7-Step Process to Become a YouTuber in 2025

Happy 2025!

Hope you all had a good break and put on a few kilos from eating so much food (like me).

But now it's time to get back to it.

I know one of your New Year's resolutions is to build a YouTube channel (great choice).

So I'm going to give you my 7-step process to achieve your dream this year.

And after generating 20M+ views on YouTube, I can promise this works.

Let's do this.

1) Find your intersect of interests

I'm sure you've heard many creators saying: "You need to find your niche!"

But I hate the word "niche."

It makes me think that all you are doing is trying to find a gap in the market, irrelevant of if it's something you actually want to talk about.

There's a problem with this.

If you are confined to a niche you're not truly passionate about, you'll end up hating the content you create and eventually burn out.

This is the reason we've seen so many creators push the idea of "building a personal brand."

My issue with personal brands is that many creators then focus on making content only they’d watch, rather than what their audience actually wants.

Here's what you need to do:

Find the balance between what you want to create, and what the audience wants to watch.

Find your Ikigai

If you want to build a successful YouTube channel in 2025, you need to find your interest of interests.

Which is why I love to use the Japanese term "Ikigai", which translates to "reason for being."

So here are 4 questions I want you to ask yourself:

1) What do you love?

2) What are you good at?

3) What does the world need?

4) What can you be paid for?

Then, you combine the answers to those 4 questions to find your "Ikigai" (your YouTube channel topic).

Here's an example:

Let's say you're a vegan chef.

1) What do you love?

• You love cooking unique vegan recipes.

2) What are you good at?

• You're good at making recipes simple and fun.

3) What does the world need?

• The world needs quick, budget-friendly vegan meals.

4) What can you be paid for?

• You get paid for cookbook sales, cooking workshops, and sponsorships for vegan brands.

You get the idea?

Try this out for yourself and let me know how it goes.

2) Study competitors

Becoming a YouTuber means becoming a student — every single day.

It is the ultimate platform for creators.

Why?

Because everything you need to know to grow your YouTube channel is already out there.

All you have to do is study, analyse, and apply what works.

Here's what I want you to do every day:

• Study YouTube for 1 hour

• Watch competitor channels

• Write down what they're doing better

• Analyse why a particular thumbnail made you click

• Breakdown an outlier video

Later on in this newsletter, I break down a specific technique you can use to study YouTube and apply what you learn.

3) Focus on ideation

A good idea can save a bad video.

A good video will never save a bad idea.

The idea is the foundation of your video. If it's not a good one, the whole video will fail.

This means you need to be spending more time on generating ideas.

Here's how:

• Create a database of video ideas and add 3-5 every day

You can do this in your notes app, a Notion document, or a piece of paper, it doesn't matter.

Over time, your database will build up and you can pick the best ideas to focus on creating.

Truth is, for every good idea, there will be at least 50 bad ones.

If you're unsure how to generate good video ideas, I'd recommend reading this thread:

4) Spend more time on packaging

The 80/20 rule for the success of a YouTube video:

80% comes down to the packaging.

20% comes down to the video.

But here's the big mistake I see most creators make:

They spend all their time focusing on the content, then neglect the thumbnail and title.

You're forgetting that your thumbnails and titles are your first interaction with the viewer.

If you can't get them to click, it doesn't matter how good your video is.

Here are 5 tips to improve your packaging today:

• Create a curiosity gap

• Keep it simple

• Create contrast

• Use evidence of what's worked from other videos

• A/B test

I could spend hours writing about the importance of packaging and how to improve it.

If you want to learn more, read this thread on the #7 biggest thumbnail mistakes on YouTube:

5) Tell a story

Every single one of your videos is a story.

And what's the most important part of every story?

The hook.

There's 1 simple step to any good hook:

1) Tease the major payoff the viewer will get by watching the rest of the video

This payoff will have also been teased in the thumbnail and title because that is the reason the viewer clicked in the first place.

The hook is only confirming what was being told in the thumbnail and title.

Let's look at an example:

And to no surprise, the intro features a clip where he's just about to hit the ramp.

You can watch the full video here.

The next step is to make the viewer stay for the whole video.

I'm going to save that for another newsletter because that's something I want to talk about in more detail.

If you want to learn how to create better hooks for your videos, check out this thread:

6) Improve by 1%

Here's the truth:

When you first start making videos on YouTube, you won't be good.

That's why you need to be trying to improve on every single upload, even if it's by 1%.

It compounds.

If you're improving by 1% on each video, your 100th video will be 170.48% better than your 1st.

Now, imagine if you were improving by 5% or 10%.

How to improve on every upload

Here's what I want you to do:

1) Find a big YouTuber in your niche & one outside your niche

2) Each time you publish a video, compare it to one of theirs

3) Write down 3 things they're doing better in the idea, packaging, and video

4) Implement what you learn into your next video

Then, as you get better, start to take learnings from other creators you watch.

Eventually, you'll have created a style that is unique to you.

7) Diversify your income

The biggest problem for a lot of YouTubers:

They rely on AdSense money for the sustainability of their income.

This is a problem because it means you'll constantly be chasing views, trying to create content for virality rather than value.

And as YouTube gets more competitive, it becomes harder to create viral videos.

So find ways to diversify your income.

This could be:

• Creating digital products

• Doing client work

• Affiliate marketing

• Building a Skool community

• Sponsorships

There are so many different avenues.

If you filled in your Ikigai correctly, it means you're creating content around something you're interested in and something your audience needs.

So ask yourself:

What are some problems my audience is facing?

Can I provide a solution to that problem?

Can I turn that solution into a digital product?

I'm more intrigued by the creator that makes $500k/year with 100,000 subscribers than the creator that makes $500k/year with 1 million subscribers.

And trust me, they're out there.

In 2025, I want to start helping you build your YouTube channel.

That's why I've launched 90-Day YouTube Accelerator.

I create a personalised, content roadmap for the next 3 months to accelerate your growth to 10K subscribers.

Thank you for reading.

Here's to the best year of our lives.

See you next Sunday,

Rory