YouTube Channel Reviews!

Hello everybody. I am getting set up here to make sure we are ready to go. I'm super excited to be doing channel reviews today. This is kind of the last thing I've got to check off my list of to do's before I'm officially in the holiday mode. So today is my last day of work here in the office and doing a YouTube live for you guys. The last thing that I have left to do. And so if you're new here to my channel, first of all, don't forget to go ahead and click that subscribe and hit the bell notification because I'm going to be doing more of these channel reviews in 2019. I'm going to be doing them on Wednesdays around 1pm and so for you to subscribe and hit the bell, you'll be notified then when I am live because I'm going to select people for channel reviews as soon as I go live. So go ahead. If you volunteer for a channel review, go ahead and type volunteer down in the comments section and we're going to get started here with the first channel review. I love doing these because I love helping people figure out how to make their YouTube channel better. I feel like a lot of the times we get so stuck into what we're doing and we're just like, what the heck. I feel like I'm doing everything and nothing's working. And so I love doing these. And that's why I'm really planning to incorporate more of these in 2019. So I'm going to check and see. Okay, Carmen is ready for a channel review. And let's see, April as well. April gets my Hunger Games reference. So April and Carmen are volunteering as tribute. I love it. So why don't you guys go ahead and let me know where you're watching from so I can just get a general idea where everybody's at. I'm here in Pennsylvania. It's very sunny, but I have a feeling it's pretty darn cold out there. I'm going to be jumping out here later to do some last minute Christmas shopping and cookie ingredient shopping since today is my last day here in the office. Tomorrow a cookie baking day with my kids and my mom. And so what should be fun, I have a 2 and a 3 year old. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead get this party started. As we go through here, feel free to ask questions. Carmen and April. I see the comments, I see the chat box and so I can answer your questions as I go through these. So feel free to make this kind of two way conversation, even though you're typing. And we can make sure you can get the most out of this. Carmen is from Phoenix. Okay, I will be too jealous, but all right, I'm gonna go ahead and pull up. Let me just get your channel up here and organize the save. Hi, how are you? I'm so excited you're here. Los Angeles. 63. So kind of chilly for us. Oh, yeah, 63 is really cold, let me tell you. So I'm gonna go ahead and do April here first. So I'm going to her channel and then I will share my screen with you all here. I'm having a little bit of a difficulty here, April. And what in the heck is going on here? Go to channel. All right, we got it. And I'm gonna hit pause before she starts talking to me. It's funny. It's 63 degrees, so you think it's chilly. I mean, I'm from the east coast and so it's a little bit different here. When people say it's cold, I just think it's funny. Okay, so let me close out of that. Here is April's channel. Yes. A brand new channel. I love it. April, I love that you have so many things done here already for a brand new channel. I don't want you to get discouraged with a slow growth of a channel. I'm not sure. I haven't looked yet to see how long you've been doing this, but I see you have 33 subscribers and then you have 34 subscribers. I love the channel banner. Bringing the country life to the big city. I love that slogan. The one thing problem that I have. Hi, Whitney K. The one problem that I have with that, though, is what, what are you doing? Like, what value am I gonna have watching your channel? Like, what country life are you bringing to the big city? And a scan down here, it looks like you're doing some recipes. It also looks like you're doing some diy. So looks like we're a little bit all over the place. Great job with this. 99 views on here and 166 views. Oh, that is awesome. You are doing great with that, April. So I'm originally from Wisconsin and I've been doing this channel since July. That is amazing, April. So first things first. I'm loving the channel art, except I need a reason to subscribe. Like bringing the country life to the big city doesn't tell me why I'm going to subscribe. Are you going to be giving me Country Life recipes? What is the value for me to subscribe to here, potentially, I might know in this channel trailer. I haven't watched it, but it looks like joining me, bringing the country life to Los Angeles, making homemade foods, farmhouse furniture, crafts. Okay, again, I think that's a great start, April. But again, it doesn't really hone in on a specific niche. So a specific niche would be strictly farm style recipes or strictly DIY or strictly furniture. You've got to really hone in on that. One reason why people are going to come back to your channel. And so I think that's the one problem you need to solve right here is definitely what do you want to focus on? Because unfortunately, it can't be something for everybody or you end up being no 1 for