How to Start a Life-Changing YouTube Channel (ft. Ali Abdaal)

there were so many obstacles to me actually hitting publish people are held back by all of those things think oh my content is why does anyone care it took me like 6 years to make my first YouTube video this whole thing around treating YouTube like a business this is a real hack I I didn't think about it in the same framework there's dozens of videos on YouTube hundreds about how to grow on YouTube very few of them talk about like starting a YouTube channel can completely transform your life and it did that for both of

us this is my good friend Ali he has a YouTube channel with you just hit 5 million subscrib on YouTube channel congratulations firstly both of us have had things happen that we never would have anticipated because of our YouTube channels it's allowed me to make so many friends it's allowed me to get an audience of millions of people around the world who for some reason seem to care what I say about things which is just really cool you know I've written a book because of the YouTube channel so many things in my life have been

as a result of just starting a YouTube channel and deciding to take it seriously my YouTube Journey has only been going on for like just over 2 years now but in that time it has completely changed the way I view the world the way I view myself the things that I do in my time and in my in my spare time similar to you I've made friends with so many different creators and connected with I think like over half a million people have subscribed to my channel which I find mind-blowing so thank you so much

for subscribing because it genuinely means so much to me that you would want to actually hear from me and and listen to me making these silly internet videos in today's video we're going to break down a threep part process for you to start and grow a life-changing YouTube channel of your own the way I approach YouTube and this is a system that I've taught various students of mine in a course that I run called the part-time YouTuber Academy which Izzy was in fact an alumnus of alumna actually Alum of um the system that we teach

all of our students is three levels level one is get going level two is get good level three is get smart if you are thinking of starting a YouTube channel just make your first video and then another one and then another one you're not worrying about what Niche you're trying to make videos in you're not overthinking your camera setup the whole point is that it just gets you over that initial hurdle winding back to the parttime YouTuber Academy cohort 3 we had a homework assignment to post one video per week for 6 weeks of the

of the course I was like I'm going to do it but there were so many hurdles to me actually hitting publish on those first few videos looking back I remember like feeling so full of stress and fear and anxiety when I was trying to think of the idea actually filming the video editing it every stage of the editing hitting upload and then also dealing with the Crickets and the silence after uploading it so every single stage was just full of so many emot hurdles and I think that's something that people don't necessarily talk about a

huge amount is the emotional struggles of YouTube the difficult stuff is actually figuring out why you're doing this what you're doing with it how you can manage the emotional and spiritual side of playing the YouTube game in in 2010 I wanted to be a YouTuber I wanted to be a music YouTuber cuz I followed people like coach Schneider and samsi and these people who do covers of popular songs but every year I would put it off because I was like oh you know I don't I haven't haven't got The Right microphone yet and you know

obviously you need a whole studio setup to be able to do a music video it took me like 6 years to make my first YouTube video because I was held back by that thing of like I don't have the right gear in 2016 I made a few videos with friends one was me playing the guitar and my friend Catherine singing pay phone by Maroon 5 my first few YouTube videos are still on the channel to this day and there were actually music videos I I made one video where I filmed myself doing the singing my

friend Sahel played the guitar and I sang a cover of Thinking Out Loud by Ed shiran that was the only video well one of the only videos I've ever deleted from my channel because it got three dislikes and only one like and got like 12 views and I was like you know it was crushing the one video where I was the one singing was the one that no one cared about and got way more dislikes than like I had 7even years worth of emotional hurdles made music videos deleted some because I felt bad about it

by the time I made my actual videos talking to the camera and teaching how to get into med school I'd lost a lot of the emotional hurdles I was really focusing on how do I just teach the things that I know I think it took me four months the part-time YouTuber Academy cohort which I signed up for arrived and it was a forcing function to actually publish my first video if you're interested in the part time YouTube academy by the way I'll leave a link down below nice when I first started the course my thought

was the thing people want to learn about and the thing they need is systems and processes and delegation and how to Outsource your editing and how to systemize your idea generation and all that crap and what we found that for like 95% of the people actually it was all these emotional hurdles that was stopping them from getting started which is why you know level one of the system is just get going upload your first video and your second and your third talk about whatever the hell you want no one's going to watch your first video

