This video is part of my series, “Life of an Archaeologist,” where I share parts of my life and answer your questions about being an archaeologist. In this post, you will find the YouTube video where I chat about how YouTube changed by life, as well as a full video transcript (with relevant sources and links).

YouTube Video

YouTube Video Transcript

Here, you will find the complete transcript of the video in the previous section with hyperlinked references/citations.

Intro

 Hi, I’m Smiti and I’m an archaeologist.

Now when I first started this YouTube channel, I was a little all over the place. I was talking about books, travel, and archaeology. I just threw it all out there. But then I got some feedback that made me stop and think, what am I really doing and who am I doing it for? This question changed everything and something unexpected happened.

Early Days

Now, when I started my YouTube journey, I had no clue about researching, writing, and editing videos, as well as titles, thumbnails, analytics, and so on. So, I had a lot to learn, and for me, as a beginner, the most important part was just getting started. and creating some videos and posting them and just getting better with each video.

Now, I’m an academically trained archaeologist, so that means I like school. I’ve done a lot of school. I’m comfortable with the course structure that goes into schooling. So when I got started in YouTube, I signed up for a YouTube course. Now, this video isn’t sponsored by them, but I will talk about my course experience a bit later.

But in getting started with the course, it helped me get going with my channel and I was posting videos and getting feedback on them. And getting into a decent groove. And then I built out my small and mighty team. Shout out to my team. They are awesome. And we were just getting into a good working flow together.

 Then I decided to get feedback on my entire channel. And it was actually the feedback that I got on my channel banner. Yes, that image that you see on most YouTube homepages that really made me stop and reevaluate things.

Here’s a snippet of that feedback. And some of the highlights include, “very graphic.” Yay! “It isn’t clear how the topics of archaeology, books, and travel link.” Fair. “Is the major topic archaeology?” Good question. “There is nothing wrong with having multiple interests and not wanting to restrict your creativity on YouTube.” But, “Three distinct niches target different audiences.” Again, fair. So, in summary, what are you really trying to do and who are you doing it for?

Hesitation

 So given that I’m an archaeologist, the obvious answer would have been to focus on archaeology, but I honestly was a bit hesitant to do that. You see, I tend to put a lot of thought into anything having to do with archaeology. Some might call it overthinking. By having this doctorate and advertising that fact, It’s not so much of me saying, Hey, you should listen to me because I have this PhD.

Instead, I just feel this huge responsibility to do rigorous and well researched work because I feel the trust that people have in me. So I just want to deliver. So this means that a lot of the content we produce around archeology takes weeks, if not months to produce.

And I know there are content styles that might not take weeks on end to produce, like reaction videos or just speaking from your heart. But I find that I’m not so great at speaking off the cuff and just riffing about general archaeology topics. Now, I might feel a little more comfortable doing that on my own specialties, but when I got started with YouTube, I really wanted to explore a diversity of archaeological topics, even those that I might not be a specialist in.

So with the help of my awesome team, we started creating those labor intensive videos. And this was in the docket with other videos that were not as labor intensive to make. And, If I’m really honest with myself, I know I wanted to post consistently, but I was also a bit scared to go all in on just the archaeology of it all.

Rebrand

So when I got that feedback on my banner, it really hit me. I knew I had a choice, and I could either just keep going down the path that I was on, which was perfectly fine. Or I could double down and make that dream archaeological content with my team. So I decided to double down and the first thing I did was go on Canva and we redid our banner.

And then I told my team about the rebrand and they were excited and energized about it. It felt like a fresh new start.

That’s loud. Asking my husband to turn off the loud AC. Anyway, I decided to actually delete all my book content and migrate that to a dedicated book channel, which you can check out if you’re interested. A few days after our quiet rebrand, we published a video on what animal bones can tell us about life in the past.

And about three days later, I believe it was actually Thanksgiving in the US, the video took off. We were getting views that we never saw before and it was really exciting. But the views don’t tell the whole story. We saw that most people actually didn’t stick around for the whole video, they were actually dropping off after 30 seconds.

