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Written by JJ Barnes
I interviewed YouTubers Christine and Kevin Skelton about their YouTube Channel, Never Stop Adventuring, what inspires them to make videos, and the work that goes into it.
We are Kevin and Christine Skelton, and along with our two young kids we have been full-time RVing around the United States since the beginning of 2018. We’ve been loving this unconventional lifestyle to be able to have the freedom to see the country in our own home on wheels, spend amazing time as a family and teach our kids as we travel. We work from the road, homeschool, and travel the country while documenting and sharing what we’ve learned.
We started making YouTube videos in September of 2020 which was several years after we started full-time RVing. We tell ourselves now we should have started much sooner, because it has been fun to document our travels and look back on them. Our kids especially enjoy re-watching the places we’ve been.
We also wanted to share what we were learning and experiencing with others. When we first got started, it was so helpful to see other RVers and learn from them, and we hoped to do the same for others, as well as begin to build a business that could help sustain our travels.
Our channel is called Never Stop Adventuring. We wanted it to convey that there are adventures of all kinds, and they can continue no matter the stage of life you’re in or where you’re at. Sometimes life is just kind of day to day for a while, and seeking out small things right at home or just out your front door could be an adventure.
Not all adventures need to be huge and grand, but then again sometimes they are and so we wanted our channel to also inspire others to dream big and take the next step toward a big adventure or life’s dream.
Our videos center on RV family travel but they are really for anyone who is interested in RVing and travel. In our videos we often share travel destinations (mostly in the United States but hopefully with more international content in the future) and activities like hiking, biking, paddle boarding, exploring new towns and places. We teach others about RVing including RV projects, RV solar, and tips and tricks. We like to share about the everyday RV life and how to’s, sharing great campgrounds and boondocking spots off-grid, and detailed RV budget and costs.
[5 Things To Do In Page, AZ: https://youtu.be/2wYR-zMyLeQ]
Our content varies as it relates to RVing and travel, but we try to cycle through a few different topics including destinations and adventures, RV projects including solar, RV life and how to’s, RVing costs, and so on. We did recently complete a series about RV solar system design.
Since there has been so much interest in the RV solar system Kevin installed on our RV and how it has been doing after about a year and a half, we decided to share the steps he took to determine how much power we needed for our RV, and the batteries and solar panels needed to support this in a 5 part series.
[RV Solar Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH9-NXsf-RaJ9mwXQ4gu60oDlG-jwbfF-]
We were inspired to start our channel and make these videos because we love the fulltime RV lifestyle and the freedom, time, and memory making it has given us with our kids as a family, and we want to share that with others, so they can feel inspired and empowered to give it a try or take the first step on their own dreams. We love the creative process, the community that we are building, helping, entertaining, and inspiring others, continuing to learn ourselves, and building something as a family. These are all things through which we feel accomplished and hope to continue to accomplish moving forward.
We feature personally in our videos. We’re always in them taking you on an adventure with us, walking you through a project, or talking with you about some RV or travel topic. At times, depending on the topic, the video will only feature Kevin, if he is the one doing the project or if it is about RV solar, for example.
We have not yet featured others on our channel but it could definitely be fun to do this in the future. It would be interesting to try a collaboration with other like-minded content creators.
We’d also love to talk more with people that we meet who run or are knowledgeable about locations that we visit in the future and maybe feature portions of conversations in our videos if they agree. That could be a really fun way to augment and enhance our content at times.
We edit our own videos. It has been fun to learn this new skill and to grow creatively as we continue to learn and add new facets to our videos. Christine initially was the one to take an online course on video editing, which helped tremendously for gaining the basic skills and confidence to get started. Christine did all of the editing for a while, until we realized it would be better for Kevin to take over this task and free Christine up to do a myriad of other things for our business instead. After a bit of training, Kevin took over and has been editing for our channel ever since.
We always like to plan ahead for our videos, but the topic is really what determines how detailed that preparation is. If our video will be on a highly technical topic such as RV solar design or RV cost related where there is a lot of information and numbers we want to convey, we will script out the entire video.
