5 Common Mistakes New YouTubers Make
More often than not, new YouTubers are obsessed with having everything perfect for their YouTube channels. However, making mistakes is not such a terrible thing for a beginner as that is how you learn to do things better.
It’s a given that we learn from mistakes made, but to be a successful creative, you must be able to distinguish times when your content is ready for upload or when to tweak certain things in it.
When starting a YouTube career, the following are some mistakes to avoid making to enable make you the right decisions for your channel.
If you’re able to recall these, you’d be on track for success while remaining consistent. This ensures that your channel is optimal for viewers and subscribers.
Poor Thumbnail Quality
The thumbnails and title structures on your videos impact its performance the most. These are what bring you viewers directly. New YouTubers tend to fixate on editing their videos and forget to also prioritize their thumbnail images. Simple and catchy thumbnails are more likely to attract clicks, hence avoid overtly busy images.
A powerful and catchy thumbnail should easily have the following:
- Simple design- less is more!
- Action shots
- Use complementary colors
- Short, readable text in legible fonts
As a YouTuber, before filming, you must consider how to structure your video title to get the most views you can.
Taking a cue from MrBeast, a subscriber who’s familiar with his thumbnail format can easily identify when another creative has made their thumbnail off a similar design.
MrBeast’s thumbnails are simple with action shots, he also keeps his video titles succinct and eye-catching.
At this time, MrBeast has the most subscribed channel on YouTube. His strategies are worth emulating.
Obsessing Over Views And Subscribers
As a beginner, it is easy to sucked into the craze to garner views. This is because increasing your watch time would enable your channel get monetized and earn you a living.
Getting views and subscribers isn’t an easy feat, one study showed that getting 100 subscribers takes up to a couple months, hence YouTubers must put in quality time to nurture a loyal audience. If done properly, the rewards add up over time.
In order to get your first 1,000 subscribers or achieve a viral success, you must understand the steps to take that’d help you achieve those goals. The following are important YouTube metrics you should know:
Metrics
Impressions: This means the number of times people viewed the thumbnail of a video. You can track the impressions of your videos from the analytics tab.
Click-through Rate: This refers to the percentage of viewers who clicked on a video after seeing the thumbnail. Most videos have an average CTR of 2-10%. Older videos mostly have higher click-through rates which may not be the case for your new videos at first.
Average view duration: this means the time spent watching a video by the average viewer.
To rank on the search algorithm, you want to aim for more than 50% average view duration as it makes YouTube believe your videos are enjoyed by a majority of your videos.
Watch Time: This is the amount of time people spend watching a video. YouTube measures your watch time by calculating the amount of hours your content was watched in the last 365 days. To qualify for YouTube Partnership Program, you need 4000 hours of watch time alongside 1000 subscribers.
Traffic Sources: These are the mediums by which people find and watch YouTube videos. Much of traffic can be sourced within YouTube, you can get more traffic to your videos by YouTube ads, sharing your video links on social media, forums and communities.
Once you have taken note of these important factors, it is possible to increase the number of views and subscribers on your channel.
Not Carrying Out Research
Research is usually not a fun process, but it is essential to the progress of your channel. Study channels similar to yours, look into their strategy for editing, thumbnails and titles.
Analyze their strong areas, you could get inspired from that, look at their weak spots and how you can improve on them should you choose to apply same methods.
Strive to remain consistent, it’d pay off subsequently. If you are on a time constraint, you can do research while you’re scripting your video.
Not Testing Correctly
When trying out something new on your channel, be kind to yourself if you make a mistake.
In fact, one way to limit yourself is not experimenting. You’ll most likely try something that’d flop, but if you don’t try at all, you won’t know what works for you or not.
For instance, some YouTubers were skeptical when shorts were rolled out, others embraced it. It worked for certain niches and didn’t for others. For those who kept an open mind and applied correctly, the rewards have been great.
Spending A Fortune On Gear
Many YouTubers make the mistake of spending tons of money to get gear to get the perfect video quality even before they become profitable.
A crisp video quality achieved with expensive equipment isn’t always the surefire way to getting views and subscribers.
You might want to hold off on splurging on equipment and stick to the basics that’d still give you the desired quality. The experts would always tell you it’s best to keep it simple on your channel.
Flagship equipment mostly require more time to setup and process, thereby affecting your output frequency of content.
One female creator you can learn from is Tolulope Solutions who used her iphone X to film videos and grow a strong subscriber base. It was after her channel had gotten up to 100k subscribers that she went on to buy cameras for filming.
The message here is to spend your time making engaging content that’d retain viewership and every other thing such as watch time and subscribers begin to come naturally.