So after getting some feedback, it was clear that the title and thumbnail were catching people’s attentions. But once they saw the video, it wasn’t delivering on their expectations. And it reminded me of the second part of the question that I asked myself, who are you doing this for? So we decided to focus on you, our wonderful audience.

So I tapped into my research and design thinking experience. Experience as well as some reflection activities from the course that I was in to really dig into and figure out what you, our wonderful audience might find engaging and valuable. So through this exploration and getting these insights, we started making tweaks to our videos.

And two months later something life changing happened. We published a video on knitting and archaeology and it went viral, at least for us. We were seeing a spike in views and subscribers. It was really cool.

And two life changing things happened. One, we got monetized, so that means that we started seeing money from AdSense. And two, I experienced my first major wave of comments. Both kind and not so kind.

Comments

 Now I think a reason that people are hesitant to start a YouTube channel or even decide to stop a YouTube channel that they’ve created is because of mean comments. This was definitely a worry for me getting started on YouTube and it’s definitely something I also experienced.

So when I got this wave of comments on this knitting video, I knew that I had to be intentional about how I managed comments in general. I asked many people how they dealt with comments, and it was actually something that the YouTube channel Healthy Gamer mentioned that really resonated with me.

“So the biggest mistake we see content creators make is that they are not intentional about the way that they receive and process feedback. And people are kind of like, oh, I need feedback on every video. You don’t need feedback on every video every time it gets uploaded. You can sit down for one hour a week, maybe two if you really want to, and look at feedback in a very systematic way. And what that does is primes your mind in a different mode, where you’re hopefully a little bit calmer, you’re hopefully like, confident in yourself, and you’re kind of looking at it. You’re also taking action about it if you’re kind of, you know, working on it, which is, which does something very different to the brain.”

So for me, I want to engage with my wonderful audience. However, when I open up that comments tab, I just, I don’t know what I’m going to get. So I’ve started to make sure to ask myself if I am ready to view comments, and I also set aside intentional time in which to batch respond to comments. This has made the process feel less reactive. And more proactive. Just kind of part of the job. It’s also helped me enjoy those nice comments more and brush off those mean comments a bit easier.

And the part about this that was life changing for me was that the idea of getting a mean comment just felt so overwhelming and I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it. And the fact that I figured out a way to deal with it that works for me makes YouTube far more sustainable. And I just really appreciate that. I feel that I can keep doing this for far longer now.

 Now, as exciting as it is to have a viral video, it’s also daunting. The internal pressure to replicate that success is real.

I started to feel a bit disoriented on what this channel’s audience really wanted, and if I was able to deliver it, and I had a swirl of other thoughts, so I just decided to ask for help.

Course

 Now I mentioned that I enrolled in a YouTube course. And I don’t think you have to enroll and pay for a course in order to be successful or just even get started on YouTube.

And to be honest, I debated whether to even include that aspect in this chat today because I know it’s such a privilege to be able to pay for and participate in such a course. And that might not be very relatable to someone who might be watching this video. However, it was a big part of my YouTube journey and I wanted to be transparent about that.

So when it comes to the course, I will say that there were three main reasons why I decided to enroll in a YouTube course.

The first was information overwhelm. There is so much wonderful and helpful information on YouTube that is freely available. It was just a lot for me and because I had no background in YouTube, I wasn’t sure what to pay attention to and what wasn’t relevant to me. So I was feeling overwhelmed. I was really looking for a trustworthy source that I could go to and learn from and not just get better at YouTube but also build a good foundation for my business.

Now the second thing I was looking for was community. Now there are archaeologists on YouTube and it is a small and mighty community doing wonderful work and I’m excited to get to know more of them. But when I was starting off I also wanted to talk to people who are also at the the beginning of their journey and get that kind of cohort, we’re in it together feel. So yeah, the school lover in me really wanted to learn alongside other people.

And finally, I was looking for feedback. I wanted a place where I could get feedback on my videos and learn what I was doing well and what I needed to work on. And I also wanted a place where I could ask questions and know that I would get some type of response. Whether it was an answer or some type of redirection.

