Every month, YouTube records two billion+ active users, almost 25% of the global population! And guess what? While YouTube is available in more than 100 nations and 80 languages, Statista shows its largest viewership is in India, where 467 million people utilise the service every month. The numbers prove that starting a Youtube channel and becoming a YouTuber can be lucrative. The platform has a great established audience and gives exposure to all kinds of content. Not to mention it’s a fun career that would especially suit someone into vlogging and taking videos.
If you need more reasons to start a YouTube channel beyond the possibility of gaining fame like PewDiePie, we have many! Here are a few that we’d like to point out:
- As a small business owner, starting a YouTube channel can be an additional source to drive traffic to your business.
- A YouTube channel can help you build a community around a subject you’re passionate about, such as cooking or dancing.
- It can be a channel of self-expression where you can use vlogging to showcase your creativity.
- There’s no need for a degree, experience, or any initial investment. Just dedicate yourself to creating videos and learning as you go. You might also need some basic equipment.
- While you might not become PewDiePie famous overnight, with consistent content, you’ll gain recognition from a dedicated audience. It will imbibe you with confidence to do what you love.
- When you build a sizeable audience for yourself, you can monetise your content on YouTube with advertising and affiliations.
As you can see, there are numerous perks to having your own YouTube channel and starting vlogging. But doing so also demands your time and effort, and the process to begin might be overwhelming. To help you take off, this article will be a practical guide to starting a video channel on YouTube. So let’s take the first step together in your journey to becoming a YouTuber!
Step 1: Finding Your Niche and Planning Your Content
As we mentioned earlier, YouTube is the platform where you’ll find an audience for all kinds of content. But if you want consistent viewership, you need to create niche content. Creating niche video content means producing videos tailored to a specific demographic to generate significant results. Creating content for niche audiences may:
- Help you connect with the audience on a deeper level and recognise you as an expert, and
- Allow the YouTube algorithm to make you visible for certain search queries.
Here are a few famous YouTubers along with their niche and target audience:
- PewDiePie is a Swedish YouTuber who targets the gaming community of YouTube with more than 111 million subscribers.
- MrBeast is an American YouTuber with an entertainment channel of 155 million subscribers.
- Sandeep Maheshwari is an Indian YouTuber who makes inspirational and motivational videos on YouTube with 27.6 million subscribers.
- Mr. Indian Hancker is another Indian YouTuber with 31.1 million subscribers. He targets the educational community on YouTube with videos of experiments.
By now, you understand why to narrow down your subject of interest and passion and identify your niche. If you’re into cooking, you can narrow it down with videos of recipes for weight loss or vegan/vegetarian diets. Or you can also start a video channel of foods around the world. The possibilities are endless! Here are a few tips for you when you decide on a niche:
- Get to know your target audience and ask yourself:
- What’s their median age, where they’re from, what are their interest and hobbies, and what kind of videos they’re likely to look for on YouTube?
- Check the competition and ask yourself:
- How difficult will it be to get recognition in your field? Is there a niche with low competition but high demand?
- Get inspiration from others:
- What kind of content others are making that brings them success? In what ways can you add more content or contribute a different perspective? Can you add more value to the same viewers?
Once you’ve figured out your niche, make a calendar with topics to create videos about. Stick to your theme that serves your niche and strategize video ideas. Remember, to achieve success on YouTube, you’ll need to create videos consistently. So it’s better to plan and maintain a scheduler to post videos regularly.
Step 2: Setting Up Your Channel
Now that you know what kind of videos you’ll be producing, you’re ready to set up your YouTube channel. Do we need to mention that you’ll have to create a YouTube account if you don’t have one? You can sign up for YouTube with your Google account, as we know that Google owns YouTube. Once you’ve signed up, you can customize your YouTube Channel with the following:
Channel Name: This can be your name or a unique name that speaks to your niche and helps you build a brand. You can incorporate keywords to make it easily searchable.
Logo and Banner: The logo or profile picture needs to be a minimum of 98×98 pixels, and the banner image needs to be at least 2048 x 1152 pixels. Ensure the graphics and design are consistent with your branding and overall theme.
Channel Description: You may use the description space to assist your intended audience discover your channel by using relevant hashtags and search-intent keywords. Although brief, it can serve as a potent medium for both expression and visibility.
Total Gaming serves as a great example of branding with an appropriate channel name, logo and banner that keeps a consistent theme and simple yet clear description. Once you’ve set up your very own YouTube Channel, you’re ready for the main part of being a YouTuber– creating video content!
Step 3: Video Content Creation
In this step, you’re ready to pick up your camera and start creating content. You will have to create videos that speak to your niche audience. You can use topics and prompts you may have planned in step one here.
As YouTube is a primarily video-sharing platform, unlike other social media platforms where you can post other formats of content, video quality is a high priority in addition to content quality. What this means is that if you want to gain recognition and earn a large followership on YouTube, you can’t just start posting videos that are:
- Shaky and muffled,
- Lack of proper script,
- Shot in a dingy background,
- Use a low-quality camera.
Statistics show that every minute 500+ hours of videos get uploaded on YouTube. So, if you don’t want to get lost in the crowd, you should invest in the right equipment. Wondering what kind of gear and equipment you need to create high-quality YouTube videos? Keep reading!
