How To Make Your First YouTube Video (Step By Step For Beginners!)

Have you ever wondered how I make my YouTube channels from start to finish? And how long does it really take to make these YouTube videos? If you're ready to see every single thing that I do, hit that like button and let's dig in. The very first step that I suggest doing that I didn't do in the beginning, which caused a lot of pain, overwhelm, and stress, was creating a process, something that you can duplicate over and over again so you're sure you're doing every single step that you need to do. I like to use a project management system called Asana. Inside of there, I have a template where every time I come up with a video idea, I will just duplicate that template so it reproduces all the steps that I need to do to get a video out. Now I'm going to share with you how you can get my exact workflow on Asana at the end of this video. So make sure you stay watching. You'll see this template is broken down into different phases. So prerecord record editing, and then there.

Are separate steps under each phase.

So we're going to jump right into that pre record phase. Now, this prerecord phase may not seem super important, but is really key to make sure the effort you're putting into creating video actually pays off. I mean, people actually click on your videos and want to watch them. You have really got to do this research. This is honestly the longest piece in my entire creation process, and I will spend about an hour researching one video. When I'm researching that video, I'm looking at what people are searching on YouTube for, what videos are currently showing up for that topic, how those videos that are performing well. So the videos that are getting more views than that channel has subscribers, how are they structuring it? What are they saying? What are they sharing? What are the comments? That's all going into my research phase.

Now, since I like to batch a.

Lot of my content, which also helps me stay consistent here on YouTube, that means I'll spend about four hours researching four different videos. And you can absolutely fall down a rabbit hole doing this, trust me. But you have just got to set a Timer. And when 60 minutes is up, or maybe you only have 45 minutes or 30 minutes, I wouldn't do any less than 30 minutes. But once that time is up, set a timer, move on to that next video and research it. Once you've determin kind of the direction your video is going to be going, you need to decide what the goal is for that video. So is the goal of your video to get people to subscribe is the goal of your video. Just to get views is the goal to send people to your free opt in to get people on your email list. You can't do all of this in one specific video. You really need to stay honed in on one goal of your video. So when you are planning your video, also put in your card. What is the goal of your video? When you tend to put too many calls to action in your video, people end up doing nothing because they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. They're too overwhelmed with decisions. So make that decision super easy for them and just give them one clear call to action. Moving on to the next piece of the prerecord is determining your title and the direction of your thumbnail before you even script your content. I did a video last week that goes way more into detail in this process, so I will link that in the card right above and down in the description box. But you really need to come up with that title and that thumbnail before you can adequately script content that is going to keep people watching. And we're remember the YouTube trifecta which really sets you up for success as having a high click through rate, high audience retention and high end screen click through. So really knowing what the title of your video is going to be, to make sure the hook of your video ties into that is really going to help your audience retention. Every single script for your video should follow a similar format. You want to open your video with that hook. Then you want to move into a quick intro. So who you are and why people should care and really get to the chunk of that content, the meat of that content within the first 30 seconds max. You want to make sure you're delivering that content and easy to follow steps or tips. So in here I'm breaking it down into phases so that it's easier for your audience to follow along and help you boost your audience retention. After the content, you really want to think about that call to action, right? That goal, that primary goal of your video is going to tie into your call of action. You want to avoid saying anything that lets people know the video is over, it's wrapping up. You're going to go from that last bit piece of content that you're sharing and then tell people either to get your free opt in or go watch that next video before they have time to leave. That's really going to help people actually take action. It's going to get you to grow your email list. If that is the goal of your channel, it's going to help you get more views on your channel as well if you're sending them to other videos. But that's the main structure your script should be following. Now we're moving on to that filming phase. And you'll see there are two different things that I'm filming. I'm filming A roll and B roll. So me talking to the camera right now is the A roll. And then things on top of it, like me searching on YouTube like this right now, that is B roll. So I need to be creating B roll to help keep you engaged. Because after studying my audience retention, I know if it's just me talking to you, talking head for too long, you're going to leave my video. So for me to add in B roll or add in certain kinds of text, that's going to keep my audience watching. So when I am filming, I'm also.

Thinking about what I need to film.

