RetroBreak Rewind #4 – April 2021

When I hit 10,000 subscribers, I always had the idea of reaching out to someone to do a channel review, so I went on Fiverr and found a great guy who goes by the name of NextStepz. He decided to invite me to a zoom call rather than doing the standard infographic / text document as I had already got the basics covered. We had the call which lasted just over an hour and I took a lot of great ideas from it, which I condensed down into the following points:

Notes from channel review:

• Comments and engagement – ask viewers a question to keep them engaged and commenting
• Giveaways
• Choose a good time to upload when most people are online – first hour of video is important for YouTube to decide if it shows it to more people 
• Why did people subscribe? – look at popular videos – make more of them, a series of videos around a particular topic to keep new subscribers watching new content – after around 3 videos watched I will start to appear on their home pages
• Focus content
• What makes me unique – make videos other people can’t make
• Start by searching for topic, drill down title as far as it can go and make a video on the topic, show up in that search then move up to the next layer
• Aim to get 10,000+ views per video (Match subs with views)
• Go for 100% watch time! – looks at stats and note when viewers drop off
• Find trending retro gaming topics and search them on YouTube, see what comes up in suggested in the search bar and make video with that title to appear in search results 

FOCUS on the most popular styles of video

• Pickups
• Game Boy Homebrew
• Top Games Lists

So as you can see from that, there’s definitely a good list of things I can do to help grow the channel, while still staying true to my own style and without loosing the passion I have for making videos I want to make.

Before I started making any videos this month, I went back over the past few months worth of videos and updated the thumbnails to color code them in the different playlists. I think it looks great and helps differenciate the types of videos. Originally I was planning to use the colours of the rainbow, but after deciding to scale back and focus on just the three key video topics, I made every other kind of video have a black border in order to separate them even more. Hopefully there will be less black border thumbnails in the future, if there is, that means i’ve been able to focus on the main three topics! I do plan on doing the occasional random video, but not as often as I used to.

I also went back over some of my most popular videos, as well as all the ones I have uploaded this year and updated the titles and descriptions to make them more searchable, as well as updating the tags using TubeBuddy and VidIQ. I’ve been enjoying trying to get my VidIQ scores to 100 for each video. The closest i’ve got so far is 97.5!

I have also changed the outro in the last episode this month to see if I can stop the dropoff that I get at the end of each episode. View duration and retention are important, so if I can get people watching right until the end, it should help a lot in terms of getting recommended!

The first video of the month was another pickups video:

Next was the Anbernic RG351P Review! This was sent over to me to show off in a video, but I had complete freedom with what I did or said, so I was completely honest and talked about the difficulties I had in setting the system up and getting it to work smoothly. I think that honesty and the struggles I went through made for a much more interesting video compared to the other videos on youtube about it, which just sing its praises and gloss over all the negatives. I’m glad people appreciated that I was honest. I did end on a positive note though, and it’s doing pretty well considering I don’t do that many hardware reviews.

Deadeus – Physical Game Boy Homebrew Review! (GB Studio)

Next was another GameBoy Homebrew game! This time, Deadeus, a game that i’ve been looking forward to playing for years now! The publisher Spacebots very kindly sent me this copy to review, and I loved the game! Definitely the most polished experience in GB Studio that I’ve played so far!

The video just passed over 1000 views yesterday too which I’m happy about! I like doing these in depth videos because it gives me a chance to improve my script writing and editing style a lot more than a pickups or a lists video, so expect to see a lot more reviews in the future!

I feel like I need to rethink how I do the sponsored sections at the start though as a lot of people skip past it. If you can think of a way of me introducing the sponsor without people getting annoyed and skipping past, please let me know!

I finished the month with two top games lists, Top Wii Games, and Wii Hidden gems:

Both of these have done really well, and mark the beginning of me really starting to focus on the types of videos that have done well for me in the past. If the Top DS video is anything to go by, these shoudl hopefully have a long steady growth as people will stumble upon the videos while searching. Its tough to make these videos as they take a long time to capture the footage for everything, and I have to take breaks while recording as it’s pretty tiring keeping up that level of evergy for around 20 mins each time! It’s worth it though!

I have one more hidden gems video planned which will be up next week. Then some other interesting videos planned too, so let’s hope that next month there’s some good progress to show here!

Thanks for reading and choosing to keep up on my journey! I really do appreciate it! Maybe one day if I keep this up, I will start to make enough to do this full time, if that ever does become the case, i’ve got some really exciting plans for bigger videos that there’s no way i’d ever be able to do at the moment!

If you’ve been enjoying these monthly updates and want to support me, and see extra weekly behind the scenes content, please consider pledging on Patreon – patreon.com/retrobreak

Thanks for reading, Nick (RetoBreak)