Lessons

Lesson Info

Demo: How to Set Up Your YouTube Channel

What I thought we'd do next is actually just start your YouTube channel. Because let's just dive right into it. (laughs) By the end of the day, I want you to have a YouTube channel with at least one video on it and know how to make it super effective so the first step of that is starting the YouTube channel. So I'm gonna show you how to do that and where to go to make that happen. I've included this link in the resource guide so you can just click on it and get right there. But, oh look there it is! Okay, so when you have a Gmail account, so Google owns YouTube, You need a Gmail account in order to start a YouTube channel. If you don't have one, if you go to YouTube and you say, click the upload button or try to do anything related to uploading a video, it will prompt you to create a Google account. Once you have a Google account, which almost everybody that I talk to does, you can go to YouTube.com slash channel underscore switcher and it will show you your various Google accounts. I ...

apparently have a lot, also I've been testing this a bit. You click on Create a New Channel. And it's gonna tell you to create a Brand Account. Now what this means is this is an account that you can use on your YouTube and you can also share with other people so that they can access your YouTube like if you're working with somebody who does your uploads or creates your thumbnails, all of which we'll talk about. You can share this access without them having access to your Gmail and your Google Docs and all your private Google stuff. Also this lets one Gmail account have multiple YouTube channels. Does that make sense? So this is a Brand Account. This is gonna be what your YouTube channel is called. So we're gonna type in a name. I'm gonna make one for essential oils. Essential Enthusiasm. This is actually a podcast that's currently on my YouTube channel if I wanted to branch it out and put it on a separate one. Then you click Create. And hopefully it just makes one for you. That's literally how simple it is to start your YouTube channel. Now I have a channel. What we're looking at here is this channel. So this little purple face is where I put my profile. To do that, you're gonna click Customize Channel. I have already made a header, so you guys didn't have to watch me do my very slow graphic design. So this is what my channel looks like to anybody who comes to it. Obviously nobody's coming to it yet because we just made it. To update the header, you click Add Channel Art. So I've got it right here on my desktop. It's gonna upload. And then, okay so it's telling us right here that it's gonna look different when people see it on their TV, when they see it on their desktop, and when they see it on their mobile. To me, this looks good in all of those places. So now we're gonna just select it. I can't get there. And it should show up at the top. Yay, there it is. So if I wanted to upload my profile picture, I'd click right here. I don't have one saved on this computer but when you do this step, you can make some header art. There is a link in the resource guide that gives you a template for doing that. So you open the template, you drag in whatever image you want, you can type in any words you want. It's got the template that will make it right at all the sizes. So if you went to this on your phone right now, this is gonna scale to the proper size. You're gonna see what it says. This is really important to use their templates to do this and that's it! You click that button, it makes your account, it's that easy. Now you have a YouTube account. What we're gonna talk about in a little bit is actually uploading the videos so that they show up under Videos and at any point, you can write a description which is gonna be over here under About. And you click About. It would, anything you've written in your description of the channel will show up there. Without any videos, it's a pretty blank channel. So let's go to Customize Channel. I'll show you where to put that description now. I think it's here. Yeah, right here! So did you see? I clicked Customize Channel and then I clicked on About and then it's gonna ask me to write a channel description. I'm gonna say weekly show featuring awesomeness. In reality, what you're gonna write here is a description of what you do, which we don't know yet. So we're gonna talk about that in the next segment, what exactly you're gonna talk about, how often you're gonna post videos. You're gonna take the intro that we work on today and just past it right here in this channel description. And then you can also set up how people reach you. So do you want them to email you, do you want them to send you a YouTube message? And then you pick your country and you can add in links to your websites. So this is really important. Right here, I'm gonna put my website. And when you're done, do you see how it shows up at this header? So now it says Tara Swiger. People can click to my website. If I put my Instagram or my Twitter or my Facebook, those would show up across the top there. So when people are looking at my YouTube channel, they're gonna be able to easily click onto my site. Does that make sense? That's how easy it is to start a YouTube channel. You just give it a name. (laughs) And then you can upload your header and upload your image. Are there any questions about that? We'd had a few comments online. Vivid Photography said, why's YouTube important if you have a big Instagram base? Do people still really use YouTube these days? (laughs) Yeah that's a great question because actually more people use YouTube than use Instagram. If you're already using Instagram all the time and all your friends are, you might be really used to that but actually the, as Instagram goes on, it's demographics are older and older and YouTube the demographics are still really young. All ages use YouTube a lot but if you want to reach, if you want to keep reaching and keep showing up where people are watching, having both Instagram and YouTube is really important. Way, way more people use YouTube and spend