so you want to start a YouTube cooking channel in 2023. Well, there are a few things you should have, a few things you should do, and a few things you should know to be successful. My name is Steph, and I started a YouTube cooking channel two years ago. Despite the initial love bird, I've had some sponsorship deals. I got monetized after a year, and now the channel is growing by 1,000 subscribers a month, and I'm at 7,000 subscribers now. So in this no BS video, I'm going to show you what you need to do to be successful, and most importantly, what you don't have to do to waste time like some of the time I wasted when I started my channel at the beginning. So let's divide this video into three parts. The first one, the equipment that you must buy. This is the minimum amount of equipment that you need to start recording, which, by the way, is not very much. Secondly, is the niche or the unique propositions that you need to

think about before you start your YouTube channel. Otherwise, you're going to waste a lot of time. And thirdly is the most important is the strategy. The strategy is key to make sure that your channel is a successful as quickly as possible that you don't waste any time. So let's start with the equipments. For the equipments, you need four basic things. Potentially you can do it with even less. But I think that these four things are actually quite important so that you start producing videos which are of medium to high quality straight away. So the first one is a recording device. Don't think you need a fancy camera. I've been using my iPhone from the beginning. Of course, maybe the quality is not as amazing as a very expensive camera. But I would say it's on par with everything else that is out there. So use your phone. Number one. Number two is very important is the sound. You want to have a really good sound. Because it might sound counterintuitive. But the sound is much more important than the video. So you need to buy a good lapel mic. Mine is

Wireless so I spent a little bit more on it, but to start off you can use something like this from Boya. I bought this from Amazon. I'm gonna put all the links, all the things I'm going to say, just in the description so you can have access to it in an easy way. Those are affiliate links, so if you click on it, I'll get a little bit of money out of it, but it doesn't cost you any more. And anyway, this one is wired, so it could be a little bit of opaque just carrying the wire on, but I think it was like 15 pounds, 20 dollars. It's very cheap and the sound is very good. Then the next thing is light. You want to have a nice soft light to go with your videos, so I suggest buying something like this, which is very good. It's very cheap, surprisingly. I bought it from Amazon, which was a little more expensive, but surprisingly Tick Tock Shop sells it very, very cheaply. So again, put a link down below. It pretty much costs you half.

the money from Amazon. I think Amazon's something like 60 pounds on Tick Tock shop is something like, I don't know, 28 pounds last time I checked. So these are really amazing by one, you can buy two depending how big your studio is where you want to record. I have one because my kitchen is not too big, but it's up to you. In number four is the tripod, which again I bought it from The Tick Tock shop because it cost 10 pounds, and on Amazon it was 40 pounds. I don't know how they can sell so cheaply, but there you go, buy from there. And the tripod is important because you want to have a good stabilization. Of course, if you've got a friend to hold the camera, I tend to prefer those videos. I feel that there's a lot more dynamic, but if you like me, you're by yourself, then you need a tripod. And one which is very versatile is the one I put the link below. Can go very high, you can go very low. It's

sturdy, and it has all the functionality that you want to have at the beginning. So, with that said, excuse in the phone, which you already own with about 50 to 60 pounds, you have all the equipment that you need, and you can start recording. Then, the other thing which you need to get acquainted with is an editing software. There is a lot of uh steep learning curve in most of the editing software to begin with, even if you want to do pretty standard stuff. There are a few people I've followed on YouTube, which are absolutely amazing, like Mr. Alex Stack and one which is called something like three minutes videos. Again, I'm going to put all the links. These are fantastic creators that teach people like us that never edited before, and it gets you into a state where you can start editing your videos quite effectively after maybe the second or third video you edit. I started with DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve is a software, and you can do well so many things. I mean, like they use it for proper movies. Of course, they have the

