🚫 YouTube Mistakes You Will Regret Making

How to YouTube #9

Hey YouTubers,

I’ve learned a lot about YouTube over the past 2 years. I’ve spent 1000s of hours:

1. Making videos for Ali’s channel.

2. Making videos for my personal channel.

3. Talking to other YouTubers, from 0 to 5m subscribers.

There’s still lots to learn, but over this time I have made many mistakes myself, and seen many YouTubers make mistakes.

Today, I want to go through a few common ones to avoid, regardless of channel size.

Quick note - these are for YouTubers who want to make money from their channel. This newsletter isn’t for hobbyists, it’s for people treating their YouTube channel like a business.

😅 “I’m a perfectionist”

In our Part-Time YouTuber Academy, by far the biggest struggle that most YouTubers have is perfectionism. Either it stops them starting, or once they’ve started it makes the whole process much harder.

I’m telling you now, perfectionism is hurting you, not helping you.

You’ve made it this far in spite of your perfectionism, not because of it.

It’s very hard to navigate and even harder to overcome, so I’m not going to try tell you how to do that. I’m just telling you that it’s not helping you, even if you think it is.

The book that helped me personally overcome this psychological barrier was Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. She taught me that perfectionism is in fact fuelled by fear of shame, failure and of not being enough.

Sorry to call you out like that, but both YouTube and life will be a bit easier if you learn to beat perfectionism. And beating it starts with understanding it.

💰 Too high expectations

It is unbelievably tempting to set ridiculously ambitous goals for your YouTube channel. Trust me, I’m still doing it 😆

I’m not here to curb your enthusiasm, but not meeting the crazy expectations you’ve set for yourself is worse for you over the long term. It drains your energy, even if you’re doing well.

I’d find another YouTuber to discuss what would be a healthy goal, both in terms of your upload schedule and subscriber count. I recommend not making goals for your channel beyond 12 months at the start.

There is power in thinking big, and thinking long term, but for most of us the best approach is to set ourselves up for success. This means having a goal that would be exciting to achieve, but easy enough not to be discouraging.

James Clear calls this ‘The Goldilocks Rule’.

YouTube is a long game, it’s best to play it that way.

🎬 Not learning to how to make videos first

As ever, this advice depends on your channel and your niche. But, YouTube is a video platform and most YouTubers need to learn how to make good videos.

Before you dream of having 1 million subscribers, you need to learn how to make a good video that someone actually wants to watch.

You can save yourself a lot of time by mastering that part of the process first. Everything is down stream from making videos that your target audience want to watch.

The key skills are ideation, titles and thumbnails, writing, filming and editing. You can fast track your progress dramatically by hiring people who are better than you at those things as soon as you can (except filming obviously, if you’re in the videos).

📊 Neglecting positioning

YouTube, and more broadly social media, is becoming more competitive every day.

It’s not 2015 anymore. It’s a lot harder to get the results you want just by making videos about your life.

If you’re approaching YouTube like a true entrepreneur, I’d recommend thinking as much as you can about positioning.

It depends on your niche, but you should be thinking about where demand is high, supply is low, and how you can position yourself within that space.

The YouTube advice space was already crowded, but Film Booth differentiated his channel by making the most entertaining videos in the niche.

The key is to lean into your unfair advantages and your authentic edge, and over time hopefully something will start to appear.

Charlie Munger said “I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don't play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise, and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich.”

Be kind to yourself and do what the smart, rich man says.

The Takeaway

YouTube is hard, especially at the start.

There are many more mistakes that YouTubers make, but those are some of the biggest ones.

Let me know if any of these resonate with you. If you would like to get in touch the best way is to comment on this post on Substack. I reply to every comment there, it’s a much better option for me than email.

Have an epic week making videos!

Tintin 🧑‍💻

P.s. I’m looking for someone to help me a few hours a week with writing and generally levelling up my side hustles. If you’re interested in helping me out then please fill in this short form here!

The YouTube Tin

🐦 Tweet: This is a great thread from Ryan Hashemi, the creator of the Jubilee YouTube channel.

🎙️ Podcast: A recent interview with Paddy Galloway about growing on YouTube.

🗞️ Tool: The 1of10 chrome extension is really useful for previewing your videos actually on the YouTube homepage.

🔬 My Channel: I make videos (really just screen recordings) about YouTube to help you guys as much as I can and share more of what I learn at my job. Let me know what you’d like me to make videos about. I’ll share as much as possible!