The ULTIMATE Guide to Starting A Successful YouTube Channel In 2021

Let's cut the fluff and get right to the good stuff. I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do to start a successful YouTube channel. Even if you're starting from scratch, I am not going to hold anything back in this video. This is a true deep dive into starting and growing a YouTube channel. I'm going to tell you you may want to have a notebook and pen handy because I'm dropping a lot of information in this video that's going to be incredibly helpful to you. And make sure you stay to the end because I'm going to bring you behind the scenes of exactly how I shoot my YouTube videos, what the setup looks like, what my lighting looks like, everything. If you're ready for this in depth training, hit that like button and let's go. First, I want to personally thank one of you in a shout out. If it wouldn't be for all of you watching this video, I would not be able to show up and do this every single week. So Red curl Vegan, I want to thank you for your kind comment the other day. I am so glad these videos have been helpful for you, that you've been getting better with your confidence on camera and that you found your niche. If you want a shout out in my next video, make sure you grab a selfie of yourself watching this video and share it over on Instagram. Tag me treinal and you might just see your name popping up or leave a comment below letting me know how my content, how my videos have helped you so far. One last thing before we get to what you came for. Check the description box below because we do have timestamps. If you need to jump to a specific part of this video, go ahead and check that out. And here we go. 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 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 basically some great market research. You 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 of 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 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 screens. 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 click 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 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? But 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? One of the first things that you need to do to get to 10,000 subscribers on YouTube is know your niche. Yeah, I know you probably hear this all the time and it probably gets a little boring. In fact, every time I talk about niching here on YouTube, I see my audience retention graph drop. I know it's not the sexy side of YouTube, but it's the side of YouTube that will help you grow to 10,000 subscribers because it's critical for the YouTube algorithm. So the YouTube algorithm is trying to figure out who to put your videos in front of, who's going to watch your videos. And if you don't know who's going to watch your videos, how is YouTube going to figure out who to put your videos in front of? Now, if YouTube knows who to put your videos in front of, that's going to help you get more subscribers because YouTube's going to continue to do that. This is very simply why you need to understand who you are speaking to. And you can't just have this broad audience because you're going to confuse YouTube. Right. YouTube may put a video out and 10 people click on it, but then YouTube puts your next video out to those 10 people and one person clicks on it. So then it sends total Confusion through the algorithms. So I'm going to use my channel as an example case study, and then I'm going to share with you about the student who had 10,000 subscribers and what she did as a case study. Again, all revolving around your niche. I'm telling you, this is critical. So I do a lot of content here on my channel about growing on YouTube. Not only are you, my subscribers, signed up for that type of content, but YouTube has kind of categorized me as a YouTube education channel. It knows it can put my videos in front of people that are searching for content around growing on YouTube. So if I post a video on Instagram, not only am I confusing the algorithm, because it's putting my videos in front of people that aren't looking for Instagram content, but it's confusing you as the viewer as well. And you're going to be more likely to skip that video, making YouTube think it's not what my viewers want. Therefore, my video performs below average. Example right here. When I publish an Instagram video and my channel is going to continue to perform below average. If I stay on that route, right, if I expand my niche, it gets everything confused because you can see my top videos all revolve around YouTube in some way or form. Now let me show you how Hope use this to grow her channel. But if you want to see how she used keyword research to figure this out, make sure you're subscribed to my channel and turn that bell on, because that's what we're going to dive into next week. Keyword research and how to find that out. So what Hope actually did was double down on the niche. Frugality, frugal tips, frugal living. And that's why her top videos right now are so huge and drove so many subscribers so quickly, because YouTube got the data on who to put these videos in front of and then put it in front of more of those people, quickly growing her channel to 10,000 subscribers. And again, the same thing with Katherine Manning. She's one of my favorites to watch. And she blew up and kind of really snowballed her growth when she decided to Double down on YouTube monetization. And she will tell you that in that particular video, that's what she did. So these are three specific cases that prove to you that knowing