When Growth Stalls, What Do You Let Go Of?

A listener called me out for being vague, so I’m giving you the full story: I’m pressing pause on creating new YouTube videos for the summer. Not because I don’t love my audience, and not because I’m quitting, but because the platform has become the most draining step in my content workflow. After a year of consistent uploads and lots of effort to learn YouTube keyword research and improve discoverability, the impressions and views still haven’t matched the time and stress required.

I talk through what that stress looks like in real life. When I’m trying to record video, I’m thinking about cameras, editing, and whether I’m “performing” correctly, which pulls my focus away from the messaging and education I actually want to deliver. That pressure can make the content worse, not better. If you’re building a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a blog as part of your content marketing strategy, you’ll understand how quickly “one more platform” can turn into burnout.

I also explain the batching reality that drives this decision. I don’t record from around Memorial Day weekend until mid-August because summer noise at home makes it nearly impossible to create calmly and efficiently. So I need to get all my summer podcast episodes recorded ahead of time, and dropping the extra work of new YouTube videos helps me protect consistency. The channel won’t go dark, though: I’ll keep optimizing existing videos with tools like vidIQ, improving keywords, thumbnails, and titles while I take the break.

If you’ve ever wondered when to pivot, what to pause, or how to make content creation sustainable, this one will help. Subscribe for more practical creator strategy, share this with a friend juggling too many platforms, and leave a review if it resonated. What platform are you debating cutting back on right now?

Transcript

A Listener Demands Details

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I told you all that yeah, I did give you an opening to be able to ask me any questions that you had. And immediately after yesterday's Unhinged episode, I got an email from a listener asking me, okay, you alluded to the fact that you're walking away from something that you're pivoting from it. What was it? Don't just share that you're doing it and then not tell us what it is. We're very curious. So it is not my audience. I love my audience. I am in the right audience now. But one of the things that I have been focusing on, and I focus on it for a year, and I checked and I looked at my stats is YouTube. I have been consistently posting a YouTube video that is also then my podcast audio and also then becomes a blog post. And what I have been finding is that YouTube is just not getting the impressions, the views that I had anticipated after a year of it getting. There's been some videos that have done well, and I have really tried to under better understand keyword research as far as what's needed for YouTube and how to get myself out there. But what I am finding is that it is so draining for me to add that in as an extra step of content that I need to create. It stresses me out when I go to record. And because of that, I sometimes feel like I'm not delivering my best content. I feel like I'm struggling to kind of like stick and make sure I'm looking at both cameras and then I'm gonna be able to easily edit it rather than being able to have my soul focus on the content, the messaging, the information and education that I'm trying to provide for you. So because of that, I knowing very well also that I am going into a season where I need to get ahead. Many of you have heard me talk about in the past that I batch my podcast episodes, my blog posts, my YouTube videos. I make sure that I am ahead of myself at least normally by at least a month. And because of that, the summer becomes difficult for me. I cannot record when I have a house full of people. When my girls are home for the summer, when the dogs are off, because there's people outside walking by and they just start barking randomly for no reason. It raises my anxiety and the content will not be of value and it'll take me so much longer than it should. So, because of that, I do not record any podcast episodes from Memorial Day weekend. So it's like May 20, let's say 4th, until August like 13th, which is when my girls go back to school and things start to get normal around my neighborhood and the kids being outside and all the things. So, because of that, that therefore means I have to have all of my episodes for the entire summer recorded before that May 24th date. And doing YouTube videos on top of it makes it that much more difficult. And I feel that going forward for now, I'm gonna take a little bit of a break with YouTube over the summer. Most likely we'll try to come back to it over the fall. But knowing myself and knowing how many videos I need, or not videos, but episodes I need to get ahead right now. YouTube is gonna take a little bit of a sit on the shelf for a little bit. There's plenty of content out there that I already have. I will look at potentially improving upon that content using vid IQ to improve upon the keywords that I'm using in the descriptions, as well as making sure my thumbnails are doing well and the just uh titles of my videos are what vidIQ is recommending. So there's lots of different things that I'll still be doing on YouTube. It won't be that I'm totally inactive, but new content will not be coming out. So for those that were wondering, I did have someone reach out to me and I wanted to make sure that I answered that question about what it was that I alluded to yesterday in the episode. Um, that is it. So, as you can obviously hear, I love to take questions from my premium podcast listeners. I want you to be able to have all the info side inside information that you want and need. So please do not hesitate to reach out to me. You can send me an email, jenny at jennymelrose.com. You can put a comment in on the actual podcast episode, or you can send me a DM on Instagram at Jenny underscore Melrose, and I will be happy to answer your questions on the podcast.