everyone. All right, so that's what I would do here. First, as far as channel, I mean, thumbnails, there's no consistency and it's showing me. This is your thumbnail. Also. Super tiny writing right here. Super tiny writing right here as well. And it's covered by the timestamper. This writing is very dark and it blends in on my laptop, let alone on a mobile device. So I would think about what is your branding going to be? So you have amazing branding up here with this watercolor, black and tealish incorporate more of this color that your horse is down in these thumbnails. Maybe this border is this color as well. Maybe you have a little mark right here. So on my channel, I have like the pink triangle over here. That really stands out as my branding. But your thumbnails have really got to make it easy for people to know. This is April. And April is giving me farm style recipes even though she's living in the city like me. Maybe you open your video up shopping at, you know, Whole Foods or at some big city farmers market, and then you bring us into your kitchen and you share these homestyle farm style recipes even though you're in the city. So the two things I'm seeing here, April, are first, your channel trailer, your channel banner, and honing in on that value proposition. Um, also, April, as I'm going through here, let me know what questions you have. Okay, so that would be the first thing. The second thing is honing in on your channel art or your channel branding. So Michelle B. Over on Channel Notes likes to call it your channel vibe. And so for me, if I go up here to this little eyedropper, my brand colors are right here. So there's the pink that I use, there's the light pink that I use, there's the Gray that I use. And I use these color codes on everything that I create. Every thumbnail has either black, white, or that hot pink so that people can see it. Also, on my newer channel, I'll show you, for example, if we go over to YouTube on my newer channel, all my thumbnails are currently solid colors. So let me just show you real quick what that looks like so you can get an idea of how you are branding your channel. So you'll see over here on my new channel. Look at this. This is always a pink right here. This is always this teal over here. And we're doing a solid background right now. I've just been testing these. I'm trying to see what actually works. But you'll see, look how different these thumbnails stand out than, say, these thumbnails. These are from three years ago. Yes. I've abandoned this channel for a little bit, but you'll see this really stands out. Oh, that's a Trina thumbnail. That's why I want to come back to it. So that's something that we've been doing over here. And then on my tips channel, which we're on right now, you'll see that we have, you know, this pink with the pink hue in the background. I'm trying to minimize this solid color. I'm still trying to keep some of my personality in the background, so I think that's what you need to focus on. April is honing in on what is your branding going to be and keeping those thumbnails consistent. Again, I'm not able to watch any videos while we're on here, so I'm just able to give you a few insight from the outside looking in. I would also want you focus on your niche. Start setting up your playlist for value. Proposed playlist. So farmhouse decorations. Okay. Are you making farmhouse decorations? Are you hanging farmhouse decorations? Like, what value do I have to watch this playlist? April says I've been struggling with what to do with thumbnail. Great tips. Yeah. Just focusing on creating. So you'll see with us in my most recent videos that we have created. Let me get to a couple. Just a few thumbnails templates. So right now I haven't been doing any text, but when we do text, so we have, like the white text there and we have. You're seeing some of my private videos as well. These are some of the formats too. So the pink block and the white block, and then you're just cycling through all of these. Okay. I'm trying to get to some More there was some pink as well. So once you can create a couple templates, say in canva, it makes it a lot easier. Then the third thing, April for you would be really honing in on playlists that pitch your value proposition. So like farmhouse decorations, maybe aids five minute farmhouse decorations you can make this weekend. All right, that's gonna say, hey, this is great. I want to create some decorations this weekend. These videos are going to show me how to do it in five minutes. Perfect home style recipes. Okay, are these dinner? Are these breakfasts? Are these dessert? Are these snacks? How fast are they? How easy are they? Are they difficult? Like another idea for this would be easy dinner. Well, let's see. It looks like you have a lot of dessert. Ish. So easy dessert style, Easy home style dessert recipes you can make in an afternoon. See how that pitches more of a value. Somebody else want to click on a recipe that's going to take them all day to make. So if you can tell me I can make it in 30 minutes or less, that is much more valuable propose than home style recipes. How do I test thumbnails? Like try different ones and see what gets the most clicks. Yeah, for sure. So TubeBuddy allows you to test thumbnails