your niche is critical if you want to get to 10,000 subscribers. So your action step here is to look at your top performing videos. Which ones are performing above average? Which ones are getting the most subscribers? Which one's getting the longest audience retention? Find the common theme or the common topics that these videos center around. Double down on those videos. Next thing you need to do is level up. And while this can mean leveling up your equipment, it's not the first thing that you need to do to level up. You need to be leveling up your content. Like I said the past couple of weeks, looking at your audience retention graphs and finding ways to improve it and get people to watch your videos longer. If you want to hit 10,000 subscribers, you need to get at least a 50% audience retention or more if you want YouTube to start recommending your videos to more people. YouTube's not gonna push content to people that people aren't watching. So, again, I've mentioned this earlier, but really study those audience retention graphs. Try different styles of video. For me, I tried a little bit of vlogging, and that actually helped my audience retention. Try different camera angles. See if using different camera angles keeps people watching longer. See if a different style of editing or faster pace editing keeps people watching longer. And I know this isn't a simple search for the best keywords to help you grow to 10,000 subscribers. It takes work. But if you put in the time to do this, you will see a difference. Because if this was easy to grow on YouTube, everybody would be doing it. In fact, understanding your audience retention graphs are so important that we do this with our clients inside of our agency. For example, Virginia is a student of mine, and she's in a pretty competitive niche on YouTube around Instagram education. She came to us back in December with about 500 subscribers, and within three months, we're able to hit over 3,000 subscribers for her. Her channel's been monetized, and each month her subscriber rate continues to grow. So she's gone from getting 400 subscribers a month, 700 subscribers a month, to 900 subscribers a month and a completely competitive Instagram niche. How is she growing this fast? Because we here at the agency are putting in the work. We're reading the analytics, we're studying the audience retention graphs, and we're telling her how to level up her videos, how to level up her content because of the analytics that we are studying here in the agency. But what's even better than more subscribers? She's getting more and more sales every single month to her digital course, and that's what we love. Even more here is seeing our clients actually making more money because of the work we're putting in to help them grow their YouTube channel. So you guessed it. Your action step here is to Study those audience retention graphs, look at the best performing ones and try to replicate that. What do you need to do to your videos to keep people watching longer? Or maybe none of your audience retention graphs are that good. So maybe you need to to scrap it and totally try a new style of video. Maybe you try vlogging, maybe you try a different style of editing. But you need to do something to make those audience retention graphs better. And maybe you do need to upgrade your equipment. Now before you upgrade your camera, I would recommend upgrading to a microphone or a lighting first because that can make a difference with your quality of your camera. If you want to upgrade your camera for sure, but it's an easier upgrade if you do a mic or lighting first. The third thing you need to do is consistency. Now a few weeks ago I ran through 20 different initial video ideas for you, so I'll link to that up here. But you've got to be posting at least once a week here on YouTube to see growth. Not only is it helping you get data and analytics by getting videos up, but it's helping you figure out how to make better videos every single time. It's also building your content library, allowing more chances for people to find your content. And like I said, I'm not talking about doing multiple videos a week. Honestly, quality over quantity will win on YouTube. Case in fact, back in January and February I upped to two videos a week and my YouTube channel didn't grow any faster than in December when I post one video a week. So really focus on finding a way to stay consistent. Your action step here is to figure out a plan. Look at your calendar. Maybe every single Wednesday you record videos and every single Thursday you edit. I personally like to batch multiple videos. So today I'm filming five videos in one day. But I had to back that up and plan to batch my video game plan. So I researched and script these videos first so that today I could just focus on filming. So I know every last Wednesday of the month is my day to film videos. So I have the next month's videos content done. So look at your calendar and start to figure out what routine works for you. Our client Virginia, her routine works best if she knows she films every Tuesday. That's her filming day. She gets us the videos, we edit it and we upload it for that next Wednesday. Find what works for you. The next thing you need to do to hit 10,000 YouTube subscribers is self promote. Now the past couple of weeks I've talked a lot about how we promote our YouTube video. So I would check those videos out after this. But I want to talk about something a little bit different here in Self Promote and I want to talk about public relations pr. So what I mean by PR is finding ways to reach other people audiences as long as that audience aligns