However, if we’re going out on an adventure, we’ll research and layout a basic outline of the places we want to see, what we plan to do, and some facts or talking points to cover. We want to make sure that what we plan to do seems like it will be interesting for others and to provide some valuable information. We like to be organized and plan so that approach works for us!
Our main camera is a Sony ZV-1 which we use on a Zhiyun Crane-M2 gimbal. It’s been a great little camera. Sometimes we augment with some footage from our Google Pixel 5 phones but for the most part we use the ZV-1.
We recently added a Sony A7C to our kit so that we could have another camera to make some of our filming easier and more efficient, as well as add some other types of shots on other lenses to the mix that we couldn’t do with the ZV-1’s built-in zoom lens.
We use a Blue Yeti Microphone for Voiceovers and audio when we film “talking head” videos. And we also love our DJI Mavic Air 2 drone for really capturing the scale and jaw dropping scenery from some of the places we visit. We share our full gear list on our website’s Resources page.
We have definitely continued to learn a lot. We watch and learn from other YouTubers to try and improve our craft, and we can see improvement from our earlier videos. We have gotten more comfortable in front of the camera and we believe that shows as we’ve let more of our personalities come out. We’ve gotten more efficient with the amount of time it takes to edit each video, though that is still very time intensive! We’ve also learned some areas of our content on which to focus and topics to pursue that have been popular with our audience as we’ve looked at the analytics and feedback from viewers over time.
As a family with young kids and the time and dedication we put into that aspect of our lives, it can be hard to find all the time we need to commit to our YouTube channel. We work hard to create a balance so that we can get the things done that need to be done, so we find ourselves often switching off who is working and who is caring for our children. We also work what we call “the night shift”, where both of us can work and collaborate together on our channel after the kids go to bed. Building lists and repeatable processes has helped us with this aspect as well.
Also, with as much content as is out there, more and more every day, it sometimes feels challenging to be seen and get in front of our potential audience. So we continue to learn, consistently put out content we believe will be interesting to others, and work on staying patient!
We also enjoy watching a lot of RV and travel related YouTubers. Our favorites are Kara and Nate, Eamon and Bec, The Endless Adventure, Adventures of A+K, Raising Voyagers, and Tim and Fin.
As part of our video release process we try to promote each video and the channel through publishing a related blog post on our website and embedding the video, posting related pictures and content to various social media platforms, and sending out our weekly email newsletter.
We’ve also been contributing to various publications as opportunities arise to provide additional valuable content and through all of these get a bit more visibility. People view content on so many platforms these days that we’ve tried to get in a habit of sharing our content many places where we might reach people who are interested and whom we might help!
Yes, our channel is monetized and earns some money which helps to invest even a small amount back into the business. We hope to continue growing the channel and its income potential over time.
We didn’t expect to find such a community of YouTube creators that we could connect with and how willing so many of them are to give advice and help. It really is such a nice and helpful thing. We had realistic expectations for rate of growth and amount of work, but we’ve learned that it’s even more of a long game and even more work than we knew we were in for up front.
If you’re interested in starting a channel, go for it. Don’t wait until you think it’s the perfect time or you’re perfectly prepared. We wish we had started sooner and so that is our advice for others. You will learn more and more as you go along. If you feel there is some barrier to entry regarding knowledge or skill, there is a lot of free information out there, but we paid for and took a video editing course that was really worth it to us and we’d recommend you consider investing in yourself through taking a course if it would help you.
It has absolutely been worth the effort. We’ve had people tell us that some of our content has helped them in some way and that is the best feeling. It is worth it just to help or inspire one person and we hope to continue to do so. We’ve really enjoyed this process, the creativity, working together as a couple to grow our business, and living this lifestyle as a family.
We’d love for you to check out our work at the below locations. We hope it’s helpful to you!
Website/Blog: https://neverstopadventuring.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/neverstopadventuring
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_neverstopadventuring/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialneverstopadventuring/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@neverstopadventuring
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