How To START A SUCCESSFUL YouTube Channel in 2020: Even if you are starting with ZERO subscribers!

If you're ready to finally get serious with YouTube, in this video, I'm going to walk you through 12 steps to take to start your YouTube channel and also how to get your first 100 or 1,000 new subscribers. All right, hit that like button and let's dig in. The first thing I really want to talk about is understanding what makes a successful YouTube channel. So what are the things that you actually have to do on YouTube for YouTube to promote your channel and for people to actually find your videos? It's what I like calling the YouTube trifecta. So the YouTube trifecta is your click through rate. So how well your title in your thumbnail get people to actually click on your video, your audience retention. So how long people are actually watching your video and are they getting to the end of the video? And the third piece of your YouTube trifecta is your end screen click through rate. So how well you're getting people to watch another YouTube video after they watch yours. And seriously, this end screen click through rate usually goes unnoticed. But I have seen students and clients who increase their end screen click through rate from about a 2% average to about a 10% average. And instantly their YouTube channel starts to skyrocket and YouTube sends that channel more traffic. I'm telling you, these are the three things you really need to be thinking about before you even start publishing your first videos. Because if you understand these three things, this is what's really going to help you grow your channel a lot faster and get those first subscribers a lot quicker. Because by nailing these three things, instead of YouTube recommending about 5% of your traffic, so showing up in the browse features and the suggested videos, you could explode to having YouTube recommend over 83% of your traffic. And that is actual numbers from a client of mine. And these are the steps that are going to help you do that. The first step before you do anything on YouTube is you really need to understand what your YouTube channel is going to be about and what is your purpose or your why for showing up on YouTube. Because that's really going to help you understand what kind of content you need to be creating. What happens when you just start posting whatever kind of content you want on YouTube. Maybe you do an unboxing, maybe you do an educational video, maybe you do a vlog. YouTube doesn't really know where to recommend you or who to recommend you to, because there's no consistency or content throughout those three videos. And viewers don't know why they should subscribe to your channel either, because maybe they showed up for that educational video, but they don't care about the vlog yet because you're just starting to grow following on YouTube. Or maybe they showed up for that vlog and then you're talking about educating them and they came for the entertainment value. So while this piece seems kind of boring and like, hard to conceptualize, it is critical. If you want to start out on YouTube and start with success immediately think about TV channels like Home and Garden, right? People come there to watch how to do projects on their home or how to make their yards look better. Comedy Central people go there to laugh. So really think about what is your channel going to be about? Why are people going to come to your channel? Step two is you need to have a Google account. So YouTube is owned by Google and you have to have a Google account to be able to set up your YouTube channel. Once you have that Google account, then you can go into YouTube and create your account. Pretty simple step. The third step is naming your channel and customizing it. When it comes to naming your channel, you want to go back to step one when you were thinking about your why and your purpose for starting your channel. If you can think about keywords or actual phrases, people are going to be searching for that, your channel could come up. You could always tie that in. Let's say I was a business coach. I named my channel business coach Trina Little, or YouTube strategist Trina Little. But the simplest thing to name your channel would be your name. Now if your name isn't available, you have to get a little bit strategic there. I would avoid any numbers of some sort, but also you could name it your business name. If you already have a business name as well. Don't get really hung up on what to name your channel. That's not really the super important part here. What I do want to talk about though is customizing your channel. And this piece is about your channel banner. So that little graphic that shows at the top of your channel, your about section. So all that information about you and what your channel is going to be about and also setting up your channel homepage. Now, you won't have any videos yet to organize on your channel homepage yet. So when you do, I have an entire video on how to do that. I will link it right up here for you to check out. But by customizing your channel homepage, it allows people to really get the best of your content front page. And it makes your channel look more professional. Now when you why I suggest really customizing your homepage is because again, you have that first impression. So when you're creating your channel banner, which I will link to a video where I teach you how to do that as well, you want to have your name up there really your reason for creating videos and possibly your publishing time. So I publish every Wednesday around 11:00am Eastern Standard Time. If someone's brand new to my channel and they come to my channel homepage, they're going to see that. They're going to see that I post videos every single week about YouTube and growing your business here on YouTube. So if that is something they came to my channel for, they are going to be more likely to subscribe to my channel. And in your about section you really want to use phrases or keywords people might be searching for for your specific type of content. So for me in my about section, I'm possibly going to write something like hi, I'm Trina, a YouTube strategist. I help business owners start creating YouTube videos, start a YouTube channel, grow a YouTube channel, those types of words and phrases in my about section. So YouTube can start to see what my channel is all and know when to suggest me and who to suggest me for. So for example, if somebody jumps on YouTube and they all of a sudden and watch a bunch of different videos about starting a YouTube channel and using YouTube in their business, my channel could potentially show up more because I wrote in my about section, that's what all my channel is about, right?