or your second or your third The Crickets after the first video it's like oh my God I'm about to hit publish finally click it and then like nothing happens for weeks I think some of the other emotions that came up for me at least were things like fear of judgment not from strangers but from people I knew finding my channel and then being like Oh my God guess who started a YouTube channel and did you have some of that I think most people were pretty chill about it they were like okay yeah cool some people

were very supportive they were like oh yeah that's really cool like a nice side hustle and then I also heard of some people finding it funny that I was starting a YouTube channel and like laughing about it lowkey and laughing now I know he's you're a beginner if a baby was learning to walk and stumbled you wouldn't laugh at the baby and be like oh my God what an idiot because they're a baby learning to walk and the same way on YouTube having that level of forgiveness for yourself and understanding these are your first steps

on YouTube on this path that you've decided to go down you are the only one who's responsible for making that dreamer reality I feel like you should read out the man in the arena speech and then we can put some you can you can put some like inspiring music over the background okay it is not the critic who counts not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of Deeds could have done them better the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred

by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly who s who comes short again and again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming but who does actually strive to do the Deeds who knows great enthusiasms the great devotions who spends himself in a worthy cause who at the best knows in the end the Triumph of high achievement and who at the worst if he fails at Le least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid Souls who neither know Victory nor defeat and if

you're wondering where that incredible background music came from oh my God epidemic sound epidemic sound are a platform which provides Amazing royalty-free Music I've personally been using them for 2 years by now I use them quite early on in my YouTube Journey if you don't use royaltyfree Music your videos can either be taken down get a copyright strike but we still want great music in our videos because one of the key components of a YouTube video is the energy the vibe the storytelling and the most powerful way to achieve that is through music epidemic sound

have over 40,000 musical tracks and over 990,000 sound effects if you type in any of the kind of vibe or energy that you want into the search bar they've really nailed it in terms of suggesting music that would exactly fit the vibe epidemic sound have a personal plan and a commercial plan the personal plan is great if you are a Creator like the two of us and you know we are both subscribers to the personal plan and the commercial plan is if for example you're an agency or you're a freelancer and you're using multiple tracks

for multiple clients then the commercial plan is great for that if you're interested in trying out epidemic sound feel free to sign up for a totally free trial using my link down below there's literally no reason not to check it out so click down below another thing people often worry about when they're starting the YouTube channel is Niche I know I want to start a channel I just like so many different things and I don't know what to make videos about the the framework that we've come up with um in the YouTuber Academy is the

architect versus the archaeologist for the record worrying about your Niche is not a level one question it's a level three question so you should only worry about your Niche when you get smart but I know people are going to worry about about it anyway which is why I like to tell people this up front so an architect understands the entire plan of the building that they're going to make before they lay the first brick everything is meticulously planned out got like massive blueprint like 3D visualization of everything the whole thing they know exactly what materials

they're going to use like nothing happens that's not already planned out not the approach I would recommend for the vast majority of people out there the alternative approach to YouTube is the archaeologist approach to YouTube an archaeologist would think you know what I think there's something in this site over there so I'm just going to go there I'm going to dig I'm going to do the work they'll do that a few times and they're like okay cool there was actually nothing here let me now go to Santorini where the minan civilization once was and I

know that there's a village there maybe there's going to be some stuff so they go to that Village and they start digging away hopefully with the consent of the people living in the village uh hopefully they're not digging up anyone's house but they you know they're digging they're digging they're digging and they're like cool didn't find anything and they go somewhere else and and they do that again until eventually they find a place where they dig and they dig and they dig and they get a kind of sound and they're like oh what was that

kind of sound and then they dig some more there's something over here and then they dig more and they excavate more and eventually they find this like glorious Fortune hidden in the 18th site or the fifth site or the 24th site that they looked in the archaeologist approach to YouTube is I don't know what I'm going to make videos about but I'm just going to try out a few videos about this thing and then maybe I'll try out a few videos about that thing I'll just kind of see how I personally feel about it what

are the videos that I enjoy making what are the videos that seem to be resonating with other people if anything what are the videos that I can see myself making over the long term at some point you'll stumble upon your own Niche and you'll discover like you did oh my goodness when I talk about language learning and in particular Mandarin learning wo people seem to care about that you sing a few Adele songs and a few Coldplay songs and you do a bit of like productivity hacks you get a few dozen views and then you

