Becoming a YouTuber sounds easy, all you have to do is sit in front of a camera and talk about your favorite topic or maybe your wildest experience.
….Nope. It is not as simple as that.
Anyone with a camera and some interesting content can become a YouTuber, but it takes multiple other steps to become a popular or trending youtube channel!
You need to:
- Know camera usage
- Work on audience-building strategies
- Elevate your social media management
- Make investments
- Do PRS
And whatnot!
Many YouTubers can claim that vlogging and video making on the platform Youtube is not an easy deal at all.
Although the platform is quite promising with its 2 million active users, it’s not easy to thrive on. The platform generates 82% of the entire online traffic, meaning the audience is wide and the competition is tough.
In this article, we will share a step-by-step guide to how to start gaining the ultimate pro-YouTuber experience! From content creation to monetization, we’ll guide you through it all!
Table of Contents
The Ultimate YouTuber Guide
1. What’s your goal?
It is essential to align with your goals and aims for your channel before diving into the content creation journey.
There are several genres and video types you can cover being a YouTuber. You need to focus on what kind of video content you would like to create and to who would you like to cater.
Here are some questions you can answer to mindmap your aim for your channel:
- Is the purpose of my channel to entertain or educate?
- Is this a vlogging channel, a tutorial video channel, or creative content?
- Is your channel for an existing brand or personal brand building?
Once you have answered the questions above, you will have a clearer perspective on what type of demands you need to meet before launching into the Youtube world. Once, you have defined your goal and developed a sense of direction, you can head onto the next step.
2. Pick a niche
Although there is no restriction on the variety of things you can put on your channel, it is important to pick a niche. Defining the core vibe of your channel is necessary to avoid an inconsistent content pattern. It will give you a direction for your video and prevent you from covering multiple things and losing value to your videos.
Select a niche depending on your areas of interest, and with potential video content, start researching the current trends. This way will discover a lot of defined material for your videos. Plus, you will be able to focus on producing better content than what is already available in the market.
A focused path for your channel will also attract consistent viewership. And once you have a strong following, you can start expanding onto a broader niche. For example, Emma Chamberlain is a very popular YouTuber who started her channel by vlogging about her daily activities and eventually moved to cover topics on fashion, travel, and so on.
3. Study your audience
Another vital step to becoming a pro-YouTuber is to be aware of market demand and produce content accordingly. For your audience persona, you need to research trends and study what competitors are already doing.
Studying the needs and mindset of your audience will allow you to put out valuable content that caters to them specifically. And if you can successfully add quality material, you can generate a heavy subscriber count in no time.
For instance, if you are a food channel, you might want to see what level of food reviews are preferred and what sort of tutorial videos are trending. Whether you need to use trendy transitions or simply, focus on the storytelling rather than the visuals.
This will also help you discover your style based on your expertise.
4. Create your branding
Once you are done with the basics, you can start working on your branding. The branding on your channel is your public image and represents the overall vibe you will want to be associated with as a creator.
You need to pick a theme for your brand and create a logo based on it. Some YouTubers even hire people on a freelance basis to make their mascots or animations, which will pop up in the end credits or begging of the video. Or you can choose a phrase or a song that plays at the outro or intro.
Branding helps with building an identity for which you will be recognized throughout your career. A very famous gaming YouTuber Pewdiepie used to end his videos with the gesture of a fist punch with his viewers, and he would refer to it as the brofist.
Soon, as he gained popularity, it became a symbol for his brand, and his subscribers would only recognize the brofist as something Pewdiepie would say. The element of brofist was even his channel’s logo for a long time. Based on the brofist he even released his own indie game and a song!
5. Make a content calendar
After researching, studying, and coming up with a bunch of solid content for your channel, you need to plan out the execution process. Planning your content will help in consistent output.
Essentially your audience will know when to expect new videos and not lose patience or interest in your channel. If you keep hanging your subscribers for fresh content for too long, they will move on to a different channel with frequent uploads.
