Luke Risk runs Forest to Fork, guiding people through their first public land hunts in New South Wales. He works in the bush, often out of reception, with no time to film, edit or run a website. Since December 2024 we have done that part for him.
Website new visitors a month, January 2025 to September 2026: from 54 to a peak of 413.
Everything below is measured against the same months a year earlier, not against a standing start.
The first job was a single edit: 48 minutes of footage from a sambar hunt, cut down to a 27-minute film. Luke had shot it for himself, not for a camera crew, and said so. The channel had two short videos on it.
The footage was honest and the hunting was good. What was missing was a way to turn a working guide’s weekends into a steady stream of content without asking him to become a filmmaker.
Luke is in the NSW bush and we are a long way from it. This is the loop.
Alongside the videos we rebuilt the brand basics: one handle across every platform, a cleaned-up logo and tagline (A Timeless Pursuit), his licensed-guide credentials on the site, and a brand film for the homepage. Clients became guests in every piece of copy.
The website stepped up after we took over the channel in August 2025 and again once the brand film went on the homepage. YouTube only took off once the diary series gave it a release calendar in March 2026.
From August 2025 to February 2026 the channel published 7 videos, two of them long-form. From March to early October 2026 it published 15, eleven of them long-form.
Some of it changed what visitors did once they arrived. Each row compares the four weeks before with the four weeks after.
| When | What we did | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2025 | Took over the YouTube channel and socials, with new thumbnails and regular posting | A typical day went from 3 to 6 new visitors and stayed there |
| Sep 2025 | Logo, credentials badge, one handle everywhere | Same traffic, but visitors stayed longer: 75 to 86 seconds each |
| Oct 2025 | Brand film live on the homepage and as the channel trailer | Page views doubled for a month and returning visitors doubled |
| Oct 2025 | WhatsApp chat button that tells Luke which page a visitor came from | 41 people have started a chat this way, a route that did not exist before |
| Oct 2025 | Keyword and competitor research, page and image optimisation | Slow by design. Google search now brings 57% of new visitors, and they engage at 70% |
| Apr 2026 | Gear and education videos alongside the hunt diaries | The rifle review is the channel's widest-reaching video and still pulls hundreds of views a month six months on |
| Jun 2026 | Link-in-bio page for Instagram, and a check of every form submission | Found the contact form had stopped reaching Luke's inbox. Fixed, and the missed enquiries recovered |
The cleanest sign that this is building something is the returning visitor figure. It rose at every stage, including the quiet ones.
The best episodes lead with what went wrong. “2 Days, 1 Clean Miss, 1 Heart Shot” is the most watched diary episode. “Close Encounter”, a bow hunt that ended without a harvest, is close behind. “I Broke My Own Rule”, where Luke owns a shot he should not have taken, is the fastest video the channel has had. Hunters can tell when a video is sanding the edges off.
The median day on the channel went from 5 engaged views to 63. The back catalogue now earns between releases, so each new episode starts from a higher base.
Hunt diaries hold the existing audience and earn the watch time. Gear and education videos bring in people searching for answers. Shorts buy reach, but they are 14 of the channel’s 33 videos and only 5% of its watch time. The brand film converts viewers to subscribers better than anything else.
YouTube sends almost nobody straight to the website. People watch Luke guide, then search for him later. One guest found Forest to Fork through a diary episode, booked a bow hunt, and became an episode himself. That loop is the whole idea.
The brand film that sits on the homepage, and the diary episode that travelled fastest.
Living the Hunter LifestyleBrand film, built from seven years of Luke’s own footage
I Broke My Own RuleDiary of a Hunting Guide, episode 9
“It developed into, well, my video guy, because I wanted to show people what I could offer them. To now, my advisor on almost all fronts of my business.”
Luke Risk · Forest to ForkLuke on two years of working togetherHe talks through the brand film, the referrals and what the work turned into.
More people now find Forest to Fork than ever. Most people who start the enquiry form do not finish it, and committing to a multi-day hunt is a big first step.
The next phase is conversion: an easier first step than “book a hunt”, a rebuilt website, a wall of guests with their harvests and their own words, and more Google reviews.
We work with a small number of Australian and New Zealand businesses at a time, directing, editing and running content on Sydney time.
Book a chatFigures from Google Analytics 4 for foresttofork.com.au (January 2025 to October 2026) and YouTube Studio for the Forest to Fork channel (July 2024 to October 2026), exported 9 October 2026. Typical-day figures use medians, so one-off spikes and bot bursts do not distort them.