i have a not fail i have just found 10 000 ways it won't work thomas edison thomas edison invented the light bulb it took him 10 000 times that he so-called failed but he didn't look at it as failures he looked at it as other ways that it didn't work until eventually he did construct the light bulb and he did it succeed so i wanted to start with that quote just to give you a little bit of inspiration youtubers may fail but you have to start by failing before you actually succeed before you actually get anywhere so in today's video i want to show you how i failed at youtube and the mistakes that i was making as a new youtuber on my other channel when i first got started and i also made mistakes on this channel and i'm still making mistakes of course because we are human okay i'm actually going to go through my old channel and show you what i was doing wrong and i'm also going to give you some tips on how you can avoid those same mistakes as well now before all of that welcome if you're new here my name is delania i make videos about how to make money online working from home how to make money on youtube so if that sounds good to you then go ahead and make sure you are subscribed tap the bell down below so you don't miss out so i started my first channel back in 2017 when i started that channel i totally did not know what i was doing now the first fail the very first mistake that i did on youtube was actually two years prior because in 2015 i actually wanted to start a youtube channel and i didn't so the very first mistake the first reason you're going to fail is that you don't actually start anything that was my first mistake okay now that's an obvious one i waited two years to start my youtube channel so that was mistake number one now i had a valid reason for not starting a lot of people actually have this reason for not starting but i was scared and i had fear of criticism this fear of what are people gonna think about me are they gonna think i'm stupid this is so stupid walking around with a camera and actually recording myself i'm gonna get weird looks and things like that so that's what i was thinking at the time i actually wanted to go out there and vlog and talk to the camera just like i'm talking right now but i wanted to go out and do it so i thought people were gonna think i was weird and it took me about two years to actually develop this mindset of not caring and actually going for it try to avoid that try to just get going everyone is going to have opinions about what you have to say it's just how the world works do what is best for you if you want to get started on youtube just get started so thankfully i started working on my mindset and started to care a little bit less about what people thought about me actually recording myself and talking on camera even though i felt weird it was like oh well i'm gonna do it anyway there you go so the next mistake that i made was i had no specific niche i was doing hair videos which are no longer on that channel anymore because i deleted them i was doing fitness videos i was doing vlogs i was doing cooking i was doing comedy skit recipes i mean it was all over the place my channel was everywhere so that's definitely something that did not help so let's go ahead and take a look at the channel i will show you very quickly why it was not working and by the way i deleted a lot of videos from here so this is not even it okay i have videos about my fitness journey what i eat then i also have videos about going on a staycation and vlogging i also have videos about there being a snake losing the garage i'm actually out eating at a restaurant it was like a whole thing and i really never got to it i just spoke about the snake a little bit so i didn't even give you a whole story there yeah i was even house hunting and this actually was a skit video that i did with a friend of mine and i have a couple of videos that are just totally random so what you actually want to do is you want to choose a niche if you want to actually have vlogs then create a vlog channel if you want to talk about hair and curly hair products and things like that and product reviews about curly hair then go ahead and make a curly hair channel and that's just an example because i was making curly hair videos in the beginning you choose a niche and be very specific to what you want to talk about and the reason you want to choose a niche is because youtube is a big algorithm and they have to index your channel and your videos to people who are actually searching for that type of content so if your content is all over the place then youtube is not going to show it to anybody or they're going to show it to just a very small amount of people so you want to be very specific as to what you're talking about on your channel make sure you do niche down the only way that you will succeed at doing this without having a specific niche is if you're actually a celebrity and people already know you so if you're jack black you're good to go you can do whatever whatever you want on your youtube channel you can start as many youtube channels as you want and it'll succeed but that is the only way other than that you have to niche down and be specific so the next mistake that you can make that i was making was i wasn't using my video's description i had very very little inside of that description box and you can actually put a lot of stuff in there all right so let's go ahead and take a look at one of my videos okay let's go ahead and click on this one no no no this is so cringy anyway this was basically my video's description and i actually am surprised that i started to put hashtags here basically i gave you everything that was in the video i just gave you all the steps and then that was it and i gave you the title that is all i gave you here i gave absolutely nothing else there is so much you can do on your description you can promote other videos on your channel you can promote a business that you have you can add affiliate links to your description and you do have to put a disclaimer inside of your description as well that you are earning commissions through any of the links or through some of the links that are inside of the video's description as well so that is something else that also goes in the video's description if you do have links you can recommend any of your other videos in there you can recommend a playlist and also if you want to credit anyone for any music