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How to Start a YouTube Channel for Your Business

How to Start a YouTube Channel for Your Business

Daily, the number of people who watch videos on YouTube is increasing and on the average, nothing less than a billion hours of videos is being watched daily on YouTube by users. Despite this increasing demand for YouTube videos, only about 9 percent of small business owners has launched out their own YouTube channels. This looks appalling, isn’t it? As the number of hours spent on watching videos on YouTube is increasing, this is opening a bigger and better business opportunity for only owners who can tap into it. If you are a business owner and still wonders how to leverage the YouTube channel for your business growth, then this post is for you.

In this post, I will be showing every business owner how they can start a fully optimized YouTube channel for their business.

I would also show them how they can create interesting and exciting video content, compelling enough to attract and engage both their current and new customers.

Tapping into the YouTube’s video marketing strategy on YouTube would help you to showcase your products, build and propagate your brand’s identity, as well as connect with the old and new audience in an exciting and fresh way.

Now grab your seat and follow me on the step by step training process.

Setting Up a YouTube Channel for Your Business

The first step you need to take is to create a YouTube channel for your business.

To do this, you need a Google account. If you don’t have already, open one it’s free. If you already have, log into the account.

N/B: Your Gmail account is the same as your Google account and that’s what you would use to manage the YouTube channel.

It is important that you use a Brand Account to run your YouTube channel and not a personal account.

This is because having a Brand Account makes it possible for you to add other users using their Google accounts to your Brand Account instead of sharing the login details of your account.

Here is a quick run through of all the steps involved in creating a Brand Account for your business’ YouTube channel.

Foremost, while logged into your Google account (the one you intend to use for the Brand Account), visit YouTube, click on YouTube Channel Switcher.

This should display your personal account, your Brand Account if any, and an option to create a new channel.

Click on the “Create a new channel,” this should take you to a screen where you would create a new Brand Account.

The next step is to give your new Brand Account any desired name, then click on ‘Create.’

Voila! You now own a YouTube channel for your business.

Customizing Your YouTube Channel

Congratulations! Now that you have successfully created your Business’ YouTube channel, wouldn’t it be a nice idea to give it a pleasant, personalized, and professional look?

This leads us to customize your new YouTube Channel, making it look its absolute best.

Customizing your new YouTube Channel involves only a few easy steps. And with that, you would be making yourself unique and easier for your customers to spot you online.

Now we will see, how you can give your YouTube channel a custom look.

The following are things you can change to give your YouTube channel a brand new look.

Channel Icon

Your Channel Icon is automatically linked to the profile picture on your Brand Account by default. So, you need to change it, you should be directed by YouTube to update your Brand Account.

 

Click on ‘Edit,’ this should direct you to the “upload photo” screen in your Brand Account.

Ensure that you proposed Channel Icon picture should be any of these formats – JPG, BMP, PNG, or non-animated GIF, and should be of size 800 x 800 px.

Also, ensure that your chosen photo displays very well in smaller sizes, in a square crop, and also in a circle crop, as YouTube may be using these various styles in multiple places.

Channel art

The next thing you have to do is to add channel art to your Channel. This is a great way of showing off your unique brand personality as well as creating a more visually engaging YouTube profile.

It is recommended that your Channel Art should be at most 4MB, lower is better as long as it’s in high resolution.

As recommended by YouTube, your Channel art should be 2560 x 1440 px for best performance, though a Channel art of at least 2048 x 1152 px is also ok.

When you upload your Channel art, YouTube would give you a preview of each photo you upload, so as to let you know how it would display across multiple devices. You may also edit the crop of your photo to choose parts to display.

Details and Description

To open the Channel settings where you could see the full customization options for your channel, click on the gear icon in the section beneath your Channel Art.

The Channel settings should pop up.

Look for the “Customize the layout of your channel” option, click to enable it. Then click on “Save.” This opens more variety of options for you sorted into 5 tabs – Home, Videos, Playlists, Channels, and About.

Click on the “About” tab, this enables you to edit details for your store.

Under the Channel description, give brief details about your store, the products you offer, you’re your mission.

You should have your main keywords for your store by now. Use them strategically in your description. This will help people to find you easily when they search on YouTube.

Don’t forget to include your contact email also.

Also, include links to your store and social media profiles/accounts. You can set these links to appear over your Channel Art, becoming visible to your audience.

Almost all the links will get converted to a favicon and hide their “Link title.” However, the first link would show its “Link title,” which is just 30 characters.

It is advisable that you make the most use of these 30 characters by inserting actionable call-to-action words like “SHOP NOW.”

If you have other YouTube channels you wish to feature – either owned by you or managed by your workers, move to the right-hand side of your profile, you should see a section named “Featured Channels.”

As a new beginner, the “Featured Channels” may not be useful to you yet, but would definitely be once your YouTube presence is well established.

Now you have your YouTube Channel ready!! Next we will see how to create great content to attract more customers.

Creating Great Content to Attracting More Customers

By now, your YouTube channel is well-crafted and is set to go. What you should think about now is your video content.