So in step three you are going.

To want to go ahead and name your channel. Don't overthink it. Create that channel banner and fill in your about section which I will link to all videos specifically on that topic down in the description box below. Step four is all about coming up with your video IDE. If you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel, you already probably have a couple video ideas in mind. So start writing them down. I suggest going electronic with this. I have lost plenty of notebooks and plenty of post its that have video ideas on. So I started using Asana to really organize and keep track of my video ideas. When they pop into my head, it's great because Asana has an app that even if I'm out and about getting groceries or something and a video idea pops into my head, I can go ahead and pop that into my app. If you're kind of stuck on video ideas, I would go to other channels channels on YouTube who are talking about similar content as you. So for me I may look at video Creators or Sunny Lenarduzzi or even TubeBuddy to see what kind of videos are they creating and then listing them by their most popular. So what topics around YouTube are people really watching on those channels and how can I put my own spin or take on that topic? You're not copying these videos, you're just taking that topic or that idea and spinning it into your own content. I also love using Tubebuddy's keyword planner.

So tubebudd is a Google Chrome extension. You'll come right up here once you install it and then you will click on this keyword explorer and this helps me come up with more video ideas. So let's take our chocolate chip cookie example and you see it's already coming up with some ideas. So let's just do chocolate chip cookie recipe. And just briefly, what this is showing you is that chocolate chip cookies recipe is very, very competitive. You'll see it has high search volume, but the competition is there. And you'll see that There are almost 4 million videos for this search result. But it's also searched over 2 million month. That's not really what I'm looking at right now. I'm looking at these related topics and these common video tags. I'm not using these as video tags, but I'm using these as a way to maybe shift the way I want to talk about chocolate chip cookies since it is so highly competitive. So again we'll scroll through here. Best chocolate chip cookie recipe. Chewy chocolate chip cookies is another way. Easy chocolate chip cookies and also these as well. So chocolate chip cookie recipe without brown sugar without egg. So this is what I'm really using to help me figure out the direction of the video that I want to take.

I'm using these keywords as topic ideas and it really allows me to broaden my ideas for videos and it may actually turn into seven different video ideas that I get just from that. Now I have a link for you to try out tubebuddy free for 30 days. I will link it down in the description box below. So if you are struggling with some video ideas, definitely try this out for the next month and see if this really helps you spring some ideas. I also love to check out Pinterest. I know my audience is predominantly female. Don't worry if you're a dude, you're absolutely able to watch my videos as well. But I know predominantly my audience is female and my audience uses Pinterest. So I can go to Pinterest and search some ideas there as well. I actually get a lot of traffic from Pinterest behind Google. My second external Traffic source is Pinterest, so I know I can go there to definitely come up with ideas that I know my audience is searching for. Now that you've compiled a laundry list of video ideas, I would hope at least 20 to 30 ideas. Now let's narrow it down to really figure out which ones you need to be creating. So in step five, we're going to research the videos that you came up with. I would say this is one of the most important steps, because without researching your video ideas, you're not sure if the video you're creating your audience is actually going to respond to or people are actually going to want to click on it. So researching is critical here if you want to see success on YouTube immediately and get that first 100 to 1,000 subscribers really fast. So why don't we go over on my computer and I can show you exactly how I research my video ideas to determine which topics I should do and how to start structuring that video to make sure it does well when I publish.

This is the exact process I use for researching my video. So we're gonna go in here, we're gonna type in chocolate chip cookies, and you'll see these numbers. Right here is a tool called keyword everywhere. And it's actually just telling me how many times per month this particular word is searched. So you'll see chocolate chip cookies. Cookies is searched 550,000 times a month. But it also means it's probably pretty competitive.

