 Everything you need to know to start a YouTube channel in 2021. A complete beginner's guide. Part one of two. Okay, so you wanna start a YouTube channel and you're asking yourself, is it too late? The answer is no, not at all. As a matter of fact, there's never been a better time to start a YouTube channel. In this video, I'm gonna walk you through everything you need to know so you can get up and running fast and take advantage of what's going on on YouTube now. Dude, I gotta tell you, I gotta come clean. I started my YouTube channel in 2015 and I didn't do the things I was supposed to do. I didn't do any of the things I was supposed to do and it really hurt me and I got no traction for that reason. So I don't want that to happen to you. I want to share with you the things I did change that started to get me traction, got me monetized and got me making money on YouTube. Now here's the truth. I've spent years learning this stuff but the cool thing is on this video I can share all these things with you and you don't have to go through all the trials and tribulations that I did and you can get going fast. Now, like I said in the beginning, some of you may think it's too late, it's not too late. As a matter of fact, yeah, there's more channels on YouTube than there's ever been. However, there's more viewers on YouTube than there's ever been too. Now I wanna be up front with you, okay? Cause some people are not up front with you. It takes time. It takes a lot of time to do videos on YouTube. An average video that should be about 10 minutes can take you about 10 hours and the reason for that is you've got to script it and you've got to plan out what you're gonna say. You don't wanna just turn on your camera and talk. Okay, it's not gonna be good. You have to plan out that video a little bit. Now what I do is I'll put like some bullet points on my computer here of the things I wanna talk about. I don't script it word for word. I don't use a teleprompter or anything like that but you certainly can if you feel uncomfortable trying to talk, you know, extemporaneously. Now let's get right to the part that you're probably interested in. Can you make money? You can make money instantly, okay? You can make money instantly but it won't be from YouTube ads. YouTube ads are gonna take some time as a matter of fact to even get monetized. For them to pay you, you're gonna have to have 1,000 subscribers in 4,000 hours of watch time. Now here's the cool thing. All these big YouTubers that you see that are making all these millions of dollars, they all started exactly where you are at zero subscribers and no views. You can do this but there's other ways to make money on YouTube too. Now you're gonna wanna experiment a little bit. You don't know really what your groove is until you get started but I will tell you this, you gotta get started. A lot of people say well I don't wanna do a video cause I know it's gonna be bad. Well if you know it's gonna be bad you might as well go ahead and make that video and get it over with. If you go back to my first video on this channel, yeah it's pretty bad. I don't even wanna show that video. But here's the point. As you do videos, you'll get better and better. You keep studying and keep learning different things that you can do in your videos to improve the quality. But here's the cool thing. Your videos don't have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough. And keep in mind you can always reshoot if you're in the middle of shooting a video and it's not good, just do it over again. Or let's say you do a video and you publish it and you didn't think it was a very good video, you can always do another one in six months or a year on the same subject. Now let's talk about some of the equipment you need. You gotta have a camera, okay? Undoubtedly you have to have a camera but most people have a good enough video camera on their smartphones nowadays to use it. I would also recommend getting a tripod of some sort. Having a tripod is gonna hold that camera steady and you're gonna get a much better quality video. But keep in mind a tripod can be stacked up books with your camera setting on it. It doesn't have to be a professional tripod, it can be some cardboard boxes, whatever you need to use to get yourself going, do that. Now you're also gonna need some video editing software but most smartphones nowadays come with video editing software. You could just use the software on that phone. Hey, before we go any further, I forgot to tell you, you need to subscribe. Don't forget to click that button below down there. If it's red, turn it gray, click it, make it turn gray and when you do that, a bell will pop up next to it and you need to ring that bell. Turn on all bell notifications so that you are notified every single time I do a new video or I go live. Now that we got that out of the way, let's keep going. Next thing is an external microphone. Now this is a funny situation. Most smartphones have pretty good audio but it's usually arm length away, okay? If you get any further than arm length away, it's gonna get a lot of ambient sounds around you so you're gonna need an external microphone. Now the good news is you can get some pretty cheap external microphones and I'll put a link in the description below but you can get one of these lavalier microphones with a wire that goes to your phone and you get much better sound. Sound is super, super important because if you don't have good sound, people aren't gonna watch the video. You can have a mediocre quality video but with bad sound, nobody's gonna watch. Next up is lights. Now in filming this video right here, I've got one, two, three, four, five lights and a ring light so I've got six lights on here. That doesn't mean you have to have them. I didn't have them in the beginning and they're not necessary. So if you don't have light, that's not a problem. You can face one of your windows with a light coming on you and that's enough light. Make sure you're never backlit, okay? You don't want a light behind you. If you put the light behind you, it'll make your face darker. And the last thing is enthusiasm and work ethic, okay? A lot of people are enthusiastic but they lack the work ethic. It takes a lot of work. Today I'm filming videos. I'm filming 13 videos in one day. It's gonna take me about 12 hours to do that but I've also spent another two or three days scripting out these videos before it even got started. And then once I do that, I've gotta do a rough edit of these videos and chop out the parts I don't want and then I give them to my video editor and then he edits them to make them usable. Now if you think, oh my gosh, I don't have a video editor, JR, I didn't either for years, okay? That's just something that I was able to acquire after I built up some money from this channel. Now as far as the camera goes, yeah, you can use your phone but as you grow your channel, I would recommend you going with a DSLR camera. We use the EOS Canon which I'll put a link in the description below there. In addition to that, the editing software that you need is on your phone but I would recommend you moving up later on to something like Camtasia, Final Cut Pro. There's a