You MUST DO THIS Before Starting a YouTube Channel

If you're ready to start creating videos for YouTube, but you want to make sure when you do, you're doing everything right. Or maybe You've been on YouTube for a little bit and it just seems like nothing is working to grow your channel. I'm going to share with you today the first things that you need to do before Getting started on YouTube. Welcome back to Tips with Trena where I help you do YouTube better. And the best way to do YouTube better is to know what you need to do have in place before you even get started on YouTube. So I'm going to walk through a couple of those things here today. Again, this is going to work with whether you're a newbie to YouTube or you've been on YouTube for a little bit, but not doing it strategically, these are the things that you need to do now to have success on YouTube in 2019. I have spent a lot of my time in the past two years helping businesses and YouTubers create a YouTube strategy that has skyrocketed not only their YouTube success, but but also their business success. And I'm here to give you those secrets. The first one is you have to have a plan of attack before you get started. I talked about this in a previous video where I walk through how to start a YouTube channel from scratch. I'll link that video down below. But without having a clear plan for YouTube, just throwing up a video on YouTube is basically like throwing spaghetti at a wall. It's probably not going to stop with a clear YouTube strategy. First of all, you're going to be playing nice with YouTube so that they start suggesting more of your videos. And second, you're not going to be stressing over shooting a video and getting it out or not being consistent on YouTube, which is critical by sitting down before you even get started and creating a plan of attack, creating a list of videos, a playlist, a strategy of videos. This is really going to help you be successful on YouTube from the start. Basically getting on YouTube without a plan is like going on a road trip with no idea where you're going, you're not sure which turn to take, how long to drive that day, how far to go in a day. And so it just gets very overwhelming and makes you kind of just stay where you are. So these are the things you need to think about before you start filming your videos. This process is really going to help you figure out what kind of content to create to make sure you stand out on YouTube so more people come to watch your videos. The first thing you need to decide is, what is your value? What is your value proposition? So what that means is what do you propose to provide value to? The thing is, we are very selfish people nowadays and we don't care who you are. We're jumping on YouTube. We're searching on YouTube because we have a problem we want to be solved. We whether that's to be entertained, whether it's to be taught how to use foundation or curl your hair, or whether it's how to create a YouTube strategy, there is a pain point we want solved and we want you to do it for us. So what value are you going to serve up to your audience? What are you going to be known for? The more you can think about what your value is, the more likely the people who do find you are going to recommend and share your content to more people who are looking for the type of content that you're creating. Trust me, if you want to stand out on YouTube, which is quickly growing and hundreds of thousands of hours are uploaded every single day, by clearly understanding your value proposition, that is the first way you are going to stand out. The next thing you want to do is have clear branding. What I mean by branding is, yes, the similar colors and fonts across your channel, but there are some other things I want to talk about as well. What I want to talk about when it comes to branding is it needs to be easy for people to recognize your videos. So when you start putting all different kinds of colors and fonts on your thumbnails and your channel banner and in your video, it becomes kind of confusing. So your content doesn't stand out. If somebody watches one of your videos and was like, wow, I really like Trina's video where she talked about how to grow a YouTube channel from scratch. If I didn't have that pink color or that similar way, I'm creating thumbnails. And it's going to be a lot harder for them to find more content from me if they didn't subscribe. Whereas if they see that pop a pink and that same kind of thumbnail format, they're going to recognize more of my content and say, oh yeah, I watched her one video. I really liked it. I'm going to watch this one too. That's going to help you get not only more views on your videos, but it's going to help you convert those viewers into subscribers. And if you're a business, help you convert those subscribers. Subscribers into paying clients or customers. So you just want to have a consistent brand experience on your channel. Again with your channel. Banner. It should also look similar to your thumbnail. So if they go to your channel, they see it all ties together and makes sense. The quickest way to make this easy and doable for you is to go into a program like Canva and create three or four thumbnail templates. Just go in, add some text. I'll show you how I do it here in a second. But, but if you can have three or four templates that you use interchangeably throughout your video, all you have to change when you upload a new video is that photo that you can take while you're filming. So let me show you how I create my thumbnail templates. So you'll see these are edible templates. So every time I create a new video, I can pop my picture in here. So if I want to grab this picture and pop it right in there, I can edit this and then I just change the title here. Or maybe I want to use this template right here, but we need a different style photo. So maybe we grab this photo but it needs to be on the other side because I want my text here so we can flip it horizontally and there it's on that side and I can make this text. You know, my, my colors that I, my brand colors that I have. All right. That's why I really like having pre made templates. Again, I have four of these inside of Canva and that's something that I offer my members of YouTube for Creatives. They get these templates for free. Trust me, having these templates to fall back on are going to save you so much time. Now we're going to talk about strategy again. You need to have this strategy in place before you start posting your content. Because just posting a video here on YouTube isn't what people are doing. There is a clear strategic step science to it all. I like to use a tool called