How To Start Your YouTube Channel

So you want to start a YouTube channel. Presumably, since you’ve clicked on this article. Or maybe you want to help a friend get theirs started. Whatever your reasoning, welcome! This simple guide will set you on the path to making a channel.

Let me be blunt. I’m not going to promise you’ll become famous with this guide. I’m not going to teach any clickbaity tricks to become wealthy and renowned on the site. Most of the people who say they are are trying to sell you something.

This guide is for those who have the itch to create a channel but don’t know where to start. Instead, I’m going to use what I’ve learned from running my YouTube channel, Tears In Rain, to help you get started. Let’s jump in with our first topic.

HAVE AN IDEA

Sounds simple enough, right? I’m not talking about an idea for a video, though. That can be a good starting point - but where do you go after that? If you cultivate a single, perfect video idea and make, what’s next?

That’s why you need an idea for our channel overall. It doesn’t need to be a super detailed idea. It can be flexible. But having something is vital. You can make YouTube videos on any subject. The possibilities are so vast you need to whittle down the topics.

Take “cooking,” for example. If you want to start a YouTube channel focused on cooking, how will you do it? If you want to encompass everything under the culinary sun, you’ll get buried beneath your options. But what if you narrow it down to say, cooking on a budget? Or basic cooking techniques to help college students put down the Cup-O-Noodle and pick up a knife?

Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to only follow one type of idea forever. You can branch out. Consider the Babish Culinary Universe cooking YouTube channel. Babish has several different series on his channel, including Binging with Babish where he makes dishes from films and television, and his Basics with Babish series. But having a solid idea you can mine many videos from is one of the most important steps you can take.

BE CONSISTENT

This doesn’t mean you have to produce a video every week, but consistency is a key part of growing an audience. There are a few ways to be consistent in your channel, all of which are useful. Firstly, consistent content.

Keeping your content consistent doesn’t mean you have to produce the same video over and over and over. But some stylistic choices and common themes help to keep viewers watching. For example, the channel Lessons from the Screenplay starts every video with the narrator saying “Hi, I’m Michael and this is Lessons from the Screenplay." This immediately brands the video as an LftS video.

Making consistent content also ties into the previous point about having an idea. You’re trying to snare a particular audience - more on that later - so you want to keep the same type of videos up. If you upload a cooking video, then a makeup tutorial, then a video about car maintenance, the lack of consistency will hurt the odds of your channel growing. You might get a young makeup artist fascinating by your tutorial, only to be put off by the car lesson.

Another way of keeping your channel consistent lies in how you brand your work. Branding is pretty basic stuff when it comes to creating anything you want to build a following for. The above tips are including in branding, but so is the presentation of your videos. For presentation, I’m talking about thumbnails and titles. Consider these screenshots:

These are feeds from two League of Legends YouTubers I follow, Zwag and SoloRenektonOnly. See how each of their thumbnails have a similar layout and use the same backgrounds and fonts? These small details keep their content consistent and make it stand out. I can tell a Zwag video from an SRO video at a single glance before I even read the title or channel name.

As a final note on consistency, uploading at the same time helps maintain a following. Your viewers, especially the devoted fans, will become familiar with your schedule and keep an eye out for it. Like I said at the top of the section, this doesn’t mean you need to post every week. But if you’re putting out one video a month, try to put it out on the same day. That way viewers will know it’s the third Friday of the month, so they need to watch out for your next video.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

The last section was pretty long, so I’ll keep this one brief. You need to understand your target audience. This may be the most useful tool in your kit to help grow your channel because it will help attract and keep viewers. You don’t need to write detailed character profiles for your audience, but you should have an idea of who you're writing for.

For example, in the first section, I proposed a cooking channel to teach college students basic cooking skills. That’s a great example of knowing your audience. It’ll help keep your videos on track and consistent, too. If you’re trying to teach a college student with little cooking experience, you’ll want to avoid a video on beef wellington with a truffle puree in favor of something like pasta carbonara.

Knowing your audience also helps generate ideas when faced with an topic. Take writing, for example. Writing is such a vast field you could never realistically cover every aspect of it on one channel.

The Reedsy YouTube channel acknowledges this. Rather than tackling every aspect of novel writing, it focuses on topics about self-publishing novels. Topics like when to hire an editor or how to market your book. Hello Future Me is another channel about writing, but he tackles it from a more technical, how-to perspective with his “On Writing” series.

Both channels focus on writing from an educational standpoint. But they seek out different audiences. This gives their videos different topics within the same sphere and lets them build a consistent audience. If they tried to cover every aspect of writing, then some videos would be a hit for some viewers while others would ignore them.

KNOW YOURSELF

This might sound trite, but it’s one of the most important points in this article. You need to ask yourself a single, burning question: Why do you want to build a YouTube channel? What do you hope to get out of it, what do you want to share?

This question will help you build into all the other topics on this list. If you want to write about movies and be an educational channel, that’s going to look very different than a channel that writes about movies to share opinions or as extra entertainment. Finding the intersection of passion (ie cooking) and purpose (ie education) will help you come up with an idea for your channel, will help you create consistent content, and find an audience.

My answer to the question is twofold: I create video essays on movies and television simply to share my thoughts and hear what others have to say, and because I love it. I’ve worked on Tears In Rain intermittently for over three years. Sometimes I get burnt out and stop making videos but I always come back to it. There’s always another video idea lurking in my mind. So I’ve never stopped.

IN CONCLUSION

Have an idea. Be consistent, know your audience, and know yourself. These tips will help you on your path to becoming a Youtuber. It might be a hobby, or it could be the start of a career. The most important thing you can bring to your channel, however, is passion. As long as you care about the subject you’re working with, your channel will be successful regardless of views or subscribers.