In this post, you are going to find the top 20 biggest mistakes new YouTubers make when they’re starting their channel. I’m not saying it’s the end of the world if you make any of these mistakes, but it could be the death of your channel.
I am writing this blog post because I’ve literally made all of these mistakes and I have compiled all my mistakes together and I want to share them with you so that you can have explosive growth and exposure for your YouTube channel.
Let’s start right now.
What Are The mistakes new YouTubers make?
1. Not starting.
The first mistake YouTubers make is not starting. This was me for an entire year. I did not start my youtube channel.
I had started, I posted about four videos and I had no views, and then I gave up for about one year which, dang, if I would have continued and just gone hard that first year like I did a year after I had first, started, who knows where I would be right now?
Be sure to just start the channel because if you don’t start you’re guaranteed no results, no growth, and no knowledge of learning from your mistakes, and no views, subscribers, and data.
Here’s the thing, you’re going to suck at first. It’s inevitable. Whatever content you put out there, it’s not going to be your best and your videos are gonna evolve.
Get out there make your first 50 videos. You’re not entitled to have the best videos when you first, start and it’s okay. It’s okay to get out there develop your style, figure out who you are in front of the camera, and just get going.
2. Not Planning
The second biggest mistake I see YouTubers making is not planning. They have no plan whatsoever, and they just spit out random videos about random topics.
They’re not properly researched, and this is bad because you don’t want a channel about randomness.
You want your content to make sense and have a flow and have a meaning to the viewers, It’s great to plan because the other reason this does remarkably well is that you can group video ideas.
What I tend to do on my financial channel is I’ll talk about how to make money online, and then I’ll make a group of videos about passive income, then I’ll make a group of videos about YouTube marketing.
They all fall into the niche of my channel which is helping entrepreneurs grow, build, and scale with their online business.
It’s the same for you, you have to plan ahead of time to make sure you’re feeding the algorithm properly and your channel makes sense to the viewers.
3. Expecting Virality
The third mistake YouTubers are making when starting is expecting virality. Why does this happen? I don’t know why, but, people see YouTubers and they see explosive growth, they see millions of subscribers and views, and that just does not happen overnight.
It doesn’t even happen in a month, it doesn’t even happen in six months. You have to not expect to grow like crazy within the first couple of months or even the first six months of your channel being public on YouTube.
It takes time, you have to have to be consistent with YouTube, that is how it works. CONSISTENCY. I can’t emphasize this enough. I compare YouTube to a job or a brick-and-mortar business that you’re growing.
You have to treat it like a job or a business because if you start a coffee shop and ignore the coffee shop, the coffee shop is going to fail and you’re not going to get customers to your shop. It’s the same thing with the YouTube algorithm. If you post five videos and then leave YouTube
for five months that’s not going to help you at all and you’re not going to grow.
At the beginning of YouTube, it is extremely hard and you have to push through those first three to six months. Those are the months with the slowest growth and people don’t understand that, they think that they’re just going to go viral after they post a few videos and that’s not true.
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4. Comparing Yourself
The fourth thing that you have to beware of is comparing yourself to others. This serves you no good, and I understand how tempting it can be in the beginning because you feel as if you have a small audience or no followers and I get it, I’ve been there.
But if you let that hold you back that’s not good because these creators and these YouTubers that are out there, they’ve put in the work. They didn’t give a damn about how many people were ahead of them, when they started, they just started.
Don’t compare yourself like “Oh, I posted 10 videos and have 22 subscribers and such-and-such has posted a hundred videos and they have 60,000 subscribers,” well, what if you went ahead and posted 90 more videos?
You could get to that sixty thousand subscriber mark, you never know what could happen five videos from now, ten videos, a hundred videos from now.
For example, If you have posted about two hundred videos on your channel, and you have about one hundred thousand subscribers, and you see other big channels with maybe one million subscribers and with the same number of videos as yours you could get down on yourself, but no. Don’t do that.
Always remember that it’s not about their journey, it’s about your journey and that is why you have to stay in your lane and focus on how good you’ll be doing throughout your journey.
5. Fancy Equipment Syndrome
The fifth big mistake I see new YouTubers are making is the fancy equipment syndrome. They’re like “Oh my god, all’s I have is a smartphone. I don’t have the light, I don’t have the 4k camera, I don’t have the big fancy studio lights in my room, I can’t do it. I have to wait until I get this, I have to wait until I get that.”
