The world of YouTube is tricky, confusing and overwhelming.

If you want to start a YouTube channel, the first thing I would recommend is to start fleshing out episodes and individual videos on paper, with subjects and content organized. This will help you get an idea of how much content you have to begin with. This outline would include writing out potential title names for video segments and writing out the focus points and sub-topics.

YouTube channels work well when content is regularly updated — so building content should be your constant focus. Starting with at least weekly or bi-weekly updates on your channel is a great place to start.

Once you have an idea of the content, you’ll begin to see how far out you’ll be able to develop your channel initially.

Test Your On-Camera Video Capabilities

Apart from developing the structure of content, recording the video to “test” online camera presence is another excellent next step. The latest iPhones have some of the best video recording capabilities and often compare to video cameras worth thousands.

If you have one available, if you’re able to record a test horizontally on the phone – that will give you the widescreen angle you’d want. And then on iPhones, if you go to settings –> camera –> record video, you’ll want to set the recording at 4K at 60 fps. This will give you a REALLY high-quality video to start working with.

Begin Planning Your Next Steps

Once content is fleshed out, and some tests have been done – this would give a good starting point to work with, all WITHOUT having to invest money, but having a good idea of where you want to take a YouTube channel next.

Before buying equipment or paying editors and videographers to assist, I always recommend starting with a test phase first.