The ultimate guide to building a successful YouTube channel
Who is the competition? What are the competition doing and how can you do it better? These are all questions the need answering, you may not know them all in the beginning, but the more you do know the better off you will be. If you are doing How-to videos for installing video editing software, a Lets Play on Minecraft or simply being entertaining in any chosen subject, make sure you know what you are doing. Audience Retention is key to building an audience and keeping viewers coming back to your channel.
This can often be the hardest part of creating a successful channel, a channel name needs to be easy to remember, easy to spell correctly and have something to do with your channel. Yogscast , Pewdiepie and Machinima , however, those names had the potential to become brand names and were easily marketable afterwards.
Keep it simple and keep it clean. Before taking the leap of faith with a name try and make sure the same name or something similar is available on social media outlets such as Twitter, Twitch and Reddit etc. This is more than likely going to be the easiest part of the process! Fill in your details, choose a secure, yet memorable password and choose an appropriate email address.
Now you are ready to produce your first video! There are a lot of things to consider, both creative and technical. Like the examples I used earlier, are you creating a How-To video about installing video editing software? If so, the chances are that the age demographic is going be teenagers-adults approx.
Making demographic appropriate content is key to audience retention, audience engagement and monetisation. Having a simple thumbnail is a key ingredient to attracting views. The ideal thumbnail needs a related image and some simple text which can be the video title or something similar. This is more for people looking to gain views on a video quickly however this will damage audience retention if it attracts viewers who are not looking for the actual content featured in the video.
Having Credits and Intros on a video will improve the quality of your content. Opening credits will make your videos look professional and a small verbal commentary over your intro just discussing what the video is going to be about will help keep people on board until a specific section of the video so leave the best until last! Always thank your audience for watching your videos and include video credits.
Video credits are a great tool for keeping people on your channel, for this you will need to take advantage of the annotation tool , this can be used to frame a small snippet of a video at the very end to try and get your audience to watch a different video on your channel, it is always good practise to have a preview of different videos in your closing credits. You can also use video annotations to provide a link for people to subscribe directly to your channel, try and take advantage of this as not everybody remembers to subscribe to your channel even if they love your content.
High-quality video and audio is an integral part to making the highest quality content possible. Or that you need to expose celebrities or hypocritical politicians to get attention. Or something you want to take a stand on. For example, we did a video where we took a confident guy and gave him an aesthetic handicap. Then we had him ask random women out on dates. That looks are the most important thing in a potential mate.
These kinds of videos are popular because when people hear they might be wrong about something, their ears perk up. And if you make them think differently, they are more likely to share what they saw. There are hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. How is your content going to stand out in a sea of sameness? This one might seem obvious, but most people get it wrong. Stories make people take action because they tell a narrative that helps us relate to each other and process the world. You can create an underdog story, a surprising plot twist, a tragedy, a comedy, a rags to riches tale.
The list goes on and on. So make sure every video you make tells a compelling story that has a beginning, middle, and end. To become a better storyteller, break down your favorite movies, TV shows, or YouTube videos. What are your favorite elements? What is the plot beginning, middle, end?
If you bake these traits into your first few videos, you will be miles ahead of the competition.
No matter how great your content is, you will still have to hustle to get it in front of as many people as possible. Especially when you are first starting out. The reason people get this so wrong is so-called experts have been saying for YEARS that if you make good content, people will find it. So now we have an entire generation of people that think if they make amazing stuff, an audience will magically appear. Just the people who are already into what your channel is about.
And you can use them to your advantage by following these three steps: Search for Reddit subreddits, Facebook groups, forums google [your niche] forums , etc. Share other content you like. Answer questions you know the answer to.
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Reference older, popular posts and add a new take on them. You only need to spend an hour or two a week doing this. But you should be contributing a few times a week for about a month before you start doing any self-promotion. The dumbest mistake people make with this strategy is spamming. Getting your content in front of other audiences is crucial to growing your channel. These are sites you want your content to appear on. Search Google or Facebook for sites in your niche e.
Aim for smaller, relevant sites that are more likely to take a chance on you. Remember, the right audience is better than a big audience. You should have at least 20 targets and create a spreadsheet to keep track. The easiest way to do this is to look for submission links, social media handles of writers, and about us pages on the sites you want to pitch. Put all the contact info you find into your spreadsheet. Editors are pitched hundreds of stories a week. Your job is to stand out from all the other pitches by making their job easy.