As a content marketing strategist, videos are important part of your content marketing strategy. Creating creative videos are fantastic ways of providing your current and new customers with entertaining, informative, and high-quality content that would always keep them coming back.

More so, YouTube seems to be the next largest search engine after Google.

Hence, if your video is well optimized, your videos would appear more in search, and would offer a great place for you to connect with new customers who seeks what you offer.

Now let me show you how you can use great video content to attract audiences for your YouTube brand. Here are some of the great videos you can use for your YouTube business.

Educational Content

People visit YouTube daily to learn new things. Actually, the search for “how to” videos on YouTube has grown by about 140 percent in the past 13 years.

This translates into a growing opportunity for your businesses to attract new customers by providing them with educational content.

You can consider videos that teach new skills. These are great for building your audiences’ trust and taking them further the conversion funnel.

For instance, Retro Supply Co. sells retro effects, such as brushes, fonts, etc. that can be used in Photoshop and Illustrator. On their YouTube channel, Retro Supply Co. focuses on videos that teach audiences how to effectively use Photoshop and Illustrator irrespective of whether the audience use their products or not.

These videos, sometimes, include step-by-step video tutorials on how to use their brushes and products.

Snowboard Addiction is another great example who has made more than 145,000 subscribers on its YouTube channel by posting videos that teach people how to improve upon their snowboarding skills.

Their videos do not only help people to improve upon their snowboarding but also introduces Snowboard Addiction to new viewers on YouTube.

Brand Storytelling

Another way of creating compelling video content is creating great storytelling. Creating inspiring videos that portray the identity of your business are great way of communicating your brand’s image to a wider audience.

Such videos should be in line with building a lifestyle around your brand that shows your audience and prospective customers that when they buy your products, they are also buying an experience.

For instance, GoPro posts creative videos that showcase their tagline “Be a hero” to their audiences in various ways.

Entertainment

Another way of capturing the attention of viewers towards your products is by building fun videos that cater for the interests of your audiences.

For instance, Vat19 who currently has more than 2 million subscribers on its YouTube channel achieved this by creating comedy sketches around their various novelty gifts to introduce their new products to viewers.

LastlyI will be explaining how to optimize your videos for search.

What is the essence of having great video content that is not easily searchable by the audience?

About 400 hours of video content are posted on YouTube every minute. It is critical for you to stay on top of your YouTube SEO if you ever want your videos to get noticed. So, you definitely need to do everything in your reach to stand out from the crowd.

Do you know that you can actually make a huge impact with every element of your videos? Right from the title to the keywords, to the description, you can strategically set how prominently you want your content to get featured in search results.

Here is how to go about improving your search result:

Using Keywords

The first step to optimizing your videos is narrowing down which keywords you would be focusing on.

Brainstorm on the likely keywords that anyone might want to search to come across your video. Run those keywords through keyword planning tool, such as Keywords Everywhere, to get their competition, cost per click to advertise against that keyword, and the monthly search volume. Use those keywords in your titles and descriptions.

Engagement

One of the most important things that YouTube takes into consideration when determining the quality of your video is its engagement.

YouTube takes your video engagement into consideration when determining the quality of our video. Therefore, always encourage your viewers to leave either share, subscribe, comment, or tap the ‘Thumbs Up’ button after watching your video.

This would increase the chance of your video showing up higher in search results. To boost your level of viewers’ engagement, you can run a contest.

Contests and giveaways are great ways of increasing your viewers’ participation and connecting with your audience.

YouTube also takes into consideration your video’s view count when determining your rank. Hence, ensure that you distribute your new videos to all your business’ social media channels and through your email list as soon as you publish them on YouTube. Doing this will help to kick-start your views.

Your Video Format

The video format also plays an important role in your overall search ranking. Though YouTube doesn’t watch videos to determine their content, it looks at to other few things that make an educated guess. These are:

Filename – ensure that you strategically and meaningfully insert your target keywords in the name of the file you are uploading. YouTube pays attention to this.

Length – YouTube also considers the length of your video, the longer your video, the higher its value. Hence, ensure to make them your video of substantial length as much as possible.

Note that misusing the video length would not help you. For instance, if your video should actually be 2 mins long considering its content, but you stretched it over 10 mins. If viewers found your video unnecessarily longer, they may drop off after 1 min. In such as case, YouTube would not rank your video higher. Hence, always balance your video length with its content

Title – make sure that the title of your video is descriptive, concise, and contain your target keyword near the beginning.

Description – note that the longer your description, the better. So, try as much as possible to add as much content to your description. In your description, try to include a detailed summary of your video and any relevant resources that your feel viewers might need. Don’t forget to add target keywords in your description.

Tags – the last thing you should consider is to include your target keywords and other related terms as tags on your videos.

If you consider the steps above, you would be optimizing your video content for search and this will help your great video content to show more in during a YouTube search.

Now you’re all set!! You’ve an optimised YouTube channel for your business

 

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