How I Made My YouTube Channel
OK… Buckle Up!
I am going to take you through the story of the creation, foundations and growth of the Avomance YouTube channel.
I’m not saying that if you copy what I did you will grow to over 80,000 subscribers BUT I do know that I made some good and bad choices along the way.
If you can learn from my mistakes thats a great thing!
It was a rainy day in April 2015 when I made my first ever YouTube video. I knew I was going to play Minecraft and the game was ready and loaded in front of me.
I had practiced recording my screen a few times with the Bandicam free package. Its a great system to get used to, although it was only available for the PC (That may not be true any more with the rise of the Mac). However, to remove the watermark I had spend the $30 necessary to get a premium account and I was ready!
So thats all I had… a Laptop PC, a copy of Minecraft, a $30 Bandicam account and Windows Movie Maker which comes free with every Windows computer! It was all I needed to start my Journey!
Two quick fire videos later and I realised that WAS NOT all I needed. To make any kind of quality video for YouTube you need a number of things.
These include a way to get good sound!
My first two videos were so quiet that you have to wear headphones to be able to hear what I was saying, with the volume up to maximum!
So my first recommendation is an easy one. Get yourself a microphone. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it just needs to be able to capture your voice clearly so the viewers can follow your story! People watching YouTube want to connect with the YouTuber so make sure they can hear what you are saying, or singing or rapping or playing!
People watching YouTube want to connect with the YouTuber so make sure they can hear what you are saying, or singing or rapping or playing!
My FIRST microphone on YouTube was the amazing Snowball Ice. I will never be persuaded that this is not the best starter microphone in the world!
I ordered it when a guy on Twitter said he started out with one. I researched it, read a lot a reviews and decided it was the right mic for me. For less than £50.00, it was actually a no brainer.
Amazon Prime is a. wonderful thing. My beautiful white Snowball Ice Microphone arrived the very next day and Avo’s Journey Episode 3 was the first video created with it.
This set up was perfect for me for a while, and I successfully made a number of videos using Bandicam and my Snowball, and editing on MovieMaker. I did notice that the choices for editing were a little limited and most other channels seemed to have far more dynamic edited content.
I wanted the same but really couldn’t justify changing until my hand was forced! As a result of a number of factors, I bought myself a second hand Macbook Pro. This meant I. had a much more slick and lovely machine BUT… Bandicam and MovieMaker were no more!
After the panic of realisation subsided, I set about looking for a good recording and editing suite. I found exactly what I was looking for in Camtasia!
With Camtasia you record AND edit in one package. This makes it so much more simple to create your content and stitch it together with smooth transitions and multiple layer editing, which was a brand new thing for me!
I continued to use Camtasia for Mac (also available for PC) for 2 years and it served me perfectly as a growing and developing content creator.
It was reasonable priced, (far lower cost than the superb Sony Vegas or the Adobe packages) which for a Creator with just a few thousand subscribers is hugely important.
This brings me right up to less than a year ago as I write this!
It was time to upgrade! I got myself a more powerful machine and equipped myself with some great, but economical, equipment.
You HAVE to understand that you do not have to spend a lot of money to gain a pretty professional set up. The things below cost little, if any, money and will give you high quality results!
With these three pieces of equipment, my sound quality shot up, and the combined cost of all three was less than £140!
The Blue Yeti gives the sounds quality of a professional cardiod microphone and can switch between sound modes. It revolutionised the quality of my content.
This was made even clearer through a near silent mouse that gives almost zero sound contamination in my videos and wireless headphones that are so comfortable on my head I forget I am wearing them and answer the door! The Postman thinks I am crazy!
Its all for nothing if the Thumbnails aren't eye catching
If I can give you one piece of advice, sunscreen would be it. However, If I can give you a second piece of advice then it would be to make sure your YouTube Thumbnails POP more than those around them. Unless your thumbnails stand out, you will never get picked from the crowd!
Sometimes I don’t achieve this, you can’t get it right every single time, but a good graphics creation package makes a HUGE difference.
I don’t, and have never used, Photoshop.
I wouldn’t know where to start!
What I DO Use is a package called Snappa!
The Snappa graphics creator is the most simple yet hugely effective thumbnail creation tool I have ever used. It works on a similar principle to Photoshop but without the complexity that the Adobe programme includes.
The Free version gives you access to a number of templates that can help you start to create some great looking YouTube thumbnails, and also assist in Facebook posts, twitter graphics and other social media feeds.
The “Pro” Version has a massive choice of templated options, plus allows you to create unlimited graphics and save your creations in a “Snappa file” for access later. This is REALLY useful when you have thumbnails in a series that have a similar style (Like my AlphaCraft videos). I don’t have to create them from scratch every time, which saves me hours.
Some of my best thumbnails have been created in just a few minutes using snappa and I cannot recommend it enough for your “YouTube package”.
Some content here is affliatised. If you choose to make a purchase it will support this site. I will only list quality. After all this a recommendation section!