Should you Re-Brand or Start from Zero again on YouTube?

If you are thinking about whether or not you should rebrand your channel or create a new channel, then keep reading!

I remember when I first started thinking about changing my niche back in November 2019, I really couldn’t find a YouTube channel to help me because I felt like none related to me or my particular situation. So I’m going to explain my thought process and what ended up happening that led to my ultimate decision (because this was not an easy decision).

To give you more of a backstory, I started on YouTube back in 2013, so I’ve been on it for almost 7 years. I created my original YouTube channel around beauty and DIy. After I had my third child in 2016, I wasn’t so much into beauty. I wasn’t passionate about it and my videos weren’t doing well at that point.

Anyway, I definitely had this shift in life and fast forward to 2018, I decided to create a second channel about piercings. I took everything I knew from working as a store manager at Piercing Pagoda and put that knowledge in creating content, and in 18 months, it grew to 10K subscribers. So then I was like, “Okay, I definitely know what I’m doing here”! It brought my confidence back so I thought “Why don’t I create  videos on how to build a YouTube channel?” When people saw that I had done this twice, they’d ask me how I did it. I decided I could make basic videos showing them how.

At first I thought I could just rebrand and put those videos into my regular channel. I accepted that I would lose subscribers, so I decided to test it out. I started with the “Dear Gary Vee, I Ate Shit for Two Years’ video, which did well with watch time and that’s how I began to gauge my videos. However, the views weren’t there and also they didn’t pick up. I uploaded four more videos, but now both the watch time and the views weren’t doing well. The algorithm was not picking them up and I have a feeling as to why: my subscribers were the only ones watching the videos and they weren’t interested in them. Therefore, it killed my watch time, and when your watch time isn’t good, YouTube will not push out your videos.

I was getting really frustrated because I’m like, I know how to get my videos to rank in search and I started obsessing over my analytics. I switched my thumbnails to increase my click through rate and tried to find ways to get my watch time up. But then I realized if my subscribers aren’t interested in my content, it was not going to get found...so I just needed to create a new channel so these videos can get to who they’re meant for.

So, rebranding didn’t work and it was because the new content I was creating was not what my audience signed up for. Though I had variety on my channel, this new content was totally different, and I have to respect that, and I had to start over from zero. In the end, it wasn’t a bad thing because once I finally accepted “okay, let’s start a new channel”, I started thinking of more ideas and I didn’t feel limited and in a way, I had got it off my back. It was not what the people wanted to see, so I needed to give the information and knowledge to the audience that is searching for it. 

So, remember why people originally came to your channel and why they hit that subscribe button. Just know that you are not trapped, you are not limited to creating just one channel or one type of content. And if you have already made a subscriber base once, you can do it again.

I’ve created a subscriber base twice already, and here we are creating a third because I want to share the knowledge of how to do it, how to engage an audience, and how to to build a channel from the bottom. I’m teaching you guys everything I’ve learned from my mistakes. While testing out whether or not to rebrand or recreate was not a mistake, it was something I learned through trial and error. I’m also showing what I learned from seven years of being on YouTube, but the difference is, it’s not going to take you seven years to know what I now know!