I’m assuming you are reading this post because:

You are a new YouTuber and you’d love to see your message reach many people as your channel grows.
You’ve not yet began your journey as a YouTuber. You’re planning to start a YouTube channel.
You’ve been on the platform for awhile as a YouTuber and aren’t seeing much tangible growth.

My Journey on YouTube

I began my YouTube journey 4 years ago as a Christian Homemaker.

I’m not sure I knew what I was doing at the time. I even think I was a little overconfident, especially because I could see my solutions already helping others around me. I thought this would automatically lead to significant growth, like 10k subscribers in like a month lol!

As you would imagine, this was not the case. Mine wasn’t viral growth.

It took me a year to get to a thousand subscribers and almost 2 years to get monetized.

In the process, I got to learn a lot. Part of this learning meant I also made a tone of mistakes as I continued on my YouTube journey as a Christian Homemaker.

I didn’t give up…

These mistakes slowed down my YouTube journey significantly. I’m only grateful I didn’t give up.

I wouldn’t want you to make these same mistakes. This is why I wrote this post.

Again, like I said, mine was not viral growth. Viral growth happens to unicorn channels. (By unicorn channels I mean the channels are unique. Most of us may not replicate their process and get results. Some also grow rapidly because they are celebrities or they do weird things that may not align with our values as Christians)

I’ve continued in the YouTube game. I learned to identify the mistakes that I made and to correct them. This has led to the growth I am now seeing on the channel.

I gain over 1000 subscribers and over 3000 watch hours every month. I’ve garnered over two million views so far. This is far from viral. I can only call it steady growth.

This is what gave me confidence to share with you this post, hopeful that you will experience steady faster growth than I did.

Let’s get into the mistakes I made and what I did, and I’m still doing to correct them.

1. A Long Intro

When I started my YouTube channel, I thought it made a lot of sense to start by introducing what I was going to do, how I came up with the solution, and many other details I thought my viewers would be interested to know.

It turned out that no one was interested in the preliminaries. Most of the people were interested in what I had to offer. Not a long-winding history of how I came up with the solution.

My YouTube channel focused on budget-friendly recipes. I soon realized I had to cut out the fluff and go straight to the recipe my viewers had tapped the video for.

But because I wanted to build a community, I knew an intro would be necessary if I wanted to connect closely with my audience without causing them to get off my video or go ahead into the video.

I therefore had to learn to go straight to the point when introducing a video. I also began sharing B-roll content of the finished recipe and some helpful information when they would be making the recipe.

In short, I learned to significantly shorten my intros and strategically make them value-packed for my viewers.

Keep in mind that as a new YouTuber, nobody is interested in the details of your process unless the details are offering them some form of value. Learn to go straight to the point, offering what you promised in the intro.

There might come a time when your community will have grown and will start getting interested in other areas of your life. You will then share other aspects of your life.

2. Listening to too many “advisors” on YouTube

I started my YouTube channel with some level of confidence, (Overconfidence I think) that I would reach many people. I even thought that growing a subscriber base was going to be easy peasy lemon squeezy!

When I realized I wasn’t growing as quickly as I thought, I listened to every YouTube advise I could get from channels I thought would help me.

I started implementing the advice I was receiving. After a while, I began realizing some of the advice was contradictory.

A case in point was when one “guru” would say, narrow your niche to grow. Another would say, start with a wide niche then narrow down as you see which videos are picking off.

While all this was not necessarily bad advice, imagine a newbie in the YouTube space groping about trying to implement everything she was getting! I’ll talk about this “niche” situation in my last point in relation to a mistake I made.

I later focused on two to three YouTube education channels. My energy went towards making my videos better and implementing something new that would help the channel grow rather than trying to implement all the advice.

Some of the new things I learned were how to make a thumbnail that would attract the audience I was looking for, how to edit, and how to work with YouTube analytics to know what kind of content my target audience was resonating with. I’m still a student of YouTube, to date.

I didn’t make this final bonus mistake, thankfully, but don’t make this one: If you are working on a low budget, work with the free version of the software you’ll need such as Canva. The free version works just as well when you are starting out.

