Very First YouTube Video? This Is Everything I Would Do

Your first YouTube video will no doubt be the hardest one you ever create. In fact, if I know you watching this video right now, you've probably been researching YouTube for far too long, trying to figure it all out and not taking action just yet. Even though you've probably watched all the videos, right? You might have already started planning out your strategy, and you have plenty of video ideas to create, but you still haven't taken that step to actually film and publish that first YouTube video. In this video, I'm gonna walk you through everything I would do if I was publishing my very first YouTube video. Everything from what my first YouTube video would be to how I would even record my first YouTube video if I was getting started. Sound like your cup of tea. Hit that like button and let's get started. Let's first talk about that first video. What should the topic be? Whether you have lots of ideas and you're not even sure which one to pick, or you have no ideas at all. Let me actually show the process I go through for picking which one would be the best one for me. So let's go over to my computer and I'll show you how I do that. First thing I'm going to use is YouTube search. So I'm going to take this video, for example. First video idea. I'm going to go video ideas. You can see video ideas for YouTube for beginners that will get views without showing your face. These are all video topics or phrases people are searching on YouTube. So if we go to video ideas without showing your face, then the next thing I'm looking for is a video that's getting more views than that channel has subscribers. Now, the one way to figure out if that channel has more views on a video than subscribers. As you can see, this is showing up first in my results. Has 20k views. If we go to this channel, we can see that they have 71,000 subscribers. So it's not necessarily a breakout video. This one has 228,000 views. If we look at make money, Matt, I know he has a lot of subscribers, so 154 subscribers. So. So that's a bit of a breakout video there. 15 video ideas to make money without showing your face. All right, that's a topic that I'm thinking about potentially doing. It takes a different spin on the video than just without showing your face is talking about video ideas to make money without showing your face. Again, you can continue to scroll down here and really find videos that are breaking out. So 322,000 views. This channel has only 3,000 subscribers. Again, that's a great thing to look at. 10 YouTube channel ideas without showing your face. Now, maybe I could turn this into an entire series and talk about channel ideas. Now, if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty, you can also use TubeBuddy. And so what I'm going to do is come into my tubebuddy extension and I'm going to go to the keyword explorer and do video ideas. All right, now we're just taking this broad topic and we can see that the overall score is fair. It says the score above is specific to my channel. All right? So it's taking into consideration my particular channel and how it performs, and it's still fair. You can see that the competition is poor because there's a lot of competition out there for that. A lot of these videos that are out there, they're optimized really well. There's over 128,000 monthly searches for video ideas and over 152 million videos in the search result for that. That's why I want to get just a little bit more detailed instead of this big, broad idea. So you can also come over here in TubeBuddy to video searches or video topics is a great way that I like to nail down or dig into a more specific topic. So if we go to that without showing your face idea, you can see this is a video search. Video ideas without showing your face. And we can see how this overall score does since we. A little bit more detailed. Right? It's a very specific type of video. You can see the score definitely went up. Now, I could think of video ideas forever inside of TubeBuddy here, because what I will do is I will just look at these suggested. I can look at web searches. I can look at common tags down here as well to really help me spin more ideas to even make this an entire series. So this is one great place to start coming up with ideas and then validating which ideas are good. Good, right? Video ideas was too broad. So we narrowed it down just a little bit to video ideas without showing your face. And that's kind of the direction that we need to go or even the one that we saw here, video ideas to make money without showing your face. Now that you know what your video is going to be or you have a rough idea of what the topic or the title is going to be, I want to share with you what you should say in your YouTube video, because this tends to be a huge mistake. I see with people Getting started on YouTube now, when it comes to opening your videos, what I don't want you to do is to say, hey, welcome to my channel, or to have some kind of graphic intro with your logo and some music playing. You have three to five seconds to grab a viewer's attention. So you really got to do something in those three to five seconds to keep people watching. So you'll notice back at the beginning of my video, I opened it with a hook or speaking directly to you. So I highly