Pivot Your Channel or Start from Scratch?

First of all, if you have a channel where you have your brand name or your name, you don't wanna lose the handle, right? Like my handle on YouTube is Meredith Marsh.

If I started over somewhere else, what am I gonna call the new channel, right? I already have the handle that I want.

Plus maybe you have some videos on your existing channel that are applicable to this new direction and maybe some of them aren't exactly applicable and now you all of a sudden have all of this new clarity and you're like yikes i can't put this new stuff on a new channel because then i'd be leaving my old handle my old videos and my old audience behind that i've already built by investing my time and energy but the new stuff doesn't really fit with the old stuff and suddenly all of this newfound clarity turns into confusion when you start to go wait, what am I supposed to be doing when it comes to my YouTube channel? Do I have to start over from scratch? I want to share with you a little bit of my experience of my channel over the last 11 years because I did pivot my channel and I did a whole video on this where I explained pivoting and how I pivoted my channel, like the specific steps that I took on YouTube to pivot.

And there's some really good tips in there if you plan to pivot your channel.

However, I also mentioned that if I had to do it over again, if I was faced with that same question of do I pivot my existing channel or start new, knowing now what I know, I would have started a whole new channel.

As much as it might have hurt to start over, I would have started a new channel because if algorithmically, strategically, content strategy wise, it would have been a much smarter business decision.

And the reason why comes down to the number one mistake that I see business owners make on YouTube.

And that is forgetting that YouTube is not really a bunch of videos categorized by topic.

It's a bunch of users who have interests in certain topics.

And so the question, the question you should be asking yourself, if you're wondering, do I pivot my channel or start over from scratch is not a matter of, is my new content in the same category or the same topics or the same niche as my old content? The question is, is my new audience different than my current audience? Am I targeting an entirely different group of people with separate interests, maybe separate demographics, but certainly you should be asking if they have separate desired results, sets of problems that you're going to be solving on your channel, hopes, dreams, what are they going after? And where does all of that fall within your niche? If they're separate audiences, you really should start a separate channel.

Now, that might be good news to you if you're thinking about pivoting or you're making a shift.

If you're still targeting the same audience and they still have the same desired results, the same goals that they're trying to achieve as your current audience, then pivot.

they're the same.

The audience is the same.

The topics can be different and how you speak about them can be different and how you present and communicate can be totally different.

But if everyone's going to the same destination, then the audience is the same and you don't need a new channel.