I have been making YouTube videos as a hobby for about 10 months now.
Here are a few tips that I can share.
1)Understand what you want to do. – “What do you want to talk about?” For me, I initially thought, “Hey I’ll be the guy who talks about audiobooks!”. That changed pretty quickly for me and evolved into doing a variety of videos ranging from recommending movie and comics, to singing and making funny skits, to a variety of other things. Either way, this will be pretty important in determining who your audience is/will be. This is pretty flexible, so there’s no rush in committing to any one topic.
2)Understand who you are. – “Are you gonna be a character?” The kind of personality that you have when making videos can affect how interested people will be in watching your content. This is very flexible so you shouldn’t feel afraid to change it if you’re not satisfied.
Those are the 2 biggest things that come to my mind.
Also, here are a few tips that I have learned recently.
1) Innovation is a good thing.- Learning new audiovisual “tools” can help improve the quality and appeal of your content. This can include the use of
microphones, video cameras, editing programs, lighting, use of green screens, and other elements of visual media. The appeal of your content can be positively or negatively affected by the quality of your visual and audio presentation.
2) Go at your own pace. – Don’t feel the need to “race” with other content creators. That is not to say that you cannot get inspiration and motivation from this type of “competition”, but rather that you shouldn’t negatively compare yourself to other creators and their content. Around the time I began making videos, RK Outpost and Darth Barbie started up their own channels and each of them has had amazing success. Within the span of a year both of them had reached monetization and gained an incredible following online. Another example would be Metal Gear Mando, another similar story of a creator who has had incredible success based on a combination of his personality and audiovisual quality and has an admirable following online. The bottom line here is that instead of being jealous or bitter about another channel’s success, be happy for them and use their success as your motivation to improve the reach and quality of your own work. You can gain valuable insight on how you can improve your channel through watching and interacting with other creators.
I’ll share this forum thread on twitter and hopefully, we can get some more people on here to share their thoughts on this topic.
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