Youtube video transcript
So you wanna start a blog or YouTube channel in 2021? Be careful not to make these mistakes cuz it’s wild out there. You’re gonna pan.
Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil. And welcome to my channel where I document my journey, building an online income, hopefully helping you with your own journey. So this weekend I’m away on holiday in the south of Taiwan, but I got to thinking about a conversation I had with a friend of mine about starting a brand new YouTube channel or a blog.
Some of the things that were coming up in conversation kind of rang alarm bells. So I wanna talk about a few things that you should not be doing if you are starting a brand new blog in 2021 or a brand new YouTube channel. So let’s talk about that now. So the first mistake that a lot of people make. And it’s one that I made as well when you’re starting a blog or a YouTube channel just to talk about your opinions.
So whatever niche you’re in, if you’re a little bit knowledgeable, there are probably things that you know that your audience should also know. But the thing is no one’s searching for that. And also no one really cares what Mr. Blob says about this or whatever. So always match your posts to an actual query that someone might search for and the same thing for YouTube.
So you can go into Google search and use the autocomplete function to find these, and then just use common sense to guess, okay. Is this a query that people are gonna be searching for? Is it a beginner star query? Therefore, it probably has a lot of traffic and this is true for blogging and YouTube.
So another kind of important question is about choosing your niche. And I think one of the things that I’ve come to learn is that as a beginner, you should, you probably shouldn’t go for a very kind of niche, like a tiny little niche, even if it’s low competition. And on the other hand, you probably don’t want to go through a very saturated niche, something like cooking or health and fitness.
It’s just because in either situation, you are not going to get results very quickly. And also if you don’t get results quickly or any results at all, it’s gonna be really disheartening. So try and go down something that is run of the mill. It’s quite common. I would put anything to do with pets in this kind of box.
So try and pick something like that for your first niche, just to help you learn the skills that you’re gonna need. And also to get some of those early wins. If you do that, I think then this kind of is gonna be a longer road for you. If you go into something very competitive early on and you don’t see success, you’re just gonna give up much more quickly than you should do.
So for most people that start in a blog or a YouTube channel, they’re actually hoping to turn it into some form of income. Now, this isn’t true for everyone, but a big mistake is not actually thinking about that early on. You may be passionate about a topic. It may mean a lot to you, but you’ve also gotta think about this because it’s gonna take a lot of time to produce the content for a blog or even for a VI, YouTube channel, editing videos and things like.
And you really gotta look, what is the return on investment? And it’s not just money that you put into the project, but it’s actually an investment on. So make sure that before you jump into any niche, you really do think about that return on investment. So another question that came up recently in the Project 24 community, and it’s actually something that I did as well, was whether or not you should design your website around one product.
So the problem with this, especially when it’s something to do with technology, With blogging, it takes so long to rank. Like organically can take up to eight months for your post that you get to where they need to be. But the time you do that, the technology can move on. Or if you are designing your blog or your YouTube channel around an affiliate program, and suddenly that affiliate program stops, which happens quite a lot.
You’re left in the lurch, you’ve got no recall and all of that work will be for nothing. So it’s far better to organize your blog or your YouTube channel around a niche. And within that, you can focus on products, which from time to time, you can change. Another thing that came up in the conversation with my friend was about coding websites.
So we are both quite eager in the beginning to do everything from the ground up. But I remember the first site that I actually tried to launch. I coded everything. I did all of the design and everything, and I was learning as I went and it just took me ages. It actually took me six months to get the site the way I wanted to look.
And I never launched it. I never made any money out. So nowadays, just go with something simple, like WordPress, there’s everything you need. There’s ready, made themes. And you’re gonna get straight to the most important thing, which is producing the traffic, making the content. So you get people to visit your website.
So another thing that I’ve noticed coming up in Project 24 in the community, quite a lot, especially questions from people, just joining the community and new to blogging and YouTube to a certain. It’s to do with things like hosting and the actual platform that you are building your blog on.
So a lot of people are going for these kinds of cheaper options or the options where they offer a free domain, something like Wix. And for the most part, I would always say, do not do that because it’s very short-sighted. What you should be doing is getting shared hosting on something like blue host. So I’ve always used bluehost.
I’ve used other things like I, I page and things like that, but blue host is a really good hosting. Company. And there is a link in the description if you want to join blue host and it’s just, you should definitely be hosting your websites yourself. You should have your domains hosted with another company.
You are good. I use namesilo to keep them separate. The reason for this is if suddenly you want to sell your site or something like that, it’s not so easy when you’re using these kinds of free websites like WordPress or Where you don’t actually own anything to do with the hosting. So definitely early on bite the bullet and invest in hosting, even if it’s shared hosting.
