- The questions most of you are asking me is,
Roberto, what am I doing wrong with my YouTube channel.
Well today, we're gonna talk about it.
I'm gonna tell you 10 things, 10 mistakes
that most of you are making here in YouTube.
Let's get into it.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake and robertoblake.com
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome to the channel.
If you're new here, I'm a creative entrepreneur,
public speaker and I am a YouTube certified marketer.
I'm here to help you grow your YouTube channel
and we're gonna do that today
by covering 10 mistakes that most of you
are making as new YouTubers.
I'll let ya in a teeny, weenie little secret,
everybody makes mistakes when they're new
and when they're just getting started.
Every small YouTuber that have helped,
even me, especially me, made mistakes when
they were getting started in YouTube.
So don't beat yourself up about it, don't feel too bad.
And I'm here to help.
So let's get into these 10 things
that you might be doing wrong on your channel,
and let's see if we can fix them.
So one of the first things that I would tell you
that you're probably doing wrong as a small YouTuber is,
you probably don't have a focus for your channel yet.
You're probably still trying to figure things out,
you haven't picked a focus or a niche or a theme
for your videos and built out the concept
of what your brand is.
And it's okay if you haven't quite figured it out yet.
It's just if, if you haven't, then you can't
be expecting growth right now and you shouldn't
be beating yourself up and wondering why you're not growing.
Because the reality is, people don't know what
they're committing to.
Until you get something focused and something specific
going on, on your channel, people don't know
whether they wanna commit to this,
whether they want it in their sub-feed
or whether they ever wanna come back.
And so, you need to get focused
if you want to grow your channel.
There are a few people that you probably look up to
that have variety content.
But they started YouTube a long time ago, a lot of them.
Or their personality and so.
It's something that, when you're just getting started,
it's very difficult to do.
Even PewDiePie, the biggest YouTuber
didn't start out as a personality doing whatever he wanted.
He started out with something specific, gaming.
So a lot of times you have to start with something specific,
get people used to you and then as you grow
as a person, sometimes you get permission
to change and pivot, and sometimes when you try to do that,
it totally kills you channel because people just aren't
interested in that thing.
So just kinda be careful with this and pick a focus
and understand that you might outgrow your channel one day,
especially if you're very young and you don't know
who you are yet.
Tip number two is about the making of the videos themselves.
It's about your background.
Making your background interesting and unique to you,
making it a character in the video is really important.
You'll notice that I have books that inspire me
and I reference a lot of the people in these books
in my videos, especially the videos that are about
entrepreneurship or making money online.
I talk about these people all the time.
You'll also notice that I have my YouTube pillow
in the background and that I've got my camera lenses.
These are all things that kind of add up
to what this video and many
of the videos on this channel are about.
So when you have your background, make sure there aren't
too many distracting elements, make sure that it makes
total sense to have these things in your backdrop.
You know, the scene is important.
It kinda sets the tone of the video
and I think that's something that a lot of people get wrong.
At a bare minimum, at least clean your room.
Tip number three, not being consistent.
Yeah we talked about focus, but also something
that has to be said is consistency.
People who show up on a regular basis,
usually perform better.
And I'm not telling you to go daily,
god no I'm not telling you to go daily.
That's not for most people.
And when you're just getting started,
it's not the best idea in the world,
especially if you don't know if you really wanna do this.
You won't know until you've done it a couple
dozen times and then you'll know whether you wanna commit.
That being said, at least upload every week
and set good habits for yourself.
And set expectations for you audience
and deliver on those expectations.
If you make a promise and a commitment to your audience,
try to honor that commitment.
Be consistent.
Tip number four is a little on the rough side because
a couple of people are gonna take offense to this
but a lot of new YouTubers are dramatically lacking
when it comes to creativity.
Everyone wants a voice.
Very few people have something new to say.
And it's a real issue with why people aren't growing.
It's because they're not bringing anything new to the table
that somebody bigger than them
hasn't already done very well, or done better.
I know for a lot of you that sounds soul crushing
and demotivating but that's not really my intent here.
The idea here is to get you to think
and to think about how you can be unique.
Are you doing something and does it look visually
very different than what other people have done?
Are you bringing a completely different persona
and approach and angle to something?
I mean that's what grows channels,
even in established niches.
And I'll give you a really good example
that you might be familiar with.
