How to Start a YouTube Channel for Your Business
How to Start a YouTube Channel for Your Business
YouTube users have been increased tremendously over the period of time and they watch above a billion hours of YouTube videos. However, the business i.e. YouTube channels which have started over the period of time are very small in number and makes around only 9% of small businesses. With the continuous rise in the usage of YouTube, the chances for YouTube business is getting wider for those who are ready to get into this business.
Therefore, this post is intended to share with you a few strategies to set up your own business through elevated YouTube channels. Moreover, how can you attract new customers and retain the current users by making appealing videos? An indispensable video making tactic on YouTube will help you to make an image of your brand, stage your goods and commodities and create exciting and fresh connections.
Creating a YouTube Channel for Your Business
For creating a YouTube channel for business, you need to be logged in to the Google account through which you want to manage the channel.
The best way to run a YouTube channel is through a Brand Account (not a personal account) so that you can add as many people as you want using their Google Accounts, without sharing your personal login information.
In order to set up a new Brand Account for your business YouTube channel, follow the following outline of the steps.
1. YouTube Channel Switcher: Log in to the Google account you want to manage your Brand Account and head towards the YouTube. Then move to the YouTube Channel Switcher.
2. Then, you will find your personal account or any Brand Account you manage, and where you will see the option to create a new channel.
3. Click on “Create a new channel,” which will give you the option to create a new Brand Account. Name it and click ‘Create’.
4. Cheers! You have successfully set up your own YouTube Channel and now you are the owner.
Tailoring or Customizing Your YouTube Channel
So, you have successfully created your YouTube channel, now it is the time to make it look perfect and elegant.
We are here with few cool steps you can follow to furnish your channel, make it more professional. Also be certain that your customers know how to easily find you online.
Channel Icon/Symbol
Channel Icon are always associated with your Brand Account’s profile photo, therefore, amend it. YouTube will direct you to update your Brand Account.
By Clicking ‘Edit’ you will be directed to upload photo screen in your Brand Account.
For your convenience, we suggest and you should use picture of JPG, BMP, PNG, or non-animated GIF and 800 x 800 pixels. The picture should be displayed well at smaller, square and circle crop wherever YouTube will use it.
Channel Art
For an enchanting and attractive YouTube Profile, you must add channel art which is a fantastic way to showcase your brand’s personality. Your Channel Art should be under 4MB and at least 2048 x 1152 pixels, though for better results on each and every device YouTube recommends to go with 2560 x 1440 pixels.
Furthermore, YouTube will also provide you a preview of every image you load that how will it appear in different devices, so that you can edit and crop your image accordingly.
Details and Description
Beneath your Channel Art, there is the gear icon which will enable you to customize your YouTube channel by unlocking the customization option.
Then ‘Channel settings’ will pop up. Go for the ‘Customize the layout of your channel’ option. Enable it and ‘Save’ it. Multiple options sorted in to five tabs will pop up: Home, Videos, Playlists, Channels, and About.
Move to the About tab and amend your store’s details.
Add description, where you will give a concise profile of your store, products and mission. Don’t forget to use the keywords for your store in the description for the convenience of people when they search you on YouTube.
Don’t forget to include your email details. In addition, provide links to your Social Media Profiles and your stores which will show up in your Channel Art and will be greatly visible to your audience.
Mostly, your links will default to just the favicon (the small image that shows up at the top of your browser) but the first link in the roster will also show the link title, there are 30 characters, use them wisely as 100% Pure has done with their “SHOP NOW” call to action.
If other YouTube channels are run by your brand or owned and managed by your employees, you can feature them too. Head towards the right hand side and click on ‘Featured. Though this may not help you now but will help in some other time.
Attracting More Customers with Great Content
Once your channel is ready, it is time to ponder about the videos.
The basic and essential part of your content marketing strategy can be the videos. It offers enlightening, instructive, entertaining and great quality of contents which compels the customers to reach out time and again.
Additionally, the second largest search engine in the world is YouTube. Hence, if you boost your videos to be found in search, it will be a great chance to build links with new customers. Keeping this in mind, let’s discover how a video is used to attract audience towards your brand.
The contents which your business can use are:
Educational Content
Since, people like to learn new things and according to the statistics, the searches for ‘how to’ videos have flourished to 140% over the past 1 years. It reflects there is a fertile ground of educational content for businesses.
Building trust is an important part of any successful business; hence, the videos that teach skills are of great importance and push the audience down the conversion funnel. A solid example of this is courtesy of Retro Supply Co.
They sell retro effects which are used in Photoshop and Illustrator, consisting brushes fonts etc. in their channel, they demonstrate to the viewers the effective use of Photoshop and Illustrator using step –by-step tutorials and keyboard shortcuts.
Another example is Snowboard Addiction, who has 140,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel where they give tips to enhance the snowboarding skills.
Along with the videos, the how-to content also improves their audience flow via YouTube search.
As far as their arrangement is concerned it has a great level. Snowboard Addiction, apart from selling their training products and make various videos to help you improve your snowboarding skills, consequently, the “interested viewer” becomes the “happy customer,”. This all became possible due to their video content marketing on Youtube.
Brand Storytelling
Inspiring videos appropriate to our business’ identity are more operative and significant than a wonderful storytelling to create compelling video content for leading brand’s image and ideals in an audience.
Such videos should be an equipment to build a lifestyle around your products and make the audience believe that they not only purchase a product, but they purchase an experience as well.
In this regard, GoPro has a diverse collection of YouTube content that has created a super image of the GoPro which revolves around venture, explorations and alike.
GoPro tagline: “Be a hero” compels their customers to use their products using different videos such as “helicopter skydiving” and a fireman saving a kitten.