So the program I decided to enroll in checked those boxes for me, and I really just like the vibe and the teaching style, so I made the investment. And this video isn’t sponsored by them, but I’m a YouTuber, so I do have an affiliate link.

Anyway, as I was feeling this disorientation about my channel and where it was headed, I was also nearing the end of the program I was in, so I decided to hop on one of these monthly Q& A sessions they have and asked the creator of the program itself for some help.

Now we had a longer conversation but this snippet here summarized but really resonated with me.

 ”Focus on what is interesting rather than what is informative. The thing is, every YouTube channel is, has either implicitly or explicitly a target audience and a value proposition. So there’s some sort of transformation you want to take the reader through. So Smiti, it looks like for your channel, the value proposition is ‘I teach you interesting things about archaeology.’”

Now I’m academically trained, so it’s easier for me to lean on being informative. So when Ali said, focus on what’s interesting. I didn’t take that as, hey, you should just ignore data and information and focus on clickbait.

Instead, I interpreted it as, like, hey, like, you got a good grasp on how to find and interpret information. What you need to focus on is how to make that interesting and relevant for your audience. And that advice really resonated with me. It literally led us to change our banner again, so thank you Ali for that.

But more importantly, it started to help me reflect on my broader journey as an archaeologist.

Archaeology

 Now, I know there’s no one way to be an archaeologist, but I was also trained for an academic path. Now, if you looked at my LinkedIn, it’s a path that I’ve definitely deviated from, but it’s also a path that I never felt that I was strongly on to begin with anyway.

Even though I know I would enjoy some aspects of a traditional academic role, like teaching and research, I knew that even if I were to find that coveted tenure track job in a place I wanted to live in, that was well paid, with colleagues that I liked. It still didn’t feel like a fit for me at this point in my life.

I think I’ve always been searching for a way to do archaeology that fits with my values, my life, my skills, and YouTube definitely is checking those boxes. But I realized it’s also checking a box that I didn’t even know was on the list to begin with. Now when it comes to archaeology, there are parts that I definitely find interesting.

However, I’ve also learned how to work through the parts that I don’t find interesting. And while that’s an important skill, I’ve kind of lost sight along the way about what I actually find interesting. That’s not to say that I don’t find the academic field research that I do interesting, and I feel very fortunate to work on a team that values interdisciplinary work, and that is doing interesting things.

However, for the past 10 years, I’ve been really just focused on one region, a certain set of methods, and a certain range of topics. So when I started exploring other aspects of archaeology for this channel, whether it was different places in the world, different time periods, different methods, different topics in general. I found that I was getting excited and energized about archaeology in a way that I never felt before.

I remember the stress of trying to figure out a dissertation topic, and that’s so contrasted with to how I view and feel about brainstorming video ideas for this channel because I feel like I can find inspiration anywhere.

Now we do spend a lot of time in assessing and interrogating and researching what we think you might find interesting, and even if a topic makes it past that initial round of is this interesting enough for our audience, If we find that we are getting underwhelmed or disinterested in a topic, we toss it.

Now this is quite liberating for my team and I, because we’ve been trained to work through even if we’re not interested. and having a job where you really need to focus on the interesting makes it a lot more fun in general. So researching and writing scripts has just become so much more invigorating and it’s almost comical how often my team and I say something along the lines of, so excited for this video, for almost every video that we’re producing.

The process of finding and sharing these interesting topics has sparked intellectual curiosity in me that I don’t think was in me before. It’s honestly the number one way in which I feel YouTube has changed my life because it’s changed my relationship with archaeology, both in how I do it day to day But just that feeling of flow that I feel so often in creating and sharing these videos with all of you. It’s a box that I didn’t know was on the list, but it is here to stay.

 So thank you for your support, trust, and interest. And i’m just so excited for what’s to come. And if you’re curious about what we’ve been up to feel free to check out this video here. And that’s all for this video. And we’ll catch you in the next one. Bye

Credits

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