For my B roll as well. I also like to keep my filming set up so super, super simple. So, for example, today was not meant to be a filming day for me, but we've been in quarantine and since my husband is working from home, we had to shift some days around. So instead of me working and filming on a weekday, I had to do this on a weekend. And I keep it simple. So all I know is put my camera here on my tripod, put my lights up. My videos were already researched. So I can immediately sit down, film these and get them out of the way whenever I need to. But that's the key, keeping it super simple. You can use a WE webcam, you can use your cell phone, an iPad, whatever you decide to use as equipment. Don't make it too difficult. Because when you make it too difficult, that's just another barrier for you to create content. Like I said, I really focus on picking equipment that's easy for me to set up. I have a Canon eos. I'm looking at it right there. But I picked this camera because I can easily just flip the screen open and hit record whenever I need to. I don't have to mess with any certain settings. I know that it's autofocus on me. I know when I export it is going to be great quality content. So that's why I say keep it simple. Pick equipment for yourself that A, you can afford because you do not have to go out and buy anything new, and B, it's easy for you to set up. Teleprompters is another piece of equipment that I get asked about all the time. And I suggest not using a teleprompter only because we can usually tell when you're reading from a teleprompter. So what I suggest doing and is what I do is not memorize your script either. I actually have my script sitting right here and I am just looking at it, remembering a couple lines, coming back to the camera, delivering it to you only about 30 seconds at a time, taking a pause, my camera is still rolling, looking at my script, then coming back and delivering it. That way I can allow my personality come out a little bit more. I'm not so wrapped up on delivering word for word what I want to say, and it just allows me to connect with you a little bit more and it makes filming a lot less stressful. And I got a super secret little tip for you in the filming phase if you're wanting to create video content for multiple platforms. I just film alternate endings to my videos. So reason being, as a business owner, I'm trying to get more people aware of who I am, what I do. I'm trying to get them into my email list, I'm trying to get them to convert as students or clients. So I'm not here to necessarily grow a YouTube channel. So I want to take the video content I'm creating and then maximize my reach with it. So I just film alternate endings to every single video that I film. I will film the YouTube ending, then I will film a Facebook ending so it'll tell people to share like this page. And I will also film a Instagram TV ending as well where I will tell people to follow me or to DM me because that is Instagram specific. So now you're able to turn one video into three different videos.

So once I have all of that.

Filming done and those three separate endings, I will also take photos of myself. For my thumbnails, all I do is just turn my camera on self timer, do a couple poses, then we can use those photos to create my thumbnails. And since I already thought about my thumbnail direction before I shot this video, I knew what kind of faces I wanted to make in that photo. Now since I am a mom and the children are here, I'm actually going to film my B roll at a small separate dates. So I'm filming all the A roll right now where I have to look presentable. Then when I film my B roll, all the screen captures or anything else that I need, I'll be behind the camera so I don't have to do this. So I'm actually planning to do that on a separate day this week. But it is part of my process that I will need to check off in my Asana board. Now let's move on to the editing phase. And I edited my videos for years by myself. I got started with Imovie and then I eventually moved over to Final Cut Pro. And I actually still edit some videos for clients. I don't edit my own, but I edit client videos. And what is key to making editing faster is one, scripting your videos so you can know when to cut them and having templates. So let me show you real quick my editing software and how I created templates for a client so that she can send me about a 30 minute raw footage video that I can end up editing and turning around back to her in around two hours or less.

So I edit my client's videos in Final Cut. And you can see I have all of her videos listed here. But I've already deleted the video file so that that's not being saved on my hard drive or my desk drive or anything. But we have this that we use on every single video, which is you can see her Instagram handle. We also simply use this screen. So she creates this in Canva. All she has to do is change the text on there. And then I use the same transition every single time, which is called the simple transition. We have her bump the same every time. So I'm just copying and pasting this bumper. We have the exact same call to action. You can see it's right here. Copy and paste it along with the sound right here. So if we zoom in a little.

Bit and you'll see if we play it.

And you can see we just copy and paste that again to every single video. And so basically all I need to do for each video is just cut up her audio and her video and then again I'm copying pasting these templates that she's created. And it's that simple. One other thing that we also have templates as well is if we go.

To the very end, we use this.

On every single video. This is her end screen. So we just shrink her video down into the corner and use this for again, all of her videos.

Another template to think about is Facebook templates and also Instagram TV templates. So when you're shooting for YouTube like this, you're obviously shooting horizontal videos. Facebook really likes that square look. And Instagram TV is that vertical video. So we have templates where we just plop this video onto that template to make it super easy to export, upload and publish. So now that we have the prerecord, the filming, the editing done, now we're moving into the uploading and optimizing stage. Now, when you are uploading to YouTube, do realize, depending on your Internet speed, it might take a while to upload. Sometimes for me, what I just like to do is upload it overnight. So it does all it needs to do while I'm sleeping. And I don't get frustrated with it. You also want to make sure you go into YouTube and change your upload defaults to private. Because if you're uploading your video as private, that's going to allow you to eventually schedule this video. When you upload it as public or unlisted, you don't have that option to schedule. So if you're batching videos and you're uploading, say three videos that are coming out the next three weeks, you want to schedule it so it's a little bit easier. So let's go over to my computer and I'm going to show you exactly where to find this upload default and everything that I do behind the scenes while my video is uploading.

To get to your upload defaults, you're going to come into your studio and then you're going to come down here to the settings right here. And this is going to pop up upload defaults and you can add in, you know, any kind of links or any kind of videos that you want to add here playlist. But then every single time you upload a video, it will be in the description box. You can also make sure you upload the visibility as private and you should be good to go.

