How to become a Youtube Star - Practical Advice for Starting a YT Channel

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Disclaimer - I am not a Youtube star but I do have a few years of experience and thought I would take some time to offer a bit of advice on starting your own channel
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Let's go back summer 2012 that's when I realized that the best way to get my content out to people was YouTube. I had been posting in forums, tweeting, blogging but it wasn't until I started consistently uploading videos to YouTube that I started to grow an audience that connected with me. Now if you are paying attention and good at math - you should be able to figure out that is almost 5 years, 5 years! My success has been earned with some hard work from 2012 to 2014 I had a full time day job, I would come home from day job and usually work till 11 or 12 at night on the channel - most summer saturdays were spent shooting weddings and sunday was recording content for the channel for the week… for nearly 2 years that was my schedule. If I wasn’t shooting a wedding I was creating content for the channel, if I wasn't creating content for the channel I was shooting, learning, responding to comments -now much of this didn’t feel like work because I love photography, I love teaching and that’s important - you need to LOVE what you do because to have any type of success, you will be doing it non stop - I settled on 3 videos a week and saw good growth as a result, enough that I left my full time job in may of 2014 - almost three years ago And while I am far from an expert I have some advice to share -
It is important to be as consistent as possible. While this can apply to anything in life it is hugely important for Youtube - Find a schedule that works for you and stick to it. If your schedule makes it tough to be consistent create a backlog of videos before you begin releasing them and then as you release those on schedule create the new content.
Be yourself - There is an audience out there waiting to connect with YOU. Trying to be someone you're not will be exhausting and the people you are connecting with won't be, in the long term the best audience for you. And here’s an important fact - it is 100% OK if the real you is not perfect - you don’t have to be a perfect speaker, editor, presenter. What do need to be is you and that you should be passionate about the content you are sharing. And if you get your video online and realize it isn’t perfect - don’t beat yourself up - learn from it and move on.
but you will get those negative comments - there are two main types - the constructive ones that I think you should acknowledge, learn from and respond nicely to and trollish ones that you should ignore and try your hardest to not think about as you are falling asleep- some days it is easier than others but just know that you have taken that HUGE step of creating helpful content out there for someone somewhere and that is way more than these trolls ever did.
Back to the practical tips - don’t spend a ton of time on figuring out a name and a logo- focus on the content but do make sure you tell people who you are and how else they can connect with you at least a few times. Have you ever listened closely to a radio advertisement? Sometimes in a 15 second spot they will give you the url or the phone number 5 times - they have clearly found that repetition is key! I don’t think you need to be so drastic but you do want to make sure it is easy for people to find and connect with you beyond this Youtube content.
And a few more quick tips - if you want to create a channel like mine - you should make it a mix of content - gear reviews - that is usually how people find you and helpful advice videos that gives those people a reason to stick around and watch your stuff.
How to get the gear to review? When I started I bought or rented the gear - it’s easy to make multiple helpful videos about a single piece of gear - do that. Renting also helps and yes I know that buying and renting are expensive but consider it an investment into your channel and work. And as you grow and get an audience email EVERYONE you can think of asking for ger loans in exchange for gear review.
And diversify - if you are just looking for extra cash the money from youtube can seem decent but when you want to live off it it is far from enough - so have a plan for other sources of income.