- So starting this YouTube channel is hands down,
the single best thing I've ever done in my life.
And so in this video,
I'm going to be sharing my top 10 tips,
on how you can get started with setting up your own channel
if that's what you're into.
Coming in at number 10, we have,
don't worry about what other people will say.
I always ask this question.
I ask the question on Twitter and on Instagram
and I ask people, you know
what are your fears about starting on YouTube?
And what do you want to know?
And the number one complaint is always
I'm worried about what my friends and family will think.
I've been running a course
called the Part-time YouTuber Academy,
where we have people who are sort of aged
from 18 up to like 55.
And basically everyone in that age range
also worries about what their friends and family will think.
But you know what?
The thing that everyone realizes
is that once you've uploaded your first video,
all of that fear kind of goes away because you realize,
that no one gives a shit,
like no one actually cares
whether you're uploading videos to YouTube.
You might think it's like the biggest deal in the world
that, oh my God, what is my mum going to say?
What am my cousins going to say?
What are my friends and university going to say?
But no one actually cares.
Everyone is just so worried about their own lives,
that the fact that I'm doing YouTube, no one cares.
The fact that you're going to start a YouTube channel
talking about whatever you want, no one cares.
And we just need to get that into our heads.
And this is such a common fear and we all have it.
And it's just the first thing you have to get over.
Basically, no one cares.
Stop deluding yourself into thinking
that people are thinking about you,
because everyone is just worried about themselves.
They're worried about
how they are appearing to other people.
There's this thing in psychology
called the spotlight effect,
which is that we all walk through life
thinking that there is a spotlight trained on us
and just not realizing that everyone else
is absorbed in their own life,
and we are only the heroes of our own story,
and we are supporting cast and everyone else's story,
if they're even thinking about us at all.
So start your YouTube channel.
Do not worry about what people will think.
99% of the fear is
in just before you publish your first video.
But I promise you, as soon as you hit publish on that video,
99% of the fear will disappear,
and you will stop worrying what people think.
Then at point number nine,
we have gear doesn't matter at the start.
Gear does matter in the long run,
but at the start gear does not matter at all.
When I started my YouTube channel,
I started filming on my iPhone,
I did not have any microphone attached to it.
I literally just got the camera,
lay in bed, pointed at myself and said,
hey guys, I think I'm thinking
I'm going to start some kind of vlog.
I knew absolutely nothing about editing,
I just followed free YouTube tutorials,
about how to edit videos.
And that's what you have to do when you're getting started.
It's like, if you're starting learning how to write,
it doesn't matter what pen you're using
as long as you're writing something.
If you're getting started learning how to draw,
it does not matter what pencil and what paper you're using.
That's all a distraction.
what you need to do is just
pick up any old pencil you've got lying
or pen that you've got lying around the house,
any old piece of paper or scrap paper
and just start learning from day one.
It's the same thing with YouTube really.
If you're watching this,
you have a device which is capable of recording video.
You have your phone.
If you want to get started on YouTube, screw the gear.
Don't think, oh, I need to wait to upgrade
to a fancy ass camera before I'm allowed
to get started on YouTube,
start with whatever you have,
start with your phone and you can always upgrade later.
And in fact, over there is a video where I talk about
exactly how to start filming videos with just your iPhone,
and it looks pretty reasonable.
If you do want to upgrade something,
then upgrade your audio quality.
Firstly, because people will sit through a bad video quality
but no one will sit through bad audio quality,
so that's the first thing to upgrade.
And if you want to learn more about
exactly which gear to upgrade
and like a shopping list for gear at different levels,
you should definitely sign up to my Part-time YouTuber
free seven day email course.
This is totally free.
You just enter your email address
and then every day I will email you with a long ass article,
which contains lots of tips
about getting started on YouTube.
And one of those in the seven-day course
is about exactly what gear you need to upgrade,
and in which order, and I give you different levels
for gear a different budget levels.
