- So you haven't got any subscribers,
you don't have any views,
you haven't even published a video,
and oh, my word, where's your channel banner?
How do you start a YouTube channel from absolutely nothing?
Well, it's pretty simple.
You eat, sleep, create lots and lots of content,
and repeat.
(crashing)
Now then, I'm gonna start with these two concepts
and I'm not gonna lie.
They're gonna be in complete opposition to one another,
but well, that's YouTube.
But anyway, the first strategy is this.
Make lots and lots of content
and just have fun doing it.
There is a huge difference between
watching YouTube videos and deciding, yeah,
I like the idea of that,
and actually making YouTube content.
I always say that you should spend your first six months
just making YouTube videos to work out whether or not
you enjoy making YouTube videos.
And through all of this,
you're gonna master the YouTube process
from starting a project to pressing Publish.
And I also say that you should make lots of content,
which does naturally lead to, at least to begin with,
quantity over quality.
For quite awhile, I've been looking for a really good way
to explain this concept,
and I think I finally found it.
I want to thank my vidIQ colleague, Alexi,
for pointing me to this article.
I'm gonna be honest, it has nothing to do with YouTube,
but it has everything to do with the creative process.
And I want to read out the following section,
so settle in for a bit of story time.
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day
that he was dividing the class into two groups.
All those on the left side of his studio, he said,
we'd be graded solely on
the quantity of work they produced.
All those on the right, solely on the quality.
His procedure was simple.
On the final day of class,
he would bring in his bathroom scales
and weigh the work of the quantity group.
50 pounds of pots rated an A,
40 pounds a B, and so on.
Those being graded on quality, however,
needed to produce only one pot,
albeit a perfect one to get a grade A.
Well come grading time and a curious fact emerged.
The works of the highest quality
were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seem that while the quantity group
was busily churning out piles of work
and learning from their mistakes,
the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection,
and in the end, had little more to show for their efforts
than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Or if you prefer much shorter, simpler
Hollywood blockbuster interpretation of this.
Yeah, yeah, all very well and good,
but should I take the red pill or the blue pill?
Let me boil all of this down to a simple choice.
It's your first month on YouTube.
Do you spend that time making one perfect video
or as many videos as humanly possible?
For me, it's always going to be that second option.
Get scrappy, get messy, make mistakes,
get better, build confidence.
What I can guarantee you is this.
The video that you make today that you think is perfect
will be absolutely terrible in six months time,
because you will have learned so much
and gained so many new skills.
And that is a wonderful place to be in as a creator.
But you do have to get your hands dirty.
Now having said all this,
you don't just want to create content in an echo chamber.
You want to be doing as much research
on your video topic as possible.
This can be as simple as doing a search on YouTube
as if you were a viewer of a type of content
you are going to make.
The auto-complete results will give you a great insight
into the keywords used and for creating video ideas.
Go to YouTube's search page and see what videos rank highly.
Look at the titles and how they match searchability
with intrigue and emotion.
What makes the thumbnails clickable?
In this example, the patterns we can see
are 4,000 hours in huge text on the thumbnails.
We often see the creator too,
and the titles all try to enhance the concept
of getting 4,000 hours of watch time,
whether it be the fastest,
the most precise, or an exact workflow.
The next time you're on YouTube as a viewer,
I want you to start asking yourself this question
as frequently as possible.
Why?
Why did I type in these exact words
when I was looking for something?
What made me click this thumbnail over this thumbnail?
I'm four minutes into a video.
Why am I still watching it?
Once you're able to answer those questions as a viewer,
you can start implementing those answers
as a content creator.
When you watch videos, again, as a viewer,
start to make notes on what keeps the viewer engaged.
In particular, keep a close eye on the first 30 seconds
of videos, as that is what gets the viewer hooked
for the rest of the video.
That's why I'm now introducing this epic music
and these really fast moving bits of video
in the intros of vidIQ content.
Viewers make decisions very quickly
about whether they are in the right place or not,
which leads to a lot of people abandoning videos
in the first 30 seconds.
If you want to get people to watch your content for longer,
your first goal should be to flatten this initial decline
as much as possible,
and then you can focus on the watch time
on the rest of your video.
Now then, pay attention to this next strategy,
because it will give you a deeper insight
into YouTube's recommendation system.
Or as some of you like to call it, the algorithm.
You will need to create a new YouTube account for this,
but don't worry about the channel aspect of it,
because you're going to use it
solely for the purpose of watching videos.
So you can do a search of the topic
that you want to make videos about,
and maybe watch the first result in the list.
Make notes about it.
And then from the suggested section,
watch a similar video, make notes,
and then watch another from the suggested section.
Keep doing this until you've watched maybe
five or six videos.
What you're trying to do here
is to communicate to YouTube's recommendation system
that I am only interested in videos
about a very specific topic.
And because it's YouTube job
to serve up the right content to the viewer,
in 24 to 48 hours, the homepage of this account
will start to focus on the content you've just watched.
