Transcripts
1. INTRODUCTION: Hey everyone. My name is Jed, and welcome to my
Skillshare course. I'm a full time YouTuber
based in New York City. I've been posting on YouTube for the past three to five years. I post Lifestyle
logs on YouTube, which includes things like
documenting my career, my social life, and
everything else that comes with
navigating my 20s. I'm very excited
to be working with Skill Share and bring
you this course. If you're interested in
becoming a YouTube logger, or curious on what it's like behind the scenes,
then stick around. I'll be talking about
things like camera gear, how I edit logs, as well as YouTube tip
strategies, and all that stuff. So let's get started.
2. CHOOSING A NICHE: A Tub channel, is very similar
to starting a new company. You want to determine
your niche, do market research,
launch your M VP, and determine your
value proposition. Determining your
niche and value prop can be hard, especially
in the beginning. But the great thing
about starting a new channel is that
you have the freedom and the flexibility to try out all sorts of videos and
see which ones you like, and see which ones perform
well in the beginning. I do logs now, but in the first five to ten videos
of starting my channel, I posted videos of
all sorts of niches. I did interviews, I did videos
about chest, photography. It wasn't until I posted a video that was
a more lifestyle, gained the life of a
software engineer video, that I saw that that was a really popular
niche apparently, and that was one of
the first videos that So you should see
your first ten videos as like a trial period. This is also why in the
startup world, they say, don't spend too much time
on your first product, just launch as soon as
possible, launch your MVP, which tends for a minimum viable product
because you really learn the most
when it's launched when you get feedback
from customers, and same thing
goes with YouTube. After I made that day in the life of a software
engineer video, I started making
more lifestyle logs with a little bit of
computer science in there That's what I knew that this is what people want to see for me, and I really dialed
in on that niche. Four years later, the videos I make are mostly
livestock videos, and about 20 to 30%
of those are more focused on software engineering
or building a startup. I wouldn't have known
this if I didn't try out all sorts of niches in
my first ten videos. Your value proposition is why should viewers click
your thumbnail and watch your videos? That could be all
sorts of things. Your value prop could be an
entertainment information based off the comments on my
videos and the DMs I get. It seems that my
value prop is more inspiration, whether it comes to wanting to live
in New York City, which is where I live or working computer science or
building a startup. The most important
thing here is finding a niche that you really do
enjoy making videos about. Something a lot of
people don't really realize is that they
chase viral videos, and they think that
it's a great thing. But once you decide your
value prop and your niche, it's pretty important
to stay within that niche as you
continue to make videos. Because you want to think
of your YouTube channel as like a TV channel. You have regularly
scheduled programming, for example, in my lifestyle
log YouTube channel, If I decide to post a video, that's how to do the
perfect sprinting for. People will probably
unsubscribe. And even if I post that video and it goes viral
from a new audience, that's not going to do any good for me because
that's not going to translate to views on my
other regular videos. So I have a lot of friends that had a viral video years ago, and it went so
viral and they have so many subscribers
for that video. But then when they post the videos that they
do want to make, the regularly
scheduled programming, those aren't getting
nearly as much views. Yeah, it's just better to
have a community within a certain niche and staying
true to that niche, and don't worry
about going viral. But anyway, this lesson is about getting started
and just some things to think about as you're starting a
YouTube channel. The last thing I'll say is a
lot of aspiring YouTubers, aspiring bloggers tell me
that they want to start, but they feel like their
life is too boring. I honestly would say that even
I think my life is boring. And I think most people honestly just live
the same lives. Both my friends that are
doing full time YouTube and my other friends from college doing regular nine to five jobs. Lives are pretty similar.
We're all going to work. We're all eating,
going to the gym. The difference with
full time YouTubers is decide to spend their day
shaping it in a way where they can make a video out of it and telling a story within that day, and that's where the real
skill of logging comes from. Because my non
film days are very similar to my days when
I had a nine to five. I really wouldn't say
that's a great excuse. My last tip to close off this lesson is don't
quit unless you've made 20 to 30 videos because those first 30
videos is where you learned so much about
how the algorithm works, about your editing style,
your filming style, and your process of making
your first 20 to 30 videos is really the equivalent of
going to YouTube college.
