How to become a Great YouTuber in Eight Easy Steps

1. Create a great Channel Page

While YouTube does not have the customizable pages like it once did in the past, customizing your page can lead to more people discovering your channel and watching your content. My view is that your avatar is very important; you should understand it is like your personal identity on the site.

2. Comment on other people's videos.

YouTube is the video castle of cyberspace. It is a like a mall with billions of people you can talk with. It is not simply a place to put videos on; a personal website can suffice for such usage. However, YouTube is a community not just a website.

3. Make great thumbnails for your videos

Making thumbnails is equivalent to making the front cover for a book. While the contents are important, you need to get a hook to get people interested in what you have to say. 

4. Make YouTube Playlists

Playlists are underappreciated aspect of YouTube. While people may want to trust the computer to show them videos, playlists are still lurking from the days when YouTube was still a more human site. I utilize playlists so that people can focus on my videos and not have to look for every video that I make. It is also better for YouTube as a whole as you are curating videos that you find interesting rather than using AI as crutch for video discovery. We need to make YouTube human again and using playlists is very important in attempting to achieve such changes.

5. Attempt to maximize the use of the Video Title

The Video Title is basically one of the most important ways for you to get people to watch your videos. I recommend having a title which will gain people's attention. Clickbait is a thing for a reason but your content needs to go beyond the hook and keep people's attention when they click on your video.

6. Make YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts are a callback to the older days on YouTube when most videos were shorter. The idea of uploading a 15-minute video is not the best approach for new channels, especially when you do not have many real-life friends who can spread it online. 

Making short videos when your channel is small will help it to grow. Longer videos are risker, and you are wasting more of your time on getting discovery on anything else than hobbyist channels. 

Concise and straight to the point videos are best place for using YouTube Shorts. Brevity as they say is the soul of wit and especially on this site.

7. Maximize your watch time not the views.

In the early days of YouTube, Views were what was important. The categorization of videos by the algorithm was mostly basic and about how many people clicked on your video rather their interaction on the video. 

For quite some time, the interaction of users was Watch Time. This metric helped the algorithm rate whether a video was worth watching or not. This prevented someone from making a video which was great but would simply rely on shock value to get people's attention.

The company has been changing the algorithm once again. Now you need to make a video that gets watch time but is also having interactions such as having likes and shares.

8. Research before making videos on the site.

Making videos on YouTube is like running a business. You need to do your research before you start putting out videos.

Here are some additional tips on how do to that research here.

1. Look at what your competitors are making.

2. Trending and Relevant to your own content is the tight rope of running a small YouTube Channel.

3. Once one has a subscriber counts in the 100,000s, it is important to research competitors even more in those cases.

4. Try to look at what videos are higher preforming in your area of interest.

5. Take your time with your research, sometimes you will find a hidden, almost trending interest and you can take advantage of it in order to propel your channel to stardom on the site.

YouTube still has the "You", but you got put effort into it.

YouTube has changed a lot over the years. Keeping the "You" in the site is going to take more effort than in the past. There are many corporations who want to control YouTube. This is why so many of your recommendations are full of local tv channels that are not in your local area. Google, the parent company, or more specifically, Alphabet, has been too easy on the mainstream who have no understanding of the internet or its horizontal nature. This is not a realm which is like the old mediums which relied heavily on centralized control. The average user is going to have keep maintaining his kingdom against these invaders. You made the platform what it is and the corporations will have to learn to live with us and adapt rather conquer it to turn into another television station.

Quality still matters but you need to put more effort into it.