From Zero — YouTube Lessons Part 1

The Hell Known As YouTube

A series where I share what I’ve learned about growing a YouTube channel. Practical advice, personal takes, and lessons from experience. Some things you’ve probably heard before, others you haven’t.

I hit 1,000 subs about a year after starting my channel, peaked around 1,780, then it died out… I also got a meme channel to the point of being monetizable, but that’s another story.

I’ll keep adding to this post as I remember more. This first iteration is basically what I can recall off the top of my head.

This is a lot of fun, after you go through all the cringe and pain and get used to it. It gets better.

Best Advice

Things that I’ve heard and make sense:

• Do this as a hobby. Making it for a living or full-time will drive you insane.
• The algorithm eventually will hit you, sooner or later. Some people take a few months, others a few years. I believe the average is like 5 years.
• When the algorithm hits, you better have content. Otherwise you won’t retain audience, and also, more chances that they sub. Especially with Shorts.
• Shorts are OP. You can get quick views and more subs with a constant flow.
• Find your niche. It’s easier to connect that way. There are communities, and if your content is something that’s not that common, you have better chances to grow.
• Try to limit your content to one thing and iterate over it until you find your “formula.”
• The “formula” depends on your content. The metric insights can be useful to see what works and what doesn’t. It usually boils down to cutting the fat and keeping a good pace.
• Keep in mind that metrics from video performance will sometimes make you feel miserable.
• It’s sad until you start getting traction and interact with more people. Like streaming to 0 viewers. Having a friend or someone to watch your content will make you cringe a little less.
• The cringe is part of the process.
• The cringe won’t go away, especially when you look at your past videos.
• Perfect is the enemy of good.
• You don’t need to go that hard. The more effort you put in, the more it will hurt when you don’t get the results.
• A video that you pour all your love and skills into may fail, and one with barely any thought put into it may succeed. That’s YouTube, that’s life.
• Time consistency is important, but finding the best time to publish comes first. That’s odd and requires a lot of experimentation. In my case, 12 PM and 3 AM worked great, and certain days were better than others, but after that it was hit or miss.
• Promoting your channel through ads is not worth it unless you are a business.

Impressions

Some things that I noticed with my deceased channel:

• It didn’t have 4K for Shorts until basically half its life. Also, the max duration was 1 minute, when the publicly available info said 3 minutes. My new channels didn’t have that problem.
• Somewhere along the way, timestamps started working. Before that, they didn’t work even with the right pattern.
• I never saw the option to edit Shorts thumbnails. Maybe skill issue.
• People that found my channel said it was hard to find (partially blame the shadow banning), but also that even if the title and description can be translated when viewing, you need to add the additional languages so it’s also searchable that way. And that’s how I made my first n8n template.

Channel

• Keep in mind the settings for your channel. They do impact the visibility and the reach of your videos.
• Make it unique, personalized in your style.

I’ll cover this in another post.

Content

• If you want to have NSFW stuff, don’t push it too hard. Make a secondary account even if it pains you. You will receive fewer strikes and avoid unnecessary problems in the long run.
• Try to go for royalty-free music. If you have any copyrighted content, your video won’t be able to be monetized. I know that because of the meme channel that I mentioned.
• Make good quality content, lol.

Edition

• Be organized.
• Free tier goes a long way. I use CapCut since I didn’t want to try anything else until I felt fully well-versed in it. I’ve learned quite a few tricks, and that’s for another time.
• Have predefined assets and templates that you can reuse. Most editors let you create custom presets that you can copy between items, like sound levels, image adjustments, and so on.
• Thumbnails are important. Canva is a powerful service that goes a long way with the free tier, but you’ll save a lot of time by paying for features you’d otherwise need third-party tools for.
• Storage, especially if you record in 4K, is going to be a problem. Be prepared for that.
• Make backups, even if it’s on another YouTube channel.
• Color grading is horrible if you want the highest resolution. I cover that briefly in this series.
• Again, you don’t need perfection, just flow.
• AI slop will be AI slop.

Quality of Life

• Try to save time in any way possible. Be organized, have shortcuts, and so on, because it gets time consuming. I recall my first videos took me like 8 hours. Then it went down to an hour and a half, by trimming the fat and having default settings ready.
• I’m not fond of intros, which are suggested at certain points to make a channel more “familiar” to recurrent subscribers. But try to make the content standard. Like in my case: spin, overview, quick review, spins to end, outro screen.
• The outro screen that I use is just a dimmed transparent screen to remind viewers to subscribe and like (primo advice), but it reduced the visual clutter.
• Music helps a lot. Just be sure to balance the audio if you’re talking.

What’s Next

Next up, I want to cover customization and the common settings. There’s a lot of info out there about this, but I prefer having it my way and without having to sit through a video for it. The irony I know.