Video Recording Gear
While it’s perfectly OK to begin vlogging with your smartphone, we promise that it will be worth buying better gear if you intend for your viewers to stick around. Standard equipment for YouTube content creators includes the following:
- DSLRs or mirrorless cameras,
- Lenses with different focal lengths,
- Tripods,
- And studio lights
If you’re going to be travelling a lot and not stick to a single studio space, it might be worth it to invest in:
- A mirrorless or action camera,
- A decent monopod,
- And a handheld gimbal.
Audio Recording Gear
Keep in mind that a high-quality video recording device will not serve everything you need to make good videos. Even if your films are well shot, you risk losing viewers if you don’t pay attention to details like sound quality, brightness, and lighting. Along with your camera and tripod, get a high-quality camera-mounted microphone.
Pro tip: Keep your recording environment in mind while making it a practice to test whether or not your audio is comprehensible to your audience. You can use different types of microphones for different situations:
- Shotgun microphones – great for capturing isolated sounds from the front, cancelling the background noise.
- Lavalier microphones – tiny, lightweight microphones you can pin on your collar and record away from the camera.
- Condenser microphone – often used for podcasting, will enable you to make clear voice-overs.
Editing Tools
You don’t need professional-level editing software at first to edit and enhance your videos. Such editing software won’t magically make your videos better because they’re often hard to use and come at a substantial cost. Easy-to-use video editing software is a good place to begin when you’re not an editing pro, using tools like the following:
- Windows Movie Maker or
- Apple iMovie
These may be downloaded free of charge on your PC. Once you’ve got a good grip and would like to upgrade your tools, you can do your research and choose some advanced editing tools. The following are some popular options that are free to use or have a free version to work with:
- Lightworks
- DaVinci Resolve
- Clipchamp
- Hitfilm
Step 5: Review Copyright and Legal Considerations
As YouTube has grown in popularity, so have copyright disputes among YouTubers. When users upload content that belongs to others without permission, YouTube must remove them to avoid a far bigger legal dispute. YouTube users must (under the terms of service and regulations) post only content with the rights to upload. YouTube’s ‘Copyright Management Suite’ is responsible for protecting users’ copyrights. By using this mechanism, shareholders who regulate originality in the content may determine what should happen to plagiarised videos.
Tips to avoid copyright implications:
- Don’t upload duplicates of concert recordings, DVDs, TV programmes, or ads.
- You should get permission from the creator before sharing anybody else’s work, whether it’s music, video, or still photographs. If you have permission to upload any third party’s content, contact the owner first anyways.
- If you want to be sure your material doesn’t violate any laws, check with the YouTube Copyright Center and the relevant law authorities in your country.
- Using the audio files that YouTube provides will always be completely legal; Use that, and you will never face any kind of repercussions for uploading it to the website.
- Make use of films made available under the Creative Commons.
- Don’t post anything if you doubt whether or not it is plagiarized.
In addition to copyright law, users must adhere to community guidelines and official YouTube guidelines. Accounts or videos found violating the policies may be disabled or deleted. As a social media network with billions of users, YouTube must avoid breaching local regulations, including those protecting free speech and access to information. In addition to this, you must be aware of some other common legal risks YouTubers might face, such as:
- Cyberbullying and harassment
- Intrusion of Privacy
- Defamation
- Censorship or demonetization, etc.
Once you start a YouTube channel, you can safeguard yourself from the above risks and more with Creator Insurance. Creator Insurance is a YouTube insurance that protects content producers against financial damages from the content shared on social media. Welance, in partnership with SBI and BSE, has devised this Insurance for digital creators to protect the rights of YouTube content producers and guarantee the stability of their earnings.
Step 6: Promote, Engage, and Grow Your Channel
Now we’re at the last step of starting your YouTube channel – bringing in viewers! If you’re on YouTube, we’re sure you’re on other social media platforms too. Almost 99% of users of YouTube are on other social networking platforms. Therefore, promoting your YouTube channel on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., should be a component of your overall plan for growing your channel’s viewership. Additionally, you may increase the number of views you get from those who are already using YouTube or who often search YouTube by improving your:
- Video description,
- Title,
- Utilizing keywords,
- And optimizing thumbnails.
Your videos will reach more people if you embed them and enable others to do the same. If you make a Nike review video and then enable embedding, Nike can include your video as an embedded link on their website or another platform. You’ll find the option to enable embedding under the Advanced settings of your YouTube account.
YouTube, like other social media networks, encourages active participation. As you begin uploading videos to your channel, monitor engagement metrics like views, shares, and comments. You can let viewers know what you want them to do by asking them to subscribe to your channel and like/share your video. Simply add that to your audio script!
Conclusion
That’s it, that brings us to the end of our step-by-step guide to starting your YouTube channel. To become a successful Youtuber, you’ll have to keep refining your videos over time, learning more and more about different techniques and trends. By automating routine tasks, Welance makes YouTube content producers more productive and helps them get access to new avenues of income. You may build a solid career as a YouTuber with the help of our resources and techniques. Additionally, check out our social media insurance, Creator Protect, which will protect you from the legal risks of being a YouTuber and using the platform.