Transcripts
1. Introduction: So you want to be a YouTube? My name is Josiah Brooks also go by jazz A. And I have a YouTube channel called Draw with Jazza, which is my full time profession. This skill share course is dedicated to helping you with some tips and tricks and valuable information that I've learned on the road to becoming a full time YouTuber to help you turn your passion, your hobbies, your interests, your talent and your business into something that can be successful and thrive on YouTube. Standing out and making money on YouTube is easy to say and a lot harder to do, especially considering there are hundreds of thousands of creators trying to make it big on the platform. On While a lot of people have heard these stories about overnight sensations and viral success is, this course is going to be centered around my personal experience, which as a full time you Chuba began and always has continued without a single viral video , but rather has been based on a long term relationship with a platform and building a stability through a whole bunch of different things, like different revenue streams, understanding the analytics targeting, serving and respecting my audience and, of course, aggressively and enthusiastically endeavoring to produce high quality video content for my audience. Now should also preface with the disclaimer that this is not a video production course. Unfortunately, you're on skill shares, so there are loads of those, and I encourage you to go check them out if you're interested in learning things about filming, framing, lighting, editing and all that cool stuff. But here we're going to be talking about the platform YouTube on how to succeed on it on the title of the course. Being about getting attention and making money on the platform don't necessarily have to mean exploitation and attention seeking. They can be done with integrity. And that is also a foundation of the course that I'm sharing with you today. I'm going to share with you how to get noticed by hoping you understand how the platform serves its content and also how to provide value to your audience and have them keep coming back for more and share your work. And, of course, to monetize your content not only on the platform itself, but with other streams of revenue that you can build a diversified to help you build stability on a very tricky to understand and navigate platform. In this course, we're going to talk about optimizing your channel to increase quality views. A lot of people talk about how to use keywords or S E o to optimize and good your channel out there who actually really might not know what they're talking about. I'm going to share with you as best as I can and from a place of experience how you Kenbrell your channel to grow from zero subscribers and rocket up to a 1,000,000 in no time . Well, actually, that's not true in a lot of time and with a lot of hard work, but I'll show you how to do it with enough careful crafting a lot of hard work. It can be a really great business model with low overheads and a diverse stream off somewhat predictable revenue. Seo share is awesome, and one of the reasons that so awesome is because it's centered around active learning through participation in projects, and this course is no different when you apply the principles of shared in this course, share a screenshot of your YouTube channel as a new visit would see it and attach it and a link to your channel to the project section. There's no need, believe it or not, to add a blurb or intra text to use admission, your channel should speak for itself. Its title and its theme and content should be pretty apparent with the visiting of the link or the screenshot. But you submit now remember, you're not here to get your classmates to subscribe, so don't bother asking for subscriptions. You're here to get honest and constructive feedback, and as such, I encourage you to review a few other people's channels as well. After all, what goes around comes around. And if you're interested in people's on this feedback, it's only fair that you're willing to take a moment to give a little bit to other people as well. Make sure to show your gratitude to people who take the time to review your channel and feel free to come back later. Down the line is your channel makesem progress. Not too often, but let's say every couple of months or every time you reach a new landmark to share your journey with your classmates and to continue the feedback cycle. Success on YouTube isn't exclusive to themes like vlogging and gaming, and it certainly isn't exclusive to any geography like California or New York. There are people from all around the world who have built huge audiences in a huge variety of topics, from sports to art and music to cooking and crafting even all sorts of other weird stuff. Whatever your passions and your skills are, you combat that there is potentially on adoring audience out there waiting to meet you, and I can't wait to show you how to make that happen. If you condone dream it, you conduce. Oh, it because today is the first day of the rest of your life because the secret of getting ahead is getting started. Baby, you're a firework. Come on and show them what you're worth. That's what makes you beautiful. All right, stop collaborating with that terrible, corny mash up marks the end of my little skill share course introduction. I'd be find the content off it interesting. If you go forward and watch the course, make sure to share your progress and your channel in the projects section with your classmates and most of all, have fun. Onda. Good luck on your YouTube adventure. I look forward to seeing you in my course
