Becoming a YouTuber is a dream job – doing what you love, having a great audience, and earning a solid income. But how exactly do you get there?
How do you start a successful YouTube channel? Should you just start creating content? Or do you really need an elaborate strategy to make it?
A bit of both, as it turns out. Here’s our in-depth guide on how to start a YouTube channel and make sure it takes off.
In a Nutshell 🌰
- Treat your channel as a business from the get-go.
- Set measurable goals.
- Plan your content, schedule, and monetization tactics accordingly.
- Pick a niche that actually suits you – you’ll need to grind.
- Outsource what you can to save time and get expert work.
Keep reading for the full scoop!
Contents
Outline Your Goals and Timeline
First things first, you do need a plan.
In the early days, you could create a YouTube channel without much preparation and have some decent success with it. You’d just start making content on the fly and eventually amass an audience and monetize it. Somewhere along the way you’d figure out what works best and run with it.
That is, after all, how some of the most successful YouTubers got started. MrBeast has been around since 2012, PewDiePie joined in 2010. But they both still took years to gain traction.
Today, YouTube is a far more competitive playing field – it has become a pillar of the creator economy. Creators have professionalized, too: For many, the end goal is now definitely to make a living off the platform. In this environment, the only way to success is to treat your channel like a business from the get-go.
At a basic level, that means outlining your goals and setting a timeline.
Making a Roadmap
First off, you need to be clear about what you want to achieve with your channel. Want to make a full-time income as a video content creator? Raise your existing business’ profile by creating highly visible content in your niche? Or do you really just want to share your passion with an engaged audience?
And then you ask: By when?
If you want to monetize your channel, the first on-platform milestone is the YouTube Partner Program. To join the YPP, you’ll need 500 subscribers and 3,000 public watch hours (or 3 million Shorts views). If you meet the eligibility criteria, you get access to the growing set of fan funding features. Get over 1,000 subs and either 4,000 watch hours or 10 million Shorts views, and you also get a cut of the earnings on ads – the classic monetization route.
Obviously there are other monetization options, like Patreon and similar memberships, or increasing your product and service sales. The point is to spell it all out: to make a business plan, if you want.
For your roadmap, write down measurable goals for channel subscribers, videos produced, and money earned. Your goals will determine how much work you’ll have to put in and over which period.
For example, the quicker you want to hit the 1,000 subscriber threshold for ad revenue sharing, the more videos you’ll have to produce in a shorter time. You’ll need a decent production value, too.
Sure, a video can go viral and explode your channel overnight. That’s rare, though, and you shouldn’t bet on it when you outline your strategy.
Pinpoint Your Niche and Audience
Actually setting up your channel on YouTube is the easiest part. Just log in with a Google account and create one.
Before that, though, you’ll need to spend some time on creating memorable branding. First off, you’ll want to pick a good channel name, profile picture and/or logo, banner and channel description.
However, your branding needs to go much further than that. It should inform every piece of content you make. This includes the fonts and colors in your custom video thumbnails just as much as your video intros and outros.
So how do you pick a YouTube niche?
So how do you pick a YouTube niche? There are three factors to consider: What you know, what interests people, and how profitable a niche is.Â
To start with the first, you should pick a topic that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about. After all, you’ll have to spend hundreds of hours making YouTube content about it in the coming months.Â
If you already have a solid basis in the topic you’ve chosen, that’ll make things a lot easier. Think about your professional skills and your hobbies to get some basic niche ideas.
Next, you need to consider whether there’s actually an audience for the niche you’ve chosen. Are enough people interested in a topic to grow your channel? To answer that question, prowling around internet forums and existing YouTube channels is a good start.Â
If you’re thinking about starting a tech channel, for example, you might begin with looking at exactly how successful the most successful tech YouTubers actually are.
Don’t be afraid to go look even at weird pet interests of yours (or even your day job, if you can stand to). As ASMR and pimple-popping dermatology creators show, for example, there’s an audience for pretty much anything out there. It might be small, but it can be extremely engaged.