premium with a few other bits and pieces, which you technically really don't need. And the Venture is all. I find that it's super easy to use once you go past kind of like first, second, third video. And it's free. And as when you start, you don't want to spend any money or you want to spend as little money as possible. So anything which is free, it's good on my boat. Then the second part is the niche. What kind of videos you're gonna make. And I'm not gonna be spending too much time here because I don't have the skills to advise you specifically on what you should be doing. But what I found that is useful for me when I started thinking, what kind of food you want to cook, is who am I? Where do I come from? Where is my experience from? What could be my little edge in a video? So I thought, you know, I'm Italian. I speak better English than many Italians. So why not do Italian cooking channel spoken in English? And in my videos, I tend to

add a little bit of the story where dishes come from so people get to learn not only about how to cook the dish, but maybe it comes from these regions, from this town. This is the story 200 years ago. There's a guy that did that. It just kind of adds a little bit more of an educational aspect or a culture-sharing aspect to making my videos. I find that if you go there and you start making, I don't know, Burgers, mac and cheese, there are so many big channels that are already making Burgers, mac and cheese, or you know, standard stuff that it's really difficult for you to be clicked on more than somebody else. There's a channel which I wanted to put here, but I can't find any more, which starts during covered when I did. He made four videos and then stopped. Things must have changed, but with those four videos, he got to over 2,000 subscribers. And why were they so successful? Well, he did nice food, but instead of explaining it, it was a poem. So he recited in a really kind of

funny poem way, poetic way, uh, the recipe, and that was a music. Or if you check Usaka cooking, that's another fantastic Channel. And what is that? It's just fun, entertaining food with a bit of banter. So you need to find something that works for you. If you're replicating one of the successful big guys to the T, you're probably not gonna make it because people are gonna click on that big successful guy because it's big and successful. So, you know, food for thought. And now is the most important thing. So if you're not been listening up until now, well, this is probably the next three or four minutes where you need to pay attention. And by the way, if you're enjoying this video, it's the first time I'm doing this kind of like baseball video. So leave a comment, like, subscribe, do all those things, and let me know if you want to know a little bit more about the background behind, uh, Cooking Channel. I'll be happy to do that. So let's talk about strategy, which is the key. Because

I spend so much time trying to find a strategy that worked, and it took a while to find something that sounds like it's working. I think I found it now, and it's going good, but I want to make sure that you don't repeat my mistakes. So, point number one: make your first video. Don't overthink it. Do a recipe that you like, try to be natural, and you'll do the video, and it will be rubbish. You think it's gonna be great because I thought my videos was quite good, and then I looked at it after a few months, and it's just a good cringing. But that's the way to start. You make your first videos. It won't be great or anything. It will be a Sunday. Your acting or you know talking to the camera will be really awkward, but you will get better. And if you don't start with the first video, you're just not gonna start. So start making the first video. You won't be great. You won't get that many views, but it will start your journey.

that's super important. Number two, this is something that really helped me to begin with is joining a number of Reddit groups. Again, I'm going to put some of the groups I like in the comments or in the description, but these are groups that are designed to help you get better. So you post your video and you get some free views because people are going to watch it. But most importantly, people are going to tell you, Oh, your lighting is not very good, or Your sound is not great. I don't like the tone. And these are people that are spending their own time, people that have channels themselves which are very successful at times, that give you really good advice. And I can't tell you how useful this was at the beginning for me because my lighting was really terrible, my voice was awkward, I had weird shadows in my videos. So Reddit is a great way to get some good advice and really help you grow and tune your skill as you progress. And then let's move to the third advice, which is using shorts. Shorts are the one-minute or less video.