make a video about how you mastered Mandarin in 6 months or some clickbait title like that boom that video that video goes viral and now people start asking you hey your accent is so nice so now you're like great let me make a video about British accents boom that goes viral you're like crafting your Niche over time by using this archeologist approach I definitely Vibe with the whole archaeologist approach as soon as I had a video idea in my head I would write it down on an ocean cman board and I just s of gradually

go through those there was something powerful about the Mandarin stuff being very specific and being something that not that many people are talking about that allowed it to be one of the First videos that gained traction for my channel and after I already had that audience then at that point the other videos could also get some attention and get some TLC figuring it out before you start is a massive myth and I think it holds so many people back so if you're worrying about that please just make videos that you enjoy making that you're passionate

about that you feel like could bring value to at least one other person on the planet and your Niche will find you if you want a serious relationship with YouTube and I would Define serious as a commitment of some sort to uploading publishing on some sort of regular Cadence we then go on level two which is get good point in level two is we just make more videos and get better at the craft of making videos I think people have this weird expectation it's like they they are they are terrible at making videos initially because

everyone is terrible at doing something that they're a beginner at well why would you expect lots of people to see you doing this thing that you're objectively terrible at and that's okay the point of level two get good is you just get better at the craft still not worrying too much about what videos we're making we're just trying to get better each time yeah learning how to speak to a camera a little bit better learning how to script a video a bit better thinking about titles and thumbnails a little bit upgrading your microphone is helpful

because like audio quality matters you start watching tutorials about how to do YouTube and maybe you take a course like mine about how to do YouTube maybe you watch some videos about how to improve your editing I think I have a bit of a perfectionist streak I think many of us do really one thing that I would always tell myself was that actually I'm just going to like launch ugly with my videos release them before I feel like they're actually ready and I just hit publish and then the next video would be better and I

just iterate and improve on each each video there's kind of two things that mean you're ready to move Beyond level two and those two things are an internal Quality Bar and an external Quality Bar so the internal Quality Bar is where you no longer cringe at the thought of someone else watching your own videos like if someone if a coworker or someone at your school came to you and said oh I watched your video the other day you wouldn't have this profound cringe response to that like you generally know when your videos are objectively bad

and you generally know when they're getting better over time because you can compare your videos to other YouTubers that are in a similar kind of space of doing similar things your videos are actually pretty good from day one you're talking to the camera stuff's coming up on screen you you still probably think oh my content is why does anyone care but if someone were to objectively look at your video they' probably be like oh I mean this looks like a reasonable YouTube video yeah that's true kind of the internal bar and then you've got the

external bar which is you start getting one or two comments from people being like oh this was really helpful or thank you for making this video you start seeing a few views and maybe a few likes on the on the videos that's a sign that they're actually hitting with some kind of audience and now you're ready to progress to level three how many videos did it take for you to feel like you didn't cringe at them I think on video number 18 or something I posted about it on Facebook that was when I was like

I I I am now okay if people subscribe to this channel coming out the closet my channel like initially the only people I sent the videos to were like my grandma cuz I was doing Vlogs of my medical elective in Cambodia I'm not sure if I've reached the point where I don't cringe at my videos anymore sometimes I look back at a video and I'll be like that was a banger equally sometimes I'll look at a video and be like oh this could have been better in some ways I could have improved on this so

I think if you're feeling like that just know that's quite natural but I liked this framing of actually if an objective viewer were to look at your Channel what would they think especially as a woman this is something that often we're trained from a young age to be very hard on ourselves um and to to not want to be SE to be not perfect or to mess up or to produce bad work or sloppy work we take pride in like that level of attention to detail trying to imagine okay if this was my friend's YouTube

channel or just a random stranger YouTube channel how would I feel about that and actually when I think about my own channel in those times I'm like oh quite reasonable like that's actually not bad you're always going to be in level two me and my team are still trying to make every video better so level two never ends level two is like an infinite game just find it a useful framing to help people get over the initial hurdles cuz level three is where you can start overthinking about your Niche and all that kind of stuff

and level three is get smart get smart okay yeah before level three we ask ourselves another question do I want YouTube to be a hobby or do I want YouTube to be a business on a scale of 0 to 10 where zero is Hobby and 10 is business where would you put your YouTube channel now a hobby is something you do primarily for yourself and you do it to have fun a business is something you do primarily for other people because a business is a thing that adds value to someone else you're not doing it