Keep your email short, credible, and not spammy. You want to seem like a respectable, interesting person, and give them a reason to actually watch your video. Feel free to use it as a model for your pitches: Why the Tesla Model 3 could suck — big fan. Anyway, thanks in advance for checking it out. But it only takes one feature for all your unanswered pitches to be worth it.
Of course, when someone features your content, be sure to follow-up and thank them. If their audience likes your content, that site can become a consistent source of views for your channel. Adsense is just a small slice of the revenue pie for true YouTube entrepreneurs. You see, YouTube entrepreneurs treat their channels as a business. This is how ad revenue much Simple Pickup made in January Ad revenue is just a small slice of how the most successful YouTubers make money. Once you have a dedicated fan base, there a plenty of ways to start bringing in revenue.
Keep this in mind as I explain how you can bring in that cheddar. If you sign up for a service like TeeSpring. They handle manufacturing, inventory, customer service, shipping, etc. Plus, you can slap your logo on all kinds of gear, from hats to coffee mugs and posters.
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Not to mention the free marketing you get by turning your fans into walking billboard for your channel. Of course, you need to build a decent-sized audience to start getting brand deals. But having 4 deals a month once your channel starts growing is VERY doable. This is just ONE revenue stream. Imagine if you stacked a merchandise revenue stream on top of this? Info products are things like books, online courses, coaching, seminars, podcasts, etc.
The Ultimate Guide To Success on YouTube
In other words — premium information your fans want to pay for. Something above and beyond the videos you give them for free on YouTube. The costs to create and launch info products are low, and they scale beautifully after you launch. Split between 4 people, we were basically slumming it. Once we released our first info products, our costs to keep selling them were basically zero.
All we had to do was keep marketing them to our audience. The key to selling information products is building an audience first. If you don't, now's the time to test all that out. Since the aim of the game is coming up with regular content for your channel, knowing how long each little step takes you now will help you plan your days and weeks ahead.
You should have a pretty good idea what your channel's title, look and feel is by now, so get cracking on that snappy title and logo. Your brand is super important, though might take a while to get right. Once you've got your look and title figured out, why not get all the extra little media pieces you could ever need sorted out ready for when you need them?
For example, your logo at every resolution you might ever want, from print to profile picture. If you were considering buying a dedicated domain name, or setting up a supporting blog, go do that now too.
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Or hey, you could even set up all the video 'subscribe now' panels you're going to be adding to the end of your videos, or if relevant, your opening title sequences. Investigate all the payment methods or tax implications that receiving YouTube royalties entails in your country. Make sure you understand all about YouTube's approach to copyright.
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Take stock of all that copyright and financial stuff that you will need to sort out later; last thing you want to do is get caught out doing something wrong once you're up and running. There's no strict rule on when you do this, but it's important to have gone through and familiarised yourself with all the various details and features available to every YouTube user.
The earlier you do this, the better:. You'll definitely need to have one of these in order to create a YouTube channel.
The ultimate guide to building a successful YouTube channel
Whether you use your own personal Google account or a fresh one dedicated to the project is entirely up to your personal needs, but choose wisely as you don't really want to be changing your mind down the track. By now you should have a blank-looking channel waiting for you to show it some love. Add your profile pic, and some channel art being sure to pay attention to the suggested sizes and resolutions during that process.
When you're done, click on the 'Channel description' button, and fill in the all-important blurb that describes you or your channel. If you head over to the features page , you're suddenly presented with everything you'll ever want to customise regarding the back-end of your channel. Things like monetisation or live-streaming are covered here, with most of the important settings grouped under the 'Channel' tab.
Take your time to read through every one of these and be sure to click 'Learn More' under each option if you need to. YouTube has documented their process quite thoroughly, so don't skimp on the reading. By now, you're probably ready to jump in and begin shooting your first YouTube videos. Of course, that's easier said than done.
While it's more than likely you already have some experience producing video content, it still pays to be cautious. Be thorough with your planning and perfect the various arts that go into video production. It's going to be tempting to simply shoot and cut your first video and upload it straight to your fresh new channel. To be honest, I'd advise against this. That way, you can also get a backlog of clips ready to roll, get the opinions of your peers with a few sneaky preview screenings, as well as plan a big launch date without worrying about whether or not your first few weeks are covered.
Take your time — what's the rush? Of course, the production phase itself is a massive set of skills to master, with different types of skills and equipment required to cover different kinds of videos.