formats. Vertical format, portrait format, as opposed to the landscape you normally do your YouTube videos on. And why it is amazing is because YouTube is at the moment competing strongly versus TikTok, versus Instagram Reels, and it's really, really pushing the YouTube Shorts. It wasn't when it first launched the Shorts, while it was a little bit, but not as much as now. Now you can have zero followers, you can do a Short, which is really good, you can get 10,000 views or more, and that gets you your first 50 subscribers, 80 subscribers. So it's a really useful tool to get to a place where you start building subscribers, which then will transition to moving your long-form content. So don't be as scared of that. And then it brings you to my other point, which is cross-pollination. So when you open a YouTube account, open a TikTok account, open an Instagram account. And doing that will not actually add you more work because a lot of the material you're using, you can use for the other channels, platforms as well. So you make a YouTube

short less than a minute goes on Tick Tock. It goes on Instagram and all of these platforms use different algorithms that are push you in different ways. So for instance, in my specific case, I did a Tick Tock video, uh, two years ago, first Tick Tock video about what not to do with Italian cooking. He had 1.1 million views in a week. So that gave me a huge boost on YouTube because then people transitioned from my Tick Tock to check out what my YouTube was doing. Also, my Instagram and you know it's all that kind of positivity that you're creating by cross-pollination. So do the shorts, use them on Tech Talk, use them on Instagram, and just keep cross-pollinating. Now, number five, are we at five? I think we're five. This is a little cheat that I discovered by accident, or at least I did by accident, and then I discovered that it was an amazing way of getting a lot of views and a lot of subscribers, which is making review videos. Now, mine is a cooking channel, so

out of say 100 videos, probably I have two review videos. So you know the minimum amount of percentage. And that's because you don't want to change the Channel DNA. But when you do reviews, especially when you do reviews of really purchasable products, you get a lot of traffic that you would not otherwise receive. So I was lucky enough to receive a free Rock Box from Gosney because I had a viral video on TikTok for pizza dough. And that got me the free oven. And you can see cross-pollination. You got free stuff. That's good. But I could have bought it myself. Doesn't matter. And I started making review videos about the Rock Box. I opened it. Then I compared it against the Nuni that my brother-in-law had. And then I did that six months review. And then they did the one-year review, etc., et cetera. And these are videos that I've got in 20, 30, 40,000 views. Huge amount of watch time because their views tend to be quite long. And they

really speed it up my reaching monetization because I had a lot of followers anyway thanks to my shorts, but I didn't have the watch time. This really allowed to increase the dramatically the watch time, and then when I got monetized, they started making, you know, so much money, but like enough money that actually even if I bought it over myself after two, three videos, it's more than paid for and more, right? So if you find two, three objects to review every so often that you know are clickable, you know, people are searching for it, you will see that you're competing in a much narrower Niche so you won't be competing against very many people, and you will in fact receive a lot of views, and that will definitely help your Channel. The last Point, number six, assuming the other one before was number five, is how often you should publish. I mean, people are saying consistency because it's a consistency, and yes, consistency is key, but I think it's more consistency in attitude and intent more than

consistency of publishing every Sunday at 4 pm on the dot because at the end of the day. You're going to start off with 10 followers, of which one is your mom, one is your dad, two of the siblings, and another four your mates. They don't really care when you're posting. And even as you grow bigger, your followers are still not gonna care when you post. So consistency is the intent. Say yourself once a week. You should try to aim for once a week or once a month. Try it. Probably once a month is not enough. But let's say once a week, once every two weeks. Then the consistency is trying to over a long period of time to keep posting with that frequency. And then what happens is that the result is that after a few months, you will have a good library of content that people will go and reference, etc. So don't kill yourself if you cannot produce a video on the dot on the data. Set yourself to but rather get into the frame of mind of trying to consistently produce good content and better content.

every time, so I hope this was useful. You'll see that you don't need much to start. It's all a question of just doing it. So go ahead, make your videos. If you're starting a channel, just put your channel in the comments. I'd love for this video to be a good platform for people to start a cooking channel, for people to write their channel in the comments, for people to help each other out as we all try and grow and be successful on YouTube. So thank you for watching and keep cooking.

DON'T Start a YouTube Cooking Channel in 2024 without watching this first!

DON'T Start a YouTube Cooking Channel in 2024 without watching this first!

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