Starting A YouTube Channel? Do These 5 Things FIRST!

It is not too late for starting on YouTube, so stop procrastinating and let's get your YouTube channel started together. This is everything you need to know if you're serious about starting your YouTube channel. But before we jump in real quick, shout out to yoga with Sam. Thank you so much for your kind words, Sam. I appreciate your support here on my channel. If you want to see your channel, shout it out. Make sure you leave me a comment below. Let me know what your favorite takeaway was of the video or how you like my content. Now, if you're starting a YouTube channel, you need to have a YouTube plan. What's that mean? Trina? So a YouTube plan is very similar to a business plan or like a marketing plan. Let me run through everything that should be included or things that you should think about as you're getting started here on YouTube. So grab the paper and pencil and write these down. First, what is the goal of your channel? For many of my students and clients, their primary goal of YouTube is to generate leads to their business, get them in their email funnel, get them as clients, get them to buy their digital products. Maybe your goal is that maybe your goal is to get more subscribers, maybe your goal is to get monetized here on YouTube. But you need to really understand what the goal of your YouTube channel is before we move further. Because depending on your goal, the strategy and tactics that you will use to start your YouTube channel will be different. The next thing in your YouTube plan is who is your target audience. Now I talked more about this in a previous video which I will link to and why it is so important to understand who your target audience is. But you need to clearly understand who are the people that you want watching your videos. This is going to give YouTube the data to know who to send your videos to and it's also going to help you know what kind of content you need to be creating because you want to be creating content that your target audience will watch. Next thing you need to think about in your YouTube plan is your niche or the umbrella topic of your channel. So niching is kind of hard when you are getting started. Unless you already have a business. If you have a business, you probably already know what your niche is. But if you can get clear on what it is you're going to talk about on your channel, that's why I say your umbrella. It's going to be again easier for YouTube to figure out where to put you, who to serve you to, who to put you in front of. If you're all over the place you're talking about meal prepping and you're talking about Instagram and you're talking about your favorite phone apps and it's not all tying together. It's going to be super hard for YouTube to figure out where to put you. And if you're just starting on YouTube, it could be the kiss of death. But you could take all three of those videos and tie them into an umbrella topic, right? For example, my channel talks specifically about growing a YouTube channel. But maybe I talk about how I meal prep to be able to batch videos in a day, right? What does the meal prep look like so I have time to batch videos. What is my social media plan to promote my YouTube channel? Right? You see how these are starting to all tie back into this umbrella topic. So maybe you are a lifestyle channel, but you're targeting specifically again, going back to your target audience, busy moms. So you need to make sure all your content ties back into busy moms. So how do you meal prep for busy moms? What kind of exercises do you do if you're a busy mom? What are your favorite phone apps for busy moms to help them have more time? Right? You can talk about these things. You need to tie them all into your umbrella niche or your umbrella topic. Still, with this YouTube plan, the next thing you want to write down and figure out is who is creating similar content to you. This doesn't give you a free pass to copy what they are doing, but it allows you to see what kind of content they're creating and what are people responding to. This is some great market research. You can look at their top performing videos, you can look at comments of their videos to help you figure out again what that target audience really wants from you. You also need to define your brand and your style. I love canva for this. They will literally give you colors and fonts that go together. So if you don't have a brand yet, go on over to Canva, pick out a color palette, pick out a set of fonts that go together and keep those, keep those for your channel banner, keep those for your thumbnails, keep those for the text in your videos. Branding so important here on YouTube and you need to make sure it's cohesive still. YouTube plan, right? You need to figure out what your posting schedule is going to be. I will tell you, you only need to commit to one video a week. That is the biggest consistency that I would ask for. So think about your week. What day of the week is best for you to post videos? As in what day of the week do you have time to promote that video? Because you will need to be doing some legwork. So maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays are preschool days. So you publish on Wednesday when you have a babysitter. So look at your schedule. Figure out right now in this season, because trust me, it all changes every single season. In this season right now, what looks like the best day and time that you could consistently commit to publishing a YouTube video? In addition to that, what days of the week could you commit to filming videos? Because remember, you need to stay consistent. You need to create those videos. So again, Wednesdays are another important day for me. I will batch videos on Wednesdays like I am today. I am batching four videos on this particular Wednesday because I don't have kids at home. And that's the only days that I can film and not have kids at home. And so I commit to at least one or two Wednesdays a month that I film YouTube videos. What does your schedule look like? What can you put on the calendar as filming days for you? And you don't have to batch. Maybe you just film a new video every single Tuesday. You film a new video every single Thursday, right? What works best for you and your schedule? Put that on your schedule. And the last piece I want you to think about in your YouTube plan before we move on is where are you going to film? And it does not have to be perfect, okay? It can be on your bedroom floor, it can be on your kitchen table, it can be in front of a plain blank wall. But just figure where you're going to film, accept it and commit to it. So you got all those questions written down to ask yourself as part of your YouTube plan. Let's get your YouTube channel set up. So if you are starting a YouTube channel, there are some things you need to actually set up on YouTube. So let me show you what those are. The first of the three most important things you're going to need on your channel to get set up is your channel banner. It's this graphic right here. That's basically your billboard, right? It's going to tell people immediately when they come to your channel who you are and what you're about. So I highly recommend you have a photo of yourself somewhere on there. It's on brand, which we're going to talk about here further in this video. And you have a value proposition, right? What is the value people are going to get out of your content? People are selfish. They want to know instantly what are you going to do for them. So if you go to my channel, you're going to see, I'm going to help you organize, plan and create video content that makes you money. Pretty simple and clear right there. The next thing you want to add is channel keywords. And