How To Start A YouTube Channel in 2020: Beginners Guide to Starting YouTube from Scratch!

We've all heard it. That video is king. And video content continues to rise to the top on just about every platform from Facebook to Instagram. Even Google puts YouTube videos at the top of search. But every time I talk at a conference or I talk to new clients or new students, they always struggle with how to get started on YouTube, the number one video platform in the world. It's usually always the same thing, like it's a brand new platform. There's a lot of stuff going over there. It's just super overwhelming to get started on YouTube right now. And I totally get it. There's a lot of moving pieces when it comes to video, let alone having a quiet house. I've got two small kids. You can kind of see their artwork back there. But we've been quarantined since March. It is now October, and they're here every single day. In fact, this fall, we even started Virtual Kindergarten, which is now in my office. So I 100% get if you're trying to figure out how you're going to balance doing all your mom stuff, doing all your business stuff, and starting a YouTube channel. So I want to use this video to show you how you can start a YouTube channel without stressing out, burning out, and overwhelming yourself with some simple, attainable things that you can do to actually start using YouTube as part of your business's marketing plan. Because I'm partially biased, but YouTube is the best kind of content to have in your marketing plan. So while it seems pretty quiet right here, this is the Sunday that I have shipped the kids out to Nana's with my husband. They're going to go have lunch with them. Let's go on up to my office and start breaking this down into simple steps that you can start doing. Baby step number one, don't care if your house is a mess because it's quarantine time and nobody's coming to visit you anyways. So don't worry about having to get the house clean, because I don't. Now, I know there are a lot of YouTube videos out there that will show you how to get started on YouTube. But here's the different perspective that I have. Being a mom and not being able to commit a whole heck of a lot of time to my YouTube channel. So if you are a mom or you are a dad or your business is booming and you're taking care of your clients all the time, and there's no time in your day, this video is going to be for you hit like, if you're excited to Dig in. Before we jump in, let me introduce myself. My name is Trina. I am a mom to a three and a five year old. I have an MBA and I started this YouTube channel to help women business owners and content creators figure out how to start using online video to grow organically. Now, I need to have a real talk with you before I get into these tactical steps, but I need you to understand, if you are getting started on YouTube, you're probably going to suck at it at first. You're probably gonna hate the way you look on video, hate the way you sound on video. Yes, I do too. But you've got to stick with it because you are probably your own biggest critic and you're pointing things out that other people don't even notice. I use this example so many times, but I literally hate my bottom teeth. I pretty much hate all my teeth, but my bottom teeth the most. And while I see that every time I record videos, I record an Instagram story nobody ever points out. So think about, while you may be watching yourself back, you record it and think it's totally terrible and you look horrible. It's probably not true. And you just got to rip the band aid out and get that content up. One of the first things that you need to understand about doing YouTube and doing it in a way that it is time effective and pays off for you, is that I don't just turn on my camera and start recording. I am filming on a Sunday and I'm going to film four videos. That's the entire month's worth of content for me. But prior to today, I. I planned my videos, I researched my video. I really want to make sure the videos that I create are the actual topics that my audience is searching for on YouTube. I also want to make a game plan because again, the kids are only going to be gone for so long. So I need to know exactly what I want to say on these videos so I can say them and get them done before they come home. And I have to start doing laundry and I have to start meal prepping. So I know I just talked about planning this video, but how do I do that? What does that planning piece look like? Let's go over to my computer and I will actually walk you through the entire process of researching and planning out my videos so you can see what I do to really maximize the time that I do get to film a video.

One of the best places to go to start planning your content is the YouTube search bar. When you start typing in a topic here. YouTube is going to pre populate actual ideas people are already searching for. So how to bake chocolate chip cookies. Here's a bunch of different options of actual video ideas that you could create because these are the terms people are searching in YouTube now. I love to use a tool called TubeBuddy to really streamline this process. Tubebuddy is a free browser extension and it's actually a mobile app that integrates directly into your YouTube channel to really streamline your process. So my favorite tool in TubeBuddy, you can see that I have it installed right here. And I'm going to go into the keyword explorer. This really helps me streamline the exact topic that I want to go after. So I know when I create this.

Video, it's going to reach people that.