with you. So for example, think about podcasts that you could go on and talk to. Find podcasts that are reaching your target audience. For me, this is like Jessica's Speak to Scale podcast. Amy Porterfield's Marketing Made Easy Podcast Boss Project Strategy Hour podcast. These are the podcasts that I would want to reach out to in pitch to Speak their podcast. Then I could get in front of their audience to help me grow my subscribers. Right, because most podcast hosts are going to let you tell their audience how they can find out more about you. And you can tell them to go to your YouTube channel, thus helping you grow your channel. Another way to do this is with some partnerships. Maybe there is a brand or another influencer that has the same audience as you that you could do Instagram lives with or Facebook lives with. For example, I partner up with TubeBuddy and every time I go live on TubeBuddy, I see an increase in subscribers on my channel. So you really want to start thinking about outside the box as well. Not only promoting your content, but promoting yourself as well with pr. One last way to get some PR as well is online summits or what used to be in person conferences. I have actually found that online summits are great for growing my YouTube channel. I think since this online summit way of doing things helped me grow my channel quicker because people are online watching the training and they can easily go to a new tab and subscribe to my channel when I talk about it. Whereas conference conferences are great because you're reaching a lot of people. But we're usually buzzing around back when we could go to conferences and we tend to just forget to look that person up. So think about ways that you could start maybe speaking at conferences to also build your publicity so that leads into the action step, right? Think about a PR plan that you could have for your YouTube channel. Could you speak on podcasts? Could you speak at an online summit? Could you maybe guest star in somebody's live series or maybe do an Instagram story takeover with somebody with the same audience as you. The next thing is to think about playlists and series again. I went into a deep dive on this with my YouTube strategy video. I will link that up here. But you want to find ways you can get people to binge watch your content. How can you get people to watch multiple videos of yours? Back to back to back and series is a great way to do that. That's exactly what we're doing here on my channel. This entire month we've been talking about strategies and tactics to help you level up your YouTube strategy. This has hopefully been getting you excited. Come back every single Wednesday to watch this video and I'm hoping long term it gets people to one of these videos and then the end screen or the additional videos I'm talking about gets people to watch video after video after video. Because let's say I get somebody to watch this particular video and then they watch four more videos of mine. YouTube's actually going to push this video in the algorithm more because they know people are going to click on it and watch four more videos. That's what they've seen, right? If you can get people to binge watch. And for me, I've just found it easier to think about Playlist as a video series. And we're already planning what our series is going to be next month as well. So your action step here is to think about how can you create a three, four or five part series that you could then turn into a playlist or a compilation video to get people to binge watch your content. That's the key here to growing to 10,000 subscribers. Now this last one, like I said, is the most important of all of these. All of these will help, but not if you're focusing on this one. And it's the YouTube trifecta. I've talked about this before on my channel, but the YouTube trifecta are the three major metrics that matter in growing your YouTube channel, and that is your click through rates, your audience retention, and your end screen clicks. Everything that I talked about earlier is what's going to help you focus on these YouTube trifecta pieces. With the click through rate, you need to be making sure your thumbnail and your title are getting people to click. You need to make sure every single video that you put out, you're getting a better click through rate and a better click through rate. Compete with yourself. Or you can shoot for a 5% click through rate and go up from there. Because it doesn't matter how great your content is, if people aren't clicking on it, they're never going to see your content. That second piece, audience retention, we've talked about it a lot the past couple of weeks. You need to focus on getting people to watch to the end so that they can get to that third piece. Your end screen click through rate, which I just talked about in the previous step. Right. Your binge ability, your binge worthy channel. If you can get people to the last 20 seconds and you can add an end and tell people to watch that video next, you're going to see a snowball of growth. I've seen channels that I've worked with have a 10 or more percent end screen click through rate that skyrocketed their channel growth. In fact, one of the videos that a client has a 10% end screen click through rate has over a million views on it because that video hit the YouTube trifecta. So that video got pushed to even more people. The algorithm knew if that video was shown to somebody, they were gonna click on it, they were gonna watch the end and they were gonna watch another video. That's why this YouTube trifecta is critical to hitting 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. You