So what I'm going to look for.

Is maybe a different take on this video or a different direction that may not be as competitive. So one could be chocolate chip cookies without brown sugar, chocolate chip cookies from scratch without eggs. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this without eggs. Then the next thing I'm looking for is how many views the video has per subscriber. So another tool that I'm using is this thing right here called Vidiq, and it's allowing me how many subscribers this channel has and how many views this video has. The reason why I'm looking for that is because if it has more views than the channel has subscribers, that means YouTube is suggesting it to more people. That means something in this video is doing well. People are either watching it or it's doing a good job of keeping people watching and watching more content. If I scroll on down, I see here's another great example. This channel only has 1,140 subscribers, and this. This video has over 324,000 views. Another great video idea. This is Just reiterating the fact that this is probably a good idea because again, 105,000 views, only 700 subscribers. And you can just scroll through here and just see what people are doing and what looks best. So then when I do. So this one is an eggless chocolate chip cookie, 58,000 subscribers. I'm just going to go in here and actually watch these videos and see how they perform. How are they opening these videos, what are they saying in these videos? And to take it a step further, which I'm going to talk about here in a minute, is going down into the comments and seeing what are people saying? What are people looking at like, can I use butter? What are the measurements? Maybe I should use measurements in my videos. Quality quantities. Those are the types of things I'm looking at when I'm researching my video. So I may come back here and watch another one of these. So this one that is ranking number one. Let's go watch this. So the last one we saw, it opened with the cookies. This one is opening with her talking. But again we can come down here, look at the comments again to really help us decide how to make a better video.

Another great idea is to look at some comments of other videos. So let's say I'm doing a video on chocolate chips. We've been using this sample for the past couple of weeks. And I'm gonna go to a video that talks about baking chocolate chip cookies. And then I'm just gonna scroll through the comments to see if anybody has any questions about can you make this with vegan butter or can you make this without dairy or something like that. Then I know I can create a video specifically around non dairy chocolate chip cookies or creating chocolate chip cookies without butter or whatever questions were showing up in that video. That's a great signal for you to create a video on it. Moving on to step six. And this is all about titling your videos and thinking about that thumbnail before you even script any of your video content. Yeah, I believe this is key. If you really want to have success on YouTube, you need to decide what the title of your video is going to be so that when somebody sees that title, you can ensure you're delivering on that title within the first three to five seconds of your video. Remember, audience retention is critical. It's one of the three YouTube trifecta pieces that I talked about earlier. So if you can make sure they click on that video and they are enticed to watch in this first three to five seconds because you're delivering on that value or that promise from the title, that's where your audience retention is going to do well. So if we talk about that chocolate chip cookie video again, let's say we're doing that non dairy chocolate chip chip cookie video. So your title says, make chocolate chip cookies without using dairy. Clickable. People are like, yes, this is me. I can't have dairy. You want to open that video immediately promising them that's what they're gonna get. So you could say something like, if you can't have dairy and you love chocolate chip cookies, this recipe is going to be for you. I'm going to show you exactly how to create chocolate chip cookies without using any dairy products. So you're hitting a pain point. Maybe your audience loves chocolate chip cookies, but they recently found out that they can't have have dairy and they're dying to have their chocolate chip cookies again. And you're going to show them how they can without having any dairy. You see how that title really formulated the hook of the video then? When it comes to thumbnails, some of the best things to do for your thumbnail is to have highly saturated color thumbnails. So remember, YouTube background is white or black, depending if your viewer is in dark mode or regular mode. And so a white or a black thumbnail might tend to blend in. So could you put like a super colorful border for me? We've been using that bright pink. It also stands out as part of my branding. So if you are ever scrolling on YouTube and you see this bright pink color, you know that's me. Thumbnails also perform better when there's an actual person on that thumbnail. So taking a photo of yourself and putting it on that thumbnail with maybe the stack of cookies that you just baked in your video, that would be a great thumbnail for the video that we're talking about. We're also talking about non dairy chocolate chip cookies. So maybe you have a picture of milk and you put like a, a cross line through it so they can instantly see in that image. You are going to teach them how to make chocolate chip cookies without dairy. And then your thumbnail ties into that. It's just causing people to want to click on your video. You're opening that video all about specifically what your title and thumbnail said. And again you're hitting those two big YouTube trifectas. Let me show you how to actually check your click through rates because YouTube gives you all this information. YouTube says the the standard click through rate for your title and thumbnail should be between 2 and 10%. Now, I suggest that you just always look at your video and try to make your next click through rate even higher. So let's see how to find that number.