as well. But one of the things that I do too is if you go into your YouTube studio beta, I'll show you real quick something that I talk a lot about in my group program. What I do is I go to analytics and the number that I'm looking for in analytics is over here on Reach Viewers and you're looking at impression click through rate. So out of almost 30,000 impressions, my videos were clicked 4.7 times. Now you can get more granular in here by going to the video and let's just go to last week's video and I'm going to analytics and you'll see Reach viewers, it had a 5% click through rate. All right, so that was just that solid background. Now if I go back to videos and we go to an older video, let's go to like a solid color background to show you why I switched. We go to this particular video and we go to analytics and we're gonna go on over once this gets going. To Reach Viewer, it had a 1.9% click through. So you see this solid background just wasn't working. And remember, it's not just your thumbnail, it's your thumbnail and your title combined. That's causing people to click. And so that's why I determined to change my thumbnails I just went through all of my thumbnails and realized that the more simple thumbnails were getting a higher click through rate. All right, so April, those are some of the first things I tell you to do. Definitely your value proposal, branding your thumbnails here and also coming up with playlists that propose that value as well. Do you have any videos on how best to use analytics? I check it, but I guess I don't really know exact. Yeah, I have a couple here on my channel. Let. If. Let's see. We can just go to. Can I get back to YouTube? So if you go to YouTube and you just search analytics, Trina, let's see what comes up. I did a couple analytics. Let's see. Yeah, so here I Talked about the YouTube Studio Beta. So what we were just looking at this video specifically talks a lot about that. This video also also analytics for YouTube. So I got quite a few here that I do talk about. So again, if you just search analytics, Trina Little, a couple of those videos should come up. All right, so let's stop sharing a second. All right. That was so much fun. April, I think your channel has a lot of great potential, but it's just focusing in on that niche that you really want to talk about once you can hone in on that niche. So like for example, on my. On my channel here, I'm focusing on using YouTube to grow a business. So most of my audience that came here first wanted to use YouTube to grow their business. And so then on my mom channel, it's focusing on organizing and simplifying. I'm not doing recipes. I'm not doing exercise routines. I'm focusing on scheduling and organizing things to make life a lot easier. Okay. So you can see I can start to niche that down. All right, so the next person was. Let me pull her up it. Carmen. Carmen, are you still here? Can I see Carmen? Hello. Hello. Hi. Brand records. Highways to grow. I love it. I love that you guys are here. Thanks for spending the day with me here today. I'm gonna jump into Carmen's channel, so I'm gonna go ahead and share. Got to love value prop. Hey, Shannon from Elite. Sharon from Elite Pro Mom. Yeah, Definitely organize to save. Check out those analytics. For sure. Elite mom planning will tell you she's in my group program that I hit very hard every single day on analytics. She can attest to that for sure. Let's jump into Carmen's channel here. Let me share my screen real quick and we'll start talking to. To Carmen. All right, so Carmen has tips on balcony gardening, succulents, and house plants. Wow, Carmen, perfect niche. I love this niche. You. This. I don't know how long you've been doing this. Carmen, let me know how long you've been doing this, but you've already got a good base of subscribers. I love that. This is so niche, you guys. This is a great topic for niching. Okay? She's talking about balcony gardening. She's not just talking about, like, any old gardening. Not, you know, landscaping, gardening, and shrubbery and vegetables. She's talking about balcony gardening, succulents, and houseplants. She's been doing it just over a year. This. This is amazing. So let's look at a few things we can do, Carmen, to make your channel better. So the first thing is I'm not subscribed to your channel yet, but I'm going to click it here soon because I kill all my succulents. And I would love to have some houseplants, but I kill them all. Yeah, living in an apartment is perfect. I don't even live in an apartment, but I prefer not to do outside gardening. And I would like to have some houseplants. So I'm definitely hitting subscribe here in a second. But what I want to show you is you've got to have some kind of channel trailer here when I come here. So, like, when I go to April's channel, her channel trailer plays automatically. And so what happens is, without a channel trailer, nothing's playing here automatically. And so this is kind of the second way to get people to subscribe to your channel. So you have this beautiful channel banner telling me exactly what you're doing. But I need you talking to me here, telling me what I'm gonna get. Like, every week, you give me tips on how not to kill your succulents and how to create a