So again, that'll be linked in the video description
if you want to check it out,
again, totally free.
Just seven days of emails from me,
where I give you my top tips on getting started
on YouTube as a beginner.
Point number eight,
we have, don't worry about the numbers.
Once you started on YouTube,
this is a mistake everyone makes is that you're
way too focused on the analytics,
but at the start, like it doesn't really matter.
The only thing you have to do
is just keep on producing more and more and more videos
and not really worry about the fact that
no one is watching them,
and that you're not getting very many subscribers.
If you look at the stats,
according to Tube buddy, the average channel
with 1000 to 10,000 subscribers has made 152 videos.
So until you've made 152 videos,
you do not have the right to complain,
that you're not growing on YouTube.
You have to make 152 videos first
and then we can think about
how to tweak your growth prospects on YouTube.
For me, it took me 52 videos and six months
to hit a thousand subscribers,
that was making two videos a week, six months in a row
while I was a full-time medical student at Cambridge
while preparing for my final year medical student exams.
Two videos a week, six months
and then I hit a thousand subscribers.
And so at the very least,
if you've made anything less than 52 videos,
then don't worry about your subscriber count.
You can always email me for advice
or sign up to my YouTube,
Part-time YouTuber mailing list and reply to emails on that.
You can always email me for advice further down the line,
but I can't give you any advice
until you've made at least 52 videos.
That's just how it works.
All right.
Point number seven is this idea
of stacking the deck in your favor.
So we've established that you're going to start your channel
and you're just going to do it
and not care about what people think,
but to succeed on YouTube,
you want to think in terms of
stacking the deck.
How do you take the deck
and how do you stack it in your favor?
Now, the extent to which you should stack the deck
depends on how you're thinking about YouTube.
If you're thinking about YouTube purely as a hobby
where you don't actually care about the numbers
and you're thinking,
oh it would be nice to make money from this
further down the line,
but it's not my primary aim right now.
And that's great,
you don't need to worry
about stacking the deck in your favor,
but if like a lot of students in our course,
the Part-time YouTuber Academy,
you're thinking of YouTube more as a business opportunity
so the more business
entrepreneurial people minded end of the spectrum,
you then want to think about how do I stack the deck
to try and grow on YouTube or to try and get,
achieve my goals for YouTube, you know,
as effectively as possible.
And there's broadly two ways of stacking the deck.
You can stack the deck in terms of time,
or you can stack the deck in terms of money.
How do you stack the deck in terms of time?
Well, it involves putting in the time
to learn how to get better on camera,
which happens over time as you make more and more videos.
It involves putting in the time
to get better at editing videos.
Again, it happens as you just produce more and more videos.
I've got a friend called James Johnny
who has grown from zero to 500,000 plus
subscribers on YouTube
by making like 10 or 12 videos or something stupid like that
because he spends hundreds of hours editing each one
to make it, craft it into a perfect
Netflix documentary style video.
He is stacking the deck in his favor,
by spending large amounts of time,
hundreds and hundreds of hours,
writing, scripting and editing his videos.
The other way of stacking the deck in your favor
is by using money.
Now we're not going to talk about this
because this is a more advanced point.
But for example, you can invest in gear,
and number two, you can invest in hiring your own team
which is now what I've done.
And actually a lot of people don't realize
that you can outsource video editing for quite cheaply,
very early on.
And so, especially if you have a job
where your time is worth let's say more than $10 an hour,
you can easily outsource video editing
to someone who you're paying less than $10 an hour too,
if you want, as a way of stacking the deck in your favor
by using money.
Again, that's a bit of an advanced point.
We'll talk about that more
in my Part-time YouTuber free email course,
just sign up in the video description,
if you want to check that out.
But yeah, that's kind of how I think about it.
Like there are no guaranteed formulae to success on YouTube,
but really it's all about stacking the deck in your favor
in whatever way you can
depending on what your goals for YouTube are.