And that’s just gonna give you so many more opportunities in the future to sell your site and to grow it. So another thing that I struggled with early on is approaching this in a very amateur way. So when you’re building your blog or your YouTube channel from day one, think of it as a.
And one of the things that kind of tripped me up a little bit was letting technology or skills get in my way, not knowing how to do something and not being willing to pay money, to buy the right tool or the right person or service to complete that task. So make sure that you do invest in things because your time is the most important thing.
If you can cut down how long it takes you to do something that is money well spent, and that could be anything from just a plugin that you pay for, or going onto five and getting a guide designer logo it is great to have the skills to do all these things. And early on, you will be having to do much.
Of the daily tasks then maybe later on in the history of your business, but don’t let a task get in your way so much that it costs you weeks trying to fix it on your own. Just pay someone to do it for you. So another thing that I’ve noticed this was true about myself and a lot of newer bloggers and YouTube is that I’ve spoken to, I’ve had interactions.
It’s a question of trying to get to the end quickly and not really learning the skills that you need in order to do that. So as far as I know, and if I did know of one, I would tell you, but there is no shortcut to success in blogging or YouTube. It is like a job. Like anything else, you’ve got to have certain skills.
And if we imagined if you were, I don’t know, wanting to be a surgeon, you wanted to cut people. You wouldn’t imagine just picking up a knife one day and suddenly like cutting someone open, right? You would go to school and you’d invest in your education. You’d invest a lot of money.
This is something that I think everyone should do. You should either, at the very least join a good forum, find a good group of people. Follow a few good people on YouTube. There are people that are far more knowledgeable than I am, and I follow them as. but also of course joining a course.
Now I chose to join Project 24. I think it’s one of the best courses out there. Really, there is information about that in the description, but it will teach you most of the things that you need to know for blogging and YouTube. And also on top of that, you need to get into your niche. One of the things you should be doing is not necessarily investing money, but investing time.
So I listen to podcasts. Going to interact with people. If it’s a hobby niche, people doing the hobby are actually getting out there and meeting people, maybe at conventions or whatever, it is for your particular hobby, really getting into it and investing your time. And if there’s a certain way where you can invest in the products, things that people have to use in order to do your hobby, whatever your.
Invest in that. Don’t just rely on Amazon reviews and never actually get your hands dirty. So this really is something I learned. I learned the hard way, and it’s something that I’m trying to do much more of. There are certain limitations, not everyone’s as rich as they would like to be, but at the very least you can invest your time into this read books podcast.
Watch YouTube. Do. And that knowledge will come through in your videos and also in your writing. Another thing that new bees do when they start a blog or YouTube channel. And I certainly did this by comparing yourself to the big players in that niche. So when you’re choosing your blog titles, read about your niche a little bit and get to know which are the websites that keep popping.
These are likely to be the biggest players in your niche. So you shouldn’t be going after queries that they’ve already covered. You shouldn’t be trying to compete with them on day one. And the same thing is with YouTube, the bigger YouTubers can get away and do things that a new YouTube channel can’t because YouTube doesn’t trust you yet with YouTube, you’ve gotta really start off with searchable content.
And then from that, you build up on the kind of entertainment. So basically don’t compare yourself to the big boys because you’ll fail. And this kind of brings me to another point is something I really, even myself, I don’t like to admit quite yet, which is cutting your losses. So we all know that we are doing this to build an online income.
We need a return on investment that is both on investing on money, into things like content or what. But also our time because writing a blog, filming YouTube videos, editing, it all does take time. So you need to recognize when a project is just not working. So what Income School says is if you’re not getting a $12 return for every thousand views across our website, then it’s probably a niche which is not worth pursuing.
So you’ve got to recognize when you’ve gotta cut your losses, but saying that. It does take time. I wouldn’t give up on a site. I wouldn’t give up on a YouTube video. About a year in, because I’ve had websites where I didn’t turn on ads until a year into doing it. And also with YouTube, one of my YouTube channels, no, both.
In fact, they took at least a year to get up to a thousand subs. And they’re not even quite there or at least one of them with the watch time. So it takes a long time to get things moving, but you’ve also got to be patient. Know when to cut your losses. So I think this is a big mistake that people make.
And if you’re going into a niche, look around, see, what is it likely that you’re gonna get a good affiliate kind of deal? Is it a niche that does well with, and you can suss this out and a really good way to do this is to join something like Income School, cuz this is a wealth of knowledge from just normal people taking the course.
They can tell you this niche wasn’t really good for me. This niche was better and. If you found this a useful video, don’t forget to give me a and if you have any questions at all, about my experience with blogging or YouTube, do leave me a comment, cuz I always reply to every comment that I get and I try and help you out if I can.
So thanks very much for watching. I’ll see. See you in a future video when I’m back in type A and filming in my new office. See you there.