2. Grounding Expectations: we're gonna start off with some real talk. This is my YouTube channels social blade and will go into what social blade is and other useful websites later on in this course. But I just wanted to begin by essentially introducing who I am and what I do. My channel is draw with jazz er, where I do art and animation, tutorials and entertainment. As of recording this course, I currently have 1.4 million subscribers and 113 million video views are channels been around for going on five years now? And though these numbers that I opened up with kind of cool and fun to share, the other thing to realize is that over 21 million off my video views, which is what about 20% or so of the entirety of my channels. Video views have happened in the last 30 days. Now that's not due to Vire ality, but that's due to exponential growth. And that's what old talk about in this course as well as you can also see. I've gained 169,000 subscribers in the last 30 days, which is a pretty large chunk of my overall subscriber ship. It took me well over two years to get my 1st 100,000 subscribers and the fact that in the last 30 days I've gotten almost double that is kind of cool, but again speaks for the process that I'm going to break down for you in this course. As you can see, my YouTube channel has been averaging around 2 to 3000 subscribers a day, occasionally with a peak it around six or 7000 subscribers a day. But in general, that's the gain of subscribers ship that I've averaged so far. But in general, that's where my channels currently sitting. And as you can see, video views range anywhere from between 400,000 views to a 1,000,000 views on the channel every day. This is the analytics page from my YouTube channel. And as you can see, the views and watch time, all follow the same sort of curve with this very gradual but rapidly increasing upwards trajectory. This in mind somewhat biased opinion is what a healthfully growing organic YouTube channel growth chart should look like. Now. I wanted to open up with this to give you some context, because often people see the YouTube channel and they see the total off the subscribers or the views, and it seems intimidating and unreachable. But the thing to keep in mind is that if you actually break down a YouTube channel into the perhaps amount of years that it's been running, so in my case, let's break this up into five badly divided portions. You can see that the growth between each of these is pretty minimal, but ever increasing. And as you can see in the last year, my channels growth has almost doubled what it had done in the previous entirety off his growth. So now, for context, let's look at the very first year. This is the 1st 365 days of my entire YouTube's channel life span. And you can see that in the beginning I was averaging 3 to 5 subscribers a day. I started to go up a little bit, maybe 7 to 8, or I had a bit of a spike here. Maybe a forum post I made or a plug I got from a friend gave me a little bit more attention , so I got 24 subscribers. But as you can see, it still was very slow and very incremental. Now again, this is a year. So if you break this up into 12 I'm not doing this very evenly. But let's just pretend that this is 12 even portions. You can see that these bursts of growth come at about, you know, two, perhaps three months apart. But after each burst of growth, which comes from being proactive and posting on forums and interacting with other people's audiences, the level that the subscriber growth sits at slowly increases over time. Now again, please keep the context in mind that at the beginning, where I was averaging 3 to 5 to prescribers a day on then towards the end of this graph forum, are averaging over 100 subscribers a day. This is an entire year where I was uploading at least one, sometimes two or three videos a week, and I never broke that cycle. Consistency is key. Another thing I mentioned is that while I don't exactly remember what caused these spikes, I could, with a degree of confidence, tell you that they came from an audience or a community that I was already a part of, and In my case, this was a website called New Grounds. This was a website where I had already for years created games and animations and as I was transitioning to YouTube every now and then I would make an animation or a game, and I would link to my YouTube channel and say, Go subscribe to my YouTube channel. I've got tutorials and I'm doing art stuff. And whenever I made the effort to make good content on a different website, not YouTube on plug my YouTube channel, I got to bring people already interested in my content to a place where I was going to consistently create more content and because I did consistently create that content that growth did slowly and steadily increase over time. Now I want you to try and think like that. If you have a YouTube channel that you feel isn't growing fast enough, maybe think outside the box. Instead of thinking about how you can harness YouTube on its own, think about how you can use the communities you're already apart off. You might be part of some Facebook communities or have some friends. Maybe you'd encouraged to sign up first. Maybe you have a deviant art page or a tumble page, or you're a moderator on a Reddit forum. You don't want to exploit the trust that you've built in these communities, but you do want to encourage people to participate and partake in the quality content that you'll be creating on YouTube and all the while while you're collaborating and building your audience from other areas and websites. You also want to prove your worth on YouTube by creating good content. Consistently. Growth on YouTube takes time often and usually years. It's normally very slow to begin with, and this is normal. But it can also be really frustrating, especially if your expectations are ambitious in that long period of time where your channel may be very slowly growing, you should always be regular with your upload. Be ambitious and innovative with your content and, of course, be always present an interactive with your audience. This process can be sped up with the luck of a viral hit