Getting Started With YouTube: What You Need To Know

I’ve been working with content creators and managing YouTube channels for 10 years now and every year I learn something new. YouTube is constantly evolving, however, three fundamental things will always be key if you want to be successful on YouTube.

The first big YouTube channel I started from scratch and managed for five years was Your Discovery Science – a channel dedicated to exploring the weird and wonderful world of science. We gained over 300k subscribers and over 100 million channel views. I learnt so much and I went on to work on more channels and creators in the process. Over the years, I’d forgotten how difficult it is to start completely from scratch and how long it takes to start gaining views.

This year, I’ve taken that risk – I am working with an artist – Laurence M White (YouTube link is at the end of this blog) to document his life as an artist who is trying to expand his art business on YouTube. This artist has a decent following on Instagram and TikTok but has never done YouTube before and is not that well known on the platform. I’ve decided to document this journey of starting a YouTube channel from scratch and give you an honest review of successes and failings along the way. This will be an honest account of certain things that I am learning, tips on what I know works and the journey of us trying to be successful on YouTube.

In today’s blog, I want to talk about the very beginning of starting a YouTube channel. It’s probably the worst and most exciting part of the journey. Worst because you just won’t gain any views for a long while and it can be soul-destroying – especially when you spend a lot of time on a video. Even more so when you are convinced that video will be a hit. We started the YouTube Channel back in June and have amassed 156,000 channel views which is okay but mainly through YouTube Shorts – which as we know doesn’t fully help with exposing your channel compared to a longer form video. Our long-form videos haven’t hit over 300 views per video, we’ve had some that have gained over 250 views and then some that have tanked and only hit 11 views. Are we worried? No! Here’s why:

• Storytelling really matters, we’ve been focusing on different formats that stick close to the core values we discussed when we began the YouTube channel but also evolving the content with the learnings we are finding from posting. We just need to remain consistent.
• A lot of the time content creators are uploading to YouTube in their spare time with limited resources – we are the same, so we are finding ways to remain consistent and be as productive as possible. The reality is, we are stealing time and having to make compromises. This takes time and perseverance to get right!
• Creating a productive way of making content is so important and we didn’t get that quite right in the first few months! We’ve learned how to plan our content way better and we have more discussions about how we shape the content and create more than one piece so we can get ahead of our upload schedule!
• We want to find the right audiences and this takes time. Understanding your audiences is really key as you want to provide value to them – you only really know this once you start uploading and the more you upload the more insights you get.

?I personally believe the first year of YouTube is a complete test phase, you’re working on so many different things to get right all the while trying to remain consistent

Planning Your Content

In the beginning, we found it very difficult to plan ahead because we were trying to edit the vlog in real-time – so whatever was going on that week, we were filming and then editing to get out on Sunday. This method of posting was a complete mess, we just felt constantly behind and although we didn’t miss a upload day, we were stressed.

What did we change? Two things:

#1: We started creating each episode around a theme, whether that was Laurence’s learnings from the mistakes he made with a commission or whether it had to do with the reality of things that can go wrong with running you’re a small business. From there, we set up scenarios, interviews and events that we could film in one day. In between those scenarios we would have moments where Laurence would update the viewers on what’s been happening to him recently i.e the Jadon Sancho commission.

#2: We added a separate format that viewers could engage with. In the beginning, we were trying to fit an educational and entertainment genre into the one vlog – this didn’t work so much because we were fitting in too much. So we decided to split the two; the vlog would be called “Art of the Hustle” and that would be about laurence’s journey as an artist and how he’s trying to expand his business and “Hustling Overtime” would be tutorials for beginner artists trying to start their own business. Hustling Overtime is a easy format because it’s essentially one location and with evergreen themes which can be filmed any time. So we bulk film that content in a day and then schedule in advance and then we dedicate half a day to filming the Vlog.

This has allowed us better consistency without feeling too much pressure.

Understanding our audience

This is evolving as we speak, but you really need to start posting to understand what is working and what is not. You have to not be afraid that many of your videos will fail in the beginning but as long as you keep trying to learn your audience you will start to see some success. In the first 8 videos we posted I learn’t that our audiences prefer seeing Laurence with his artwork in the thumbnails – we are still experimenting with colours and text with our thumbnails but just that little insight helped our views grow slightly. We also noticed that talking scenes had to be less than 2 minutes, unless he’s explaining a process or giving the audience a tip about art or business. All the little things help contribute to channel views and retention and helps you grow – and all these insights are all within the YouTube analytics page, you just need to learn how to understand the research. One other thing we noticed was that Laurence is studio is very echoey, we tried to make do with the best we can with my rode mic pros but our audiences were put off by it – so we’ve invested in some lapel mics and in the recent video it’s helped with our retention. All these bits of information are based us posting what we think might work and then adapting to what we learn from the insights, i’d suggest you do the same. You don’t have to be perfect in the beginning!

If you want to follow our journey you can subscribe to the channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@laurencemwhite/featured