more time there every day than go to Instagram. And the other reason why it's important though is you don't ever want to have your whole business on one platform. When you do, that platform can make a tiny change and ruin your business. So you might have heard stories of people being shadow-banned on Instagram, which means that Instagram doesn't show their images to their followers anymore because they thought maybe they were sketchy, because the way they used hashtags, because they actually had too many followers liking their stuff. And a while back, Facebook changed their algorithm and how you saw the feed and everybody's traffic from Facebook back to their sites dropped precipitously. Which if your business was built on people clicking your Facebook link to go to your website, it dramatically impacted business. So while Instagram is amazing and I totally love it, you don't want it to be your only elite platform because at any time they can take away your traffic. They can take away your followers. They can ban your account if you do anything that they think is sketchy or if anyone who's mad at you reports you, you might lose access to those people. So actually I always recommend people get an email list, which we'll talk about a little bit more, but in Abby Glassenberg's CreativeLive Class, she goes deep into how to make an email list and then after that, the YouTube channel gives you a way that's personal and intimate in the same way Instagram is but on a totally different platform and even owned by totally different people. So that's the thing about your business, you don't wanna build it entirely on someone else's platform. That's my answer to that. A couple of questions also about, does it make a difference if you use long tail keywords in your YouTube channel description? And also your username. It's kind of important to choose a name that people are gonna find easily, that they're gonna be able to remember and access. Yes, we're gonna talk about choosing a name in a little bit and for the description part, we're also gonna talk about choosing keywords for the description. The, when they said long tail keywords, what they're referring to is keywords that are really specific that your customers are gonna search for. So not like "pretty" (laughs) and "YouTube video" but things like porcelain ceramics, hand-painted porcelain ceramics or something. That would be a long tail keyword. It's something that not a huge amount of people are searching for but the people that are searching for it want specifically what you're doing. So it is absolutely important to put those keywords, what your people are searching for in your channel description which I showed you a second ago, in your video description, in your video tags. We're actually gonna have a guest expert, Joli Kelly, talk more about how to figure out those keywords and where to put them so that you are gonna get found when people are searching for you. Your title is a little less important, what's really important, we'll talk about this in a bit, is people remembering it and people being able to spell it. Essential is actually bad as is enthusiasm. I misspell enthusiasm all the time. (laughs) So you wanna make sure you've picked a word that people know how to spell. Which is also important if you're thinking about where your audience is and what language they speak and if you choose a word in a different language, they might not know how to spell that. Cakes By Sabrina got in touch and said, I already have a YouTube brand account but I have found that if I am searching for other things, like make-up tutorials or whatever you might be interested in watching, it will show up to other people that my account has been looking at it. Is there a way of removing that? Or she doesn't want to associate the videos that she's watching perhaps with her account. If people are searching for her. Yes. So I don't think that YouTube shows what you're watching, it shows what you like. And you can turn that off. I don't know if I can navigate to where you turn that off fast enough. Yes, okay right here actually! (laughs) So if you hit this settings, let me do that again. Cancel. So right here, I'm on my page. I'm viewing it as myself, you can also view your page as a returning subscriber. It would look different if you set it up to look different. Could you just do returning subscriber? Yes. Okay. So you can change your page so that when someone's already a subscriber, they see something else. On my page, when you go the first time, you will see a video that welcomes you. I actually need to update it, it's like five years old. But if you're a returning subscriber and you go to my YouTube page, you won't see that, you'll see the most recent episode. So that makes sure that you're showing different things to different people. Now to keep people from seeing the videos that you've liked, you just click this Settings button. Privacy, keep all my liked videos private. Turn that on. Keep all my subscriptions private. So actually, (laughs) it's kinda tricky 'cause having it blue like this means that it's keeping them private. So when you turn it off, it makes them public. And all your saved playlists. Now, for my channel, because I work with a lot of students who use YouTube in their business, I have all my subscriptions because I'm subscribed to their channel, I have it public because I like to say, look, go watch these videos. But if you're subscribing to a lot of make-up artists or one of my friends' kids uses her account to look at Pokemon Go videos. You might wanna have that set as private. (laughs) So that your people who are following you for knitwear advice don't see your Pokemon Go fetish. And then right here, you can also, this is where you customize the layout of your channel. So if you have that turned on, you can change the way that things look for different people when they come to visit. And we're not gonna go too much into how to navigate around on YouTube because they're changing it all the time and what I tell you is in one place today, it might be in someplace else tomorrow. But they have massive