From Newbie to Creator: The Steps You Can't Skip

Every creator's path to fame and popularity on YouTube is unique. You can try as much as you want to replicate the journey of a YouTuber with millions of followers, but it won’t work the same way twice.

However, over the years, the platform has developed a wide range of proven methods that work for most creators. And it is better to learn about them now, before you decide to launch your YouTube channel.

Let’s go!

Step #0: If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.

This phrase wasn’t counted by us, but we made it the title of the very first section of this article for a reason: it perfectly highlights the ultimate secret to success that everyone’s chasing — planning.

 Here are a few key points we’ll be building on as we go:

• YouTube has been, is, and will remain the largest platform for self-expression and creativity.  
• It’s also one of the most popular platforms for promoting businesses, brands, products, and services.  
• Competition on the platform has become much tougher — both in terms of the number of creators and the quality of content.  
• Over the past couple of years, the barrier to entry on YouTube has risen significantly.  
• Without investing resources, achieving long-term success on the platform is nearly impossible now.  
• If you’re planning to become a YouTuber, you’ll need to prepare and gain the right knowledge to compete with those who are already successfully running their channels.  
• Structure, consistency, and strategy — these are the three core pillars every YouTuber needs to focus on.

And even though YouTube is now filled with more high-quality content you’ll have to compete with, everyone still has their own shot at success.  

All it really takes is a little dedication — and a thoughtful approach to creating and promoting your content.

Of course, it also helps to have a reliable partner by your side — one that’s always ready to promote your videos and connect them with the right audience. That’s exactly what our service, Prodvigate, is here for!

We take the complex process of promoting videos and channels on YouTube and make it simple and accessible for everyone.  

With the help of our smart algorithms, you’ll be able to reach subscribers who are genuinely interested in your channel, your niche, and you as a creator. As a bonus, this audience will also drive organic growth.  

And for new users, the promo code BLOG10 gives you 10% off your first promotion.

Once you’re fully prepared — don’t wait. Just go for it and —

Step #1: Just start creating content

Wow, this is unexpected now.

After all that long introduction about how important it is to be prepared and have a strategy, we advise you to just go ahead and start a channel without thinking or engaging in lengthy preparation. And this is not accidental, of course.

We will definitely talk about what steps will really help you promote your own content, but let's be honest: it's very difficult to take the word of internet specialists at face value, even if you like the blogger and trust their opinion.

You can give a thousand strategies, ideas and tips that will really help and work, but if you've come to the platform and have no idea what YouTube is all about, then it's best to just go ahead and try to make something here.

You'll learn how YouTube works, how the platform operates from a blogger's perspective, you'll understand what you like to do and how, how people react, you'll gather your own information base about YouTube that you'll trust and on which you'll build yourself.

And most importantly — you'll start having questions. And when you go looking for information with an understanding of where and what problems you've encountered, it will be much easier for you to perceive useful recommendations about YouTube from experts.

And who knows, maybe you'll take off on YouTube from the first attempt, or maybe the opposite will happen, and you'll bury your first channel. Both are normal, and both are good, no matter how absurd that sounds.

You'll learn best from mistakes, particularly your own. And you'll make a bunch of them, believe me...

And when you've gained experience and start looking for answers to questions, you'll already be ready for the really correct format of work on the platform, which experienced bloggers, producers, and promotion experts come to.

Step #2: You need a plan

Regardless of which path you choose for yourself—immediately diving headfirst into YouTube or carefully studying all the issues from the sidelines—sooner or later you will face the fact that planning is the most effective tool for working on YouTube.

There are certain things on the platform that don't fundamentally change, and that you need to know in advance: this is how YouTube algorithms and rules work.

Knowledge and understanding of how the platform's recommendation systems, aka algorithms, work will help you determine your strategy for working on the platform in advance.

Briefly speaking, the platform's algorithms are built exclusively on viewers' interests: YouTube collects information about the audience, search history, and views of each individual viewer on the platform, and based on this, selects videos for the Home page, in search results, and recommendations.

In order to get a complete picture of your channel's potential audience, you need to do two things: analyze competitors' content in your niche and topic, and create a portrait of your future viewer based on this information.

Study comments and audience activity under videos from other creators. Basically, we're feeling out whether there's some kind of demand here and general audience interest.

At this stage, you may realize that viewer interest is high, for example, but creators cover the topic poorly. Or that the topic is too narrow, and you won't attract enough people to it. This is why you should start with analysis—it will tell you whether it's worth spending your energy and time developing content.

All this information will form the foundation of your YouTube promotion strategy. But this is, of course, only a small part of what will help you formulate your plan. Don't forget about the goal and purpose of your channel:

Why am I creating it, what audience pain point do I want to help solve with my content, what do I want to achieve on YouTube and in what timeframe.

So, what's next in the plan?

Take care in advance about the style of your channel: what color scheme and design style do I want to use in the design of the channel and videos, what will the header, covers, animation, and music be like. How will they reflect the idea, mood, and format of my content?

This is a big chunk of a job, and it shouldn't be done on the fly, but ideally, of course, in advance. Then you'll give yourself enough time to think everything through, try different options, and choose the one that seems most advantageous to you.

Step #3: Determine what character you are on YouTube and for whom

50% of your success on YouTube will belong to the viewers, because they will be the ones choosing or not choosing your content. It's their subscriptions, likes, comments, and support that promote you on the platform.

The other 50% depends only on you, your team, and strategy, which must definitely take into account how you want to present yourself to your viewers.

This symbiosis between your character and the viewer is inseparably connected, as primarily your content will be found and watched by those who share your point of view.