or an effective collaboration, which we'll talk about later in this course. But realistically, neither of those things can be relied on. And if you want your YouTube channel to be self sustaining and growing. Then we're gonna have to talk about something a little bit uncomfortable. And that's the reality that growing your YouTube channel is a little bit like dating. That's right. We're having the commitment talk. You see, you want a long term relationship, something that will strengthen over time. And as you invest your skills and passion into it, nurturing this kind of long term relationship means accepting the fact that there will be times where the spark fades a bit. And if you're serious about establishing something that lasts and flourishes, you need to start off with self determination that you will see it through to the end. But you're gonna push past any roadblocks and make it work, even when it doesn't feel like it's working. Running a YouTube channel is a serious commitment, and one not to be taken lightly coming inside. No, I'm still filming. What are you doing? Stuff about YouTube going to be another six hours. Yeah, but my grandmother died and we're going to a funeral. Sorry. I'll see you when you cheap. Yes. I love you. When you're exhausted or uninspired to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and make something until you're inspired again when you feel down, because it feels like it's moving too slowly and it most likely will feel like it's moving too slowly. Remember the long term commitment you made and focus on some content you can make to keep you inspired and excited. Building a long term and sustainable YouTube channel with that long term commitment is a grueling process I know from personal experience, but what you actually don't want is a one night stand. There's a lot of glamour or excitement around the idea of having a one hit wonder viral success, but I personally believe that this is actually a disadvantage in the long term. He's a bit of a direct comparison. This is my YouTube channel has shown on Social Blade with my lifetime views and subscribers , with this graphic waiting to roughly one million subscribers and the duration off this graph being about five years long, this is what I would in a very biased fashion. Consider a very healthy trajectory. It starts up very slow but build momentum, and you know that when we're peaking and having high points like this, it's unlikely to immediately drop overnight. Based on the fact that there is a momentum and that it is going upwards. Now, you see, you can't take things like that for granted and things can change overnight. But that is the exception and not the rule. And in general, if you have a track record and a consistency of up close and quality, it is more likely to at least be on the upwards direction for a longer period of time. Then, for example, a channel like this. Now, this channel will remain unnamed, but they, like my channel, have about a 1,000,000 subscribers. This is a much shorter graph. As you can see, this is just from 2015 to now. So this timeline is a little under two years, and as you can see, a majority of the channel subscribes, and views came within a month or two. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what viral looks like. And while it sounds glamorous and fun and the idea of achieving so close to a 1,000,000 subscribers in such a short period time sounds really cool. The reality of it is this. This is what follows most viral successes. There are, of course, examples of people who have used vier ality to their advantage and been able to make a sustainable business or brand out of it. But in most cases, nearly all cases viral videos and viral channels tend to die pretty quickly and again, this doesn't apply to all viral channels. Some have been able to push into an upward momentum after the big drop after the spike. But to a lot of people who achieved this random success, it's exactly that it's a bit random and without knowing exactly what the magic juice was that gave them that burst of success without being able to replicate it in a way that is new and interesting, or being able to entice the audience in a new and interesting way. Getting that trajectory back up again or building into a channel on brand that will continue to grow and have long term success is very, very difficult. So in my opinion, viral is a bit overrated. The point I'm trying to make is, and the reason I opened up the course with this chapter is that it's really important to keep your expectations grounded. If you're starting from the ground up, work hard and have fun but understand that these things take time. It's a bit of a weird place to start the course. But for example, mine YouTube channel took about four years to become sustainable as an income to keep your expectations in check, work hard, have fun. And, of course, remember that YouTube is a long term commitment and not a one night stand, and it's definitely not a prostitute, but we won't get into that seeing the next video.
