Today I am going to talk about my YouTube channel for the last day of #Blogtober17. I am skipping the “Pinterest” prompt as I just don’t use that platform enough, but I do use YouTube, and have been for the past 10 years – though not actually as a vlogger!
My channel is under my name sabrinajillah if you fancy having a look. Go on, like and subscribe, it would mean the world to me! 😀
The reason why my channel is under my name and not “themummystylist” is because 10 years ago it was originally named “Henry The Penguin” and YouTube would only allow me to change it to my name. Why Henry The Penguin? Well the account was run anonymously by me, with my toy penguin being the star of the show. Here is our first ever video on my YouTube channel – don’t laugh!
Now 10 years ago, YouTube was still in it’s infancy. I was working in Marketing at Mattel and we didn’t know much about this platform. I said to my then manager, hey, why don’t I upload our Barbie ads so that more people can see them. So Henry became the toy penguin who uploaded brand new Barbie ads over 2 years.
Then, apart from my wedding dance video and two random baby videos of Tyler, I forgot about my channel. It lay untouched until 2 years ago when I thought I’ve give this vlogging malarky a go. And I discovered Henry the Penguin had over 1000 subcribers and the Barbie videos had had millions of hits.
This is the most popular Barbie ad on my channel – with 9.1 million hits. Crazy!!
When I started using my channel as my own and under my name, I did lose a few subscribers – sorry guys, no more Barbie ads from me!
I haven’t been using YouTube in the traditional way of vlogging where you chat to the camera – I’ve been using it in more of a ‘home movies’ kind of way, capturing family moments that we like to look back on and watch. And then Tyler became a BigJigs ambassador and we were reviewing toys for them. I started doing weekend vlogs, again more like home movies.
This summer I joined in with Vlogust, where I vlogged EVERYDAY in August! I made a little 2-3 minute video for each day and they are a lovely reminder of what we got up to in the summer holidays. It was a great learning exercise for me too, I learnt how to edit in iMovie quickly, how to make my videos snappier so they’re not too boring to watch, fitting music to it, creating a nice front cover photo for each video. I feel totally like an iMovie pro now. The only frustrating thing for me was how slow it was to upload a video to YouTube, it would take an hour for a 3 minute video! Although if I was at my parents’ house, they have superfast internet, so it would upload in like 2 minutes!
If you fancy seeing my Vlogust videos, there’s a playlist here.
More recently I have starting doing shopping hauls, which I love doing as I love sharing things that I have bought. This is one of them:
I would really like to up my YouTube game, but I just can’t find the time or energy after blogging and instagramming and life in general. Here is what I would like to do if I can find the time and just do it:
1)Film a ‘Welcome to my channel’ video with an introduction to me and my family.
2) Create one of those end shot videos where you can click on other videos and have a message saying like and subscribe etc. You know what I mean!
3) Create a music bit with my logo for the start of all my videos maybe.
4) Have a schedule where I will make a video at least once a week and upload it at the same time each week.
That’s it for now, and that’s how I’ve been vlogging but not really vlogging on my YouTube channel for 10 years.
Do you like watching vlogs on YouTube? What are your favourite channels and what things do you like to watch?
Sabrina x