It wasn’t until I began getting income from my channel that I began paying subscription fees for some of the software.

3. An Unrealistic Posting Schedule

Being on YouTube will mean understanding how the YouTube algorithm works.

You’ll need to appreciate the fact that the YouTube platform will take time to understand what your content is about.

The platform will need a regularity of posting to consistently serve those coming to the platform who need your content.

What is an algorithm anyway?

I found this AI definition capturing my understanding of the YouTube algorithm best:

The YouTube algorithm is a set of computer instructions that ranks and recommends videos based on how relevant they are to a viewer and how likely they are to be satisfying. (AI Overview)

Part of what this means is that you won’t post 5 videos this week, post one the next, post none the next two weeks, then post one every day to compensate for the weeks you didn’t post.

Find a posting schedule that you know will work for the long haul.

I found a once or twice-a-week posting schedule working for me especially as a busy stay-at-home, work-from-home homeschooling mama.

Find a posting schedule that works for you and that you can work with at least for a year.

I find a year, long enough to look back and evaluate your progress realistically.

4. Starting another YouTube Channel

This especially happens to individuals who feel they are multi-gifted and they’d like to express their creativity in offering solutions in different niches.

By God’s grace, my husband and I have been involved in Christian ministry for a long time.

When I started my recipes channel, I was advised that I would need another channel to share what was on my heart about discipleship, biblical womanhood, homemaking, and other topics along these lines. Talk of listening to advisors!

A few months after I began my first YouTube channel, I started the second channel.

4 years later, even though that channel has grown to just over one thousand subscribers, I now know that was a wrong move.

Not that there is anything wrong with starting a second channel. It wasn’t time.

For one, my attention was divided in growing two channels. As I got busier, I realized this but I had to keep going.

Recently, I had to change the content strategy to try and cope.

I for one knew if I had focused on one channel, I would have probably grown twice as much as I have grown the channel I began with.

Coupled with this is seriously posting on more than one media platform. I made this mistake too. Not only did I have two channels, I had two profiles on Instagram and I was trying to post on those as well. This does not work well, at least as you begin.

I now repurpose content rather than develop content for each platform.

You’ll spread yourself too thin. You won’t be effective, believe me. I’m speaking from experience.

Pour your energy onto the YouTube platform. Once you’ve grown significantly, start growing on another platform.

Sean Cannell, host of the Think Media Podcast and one of my 3 go-to podcasts and YouTube channels, says not to start a second channel until you’ve grown the first to at least one hundred thousand subscribers.

I wouldn’t listen then. I thought because the second channel is what God called me to do, (As though sharing recipes and hospitality content is not of God) I’d continue with the channel. Now I know better.

What if I had grown the first to over one hundred thousand subscribers, the channel would have had momentum to keep growing. I could then have the luxury of starting the second channel. Talk of being new to the YouTube game! Don’t make this same mistake.

5. Waiting for YouTube Monetization as the only way to monetize my channel

This is probably the biggest mistake I have made so far as a YouTuber.

For a long time, I closely monitored the figures and the hours I needed to get monetized with YouTube AdSense.

When I got monetized, I had to wait for about 4 months to receive my first paycheck. You have to wait to get to a hundred dollars for the money to be deposited in your account.

You’d think my eyes would be opened after this. No. They were not. I focused my attention on how to make the dollars increase.

True, the AdSense began growing. For several months, I benefitted from AdSense, certain it would take care of most of my bills in the coming future.

No sooner had this began happening than the political situation affected YouTube AdSense to an extent the income got slashed in half!

I had to learn the hard way to monetize my YouTube channel in other ways.

God used a friend who asked me how I was monetizing my YouTube channel and how unimpressed he was that I was only receiving AdSense.

God also worked on me, helping me realize he has endowed me with creativity to offer my viewers a product that would help them solve some of the problems they had in relation to my niche.

I’m now working on a cookbook as well as a digital product that I trust will help my audience effectively plan their meals.

While it is not as easy to monetize a channel in a variety of ways in the part of the country where I come from, I now know it is possible.

