Youtube Foundations
Does gear matter?
It’s one of the most asked and controversial questions of Youtube.
When you are at the start of your YouTube journey, where it’s still a bit of a struggle to make one video at a time, gear does not matter. We want to optimize everything we can for actually just making that 1 video. Ali started filming videos on his iPhone, because I knew that if I cared about gear, I’d end up caring way too much about gear and not actually filming the videos.
If you spend money on gear, then you are stacking the deck and making your video slightly better. But until you’ve gotten to the point where you’re making one video per week consistently, gear doesn’t matter.
Gear does help at that point when you’re trying to make the videos good.
Production has four elements: audio, video, lighting, and editing. In our full 50-page summary Ali discusses each one in detail.
Conceive your ideas
What’s your YouTube channel about?
Broadly, there are two approaches to answering this question –
- By being an architect
- By being an archaeologist
In general, an architect is like a meticulous planner who figures out a plan/blueprint for the whole thing even before putting a brick on the floor. So, everything gets designed upfront, and only then the execution is done. This is one way of finding your niche. Whereas, an archaeologist reckons on a site which might be legit and starts digging it, in a hope to find something interesting over time. For most of us, I would suggest choosing an archaeologist’s approach over an architect’s approach.
Planning everything out in advance, trying to exactly figure out what the niche and target audience is going to be even before making any videos, only works for some people. I would hazard a guess that 98% of successful YouTubers go down the archeologist route. They start digging and eventually their niche will emerge over time.
The full summary shows how to generate endless video ideas.
Crack the algorithm
The only way to grow on YouTube is to make videos that people want to watch. It’s that simple. There’s no secret to it.
The million dollar formula is to:
- Get people to click on your video
- Keep them watching your video
Get People To Click On Your Video
The only things we have to play with when earning the click are the title and the thumbnail of the video. That is it. Just have a good title and a good thumbnail. That’s easier said than done, though.
Titles are more important than thumbnails, if you have to choose between one or the other. As a quick hack, anytime you’re making a video, make 20 titles for it to choose from. But, if you’re still struggling to make one video a week, don’t worry about the titles. The foundation for being a YouTuber is to make one video each week.
Keep Them Watching Your Video
Basically, the formula we have here to keep viewers engaged throughout our videos is the HIVE’s framework –
- Hook
- Intro
- Value
- End Screen Sales Pitch
Keep them watching
How do we make people fall in love with our channel?
Basically, it’s all about ‘The ABCDE Of Personalisation’ –
- Aesthetic
- Branding
- Confidence & Delivery
- Editing
Aesthetics – The aesthetic of your channel is going to depend on what kind of vibe you want to portray. That vibe can be created through –
- Background Design : One hack to a decent YouTube background is to have some lamps & plants in the background. Also, it is ideal if you have a nice camera that blurs out the background a little bit. I think, just having a nice background and decent lighting is one of the highest return on investment things you could do for your channel.
- Channel Branding : A really easy way of doing this is by using ‘Canva’. You can use it to create amazing channel art.
- Background Music : You can use services like Epidemic Sound to easily find music for your channel.
As a good starting point, what I recommend is to find a YouTube channel whose vibe you like. And literally just copy it.
Build your empire
Why should we build an audience on multiple platforms?
Basically, repurposing involves recycling the content that we have created for YouTube, and putting it across multiple social platforms in hopes of reaching more people who don’t browse YouTube. Then we can funnel that audience into the things that we want them to do and actually care about. This opens a whole new range of opportunities.
Another important one is for diversification. Because, you don’t own your audience on YouTube. YouTube owns that audience. So, anything could happen. We have already seen a lot of social media platforms in the past rise and fall. Hence, having an audience only on one platform is a risk.
Monetise Your Empire, Make Good Money
Monetization is one of the best parts about being a Part-Time YouTuber, apart from the friends that you make along the way.
In the full summary Ali covers all the forms of monetization in detail.
Integrate and grow with your new system :
Quantity vs Quality – The way I think of it is that, for 99% of people quality comes from quantity. To be honest, every single creative could benefit from quantity as well.
Consistency – Consistency is the bare minimum that you need to succeed on YouTube. But consistency alone is not sufficient for your growth. Just making a load of videos is not actually going to help you. Quantity should make your videos better. If you’re just filming the same sort of video again and again and not changing anything, then you’re passively hoping your skills will improve over time. I would say, if you’re posting videos every week for six months, and you haven’t yet started to see any momentum, it just means that your videos aren’t good enough. And, that is a hard pill to swallow. But, the good news is that ‘good enough’ is actually easier on youtube than in any other field.
Why is YouTube ‘easier’ than most other fields?
- Video as a platform is growing every month at a ridiculous rate. More and more people, especially in parts of the developing world these days are going on the internet.
- There is almost no other field in which you can just publish something for free without asking anyone for permission and your work will just automatically get seen by people. Because, the algorithm here is doing that work for you.
- YouTube Analytics is just insanely strong. It gives us so much information that we can actively use to change the proof of performance, either of our existing videos, or more likely of our future videos, which is something you don’t really get in almost any other field.
- Monetization is also amazing on YouTube. Once you hit 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time, you can simply turn on your monetization.
- YouTube has a long tail of potential niches. There are viewers for absolutely every niche imaginable.
So if you think this course can help you start and grow your YouTube channel but you can’t afford it or you’re not ready to take it. You can always get the summary. Click here to get the full 50-page summary of the course with all the main insights.
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