beautifully beautiful balcony garden. I need you telling me why I need to subscribe, to entice me to click some more. So for Carmen, for you, I would definitely do a channel trailer. And again, if you just go to YouTube.com and you do channel trailer Trina Little again, Because I know I did these a couple of times. Here's the top two that I did. This is my old one on my mom channel. See? I mean, on my. On my current channel. And so you can see how terrible it is. But these are some great videos to watch to create a channel trailer. Then what I would do is same for you. Focus in on creating thumbnails that stand out. I love the green. Obviously, that makes sense for you in gardening. She says yes. The channel trailer is on my to do list. Awesome. I'm just getting over the awkwardness of talking on camera. I love it. Carmen, I love that you are breaking out of your comfort zone and doing this. This is perfect. So I want to give you guys some tips on how to make better thumbnails. So Carmen here is talking about succulents, all right? So let's just type into YouTube succulents, all right? And look at this. These thumbnails, look at the ones that are standing out to you and the ones that seem a little bit messy, all right? This one is obviously standing out, all right, because it shows the succulents very clear, has clear writing, and it know and it just stands out. Right. Here's another great one too. It showcases the succulent. It has bold, large font. It stands out as well. Okay, so when you're struggling with what kind of thumbnails you can create, just go search your niche on YouTube and look what people are doing to make it stand out. All right, here's another great one. This is just an overhead shot right here of the succulents and just enough text so you can see Carmen with yours. Your text is kind of blending in. Maybe instead of this, maybe it's a closer up of a particular plant and then some block lettering. That really stands out because this kind of text, again, is blending in. It's not really standing out. And especially on mobile devices, which is where more than 50% of people watch their videos, this isn't going to stand out on mobile devices. And staying consistent. So here we have this color green. We have this color green. We have four different color greens here. You want to keep the green consistent so people, again, know that your channel similar to what I talked to April about. Hi, Ali. Welcome. All it does is putting some time in to create, say, four or five templates in Canva or PicMonkey and then just recycling through those. The first time you set up, those templates will be a little bit harder and take a little bit more time, but once they're set up, they're set up. So go ahead and subscribe to you Balcony and patio gardening, Succulent halls and care, House care. All right, I do like these. You're getting good. You're getting better at these value proposed titles. But what I want you to do is really pitch it to me. So let's say house plant care, tips and hauls. Let's separate these. You don't need to put Tips and hauls into one playlist. Because that's two different people that you're speaking to. Let's say how to keep house plants without killing them. Right? Because I know I would probably watch an entire series on that because I kill mine every single time. I've killed a cactus, I've killed succulents, I kill everything. So by I know people are also thinking in that process too. They're probably thinking, you know, I'm terrible at keeping plants alive. So if you can think about titles that are really going to tie in with people, how to keep Keep houseplants without killing them are my best tips for growing succulents in your home office or in your office. Those are the types of playlist titles that are going to get people to watch. All right, this is great. That's a great title. That's what I would really focus on for you, Carmen. I love the niche. I don't have to talk about the niche with you. Thumbnails definitely could be improved. Like I said, just go over to succulents. Let's just say succulent garden. You can also look at more thumbnails this way and see how people are highlighting them. Another thing that I like to do, a lot of the girls, the millennials, so to speak, that are doing YouTube are doing it really great. So they do a lot of my fitness routine and just getting some help from their thumbnails, like just getting inspiration. So you see they have a lot of the whites with the black text color. So not necessarily color for you, April and Jordan, but you can see how they're using color. You can see how they're using collages. You can also just get an idea of what those look like. Even doing my morning routine, so just waiting to get inspirations from thumbnails. I actually have my own board and look, I'm keeping track of thumbnails that I see that stand out here in my own board. You'll see I've used pulled this as a lot of inspiration in some recent videos. And down here are some just taking screenshots and keeping them here in a board so you can reference thumbnail ideas. One last thing I want to look at for you, Carmen, is I would potentially make this a little bit smaller. This just seems like a lot. It's not centered. If you could possibly tips on balcony