(ringing)
Essentially what you're doing here is training YouTube
to tell you what channels and videos
your target audience watches.
And if you want to take this research even further,
go to the homepage of one of these channels,
and with vidIQ installed,
click the Trending button
followed by the Top Keywords button.
And this will unlock all of the keywords and phrases
this channel uses on their video content.
This is a type of language you should be using
in your video titles, thumbnails, description,
even the words you say within the videos themselves.
I bet you didn't even realize vidIQ could do that,
even if you've been using it for years.
It's pretty cool, isn't it?
Now let's talk a little bit more
about this keyword universe.
The more language you learn about your video topic,
the more of an instinct, a feel you'll start to build
about what content really works for your audience.
Let me show you what I mean.
Over many years and through a lot of trial and error,
we have learned that these are some of our top tier keywords
here at vidIQ.
We know that when we make videos about these topics,
our target audience watches them.
And so once we know what these keywords are,
we can really start to play with the titles
to create intrigue and interest.
We're not just telling you what the video is about.
We're telling you why you should watch it.
I mean, maybe you've noticed, or maybe you haven't,
but we have made a lot of videos about 1000 subscribers
in the last six months,
and you keep coming back to watch them.
But of course, we don't just make videos
about 1000 subscribers.
We have a second tier of keywords
we know you are interested in,
and we have a third tier of keywords
you may be interested in.
What this allows us to do
is create new combinations of keywords
to create interesting and new perspectives.
Or go after topics that aren't necessarily
that exciting or popular,
but have very little competition on YouTube.
We've had incredible success
creating content about copyrights on YouTube.
(whistles)
That was a big old section
about researching content, wasn't it?
So let's go back to creating content.
And I want you to think about the concept
of improving every single video by 1%.
This is where the sheer quantity of videos that you make
is going to expose your weaknesses, your vulnerabilities,
the mistakes that you're making and how to improve them.
Let me explain how I've been able to
improve the quality of my content
by tackling one problem at a time,
starting with this.
If there's one thing viewers cannot stand,
it's terrible audio,
And I quickly learned that if you can get your microphone
as close to your voice as possible,
that's gonna make a huge difference,
irrespective of the quality of a microphone.
For example, this microphone is pretty expensive,
but
it still sounds absolutely terrible
when I'm a few feet away from it.
Next let's talk about lighting,
and I don't mean any of this fancy stuff in the background.
I'm talking about your main light
and why I currently look yellow.
The majority of your lights in your home,
whether they be in a lamp or in a ceiling,
will have this warmer, softer glow,
because it's more relaxing.
But it doesn't really lend itself very well
to most YouTube videos.
This is when you need to think about
the color temperature of your lights.
For example, the color temperature of this light
is fairly low.
So what we need to do is crank the temperature level up,
like this.
Now we get that cleaner, more clinical studio look.
Now I do this through a ring light
that's a little off center and a little above me
pointing at an angle.
And onscreen now, you can see which ring light I use.
If you want to get a nice clean white look from your lights,
then the ideal color temperature
is around about 5,500 Kelvin.
Anything any higher than that,
then you might start to look a little blue.
And if you can't afford a ring light just yet,
then start yourself off with one of these,
which you can probably get for around about $10
off of Amazon.
Now then, can anybody remember
when my videos used to look like this?
Not that long ago, with my face a little overexposed
and all of this light spilling onto the back wall.
Well, now my videos look like this.
Now I think this looks a lot better
because the light appears to be more controlled,
allowing the background and the foreground
to do their own funky little things
and improve the color science of a video.
But of course, you can be the judge of this.
The way I did this was to let go
of a camera being on automatic mode.
Everything now is finely tuned
to exactly how I want it to look,
from the f-stop to shutter speed,
to the ISO, to the white balance.
Now of course, setting this up just right
did take a little bit of time,
along with setting up the light just right
and the microphone just right.
But that was all done through repetition and practice,
improving my videos 1% at a time.
Here's an interesting thing.
As I was editing back the last 30 seconds of this video,
I realized that this light wasn't quite set correctly,
so I've adjusted it so that now hopefully I'm well lit,
but I want to leave in that last 30 seconds
as a representation of how
we're always looking at our content
and aiming to improve.
And to be honest on YouTube,
that is almost half of the battle, keeping motivated,
turning up day after day after day.
It has taken me 2000 videos to get where I am
on my YouTube journey.
And my goal through this YouTube education channel
is to get you to the same place as me and beyond
in a lot less time and a lot less videos.
But YouTube is gonna require a lot of patience,
a lot of determination and a lot of hard effort
and work from you.
When you try something on YouTube
and it doesn't work, that's fine.
Change it, try something new.
It doesn't work, tweak it again and again and again
until you get it right.
So if you have just started your YouTube channel
and you have zero subscribers and zero views,
what's gonna get you to one,
or what is your next 1%?
That's the code word for this video.
The next thing I'm going to improve as a YouTube creator,
my next 1% is over to you.