Entertainment
One of the best YouTube strategies to account for your audience’s interest revolves around fun videos which not only attract the audience, yet focus on your products too.
Vat19 is an online gift shop which has an online kingdom. It was only possible to them through their appealing and accurately targeted content. Their strategy focuses on comedy sketches, novel gifts to showcase new products to their audience. Currently, they have over 2 million YouTube subscribers which is itself a big milestone.
Their popular video includes the one with a gummy bear which was being damaged in a succession of slapstick experiments. It does not seem a traditional ad rather a late night comedy, making the CTA at the end encouraging viewers to purchase the gummy bear.
Certainly the videos are operative irrespective of the fact that their sense of humor may not be appealing for everybody. The video of gummy bear stood out with a viewership of over 25 million times. Vat19’s approach demonstrates that entertaining and novel content grasp the attention of audience and attract more customers.
Optimizing Your Videos for Search
If you want to stand out in the crowd by staying on the top of your YouTube SEO, your videos should not go unnoticed, because every minute 400 hours of video are uploaded and you have to be unique among them to reach out a larger audience.
Every bit of your video matters a lot from the very basic title to the description to keywords to get featured in the search results. Now is the time to enhance your ranking on YouTube.
Keywords
Before you start optimizing your videos, you should narrow down which keywords you’ll be focusing on.
First of all, before boosting your videos, you should concentrate on the keywords. Think about some words someone might search for and find your video and run them through a keyword planning too like a chrome extension i.e. Keywords Everywhere.it works directly within YouTube search bar. It gives you three important information for each term: the monthly search volume, the cost per click to advertise against that term, and the competition. The popped up search results can be of great help in future videos, so it is a good notion to experiment with the suggested keywords and build content around them.
Engagement
Engagement defines the quality of a video. Comments, subscribe, share and a thumps up after watching a video may enhance your chance of showing up higher in search results so inspire your audience to do so. Running a contest and giveaways can enhance your engagement levels.
Ranking on YouTube takes in video’s viewership. Therefore, soon after you publish a video on YouTube, make sure to distribute the video through your email list and all of your business’ social media channels. Format
In the overall search ranking, the format of your video plays a vital role. As YouTube can’t watch your videos to determine their content, yet there is something that it looks at to make an educated guess.
Filename: YouTube has a keen eye on your target keywords, so ensure them while uploading a file.
Length: YouTube considers longer videos worthy than shorter ones so make it a bigger one, yet one thing should be kept in mind that is the quality of content. We can say that there should be balance between the content and the length of the video. Because ‘watch time’ also defines the ranking which means the video which you stretched to 10 was actually of 2 minutes will result viewers drop off after 1.
Title: The title of your video needs to be brief, evocative, and feature your target keyword near the start.
Description: Longer descriptions are better, so add more contents much as possible. For instance, a comprehensive overview of everything in the video and other related resources. Your keywords should be present in the description with the target words in the start.
Tags: 500 characters are available for tags. So use target words and other related words on your videos so that your video shows up as a suggested video. For instance, tools like Tube Buddy can give you some insight into the tags your competitors are using on their videos.
Tips and Tricks
After knowing everything above, it is the time to build an audience and maximize your business’ potential on YouTube.
However, if you are trying to do some novel thing, I’ve put together some smart YouTube hacks that you can use to enhance your subscribers and generate more traffic for your website.
Add a watermark
A watermark brings viewers back to your channel and makes them to subscribe your YouTube channel. These changeable images will be superimposed on every one of your uploads and offer a clear and easy way to subscribe and get updates for the upcoming videos while you are at it.
Click on ‘Video Manager’ to add a watermark on your videos. This will lead you to the Creator Studio where you’ll get access to some more in-depth settings for your account.
Once you get to the Creator Studio, click on ‘Channel’ in the sidebar and a dropdown will appear under ‘Channel’. Click on ‘Branding’ and then ‘Add a Watermark’. Now you can upload an image that will appear in the corner of every video you’ll upload.
Enable an Automatic Subscription Prompt
It’s not enough to drive people towards your YouTube channel, also encourage them to be the subscribers.
The easiest way for others to subscribe your channels when you already own a subscriber base such as your email and social media followers is by adding “?sub_confirmation=1” to the end of your channel’s URL. Then along with “Remember to subscribe” a pop up will automatically appear as a call to action for the visitors to subscribe.
Link Cards to Your Website
When you have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the past year (YouTube Partner Program), then you can also add cards that link to external websites in your videos. For example, if you own a Shopify store and you’re part of the YouTube Partner Program, then you can connect the audience to your store to purchase the items showcased in your video.
Use End Screens Effectively
When spectators have watched the video till the end and you want to make sure that they visit your channel, then YouTube makes it possible with the end screen element where you can layer over the last 20 seconds of your video.
For that you can do the following things; either you can add other videos, subscribe option or any other link to keep them engaged. It is of great use as YouTube rewards you on the basis of watch time and how long people stay on your channel, so it makes you to want more viewership and more videos.
Now we will show you how First We Feast sets up their end screens to keep you watching.
Their very basic trick is that they have connected a playlist of videos with a standalone video which will take you to another place to watch something else.
You can also set up it yourself, how? Here it is.
Visit Creator Studio and choose a video you want to edit.
In the main edit screen, you will find “End screens & Annotations” click on that which will take you to the end screen editing screen.
So what can you add to the screen? You can add 4 elements to your screen.
Test accounts are not yet part of a YouTube Partner Program, hence the link option in there is disabled. As one becomes a part of it, you can add links to your website as part of your standard end screens.
YouTube Can Help You Grow Your Business
Once you follow all these steps carefully and thoroughly, your business will grow and flourish in no time.
If you still have any queries regarding setting up your YouTube channel, let us know in comments! We would love to facilitate you.