3. CAMERA GEAR: Next lesson is going to be about camera gear and camera setup. I'll start with telling
you guys what I film with. I pretty recently
switched to Sony. I got the Sony F X three. This is the camera that I'm
filming with right now. On that camera is the
Sony 16 to 35 F 2.8 lens. Most of my videos were
filmed with a 16 to 35. Bloggers love the 16 35 because
it's a wide angle lens, when you're blogging,
you really want to get full context of your scene. I mostly film with the 16 35, but sometimes when I want more
specific cinematic shots, that's more punched in
with a blurry background. That's when I'll
switch to this sonny 50 millimeter 1.4 lens. The usual workflow with my log is that I
would film logging, a roll, talking to the camera. And then when I want
to transition to another scene of me
talking elsewhere, usually I would transition the two scenes with some
type of cinematic sequence. Oftentimes you would view
the 50 millimeter lens. I'd add some black bars,
I'd add some music. And that segment would
usually be filmed in Slomo. Normally, right now, I'm filming
in 24 frames per second. That's the Hollywood standard. And then when I want
to fill from cinematic shots for the transitions. That's normally 60
frames per second, which can be
stretched into Slomo. On top of both lenses are something called promis filters. This is actually a very
frequently asked question, and I never really
answer it on my videos, but people notice it
because there's a bit of a dreamy and misty
look in my videos, and I use the Tiffin black
promised one quarter. It's a filter I get
from Amazon, BNH, and I put them on both lenses.
They're both one quarter. And this is just more
of a stylistic choice, very optional. Next
for microphones. This one is actually a
very recent purchase. For the longest time, I would do voice memos for my voiceovers. Then I saw some of
my friends would use an actual USB microphone. And the quality
difference is insane. I don't know why I've been using my voice Milo for so long. But this is like $100. If you want a good
voice over mic, this is the Blue Yeti. I got it from Amazon. It plugged straight to my
computer. Super good. When I'm on the go, I would normally have some
type of shock in mic, either the road video micro plus or more recently.
I bought the Soony ECM M one Shock and Mike. In terms of the Mini tripods, I used to film with this one. This is what Casey
and I sat really popularized where you
put the camera on here. But I just found this
to be way way too big, so I switched to this, like mini Mini tabletop tripod. This could hold like 20
pounds. So it's really stable. This goes here, the camera
goes on top and it's foldable. I can put it in my camera bag. So much more convenient
than this gorilla pod. Although so many creators still want to shoot
with this gorilla pod. The only thing that's good
about this is that you could put it on poles and
wrap it around. Oh, this is a recent
purchase as well. When I was in Guam,
I was filming videos like commercials
for the tourism And I did a lot of
cinematic shots, and it had to be during the
day, sunny beach shots. Very important to get an
end filter if you want to shoot in high apertures
in the sunlight. I'm going to try to make this
not too camera technical, but this camera shoots in F 2.8. F 2.8 makes the
background really blurry, but the lower the number goes, the brighter it's going to be. You want to keep your
shutter speed at 1/50 if you're shooting
24 frames for a second, and 1/50 shutter
speed is also very So you have 1/50 kind of preset to match the
frame for second. I have my aperture that
I want to keep at 2.8, and what's left is ISO. Those three components make
up your scenes brightness. That minimum ISO is 100. And oftentimes, even if you're dropping that
ISO really low, it's still way too
bright if I'm going to be in the sun
shooting at F 2.8 and 1/50 shutter speed to help the ISO get a darker scene. That's why people add this. By literally adding a
filter to make it darker, ISO 100 is good to go. Although I will say, I only
do this when I do want to film nice cinematic shots,
nice, blurry background. But if I'm just logging, I'm doing aerial shots in the street just make my
aperture like F 11 F 16 because I don't really care about the background
being so blurry. If you're not at the
place where you want to buy camera gear
that expensive, a lot of my scenes and videos
are filmed with an iPhone. I have a lot of full time
YouTuber friends that will do full blogs and post it
just for their iPhone. So I would highly recommend
just starting with the phone in your pocket
or whatever you have. Like the F X three is a
really expensive camera. But I've been doing videos since literally middle school,
high school, college. I film so many
weddings in college. And I remember every time
I got paid from a wedding, I would upgrade to
the next best camera. This is probably like
my eighth or ninth DSLR mirrorless camera
that I've owned. It's all about slow upgrades. As I'm making more money, that's when I invest it
back into my camera gear. Yeah, this is what I use, and I found that this
setup really works for me.