Finally, you need to take into account how profitable different niches are before you create your channel. Both brand collabs and advertisers will pay different rates depending on what kind of content you post.
For instance, creators who focus on personal finance will earn about $12 per 1,000 views in ad money. In contrast, that figure is only $1.60 for fitness and bodybuilding. Check out this post for the full run-down!Â
Create Memorable Branding
As a next step, you actually need to set up your channel on YouTube. Log in with your Google account and create one – that’s the easy part done.
Next, you’ll need to spend some time on creating memorable branding. First off, you’ll want to update or upload a profile picture, channel banner and description.Â
However, your branding needs to go much further than that. It should inform every piece of content you make. This includes the fonts and colors in your custom video thumbnails just as much as your video intros and outros.
This early in your YouTube career, worrying about branding can feel like a waste of time. It’s not.
Kicking your channel off with a distinct style pays off. When viewers see your videos, you want them to remember you. So that when your content pops up in recommendations or search results, they’ll actually click through.
Solid branding makes your channel that much easier to recognize, and so helps you grow your channel from the start.
That doesn’t mean you have to stick to your original branding forever. However, when you make changes, it’s often a good idea to keep them small. That’s because a full rebrand will cost you vital recognition value.
Find Awesome Content Ideas
Once you’ve settled on a niche and set up your channel, it’s time to start finding viral-worthy content ideas.
At this point, you’re probably bursting with inspiration and raring to go. If not, that’s also fine. There are a couple of great strategies you can use to find ideas that will resonate with your audience. Either way, having a few weeks of content planned out in advance can save you stress later.
First, you can check out the trending page on YouTube as well as on other social media sites. That’ll give you a solid idea of the hottest topics in different niches. Playlists and collections on successful channels are also good inspiration. While you don’t want to straight-up copy existing content (for copyright reasons, at the very least), you can riff off it or adapt it to your niche.Â
The same goes for the actual structure of the content: Go analyze the competition and the different formats and templates they use.
Second, you can leverage tools that give you insights into what people search for on YouTube and Google. Google Trends is a reliable (and free) place to start for all types of content.
Beyond that, there are subscription tools like keywordtool.io, SEMrush, Ahrefs or VidiQ. A few are geared towards YouTube video ideas, or at least have a feature for it. Heads up: Most of them offer a free version or a 30-day trial to get you started.
Want to learn more about how to find content ideas? Check out our full guide here.
Assemble the Right Equipment
Before you start producing videos, you need to make sure that you have everything you need to produce high-quality visuals. Blurry, jerky smartphone videos and tinny audio won’t earn you a loyal audience. Just annoyed viewers who click away before they get a headache.
As a basis, you need a camera that can shoot in HD or better. You can get away with less for Shorts, but 4K is pretty much the standard for professional YouTubers nowadays. That’s because it gives you much more to work with at the editing stage.
If you’re planning on shooting outdoors footage, you’ll likely need solid image stabilization. A professional action cam, like a GoPro, can be very useful here. Microphone quality will also matter more, because of the background noise and wind interference.
Conversely, if you’ll shoot most of your footage indoors, you need to make sure the lighting is right. An LED light panel or a ring-light can make a huge difference in the visual appeal of your content.
Plus, investing in equipment will help you save time on video editing. As a rule of thumb, it takes roughly 1 hour to edit 1 minute of finished video. If the raw footage is poor, it’ll take longer – worst case, you might even have to reshoot some.
Get Rolling & Review
Ready? Set? Action!
Once you’ve checked all the boxes above, it’s time to start filming your content, editing your clips, and uploading them to your new YouTube channel.
The first couple of videos will take you ages to make. But after a few weeks, you’ll hit your content production stride.
Especially at the start, it’s important to keep going despite initial frustration. You’ll put your heart and soul into your videos, and they’ll earn only a handful of views. That makes it easy to lose your motivation.
Push through. A steady flow of content is key to success because YouTube’s algorithm rewards consistent, frequent uploads. This is why many professional video creators post multiple times per week, even if it’s “just” YouTube shorts.