lot of good softwares out there. I use those two, primarily Camtasia. I like that one the best. Now there's a couple free editing softwares. You can use Movie Maker, okay? Or if you're an Apple user, you can use iMovie. Both of those editing softwares are completely free. I mentioned Camtasia that sells for about $249. You can also get Final Cut Pro for $299. You do not need those in the beginning. Do not use this as an excuse to not get started. Of course, the first thing you're gonna wanna do is pick a niche. My niche on this channel is how to make money online. Your niche and what you select will really determine how much money you're gonna make. Now I will put a screenshot up of my actual CPM. CPM is how much that video will generate per thousand views and then the RPM is the amount of revenue that I actually get. Now I just watched a video this morning on a young lady who has millions of followers and her CPM is $1.63. Why is mine $33.30? Well the difference is that hers is a lifestyle blogging channel so she's all over the place. She's vacationing one day, she's cooking the next day. It is not really niche down. My channel, you know, when you come to my channel it's gonna be all about learning how to make money online. That pays a whole lot higher CPM. So you gotta take that into consideration when you're doing your channel. Next thing you gotta do is pick a channel name. That's up to you what you wanna do minus J.R. Fisher training. When people search J.R. Fisher on YouTube they'll usually stumble on my channel. They have to know me though. You may wanna have a channel that has a name that has something to do with it like barbecue right or DIY tips for moms or whatever. It depends on what you wanna do. I wouldn't worry about it a whole lot in the beginning because you can change that later on. Now you gotta decide if it's gonna be a personal channel or a business channel. A personal channel is linked to one of your personal Gmail accounts. So as a business channel really the only big difference is that on a business brand type channel like what I have here I can add managers to it so I can have my video editor also be able to log in and upload videos and make changes and that type of thing and that's kinda handy. So I would suggest you doing that. You wanna make sure that you get your channel verified. You can go in your settings and find out how to verify your channel. If you don't you'll only be able to make your videos private and no longer than 15 minutes. So you wanna make sure that you do get your channel verified. You wanna set up the basics too. You wanna have a photo for your channel obviously. You wanna have a description. You wanna have the right meta tags in there. If you want people to find your channel they search with these keywords. Those keywords have to be on your channel. A lot of people will just put the keywords on the videos but then of course nobody can ever find the channel. They can only find the videos within the channel. When you go into your settings also put some type of business email in there where people can contact you. That's super important because if you wanna get notifications of people saying hey I wanna do a brand deal with you or I'm interested in your products or I wanna buy some of what you got you gotta have that contact information there. Now I suggest you use a different email than what you normally use. That way you can tell where those inquiries are coming from. Don't forget also you're gonna have channel defaults and what a channel default is is every time you upload a video certain tags are gonna be there. Certain things are gonna be in the description. Maybe your affiliate link, something along those lines. Now let's talk about actually how to make a YouTube video. The first thing you're gonna start off with is an idea. Okay, you're gonna get some type of idea. You wanna research that idea and make sure it's worthwhile. Make sure there's enough people actually searching for that subject. And that comes right into the next thing which is research. You wanna do some research. Make sure the content of that video is useful and it helps people out or it entertains them or whatever it is you're trying to get across with that video. Then of course you're gonna wanna write your script or you're outlined. You know it can be a word for word script if you wanna use something like a teleprompter or there's a lot of cool apps that you can use for that or if you wanna just use something like ID where I have bullet points here and I just kinda read off from the bullet points you can certainly do that too. Next step, record your video. Okay, you're gonna record your video. Now don't think that you can shoot a video without editing. It's not gonna happen. You're gonna make mistakes when you say things. You're gonna make errors. Parts of it you're gonna wanna take out. Some of it is superfluous and you go, gee I don't need to have that in there. So make sure you make a video longer than what you need. If you're shooting for a 10 minute video I normally shoot for a 20 minute actual film time because I know half of that's gonna go by the wayside. Then of course you're ready. All you gotta do is upload your video, make sure you have a good title, make sure you have a good description and meta tags and you're ready to go. Oh, I almost forgot. You gotta have a thumbnail. Don't let YouTube select the thumbnail for you. It's not gonna be good, okay? You gotta have a good thumbnail, something that's gonna make people wanna click. Now I would recommend, if you're starting your channel you're not gonna wanna hear this, but you're gonna need to do about two or three videos a week. I do five a week plus one live. So I'm doing six a week, but I wanna get more momentum on my channel. That's the reason I'm doing that. If you're only uploading once a week you're gonna have very slow progression as far as building your channel. As something goes viral and believe me, odds of that happening are not very good. Don't forget to promote your video. You know, post it on social media, post it on your Facebook, Twitter, all these different places so that people know you did it. And of course you wanna analyze and adjust, okay? You wanna look at what's working, what's not working, which videos got more views than the others and make adjustments. Now, if you have videos that are getting a lot of views you may wanna make more videos that are around that same subject. Okay, so that gets you a starter on how to start your YouTube channel, but I've got a part two to this that you've got to go see. And the link is gonna be in the description below. Same title is gonna say part two of two though. I really appreciate you watching this video. Thank you so much for being here. Don't forget to subscribe below. Give me a thumbs up if you liked the video. And don't forget, ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so that you're notified every single time I do a new video. If you wanna grab one of my free courses, look below and there's a $97 course you can get absolutely free. No subscription, no credit card, no nothing. Just click and learn. Thank you so much for watching this video and I wanna see you in the next one.