tutorials that YouTube has created that tells you where to navigate for absolutely everything. So if you are, you put off starting your channel and in three weeks from now, you go to set it up and it doesn't look the same, I give you a link in the resource guide to where you can go to read the description of how you do what we just did and when they make changes, that will be updated. Away from the, we've just been looking at how to set up the YouTube channel, but going back to some of the content, a few questions from people watching online about content. How do you balance being yourself and copying other content creators, especially content creators who you admire and are successful. It's obviously important to be yourself but when you see something working so well, it's kinda tempting to follow in line. Absolutely. That's a really interesting conflict I think we all have, whether you're blogging or Instagraming or YouTubing as you see people and you're inspired by them and you're like I should do what they're doing because its awesome, right? I have two methods of dealing with this. One is that if you feel like you're doing it too much or you're comparing yourself to what someone else is doing, cut it out of your life. (laughs) Totally stop following and paying attention to the people who are doing what you're doing. So I listen to very few podcasts or watch YouTube channels of people who are helping craft businesses because I don't want to constantly be comparing myself. How many views did they get? What do they talk about? Maybe I should talk about that too. And by doing that, I'm able to focus entirely on my customers. I always always want my content ideas to come from what my customers are asking for, what my students are questioning me about. So that the inspiration relationship is between me and the people I'm serving. Not between me and my peers. So that's one thing. Just cut it out of your life. I call it going sober. Alright, you just don't partake in that drug of watching what other people are doing and comparing yourself. The other way is if it's just people who are inspiring you but maybe not serving your same audience, is you can kinda silo it. So if I watch something that's really inspiring, I'll write down what was inspiring about it but don't let it into my own stuff right away. Right? So it's almost better to get tons of inspiration from a bunch of different places and then let it filter through in my own work later as opposed to watch one video, shoot one video, watch one video, shoot one video. That is gonna be super copycatty. Instead, you can watch a bunch, like binge, on what other people are doing on YouTube, write down all the great ideas you have, and then mix it up. Well I liked her intro and I liked this topic, how would I cover that topic? Well it'd be totally different about the way I could cover it. Now I watch videos sometimes where I disagree with them and so I'll write out all the ways they're wrong. They're so wrong, I disagree, they did it wrong. And then shoot a video from that place. In my video, I don't say that person was wrong and I hate them. (laughs) Instead I say, hey so let's talk about this topic. Here is my take on this topic. So you can be inspired both positively and because you're arguing with somebody but give it some time, give it some space, and I always say, my thing is journaling, writing through it. Your thing might be talking it out with somebody, but give yourself the ability to process it before you immediately jump in to creating. Unless you were gonna do an argumentative, political YouTube show. In which case, just jump on there and argue with them. But I don't think that's what most of us are doing. So you wanna just give it some time, let it settle, think through how you could do it differently and just combine a bunch of different inspirations. Does that answer that question? Yeah, sounds great. Awesome. Kinda going back a little bit to the step, to the very beginning. If you don't know what your goals are, how would you recommend, 'cause sometimes it's hard, you kinda know you want to do something but you don't really know how you're gonna get there, what you really ultimately want to achieve. What do you recommend for people who are just trying to find their objective and their goals? Oh, that's good. Yeah, well so I have a book about this. (laughs) Map Your Business, where we talk about setting your big goals and then breaking it down into chunks so I love to talk about this. What I want you to think about is first, the big vision of where you want your business to go. What am I trying to do in my business. Am I trying to hit a certain number of sales, am I trying to hit a certain number of profit, am I trying to reach a new audience. Where, ideal version, where is my business? In five years, three years. Like that far out, how what you see happening. Because if you skip that step, and what I find is it's usually like half and half. Some artists can only think about what they want to create next month and they never think about the bigger picture and if you keep going down that path, very narrow focused on what's in front of you, you'll end up in a place where you're like, oh, is this really the business that I wanted? Are these the customers I want to work with? Is this the product I want to make? So you want to start and have that big vision. Now I work with other people who only every have the big vision and then they get stuck because they don't know what to do to get there. So after you have that big vision, you wanna break it down into okay, what is a step I could take or a marker I could hit in the next year, and in six months, and three months that would move me towards that vision? Because if you're not doing that, and you're just working day after day, you might not end up where you want to be. So think about where you want to be and then break that down. What would that look like if I want to hit, let's say 10 thousand dollars in sales or ten thousand dollars in profit. What, okay so first I need to start at, maybe this year five thousand. And then maybe in the next