So when you log into YouTube Studio, you can either go to your latest video or you can go over here to all of your videos. And what we're looking for is the click through rate. So when you pull a video up, you'll want to go to this little analytics button right here and then you want to click on the reach tab. So if you click on this reach tab, you can actually see your impression click through rate. And if you click on the impression click through rate, you can also see what your click through rates were for how long your video has been live. So my video went out Wednesday. On Thursday it had a click through rate of 2.8. On Friday, 1.6, 2.3. So you can go through there and look at your click through rates. You can go ahead and compare them across the board by going to your complete analytics. So for your entire channel. Then you can go into see more and this is going to pop up your most viewed videos and there will be a column for your click through rates. So you'll see they're all listed right here. One way to rank your videos by click through rates is going in here, clicking these little three dots. Go ahead and hide the metric over here because you want to make it your first column. Once that disappears, then you're going to go to this plus button and you are going to go ahead and add that column for the click through rate. So right here, impression click through rates. And now it should list your videos in order of click through rate. If we scroll on down here, I'm able to see, okay, what is my top click through rate? What does that look like? What's that thumbnail look like? What's that title look like? And go on down to see exactly what videos are performing. Well, remember this is in the last 28 days. You can also bump this out to a larger amount of time and it could be totally different analytics. So if we bump this out to 90 days, you'll see things are a little bit different. They're still about the same, but you can just get more data when you bump it out to 90 days.

All right, we are halfway through. Give me a thumbs up if you're still with me and leave me a comment below. What has been your biggest takeaway so far? Has anything really blown your mind yet? Now on to step seven, which is all about planning your content and in this step, this is where I really script my videos. And yes, I do suggest you script your videos because one, it's going to save you immense amount of time filming your videos. If you have a clear game plan going into filming, it's going to take you a lot less time to film it. In fact, today I wasn't planning to film any videos due to quarantine, though my husband needs my office and so I can't film on my normal days. But since I had my videos already planned, I already had them scripted. I knew that all I had to do is my hair and makeup, jump in here in my office for about an hour or two and shoot. Shoot two videos back to back and I'd be done with filming. Now, I wouldn't have that flexibility if I hadn't already planned my videos.

Right?

