STARTER KIT FOR NEW YOUTUBERS 2023 (GEAR, SOFTWARE, + STRATEGIES)
If you have ever thought about starting a Youtube channel, then now is the best time to start. There are more resources out there than ever before to help you become a successful you tuber and turn this whole thing into a job. In this video I’m going to share the definitive starter kit for Youtubers who want to grow in 2023 including the best gear to use, the best software that you need, and the strategies that you need to grow.
By the way, this video is sponsored by Storyblocks. We’ll talk a little bit more about them later on. First and foremost, your phone. I know it’s almost cliche at this point to talk about how you can use your phone to film Youtube videos, but just to prove that it’s possible, let’s just switch over to my phone for a second. You can see that I’m using the back facing camera which is going to be a bit higher quality.
I’ve got lots of natural light coming in and the background is pretty quiet so you can see. All in all you can get really great results from this under the right conditions and if you want to improve your audio a little bit you can just add a. Laugh mic like this and your audio quality will improve drastically with just one little addition. And again, you’re still just using your phone. Now obviously this is not the way that I currently make Youtube videos, but I just do this to show you it really is possible to get started with pretty much just your phone, and I feel like I have to make that disclaimer before getting into all of my actual gear recommendations telling you what I use to film my videos.
So if you want to graduate from using your phone to film, this is the. Gear that I would recommend and that I actually use every day to film these videos. And by the way, before you ask, I’m going to put all the links to everything that I talk about in that description if you want to check it out, first up is the Sony Zed V1 vlogging camera. This little pointed shoot is super powerful.
You can shoot 4K if you want to. Honestly, I just do ten eighty p because most people are, you know, watching on phones anyway. Like I don’t think you need to do 4K and honestly, I’m going to expose myself here a little bit, but I really recommend that you just get started with the intelligent auto mode. That is what your girl is shooting with right now and I find that this camera does a really good job of exposing correctly.
I love how the colors look. This is with like the updated Sony Color science. But if you do want to achieve certain results then you can start to experiment with manual. My recommendations for your kind of starter manual settings would be first of all decide if you want to shoot in 60 frames per second or 30 frames per second. 60 frames per second will allow you to do slow motion later, whereas 30 frames per second, like that’s what that’s what I’m.
You know in right now that’s like regular speed. Once you’ve decided that you can set your shutter speed for 60 frames per second, you’re going to want to hit 1 over one twenty five. For 30 frames per second, it’s 1 over. Sixty from there, you’re probably just going to want to set your aperture to as low as it can go. Right now I’m shooting in 1 8 and it’s not as obvious when I’m this close to the background, but if I got close to the camera, you can see how like, the background’s quite blurry compared to me. So that’s often a look that a lot of Youtubers want to go for.
If you want a blurry background, you need a lower aperture, and a lower aperture is also going to mean a brighter image in general. And then finally your ISO. Honestly, I just leave this at auto so that it can change because I’m shooting with natural light, so if the lighting outside changes then the ISO can adjust to kind of keep things looking the same inside your camera. You’re going to need some SD cards. I just like to use these SanDisk ones all you want to look for with an SD card, really.
Is higher storage if possible, and then also faster. So like, this is 100 megabytes per second. That’s going to allow you to record 4K and like slow mo and stuff without it being slow or you’re, you know, having any errors and you’re going to set that camera on a tripod. I really recommend this basic one from manfrotto. It’s kind of what I use every day and it’s quite affordable. I also love the peak design tripod, which I have, but it’s a lot pricier.
So if you’re just getting started, this manfrotto one is perfect atop my little camera. Sits this iconic fuzzy little guy, which is the road video micro. I swear when I’m out traveling and I’m like constantly filming, this is the thing that I get the most questions about. People are like, what’s the fuzzy thing? It’s a microphone and the fuzzy part is just to help with any like wind sound or like popping noises if you’re close to the microphone. And this mic is super affordable and it doesn’t need to be powered by batteries or anything like that.
You just plug it in and you’re ready to go. To finish off my list gear, you’re gonna need a laptop. I have a new MacBook Pro actually as a. Just a couple of weeks ago and I am loving my m one. Max chip that’s inside of it up until recently. I had been editing. All of my YouTube videos on a 2017 MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of ram slash memories. What Apple calls it and that just was not working for me anymore. Now I have 32 gigs of ram and the M one.