3. Setting Up: in setting up your YouTube channel, or at least in perhaps re identifying it moving forward. You should be very familiar with what you're going to present your content on the theme of your channel to be. Whatever the theme of the content, maybe I highly recommend it be something you're really passionate about. I recommend having a very honest conversation with yourself about the true depth off your level of interest in the content of theme you're gonna be presenting. So, for example, while it may sound like a great and fun idea to be a gaming YouTube, the reality of producing the same kind of content for a very long period of time can be a little missed, especially when you're starting off in a bit excited. So think about the long term prospects honestly, about producing the same theme content every day, or at least several days a week for the rest of your life. If that starts to sound boring than maybe you want to reconsider and think about something that you would do until the day you die without an audience, the other thing to consider when forming the identity of your YouTube channel are what your strengths are and how you can use those strengths to your advantage to present the content off your channel. Also recommend doing quite a lot of establishing research, and if you have, are starting a YouTube channel and moving forward, I recommend staying particularly alert of channel similar to the themes of the channel that you're working. And so, for example, if you have a channel way, you cook meat. Look at a lot of other channels that do the same things. Steak connoisseurs and beef jerky making channels They exist, by the way, Look at the way they present their content and look at the way that they harnessed the Mitch and then ask yourself what you can do that is a bit different. That's a bit unique and a bit more you that people will find and identify with as they discovered your channel. Now let's talk about the name of your YouTube channel, and it's important to consider that if you're working at this with a bit of a long term goal in mind, your name will become your brand essentially, so the name needs to be searchable. That needs to be easy to recognize and spell and find, and also should really clearly communicate what it is. For example, mine YouTube channel drool with jazz up pretty clearly says the two things that are at the core of what the channel is art and me. You may find it interesting to go look up a bunch of other popular and less popular YouTube channels to see how they use their name and what you think is effective or less effective. I believe that the most effective YouTube channel names ah, memorable, clearly communicative and easy to look for and say in short, do have a YouTube channel name that is clear and identifiable and communicative. And don't go for Beastmaster Lord 69 unless you're making content that is directly related to that name, which I am no longer going to talk about that because I don't want to think about what that content would be. I'm just gonna give some best practices and tips when it comes to setting up your channel. First of all, your branding should make a statement. You want people to arrive to your channel and feel the way you want them to feel. If you have tutorials, you want your channel to be clean and practical and clear. If you have an adventurer, very personality driven channel, you're gonna want to show your face or show adventures in the visual themes of the channel that you have or are showing. If you're channels aimed at adults, make sure to treat your audience with visual maturity. And if your channel is targeted to Children, make sure to include some bright colors and really cute, simplistic shapes and colors to make it really appealing to them. Your channel should always, in my opinion, have a channel trail up. Really, you want your channel trailer to quickly communicate to your viewers what your content is. And in some cases, that might mean making a channel trailer specifically for that purpose. Cutting together a video that represents different kinds of content you produce, and even saying exactly when you upload and what you endeavored to create, often is good to have popular up loads up the top or most recent uploads clearly visible and near the top of your channels page and then also try and categorize your most popular or most thematically appropriate content grouped together in playlists clearly presented in priority of what you think new visitors to the channel would be most interested in seeing. If your YouTube channel is very new, don't worry too too much about having loads of playlists. Really. Just have one or two, perhaps your most popular videos and your most recent uploads, and then really focus on creating content. However, if you have hundreds of videos, you want it to be somewhat easy for people who are new to your content to find exactly the kind of content that they interested in and have subscribed for. I'm gonna finish this mini presentation on setting up your channel just with a few important things to keep in mind. The first is going into the Settings page of YouTube channel and make sure to find all of the keywords and upload default and all of the branding options and search engine optimization options that you can find and fill them in as clearly and cleanly as you can to give your YouTube channel the best possible chance off standing out and being complete for the algorithm to serve as possible. Also, make sure to set up a custom. You are Elfi, a YouTube channel, sometimes there might be a limitation on Miss Beard and amount of subscribers or video views you might have tohave before claiming and custom you Earl. But as soon as you are able to make sure that claim it and make sure it's something that's easy to type and to share because you're gonna be using this for the rest of your channels . Life last but not least, you're gonna wanna link your YouTube account to a Google AdSense account so that you can monetize your videos. Now, as of recently, YouTube has restricted ad monetization on YouTube channels two channels with over 10,000 lifetime views on the channel. Don't worry about that, even if it takes a bit of time to build up towards. That's not a huge amount of money you would be missing out on anyway. But just keep in mind that when you want to monetize or when you're approved to monetize, to set that up and get that'll going as soon as you can. The very last thing I want to talk about when it comes to setting up your own YouTube channel is to check out both popular YouTube channels on the platform itself. and also to check out effective channels that are similar in theme and content. Toe what you want to create, goto a load of these channels and ask, What are they doing and what's working? How are they presenting their content? What visual ideas did they use that you can gain inspiration from without necessarily copying? Borrow some of their best ideas, include some of your own and make your own and kick us channel identity and make it stand out in a way that's different to what's already out there. I'm sorry to say, but even if you have amazing content in your videos, if people go to your channel and see ugly branding or a really disorganized page, it will turn away some of your potential followers. Make sure to set up a range and present your YouTube channel and its home page with the understanding that it is the foundation off your YouTube identity and that the content are the bricks that build it