So also, planning your videos allows you to be flexible with your schedule when it comes to filming. Another place that saves you time when you do script is editing. So again, you're not filming as long amounts of time, so you're editing. Raw footage is a lot less too. And you know exactly what you need to say. So really script this content to save you time across the board. Now, as I said just a second ago, I am filming more than one video. I definitely suggest when you're getting started on YouTube to try to film more than one video when you sit down the film, because one, I don't wake up like this, two, I don't normally have my equipment set up. And three, when you are filming, you're just kind of in that mindset, so it allows you to bang out a couple videos at a time. Now I had at one once batched 15 videos at a time. Now I'm being a little bit more flexible with my strategy and trying to pivot a little bit more with my content. So I'm only filming about two to three videos in a day, but that gives me two to three weeks worth of content. Finally, in the planning stage, you also want to think about your goal. What is the goal of your video? The biggest mistake I see so many people do in their videos is they want people to subscribe, like comment, subscribe to their email list, watch another video. There's a like so many things going on in a video. So when you are planning your content and you're scripting it out at the very top of your script, I want you to write goal of this video. Is the goal of this video going to be to get people to subscribe to your channel so you're Keep telling people to subscribe. Is your goal of your channel to get somebody on your email list or to see your free opt in? Then you want to remember to not ask people so many questions and stick completely with a call to action to go and get your freebie or go and get on your email list. Remember, when you're giving too many calls, action people. People end up just getting overwhelmed and confused and so they don't do anything. So really determining the goal of your video is going to be critical in this planning stage as well. Now step eight is filming. So you really did the hard part earlier. You researched, you scripted, you planned it. Now you can just sit down and film these videos. I want you to just be focusing on filming because I know it can be overwhelming. It can be weird to be talking to this camera lens. So I don't want you to think about anything else when you are filming. The best way to handle this is just strictly focus on filming for the day and try to get as many videos as done. In fact, I will show you what my filming setup looks like right now behind the scenes, so you can get a sense of what a batch day looks like for me. All right, so right now my kids are actually home. My husband has them downstairs playing Play doh. So I'm able to run up here and get things done. You can see that I have my desk, which I sit right here, obviously, and I have my computer pulled up with my script right here. So I know exactly what I need to say. I have books, just books that I stack this tripod on and move it around my desk to get some different shots. That is my ring light that is shining on me. And then I have two of these softbox lights to really, let me show you. Kind of eliminate as much shadow as possible back there. Right now it's a rainy day. I couldn't really deal with the weather because we decided to shoot these really quick since we are in quarantine. I gotta grab time when I can. But that's basically all I have. One other side tip is this is like a tile floor. You'll see and the sound is really bad. So I just put blankets on it to absorb the sound to make the audio a little bit better. And when I'm done with all this equipment, I will just put it in this closet right here and it's stowed away till I need to film the next time. One more thing. When it comes to filming, I get asked this question all the time. Teleprompters. I actually suggest not using A teleprompter, because generally we can tell you're reading from a teleprompter. So what I actually do is I have my script written over here on my computer and I'm just doing a couple lines at a time. I'm not memorizing my entire script. I am sitting here talking to you. Then I'll pause, I'll look over at my script, look at the next couple of lines that I want to talk about, look at my camera, deliver the next couple of lines, pause. My camera is still running the whole time. When I go to edit, we can cut out those pauses because we don't see any sound waves from the audio. So that really makes it a lot easier to edit and it also makes it easier for you to allow your personality show a little bit more. I know when I'm trying to read exactly my script, I tend to tighten up and kind of become a little bit more robotic. When I'm able to free flow a little bit, stay on task, then I'm able to deliver my content a little bit better. All right, step nine is all about focusing on people. When you post your first video, maybe only five people watch it. Maybe you only ever get one comment. But focus on that one comment because that is one person that watched your video. Reply to them, ask them a question whenever somebody's commenting on your video. And I, I will admit, when I was on YouTube for a long time, I didn't do a good enough job engaging in the comments, quite frankly. I just ran out of time and didn't think it was important. But it is key, especially here on YouTube, because YouTube is a social media platform. You don't think about that all the time, but it is a great place for you to really build your community and for people to get to fall in love with you. So when you post videos, I always like to write a comment below the video to engage you, to ask you a question so I can spark that conversation so I can build community in my videos and get to know more about you. And so that you can know I actually care about you watching those videos. So really think about the people who are watching your videos and try as much as possible to take time and engage in the comments as much as possible. Alright, step 10 is all about getting this first 100 subscribers. Are you ready to learn how to do it? You have got to promote yourself. You have to be your own biggest fan. You want to tell your family because if they love you, they're going to want to support you. And I know, it's scary to tell people that you have a YouTube channel. I still get a little weird feeling when somebody says, oh yeah, Trina, I watched your YouTube videos and they're friends of mine from years or family. I'm like, oh, okay. But you need to have the people that love you support you from the beginning. If you have a following on other platforms like Instagram or Facebook, Facebook or even on Pinterest or you have an email list, tell them, tell them right now. As soon as you publish a video, tell them to go subscribe to your channel. If you don't even have a video yet and you're planning to launch soon, go tell them to subscribe to your YouTube channel right now and tell them you're getting ready to release your first YouTube video. Make sure you're subscribed to support me and to see that first video that I published. You really, really need to focus on promoting your YouTube channel and telling everybody about it and telling them they need to go subscribe. Giving that exact call to action to subscribe is key as well. Step 11 is for once you get some videos up, you've got to know your numbers. I am not a numbers person, by no means. I hated anything math, anything accounting in business school. But what I found is YouTube actually makes understanding your analytics and your YouTube numbers a little bit easier in their new YouTube studio. And if you really want to be successful on YouTube and you really want people to watch your videos, you got to know what you're doing looking for in here. So let's go over to my computer real quick so I can show you how to find those exact three numbers that I talked about your YouTube trifecta and a couple other things you should be looking at on your YouTube channel to really help you skyrocket your channel growth.