Max chip which has made. I think the biggest difference just to give you some context of how much this has changed. My life with my old MacBook Pro. It would take one of my You Tube videos. Generally, like 45 minutes. All the way up to like an hour and a half to export now. My You Tube videos export in like 5 minutes. In addition to a laptop to do your editing on you’re also probably going to want an external hard drive because when you’re filming all kinds of videos that storage fills up really quick so I just have these little hard drives from Samsung ‘s or SSD.
They just they work. The first software recommendation that I have for you is not really a piece of software. Or an application. It’s more a philosophy. And that is, as a YouTuber, you’re going to need a solid file organization system. Ok, prepare yourself, because this is probably the nerdiest thing that I’ve talked about on this channel ever, and we’ve definitely we’ve been talking about some nerdy things for a while here. But trust me, this is important. It’s going to make your workflow so much easier and you’re never going to find yourself searching for a clip or a certain graphic.
Again, I would recommend setting up your new external hard drive with a set of folders. As follows. Assets for your graphics, logos, animations, that kind of thing. Music to save all of your favorite royalty free music stock footage. This folder is for footage that you either film of yourself kind of doing regular tasks that might be helpful in your videos later. This is also where you can store stock footage that you’ve gotten online. You’re going to want a project file folder. This is where I put my premiere pro projects and this wouldn’t really need its own folder except for the fact that premiere Pro likes to generate these like auto save.
Files and I don’t like that clittering up my main folder so that I just put it in there. And then you’re going to create various subfolders for your actual videos. So I like to organize mine by the date that they were made. So I have one folder for each month, and I always label them 01 underscore january zero two underscore february. This will mean that when I sort of by name, everything will be in order. That’s also why those other folders all had a underscore before them, because that’ll float them to the top of the name sorting so it’s all organized within each month folder I then create a folder for.
Each video and I also like to number these in just chronological order. So the first video I make in the year will be 01 underscore and then I’ll write the title. So I think at the end of 2022 I was up to video number like 87 or 88 and I just started fresh from one again a couple weeks ago. This makes it really easy to find any video that you want to like go back and grab clips from, because if you can remember what month you filmed it then you can easily, you know, find it that way. Ok, I kind of just spoiled it, but now for my actual first software recommendation which is premiere.
Pro this is my editing software of choice, but honestly, I’m not going to tell you it’s the best one. The best editing software is the one that you’re comfortable with and that you’re going to use often. So if that’s iMovie or Final Cut Pro or da Vinci resolve or whatever it might be for you, that’s totally fine. I’ve just been editing in Premiere Pro since I was like a young teenager in high school, so I’m just really fast with it now. It’s what I’m going to be most efficient with. And all the time other Mac users are telling me, oh, if you just final cut, it would be so much faster.
Girl, since I got the M1 Chip and I’m getting these five minute export times and zero lag while I’m editing. I’m really not concerned about it. So whatever works for you, it’s fine. Now what I also want to recommend to you, if you are new and you open up premiere Pro and you feel completely intimidated by which fare, there’s a lot going on there. Adobe also has this kind of beginner friendly version of Premiere Pro, which is called Premiere Rush or just Rush. And the cool thing about it is there’s a mobile app and a desktop version of it, and the mobile app and the desktop actually make it very easy to edit. Social content, so you can like choose right away whether you want your video to be horizontal or vertical and it remains quite powerful with also being a lot more simplified.
Also it’s a lot cheaper. So if you want to get started into the kind of Adobe Creative suite, but premiere seems really intimidating to you can get rushed I think for like 9 or 10$ a month and you can use it on your phone and on your computer and it’s just is really nice and easy to use. There’s literally so much I could say about premiere Pro, so let me know if you would want to see like a more indepth video about.
Editing process. But for now, I want to move on to my next software recommendation, which is also the sponsor of today’s video storyblocks. So I’ve been talking about the music, the graphics, the stock footage, the animations that you’re going to want to use in your video. Because I genuinely believe if you want to grow on Youtube this year, the main thing you need to focus on is making your videos as engaging and interesting as possible and adding a lot of extra visuals and, you know, music and sound effects. That is what’s going to help.
So you might be wondering, well, Katie, we’re. Can I find all of this stock footage and music and animations and all of that stuff and it’s storyblocks that’s all you need. So Storyblocks is a huge stock media library that you can get one simple subscription to which gives you unlimited access to the footage, the music, the sound effects, the after effects templates, the animations like anything that you might need as a YouTube. I’ve been a loyal user of storyblocks for many years now, and I know that I can always depend on them to have the clips that I need. Especially recently, the travel vlogs that I’ve been making for my second channel I’ve realized after the fact, Oh my gosh, I never got a wide shot of the Spanish steps in Rome.