As a beginner, it will be quite difficult to upload daily, with brand new content material. So, you can stick to 2-3 videos per week. Once you get the hang of it, you can move on to daily videos.
To maintain consistency, you can schedule your videos with automatic scheduling tools online instead of depending on manual uploads. Because what if you are stuck in a room with bad wifi, and your upload gets delayed? Now that will be a problem. So to avoid any such setback, it’s better to take precautions beforehand.
6. Assemble your Equipment
Now that you are through most of the steps, it is time to check whether you are properly geared up or not. It is not necessary to invest in expensive gear, but it is super important to have the required things to produce your desired content. Quality is always a matter of question when it comes to producing professional youtube content.
Some of the Youtuber gear must-haves are:
- Camera: If you are a vlogger or planning to film yourself, you need to invest in a decent camera or even a smartphone that has a high-end lens to support HD visuals.
- Light Setup: You can always DIY this by using natural light as your light source. However, if your niche is based in an indoor environment with facial expressions in focus, it will be ideal to invest in a light setup. You don’t have to necessarily buy studio lights for this purpose, a ring light would do the job.
- Mic: If you are planning to include voiceovers or generally talk in your videos, you will also have to buy a good-quality mic. The audio in every video helps elevate its overall quality. So, this will be a vital investment for your YouTub career.
- Editing Software: A vital part of your YouTubing career is purchase of good editing software. You don’t have to spend a fortune on them, as long as the software has a basic editing feature like on iMovie or Filmora, you are good to go. However, if you can, invest in proper editing software or service. Starting with nicely edited videos will definitely help you in the long run.
Editvideo.io is one editing service that you can make great use of as a beginner YouTuber. This service offers you skilled professionals ready to edit any kind of video, as per your requirements, in exchange for a small monthly fee (in fact it’s the cheapest video editing service out there!). Outsourcing your video editing work to editvideo.io can save you a lot of time and allow you to focus on other areas of your YouTubing career.
- A device for editing: To edit your video you will need a device with sufficient storage space to store your heavy files and allow your software to run smoothly. The device can be a laptop, a high-spec desktop, an iPad, or even your smartphone.
7. Birth Your Channel
Finally, it is time to create your channel. For this, you will need to create a Google account with the same username you would want to see on your channel, and then activate the channel on Youtube.com.
Next, customize your channel’s page. Enter your audience tags and write up a catchy description with your contact info. Then upload your display image it can be either a high-resolution headshot of your or your brand’s logo. Finally, add an attractive youtube banner that represents your channel’s atmosphere, and done!
8. Test Run
Now it is time to upload your content and test the waters. Always remember your first video will not give you immediate results. It takes time to build a reputation on popular platforms such as YouTube, where on a daily 3.7m number content is uploaded.
However, it will be a great learning experience. You can check what areas you need to improve to gain and retain audience and sorts of factors with youtube analytics.
Remember, the focus is always quality over quantity!
9. Promotion and Engagement Tips
Here are some promotional tips to increase the traffic on your YouTube videos.
- Add CTA to your video
- Optimize your videos with tags and SEO keywords
- Add social handles in your video description or comments
- Promote previous videos or popular watches in your current video.
- Run ads! They help out with reaching and gaining new subscribers.
- Collaborate with other creators of the same niche. Don’t be afraid to approach people and experiment outside your comfort zone. Such cross-promotions create PR and an influx of viewers with the new network.
- Engage with your audience. Use the comment section to interact with your subscribers and use social media as a part of your community building. It is important to let your viewers have an outlet to communicate with your content. This way you will also be able to collect valuable feedback and generate content as per demand.
End Note
These are all the steps and hacks you need to begin your YouTube journey. The key here is to maintain consistency and quality. Once you ace these two departments, you will get the hang of the video creator game in no time.
Hopefully, this article answers all of your queries. If you think there is a handy tip our community could make use of, then make sure to add it in the comment section below!