I want it to reach. I'm going to put in chocolate chip cookies and then TubeBuddy is going to tell me what are my chances of getting my video seen by people. Okay, so you can see right here that this keyword is searched often, but it's bad to target because it's extremely competitive and hard to rank for. You can see there's over 4 million searches a month. Optimization strength is poor. The competition is poor because there is so much out there. So the way I kind of tweak this is I try to find another way to pitch this video, so to speak. The reason why Keyword Explorer is so awesome is because I don't have to try to figure it out on my own. They have options right here. So I could go to this video searches tab and look at these or these video topics ideas. So I may want to take chocolate chip cookies and pitch it in a different way like how to make double chocolate chip cookies or how to make chocolate chip cookies without butter or how to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. So what I can do is click on this and it's going to tell me the same score again. Is this going to be a good idea to go after now? It's a little bit better, but still pretty competitive. So maybe I want to do how to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies without eggs. Maybe people are vegan and they want.

To make it without eggs.

Now this is telling me this is a great topic to. You can see that it is a little bit competitive still, but it's searched often enough to be worth targeting. Then from here I can also go over into the results and see what.

Are the thumbnails and what are the.

Current videos that are ranking for this topic. So you can see the best Eggless oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. What I'm noting here and what I'm keeping track of is what these thumbnails look like and how they are titling these videos. So I can go through here and see what they look like. Okay, there's a person with the chocolate chip cookies. There's some milk with the chocolate chip cookies. But you can see in all of these videos, the cookies are very prominent, prominently displayed in the thumbnail.

Depending on what your niche is, you.

Can see what is the big trend or what is something that you see happening with the thumbnails and the titles to help you determine what's the best thumbnail and title for yourself. Now, we can also go back here to summary again and you can start copying all of these video tags. So the reason why I love this again is, okay, if I'm going to do my video about how to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, I know my video is going to be about chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, oatmeal cookie recipe, how to make oatmeal cookies, eggless oat cookies. And I can go through here. I can click all the tags that are going to be relevant to my video. I can go up here and I can click copy to clipboard, or I can add this to my topic planner. And so what happens here is my keywords are successfully saved as video topics. So what I can do now is go back into tubebuddy, go to my video topics planner and you will see right here is my chocolate chip cookie video. And I can start taking notes and I can start keeping everything organized right here. And this is really how I love to figure out the best way to position my video is by using tubebuddy and specifically this keyword explorer. Now, if you want to try out tubebuddy for yourself, I'm going to link below to TubeBuddy.

It is an affiliate link, but when.

You sign up with the code TRINASBUDDY, you can get 20% off. So you can actually try out this keyword explorer for yourself.

Before we go into actually setting up your channel and the channel banner and making it all look pretty, I want to talk about something that's the not so Sexy side of YouTube and that's understanding who you're talking to and niching down. Every single time I talk about this in a video, always see my audience retention drop because it's not like this tangible thing and it's not what people want to hear. But you need to make sure your channel is the go to channel for something. I know you're probably a multi passionate person. I am as well. My husband says I change hobbies as much as I change my underwear. But listen, if you want to start on YouTube and you want it to pay off for your business and you want to make sure the time you put into it pays off, you really need to make sure you understand who your niche is. We cannot be someone for everyone or end up being no 1 for everybody. Okay? You really, really need to understand that here on YouTube. When you can clearly define who you're speaking to and what value you are going to bring to them, it is going to be so much easier for YouTube to put your videos in front of the right people. This is YouTube actually doing the work for you and getting you views and subscribers if you can clearly create content for one particular type of person. Now, there are people here on YouTube that talk about how to grow on YouTube. But what's about all of those that are out there is they're all talking to different types of people. Some are talking to vloggers, some are talking to YouTube hobbyists, some are talking to business owners. I'm specifically talking to majority women who are trying to figure out how to balance time, manage their time with a YouTube channel. That's a different perspective that I have. And YouTube is going to be able to put my video in front of that person if I'm creating the right type of content. Now, yes, anybody can watch my content. I'm not saying I'm just for those people, but if I know who my people are, like I said, YouTube is going to be able to put my content in front of those people and help me grow my channel faster. Now let's move on to building that brand on YouTube, that pretty looking brand that makes you stand out. So one of the first questions that I get is, Trina, should I name my channel my name or my business name? Honestly, it's up to you. I started my YouTube channel here as tips with Trina because honestly, I did want people to google my name and find my YouTube videos. When I got started, I literally did not want my co workers to find my YouTube channel. And so my actual mom channel has my middle initial in it so that again, it wouldn't just show up if somebody searched my name. But I do wish I would have just made it my name because this channel is about me and I'm doing amazing things here to help you. And so you honestly need to decide do you want it to be your name or your business name? And that's not going to hurt you either way here on YouTube. Next, let's talk about setting up up your homepage. Okay, we're going to actually go over to the computer again. I'm going to walk you through all the different sections on your channel homepage so you know what you need to add to make it look as professional as you are.