Are you a hobbyist
or are you a entrepreneur, business person?
I'm somewhere in the middle
leaning kind of towards the business side.
So I do whatever I can to stack the deck in my favor.
Point number six, use your unfair advantages.
Now I've got a secret three-part formula
for success on YouTube
and in fact, success in anything in life
and that is success equals work multiplied by luck,
multiplied by unfair advantages.
Now work, you have to put in the work,
you have to put in the time and the effort to do this.
Otherwise, you know, it's not going to go anywhere.
Luck, you're kind of reliant,
you do have to get a little bit lucky,
but the good thing about luck is that
the more videos you put out,
the higher the odds that any one of them will get
picked up by the algorithm and will start to go viral.
And in fact, for my channel
it's only been like two or three videos
in the last three and a half years
that have gone really viral,
that have really propelled channel growth.
Everything else has been fairly average, fairly mediocre.
So that was work and luck.
But the third component of the success equation
is unfair advantages.
What are the unfair advantages that you have
that you can exploit in your YouTube channel
or in whatever you're doing?
For me my unfair advantage was that I was a medical student
and I was at Cambridge University.
Those are pretty big unfair advantages,
because the niche that I was targeting
was people applying
to study medicine at Cambridge University.
I was not trying to be a makeup influencer.
I was not trying to be a fashion influencer
or a lifestyle or workout or fitness influencer.
None of that would have used my unfair advantage.
Maybe the medical student thing
if I was actually interested in fitness.
But you want to think about what are the qualities I have?
What are the things that
other people can't necessarily compete with,
even though we don't really
want to think about this as a competition,
what are the unfair advantages that I have,
that I can use to help propel my channel?
And if at this point you're thinking,
well I don't have any unfair advantages,
you should check out a video linked up there
which will be my book club episode
of a book called The Unfair Advantage
which is all about the formula to success
where I chat with one of the authors Hasan,
about the five different types of unfair advantages,
and we talk about how to answer this question of like,
well, I don't feel like I have any advantages,
because everyone has their unfair advantages.
You just have to lean into them.
You have to figure out what they are.
And then you want to try and weave that
into your YouTube channel somehow.
Point number five, focus on quantity
rather than quality.
It is far more important when you're starting out on YouTube
to make a hundred really bad videos
than to try and make 10 really good videos.
Caveat, unless you're going down
the James Johnny route of like, you know,
putting in hundreds of hours of editing into the videos,
that's like a different style.
But like I imagine for most people watching this,
your aim is to become a YouTuber that's sort of like me
whereby you can sit in front of a camera
and talk about whatever you want and it's kind of nice,
and you share your life and you share your experiences,
and you do some teaching,
rather than to craft a Netflix documentary.
But whatever the case,
quantity is more important than quality at the start.
And there's a nice story that I like,
which is the parable of the pottery class.
And the story goes that there is a pottery class,
and the teacher divides the group into two different groups.
One of the groups has to make a pot every day for 30 days,
so by the end of the 30 days, they make 30 pots,
whereas the other group,
has to focus on a single pot for the whole 30 days,
so they only have one pot at the end of the 30 days.
And then at the end of the 30 days,
the teacher kind of brings all the pots together,
and judges the quality of the pots.
And he gives out prizes about who's the best potterer,
and every single pot that won a prize,
came from the quantity group, rather than the quality group.
Especially when you're getting started out in something,
there are so many learnings to be had,
improving your own ability to talk to the camera,
improving your ability to edit videos,
improving your storytelling.
All of these happen through quantity,
rather than through quality.
You have to get in the reps
and so my theory on this
is that you just have to make a hundred videos,
make at least a hundred videos,
and then worry about trying to improve the quality of them.
Because by virtue of making a hundred videos
you're naturally going to improve the quality of them
without even really thinking about it.
But the main thing is you have to,
you've got to get in the reps.
It's all about quantity rather than quality at the start.
Number four is, don't really worry about what your niche is.