Well don’t worry girl, because there’s going to be a clip of that on storyblock. And anything else that you might want to have a visual for in your video, whether it’s like somebody doing latte art or like running through the grass at sunset, like you can find that. Plus it integrates into my workflow so easily with their new premiere Pro plugin. I’ve been using this for the past couple months and I’m obsessed because it’s literally just another tab in premiere pro that I can click over to quickly search for the stock footage that I need and bam, it’s one Click to download it and import it into my project.
And like I was saying, you could also find music and animation templates on there too. So as I was. Thinking about this list like honestly, if there’s only one subscription because I know there’s like tons out there, but if there’s only one subscription that I would recommend for you as a new YouTuber, it would be storyblocks because you can get all of those different media assets that you might need in one place. So if you want to try it out for yourself, I’ve got a link in the description. Make sure you go click on that after the video and check it out because trust me, it’s going to be so helpful for you as you’re trying to create the most engaging and high quality YouTube videos possible.
Ok, so you’ve got the tools both. Physical and digital that you need to start making your videos. Let’s talk about the strategies to grow. This is the part of the video where most people would tell you be consistent. But here’s what I want to tell you instead, create a content calendar that helps you improve your craft. For some people that might be strict frequent consistency. For some people, that might be following their creativity and digging a little bit deeper into the creative process.
That’s why I don’t want to just say like post weekly videos post often, because I really do believe that. It’s going to be different for you depending on what part of the Youtube journey you’re at. Basically, you need to figure out if quality or quantity is more important to you right now. I would recommend focusing on quality if you’re already experienced with making videos. If you kind of know what you’re doing, maybe you’ve been on Youtube for a little while, or maybe you were a freelance videographer or filmmaker in, you know, your past career and now you’re starting Youtube You probably want to focus on just leveling up, making every video as good as possible, and publishing more.
One out of 10 bangers on the other hand. You might want to focus on quantity if you’re a total beginner and you haven’t really made a lot of videos yet. If you’re in that position, then what you really need is practice to improve. You don’t need to sit around and fret and worry about the perfection of one single video. That’s going to hold you back from getting better. So if you’re totally new and you haven’t made a lot of videos in the past, just focus on putting out as many as you can or creating as many as you can, because that’s what’s going to help you get better.
What we don’t want is any beginner perfectionists out there that are really concerned with making the best. Youtube video possible, but they haven’t even posted one yet. You will get better as you go, so just focus on quantity if you’re brand new and quality if you’ve, you know, created some videos and you’re trying to really like optimize your performance in the algorithm. The second strategy I want to share with you is really focusing on the homepage over search results. When I first got serious about growing on Youtube all of the advice that I heard out there was about search engine optimization and getting your content to show up in search results and I don’t want to fully discount that because I actually do think that can be really valuable for certain kinds of creators, making certain kinds of content.
But what I’ve really learned over the past couple of years is what’s really changed my channel growth trajectory is stopping focusing on just stuffing the titles full of keywords and getting my videos to show up in search and instead focusing on how can I appear on people’s homepages and actually convince them to click on my content. Because ultimately, when you’re creating content for search, you are making content that people might seek out and want to watch and.
That’s great to an extent but when you’re focusing on the homepage. You’re creating content that people will watch even if they didn’t think that they wanted to watch it. Even if they didn’t seek it out and that is really powerful for viral growth and finally the 3rd strategy that I wanted to share is for the vloggers out there specifically if you are planning on Vlogging on You Tube listen to this advice my friend. You need to focus on telling compelling stories. I’ve talked about this in a few different videos before, but the point is if you are making vlogs chances are you’re struggling with the fact.
Then only people who already know you like your most sympathetic friends and family members are watching your video because they already know you they already care about you so as a vlogger your challenge is to make people who don’t know you yet actually care about you and the way that you do that is through telling stories so if you want to be a vlogger on You Tube don’t get stressed out about like the gear in the software instead. I would honestly recommend like reading books about storytelling learning how to craft a really compelling story because you can learn how to edit videos, you can learn how to work.
Camera, but being able to tell those really good stories, that’s going to be the game changer for your growth and that is everything that you need to know to be a successful YouTuber in 2023 If you want to learn about those storytelling strategies that I was just mentioning, then check out this video that I made about why no one is watching your blogs and how you can fix that because I dive into more detail over there. And as always, thank you so much for watching.
I wish you all the best on your Youtube journey this year. I hope you’re having adventures and following your dreams and I’ll see you in the next video bye.
