Start Before You Are Ready
When I first started publishing, I got 0 views and no one cared. Seriously, no one cared. This is actually perfect. It was the perfect opportunity for me to try new things and grow. I didn’t have a niche or a strategy. I just started posting videos.
Blasphemy, I know (I even argue against this in some of my other videos), but, in the very beginning, when you are first posting, you don’t need a niche because 90% of people who want to start a YouTube channel get stuck in analysis paralysis (usually around what to post) and they don’t post. And it’s impossible to become a YouTuber without publishing YouTube videos.
When I first started on YouTube, I was thinking about it for two years before I posted a video. I didn’t feel like I had any expertise or special abilities. Finally, when COVID hit, I decided to just post 1 video a week for a whole year. That decision changed my life.
About ~3 months into posting videos (12 weeks later). I found my niche and developed my “foundational content” as well as my 3 post categories. For my first 12 videos, I just talked about whatever I wanted.
Action item: decide on a posting schedule, when the first video goes live, and how many videos you are going to post. It must be within the next month.
Bonus Tip: Try and improve one thing for every video you post. Maybe this is scripting, audio, color grading, lighting, adding humor, storytelling, anything, and you can repeat your goal over and over on a single thing (like storytelling).
Copy and Steal
Every single popular YouTuber, artist, and creator in the world has at one point copied and stolen from someone else. It’s OK, as long as you do it the right way. Austin Kleon says it best, “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.”
Unless you were born under a rock and have never seen another human being in your life, then maybe, you can say you had a truly organic creative thought when you make your first YouTube video, otherwise, no, you can’t.
In reality, we are all constantly copying and stealing every time we watch something, read something, or hear something. When you write anything or say anything you are influenced of course by your genetics, but also greatly by your environment. Where did you learn your native language? What about how you dress? What about your opinions? You learned it, mostly, from others. And that’s OK!
So when you start making stuff, copy and steal! Look at other YouTubers you love, artists you love, and take what you like from their stuff and leave the rest. Copy and steal titles and thumbnails, and, over time, your own style will reveal itself.
“You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.” Austin Kleon
The only time it’s NOT ok to copy and steal is when you are copying word-for-word what other people say, or literally just stealing and reposting their content. Every time you post anything, double-check that there is a little bit of you in it. The internet can tell.
Action Item: Find your 3 favorite YouTubers and look at their 10 most popular videos (30 videos in total). Create a list of what you like and dislike to guide your channel and come up with your first 5 videos based on what you saw!
Title and Idea First
The order of operations for YouTube videos should be (according to top creators):
There are two main reasons for this:
#1: We want to create the most exciting and clickable content, so we start with what people see. In order for people to watch our stuff, they need to click on our stuff. Pre-click, all they see is our title and thumbnail.
#2: We want to deliver on content and build true fans that keep watching our videos. The YT algorithm is a black box, but essentially, it wants to keep people on YT longer. When you make your title and thumbnail before the script, your script is more likely to be aligned with the title and thumbnail, building trust with the viewer and keeping them watching the video. If they stay on your video longer than usual after the click, YouTube will promote the video more, resulting in more views, subs, and happy fans. If they click away fast, something’s gone wrong with your delivery of the promise on your title and thumbnai,l and YouTube will burn your video into oblivion.
If you promise in your video title and thumbnail to fight a great white shark, but then you actually just play tug of war with your dog, people will click away from your video and your chance of growth is pretty much 0.
Action item: From your ideas, create a highly clickable title, a highly clickable thumbnail, and then script the video.
Talk to Friends, Not Followers
The best tip I ever received when I first started was to talk to the camera like I was talking to a friend. So, I imagined the camera was my best friend and I was just talking to him about some topic or something that was interesting to me.
It made recording less scary, and over time, dramatically improved my public speaking ability.
Some random other speaking tips:
- Speak slower than you think necessary
- Remove as best as you can “ums, buts, maybes, likes, and yeahs”
- Speak from your chest and not from your nose. You can hum at higher and lower pitches until you find your “chest voice”
- If you are talking from a script, try and use it as a reference point instead of word-for-word unless you are a pro teleprompter reader (it can work)
- Record your hook/first 30 seconds of your video at the end of the video when your energy/comfort is higher than at the beginning
Action item: Are you lecturing or having a chat?
- Audio beats video quality every time
About 70% of YouTube views come from mobile, on those tiny screens. Guess what, the video quality isn’t that important because everything is squished down. Audio quality, however, is vital. People are watching outside, when commuting, or in noisy places, and when they can’t hear you (that means your voice), they will click away.
Focus on getting clear and high-quality audio, then improving the video quality.