Like people get hung up on this.
Like, I don't know what to make videos about.
It would be like a writer saying
I don't know what to write about
therefore I'm not going to write.
Or like an artist saying,
I don't know what my masterpiece is going to be,
therefore I'm not going to hold a paintbrush.
It's totally okay for your niche to emerge over time.
Yes, you can take a very calculating route
and plot out in advance and be like, okay, this is my path.
Or you can do what I recommend,
which is just start making videos on YouTube
about whatever you enjoy, whatever you want.
If I were starting on YouTube,
I wouldn't really worry about the niche thing.
I just think, you know what,
let me make videos about the things that I enjoy making,
maybe some close-up magic because I'm not a total loser.
Maybe like iPhones,
maybe like, you know my favorite pen,
maybe like, you know,
tips of getting started on YouTube,
maybe life as a medical student,
maybe like,
whatever experiences in my life that I enjoy talking about,
and that I think I could teach on the internet
that is the stuff I would start making videos about.
And over time, as you start making videos
about things that you enjoy,
the audience starts to resonate with some of those things,
and so your niche ends up emerging over time.
I never thought I would be a productivity YouTuber,
but I seem to have become a productivity YouTuber,
because that niche just sort of emerged over time,
it was not forward planned in advance.
And so if you've got a lot of interest,
if you've got a lot of things you're interested in,
or even if you don't know what to talk about on YouTube,
just start making stuff and you will figure it out.
Don't be one of those writers who says,
I don't know what my best sort of book is going to be about,
therefore, I'm not going to write a single word.
It's the same with YouTube.
Who cares if you don't know what your niche is?
Your niche will change over time.
I started off making videos for medical school applicants.
I now not only care about medical school applicants
in terms of making videos
and therefore it just sort of changes over time.
So don't worry about it.
Don't overthink it.
Just make the videos that you enjoy at the start.
Point number three, be patient and be consistent.
Those are really the only two things that you need
for success on YouTube.
You need consistency and you need patience.
Consistency in publishing at least one video a week
and patience in that, not worrying about the fact
that you're not going to get any traction
for a large amount of time.
Success on YouTube is absolutely not an overnight thing.
And certainly with my channel, you know,
my first like 80 videos, I made no money.
And then I started making a few dollars here and there.
And with all of these things,
like with every good thing in life,
it's like a compounding returns curve.
And you don't realize it,
when you're right at the start of the curve
because you just,
you're not seeing any traction,
but three years later,
if you can stick with publishing two videos a week,
for three and a half years, like I've been doing,
you look back and you think, Oh my God,
you know my first a hundred videos,
they were just part of that, getting that flywheel to turn
and really it's all about that consistency,
but also having the patience and having the faith
that this will pay off in the long run,
just not in the short term.
It's like one of my goals for the new year
is to get six pack abs.
But if I were to do some crunches right now
and to not see any abs coming out,
it would be a bit silly of me to say,
oh, you know, why am I not growing on YouTube?
Or why are my abs not coming out?
Because you have to do it every day for several months,
before you see any results.
And that consistency is what gives you the result,
rather than a super intense workout on day one.
Point number two is try and think about it
in terms of systems.
Now, this is a big thing that we teach in our course
the Part-time YouTuber Academy.
Again, if you wanted the free seven day email course,
hit the link in the video description,
but it's really all about building a system,
'cause we've established that the way to grow on YouTube
is by being consistent for a very long time.
You then want to start thinking,
okay if I need to be consistent
and put out one or two videos a week for the next five years
how can I build a system around that
to make it easier for me to do?
And at the start of our YouTube careers,
what everyone does and what I did
is you think one video at a time,
you think, okay, what's this week's video?
Okay, what's the next week's video?
And then another one,
but then very quickly you realize that,
okay this is quite hard to sustain.
And so you want to think about building a system in terms of
how can I generate as many ideas for content as possible?