Now let me cover some of the key elements here on your homepage. You see right here is your channel banner. And you can change that by clicking on this little camera button and uploading your own banner graphic. What I like to see on a banner is obviously some way to visually show what you and your channel is about. So I am a speaker, I am a mom, I like to keep my content organized and I teach about video. So I'm representing these on all of these photos. I'm also letting you know I have new videos every single Wednesday. And I'm also telling you the value of my channel and helping entrepreneurs and content creators grow organically with video content. Okay, this is one of the first elements of your channel homepage that you should think about when you are getting your YouTube channel set up. Here is where you can add a couple different elements. So what you can do is you can go into customize your channel and you can decide if you want to have a channel trailer for those who who aren't subscribed to you yet or a featured video for those who are already subscribed to you. So featured video may be a sales video that you have, maybe you're pitching people a challenge or a course that you have, or another great idea to have in your featured video is maybe one of your best audience retention videos. So one of those videos that people like to watch the whole thing so that you can keep accumulating watch time. So that's one of the best places to feature your best audience retention videos. Now from there, if you go back here, you're going to see all of these sections that I have. And now YouTube just recently changed this up. We can no longer put vertical sections, we only can do horizontal. But you can customize that right here and you can go into this featured section and you can add up to 10 sections. So right now what I like to feature are playlists that really pitch the value of my channel. So if this is the first time.

Somebody'S coming to my channel, they can.

Scroll through all of these sections and see, okay, everything you need to know for your first YouTube video. Okay, she's talking about first YouTube videos, YouTube hacks to make your life easier. Okay, she's giving me hacks about YouTube.

How to start a YouTube channel.

Quick fixes to help grow your YouTube channel so people can quickly get an idea. Okay, this person's going to help me get started on YouTube. Now the way you can add those sections is you will need to have.

Playlists created and then you'll just come.

In here, add a section, you can pick a single playlist and you can pick whichever playlist that you have here that you want to highlight.

You can also move these around in.

What order that you want right in here in this layout option. Once you're done, you'll hit publish and you'll have your channel homepage set up so it looks professional and it's really letting people know what to expect out of your channel.

The next thing that you need to know when you are getting started on YouTube and once you start putting content out there, there is your back end of your YouTube channel. So specifically your analytics in the YouTube studio. So let me go ahead and walk you through all the things that are back there. Because I personally didn't know everything that was back there. I wish I would have learned earlier. So let me just give you a quick crash course on what's back there and what's important for you to know.

So this is what's called your YouTube Studio. And when you go into YouTube Studio, you're going to see a couple things right off the bat. You're going to see your latest video performance. If you posted a video. What this is telling me is this video in the first, first five days, in one hour is the seventh out of the last 10 videos that I've done. So it's telling me it's only about the seventh most popular videos of my last 10. It's also giving me a quick snapshot of views, impression, click through rate and average view duration. From there I'm getting a summary of my channel in the last 28 days and my current subscriber count. You're also going to see a list of my latest published videos and then also my latest post on my community tab.

From here.

I really like to look at my analytics.

This is where I get all my information.

This is how I develop my strategy and my client strategies.

What I'm looking at is I am always making sure we got these little green check arrows so that I know things are growing. You can see that YouTube is also going to give you a highlight about your channel. And this is telling me my channel got about the same number of views as Usual. Now if you scroll on down here, you're going to see your top videos in this period. Now this is a video almost a year old, but it is still getting 17,000 views in the last 28 days. You can see all of these are pretty old. Maybe January, December 2018. That's how powerful video content here on YouTube can be. You can see here's an October 7th video that's getting a lot of views. So you can immediately get an idea of what videos are doing well on.

Your channel right now.

And you can also go into reach and you can see, okay, how's your click through rate doing? How are your impressions doing? You can also see what is your traffic sources. So YouTube search means I'm getting traffic from the search people, typing things into YouTube search and then watching my videos. Suggested videos are the ones that show up on the side of videos. So I'm getting a lot of traffic from suggested suggested videos as well. External is telling me they're either finding me on my website or Google or Pinterest and then browse features as well. The next thing I want to show you is this impressions funnel. So what you can see right here is in the last 28 days I've had almost a million impressions. And from those impressions I see that 25% of the traffic coming to my channel is from YouTube recommending my content. That means I'm doing all the right things for YouTube to put my content in front of more people. My click through rate, my audience retention, all of that is on point. 25% of the traffic is YouTube doing.

The work for me.