Don’t wait until you get monetized with YouTube AdSense. Don’t even wait until you clock one thousand subscribers. Think of how you can monetize your channel with the little audience you have, remembering that as long as our solution is solving someone’s problem, they will look for that solution and pay for it.

6. Giving complicated solutions to straightforward problems

Most of us suffer from self-doubt and lack of confidence in our ability to offer real solutions or help to someone else. We feel that others will offer better solutions than us, they qualify more, and they’ve offered the best solution already. Our solutions pale in comparison. Talk of imposter syndrome 1O1.

I suffered from imposter syndrome when I began my YouTube channel. I thought I had to offer big sophisticated, even complicated solutions to people’s problems.

Because I was in the food niche, I would try to create recipes that were unique and complicated, perhaps to justify I was very good as a self-taught chef.

God used an incident that has since helped inform my YouTube journey.

There was a week I had not worked on recipe footage to edit and share on YouTube. I happened not to have lots of ingredients in my pantry. I decided to prepare a very easy form of pilau rice that I’d mastered.

As I began, I thought to myself, why not capture this process on camera and share the video? It wouldn’t harm to share a recipe for the sake of consistency on YouTube.

I thought no one would be interested. I was ready to have very few views on the video.

I edited the footage and uploaded the video to YouTube. Shock of shocks. A few weeks later, that video kicked off. It became the highest viewed video on my channel that season. It is still ranking in its niche to date.

Only recently was it surpassed by another equally simple recipe on the channel.

I learned my lesson. People are not looking for complicated solutions. They want easy solutions to day-to-day problems such as how to drive a nail into a wall, how to iron a shirt, how to organize a pantry, or how to cook mandazi with 4 ingredients.

I hope this helps you to learn to simplify solutions in your niche in a way that your audience can identify with.

7. Broadening my niche too early

One of the biggest lessons a newbie YouTuber must learn is that nobody knows them and nobody necessarily cares yet about what they are posting.

Apart from close friends and relatives you might have told about your new channel, (and unless you are a celebrity) nobody else will be interested in the solution you are offering.

To grow faster, you have to feed the YouTube algorithm with information that identifies you with a particular solution.

The YouTube algorithm needs to know the kind of content you share that helps it figure out who your target audience are. The algorithm then serves your content to those it deems will benefit most from your content.

The algorithm is not a human being who’ll come back to ask what you meant in your content or who you are targeting.

Sending mixed signals to YouTube in terms of multiple niches will confuse the algorithm. YouTube will be unable to find your tribe on YouTube.

What should you therefore do?

I would highly encourage you to focus on a specific niche. Once YouTube identifies you as the go-to expert in that niche, naturally, you will branch out to related niches as you grow.

Your audience may even ask questions that will lead you towards secondary niches that are closely related to your niche.

For example, my niche centers around budget-friendly recipes that can be done without an oven. In future, I could naturally branch out towards the meal prepping niche more seriously. I might even go further to talk about budget-friendly living.

Consider these two statements:

“Don’t become a wandering generality, be a meaningful specific.” (Zig Ziglar)

“The riches are in the niches.” (Pat Flynn)

I’m grateful I discovered in time that this mistake was going to cost my growth on the channel.

I had thought for instance I could start sharing recipes done with an oven. I’ve even done some. It occurred to me there are thousands of recipes made with an oven and looking so much better than mine.

What would make my recipes stand out? No oven, and, affordability. I’ve stuck to this.

Does this mean I’ll never share recipes done with an oven? Of course not. I most likely will. In future.

These are mistakes I made that really, really slowed down my YouTube channel growth as a Christian homemaker. I’m still experiencing the effects from some of the mistakes to date.

If I had an opportunity to start from scratch, I would be sure to avoid these mistakes. I hope you too can avoid these mistakes to grow a successful YouTube channel.

Do you want to start and grow a successful profitable YouTube channel? Read this post next. I trust it will be helpful.

7 Mistakes New Christian YouTubers Make that Hinder Success on YouTube: Homemaker Edition