Hi everyone! 

  
I've lurked here for a while and wanted to make a post to share my learnings from being on YouTube for \~5 months now.

  
I started with making shorts but transitioned into long-form videos because I felt constrained by the shorter video length. Here's what I've learned which helped me reach my audience:

  
1. Let your passion guide you but not blind you, ask for feedback!

Everybody here has a passion for a particular topic or niche and your unique perspectives is what will make your channel stand out. Often I've found that the more passion and genuine excitement I put into a video, the better that video performs. However, just because you're passionate doesn't mean the video will do well. Feedback has been incredibly valuable but also stings a little when it's negative, and that's a good thing! With feedback from friends and family I managed to find my priorities with how I plan my videos, the tone and pace of my speech and my video structure. I've not "completed YouTube" now but I'm closer to my goals and feedback helped massively.

  
2. Just put out that video, perfection < consistency

  
I fell into a trap very early on of trying to make everything as perfect as possible, from the right video effects to images, transitions and animations. The reality is that a lot of the details you'll be annoyed by in your videos won't be noticed by 99% of people. That doesn't make you nitpicky, it just means that the perspective of an editor is really different to that of a viewer. Being consistent with your uploads will do more for your success than "a perfect video" because more content = more feedback = more improvement = more growth!

  
3. Don't care if a video does badly, care if it does well

A lot of the videos you'll make early on will do terribly and if, by some miracle, they capture a decent audience (for context, my first video got 1000 views which was huge for me) it won't stick! Some of my videos got thousands of views and then some only got a few dozen. In truth, maybe this one video is the biggest I'll have in a while but I care about it because it helps me learn what works and what doesn't. Without a well-performing video, you can't tell what doesn't work about your badly performing ones. In the early stages, let yourself have fun and once one of your videos pops off, pay attention to why!

  
I hope these insights helped and I wish you the best of luck on your journeys, I've just hit the 750 subscriber milestone which I appreciate isn't as big as some of you (I saw someone hit 100,000 on the front page!) but I wanted to commemorate the achievement and give back to this community :)

Just had my first big video, here's what I learned :)