followers from my YouTube content, opting instead to talk about fiction, and movies, and such.
I guess I’ve got some thinking to do. But for now, I hope this exercise has helped you see some of the questions you could ask yourself as you’re looking to discover your audience and connect with them.
As for me, for the near term, I’ll keep posting as I’ve planned, but I might start making some small pivots to be more relevant.
If you have any thoughts, comments, questions, please address them to the comments section in the YouTube Video associated with this topic at:
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