recommend when you are planning your video, whether you are scripting or what we like to call here on Team Trina Little, we call it our video game plan, you really need to open your video with a way that intrigues that viewer. Whether it's a hook, a statistic, a story, right? You need to grab that person's attention to make them want to keep watching. Also, you want to make sure that that hook somehow ties into that title in your thumbnail because the reason they are watching that hook is because your title and your thumbnail got them to click on it. So you need to make sure these all fit together. That's the first thing that I would do. I would make sure you have this 10 to 15 second hook and that's really going to get them excited to keep watching your video. Then you're going to roll into introducing yourself very quickly. Okay, I'm talking five to eight seconds of a brief intro and what you're all about. If you watched my intro, I said, I'm Shreena, I'm a YouTube strategist and the value proposition of my channel here is to help you grow a business you love without burning out. You got to keep it really short. You need to get to that content piece quickly. Now you're about 30 seconds into your video. You're your hook and your intro. Now you need to get to that content. The best way to do this on YouTube is to share it in bite sized pieces. I want you to think as you're planning out your video, how can this viewer get a win at the end of this video? Recently, I did a video on how to create a thumbnail. The whole goal of that video was to break down the steps that I go through to create a thumbnail so that by the end of the video, you have a thumbnail. Now I get asked this question all, all the time from my students and my agency clients. How long should that video be? Honestly, I never time how long these videos are going to be. Sometimes I send them over to my editor, Annabelle, and she comes back with a 17 minute video and I say, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry you had to edit that, but I just have in my game plan exactly what I want to share because I know what the goal of the video is going to be for the viewer. So there's no right or wrong answer for how long your very first video should be. Just make sure it is full of value and by the end of that video your viewer is able to achieve a goal, a result, something that you pitch to them in the hook or the title. The last part of what you should be saying in your video is super important. Listen loudly here. I don't want you to let them know your video is over. So if you're going through five steps and you get to that fifth step, don't say inclusion or in summary or I'm done. I need you to have a strong call to action. Now, your call to action could be to two different places. One, if your goal is to grow a YouTube channel, I would highly recommend you tell them to subscribe or if you have content on your YouTube channel to watch another video that makes sense for them to watch. So again, if I'm talking about that YouTube thumbnail video that I did, I had a call to action to watch the channel banner tutorial because it walked through the same process only creating a channel banner. If I know somebody is watching you a canva tutorial on how to create a thumbnail, it probably makes sense for them to then watch the channel banner tutorial. Okay, think about when you're creating your video game plan, what video you could send them to Next, if you have a video and if you want to send them to your opt in or your freebie or your website, you need to give them a clear reason why. I may say something like, if you want to see how I create a month's worth of video content, I've got a free workshop for you. You can click the link down in the description box to sign up and I will send you the link to watch that training. They hear that before they even realize your video is over. So you're more likely to increase your click through rate. The whole purpose in creating YouTube content is probably going to be for you to grow a YouTube channel or to get more leads to your business. Now that you know what your video is going to be, you know what to say in it. Let's talk about setup because this is another highly popular question that I get. And what should your setup be? Look, it's really important to keep your setup simple. You don't need to go out and buy a fancy dslr. You don't need to go out and buy all these studio lights. Honestly, you can get started with your phone. Seriously, your camera on your phone is just as good as any other camera that you might have. And people honestly aren't going to even tell if you're shooting on your camera or on your phone. So make it super simple. Use your phone if you have a webcam. I have this Logitech Stick C920 that if I'm in a pinch, my camera battery is dead. I left it in my car. My husband took the car. True story. This is great too. I actually shoot all of my video trainings with a webcam. So use what you have and make the equipment super simple. I want to take you vlog style real quick and take my camera off my tripod so you can see how simple I keep my setup. Now I am filming on a Canon. I'll have my video editor pop in a picture of that. And it took me five years to even upgrade to this Canon camera. Prior to this fancier camera. I kept it super simple with this point