need to realize when you're starting at zero, you need to be true to yourself. You're getting on a platform that may already be saturated and you're trying to grab a new audience and bring them into your world. So it's gonna take a little bit for them to be convinced that you're the place to be or you're the channel to subscribe to. So as you start creating more content, those people are going to see you again and again and again. And it's going to take some time for them to say, wow, this person is creating consistent content. It's really good. It's helped me before and I'm going to subscribe now. So just because you post one video, it does not mean somebody's going to know, like and trust you. You've got to prove to them that you're going to consistently show up and consistently give good content. Remembering that even for me when I got started, because I thought I was all about the numbers. Subscribers, Subscribers. Subscribers is going to take you a little bit to build that trust. And you need to accept that and not use subscriber numbers as whether you're successful or not on YouTube. That is a huge thing that I would do if I was starting at zero again. Look at the other metrics that matter and not necessarily the subscriber number. Beyond that, the first thing that I would do is research. So you need to really determine what your channel is going to be known for. You can't just come into the YouTube world and be an Instagram expert or a cooking channel or a DIY channel. You need to be very specific in who you are creating the content for the more specific you are for that specific viewer, the more YouTube can figure out who to put your content in front of. For example, a student of mine inside of Video Strategy Academy came to me with her channel where she was creating money saving TikTok tips. Pretty saturated, hard to break out. So when we did the research and we dove into what her audience was looking for, she niche down or she went down the lane of frugal tips or frugality tips and she was able to get 1 million views in less than five months with a channel. It came to Video Strategy Academy with about 200 subscribers now, over a million views and over 20,000 subscribers in five months. So that's the important to really dive into your research and figure out who your channel is going to be targeting. You can't just be somebody for everyone. Okay. Even if you're a cooking channel, what type of cooking? I'm going to be looking for cooking channels that are going to help me learn recipes that my kids are going to like because I don't want to create more than one meal. So are you going to be creating kid friendly meals? Are you going to be creating large family meals? Are you going to be creating solo people meals? Right. These are all different types of channels that you could dive into. Are you going to be doing keto friendly vegan plant based paleo? Right. You need to know who your ideal audience is so you can create the right content for them. And that's all with researching. Once you've researched and you've got some ideas, which I talk about in nauseum here on my channel, make sure you subscribe and I will link to a couple videos up here and in the description box, all about finding video ideas and researching your video ideas in detail. But next I want to talk about what I would do if I was starting with zero when it comes to titles and thumbnails. The YouTube world has changed a lot within the past five years that I've been here. And you need need to spend time on your titles and your thumbnails because it doesn't matter how great your content is, if nobody's clicking on it, they're not going to see it. And so what I always like to do is determine what my title and thumbnail is going to be before I even turn my camera on to record my content. That way I can be sure that my hook ties in with my title. So if somebody clicks on it, they are hooked in and they continue watching. And I want to make sure I'm getting the Best thumbnail when I'm filming and I have my hair and makeup done because I don't look like this on most days. So I need to make sure I'm getting my thumbnail as well. And that text on your thumbnail should not just be the title of your video repeated in text. You want to use the text on your thumbnail. Minimally. 3 to 5 words needs to grab people's attention. Start to hook them into a story. You continue to tell that story with the title and then you continue that story in with the hook of your video. 100%. This is not an easy process, but it is a must, especially if you're starting with 0 views and 0 subscribers. You've got to find a way to get people to want to click on your video. Because if you're putting content out and people aren't clicking on it when YouTube shows it to people, it's going to get buried under the billions of videos on YouTube. So this is why it's so important in a critical phase when you're getting started is really think through your titles and thumbnails. Because if you don't get the click with your title and thumbnail, you're not going to get the watch time. Which leads into the next thing that I would do if I was starting at zero. Be a friend to the YouTube algorithm and not necessarily watch subscribers, but watch your watch time, your traffic sources and your audience retention. Remember I said I wouldn't focus on subscribers so much if I was getting started Again, these are things that I would look at instead. When you upload your video, it will take some time. It will say processing. And that means YouTube is going through your video to figure out what you are saying. YouTube can understand what you are saying. That