Even more important than all of that? Quality of content and storytelling. As Casey Neistat says,
“Gear doesn’t matter… If all it took to be good was the right equipment, the people who had the most money would always win.”
To put this into a math equation, the secret formula to going viral is this % chance of virality = your value per second / the rest of the internet’s value per second.
Action item: My favorite cheap audio quality improvements are a lavalier mic under the shirt (DJI Mic 2 is great), or an overhead boom mic (The Audiotechnica 2020 is great value!).
- You can repurpose and reuse old content
You spent 20 hours on that one video, and now it disappears forever? Nope! Repurpose it! Turn it into a short on Instagram or YouTube, or post the content as written form on X or LinkedIn, or make a Newsletter out of it, or even wait a year or do another take on the content as a new video.
Recorded a bunch of cool B-roll? Save it into a b-roll library that you meticulously label and reuse. This will become your video goldmine for later!
Extremely popular YouTube videos? Redo it! Add onto it! My most popular videos are 30-day trials, so I’ll usually add on a how-to, turn it into a year or two-year experiment, or just film it again!
Then, I repurpose my content at least 14 times for written mediums:
- 2 Newsletters
- 1 Website Post
- 11 X Posts (Story, How To, Controversial, Q&A, Before/After, Listicle, 3 calls to action, 2 spur-of-the-moment thoughts).
And I’m planning on going on LinkedIn and Instagram shorts sometime soon.
Action item: turn one video into one other video and 5 short form videos!
- Bulk Record and Delegate
I usually record 6 videos at a time and in one week.
- Day 1: Title/Thumbnail/Outline 6 videos
- Day 2: Script videos 1-3
- Day 3: Script videos 4-6
- Day 4: Edit all videos, add B roll ideas to all videos, setup recording for tomorrow
- Day 5: Record 6 videos and upload
- Day 6: Record all B roll and upload/send to editor
So, in one month, I can finish half a year of content, or, if I publish once every other week, a whole year of content.
As a caveat, if you have never posted a YouTube video before, it’s better to work up to this so you can improve and iterate on every video. I didn’t bulk record videos until after my first year on YouTube. And I didn’t hire an editor until about 2 years in. I created standard operating procedures and guidelines around my videos that made hiring someone fairly easy.
Delegating and bulk recording have allowed me to work on other things, like building my business or simply goofing off for months at a time, because I was so ahead of the game.
If you like these tips, I have 99 more completely free YouTube tips that I wrote as an attempt to encompass everything from growing your channel to turning YouTube into a business. You can download my 99 YT Secrets Blackbook with this link completely free It will take you maybe ~1hr to read and reveals to you the rest of the secrets I wish I knew 5 years ago when first starting YouTube. You can download it completely for free at zhighley.com/99.
Action item: Try recording three videos at once!
Take a stand
When I left medicine, many people hated me an unsubscribed, but I gained some many more followers, and many more passionate followers (and buyers of my products) than ever before! Why? Because I was authentic to myself and I took a stand. It took me too long to learn this lesson. It’s 1,000% more interesting!
But the 1,000,000% better result? I felt better about myself and was happier. Now that it was all out in the open, the videos and chats and newsletters and posts came easier than me putting out this “doctor/med tuber persona.” Sure, medicine will always be a part of who I am, but it isn’t the whole of who I am.
Authenticity not only drives trust for your content but also just feels better and easier.
“It’s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.” Paul Graham
Even if you get people to like your fake persona online, you are getting people to only like your fake self. That’s just no fun. Many people do it, but my guess is that they are suffering inside or are going to break very soon.
Imagine if you were your open and honest self and people were interested in and followed that, doesn’t that sound awesome?
Action item: choose one topic (that won’t destroy your reputation) to be polarizing on, you’ll be amazed at the results.
Ok, bottom line
- Start Before You’re Ready – Post to zero views. No one cares, so experiment freely.
- Copy and Steal – Find your style by remixing what you love from others.
- Title and Idea First – Idea → Title → Thumbnail → Script. Always in that order.
- Talk to Friends Not Followers – Imagine the camera is your best friend.
- Audio Beats Video Quality – 70% watch on mobile. They’ll forgive bad video, not bad audio.
- Repurpose Everything – One video = 14+ pieces of content. Work smarter, not harder.
- Bulk Record and Delegate – 6 videos in one week = freedom for months.
- Take a Stand – Authenticity beats algorithm. Your real self attracts real fans.
Your first video will suck. Post it anyway. Your tenth will be better. Your hundredth will change someone’s life (maybe your own).
But none of that happens if you don’t start.
See you on YouTube and thanks for watching!