After some weeks of crickets, you’ll see your numbers pick up. Both in terms of views and in people who subscribe to your new channel.
However, if you’re not getting clicks after a month or two, you should review your content. Are you uploading your videos right, with all the basic info filled out and keywords in strategic positions? Are they showing up in search results, or has YouTube’s algorithm not indexed them yet? Were any flagged for violating community guidelines?
Throughout your YouTube career, you’ll need to circle back and analyze your content’s performance. YouTube Studio, with its various analytics, is a great place to do so. You can learn more about the key metrics here.
With these insights, you can fine-tune your content and your marketing strategies to level up your channel.
Schedule Breaks
Breaks are an essential part of content creation. You’ll need to factor them in from the very start.
It can be tempting to spend all your available time on your YouTube career. And it’s true, you will have to put in a lot of work at the start.
Nevertheless, you need to schedule time to rest and recharge. Call it self-care, or system maintenance, or whatever you like. The fact is, we aren’t made to be productive around the clock. Not even when producing content we love.
Creator burnout is a serious issue.
Thousands of creators have given their social media channel their all – and then hit a creative wall. At that point, they’re drained. And find it impossible to summon any inspiration or energy to carry on.
To avoid that, make sure you have regular breaks – time offline, spent on your other interests, away from your channel.
Self-care is more than a buzzword – it’s a crucial habit for creators.
Hire Help to Scale Your Channel
At some point in your YouTube journey, you’ll need to start outsourcing parts of the video creation process.
A regular content schedule is a major time commitment, especially if you want to post more than weekly. First, you need to find ideas, do research, film footage, edit it and upload your videos. Then, you’ll have to analyze their performance, reply to comments and handle monetization.
And that’s to start with.
Later on, you’ll want to diversify. That means work on negotiating brand deals, creating merchandise, and marketing your brand through other social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
All this takes loads of time. To keep up or improve your content quality and quantity, you’ll need help.
Consider hiring a video editor, as editing is often one of the biggest time sinks. A professional won’t just make your long-form YouTube video content shine. They also make creating vertical reformats for TikTok, Reels or Shorts a breeze.
You could also hire a channel manager to handle much of the routine work of running a channel – scheduling, putting in descriptions, comment moderation, and getting audience feedback. A graphic designer, besides saving you time, also helps you nail your branding.
Digital marketing specialists can take on YouTube analytics, social media posting and email marketing, and can also help you with content research.
Outsourcing lets you concentrate on what you do best – create amazing content to engage your audience.
Building a team is an investment in your channel’s long-term success. And in your own mental health and wellbeing as a professional creator.
Interested in learning more? Check out our master post on how to outsource different elements of video creation.
Final Thoughts on How to Start a YouTube Channel
To make it on YouTube, you need a solid roadmap.
Strategize your goals, your niche, and your audience. Spend time on lining up your branding, your content ideas, and your equipment. Find your content creation rhythm, make time to recharge, and eventually hire help to keep growing your channel.Â
These are all the basic steps to launching a successful channel. It’s not always an easy journey, but it’s a rewarding one. With YouTube success waiting at the end of the day!
Need more info to hit the ground running? Check out our free YouTube Starter’s Guide E-Book. This quickstart guide has all the worksheets you need to figure out your niche, draw up a monetization strategy, and fill your first content calendar.
To start a YouTube channel, you should have a clear idea of your content niche and target audience, as well as your short- and long-term goals.Â
To start a lucrative YouTube channel, you need to pick a profitable YouTube niche and regularly create high-quality content. This means lots of initial research to pinpoint who your audience is and what sort of content will resonate with them.Â
Yes, because having a specific niche helps your YouTube channel grow. It will let your audience know what they can expect of you and give them an incentive to subscribe if they like the content you’ve produced so far.Â
When choosing a niche, there are three factors to consider: what you know, what interests people, and how profitable a niche is. You should pick a topic that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about. Plus, you also need to consider whether there’s actually a big enough audience for that niche. Also, different niches pay different rates in terms of ad revenue.