It’s important that you just get started with what you have. I can’t emphasize this enough. I made it to 25,000 subscribers with just my smartphone and my webcam on my laptop.
As you would expect it was not the best quality at all. I didn’t even have the best audio and lighting, but I just got started anyway. That carried me through to the first 25,000 subscribers and it was at that point that I upgraded to a 4k camera because I could afford it and it made sense for me to upgrade.
It’s all about just getting started with what you have and not being intimidated by not having that fancy equipment.
6. Not Taking Action
The sixth mistake I see YouTubers making is not taking action, and this kind of goes with the first one. By you watching videos on YouTube on how to start a youtube channel, that does not count to starting your YouTube channel.
The things that you pick up and learn from YouTube videos does nothing unless you implement them. Don’t just read this article, but also get started today. Just do this today. Get started, film that video and edit it and get it on YouTube.
7. Not Branding
The seventh big mistake I see new YouTubers doing is having inconsistent branding or no branding at all. This means that their channel icon would be yellow and their banner would be all kinds of colors of the rainbow.
When you have an online business, your brand has to be consistent with the message you’re sending out to people, from the colors, and the image types. You can’t just put out a bunch of random designs together in regards to the thumbnail and the banner because that doesn’t look professional.
If there’s no consistent look throughout your branding, you will not grow as fast, I promise. And this was me in the beginning, my thumbnails were all over the place.
I would have small images with tie-dye, with yellow, with lime-green, it was bad. I had no clue what I was doing with my branding and what it reflected.
But once I kind of put together a branding style kit. Where I had colors and fonts that I knew I would use consistently, that automatically made an increase in my growth because when people arrived on my channel they felt how my brand looked and feel.
Please be consistent when you’re branding your channel.
8. Not Looking the Camera
The eighth mistake I see YouTubers making is not looking into the lens and it’s awkward because sometimes people are either looking at themselves in the reverse mirror camera thingy.
You want to make sure you’re facing the lens and talking to it. I know it could be weird at first, because it’s this little hole you’re looking at, but it makes the viewer know and feels that you are talking to them.
9. Spamming Comments
The ninth mistake I see YouTubers doing, and I cannot stand this, is to spam comments. Do not spam in other people’s comments to generate traffic.
For example: “sub4sub”, “like for like”, “oh I’m subbing to whoever likes in response to this comment”. This is not the real way to grow. There’s a method to comment on other people’s channels and you want to do it the right way.
Make meaningful comments, interact with people, answer people’s questions, and don’t just say “Oh, here’s the link to my youtube channel, if you sub I’ll sub back”. This is spammy and it does not make your brand look good at all.
Read: How to make money on YouTube
10. Video Titles
The tenth mistake I see new YouTubers doing with their channels is they have bad video titles. Now, what do I mean by this? YouTube is a search engine and you need to treat it like one.
You can’t have titles that are vague and titles that have your channel name or your name in the first part of the title.
You have to have titles that are searchable with keyword research because that’s the whole point of YouTube, it’s a search engine.
When people type in and search something, the point is you want them to arrive on your channel and they can’t do that if the title of your video is “my birthday vlog,” or “my family’s vacation to Europe,” or something like that.
You have to have a title that is well researched with keywords and SEO so that it is searchable on YouTube and it’s just not floating around in the abyss of YouTube and never being discovered.
11. Inconsistent.
I see this all the time, almost daily people tell me like “Oh, well YouTube’s not even worth it because I’m not getting any views,” I’m like “Well, you’ve posted five videos in the past six months,” they’re like “Yeah, you’re right…”
I recommend a posting frequency of, minimum, once per week. If you can post four times a month, that’s good, and if that’s too much, well [if] you make like motion pictures or mini-films and you need more time, that definitely makes sense and you can post once every two weeks or something like that.
I know a very awesome and talented creator who makes a video once a month because his videos are cinematic, they take so much time to do and I think that completely makes sense. Always show up and be consistent with whatever posting frequency that you decide on.
12. Bad Intros.
You don’t want to have a bad intro. The first 10 to 15 seconds of your introduction are the make or break of your video.
If you ramble, if you talk about a story that makes no sense, if you’re just showing unnecessary things that don’t relate to your video and are not entertaining or valuable cut it out and just get to the point.
You want to arrive at the first point, the first tip, first step, or whatever you’re talking about in your video right away, under one minute. If you’re rambling on in your introduction, that’s the last thing that the viewer wants to see in your video.