Now if you can see, I have almost a million impressions, 25% coming from YouTube with a 4% click through rate. That means I'm getting 40,000 views from this impression number. Because if we take the impressions, this is just the amount of eyes on my content with a 4% click through Rate you're getting. And you can see as you hover over this, YouTube is telling you what this all means. This is the amount of views I actually got then with almost a 3 minute view duration on average, I'm getting over 2000 hours of watch time from these impressions. So what this tells you is, okay, how can I increase this? How can I get YouTube to recommend more of my content? We talk a lot about this on my channel. I'll link to a couple videos right now in the card. How can you get your click through rate up? How can you get your average view duration up? Because that's ultimately going to make this number go Higher. That's predominantly what I look at here in the back end of YouTube.

Okay, it's time to have another heart to heart. And I know we're having quite a few of these here in this video, but I really want to be honest with you and give you all the information about starting a YouTube channel. When you do start, you need to realize it's probably not going to grow overnight. Now if you already have an audience on Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or your email list and you tell them about it, you are going to see that big bump in subscriber growth. But YouTube is not something where you just upload a video every single week and it magically grows. It's not if you build it, they will come type scenario. I know this painfully personally, so you may notice my channel is pretty small. And you're like, how does she know all of this about YouTube when she can't even grow her channel? Because I get that a lot in common. But the truth is I'm not able to focus on my YouTube channel because I spend so much of my time focusing on my clients channels. I do their strategy, I do their research, I'm studying their analytics and I also help my students. So I have students inside of my video strategy academy and I'm helping them troubleshoot what's not working and helping them figure out their strategy. So a lot of the times my channel doesn't get the tender loving care that it should. It's like that quote, the cobbler's children never have new shoes or however that goes. But that's pretty much what my channel is like. So take my channel as a fair warning that if you don't give it some tender love and care and you don't figure out what's working for you and you don't look at all the numbers that YouTube give you, it's really going to be a slow grow for you. Okay, I need to know if you're still with me after these heart to hearts. Drop me a comment below in the chat that says, heck yes. If you're still here and you're ready to learn, learn that next step, that step in creating videos for your YouTube channel. First up, let's talk about equipment and what you need to get started. This, this is all you literally need to get started. Even if you don't have a computer or a laptop, you can still use imovie on an iPhone. This is all you need to get started. You don't need to worry about the fancy camera, the fancy Equipment, the fancy background. Just start focusing on what value you are going to provide your audience. And start. I recently did a vlog throughout my entire week and it was so much easier to grab this and use this. And if you watch that video, you probably won't even be able to notice the clips that are from the fancy camera that I'm shooting on right now and my iPhone. So this is literally the only piece of equipment that you need to get started. Now I'm going to flip this around and show you what my setup looks like. So you just have an idea. So it's gonna get a little bit bright. But I am sitting here at my desk. I have have my script on my laptop. I have a ring light shooting right at me and I have a softbox trying to eliminate some of the shadow behind me. I am also in a room that has tile flooring, so I needed to put the blankets down to catch the audio so it didn't echo off of it. Also, as you can see, kindergarten class. So this is literally how I set up. Honestly, the simplest lighting that you would need is we're going to swing you around is a window. I. I could probably sit up again. We're going to be moving here. Sit up my camera like this in front of this window and look how great that lighting is. That's just from the window. Okay, so that's all you really need. I use this ring light because I'm never really sure what kind of lighting I am going to get outside. And again, I can only shoot on certain days. So the ring light is honestly one of the easiest pieces of lighting that you can get to make it even lighting across your face. All right, you know how to research your videos, you know how to set up your YouTube channel, you know what equipment you need. Let's talk about creating a plan. Two different types of plans here. One, your plan for publishing. When are you going to publish your videos? It's a really great idea to stay consistent on YouTube because you want to think of your content as like the next hottest TV show, right? So back when Friends was popular in the late 90s, everybody knew 8pm On Thursday, I'm eastern time. So that's when it is a new episode as Friends was going to play. So you want to think about that with your channel because that's going to give you an influx of view, say Every Wednesday at 11am Eastern, my publishing time. Now, it doesn't matter what time you actually do this or what day. Just pick a day and a time and start communicating that to your audience that there's a new video every Wednesday at 11am Eastern Time. The other schedule I want you to commit to is recording. This is the hardest part. But you have no YouTube channel if you don't commit to recording. So like I said, I'm recording on a Sunday. I only honestly wasn't feeling it today. I was just in my head about creating even better content and coming at you with new creative content. And I was hating everything that I wrote. But I had this day blocked off to film. I got the kids out of the house, I did the hair and makeup. And I like to do this usually the Sunday before the month starts because I'm shooting all of October's content