even if you put 0 tags on your video, YouTube will still know where to categorize you. Then the algorithm will try to find people who have watched that type of content before. So let's say again, you're talking about Paleo meals for kids. YouTube is going to find people who have watched videos around Paleo Meals for Kids and serve your video maybe in suggested, maybe on the browse. And if your title and your thumbnail doesn't get the click, that's bad, right? YouTube is going to put you out. YouTube is going to do some promoting. So let's say you get the click, then what YouTube is going to say, are people watching this video? So that first metric is click through rate. Did people click on that video? YouTube put it in front of people. Did people click on it? Yes. Okay, next step. Are people watching it? How good is your content? Are people getting to the end? Because you need to understand the longer people watch your video, the more ads YouTube can play on that video. Thus the more money YouTube can makes. So YouTube will push your content if people click on it and if people watch it to the end because they're going to make more money on your content. YouTube also wants to ensure it's good content by engagement. So are people commenting? Are people liking? Are people sharing it? These are all things that you should think about when you are writing your video game plan. Include calls to action or get people to engage with your content as well. Again, I didn't do this enough when I first got started. I didn't pursue until enough commenting, asking questions and really looking at YouTube as a social media platform, kind of like Instagram. So that's what I would do differently now too if I was starting with zero. Find ways to engage with your community in the comments. Because again, if people are engaging and people are watching to the end, this is sending signals to YouTube that this is good content. We should push it to more people. I like to think of it as a game of Mario Brothers, right? Remember when you went down that green tube and you collected all those gold coins? Are people clicking on your video great gold coins? Are people watching your video to the end? Great gold coins? Are people commenting? Are people liking great. All gold coins to make your video more valuable. And YouTube's gonna push it to more people. Let me know if that makes sense. Leave me any questions you're having about the whole YouTube algorithm down in the comments because I really want you to understand how this process works. The YouTube algorithm gets a bad rap that it's all about keywords and it's all about search, but when in reality it's all about God quality content. So the next thing that I would do if I was starting with zero views and zero subscribers is do about six to eight test videos. What do I mean by test videos? So you want to figure out first of all what content you're really excited to talk about and second of all what content your audience is going to be interested in watching, right? And kind of third is what content is YouTube going to pick up? So obviously you're going to be falling into a niche, right? And so don't get get so wrapped up on the specific keywords and just do about six test videos. Just put videos up that you're excited to create and look at the data from there. You can look at the search terms that are driving you traffic and kind of hone in on a strategy. But I really recommend you just getting some videos out and looking at the data. This is going to help you create better thumbnails. This is going to help you create better videos that people are watching longer. I think what I did is I didn't have enough depth of my content. Yes, I dove into YouTube and how to use YouTube, but there are other topics around YouTube that I should have talked about. So I kind of got held into this particular box and I didn't necessarily share more of my story. So people came to my channel, people watched my content and then they left. They just came for the content and left. I didn't build that relationship with them. So they wanted to subscribe and come back again and again and again. And so when you are thinking about those six videos, I would also think about about sharing more stories about yourself because the more you can make a connection with your audience than just giving amazing content like how to content that they come and leave for, you've gotta make that connection and build those relationships. The next thing that I would've done is think about series that I could create. This makes people excited to come back for the next one in the series. Or for you to create an entire playlist to get people to binge watch your content. But thinking about, you know, every first of the month is a month mistakes series where you share mistakes or every first of the month is a new dessert video, right? What is a series that you can have on your channel that people are really excited about having. And then again you can make a playlist so they can watch it back to back to back to back. Kind of like on Netflix when a new season comes out, right? Or like a mini course. So if I was going to do a channel on paleo recipes and I don't know where this is coming from just out of my head, but if I was going to do a channel on Paleo recipes, recipes, maybe I would do a breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack using sweet potatoes. I don't know. Again, just throwing this out there. If somebody's got a lot of sweet potatoes or they're a fan of sweet potatoes, they know that you have a breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks on sweet potatoes. Then you can put it into