That's why it's important to formulate what kind of person you are, what character you are in your content, what kind of creator you are, and what makes you unique. What values and views you want to broadcast, and which ones, on the contrary, you don't want to display.

You need to understand what you want to give viewers, how to reach them, and how to position yourself.

Today on YouTube, the uniqueness of the creator and their content is valued more than ever. This can be in some interesting format of the content itself, such as ASMR channels, or be completely tied to the person.

Without understanding yourself, your hobbies, interests, and views, you won't be able to make your channel unique, and without understanding your target audience, you won't understand how to promote your content.

The fact is that for the most part, YouTube promotes content that collects the largest number of reactions from the audience compared to competitors: high retention, large number of likes, dislikes, comments, and other activities under the video.

And in order to make such effective videos, you'll still have to understand what motivates people to watch them and leave reactions.

Step #4: Study the platform's tools

YouTube itself provides creators with many ways to make their content more competitive.

For example, working with your video metadata, such as thumbnail, title, and video description.

Your videos need not just some pictures, but clickable thumbnails that will stand out favorably among competitors and thus promote your videos through a greater number of clicks on them.

You can write not just some words that describe the topic of your video in the title, but create an entire intriguing message that will also add motivation points for the audience to click on the video.

Even today, through competent descriptions and tags, creators can promote their own videos much more effectively. To do this, you simply need to study what optimization is and how to work with keywords and search queries. However, you'll have to spend some time studying this issue.

YouTubers in our niche often argue, like, "no, only SEO works, you have to toil day and night over optimizing each video," or conversely, "no—only trending works, forget about interesting titles and clickable video thumbnails."

We suggest you count on both SEO and recommendation algorithms, because both of these mechanisms help your promotion. After all, if you've decided to run a channel and want to approach it consciously, then it's not so difficult to study optimization as well. Extra skills and knowledge have never hurt anyone in life, right?

Proper optimization helps your content find its audience for many years, creating evergreen videos, although it requires much more time for the video to start gaining popularity.

Getting a video into recommendations, on the contrary, guarantees you an instant jump in subscriber and view growth, and that's also cool and also a method. But while with recommendations it's almost impossible to account for all factors influencing getting there, with optimization everything is much simpler.

Another important aspect—learn to analyze your activity. Because the secret to success on YouTube is actually personal for everyone, and you need to identify it yourself by looking at your videos and analytics. And the trick is to see this pattern among all your videos that leads you to success.

Step #5: Monetization is just the beginning

Authors are still working hard to get the coveted 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, but I suggest you stop and focus on other ways to earn money.

And secondly, believe it or not, so many famous bloggers have already seemingly expressed that they actually earn mere pennies from monetization, while affiliate marketing allows them to actually give up any other work besides YouTube.

And here's our advice: focus on working on your reputation this year. Brands are ready to work with both large and small bloggers; some begin their first collaborations without even reaching 1,000 subscribers, simply because they present themselves in a way that's advantageous to advertisers, and they've already formed a base of loyal subscribers. And it's precisely this active audience that brands are looking for.

As we discussed above, understanding the pain points and requests of your audience, as well as the ability to work with your channel's analytics, is an integral part of bloggers' work, including for effective cooperation with advertisers:

Which video topics promote you, which work excellently for retention, what viewers want from you, and what future content should be like.

Here it's also important to have quality feedback from your dedicated subscribers, perhaps moving to other platforms for direct communication with them and collecting the most honest and relevant feedback.

Perhaps you're already working in partnership with someone, but sooner or later everyone thinks about increasing their check. Therefore, at this stage, it's important to select convenient schemes for interacting with advertising. This is not just work at the level of "made an ad insertion, reported, and free"—it's complete mutual understanding with the audience and delivery through real benefit. It's taking care of viewers and native integration of advertising, without imposing.

Step #6: Expand and Improve Yourself

And this is like the final stage. A stage where you stay for a very long time.  

You're no longer just making fun or useful YouTube videos — you're creating your own show and, at the same time, a business, as grand as that may sound.  

By this point, it’s important that you’ve built a team you can trust with many of the processes, because this is now a real business project.

Important: at every stage you go through, don’t forget to look back and analyze your actions.  

How far have you come? Who is your audience? What’s working, and what’s not anymore?  

Rethink your content, and don’t forget to thank and appreciate yourself for the journey you’ve made.

Three components that will help you stay on course:

1. Find like-minded people.

Family and friends who aren't involved in your creative process may not always understand or share your thoughts and concerns. That’s why every YouTuber should have at least a small circle of people going through the same stages and facing similar challenges.

Later on, this could even turn into some great collaborations. Why not?

If you don’t know where to find such people — scroll back a little to the part where we mentioned our private creator community. Think about it, maybe that’s exactly what you’ve been missing to take a big step forward.

2. Find a mentor.

On YouTube, we mostly develop solo — that’s why it’s important to have a guide who can direct and support you.

This doesn’t have to be someone you know personally, but it should be someone you trust. Choose a person (or people) who resonate with you, who feel relatable and trustworthy.

3. Get feedback.

If you have the opportunity, share your videos with professionals you know. Ask what scriptwriters, designers, and marketers think of your content.

These people can offer insight from their field — they’ll spot where you might be falling short, or where you’re absolutely killing it.

Don’t be afraid to experiment, make mistakes, or ask questions — whether it’s to experts, fellow creators, or your own audience.

Experiments will push your content forward, mistakes will become your most valuable lessons, and thoughtful questions always lead to helpful, respectful answers.

And no matter what path or strategy you choose, remember: if you’ve already started your YouTube channel, then today you’re already much closer to success than you were yesterday.