4. CONTENT STRATEGY: So you have your camera gear, you have your niche, you
have your value prop. Now, what is the strategy
in terms of making content? We're going to talk about
that in this lesson. There is something called the
Hero Hub and Help Strategy. It was developed by YouTube
and Google as part of their branding playbook
for video creators. We're going to break
down the three. So Hero Hub and Help.
Your Hub videos. That's the category of videos. That's going to be your
regularly scheduled videos. Going to be probably 80%
of all your content. For me, my hub videos
would be blogs, blogs about hanging my friends,
blogs going to the gym blogs talking about my
start up rad my dorm. That's what most
people know me for, and that's what's going to
make up 80% of my content. But there's a struggle
with blogs in that it's harder to grow
making blogs than it is, making videos like Mr. Beast. And that's
because Mr. Best makes his videos such that it's
tailored to kids age 4-65. But when you post blogs, you're casting a smaller net. I guess that's pretty obvious. If I post a video that's like gain the life of a
software engineer. Obviously, people that are
into software engineering, they're the ones
that are going to be my regular audience. How do you grow with logs? That is why Vgs would
be my hub content. There's two more and
the two other types of content, hero and help. Those are the ones that
would make you grow. So next would be
the hero content. These are going to be
the videos that you post in the hopes
of it going viral. The goal of your hero videos is to tailor to new audiences, but in a way that it would still funnel to your hub content. The mistake that people
might make is that they deal a viral video that's
totally in a separate nese, and there's zero funnel
to your Hub content. So let me give you an
example in my own channel. My Hub content are logs
about computer science. A hero video that I've
made would be like Dai Life of software
engineer, for example, moving into new apartments, transforming my body in 30
days. Then the last one would help content, and that's more tailored for better search
engine optimization. For example, I did a video titled my Computer
Science degree 8 Minutes. It's a very searchable
video right along my niche of computer science
software engineering. Help videos are
more instructional. But if you put all
these three together, it's a good way to
grow your channel. This is how I really
grew my channel 0-100 k. The most important thing with your content strategy is just consistency.
Consistency is hard. I can't even give you advice
on consistency because it's been a little tough
for me the past two. But I will say year
one and year two, I was very consistent, and that's how I got
to pretty much zero to 150 K pretty quickly. Yeah, the hero hub
and help strategy.
6. FINAL THOUGHTS: Guys, that is the
end of this course. Thank you so much for
watching and sticking around. I hope you guys
learn something and are inspired to
make some videos. Blogging really changed my life. And there were so many times at the beginning of starting my
channel where I almost quit. My first ever blog
was in 2018 or 2019, and I would just post on and off and I would keep quitting, just thinking it wasn't for me. And then, just one
day, mid COVID 2021, I thought, I'm going
to start posting weekly and really see
where this takes me. And now it's been my
full time job for three years now. So yeah, my honest honest opinion about social media is that I really
think anybody could do it. Doesn't matter how
boring your life is or I truly think it's just
a skill to be learned. I hope you guys are better
equipped from these lessons. And just a quick call back.
Don't forget to choose niche that you're into
that you enjoy doing. Because if you make a few
videos and they all do well, you better be okay
with continuing that niche and being that
specific YouTube group. And just follow the
hero he help strategy, and you got it, just be
consistent and you got it. This is totally
optional, but the next time you guys make
a video or of Log, you could share it in
the project alley below, and I'll try to watch it
and leave some comments. Thank you. Thank
you, Skill Share. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.
Jedcal