So then once that video goes live, we go through an entire promotion phase. And remember, we're using different videos, so not everybody is being sent to my YouTube video, which isn't necessari the best strategy for wanting to grow a YouTube channel. If you're wanting to specifically grow a YouTube channel, I would suggest all of your promotion have a call to action to go to YouTube and watch your video. But it is going to be really hard to get people off of, say, Facebook or Instagram over to YouTube because they probably love the platform that they already are on. But some of the things that we do every single week to promote this YouTube video is we email our newsletter. This is our core piece of content every single week. This is their weekly newsletter. They're getting a little snippet about the new video, what it's all about. Why they should go watch it and then we give them the link to go watch it. We also publish a blog post as well. I do Instagram stories about it, we do an Instagram post about it. But you can't really just let your video sit there and expect people to come. You really need to promote yourself and let people know to go watch that video. One other thing that I tested as well is I did a short Instagram TV episode where I talked about one key piece of my particular video and then had a call to action to watch the full video on YouTube. That's something that you could test as well. For us, we tracked it. It just didn't pay off the time I was putting into creating that for the clicks. We got over to YouTube. But that's also something you could consider as well. One other social media platform that you might not think about is Pinterest. And we will generally create two graphic pins for Pinterest, one to two video pins and also a little square video of the first 15 seconds of my video with captions down at the bottom. I know my audience is on Pinterest and Pinterest is my second largest external traffic source behind Google. Pinterest drives me a lot of traffic to my YouTube video. So we do a lot of promoting on Pinterest as well. If you actually want to learn more about Pinterest and how to use it, I would definitely check out Vanessa Kynes YouTube channel. She is a Pinterest strategist. She works on my team as my Pinterest strategist. Check her channel out. She'll give you all the deets on Pinterest. Now the analyze phase is probably the most important phase because you're never going to know if you look at your numbers, what is actually working if all the time you're putting into these videos, is it even paying off? Or how could you make your videos better? So one thing that we track is within 24 hours, how many views did that video get? What was the click through rate? You're not going to get the audience retention in the first 24 hours because you do have to wait 48 hours for YouTube to generate that. But those are the first things we're looking at because we want to look at velocity. So how quickly did that video come out of the gate? If we saw a huge view, Velocity meaning way more views in the first 24 hours than normal, we know that our audience is interested in it. So we need to create more content around that topic. If it just kind of went dead and Flat we know. Okay, maybe this is something we don't need to create much content around right now because our audience isn't interested in it. We've also been testing different styles of thumbnails, so that's one of the easier things to test. When it comes to testing titles, you can kind of affect the performance of your video. So I would suggest testing thumbnails first before titles. And we use TubeBuddy to test our thumbnails. Let me show you real quickly how we do that in TubeBuddy.

Okay, so in TubeBuddy you can easily do an a B test. So you'll come in here and then you'll just hit this plus button, create a B test. Then you can click any of the videos on your YouTube channel. And then I prefer to do the thumbnail click through. I don't necessarily mess around with the metadata testing. I just do the thumbnail. Then I also choose to run it until the click through rate is, is statistically significant. You can also set it for days, but I'd rather just let TubeBuddy run it till they know for sure which thumbnail will do best. Sometimes this could take as quick as a day. Other times it might take a couple days, maybe even two weeks to figure out which one is statistically significant.

And during that time, basically TubeBuddy is.

Testing one thumbnail for 24 hours and then testing your other thumbnail for 24 hours and then flip flopping them back and forth to just see which one is being clicked on more. Once you do that, you can then click Continue and then upload the file that you're going to test against this thumbnail. You can see the past ones that we did, we are just testing very small things. You can see this had a pink background and a pink border where this one did not. And this one had a higher click through rate. Same with this. We did no pink background. Pink background with a border. This had a higher click through rate. This is telling me I be creating more thumbnails with this pink border. So those are the small things that you can test to really determine how to design your thumbnails to get better clicks. You can see for this one, the original. So this thumbnail was my original. This is the one I tested it against. This one was 154% higher than this one. And then this was the original one here. And the variation didn't do as much. It was only 48% higher than the original. And then this one was even smaller, yet the original was only 3% higher. So you really start to get some data to see what you should focus on when it comes to thumbnails.

If you want to get a chance.

To test this out on your own.

I have a link for 30 days of free tubebuddy down below in this description box. So go click on that. You can test it out. When we are looking at thumbnails, remember you're just looking at changing one thing at a time. That's what's going to really make a difference. Then every single month we have time scheduled to do a monthly report. Not only do I do this for my own channel, but I do it for all of my clients as well. And what I'm looking at is the four videos that went out that month. So for posting weekly, which one ones did well? Which ones fell flat? Why did they fall flat? Why did the ones that did well do well? Was the click through rate? What is the audience retention? What can I learn from the audience retention to make that video better? The next time I film are my end screen click through rates there. What keywords are driving traffic? All of these things that are really going to be important for you to grow YouTube channel with the data YouTube provides you. Now I talked about my workflow. If you want to get it for 50% off, I'm going to leave a link down below. Just head over there. You can grab it for for $47 today there is a full training inside of there of how to use it. So if you've never used Asana, it teaches you how to use Asana. And also if you're a Trello user, it teaches you how to use Trello as well. So that link is going to be down below in the description box. And like I said, you can get it for 50% off today so you can get your YouTube channel set up for success. Then you need to check out this video that's on your screen right now where I walk you through the entire process I go through for creating a month's worth of video content in just five hours.

So click on that video and I'll.

See you over there.