About a year ago, when Pete McKinnon decides
to start making videos on YouTube,
he was starting from zero and everyone told him
it was over and that there were already too many
photography channels on YouTube.
He's 30.
And it's like, okay you should do something else.
Well, Peter decided to go for it anyway.
And what Peter did was very different than everybody else.
Peter had a personality that we've never seen
in the photography niche.
He wasn't stuffy, he wasn't boring, he wasn't talking
down to people and he seemed genuinely excited
and enthusiastic about everything.
On top of that, he brought the style of a filmmaker
and story teller to photography tutorials,
in a way we had not seen before from
any of the big photography YouTube channels,
even the ones that were close to a million.
No photography YouTube channel had broken
through a million subscribers yet and Peter McKinnon
managed to go to two million in just a year
despite people being on this platform for a decade
in the exact same niche.
And he did it because, visually, his content was different,
the thumbnails were different,
the entire style of presentation was different.
And then Peter's personality, shown through
more than anything.
His charisma, his on-camera presence completely
obliterated the landscape of what we would expect
from tuning in to a photography tutorial.
And that's why Peter McKinnon is a success story today.
He brought something new to a niche
that was already saturated, that people already had
established themselves in, over a decade
and he proved it can be done.
If you make yourself different enough.
And if you are creative and you bring something new
to the table, a new voice, instead of parroting
other people and doing the same things
that have been done over, and over, and over again,
guess what happens?
People get excited, people get interested,
people share, people subscribe and they come back for more.
Let's move on to tip number five.
Bad editing.
And by this, I'm not attacking your editing skills
so much as, well I guess I am attacking your editing skills.
But when you're a beginner it's okay.
The problem is, a lot of you are trying
to be way too fancy, way too early.
Stick to basic cuts, basic transitions
and really focus on make sure that you're getting
timing right, you're getting continuity right.
Don't try to go overboard on things.
I think that it's important to just, you know,
do some very basic things and make sure that the editing
serves the purpose of telling a story,
or being entertaining or getting to the point,
or you know, educating people, or whatever it is
that you're trying to accomplish with the video.
Make sure the edit is serving that, instead of the edit
just being completely, stylistic
and there not being a point to it.
I think that this frustrates a lot of people.
Especially me, when I'm watching.
And I don't understand why you did that.
Number six, make better thumbnails.
I cannot stress enough,
how much thumbnails matter to YouTube videos.
Ultimately before we see your video
and your fancy editing and your on-camera charisma,
you know what we see?
We see a title and we see a thumbnail.
We see a title and we see a thumbnail
and we make a decision right then or there.
And now we know that YouTube is serving
up videos and we know that click through rates
are a real thing because we have data
in the new YouTube analytics dashboard.
And so we know how much that matters more than ever.
And I make all of my decisions about whether
I'm gonna watch a video from someone I've never seen before
based entirely on how good their thumbnail is.
I am a snob about that.
I feel that many viewers are.
Because you're putting a really good video
behind a really crappy thumbnail, it doesn't
get the views it deserves.
So save your video by making better thumbnails.
Number seven.
This is the one that was devastating for me,
for my first what?
50 videos.
No on camera presence, no on camera charisma, no energy.
It makes a big difference in a video.
Am I telling you that you have to be over the top,
that you have to exaggerate, that you have to be crazy,
stupid excited about everything?
No.
I'm certainly not.
The whole point here is that whatever the tone
is supposed to be in your video, that that needs
to be communicated on camera.
If you know, you want other people to be excited
about your videos, you need to be excited
about what you're talking about.
If you want it to have a serious tone,
then you need to communicate that.
Whatever it is, that you wanna get across
from your videos, that has to be clear
from your on-camera presence and your energy.
And ultimately, charisma can carry a video a long way,
even when production values aren't great,
even when editing is spotty at best.
Even if there's poor lighting and audio.
At the end of the day, there are people like
Gary Vaynerchuk who have a lot of charisma.
And Gary could carry a video that was shot
on a smartphone, with shaky cam, bad lighting
and not great audio, on pure charisma alone.
And it would get views.
So just kinda keep in mind, that your on-camera presence,
your on-camera energy makes a big difference
in holding an audiences attention.
It pains me to say this, actually that's not entirely true.
Don't be a daily vlogger.
When you're just getting started,
being a daily vlogger is unsustainable.
