Starting a YouTube channel is perhaps the simplest way to get started online.
Anybody can start a YouTube channel for free, and there is little to no investment needed to get started.
The investment bar is low with YouTube because you probably already have something to record videos such as a smartphone, a digital camera, a laptop, and your personality.
Why choose YouTube?
YouTube is considered as the world's "second-largest search engine."
With over one billion hours of videos watched daily, YouTube remains the giant in the internet space.
If done correctly, it can help your video content to reach thousands of people and help you establish a stable video business that will earn you money passively for a long time.
Another reason to go with YouTube is its fast worldwide adoption.
With the fast worldwide implementation of 4G, upcoming 5G, and other smartphone technologies, streaming online videos has become a global trend.
YouTube has clearly come up as the topmost beneficiary of this trend as it's free and accessible to anyone.
Today it has become a part of people's lives.
People prefer video content over other content types because it's more entertaining and easy to consume.
Many people who have seen this trend and recognized YouTube's power have successfully created YouTube channels, making them hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
The world's top 10 YouTubers have individually earned more than $10 million from just the ad revenue.
The most exciting thing is that all these top YouTubers are just regular people with no fancy degrees or strong financial backgrounds.
Here's one extremely stunning fact for you, the world's highest-paid YouTuber named Ryan Kaji, who has earned $26 million in 2019 from YouTube, is just an 8-year-old kid.
Isn't this jaw-dropping?
That's the power of YouTube today, and if all these regular guys have made it big on YouTube, why can't you?
Who is this ideal for:
Becoming a YouTuber is suitable for someone who loves to create videos and share something valuable and/or entertaining.
Great for someone who loves to be in front of or behind the camera or create videos using software tools.
What skills will you need:
Recording high-quality videos is the primary skill you'll compulsorily require.
The next skill needed will be to do video editing using the right software tools and uploading videos to YouTube.
If you are not good at any of these, you can easily find and hire someone from freelance websites who can do this for you.
How much money will you need to invest:
Starting a YouTube channel is free. Hence you won't need any investment here.
In the beginning, you could use your smartphone or a laptop for recording or creating videos to keep your investment low.
But as your channel grows, it's recommended that you invest in professional video recording equipment and editing software tools to create more high-quality videos.
How much time is required to get started:
You can get be and running within the next hour.
The process of setting up an account, and your first channel is pretty straightforward.
From there, the time needed will depend on two things, first, what kind of videos you want to create, and second, editing and upload times.
For instance, you could realistically film a short review video, do some minor editing, and upload the video in a matter of hours.
You could even have your first video up and get your first set of viewers by the end of today.
Some helpful tips:
1) Find genres about which you're are passionate
Selecting a genre is the first and essential thing that you'll have to choose while beginning.
It's the larger interest pool that a lot of the people share in common.
It's the market for whom you'll create your videos. It's the pool of people that will view your videos and make you money.
If you want to be successful on YouTube, it is recommended that you select a genre that inclines with your interests, passion, and talent.
Here's a list of some popular genres on YouTube to get you some ideas.
• Product Review
• How-to
• Tutorials
• Science Experiments
• Technology
• Gaming
• Product Unboxing
• Comedy
• Fashion and Beauty
• Health and Fitness
Above are just a few genres. You can find hundreds of such and shortlist a few that suit you the most.
2) Understand the financial dynamics of getting into any particular genre
Once you have shortlisted a few genres, the next step would be to conduct a thorough research about it and see if you can set your foot into anyone based on your resources and expectations.
You'll find that some genres might need you to invest in something, while others might not need it.
For example, if you plan to get into the product review genre, you will need to buy products from your own money to create a review video. While if you get into a comedy genre, you might not need to purchase such things.
While finalizing your genre, understand the financial aspects of getting into it and whether your budget and resources can support it.
3) Perform detailed research about your genre and niche
Before creating your first video, it's always better to conduct in-depth research about your genre and niche.
The research will help you uncover data you can use to create videos your target audience will like.
The first step of the research process is to make a list of channels in your niche and study them.
Start finding answers to the questions such as:
• How many subscribers other channels have?
• How many views do they get?
• Which video thumbnails and titles worked for them?
• Which are the popular topics in the genre that consistently get views?
• Which videos got the highest comments? And Why?
• Which areas are people demanding to cover?
• What is their frequency of uploading new videos?
• What promotional strategies are they using?
• What mistakes they've made, and how they could be corrected?
All this data will help you understand your niche, your target audience better, and formulate your video creation strategy.
Research will finally allow you to learn from others' successes and avoid the mistakes they've made.
