If I wanted to be a YouTuber and start my YouTube Channel in 2025, this is what I’d do to grow and monetize as quickly as possible.’

In this post, let’s break down how to become a YouTuber in 2025. In this guide, you’ll learn 5 non-negotiable tips and tricks you can implement to grow your channel as a complete beginner. 

As always, if you’d like to watch instead of read, click the video below.

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If I Started a YouTube Channel in 2025, This is What I’d Do

I posted a video on my Instagram showing how much money I made on YouTube v.s. Instagram in a 90-day period… and quite honestly, that video blew up. People are finally starting to see how powerful growing a YouTube channel can be for content creators. 

Naturally, when that video took off, I started to get a lot of questions from people asking how to get started on YouTube. So, today I’m breaking down everything I would do if I were starting a channel from 0 and wanted to grow as quickly as possible. 

I’ve been on YouTube for 15 years now and have helped hundreds of students in my YouTube Course, The Channel Growth Lab, so these are the 5 steps I could say are non-negotiables for your 2025 YouTube Strategy. 

Step 1: Make sure it’s right for you

Being a YouTuber is amazing, but it’s not for everyone and that’s OK. In a recent post I shared the brutally honest truths to being a content creator, a lot of which apply directly to YouTube. I’d recommend reading that post next. 

If you’re brand new to the YouTube space, don’t feel like you have to have it all figured out right away. It’s OK if you don’t have a niche set, or a plan in place, I’ll cover that in future steps. For right now, I want you to go through the motions of creating a long-form video or handful of videos. 

There’s two main benefits when you start with this step: 

1. You’ll see if you enjoy the process of making YouTube videos. Start by picking any video topic that you want. Yup, anything that excites you, sparks your creativity and encourages you to film. You don’t have to post it if you don’t want to. Go through the motions of filming, editing, creating a thumbnail, etc. and see if this is something that you can see yourself doing for the long haul. Take away the pressure of ‘having a perfect plan’. 

This leads to benefit number 2. By simply starting, it forces you to step out of perfectionism and take messy action. Stepping out of perfectionism and taking messy action is my favorite advice for new content creators. You get to start with zero pressure while you’re figuring out the ropes. 

As you’re exercising these muscles, you can get some clarity on if this is something you can see yourself doing continuously as a creator. 

If you choose to move forward and keep posting, you can start asking yourself these questions:

• How long does it take you to create a video from beginning to end
• With that in mind, what consistency can you keep up with? Once a week? Twice a week? 
• What type of relationship do you want to have with YouTube? Is it for fun? Or is the intention to use YouTube as an avenue to work full-time as a content creator? 
• What do you want to be known for as a YouTuber?

Step 2: Get clear on your channel direction

If you’re still here at this point, you’re probably someone who wants to take your relationship with YouTube past a casual hobby and figure out how to turn it into a full-time income or become a well-known creator. That means, you’re ready for a YouTube strategy to fast track your growth. 

That’s where getting channel clarity is going to become so important. When you know what you want to be known for 3-5 years from now, you can reverse engineer that strategy. 

For YouTube, there are two strategies that I recommend to my students if your goal is quicker growth. 

1. Follow the traditional social media approach and pick a niche. I’m sure you already know this advice, and if you want help picking a niche, this resource is for you. 

2. Now, if you don’t want to niche down, your alternative strategy would be to pick an audience. 

This strategy is perfect for YouTube because on YouTube’s Creator page titled “Growing Your Channel” they say:

“Our algorithm doesn’t pay attention to videos, it pays attention to viewers. So, rather than trying to make videos that’ll make an algorithm happy, focus on making videos that make your viewers happy.”

AKA if you know WHO your videos are for, and you can identify the specific type of audience that will watch your videos, you can focus on creating for them (instead of focusing on posting one topic over and over.)

Step 3: Start creating “searchable content”

As you create, you’re going to add in “searchable content” to your video pipeline. 

What is searchable content, and why do you want to create it? 

Searchable content is when you create videos that will pop up when someone uses the YouTube search bar. The reason you want to START with this type of content is because of the algorithm. 