and shoot Canon G7X. I like it because it has a flip up screen. I could put this on the tripod and see exactly what was in frame so that you're not seeing the dirty dishes over there. But this was a couple hundred dollars whereas the camera I'm using now was a little bit more. Plus I can switch out the lenses so you don't need to start at the top of the tier here. It gets too confusing, it gets too overwhelming. Use your phone, use your webcam or get a point and shoot camera which is really great if you have too kids too because this is super light and small to throw in your purse. Now let's go on a field trip. Okay, so my camera will sit on this piece right here. My ring light shines right into my seat. I do have carpeting down here because the floor is like a tile floor and it echoes a lot. And you can see I got trash. I'm not clean outside of my screens. I throw down blankets as well to really help my audio. And this ring light is literally the only light that I'm using right now. I get a lot of questions about the background. What I've done is literally this stuff is things that I use on a daily basis. So I have a calendar that I'm currently using for the new year. I've just got some fairy lights because I like to make it look decorative in here. But it Also gives some dimension to my backdrop. I love Paris. My goal is to get back to Paris. It's on my bucket list. So that's why I have the Eiffel Tower over there. I have my old camera back there to literally show as reference anytime that I need to. A little quote to keep it simple. And then some of my favorite business books and a letter board if that's what it is. So there's no real secret to what should be in your background. Just let it show your personality. I recently painted this room blue. It was gray before, and since my skin is very pale, the gray just wasn't a friend to my skin color. So we painted it blue and now I can really pop in it. So you could think about that. Other options instead of painting an entire room is there's photography paper that you can buy on Amazon. It's a big roll that you could just put up against the wall. If you're working in your kitchen or your living room and you don't want to clean up the living room mess, just throw it all behind kind of that drop paper that you could get on Amazon. Now, once your equipment is set up, I will sit here and film more than one video. I'm a busy mom of two. Like I said, I've got an agency of clients to run and students that I help as well inside of my program Video Strategy Academy. So I don't always look like this every single day. So when I do take the time to do my hair and makeup, I'm film than one video. And I keep that all organized in a tool called asana. I keep my video game plan in there so I can literally just look over here at my script and know exactly what to say when I am filming. Keep in mind when you are filming that the camera will suck energy out of you. So you may seem like you're a little bit more animated than normal, but that's okay because it looks better on the other end to the person. I do like to jam out to some music to get my energy flowing so that I can show up here on camera and kind of turn the volume up a little bit on my personality so that when it gets to you on the other end of the camera, I don't look so boring. One more thing I want to talk about when you are filming is thinking about getting your thumbnail photos. So your thumbnail photos are literally your marketing material for your videos. And if you don't create a custom thumbnail for your videos, it's going to be very hard for your videos to stand out on YouTube and to get clicked on. So there's really no point in creating good content if you can't get people to click on them. So I have a checklist of everything that I need to do when I'm filming my videos and one of those things is to get thumbnail photos. And all I do to get these thumbnail photos is I will set my camera on self timer and just take a couple different photos of myself. Nothing super fancy. I will look on YouTube sometimes to get inspiration. I like to look at Amy Landino or Sunny lenarduzzi or any of the cool millennial lifestyle channels to see kind of how they're posing. And then I'll just sit here and take a couple different photos like and try to pick the best one that I like. But it's really important to get this thumbnail because it is so hard to grab a still image from a video. Whether you are making like a weird face or your hands are moving, it's really easy if you can just remember to take these photos after every time you film a video. Now, if you want to continue setting up your YouTube channel for success, I have a YouTube roadmap. It's over 15 pages of steps to make sure your channel is set up. Channel banner ideas, channel keywords, about section, all of these little nuances to get your channel set up for success. I'm going to link to that roadmap on your screen right now and it'll be down in the description box. Once you grab that roadmap, click the video that's on your screen right now because it's going to walk you through how to create a professional looking channel banner. Because I know you and you want your YouTube channel to look just as professional as your brand. And that tutorial is going to show you how to do that for your channel banner. I'll see you over there.