4. Understanding “Clickbait”: Okay, so we're going to address the accusatory buzzword that a lot of people like to use. Clickbait Clickbait is somewhat justifiably seen as a negative term due toa links that seduce people into clicking typically adds on traditional websites or annotations and obnoxious overlays with products or website promotions in place off actual content articles and websites and videos that lacks substance or don't deliver on the promises offered in the enticement to click. The result is, of course, that people feel resentment and frustration for being led to click on something where there were promised something exciting and cool and were given a bunch of ads and click throughs to different pages. This is the opposite of what you want. You don't want them to be frustrated as a result of clicking on your enticing welcoming thumbnail in title. So let's be frank. You sort of want to click back. That sounds bad, and I don't mean it in the way that people think of the term, but I mean in the sense that if your content is the main meal, you want to present a picture or short advertisement for the content itself that is both appealing and clearly communicative to what the content will be. Think of your video titles and thumbnails as a promise and the content itself as the delivery. You want to promise exceptional and exciting content in the thumbnail entitle of your video , but you also want to deliver that exciting, an exceptional content. I recommend keeping two factors in mind to make sure that people don't feel frustrated or let down after clicking on the bait to your content. The first is to keep your promises or the bait. Exciting but realistic. Don't over high bit and don't mislead people. The second thing I would keep in mind, and this is probably even more important than how you bait people. It's how you deliver on that promise. If you promise excitement to a bunch of people who don't know you and then over deliver on that expectation, you'll find that not only will that convert into an audience that is growing, but also an audience that's excited to see the next video and the next video in the next video. In short, done use cheap tactics to get views in the next part. Of course, we're going to talk about some strategies that you can use an apply to your thumbnails and your titles to make them enticing and appealing. I'll see you there.
5. Tips for Thumbnails & Titles: So let's start off by talking about thumbnails. That's the most visual part of your content that someone's going to see before they see the content when trying to stage your composer. From now on, I like to keep things in mind, like symmetry or the rule of thirds. You also want to make sure that your thumbnail doesn't have too much detail or even too much text. In my opinion, texts should be used very carefully and minimally on only when it helps to communicate the content of the video or, of course, get the potential viewer excited about the content. Sometimes it also helps to think of the content of your video as a book. On the thumbnail is the cover. And while people like to say, don't judge a book by its cover, I really don't know anyone who actually doesn't do that. I think pretty much everyone judges a book by its cover, and likewise, people judge a video by its thumb. Now consistency is also really helpful. My personal approach on this is too often include my jazz, a avatar character which helps reinforce that branding off my jazz avatar and help people identify my videos apart from other people's videos. It also communicates my art style and that it's our themed content. Try visiting some other popular YouTube channels and see how they have different areas of consistency. Perhaps they have a regular podcast, which has a different thumbnail aesthetic to their other, perhaps more popular videos. Or you might see a little icon or identify it in a popular YouTubers thumbnail of a specific type of content, so that people who are subscribed to them for a particular kind of content know how to find that each and every time the's air really useful tricks to keep in mind and something that you may find useful when helping communicate your content to your audience and potential future audience. Now let's talk about titles, which are the other half of the equation where the thumbnails are most useful in helping connect people with your content. That titles while they helped do that, of course, are even more useful in helping the algorithms of YouTube serve your content and classify it and distributed. So you're gonna actually want your YouTube video titles to be effective in two ways, the first being that they're enticing and clear to people looking through different videos on YouTube and the other that the words terms and structure of the title is complementary to the YouTube algorithms and the way that people search for content on the way that YouTube is going to identify and move it around. So I thought I'd open up Microsoft Word here and lay down a few key points that I keep in mind When creating titles for videos. I tend to keep titles to around 5 to 10 words without over doing it. Also, try and keep in mind to break