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Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
What I Learned From Making 900 House Cleaning Videos
What I learned from making 900 house cleaning videos. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve recorded my 900th Ask A House Cleaner show. And in our Monday morning alignment meeting, we were all talking about like, Whoa, we made it to 900 episodes.
And as a group, we were talking and thinking about some of the things that had happened. I am excited about where we are in our business right now, but I started going backward in time.
And what I wanted to share with you today are some of the things that I learned from having created 900 house cleaning videos.
I was Scared to Start My Channel
So, the very first thing, I was scared to start out this channel because I wasn’t going to market my business on YouTube. My ultimate desire and the end goal were to help house cleaners start their own house cleaning businesses through the Savvy Cleaner Program.
That was the end goal. Well, how do you reach the house cleaners you need? And so, somebody said a podcast, somebody said a YouTube show. I took the ideas that I was given and put them all into a little hopper. And I said, “Which is best?”
I did a little bit of research. Which would be the best approach for me? And I decided I would do a little of each of them. So I started out with a blog so that I could learn how to write a blog. I could learn how to add in some images and resize the images and a little bit about search engine optimization and those things.
The First Year I Only Did Blogs
So that was my first year. The first year, there was no YouTube channel or podcast. It was me and my little blog.
So now that I got the blogging underway, I said, “Okay, now it would make sense to add a little bit of audio and video media, but what does that look like?”
Now, one of the smartest things that I ever did, and I don’t know if it was being lazy or if it was being uneducated or whatever it was, it turned out to be a brilliant idea.
I Ended Up Wearing the Same Thing Every Day
Instead of having a whole bunch of different outfits and different hair and everything, I ended up wearing the same look every day.
Why it turned out to be brilliant is this: a lot of times when you’re making a video, you’ll screw something up, and either your video camera or audio will die. And you have to go do a pickup. I have done pickups that were two weeks later that patched together with an episode. And you never knew that it was filmed the first half now and the first two weeks later.
So I’ve been able to do pickup shots and put pieces of introductions and things like that together with different videos that we’ve done, because I was always in the same outfit and had the same background behind me.
I Also Keep the Same Background for Every Video
Now, the background behind me was also a great idea but it wasn’t originally my idea. I got it from a trade show.
So, I was looking at a trade show booth, and it was this great big monster trade show display. It was 10 feet wide and eight feet tall. And it had a picture on it. And I said, “Wait a second. You mean, you can screen capture a picture on a piece of stretch fabric, display it and it just goes wherever you go? How cool is that?”
My Screen is Actually a Trade Show Display
Well, at the time, I wasn’t even smart enough to know, understand, or manipulate a green screen. And so, the screen behind me is actually a trade show display. It’s 10 feet by eight feet stretch fabric. And it folds up.
It can go with me if I go to a trade show, but it stays right here in my studio. So, I never have to get the background clean. I don’t have to worry about what lots of YouTubers do, about having like little Christmas lights and beautiful things in the background. It’s cleaning supplies. And if a picture said a thousand words, what would that picture be?
And so, I chose plain residential cleaning supplies because to me that spoke to the audience that I’m speaking to. That was my setup. And the setup was to this day, 900 episodes later has proven to be a very good move. It became part of my brand and part of my marketing.
900 Shows Teaches You About Your Business
One of the other things that were a result of having 900 shows is the things that it teaches you about your own business. When you decide that you’re going to do this for the long haul, what does that look like?
And so, for me, it was a commitment that meant I had to make a video every single day.
I couldn’t go five days a week and then take the weekends off in the beginning because I didn’t have any of the skills or habits in place to produce a daily show.
Set a Deadline for Your Show Release
So as much work as it is, I had to give myself the deadline of releasing a show every single night at 3:00 AM. And the reason why we do this is because on the East Coast it’s 3.00 AM.
And so, we’ve already gone to bed for the night. When we wake up the next morning, there’s a show waiting for us in our inbox. On the West coast, it’s midnight. So, some people actually catch the show at midnight when it comes out. Over on the European continent, they are six hours earlier.
So, it’s nine o’clock in the morning when we go live at 3:00 AM. So, it ends up winding around the world simultaneously. That ended up being a great move for us, but it was also a great move for deadlines because if I stayed up late, our show still went live at three o’clock. When I woke up in the morning, it was time to work on the next show.
Figure Out a Pattern and Routine
So, I figured out after about 180 episodes that I had a new pattern, and new routine and it was okay if I pulled back to five days a week.
So in the beginning, it was seven days a week because I was afraid that if I took the weekends off, my weekends would get busy catching up on all the things I missed during the week. And then my show would not go out on time Monday morning.
And if it didn’t go out Monday morning, and then it gets pushed to Tuesday, and then the next week it’s Wednesday and soon I don’t have a show at all. I fall off the wagon and my show falls apart. So, for me, I had to do it every single day until I built those new habits in place.
Build Good Habits in the Beginning
And I did build the habits. And then I realized, “Oh, this is draining.” So, this was one of the things that I learned as well as how far I could push myself because, I get burned out when I do it shows every single day.
And I was doing the work myself because now it wasn’t a show. It was a YouTube show. It was a daily podcast and we still had the daily blog that went along with it.
So, it’s three pieces of original content every single day, plus the social actual media that you do to promote it. So, it was a lot of work.
Now We Have a Whole Team
We have a whole team of people that do a lot of stuff for the show. And so, we have broken up the shows in different pieces and different elements to have different people that have worked with us over the years.
It’s more than one person can do. And in order for us to make the show go, we had to monetize the show along the way. We’ve been able to monetize the show in 14 different ways so far that have paid for the people that we now have working on the show behind the scenes.
So, it’s been this little kind of like the little engine that could in creating the show and then creating a massive program behind it where everyone has their own special set of skills. And then we’ve outsourced our transcriptions to Rev. And it allows us to take this show and then you can read the closed captioning in 191 different languages because of Rev.
900 Episodes was a Huge Learning Curve
And 900 episodes in, I’m super excited about we are because it has been a huge learning curve, but it’s one that I will never forget. And it’s one that if I could go back in time and do it again, but yes, I would do it all over again.
I would do it in a heartbeat because of where it brought us and the opportunities that it provided for us. But, it was a lot of work. This is the most work I’ve ever done on any project in my entire life. This is an enormous undertaking.
When I jumped in, all the apps, internet, social media existed so I jumped in and tried to learn it all at once.
Look at Your Possibilities in Your Business
Anyway, if you’re starting a business, I encourage you to look at what your possibilities are. How are you even market your business and are you willing to jump all in and what do you have to do to make that happen? Maybe that is starting a YouTube channel?
Do you have to give a little bit more as we did in our first 180 days where every single day we produced a show seven days a week?
And now it’s only five days a week, but that’s a good schedule for us now and it seems to work really well. And everyone is on task and on schedule and it’s like a well-oiled machine. I love it.
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