gardening, maybe take succulents and houseplants under here. You just start to run this plants into this drawing right here. And so I would just maybe tighten that up or I Don't know. It just looks off centered to me. Okay, so I want to do some Q and A now for everybody. Go ahead and pop in your questions so I can answer them. Carmen, you're doing amazing. I love the niche. I love that you're honing in on that. You said, should I go back and change the thumbnails now or start from now on? So that depends on how much time you have. Carmen, if you don't have time, sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze, so to speak. To go back and fix all those thumbnails, I would start with your thumbnails moving forward and if you get a chance to go back. So if you have a couple videos you think should have did really well and they didn't, maybe updating those thumbnails. But just start focusing on thumbnails from here on out. And if you have time, going back and fixing those. Budget girl. So I'm going to be doing. She said, I love it if you do mine. I'm going to be doing channel reviews starting at the new year. So starting on January 9th, I'm going to be channel reviews every Wednesday. So make sure you're subscribed and you click the bell notification because that will notify you when I'm actually live. And you have to be here live when I go live and volunteer. And so that's how Carmen and April got that. So for anybody who wants their channel reviewed in the new year, I'm doing this more probably every single Wednesday in January for sure. So just make sure you're subscribed so you're here when I go live. Organize the save do you recommend changing thumbnails? I think that helped you organize the save. Can you do that? Are you recommending changes for the future? Again, if you have the time to change your thumbnails, you can, but it's not necessary. Just change them moving forward. April says, can you elaborate on TubeBuddy? Is that different from YouTube Analytics? Yes. So TubeBuddy is a. It's like a plugin tool for YouTube. Let me show you real quick what this looks like. Share and I also have a. I have a video on TubeBuddy. So if you go to Trina little tube buddy, I will actually walk you through. So I'm a speaker on TubeBuddy on their website on their channel. So I definitely recommend TubeBuddy. So here in this video I talk about how to get started with TubeBuddy and how to download it and the things you can do. So what it is is once you plug it once you download, shows up on your YouTube channel. And what I use it for, one of the things I do is keyword explorer. So if I'm looking for a video idea like how to organize my desk, when I type that in, it's giving me a lot of data. First of all, it's telling me just this title alone is a pretty bad overall score. It's telling me that the search volume is. It's okay, the search volume is good, but the competition is very high. So then it's giving me some related ideas. So maybe I could niche this down a little bit more. So how to organize my desk at home, I can click on that and see. Okay, that's still not great. And it's going to show me the results. So let's say maybe I want to go in here and organize your desk in 30 minutes so that's got a better score. So I just go in here to really test some of my title ideas and then I will generally just pull the tags off of here. I will do so for a video like this, I do organization, how to clean your room, easy life hacks, simple life hacks, those types of thumbnails. It really helps me. It will also give you trending ideas. So this one for example is goal setting. Let's do goal setting because that's trending right now. So we go over here to trending and you can see in the last 12 months, these are the keywords that are trending. And then historically you can get a little graph of goal setting. So people are searching goal setting obviously right now. So it peaks here at the end of December, obviously because it's the new year. Let's just say another idea. So let's look at succulents. Succulents for beginners. Let's go ahead there. It's got a poor overall score, so you need to beef out this title a bit. But let's look at historical when this goes up. Alright. So for Carmen, you'll see that a good time to start putting out videos on succulents is in April, towards the end of April, because you want to put out a video prior to the peak, which is at the end of April. So start putting out big videos at the beginning. And so this helps me, April, I hope this helps you figure it out. Osmeen Juan says, I was meaning to come on when it started. I forgot to hit the notification icon. Dang, Carmelita, I just got asked to do a collab. I've only posted my third video 10 minutes ago. And kind of collabed on that one because we started a tag video. Awesome. No, you can absolutely start doing collab videos. Sorry, I got distracted on the comments. So this is what Tubebuddy does for me. That's just some of what it does. It also, if you go into Tubebuddy, you can do some other things. Like, let me see, I can go into my account here and you can test thumbnails. There's just a lot of stuff in here. I'm gonna do an entire video on the things that you can do with TubeBuddy. But I definitely recommend it. It saved me a lot of time and