Don’t ramble, plan what you’re going to say in the video, make it entertaining, exciting, hook your viewers and keep them watching your video.
13. YouTube Studio
Have a solid YouTube studio. If you’re someone who does content outside, that’s a little bit of a different story, but if you’re like me and a creator who does more education and tutorials type of videos inside, then make sure your background looks good.
Make sure your background looks clean, there are no paper plates, there’s no trash, there’s no pizza box, nothing is distracting, and also controversial things are not the best thing to have like sports, politics, just things that could make somebody be like “Oh I don’t like him because he has a blah of president blah”.
14. Audio.
This is super important because even if the quality of the image is bad, people need to be able to hear you. The reason why I was able to grow at the beginning with my iPhone and my pixelated webcam on my computer is that my information was good and people could hear me.
Audio makes a huge difference to the people that are watching your video, if you’re outside and it’s windy and people can’t hear you or if you’re very distant from the camera and it’s hard to hear, people will not watch your video.
15. Lighting.
Lighting is also super important. I guarantee I lost many subscribers in the beginning because my lighting was not good. There’d be a shadow on half my face and my other half of my face was super bright and overexposed.
You can set up your YouTube studio in front of a window where you have 12 hours of the day with really great lighting. The point is if you do have the budget to invest, let’s say, $50 to $100 into your YouTube studio I would for sure invest in a microphone and light first.
16. Head position.
I see this mistake with YouTubers all the time, they have a lot of space left over their head and their head is way at the bottom of the screen.
That’s no good, you have to be able to show as much of you in the frame and don’t leave a lot of space around you because it doesn’t serve a purpose to your video.
Go ahead and make sure the camera is lower, you can see your head, your neck, and more of your torso. This will help you in case you want to put different effects.
For example: If you want to place titles and stuff at the side of the video. This will give a more professional look if your head is more at the top of the frame and your torso is more included in the video of your YouTube video.
17. Keyword Research
The other mistake done by many YouTubers is not doing keyword research. I had mentioned this before with bad titles, but it is extremely important to use a YouTube keyword research tool called Tubebuddy.
There are different ones out there but the number one that I recommend and use is called Tubebuddy and if you were to get Tubebuddy for your keyword research I have a discount code where you would receive 20% off at checkout when you use my link.
What Tubebuddy does, is it helps you select excellent titles that are going to help you rank on the first page of YouTube. It helps you create keyword-rich titles, that people are looking for and it has a keyword difficult rating of good, poor, or excellent.
This will help you to know if you’re selecting a good title for your videos that are easy to rank for and a lot of people are searching for it. This means you will be able to check if the keyword has a good number of monthly searches.
18. Not Engaging With their Audience.
This is all about the viewing experience of your viewers. After all, your viewers are the people who help you make money on YouTube and you need to interact with them. Give them calls to action, ask them questions, for example, if you say “Hey, subscribe to the channel hit the notification bell.”
Make sure you’re interacting so that they know that your channel is the place to go.
There are other things you can do to interact with your viewers such as creating polls and different posts in the community to ask your audience what would they like to see up next?
19. Thumbnails
Not using thumbnails. This is probably one of the big mistakes that many new YouTubers are making.
People just upload a video, press publish and there’s no thumbnail to go along with the video. This is detrimental to your YouTube channel because the thumbnail is the first thing people see right before they decide “am I gonna click on this video or no?”
It helps with the click-through rate, or the percentage of people that are clicking on the video. You want to make sure you have a good thumbnail.
And to make your thumbnails for free you can use Canva. It has surprisingly great thumbnail templates and you can create them very easily, download them for free and upload them to your YouTube video.
20. Be Yourself.
Don’t fake it and try to be somebody else. I know how it is when you have YouTube creators and followers that you’ve been following for a long time on YouTube and you see their personality, you see how funny they are, you see their style, don’t try to be them and imitate that.
Just be yourself I was super vulnerable and just told people the truth, like “Hey if I made a mistake then that’s who I am,” I would admit when I was wrong and I would just be myself in front of the camera and that’s why people join me and subscribe to my channel because I was authentic.
I was who I was, I wasn’t trying to pretend to be anyone else. I would embrace my personality and who I was on camera and I believe that you should do the same thing or else it will come out kind of awkward and it will show in your videos.
That is it for this article. Please share if it added value to you.