TubeBuddy. When I am starting to research topic ideas. What I'm looking for is, is this topic people are actually searching for. One of the biggest mistakes we have is sometimes getting too niche. Like we want to create this video, we think people are looking for it, but in reality we are wrapped up in our own vocabulary and how we talk about things that that's probably not what people are actually searching on YouTube and they don't know yet that that's what they need. So you need to go a little bit broader in that topic to make sure that people are actually looking for what you're creating. I'm going to show you here on TubeBuddy how I start to research and how I start to type in phrases and topic ideas to get a good video idea. Once you install TubeBuddy as a Google Chrome extension right up here, what I like to do is come in here to keyword explorer and this is where I'm going to start to figure out which topics are going to be best for me to create content on. So, so let's say for example, you're a photographer. Let's think about different video ideas that you could create for other photographers. So starting a photography now, what I am looking for in this score analysis is the number of searches per month. So starting a photography business that phrasing in YouTube is searched over 20,000 times. Now what if we went a little more niche and typed in starting a wedding photography business. Now this one is only searched 830 times. Meaning let's say you create a video about starting a wedding photography business, even if you got everybody who searched would only be 830views. That's a lot. But that really minimizes your reach compared to starting a photography business. Now the way you can really start differentiating your target audience is in that thumbnail. So, so even though you may have starting a photography business as your topic, you can show a bride in that thumbnail. So you can reach more people. Because someone may still be trying to start a wedding photography business, but may not actually be searching starting a wedding photography business. So when they search starting a photography business and they see your thumbnail with a bride on it, they're going to know that video is for them. So that's how you can start writing, really broadening your reach with your topic, but still talking to your target audience. Once I start to have all these ideas down, I like to put them in a tool called Trello. This is something else you need to have in place before you get started on YouTube. You have got to have a workflow in place because you don't want to upload your video, forget where it's at, or write a script and forget where it's at. You want to be very streamlined because you know you have other things to do in your business. What? So by having a workflow and having a process like I have in Trello, it lets me see, okay, this is the video. Now I am scripting it. Now I filmed it that I uploaded to Google Drive for my editor. So by having a workflow in place, it's going to make creating that strategy and getting videos up on YouTube a lot quicker. So definitely have some type of process in place. I Do have my workflow for sale. I'll link it down below if you want to grab mine. It's exactly what I use to get my videos from ideation, so brainstorming to publishing on YouTube. But whether you're doing this alone or you have a team, it's really important to have this system in place. Make sure you don't skip any important steps. Now that you have a system in place, you have your video ideas in place, is you got to script your videos. Now, I know scripting can seem like a lot of time or a waste of time for you, but it is very valuable here on YouTube. Reason being is you really want to open your videos with a hook. You want to be the first thing people see on your video when they click on it. And you need to give them a clear reason why they need to watch this video. If you aren't going to tell them how you're going to solve their pain point or how amazing your video is going to be, they aren't going to watch it. And you've wasted your time. When I'm crafting my script, I'm really focusing on what are the first sentences that I'm going to say in my video. Then I know the content, the flow of the content. I usually just put a couple bullet points so I know which steps I'm going through. And then the next piece that you really want to script is knowing where you're going to send your viewer at the end here on YouTube. What is important is to keep people watching YouTube. If one of your videos gets people to watch another video, YouTube is going to suggest that video to more people because they see that if they put video A in front of people, they're going to also watch video B that you recommend to them. And then if they watch video B and you get them to watch video C, they're going to recommend video A and B because they know that those videos are going to get people to watch more content. So clearly thinking about what video would it make sense for your viewers? Journey to take next. Okay, so we have all the video content ready to roll and it's time to film. This is crucial when it is filming time. You have got to film more than one video because look, I don't look like this every single day. I will do hair and makeup like this probably once, twice a month. And when I do, I'm shooting my videos. So I today am shooting around 10 videos because I've already planned them, script them, and I know exactly what I'm going to say, it takes a lot less time for me to set up all of this equipment to put on this makeup and shoot videos back to back than it would be for me to shoot a video this week and then do this all over again. Shoot a video next week. Really get the most out out of your time filming when you are doing it. That's why I say to really plan those videos. And really all you need to do when you're shooting content on a day like today is shoot four videos. That's one month's worth of content. So week one, you research your video ideas. Week two, you script your video ideas. Week three, you shoot those video, and week four, you edit them. That's one day a week for a month. All right, Just one day a week, and you will have consistent YouTube content. Now, if you clearly understand everything that you need to do to get started on YouTube and you're checking these things off your list to do, make sure you watch the video that's on your screen right now, because I'm going to walk you through how to get started on YouTube from scratch, even if you have zero views and zero subscribers. And it's a pretty epic training. So I want you to click on that video and I'll see you over there and walk you through that process.