apart the text. Visually, we'll give examples of that in a moment, but basically to give you a small example. If I wrote, George went to the beach and eight a tasty sandwich, obviously I can't spell very well. So let's use market of where to our advantage as a sentence. This is great, but as a YouTube video title, the I is gonna be grazing over titles, lots of them at a time. In fact, this also reads like a story. George went to the beach and I ate a tasty sandwich. When people watch their content, it's going to feel a little more present, and you don't want to speak in the past tense as if they've missed out on something, in my opinion, that's why, in a lot of links or articles, this is more spoken to in the present tense. George goes to the beach and eat a tasty sandwich. It feels like something that's happening, that they may want to watch and not be engaged in. Now let's talk about breaking apart. Visually, George goes to the beach and it's a tasty sandwich is two things that are happening in this sentence. So let's break it apart. One of the ways I like to do that is just by adding a hyphen on another space. That way we have a visual gap dividing thes. Two sections of what's happening in the text in our brain can quickly compartmentalize and say this things happening, and so is this thing to individual things that make up the whole. Another thing I like to keep in mind is using a simplistic type off text. So using the same example, basically you want to communicate these to current events in as clean and simple away as possible, said that the brain doesn't have to do very much work. I know where catering to the lowest common denominator. But really, we just want to create appeal and minimalize effort, at least on the part of the reader. I'm also going to include in the order of simplistic text prioritizing themes. Essentially, you want to have the familiar stuff first. Who is George? Is that someone we haven't met before? Why is that the first thing that we're reading? What people are familiar with is Beach. Maybe they want to see a beach trip in a fun holiday. So let's what these around? Let's put the interesting thing first. Let's put beach trip first, then with George, so we're still keeping him there. Then we have and eat a tasty sandwich Now. I mean, that makes sense, but it's sort of a boring way of saying it. However, if you simplify this by putting f t dot which is cool youth speak for featuring. Essentially, you've made the sentence off Andy to tasty sandwich into something much simpler visually and also something that feels a little bit more relaxed and kind of fun. And then the last thing I'm gonna add in here is something I call strategic capitalization Spell that you may think that the emphasis on this is on capitalization. But the reality is that can be obnoxious if too many things. Aaron Capitals. Really? The emphasis is cleverly on strategic, as I've just done in the in that sentence, you say what a deck has strategic is capitalized. Give it anyway. What I mean by that is by selecting 2 to 3 keywords to capitalize, you can very clearly and quickly emphasize what the thing of interest in your title or your content is. So in this example, beach trip is the main piece of interest because obviously, we're going to tell a story and show some content around an exciting beach trip. I suppose if you want to, in the tasty sandwich was a funny or entertaining part of your content. You could capitalize that, but you can see also by doing it too much that it starts to look a little bit too loud, and you don't essentially want to shout at your potential audience. So I'll keep it simple, where possible, and also think it's worthwhile. Capitalizing the first letter of the larger words or the main words in your titles, which essentially means that we're treating this more like the chapter header of a book rather than a sentence within the text. It's also fun to use a bit of emphasis. So if the tasty sandwiches a fun part of the story that's at an exclamation mark, and that is the result of what I would think of as a pretty clean and fun, easy to digest video title, the last thing I had when thinking about your titles is where pertinent. Using search search, search. So use your spelling correctly. First. Searchable keywords. Bread Weds, worths, searchable keywords. Correct Spelling helps to. The example. Used to demonstrate. Creating a title using searchable keywords will be a tutorial, something like a bebel trick shot tutorial. Now this beginning example of a title has three main parts in it that I want to break down . One is the overall theme, that being basketball, the other is the specific thing that is being taught how to do trick shots and then the word tutorial, which sets it apart from trick shot content, people who do the trick shots and make the entertaining content. Now, if you uploaded a video that was really entertaining and really cool and used. This is the title. It might work, but it also might have a few things that could work to its advantage to help it. B'more searchable on Give it a bit of an edge When it comes to search engine optimization over your competition on a new line, I'm gonna break this down. Let's start off with how to. That is probably one of the best ways to open up a tutorial. How to, in this case, perform a basketball trick shot. As you can see, I've used a bit of capitalization and also added some visual break and add the word tutorial here at the end. In fact, I can even simplify this further and just delete this and have how to colon basketball trick shot tutorial. Now let's talk about searchable keywords. I still have the word tutorial that I had in my original title here, but I've added the word how to because they're often searched in synonymous way. Sometimes people search up basketball trick shot tutorial, and sometimes people search how to basketball trick shot. So it's best to have