And I know that a lot of you aspire to do that
because you're inspired by Casey Neistat and I get it.
But at the end of the day, it's very hard
to sustain daily vlogging because, not every day
will be a day that's worth filming
and no everyone is capable of sustaining that type of life.
And ultimately, it'll put a lot of stress
and pressure on you, people in your life,
and you may not have built up the editing skills
and production skills in order to make that really practical
and to respect your time and still enjoy
the experiences in your life, and be present.
So I don't recommend daily vlogging
for beginners and newbies.
It may seem like a great way to grow a YouTube channel,
you might have seen a few people blowing up doing it.
But at the end of the day, it's really not for most people
and I actually don't think it's healthy.
I have seen a lot of people try and ultimately fail at it.
Not to mention the strain that it puts on people,
even people who are good at this kind of stuff,
it's pretty bad.
So I've gotta tell ya, don't be a daily vlogger
unless you really feel like you
can 110% live with it for a year.
Not paying attention to branding.
Not paying attention to branding is a big deal.
When you are deciding to do a YouTube channel,
you need to make everything feel
very consistent, very seamless.
And that means that you wanna do things like pick out
color schemes, you wanna pick out designs for your
thumbnails, you wanna do channel artwork,
you wanna pay attention to the aesthetic value
of everything because you're gonna be judged
on all of those things.
And so I think that consistent branding,
not just in your visuals, but in your style,
your presentation, your message.
I think that all of that's important.
And I think trying to match up a lot of these things
in your other social media platforms,
and thinking about them, also goes a long way.
You'll notice that most of the successful
YouTubers are doing this.
Most of them pay attention to the aesthetics
and the messaging of their brand and keeping
a continuity across multiple platforms.
And it matters.
They're treating themselves like a real company,
like a really business, like a real show on television.
And so you need to be thinking that way too,
even from the very beginning.
Number 10, not doing your research.
Not doing your research is hurting a lot of your channels.
You need to do research on your niche,
you need to do research on titles and also
potential tags for your videos.
And I actually have a great tool that I can recommend
to you guys to help you with that.
I think that this video's gonna help a lot of you,
and I made it with the help of my friends and vidIQ.
vidIQ is a browser plugin and website.
It's one of the best tools for helping
you grow your YouTube channel.
IF you go to vidIQ.com/roberto you actually
get a 30 day trial, and you can use this tool.
And you can use this to try to optimize your channel.
And they also have a new feature
that I'm really excited about.
It's the channel audit tool.
This will tell you, literally, some of the mistakes
that you're making with your channel right now.
It'll tell you if you have videos
that don't have thumbnails,
it'll tell you if your titles are too long,
it'll tell you so many great things about your channel
that you can correct really easily
and it can make a big difference for you.
So make sure you're checking that out,
link is in the description down below.
A big shout out to my friends over at vidIQ
for helping sponsor this video
and especially to my friend Jeremy Vest
who helped design the channel audit tool
that you guys are gonna be using.
It's actually a really great feature in vidIQ,
it's something different.
And I'm gonna be speaking at Jeremy's event,
Video Marketing World.
If you guys wanna come out, and you've never seen
me do a talk on stage before, this is gonna be amazing.
So come out to Texas, I'm gonna link to it
in the description for you guys.
I can't wait to see you there.
And we're also gonna probably do a meet up.
My last piece of advice for new YouTubers
is to just be patient.
You know there are a lot of people
who have been successful and it feels
like they're an overnight success, but the reality is
they've been building their skills for over a decade.
And it matters.
I certainly know that I built my skills outside of YouTube
well before I came to the platform,
with a lot of advantages that many of you may not have.
So, I don't think you should be putting wild expectations
on yourself, and saying hey, I've gotta get
to this many subs, at this time.
I think you need to be patient,
I think you need to practice and I think you need
to give yourself the opportunity to grow,
not only as a YouTube creator, but just as a creator.
Anyway, those are the 10 mistakes that many
of you are making on YouTube if you're new YouTubers.
I hope this helps you out.
If you still have questions,
let me know in the comment section.
I've got a ton of resources in the description to help you
if you're a small YouTube creator.
Anyway, like this video if you like it,
don't forget to subscribe, check out the other awesome
stuff here on the channel.
There's plenty of other videos to help you.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget, go out there and create
something awesome today.
Take care.