I think it's a great tool to use. So let's go ahead and stop while I answer some questions. Carmelita, Collabs are a great way. Yes, absolutely. Iroh, do you think this would help someone who does covers and music like me because their titles are a bit fixed. Song title artists. Yeah. So iroh for you, it's gonna be really getting people to be enticed by your thumbnail. Thinking of a unique way to make your video thumbnail stand out with the thumbnail, just download it. I think it will help for sure. Awesome. April. Hey, Meredith. Late to the video, but I volunteer for any channel review. Meredith. We're going to be doing them every Wednesday in January at 1pm so the first people here get the first opportunity to do a channel review organized to say, no, I'm going to do about. I said I was going to do two today. I've got to run some errands since this is my last day in the office. I've got to finish that Christmas shopping. Christmas, you know, is only a few days away. So I've got to run and do some Christmas shopping. So I saved about a half an hour here, but I'm open to doing questions for a couple more minutes here. Awesome. April just just downloaded TubeBuddy. Awesome. Budget Girl says Carmen. Your channel looks awesome. Yes. Okay, last minute questions, friends. Like I said, I'm gonna be doing this more in the new year. So work on some things on your channel. Come back on January 9th when the next one is. Make sure you are subscribed to this channel and hit the bell notification so you're notified when I do go live. So the people that are here first get first priority. And so Carmen and April jumped in here like right away. And they were on here before I was even live. And so they got the first chance to get channel reviews. Oh, hey, tubebuddy. So yeah, there's Tubebuddy. If you guys have any questions about TubeBuddy, make sure you go over to their channel and subscribe as well. Lots of great tips, lots of great ways to use TubeBuddy, so don't forget to go check them out as well. All right, that's gonna wrap it up for me. I do have some new videos coming out next week and the next week. So there's still some more new content coming out. You guys give me some great new ideas for new content. Definitely going to be doing some more videos on analytics for all of you and also on TubeBuddy and how to use it. I do have a Facebook group, so you'll see in the link down below there's a couple things that you can check out if you're interested. I have a YouTube channel launch roadmap that walks you through a lot of the things that I talked about today. So what should be in your channel? Banner branding, those types of things, if you want to grab that. And also the link to the. To my free Facebook group where I kind of answer questions off and on in there. And it's a group of us all doing YouTube, so feel free to join that as well. Juan says I do tech reviews and Christian videos. I know they are very different niches. I will throw in some vlogs. Do you think Variety channels can still do well? Unfortunately, Juan, it's going to be very important for you to focus on one thing, because what happens is the people that come and watch a tech video, they may subscribe to your channel and then you do a vlog video, and they're like, wait, I thought I subscribed to this channel for a tech video. And now he's doing a vlog. Like, that's not what I signed up for. And then you lose subscribers that way. And so really honing in on the specific niche you want to focus on is really going to help you grow a channel. Meredith says TubeBuddy is awesome as well. Do you recommend having a photo in the channel header? Organize the save ask? I do. I think it's a way to show your personality. You know, you have your little channel icon on the side there. Sorry, I had to grab a drink. But also being able to show your personality in another photo in your channel banner is also a great way to connect with that audience. Thank you. Organized to save. I love these reviews. Hope I can get one on the next week. Yep. So January 9th, 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time is when I'm doing these. All right. I have a group call with my students at noon, and so I go from them over here. So I'm already in the mindset, excited to teach all of you. I wasn't sure if it would be too much, so, yeah, you got to find a good balance. I like it. So that you can show people more of your personality and get to know you. You are going to be the face of your channel. And so letting people get to know you, will you be posting this whole video after the live video? Yep. Ebony, it will be on my channel for you. How do you change the watermark in videos? I have one, but want to change it. Carmelita, I just did that video last week, so just go to my channel. It was from. I took down my December calendar, but it was last Wednesday. I believe I did that video tutorial and everything on how to do it. So jump over there. All right, friends, that's gonna do it for me. Don't forget to subscribe again so that you're notified and, well, subscribe. Hit the bell so you're notified when I go live starting in the new year. I hope you all have a great holiday season and you enjoy the new year and I will catch you back here live on January 9th. Bye, guys.