six months, two thousand. Okay, so how many more sales would that be? And get really specific and actually look at do your profit math to figure out how many products that would be that you need to make and sell. And then okay, how much more audience do I need in order to do that? And then that's where videos come in. Once you have the idea of where you want to be, maybe what you want to do is land a totally different kind of client than what you've been working with. So you're gonna use videos to aim at that client. Like your goals don't always have to be sales-oriented, they might be customer oriented, they might be the kind of work you want to do. Maybe you're shifting from one product to a different product. So you can use videos to help you make that shift and reach that new audience. Is that helpful? Do you guys have questions? Yeah, I do. Yeah? So I was kind of thinking about when you were talking about to show your imperfections and to be who you are so your customers can connect with you? And on the flip side, I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about where the line is. Like how much personal information to share and how real to be and where to kinda draw that line. Yes. So the thing to keep in mind is that it's not a slippery slope. You're not gonna accidentally, if you've decided you don't wanna, say, talk about your children, you're not gonna, just because you were personal about what you're struggling with in your business, I think people get afraid that if they get personal, or they share any kind of details, that they're accidentally gonna overshare, that no, that's not gonna happen. You're always gonna get to decide what you wanna do and even if people ask you for more details, you don't have to give them what you don't want. You just don't have to talk about it. So to make that line, you really ask yourself, what am I comfortable with? What am I not comfortable with? And also what will serve my audience? You're gonna hear this a lot, we're gonna talk a lot about who your audience is and then also what will serve them. What would you do that is gonna give them what they want, whether it's entertainment or it's information and from there, what does it make sense for me to share or not share? So one of the things I do when I talk about the lessons I've learned is I talk about my mistakes. But my mistakes are entirely business oriented. I'm not telling you about the fight I had with my husband. (laughs) I'm not telling you about how I totally missed a friend's birthday. Because I serve people who are building businesses, I talk about business stuff. And so that line just makes sense because it's what is gonna serve them. Sometimes people will ask me because my husband and I work together in my business, how that works out and I kinda, before I answer, I think about what line I wanna share about that, right? So maybe I don't wanna share about how I lose my temper but (laughs) maybe I don't wanna, I really don't share anything that has to do with him, right? I'm happy to share that I lose my temper and I'm disorganized or whatever. But I don't share his faults with the world. Because he didn't sign up to be in front of the camera. So that's, that's how I think that through. Is like, what are you comfortable with, write it down, think it through. If somebody asks you a question and you're not sure how you wanna answer it, you don't have to answer right away. You can say I'll get back to you on that. If it's like a live video and they're asking questions or it's in-person. And then the other thing is you'll get more comfortable as you go, so you don't have to go full-on totally here's exactly every moment of my life. The longer you're doing videos, the more comfortable you'll feel making a mistake or telling them about something you messed up. And keep in mind that what we're not going for is I'm a total hot mess, right? (laughs) What we're going for is what's useful and personal enough to build a connection. But you can make friends with people without being a total hot mess, just be honest and that line is gonna happen naturally. Especially as you get to know your audience and they start asking questions. You'll figure that out. But I really don't, just focus on not judging yourself for not being perfect. I think that's what it comes down to. It's not that you're trying to be imperfect, you're just not holding yourself to some standard of perfection at all time. And its gonna be more authentic. That leads quite nicely to a question that Jonah'd asked online: is that you seem to do such a great job of providing free content for followers with podcasts et cetera, as well as packaging great info and selling it in order to grow your own business and to be able to make a profit. How do you think, what's a better way to give generously and what should you protect for selling? So we're talking about you keep some of yourself back personally and to have a line, it's like the business line? Like what do you give for free and what do you keep back to make money? I used to, when I would get asked this question, I wouldn't have an answer. I was like, I dunno. What I realized over time, and this is just for me, and I have a business based in information and teaching, that's gonna be different if you have a product-based business. But for me what I think about is what I give away for free is philosophy and theory and ways of thinking about your business. And then what I sell are the hard core, how you're gonna apply it to yourself. Right? So my classes are like, in Pay Yourself, we're gonna do the profit math. Here's the exact equations to figure out how many products you have to sell to hit your goals. Here is the exact math you need to do to figure out when you'll be profitable and how many products. But in my podcast I'll talk about what's holding you back from profitability in the mindset area. Or what even what those terms mean. So I always think, for my free content, what's gonna help people be prepared to dig in and actually do the work. And then what I sell is actually doing the work. So if you were a marketing consultant, what