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Written by Christine Skelton
https://www.youtube.com/neverstopadventuring
How Never Stop Adventuring Was Inspired To Start Their Own YouTube Channel
How does one go from privately enjoying their life and travels, to deciding to document and share it publicly? To inviting the world in to come along and be part of it all?
For us, the RVing and travel lifestyle started long before we ever decided to begin sharing it on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/neverstopadventuring) and social media.
We are Kevin and Christine Skelton, and along with our two young kids, we had already been living in our fifth wheel RV for several years traveling full-time around the United States as a family when we began seriously wanting to film our adventures and publish them for others to learn from and enjoy.
At first we were hesitant about it for several reasons. We were a bit nervous about how we would appear to others and how we would portray our lives. We wanted to be friendly and genuine, but we knew that at least at first we’d have to get past the nerves and awkwardness of being on camera.
We had a website on which we had been writing a blog mostly for fun for years (https://neverstopadventuring.com) which we’ve also revamped to support our YouTube channel content, but we knew video was a whole new arena compared to writing! We also weren’t exactly sure where to start and for a long time were hung up on the idea that we needed to know more, be better prepared, and start off our channel by doing everything correctly. The worry about the right timing and perfection was a barrier we didn’t get past for a while. So how did we finally start?
For years we had enjoyed sharing our story and tales of our travels with friends and family. For those interested in the RVing aspect we’d get into details on the how to’s and tips and tricks. We could talk for hours on those topics. We’d retell travel stories about places we’d been and look through pictures. The passion for the topics was definitely there.
When we turned to fellow YouTubers and specifically RVers and travel families online to watch their videos to learn more and be entertained, we finally began to see how it could be done and that if others could do it, then so could we. We saw the passion they had in sharing their stories, the communities and relationships they were building and the people they were helping, how it felt like they were talking through the screen directly to us, and we really started getting excited about the idea of our own channel.
We wanted to share our RV and family travels and adventures with others to help inspire them to do something similar, or just take a step toward living whatever their own dream is. We aim to show that adventures can happen in the everyday and can be big or small, whatever your phase of life, hence our name Never Stop Adventuring. We hope that others will learn something helpful, find out about a place they can go to themselves, or just be entertained by our content!
In the end we realized we just needed to do it. In fact, these days we wish we had gotten started much sooner and that’s the advice we give to others: just start somewhere! We researched what we could and accepted we’d learn the rest along the way.
We invested in ourselves and increased our confidence level by taking a video editing class which helped tremendously. We started with a video introducing our family and our backstory (https://neverstopadventuring.com/about), as well as a video tour of our RV (https://neverstopadventuring.com/2020/09/rv-tour), so that folks could get to know us and how we lived. We then committed to releasing a video every two weeks which gave us time to learn and figure things out while building consistency in our channel.
Before long we were able to increase our videos to weekly and continue building both our channel and our overall brand.
It really is a lot of work that goes into each of our videos, but we really enjoy it. To make our videos, we’ve built lists and plans to help us build a repeatable process, that we can hone and improve upon over time.
We maintain a list of ideas for videos, and a plan for upcoming videos that we can pull from. We create a brief bulleted list of talking points and ideas for a video all the way up to an exact detailed script depending on the topic. Filming then entails either setting up a filming station/studio in our RV for a “talking head” type video, filming in and around the RV as we demonstrate a how to, or taking the camera along as we go on a family adventure.
We edit our videos using Movavi Video Suite over several days (the 1 hour per minute of video rule roughly holds true for us as well), we watch the semi-final cut together, make some additional edits, complete final color correction and adding music before exporting and uploading. We have a comprehensive video release process that helps us not miss any crucial steps in keyword research, titling, the description, thumbnail creation, subtitling, and then sharing and marketing of our videos on social media, blog post creation and release, and emailing our newsletter subscribers.
Despite all that goes into it, we are really loving what we get to do with our YouTube channel and other content avenues. We have a lot of fun making our videos and love the creative aspect of it all.
The community we have already started to build is awesome, and every kind and positive feedback that we get is so motivating. It’s amazing and humbling to see that our channel is helping people and we are so excited about continuing to build upon what we’ve started.
We are continuing to travel in our RV and one of our goals is to eventually visit all 50 U.S. states. We plan to do international travel as well, some of which we plan to rent and do in a campervan! We’ll be sharing throughout all of this, and have so many plans and ideas of things to film and share and ways to grow our website and social media channels as well such as TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@neverstopadventuring).
We are currently also finding great success there with short form videos. Everything we learned building our YouTube channel has been really helpful with that and the shorter format feels easy in comparison!
We often wish we had more time to do more right now, but we remind ourselves that we need to pace ourselves, find the best places to focus and improve, and remember that this is a long game after all. By finding the right balance between our creative work and family time traveling and enjoying the freedom we have in the lifestyle, we plan to continue sharing our passions with others for years to come!
We’d love for you to check out our work at the below locations. We hope it’s helpful to you!
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/neverstopadventuring
Website/Blog: https://neverstopadventuring.com/blog
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@neverstopadventuring
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_neverstopadventuring/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialneverstopadventuring/
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