that you're using inside of the video as well any copyright free music that you can also include in your description so your description can be used for a whole lot of things as you could see with my old channel i was not utilizing my description at all okay and that's actually when i started to get better so there was actually more than usual in my description on what you just saw in that video so the next mistake is that your titles are not optimized for search that was also one of my biggest mistakes for example i have 40th birthday vlog girls trip and that actually got a decent amount of views over 600 views for my girls trip so that's actually kind of decent for for this channel for example you have busy day right here what i ate uh this is terrible um right here i have two dinners and most of my videos on this channel don't have good titles that people are actually searching for and when i did actually have good titles it was by mistake i didn't actually look for these titles or anything like that but i'll give you an example of some of the things that i did correctly by accident for example you have master cleanse no food for 10 days i'm actually saying master cleanse which is something that people actually are searching for they want to learn about it and they want to do it so they're like who else on youtube is doing it and how are they doing it so i actually did that and i was specific in my title that i had no food for 10 days okay so the next mistake i was making was with my thumbnails with the text specifically of my thumbnails you couldn't see the actual words that were on there on most of these thumbnails so if you actually take a look for example at this one right here that says what i ate in jersey city right here i cannot see what that is too much going on there are three pictures and you can't even tell what they are you can't tell what the text is saying whatsoever and i was using all types of different fonts and with this video also low self-esteem as a kid how i overcame it thumbnail is also really really bad the words are very small thumbnails are very small and people are not going to be able to actually see them my thumbnails now are not really that great i do create them myself but i think they're a little bit better because you can see the actual words the words are bigger you can see my face it's brighter so go ahead and check out some youtubers who are doing really well especially if they're new and they're doing really well that means people are clicking on their thumbnails just check out what they're doing and try to do something similar make sure you're not using fonts that are hard to read the best thing is to use like a normal looking font this one i believe is helvetica or helvetica noob is the one that i'm using now just make sure that you have whatever object it is that you want to feature in your video or your face and that it's really big and it's something that people would want to click and also if you're using text make sure it's bold text that people can actually read because the thumbnail is going to look this big on the phone you're not going to be able to see it i mean come on so that is one mistake that i was making and that is how you can improve so the next mistake i was making is that i was not planning my videos i had sometimes nothing to say i just wanted to pick up the camera and record so that was pretty bad and that happened with a lot of the videos the only videos that i actually sat down and put together and gave it some thought were the comedy and skit videos because obviously i have to know what punchline i'm saying i have to know what i'm actually going to do for that video to actually put it together but i didn't plan any of my videos so before we talk about the next mistake i just want to let you know that you are going to fail at a lot of things you are going to be awkward on camera but it's all a part of growing if you're not failing you're not growing you're not learning so just go for it don't worry about that try to actually fail faster and i actually got that from will smith i think he said fail often and fail forward and try to fail faster the more you fail the faster you get to that point where you're going to be successful so just keep on going let's go ahead and talk about the next mistake that i was making the next mistake was that i was telling everybody to subscribe and i'm not talking about in my videos but i was telling people at my job i was telling all of my friends and family i was pretty much like begging them to subscribe to my channel i have a youtube channel subscribe and they were like okay sure yeah now this is a big mistake because these people are just subscribing because you're telling them to subscribe but they're not actually watching your videos so if you have people that are not watching they're just there to subscribe youtube is not really going to recommend your content because they're going to think your content is no good because the people who are subscribed are actually not even watching they expect people to watch your video because this tells youtube that the video is a good video and if they stay on your video it tells them that it's a good video therefore they will recommend it to other people if you're telling a ton of people to subscribe but they're not actually interested in watching the content then that is not good and that is a mistake that i was making telling everyone everyone and their family members to subscribe to the channel that that's a mistake so the next mistake is actually telling people that the video was over without actually the video being over i would tell people that we're close to the end so if you hint that the video is almost over people actually start leaving they start clicking off youtube actually values watch time on your video also signals to youtube that people are liking the video because they're staying on it and they're watching so you actually want to do your best to keep people watching if you're hinting and telling them that you are about to go or you know this is the final blah blah blah then people are going to click off so what you can do instead to actually segue into going towards the end of the video for example you can say now let's go ahead and keep this conversation going go ahead and check out this video where i talk about eight reasons to start youtube in 2021 thank you so much for watching and i'll see you over there