I’ve already created a full video breakdown talking about the YouTube algorithm so you can watch that video next if you’re interested… but basically there are three main places that your videos can rank on YouTube: 

• YouTube Home
• Suggested or ‘Up Next’
• Search results

In order to rank in ‘Home’, you have to keep viewers engaged and keep making what works. Well, how can you keep doing anything when you have 0 viewers? When you’re a beginner YouTuber, trying to rank on ‘Home’ is really off the table. 

In order to rank in ‘Suggestioned’, you need to use a strong CTA, playlists, links, cards and endscreens at the end of your video. But… if no one is watching your video, let alone making it to the end, how can you rank in ‘suggested’?  

Which leaves ‘Search’ as your best option for starting from scratch on YouTube. Making searchable content is going to help you start getting traction to your videos and your channel, so that overtime you’re able to rank in ‘Home’ and ‘Suggested’. 

Leaning into this content type is going to teach your really strong skillsets that you need as a YouTuber. You’ll learn things like: 

• Titling your videos
• Creating thumbnails
• Writing strong video descriptions

YouTube has said that the one thing you can do to rank in search results is to use relevant search terms in both the title and description of your video. I use the tool Keywords Everywhere to help me with creating searchable content. If you want to see this in action, watch this video (skip ahead to 10:50). 

Other tools that you can use for this are TubeBuddy and VidIQ.

So, how can you use this strategy to grow quickly on YouTube in 2025? If you want to grow very quickly on YouTube this year, I recommend making EVERY video around searchable content. However, if you don’t enjoy making this style of video… you can alternate and make every other video as ‘search-based’. 

Now, if you’re someone who is serious about becoming a YouTuber in 2025, I highly recommend checking out my YouTube Course, the Channel Growth Lab. I’ve worked with hundreds of students to help them hit monetization and their first 1,000 subscribers fast. 

The Channel Growth Lab is structured to be your A to Z Blueprint to YouTube. Typically with YouTube we see slower growth than Instagram or TikTok, which is why these strategies to help you hit your first 1,000 subscribers are so valuable. 

Step 4: Begin to prioritize video packaging

What is video packaging? 

This refers to many things in video creation, but here I’m referring to the ultimate power duo of your Title and Thumbnail. 

These two elements, when working together, make up the package that will either convince someone to click or not click on your video. 

Why should you prioritize your video packaging? 

Simply speaking, if you can’t get someone to click on your video, you’re not getting any views. 

So if you’re making videos and asking yourself why you’re not getting views, it’s probably not an algorithm problem… it’s likely because the packaging of that video isn’t interesting or intriguing enough to your audience. 

I’ve written an entire blog post about video packaging with lots of examples that you can read next. Or if you want to see me walk through an example of video packaging, watch this video above (skip ahead to 14:00).

Step 5: Add in ‘viral’ content ideas

Finally, to become a YouTuber in 2025, you should start adding in viral content videos. Notice that I said add in. This is important because you should still be creating content that you love and you should still be creating searchable content. All of these video types will work together to help you grow on YouTube. 

What are ‘Viral’ content ideas? 

For this strategy, you’re going to study other people in your industry. I call these people your ‘niche neighbors’. Instead of seeing what’s working well in search, you want to see what’s working organically for your niche neighbors. 

Just like viral content on Instagram or TikTok, you’ll see what’s going viral in your niche and it’s your job to come up with creative ways to tie that into your content. Leaning into viral content could be a way to rank on ‘home’ instead of ‘search’. 

How do you actually do this? 

Go to someone in your industry whose videos you love and look at their channel. You can click on their videos and see which ones are outperforming the rest. Is there a video that’s popping off right now? Study those top performers and ask yourself, “is that a video that I could recreate?”

Pro tip: don’t actually watch their videos. This can help you avoid copying their content. Use this exercise to study topics, thumbnails and titles. You can also filter by popular, recent videos to see what inspiration you can take. 

Now, I recommend watching this video to teach you how to master YouTube Video Packaging. 

Thank you for being here! I hope this guide has helped you understand how to start a YouTube Channel and become a YouTuber in 2025. 

Remember to follow your joy, I’ll see you in the next one.