a playlist and say something like Paleo recipes with sweet potatoes. Obviously not super enticing, but you get the point how you can create this kind of binge able videos that people want to watch back to. Remember, the longer people watch your Videos. The more videos of your channel that people watch, the more valuable your channel becomes to YouTube. And YouTube's gonna do all the promoting for you if you just play their game right. I got two more things that I would do if I was starting a YouTube channel at zero. Before I jump into them, let me know if you're starting your YouTube channel what it is about. Let me know in the comments what your YouTube channel is about. Whether you're getting started with zero or maybe you're at 10,000 subscribers. I'd love to hear what kind of channels you all have. Next thing that I would do is study my analytics. We've talked a lot about analytics here today. But when I got started, I didn't even look at that. I consider myself not a numbers person, so I just felt like it wasn't important. I didn't want to learn it. But then once I dove into it and I started to realize YouTube's giving me the answer to success, I really need to understand this. So you need to take time every single month to look at your analytics when you are getting started. Even though it may be a little bit of data is still some data to work on. Remember, you want to be looking at things that your click through. Rate how well your title and your thumbnail are getting people to click on your videos. How long are people watching your videos with your audience retention graph, why are people leaving your videos studying that? So you can make better content looking at keywords that are driving traffic to your videos. Can you create more content around those keywords? Looking at suggested videos driving traffic to your content? Is that a different channel? What kind of content is that channel making? Right? If you can take the time to look at your analytics every single month, I promise you it will be a lot easier and you'll grow a lot faster if you do this. Okay. This is the one thing where I promise you you can grow faster if you look at your numbers. And if I was Getting started with 0 subscribers and 0 views, I would get over myself. So when I got started on YouTube, I was so worried about everything being perfect. If I was starting over, I would just let my personality out. When I first created this couple videos, I felt and pretty much looked like a robot and I wasn't myself. It took a while until I got to the point where I could talk with my hands like this and wear the pink lipstick and talk to you more like we are friends at a coffee shop. That's what people are going to connect with. People are going to connect with people that feel real, that feel like they could be friends with outside of this YouTube world. And so I would just. Just kind of get out of your head and worry about everything being perfect and just try to be you. I will have a dance party before I turn my camera on so I can feel good about myself and just think about somebody on the other end. I'm thinking about you and how this content is really going to help you, how it's going to make a connection. And so if I was Getting started with 0 views and 0 subscribers again, I would try to let my personality out, not try to copy somebody else, but really let. Let who I am as a person get through that lens somehow so you could feel connected with me. And I've been really working on this this past year. It's not an easy one to do and it's taken me a long time, but it. I would say it's the secret sauce to growing a YouTube channel that a lot of people don't necessarily talk about. You can study your numbers and your analytics all you want, but if you aren't showing up as you, you're not making that connection with that viewer that wants to come back and watch you again and again and who wants. Wants to support you, it is going to take time, consistency, and plenty of practice to see your YouTube channel grow. There may be videos that you post that are flops. I still to this day have videos that I think are going to be awesome and they totally flop. Don't worry, that's normal. Just stick with it. Come back every single week. Show up for your audience, even if it's just one subscriber, that's one person giving time in their day to you to watch your content. And I promise you, if you keep showing up, if you keep practicing, if you keep looking at your analytics, you're going to show up stronger and stronger every single week. I just wrapped up shooting four YouTube videos this morning. It's actually a Saturday morning. I had planned to film on a Wednesday, which are my filming days, but there happened to be construction work right outside this window, so I had to shift my schedule around. Now that I've shot four YouTube videos today, I am done with my content for the month. Month. But maybe you're wondering, Trina, what does your setup look like? How do you do it? How do you get those videos done? That's what I'm going to share with you right now. So one of the first things that you've got to do before you even have a filming day is have a Plan. Before I even sat down to film, I had a video title, I had a thumbnail idea, and I had my video game plan already written out. Whether you want to call it a script or not, I had my talking points that I wanted to do today. If you wait to do this, today's not going to go well. It's going to be a long time of scripting your content before you even film. So I know when I want to sit down here and film. That's all I want to focus on. So I want to make sure this is all done first. So