So showed you earlier how to find that click through rate, which is the first piece of your YouTube trifecta. Let's look at your audience retention and also your end screen. Click through rate. So I'm going to pull up my most recent video, which is this one, and we're going to go to the analytics tab again. You're going to be able to see right on this first page this overview, your audience retention. So what you want to do is go ahead, click see more for this particular chart and I would suggest you going through here and watching your video and seeing exactly when people leave. So you can see from here five minutes into about 5, 25. That's a pretty steep dip compared to the rest of the video. So what am I doing here that I could change? Ideally, what I would like you to see is in this last 20 seconds. So this video is 12 minutes and 11 seconds. If we go back to about 20 seconds to the end, I would like to see about 50% of your audience still watching to this point so that they can see those end screens. Because remember, we're going to show you how to find your end screen, click through rate. The more people that see your end screens, the more likely you could get them to click on it. That's what I'm looking for. That's a goal of mine, to get 50% of people watching to this live. So to find that end screen, click through rate and see how well your channel is doing, you're going to need to scroll back up here and you want to go to your engagement. That's where that analytic is going to be. So you're going to come down here. Your end screen, click through rate. For this particular video I had a 6.8%, which for me is pretty good. My goal for me personally is to hit a 10% on every single video you see. My channel average is 3.4% and this one is a 6.8. That's for individual videos. You can also look at your reach. If we go to this reach tab and see how much YouTube is recommending your videos, you'll see that YouTube is doing 34% of the traffic coming to my videos is from YouTube doing it. So from the browse features and also other YouTube features, you can see from this video. YouTube search isn't even driving any of the traffic. So if we go down here, you can see that YouTube search is only driving 3 of the traffic. So that's why it's so important to really play on this YouTube trifecta. So YouTube can do a lot of the promoting for you. You can see for external traffic sources is Gmail. That's because I send my newsletter, my video every single Wednesday when it goes live. But let's look at some other numbers you need to look at for your channel as a whole. These are just numbers for one specific video. So if we go back to your analytics tab for your entire channel, what I am looking at when I look at this page is specifically this overview. I'm just seeing how well my channel's done this particular month in the last 28 days. And I'm seeing what are my top videos in the past 28 days. Can I do any of these videos? Can I do a different take on this video? Do I have Time in the next two weeks maybe to pump out a video similar to this. Since these are what's driving traffic to my channel. I'm also going to come in here to reach and I'm going to see what my impression click through rate was for my channel as a whole. And you can also get a bigger view of your external traffic sources for the last 28 days. Like I said, Pinterest is huge for me. It falls right behind Google Search. You can also see what specific words are driving your channel traffic. Can you do any videos around these topics? Because these are the topics that people are finding you on. Search and watching your videos again. The YouTube studio just really makes it super easy to look at your numbers. So it's not so scary to figure out what your numbers are and how to read them.

Okay, I want to know if you've made it to step number 12. Let me know down in the comments. I made it to step number 12 and here it is. It's being consistent on YouTube. And before you freak out about consistency, I'm asking you to just commit to posting once a week or once every other week, same day, same time. Because one, you're creating consistency for your audience to know when to come back and watch a video, and two, you're showing YouTube that you are going to consistently show up and feed that new content. Right? This is why batching your content really comes into play here. Because like I said, I don't have a time every single week to just shoot one YouTube video. I'm running a business, I have clients, I have students, I have two small kids. So I really need to be able to pump out as many videos as I can when I have the time to do it. Plus, the more you create YouTube content, the more videos you're putting up on YouTube, the more data you're going to get back from YouTube, the easier it's going to be for you to film videos, edit it. Your process is just going to speed up even quicker and you're going to figure out exactly videos you should be creating to grow your YouTube channel. Now, I've got a YouTube launch roadmap that's going to walk you through all of these steps in a printable PDF. It's also going to show you the exact steps for creating that channel banner and everything that you need to do in a nice little paper format. So if you want that, I'm going to add the link right here on the screen. It's going to be in a card and also down in the description box. So just pop over there, drop your email in, and I'll send that over your way. Now, I want you to go watch this video where I teach you exactly what to say in your first video. Click on that video and I'll see you over there.