Trena Little walks through ten practical steps for new YouTube creators: provide value to viewers, get feedback, master lighting and SEO, study your analytics, promote your videos, stay organized, post consistently, and be patient building an audience.
Getting started on any new platform can be super overwhelming, especially YouTube. So in today's video, I want to give you 10 tips if you're brand new to YouTube so you can be sure your channel is ready to be successful and grow your business. Hi, my name is Trena and welcome to my channel Tips with Trena. Here on this channel, I help creative business owners like you get started on YouTube to grow your business. And if you're brand new to YouTube, you're in the right spot because I'm going to walk you through 10 things that you need to think about before getting started on YouTube. The first thing you got to think about is how are you going to provide value? What's the value you're going to give to your viewer? Is it sharing advice, hacks, tips, tutorials? What's that real value chunk that's going to make people want to come watch you and keep coming back for more of your content? Second, you want to find somebody to give you feedback. Whether it's a friend or your parents or your sister or your business bestie. You've got to get feedback on your video outside of yourself because trust me, we can be biased and think that we created the best video ever and it deserves like millions of views, but we've got to take a step back and get some feedback from other people so that we can make our videos better. Maybe your audio sounds like crap, or maybe your camera's not set up in the right angle and you think it looks good but it's really not conveying well to people watching it. So get some feedback next. Lighting is more important than the quality of your camera. You can actually get pretty professional looking videos with your iPhone if you just have the right lighting. That's really what makes video more grainy, is if that lighting's not right. So buy some daylight, balance light bulbs from your hardware store and just use your phone. Take the money that you would spend on an expensive camera that may take you forever to figure out how to set up and set up all the different stuff that goes on with it and put it into lighting because that's really going to make a difference when you with your video quality. Next, you want to focus on your content, doing well in search. So optimizing those titles, researching those videos, knowing what people are looking for and searching for so that not only can you show up in search, but also showing up in the suggested videos when somebody else is playing a video. So say there's a video that has 20,000 views on it already and it's continuing to grow, you want to potentially show up in their suggested video, so someone who's watching it may jump over to your video as well. So start focusing on those keywords and finding those videos that are doing well in search. Next, you want to keep an eye on your analytics. Now I know I didn't do this good enough when I got started and it may be hard to start to get some analytics as you start putting your first videos up. Because to see some of the data you've got to have about 100 views on your videos. But you can start to see where people are coming from. What's your biggest traffic source? I knew once I checked this out I stopped wasting my time on Twitter as much because it wasn't bringing me traffic. I personally as a one person team promoting my videos at the time, didn't have time to focus on Twitter and it wasn't bringing me audience. So I focused on Pinterest and I focused on Facebook and my website because those traffic sources were showing me in YouTube. That's what was bringing audience to my channel. You also really want to start focusing on that audience retention graph as well. I as you start to get more views because it's gonna help you improve your content, help you improve your hook, just help you improve your strategy for your videos because the higher your audience retention means more people are watching more minutes on your channel. So it's gonna signal to YouTube that you've got good quality content on your channel. So they're gonna start promoting more of your videos. Next, you've got to tell people about your channel. Now I know when I got started here on YouTube I was kind of embarrassed that I had a YouTube channel and I didn't even really tell anybody. I think my husband may have been the only person to know I started a you channel. But we've got to tell people, especially when we're getting started. Any views, any shares, any comments can definitely help us not only in our self confidence but also in those first couple of views, those first couple comments to get our video rolling. The next tip that I have for you is so important and it's get organized. Let me tell you, writing down your video ideas and keeping track of things in a notebook is not going to work. There are so many moving parts with YouTube. The quicker you can get organized, the quicker it's going to be easier for you. So I use Trello. I've had multiple videos on my channel about Trello, but I keep all of my research, everything on Trello so that I'm not looking for that notebook or threw that piece of paper away that had that perfect video title that I came up with. Keeping it organized in one spot would just save you so much time. Trust me, this was my biggest mistake. The next thing is to keep doing it. Yeah, the first time you film, you may only film one video. Yeah, the first time you film, your lighting may be crap or your camera might be too close. But as you do it more and more, you start to realize, oh, this is where this light goes. This is where this camera goes. Okay, this is how I need to look on camera. You know, it just starts going faster. Also with editing and uploading, you start to remember, okay, now I do my thumbnail. Now I add my tags. Now I can publish it, Now I promote it. You start to get a routine the more you do it. And that's ultimately what's going to save you so much time in being consistent here on YouTube is doing it more often so you can get into that flow and know what routine works for you so that video content actually ends up saving you time. The biggest tip that I've got for all you YouTube newbies is YouTube takes time. It's definitely a long game. And just because you post one video doesn't mean you're going to get tens of thousands of views. It doesn't even mean you might get 100 views. But you've got to stay consistent. It does not happen overnight. There's no secret easy button. There's no easy way to do it. It's just showing up, being consistent, letting people know you're out there. And it will take off. Yes, it may take some time, but it pays off so much in the long run. I've got a great playlist that's on the screen right now to really help you get started on YouTube. So you'll want to check that out. If you're just setting up your channel, make sure you click subscribe to this channel as well, because like I said, I'm here every Tuesday and Thursday and to help you get on YouTube to grow your business. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.
Why Every "Business Guru" Suddenly Went All-In on YouTube (And What NOT to Copy)