let me show you real quick what a finished content plan looks like. Before I can sit down and record, you can see I have this all broken down into the content that I want to film. Inside of here, I have a checklist ready to go right here. I already did SEO research. I created a new Google Drive. You see the link is right there. I had decided on the opt in the title, the thumbnail text, and I wrote a script or the game plan, which you can see I have right up here. Now this week I did get a little bit more detail because I was running onto longer videos. But I highly recommend just having your intro planned out and then having key points you want to cover to make it go a lot smoother then what I do. Here in my Google Drive folder is where I will upload my video content. This is where I will send it to my video editor and she'll splice it all up. When we were done, we had it all loaded in. So we have the YouTube version, Pinterest pin version, Instagram TV, Instagram stories, a reel and a Facebook. Now I wouldn't have these done if I didn't have in here in my plan, when I record, shoot, Facebook ending shoot, Instagram story clips, Instagram TV episode and thumbnail picture. So having this all in place allows me to get more done today. Also having that checklist makes sure I get everything that I need because. Because I don't look like this on a normal day. In fact, I never look like this on a Saturday unless I have to shoot. So understand that is the very first step. And I did that on Wednesday. I, I tweaked it a bit because I couldn't film on Wednesday. So I focused on my content a little bit more and had that done on Wednesday. So today I could sit down and get this all done in three hours. So once you have that done, what does a filming day look like? So cats out of the bag. I am only filming from here up. So this looks professional. And I literally have sweatpants on down at the bottom. Also the truth on what goes on behind the scenes, because guess what, I'm not that neat of a person. I'm a planner, I'm an organizer in my business, but when it comes to my personal space, I just gotta get crap done when I have the time to do it. So you'll see that I have my water, I have coffee over here, a watering can for my plants, little post it notes. Literally it's a total mess. But you don't see that piece of it in the video because you're only seeing what's in frame. There's really no need to stress out on making sure everything looks perfect, perfect around you because as you can see, I've got a little bit of a mess. All right, let's talk about camera setup because right now I'm literally using my cell phone for this entire video. So you can see that you can get great videos with just your phone. But for my YouTube videos, right back here, I have the Canon EOS and I have a rode mic on top. And I will link to all of these in the description box below. If you've got a question, I also behind that, have a ring light. It's a diva ring light that I've had for years. Now let me take you around to the other side so I can show you why I. I use the lights that I do to get rid of the shadows that I would normally have. So we are out of the light now and I sit normally right there on that chair. Now these are two softbox lights. I'm trying to get the best angle for you. This one's a bit higher. That shoots down on my head when I am filming my YouTube videos. And then that one shoots towards the back, towards those plants because there gets a shadow back there. There's a shadow behind those plants. I can't get myself far away enough from the wall to eliminate those shadows because we're just in this small room. And so I have to have a light back there to try to eliminate as much of that shadow as possible. Again, you can see that I'm sitting in this chair right here. The camera is right in front of me. I have the ring light in front of me as well. And I do have this window, which can be a blessing or a curse. So if it's really bright out, I have to close these windows. The blinds were supposed to be blackout blinds. They are, aren't. But it does help get rid of some of that light. So it doesn't blast on that one side of my face, especially in the afternoon. There's no way I can film in the afternoon over here because the sun literally comes in from that window. So those are some of the things that I've done to negate and help make my lighting as consistent as possible. Let's talk about audio, because I know that can be a huge issue for a lot of people. So what I had to do in this particular office, as you can see, it's kind of hardwood tile. I had to one, get a rug right here, here to help soak up some of the echoing. Before that, I literally had blankets. You can see a blanket right here. And pillows that I laid down on the floor to help my audio. That's one of the easiest ways that you can fix it. You can grab blankets and pillows to help that problem. For me, I use this shotgun mic on my camera. You see right here? It's a rode shotgun mic. And again, I will link everything that I use down below in the description box. I have tested and tried a lot of things, and I really like to keep all of my tech on filming day as simple as possible. So I did use this little guy for a very long time. It's a Canon G7X, super easy, no fancy settings, and it got me through five years of content. Additionally, with microphones, I've used this, my blue Yeti mic, and had an external audio source. I then had to sync that external audio source with my video when I was editing. But this also gives very great audio, and I use it for podcast recordings when I teach online webinars Masterclass. And I've also used this Rode Lavalier