Care and feeding of YouTube channels

I made a conscious effort this year to get my YouTube channel going. While making videos is important, what seemed to get me even better overall performance it to build engagement and reply to almost every comment you wind up getting.In the past quarter year, I've gotten a thousand subscribers and I've gotten almost $400 from Google.And I think all I have to doing this and I'll be able to make my goal number of $1000 way sooner and I can start getting some toys to play with -- like the microscope that I've  been looking at.:-D