today. So you need to commit to a filming day and stick to it. I know there may be somebody mowing the yard or something may come up, but you have to commit to it if you want to take action. Once you know those filming days, then you can back up your days and figure out, okay, what day do I need to have my ideas solidified? What day do I need to script it? Once you have your filming day, then you know, what day do you need to edit it so you can publish consistently on that day that you decided what's your publishing date? And there's nothing else that I can tell you to make this easier, but you have to commit to it and stick with it. Okay, we're moving along. You've now recorded your videos. How many videos should you have on your YouTube channel when you release it or when you announce that you have a YouTube channel? Honestly, I don't think it needs to be like a podcast where a lot of people release their podcasts and they have like four or five episodes. I honestly would just stick with one per week. And that's all that you really need to commit to because YouTube is going to reward quality content over quantity of content. So. So back in August, I actually published 21 videos in 21 days. And I literally didn't see my channel grow any faster than when I was publishing one video a week. So you really want to focus on putting one video out and putting a lot of great content into it and then promoting it, sharing it with your email list, telling your Instagram followers to go watch it, doing a Facebook Live, sharing your experience of publishing your first YouTube video and telling people to go watch it. Give that one video a week, as much promotion as you can to help you start growing your brand new YouTube channel. Now let's talk about some time saving hacks, because remember I'm busy too. I got mom guilt and balancing time with kids and time with clients and creating YouTube content. So here's some of my best time saving tips. 1. Create templates I talk a lot about templates in Video Strategy Academy and I teach my students how to create these. But I will link to a couple of videos where I show you how to start creating text callout templates, icon templates, and how to create your own branded and customized animations. Once you create these titles and text callout and animations, you can then just copy and paste them in every single video so your video remains professional, remains branded, and you save time by just copying and pasting these templates in every single video. Then set up a workflow. I honestly love Asana. I have an entire video where I go through my workflow. But this will help you if you can set up your workflow and duplicate it for every single video so you don't miss any parts. For example, when I'm filming videos, I used to always forget to grab a thumbnail or do a Facebook ending. So in my workflow when I'm recording my videos, I have in there a checklist that I need to complete when my camera is on and that is one of them. So I do not forget. Having a workflow also will allow you to get help. And I know this is scary and I know you think you might not have the money to do it. I was absolutely there. But when you do get help, it allows you to free up some time so you can focus on the other things that you really need to be focusing on that are going to help you make more money. So whether you're finding somebody to help you edit or finding somebody to help you upload and optimize or do the research for you, finding help will definitely allow you to create content without getting overwhelmed and stressed out. Then my biggest secret to saving time is repurposing content. Now you'll see me take this YouTube video and put it on Instagram and Facebook as well. So technically I'm not getting the views here on my YouTube channel. But for me as a business owner, it is more important for people to see my content, feel like they have a relationship with me, build no like and trust than it is for me to get views and subscribers on my YouTube channel. So that leads me into this last step is setting some goals. When you're getting started on YouTube, you need to lay out goals that you want to achieve. Otherwise you're just doing this blindly, right? What is in your eyes going to mean success for you? Is it posting a video every single week for six months? Because that can be a goal and that's an amazing goal for someone just getting started on YouTube. Is it a subscriber amount? You know your first 1,000 subscribers? Does your email list grow because you tell them to get your freebie or opt in? You need to put in place goals to know what to be tracking, to know how to figure out what your strategy should be here on YouTube instead of just shooting at it blindly. And here's my best piece of advice. Just do it. I know you want everything to be perfect in place. This was me recently when I shot my first reels over on Instagram. I waited for weeks because I wanted to have the perfect idea. I want to have the perfect script, the perfect plan. But then I just did it. I released my course editing for conversions and I wanted to highlight all the students I had enrolled and I just did a reels. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't what I thought my first reels was going to be, but I just ripped the band aid off and did it it. And that is my challenge for you here on YouTube. Don't worry about making sure you sound perfect, your background looks perfect, you delivered your content perfect. Just do it. Now I have a huge favor for you. After sharing with you all of this information, could you please hit that share button and share this with somebody on your Facebook page or on Pinterest or wherever you're at on social media. Share this video with somebody that you know has been trying to get started on YouTube but just hasn't taken that step yet. And then I want you to continue on this journey. I'm not going to leave you high and dry here. I actually created a three video playlist for you. It's on your screen right now. It's going to walk you through some more steps to take to get you going, like how to create your channel banner, what to say in your first video. So click that playlist and don't forget to hit subscribe to this channel because I'm going to be helping you every single week grow organically with online videos.