mic as well for cell phones. I was thinking maybe I should use it for this video, but the clip that I have on a tripod, a handheld tripod I'm using right now covers the input. So I am just using the camera mic to see how well it does as a case study for all of you. Now I want to show you how I record the videos to my camera right here. So you can see my camera lens is right here and my computer is on to the side. I will pull up my video game plan. I will blow up the zoom on it so I can see the letters and the words a lot easier. And I'll have it here on my computer while I'm looking directly into my camera. So then what I will do is I will just deliver a couple lines at a time. We take this particular video that I talked about a couple weeks ago. This is actually last week's video. If you didn't watch the video on my social media plan for this year, I will link it above, because this is the video for that. But I look at my first line and then look at my camera, and I deliver that first line that I have written. So that is. YouTube is just a sliver of my social media plan. All right, I delivered that. I'm going to look back here. Okay, that's my next line. All right, I think I can pull two lines together. I don't like how that one ended, so I'm going to try to pull two together here real quick. YouTube is just a sliver of my social media plan after the last six years of growing my business. And now we are going to take our social media strategy up a notch. You see how I got that intro done just by looking at the script. Then I take a pause, I look back over here. Okay, the next line. And spoiler alert, it doesn't include clubhouse. Then we just have one large clip that my editor will go in and edit, and she can go into the sound waves and cut out all those places where I'm not talking, and that speeds up her process. Let's talk about something you're also wondering about. How do you change your look on these videos? When I first started batching, I literally would go to the bathroom, wipe off all of my makeup, and reapply it in a different way just to make it seem like I wasn't shooting the same day. You don't need to do that. All I do now is I do my hair and makeup and I grab three to four shirts. In fact, if you watch last week's video, I'm wearing the same shirt because I just wanted to grab my phone here and really share with you an authentic way of what it's like to film. And I figured it would just be easy to flow right into that video to this particular video without even making any wardrobe change. And honestly, people aren't gonna notice. Yes. If you do every single video in the same outfit, it may be noticeable, but, I mean, Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck. Mark Zuckerberg wears the same hoodie. Right. It's becoming more and more that people don't even care what you're wearing. Like when you had to worry about repeating outfits. So not True here on YouTube. Here's one more critical step to think about when you are filming. So this is a filming day. This is one more thing that I would think about, making sure you get your thumbnails so I will turn my camera, which is right here on self timer and just take multiple poses that I can use on my thumbnail on Instagram however I need to. And I will also shoot my, my Instagram stories today as well. So as soon as I'm done recording this video, I'm going to grab my phone, pull up stories, I'm going to talk about why people should watch this particular video and I'm going to save those stories until this video is live. So if you want to see what those stories look like, head on over to my Instagram Trina and you can see what I meant by also filming your Instagram stories. I love batching Instagram stories because that means when this video goes live on a Wednesday, I I don't even have to worry about being done up to beyond stories because I've already shot them and I know we can get wrapped up in making sure everything looks perfect and the background is perfect and it's quiet. I'll tell you right now, my kids are downstairs. I had to film today. Today's the only day I need a video for next week. So my challenge for you is to just let go of all the excuses that you're having and just use the space that you have. I'm already noticing in this particular angle there is a handle to my water and a weird angle of that light. But I wanted this video to be as raw and authentic as possible to show you what it's really like behind the scenes of filming. Because it's not all glamorous, it's not all perfect. I just do what I need to do. I clean up the space I need to clean up to get these videos shot, to get them to you, to help you out, to help you achieve your goals. Now I challenge you right now. If you want to Hear my exact YouTube strategy for 2021, hit subscribe because that video is dropping next week. Some of the videos that I'm filming here today and I'm going to share with you everything that I'm doing this year to grow my YouTube channel and the same things that I do to grow my clients channels as well. Yeah, you're going to get the secrets to the strategies we use with our high level agency clients. You're not going to want to miss it. So again, make sure you hit that subscribe button right now because it's coming out next week. And until then, make sure you watch one of these videos that on your screen. Right now here on my channel I'm Talking mostly about YouTube and creating YouTube videos that help you grow your business. These videos on your screen right now will definitely help you get on your way to implementing video and YouTube video into your content strategy. Until I release next week's video. See you then.