you could do in your videos is helping people think about why they need marketing, how marketing works, get them all prepared to be your client and then actually when they're your client, you're gonna work with them. You're gonna give them the marketing plan. But what's kinda great about all this is you can't give personal help in videos. Like I can't, in my YouTube video, give you the exact perfect answer to help you market your product until we're working together. I can just give you ways of thinking about it, ways of answering questions. But you're not gonna get that personal, really applicable advice unless you're in one of my classes or you're a client. So that's one way to think about splitting it up. Then maybe one more question before we let you move on to the next item. If I created a channel a long time ago for a personal account, so it's going back to YouTube, and now you want to change it because you've got a brand, is that possible, how do you do that? Yes. So that's, there's two ways of thinking about it. One is that you just start a new channel, like you just saw me do, I started this channel. You just go to that channel switcher page, create a totally new channel. If you want to keep the viewers you have, first you need to think, who are these viewers? Are they the kind of viewers who are gonna be my buyers? If not, start a new channel, don't worry about those people. If they are the exact same people, then you want to keep them. So you can change your name, you can change your header, you can file all your old videos under a playlist. So you can see right here, are we still on? Yeah. The playlists, you can create playlists for anything. You just go right here, New Playlist. And you can group those all together. Like you could say if you used to do a vlog about your dog, you can say Dog Vlog. And that's your playlist and now you videos about you interview ceramicists. You could create new playlists for that. So this playlist feature is actually really helpful in helping you group old content and also how people find similar content. So on my channel, like my real channel, I have a marketing playlist so if you want to talk all about marketing your product, then I have a profitability playlist so if you wanna listen all about that. Then I also just have my regular weekly show has it's own playlist so you can just watch just those videos. 'Cause I also do videos that are like vlogs of when I'm traveling or my mom had sheep so I did a lot of sheep videos back in 2010. So I now have grouped all those together and people don't really see them. So if it's been a long time and you wanna keep the same channel because it's the same viewers, group them together as a playlist, change all of your art, change your name, and the best thing you can do is upload new videos with the style that you want to do now and upload a lot up front so when people come to the channel they have something to watch that is more what you want them to watch. So if you have videos that are more current, they should live under the Videos and if you have older ones, you can group them into playlists? Actually, I group everything under playlists. Okay. So I wonder if we can flip over to mine, I'll show you. But like how many do you keep under Videos and at what number- So they- do you move them over to a playlist? They actually all are going to show up under Videos, right? This is just all of the ones I've done. They all show up here. And then my playlists have grouped those videos into their different types. Oh remember how you could make your liked videos private? This is showing you my liked videos. And then this is my essential oil podcast and then this is my regular podcast here, I think. It's here somewhere. And so I group all my videos in playlists. Grouping them in playlists doesn't take them away from the Videos page, is what I'm trying to say. Does that make sense? Yep. Awesome. Any other questions about that? Before we go off that screen? Yeah? So I had a similar situation where I had a personal channel and I had my URL, which was like a play on my last name I think, which had nothing to do with the brand I created later. Yeah. But I had some relevant videos. Can I move them from my old channel to my new branded channel? The only real way to do that is to download them and upload them. Okay. So there isn't any way of like easily switching them over. Okay. So you will just upload them to the new place and you can download your own videos from YouTube really easily. When you're in your creator channel, it's one of the options when you're looking at a video is to download the MP4. Like what I did is our computer crashed and I lost lots of my old files, but because they're on YouTube, I can get them again anytime. But you might already have them on your computer, in which case you just upload them. The other thing you can do about videos you don't want to show up anymore is you can change them so they're private. I don't know if we can do this easily here. But you change the setting, when we upload a video, I'm gonna show you the privacy settings. If you move it to unlisted, no one will see it on your page. It's a really good thing to do with your old videos is set the privacy to unlisted and they won't show up anymore. But anybody who has the link, say you emailed the link to your viewers six months ago, that link will still work for them. It just won't show up. Does that make sense? So you can't delete? Oh, you can delete them even. If you just totally wanna delete them. Okay. But if you've used them in anything, if you've embedded them on any page or on any site or anywhere, I would just move them to unlisted. 'Cause a lot of people have websites they've drifted away from (laughs) that they've posted their old videos on. If you delete them, they'll just show up as errors everywhere they lived. What I want you guys to do is to set up your YouTube channel. You can pick any name, go back and edit it later, I know you don't have an image but later we're gonna upload your video. And you're only gonna be able to upload your video if you have a YouTube channel.