And then number two,
how can I kind of refine these ideas
and turn them into titles and thumbnails and hooks?
Number three, how can I
sort of create these videos in parallel?
Number four, how can I find pockets of time
throughout the day where maybe, you know
I've got a 10 minute break at work,
or in my lunch break where I can plan out a video
that's going to be pushed out several months in advance?
How can I plan out my content calendar
so that I actually only have to film once
and I can batch film maybe five videos in a row
so that I don't have to go through all the effort
of setting up the lights and camera and everything?
It's all of this stuff around building a system.
And if you want a book recommendation on that
you should check out The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.
This is a book I've been recommending
to all the students in our course,
and everyone who's read it says that,
oh my God, this book is absolutely amazing.
It's just a great way of changing a mindset
to thinking in terms of systems.
And that I would say that's one of the books
that's most changed my life,
and that has made publishing on YouTube a lot easier
because now instead of thinking of it as one video at a time
I think of it as a holistic, cohesive, coherent system.
And finally, point number one is
if you're thinking of getting started on YouTube,
then just do it.
You know, you could literally pause this video right now.
You could get your phone out.
You could switch on the recording, the camera,
turn on selfie mode on your phone and be like,
hey guys this is my first YouTube video
you know, I was watching Ali's
tips on getting started on YouTube video
and he was saying, to be honest
you should just kind of do it.
And so this is it,
I'm going to start my YouTube channel
and this is video number one.
That video took me 11 seconds to film.
And if you're starting on YouTube,
you could literally do that.
Like pause this video right now,
turn on the selfie camera on your phone,
and just upload it using the YouTube app on your phone.
It is that simple.
Like we all overthink this so much,
like, oh my God, my first video has to be good
and it has to be imperfect.
And what are people going to think?
But what we don't realize is that no one cares,
no one's gonna watch your first video.
Like who gives a, it gives a toss.
Like if it takes the average channel 152 videos
to go between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers,
why do you think that video number one matters?
It's just completely inconsequential.
Video number two
3, 4, 5, 6,
20, 30, 40,
none of those videos actually matter in the long run.
What matters is that you actually just get started,
and you realize that hitting that publish button on YouTube
is not as hard as it originally seems.
And there's that quote that I like that, you know
the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.
The second best time is now.
And so if you're thinking,
oh damn, I wish I'd started YouTube 10 years.
I wish I'd started YouTube 10 years ago,
but if I didn't have a channel
and I was watching,
and I've watched to the end of this video,
I would just get my phone out and film that video right now.
In fact, if you're doing that,
link it in the comments down below,
and I will subscribe to your channel
and I'll be like your first subscriber,
for whatever that's worth.
But I just need you to upload that very first video
and then commit to publishing at least one video a week.
So those were 10 tips on getting started on YouTube.
You really don't need anything else,
you just need to get started.
But if you're interested in joining me on a live course,
where I teach a few hundred people
about how to do this stuff,
with assignments and things and everything,
and we teach you about
the systems-based approach to growing your channel,
then check out the Part-time YouTuber Academy
link in the video description,
along with my free seven day email course,
again linked in video description.
Do you need a course to succeed on YouTube?
No, absolutely not.
It really is just about publishing content consistently.
And there is absolutely nothing I teach on my course
that you can't find out on the internet.
Anyway, check out the Video Creators podcast,
check out the Video Creators YouTube channel
and check out Think Media.
They've got a fantastic YouTube channel.
There are so many free resources online.
So if you don't want to sign up to a course, that's fine.
You can do the work yourself.
But if you're the sort of person
who benefits from accountability
and having a community of people
to go through the process with on top of the content,
that's all in one place,
nicely packaged up for you,
Then you might like to check out the course.
Whatever happens once you start your YouTube channel,
you're going to need some tips for time management,
which is why you should check out that video
where I talk through my eight top tips
for managing your time,
so you can pump out that content consistently.
Thank you so much.
All the best with your channel,
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.