for fun you are doing it for the money if you're more on the business side of the spectrum we can progress to level three if you're not on the business side of the spectrum and you want to keep it as a hobby great we can flirt with level three but like a lot of level three starts to get into business analysis for example if I was trying to make money from playing the guitar that's very different to being a hobbiest musician as a professional musician I would have to think okay what's my go-to market strategy

how am I going to stand out in a crowded Market what's been what's your take on this whole hobby business thing yes so for me this whole hobby versus business thing for me I'm somewhere in the middle I want to enjoy the videos I'm making not s sacrifice the enjoyment purely for boosting metrics I think this whole division of looking at it as like balancing these two things and figuring out where you on the spectrum is actually really helpful because you're anywhere along the Spectrum towards actually treating it as a business and treating it as

something you want to grow that's when all the stuff about getting good and getting smart about it starts to come into play almost as a as a spectrum dialing it up where like as you move along this way you want to get good as you move even further on you're like bringing competitor analysis looking at the analytics getting all like Tu bu AB testing monetization all the way to that and so I feel like it's a it's a spectrum all the way from getting going to getting really smart I feel like I'm kind of somewhere

somewhere in the middle there you know the people who are like 10 out of 10 business I actually I I I feel like a good place to be is like s out of 10 on the scale and you're still focusing on how do I provide value to others yeah but you've got enough points on that I want to enjoy the process as well to have like a happy medium where I think I'm probably around a seven out of 10 on that scale yeah I think I'm probably around like a six for me the point is

to find the one that's right for you how intense do you want to get in terms of business ifying the creativity of YouTube there's lots of things you would you'd want to start considering if you're approaching it like a business imagine You've Got a Friend and the friend is like really good at cooking Italian food and then the friend says I want to open an Italian restaurant the skills of opening a restaurant and trying to make money from it are like very different to the skills of being a good Chef so if you were opening

an Italian restaurant probably figure out like what other restaurants are in the area you figure out what's the footfall like how many people actually go through this area is this area a sensible place to open an Italian restaurant how is your Italian restaurant going to be different to all of the other restaurants out there how different does it need to be you wouldn't just be thinking I want to serve really good Italian food the point of a business is to add value to other people and to capture some percentage of that value as money and

so a YouTube channel needs to add value to other people because they are paying for your videos with their time and their attention which in many ways is more valuable than money because we can always make more money but we can we can never make more time at this point we start considering things like what is my Niche who is my target audience what is the value proposition of my YouTube channel like why would someone watch my videos in the first place how how is my channel going to stand out compared to others like why

would anyone choose to watch my video compared to the other videos out there in the same Niche but also compared to the other videos out there on the platform what are the competitive advantages that I have that could help me stand out in this particular space you taught yourself Mandarin it's good competitive Advantage because very few people have taught themselves Mandarin and then are able to make videos about it also your competitive Advantage is your accent and videos about the accent do really well yeah your competitive Advantage is the fact you went to Cambridge Medical

School and so when you make videos about studying you automatically have a bit more credibility to talk about those things I know someone whose competitive advantages they absolutely jacked and so when they make videos about Fitness people believe them and they have credibility and people care what they have to say so it just depends on what what are your own unfair advantages advantages that you have that would be very difficult for someone else to replicate and how can you weave those into your content you can still absolutely stand out it's just that you then need

a little bit more than maybe you did in the past to be able to stand out you know I've seen your shea EU new Business Journal that you've got over here yeah this is this is my Business Journal I've been very impressed by how busy you are about your YouTube channel all right okay and this is this is very abnormal like for the righte very few people are as busy about a YouTube channel As You Are one of the things I think about a lot is my time and energy actually alongside medical school and alongside

working full-time as a doctor I needed to find a way to make the most out of the limited time I could afford to spend on my YouTube channel so this very early meant that I outsourced editing for example via like one of these was it PPH or like upw work or Fiverr or or some something along those lines to take off some of the burden from me that means that since I'm paying editors there needs to be money coming in from somewhere else and then it start to be this thing of like okay I can