the best way to get to those is you come up to your channel icon right up here. You go to YouTube Studio, then you're going to come down here into your settings. And right here under channel is going to be where you're adding your channel keywords. And this should really encompass or describe what your content is all about on your channel. And then the last piece is going to be your about section, which you can edit right here in customization. Once you click on Customization, you're going to go to basic info and then you can write a summary about who you are and what your channel is all about. I highly recommend these first two sentences of your about section really pitch your value and why people should watch your content. Because those sentences can show up on YouTube in different places. So when people hover over your channel icon in different places, those first couple sentences show up. So it's basically the strongest pitch you can create to get people to click on your channel. Look, I want to continue helping you as much as I can when it comes to getting started on YouTube, but I need something from you. I need you to hit the subscribe button right now and turn on notifications so that I know you're serious about creating a YouTube plan and getting started. If you hit that subscribe button, I will know that you're committed and I will continue cranking out high value videos just like this every single week for you. Deal. Hit that subscribe button. All right. Now the third thing you need to do when getting started on YouTube is have a video or content plan. The first piece of that is having some video ideas before you get started. The last thing I want you to do is get started on YouTube and then run out of ideas. So I Recommend Getting about 20 to 30 video ideas written. I like to use TubeBuddy. In fact, in this particular video, I go through how I use TubeBuddy to find my green light videos. And I also have this video where I give you 20 video ideas to start with. I challenge you to watch that particular video and not have more than 20 ideas from the ones that I give you. But this is a great place to start. Start writing your video ideas down. Also, within your content and video plan, you want to figure out how you can create a series of videos, a series of videos that make sense to Watch back to back to back to back. Remember, YouTube loves channels that create this binge session, just like we do on Netflix when we turn it on, right? So take one topic and how can you create this series of videos that make people want to come back every single week to watch but also binge watch an entire playlist when you're done? This is exactly what I'm doing for this particular series here on my channel, All about stuff. Starting a YouTube channel. We've had a series of three other videos in addition to this one that makes sense for people to watch one after another so they can clearly understand by the end of these videos how to start a YouTube channel. And one secret little tip that I will give you here is to track all this stuff somewhere electronic. I can't tell you how many times I've had a video idea and not wrote it down and forgot it. Or I wrote it down on a notebook and a child took the notebook somewhere, or I wrote it in a notebook, never to be found in that notebook again. Or I forgot about it. So keep things stored Electronic. I love asana for this. We are able to keep all my ideas in there. I also have a few employees that provide me ideas as well. As they interact with my email list or on my social media, they see ideas come up. Keep them electronic so that you can always have access to it. So if you're out and about, grab your phone, pop it into Asana Trello so that you never lose an idea again. The fourth thing that you need to do is create templates. The first templates I'm going to talk about is your animation template. So things like the subscribe button that we have or the like button. Once you take the time to create these, then you can use them over and over and over and over and over again. Right? You just copy and paste it to each video that you edit. But take the time up front to create these graphics. The next template is title screen. So the title screens you see that break down the points that I'm talking about in this video. My name call outs. At the beginning you saw my name and the Instagram pop up. Take the time to create these now. So when you start editing your YouTube videos, all you have to do is copy and paste and change out the text where you need to. This is going to make your videos look better and make your editing process go by much quicker. I also recommend determining what sound effects and what music that you want to use before getting started. I don't want you to change your music out in every single video that is going to be a huge time suck and just commit to maybe two or three songs that you're going to use interchangeably through your videos before you start. That way you don't have to waste your time or on figuring those out. The next two templates are your end screen template. So at the end of every single video you'll see my video shrink into the corner and you'll see a little subscribe text and watch more. That is a template that we created so that we can entice you to watch another video of mine or to click the subscribe button. Same with thumbnails. Create templated thumbnails. You know, maybe you have four or five different templates so you cycle through them, but this will help you create thumbnails a lot faster. Now I actually created a lot of these templates already. You'd like to get your hands on mine so that you can tweak them to your brand. I have a course called Editing for Conversions that you can get all of that inside. I will link to Editing for Conversions down in the description box below. And I've created templates for everything that I mentioned in this last piece. But if you take the time to create these templates in advance, you are going to save yourself heck of a lot of time and probably a major headache. The fifth thing that you got to do is you need to learn more about YouTube. If you don't know enough already, you need to watch YouTube. You need to watch videos in different niches and different genres and look at things like, what do you like about that person's editing style? What don't you like? What do you like about that person's content? What don't you like? What about thumbnails? What do you see a thumbnail that you like and don't like? Because if you can see how things are actually working on YouTube, it will help you understand how you can start incorporating it into your YouTube channel. If you're coming into YouTube fresh, new, without thinking about these things, maybe you have been watching YouTube but you've not been thinking about it this way. About the things you like and the things you want to try on your YouTube channel, I recommend pausing watching as many YouTube videos as possible. In fact, I watch YouTube every single week. I have time on my calendar to just browse through my homepage on YouTube and look at new styles of videos. Look at what popular YouTubers are doing, what are they changing? How are their thumbnails looking? You need to understand YouTube and what's working for you to know what you need to do on your YouTube channel to make it work. Does that make sense? Since you know you need to watch more YouTube, watch the series of videos that are on your screen right now that will take you through this entire series. We are wrapping up here on my channel. Channel about getting started on YouTube. You'll probably want to grab a notebook and a pencil, maybe a snack and some coffee, hit play and dig in. It's going to give you everything you need to know about starting a YouTube channel.