4) Fill in the gaps
Gap analysis is hailed as a great strategy to discover demand and supply gap in any niche.
It allows you to find specific areas in the genre where there's a good demand for a video on a particular topic. Still, no one else has created a video on it.
The best way to find gaps in your domain is to study the user comments on other videos in your genre and understand the audience's expectations.
For instance, if you are in the smartphone review domain and notice that most reviewers review only high-range smartphones.
You could then consider reviewing low-range or mid-range smartphones in demand by the audience, but no one has yet reviewed them.
Gap analysis is a great strategy that will help you explore areas where there's good demand but no to less competition.
Use this strategy and launch videos in the gaps to gain quick video views and subscribers for your channel.
5) Ride on the trend
Quickly creating videos on the trending topics is a guaranteed recipe for success.
A trend is a wave of a sudden interest surge on specific topics caused by some event.
It's during the trend that a large sum of people actively seek information on a particular topic.
If you create videos on trending topics, YouTube will recommend it to thousands of viewers.
With the recommendation, you can gain thousands or even millions of views, even if you have a new channel.
6) Create video thumbnails and titles that viewers want to click
Thumbnails and titles are the most critical factors determining whether any viewer will click on your video and watch it.
Why? Because of YouTube's suggested videos feature.
Suggested videos are a great source of organic traffic.
As someone is watching a video, YouTube suggests them other videos in the right-hand column.
Suggested videos also appear on the viewers' YouTube homepage. It's a free form of endorsement that YouTube provides.
If your video lands on the suggested list, your thumbnail and title should stand out to catch the viewer's attention.
Great thumbnails and titles will fetch a lot of organic views for your video.
7) Strive for video engagement
Video engagement is a prime criterion that the YouTube algorithm uses to determine whether viewers like any particular video or not.
The following are considered apex signs of engagements.
• Likes
• Comments
• New subscribers
• Longer watch time
YouTube organically promotes and suggests videos with higher engagement to multiple groups of people with similar interests.
Creating an engaging video is a must for YouTube success.
The following are some strategies to boost your video engagement.
1. Spark curiosity.
2. Incorporate storytelling.
3. Tease your audience with exciting stuff in the beginning and then reveal it in the end.
4. Ask questions in the beginning/middle/end and then ask your audience to answer them in the comments.
5. Dripfeed your video content in a stepwise way. For instance, Ten interesting facts about your eyes, you must know.
8) Actively promote your videos
Creating a fantastic video and uploading it on YouTube is just half the battle.
From there, the next part you'll have to get into is promoting your videos.
Actively promoting your videos is necessary to make your video stand out in the noise.
Let's look at some essential promotional strategies you should use to promote your videos on YouTube.
1) Host giveaways
Hosting a giveaway is a great way to gain new subscribers and boost engagement.
A typical giveaway is when you ask viewers to view your video completely, like it, share it, comment on it, and subscribe to your channel to participate.
A giveaway should be based on your channel's niche, and it should be about something worthwhile to your audience.
2) Do video collabs
Collaborating with other YouTubers in your niche helps to double your audience as subscribers from two channels watch your videos, which means more viewers, subscribers, and reach.
3) Do video SEO
SEO isn't just for websites. It's also an effective method for ranking your YouTube videos higher.
By doing SEO correctly, you can easily rank your videos higher than most of your competitors who forget or ignore to do it.
Few SEO tips:
1) Create your video titles centered around a specific primary keyword.
2) Use keywords in your video file name.
For example, suppose you change the default name of your video file from "1376_final.mp4" to "weight_loss_techniques.mp4".
In that case, YouTube will automatically focus on the keywords in your video file's name.
3) Use long-tail keywords in your video descriptions to help YouTube focus more on the keywords you want to rank.
4) Keep your video titles under 50 characters. Lesser titles are easy to see while people are searching for content.
5) Built backlinks to your videos from other websites or blogs in your niche for improving the relevancy and rankings.
9) Don't just keep creating videos without taking time to reflect
After you have some videos up, take a look at what performs better and what doesn't and try to figure out why.
This will help you to create better videos in the future that people will want to watch, instead of creating what you think they want to watch.
10) The last tip is to enjoy yourself
If you choose something you like doing or are passionate about, it won't seem like work.
How to make money:
You make money when more and more people watch your videos. It's as simple as that.
Once you have your account set up, you'll be able to enable the monetization option when your channel gets 4000 hours of watch time within one year and at least 1000 subscribers.
After that, follow all of our tips above and build a passive money-making YouTube video business.
Goodluck :)
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