get money from like AdSense or from doing tutoring for a while so for example I tutored on I talkie for a couple of months to pay for the editors to do my YouTube channel editing cuz I was like oh if I do the edit myself it'll take 10 hours but in two or 3 hours of I talkie tutoring I can pay for this video to be edited by somebody else so that's a great deal let's go then I put out some applications for a head of content role and I'm always thinking about how I can

systematize making my YouTube videos so I can talk about things I'm passionate about but also within the framework of a system where where there is a clear like order of how things work and the workflow with this Business Journal the reason why I started doing it was because I realized I had so many things I wanted to be thinking about goals and Reflections so every week I do a little journaling session where I think about the wins from the last week the challenges the obstacles moving forward and my next action point so I do those

four things most weeks when I remember to do it and I sort of set little goals for myself like quarterly goals yearly goals for the YouTube channel I'm surprised you would only give yourself a 6 out of 10 on the hobby to business I I've got a team of 14 people and this is more intense than what I do in terms of like journaling about the business what does it look like you when I was 2 years in I had barely outsourced my editing it took me 2 years to Outsource my editing and you outsourced

it within like 2 months and it was about 2 years in that I read the book The emth Revisited which is all about like how do you turn what you're doing into a process that can be repeated without you needing to be the one driving it all the time mhm and so I was thinking okay what's the process of making a YouTube video and okay I guess I should do the title first maybe and then think about the thumbnail and all of this sort of stuff so I sort of stumbled my way through a lot

of this I mean I did take the parttime YouTuber Academy quite early on in my journey which definitely helped there's a lot of confusing conflicting advice and I think PT just brought it all into one place when I would sit down and think about it then I okay this chess move starts to make sense and I Know It exists because I did the part on YouTube Academy again link down below if you want to check it out um nice thank you for all the plugs you're so welcome this whole thing around treating YouTube like a

business this is a real hack there's dozens of videos on YouTube hundreds about how to grow on YouTube but very few of them talk about like thinking of it as a business and treating it like a system finding a way to systemize the value that you're that you're providing to people but when you're starting a business you don't need to worry about all of that kind of stuff you only start worrying about it once you've got a little bit of traction already I think it's also important to approach it with a bit of a spirit

of fun which is why I chose this journal for my Business Journal I didn't want it to feel stuffy because fundamentally being a YouTuber is being a creative entrepreneur every YouTuber who starts to gain traction on the platform have some kind of creative artist in them that has resonated with the audience in some kind of way and it's about preserving that and protecting that while also having this business mode so I think it's important to have that separation of of tasks in a way yeah M I completely agree I I was looking through my journal

earlier today I asked myself the question of how do I want to approach YouTube when it comes to metrics and I said in my role as the Creator I do not want to care about numbers yeah in my role as the business owners I love numbers and numbers love me yeah and it's really about separating those two it's almost like you're wearing multiple hats yeah and if you let them merge too much it starts to create a lot of conflict and kind of just say like your channel is such an inspiration genuinely like you know

we've had 3,000 plus students go through a YouTuber Academy you are one of the most successful you and Chris Williamson are probably take you know the top title for ridiculously successful YouTubers from from going through the course we often use your videos as an example of like you know look at how easy did this people are always so inspired by the way that you approach your videos because it's not just a I'm doing YouTube to make money it's like I'm doing YouTube to share a message that I think is like inspiring and empowering to other

people it's cool to see that you've got the heart and the soul for it and you also have the business side I know that they're probably in Conflict some of the time and you probably think about this a lot but like from the outside it really looks like you've got it all sorted and your channel is just absolutely exploding you're absolutely smashing it um so just want to acknowledge that a so sweet and you know I've been reading through some of your comments in preparation for this for this collab and I see that you know

sometimes the comments can be a bit weird I think being a girl on the Internet is a lot harder than being a guy on the internet I hope that you're not letting them get to you you're really providing a valuable service here to the millions of people watching your channel I would love to see that continue for the long time thank you so much yeah I mean likewise I feel like I've learned so much from you and your content and the course yeah thank you so much for all the help with all the YouTube tips

and any time yeah anytime if you enjoyed this video I think you might like this video somewhere over here where we did another video about YouTube tips over on Ali's channel so feel free to check that out and where can people find you Ali yeah they'll be linked down below I hope in the in the video description to all of Ali's Al's bits and Bobs thank you so much for watching take care of yourself and we will see you in the next video bye bye