a way that the algorithms of YouTube can pick up both to make it more likely for your content to be found and served. Now, let's look at the word B ball and basketball. This is Google trends. To get here, you simply type trends dot google dot com. You were taken to this website. If you are interested to see how searchable one of the words you're interested in using is compared to the alternatives, enter the word here. Let's say Bebel, and you can see the overall search ability of this word over time. Now this is interesting, and you can also limit it from Web search to just YouTube search, which is obviously going to be a little bit more important to you. But the most important thing is you can add comparisons here, and this is super useful. So if we had the word basketball and hit enter, you can see quite immediately that the word basketball is much more heavily searched. In the word bebel. When you can try different combinations, you can try Bebel one word with no hyphen. You try basket ball with a space. As you can see, that is more heavily search than either of the bebel alternatives But obviously you're gonna want to use the word basketball because people are looking for basketball content and the YouTube algorithm is gonna find yours if you use that word. But it won't if you use any of these other alternatives because people aren't using it in their search terms. Let's apply this lesson to the other word. Trick shot. Now this is an interesting one because I don't even know if it's an actual word. Or if it's two words. However, trick shots are super popular on YouTube. So how are people finding them in? The most obvious way to find out is to go on to YouTube and type basketball. And if pressed, t guarantee you trick shots comes up the top here. Did you see that trick space shots comes up before tricks or tips or training, so that is obviously a more heavily searched term. While it can be useful to find the validity of search terms here, Google trends tends to be much mawr informative on the difference that this will make. So let's use this as an example. Have looked up trick shots, all one word. Change it to YouTube, search that we can see how relevant it is to what we're making now. Let's add trick hyphen shots now. Two words. Trick shots, and you can see that while trick shots is one word still has good search ability on YouTube . Trick shots with a space between them is much more highly searched, so we can remove the two weaker links here. And we can refine this even further and ask ourselves two people search, trick, shot or trick shots more. You can see here a direct comparison trick Shots is still the winner. Why have we gone through all of this? Well, it informs us that if we make out Heidel trick shots tutorial, we're gonna have a much easier time being found, because that's what people are looking for. Same. He's using the word basketball and including the words how to alongside tutorial. While at the end of the day the quality of your content matters, most people are gonna have a much harder time finding your content if use phrasing and structure like this, compared to using sentences or searched homes that are much more in demand and soared after from the audience you're essentially trying to reach. So that's my basic breakdown. I'm gonna move on to some practical examples with different context so you can see how I personally would go about titling some of this content into video titles that are easy for the algorithms of YouTube to find and serve Onda, also appealing and easy for people's eyes and brains to absorb at first example is a music video cover oven Elvis Presley song played with kitchen utensils. Well, let's open up with the title of the song. In this case, it might be Hound Dog. Now you could put the word Elvis Presley in next, But the problem is people already know who sang and performed Hound Dog. And if they search for Hound Dog or if they see titles related to Hound Dog, they're already going to sort of make that parallel. So the next piece of information is, most importantly, gonna be what makes your content different, and in this case, it's the fact that it's played with a unique instrument. So let's say it played with and using strategic capitalization utensils. Fuckin spell it correctly. Now this alone is a title is pretty good and carries the message across, but you still want to make sure you have that search engine optimization, meaning the words Elvis Presley gonna be very valuable to you. So you still want them in there and even the word cover so that people know and that the algorithm knows that it isn't the original song that it's serving, So I would also visually break it up by putting the words Elvis Presley cover in brackets at the end. Off the title, you can see that the quotation marks, as well as the brackets, help to visually break up and almost frame the part about the content, which makes things interesting. For our next example, we have a tutorial about cleaning and painting a concrete surface, something pretty mundane. But, hey, YouTube is an amazing place, and people look this stuff up. I have YouTubed how to change tap fittings and found extremely helpful content while my house was filling up with water. So, like our example, how to is one of the most important sets of ways you can use when creating a tutorial. Then we get to the crux of the content we have clean and paint a concrete surface. Now I would be inclined to add at the end here d i Y tutorial cause we want the word tutorial in there. But as you can see, we also have quiet a large sentence. So we want to break this apart visually and again. One of the best ways to do that My opinion is just at a hyphen and a space. The result is a pretty simple title where we can immediately see what the tutorial is about . How to clean and paint concrete surface, the search engine optimization we have How to and D I y and tutorial in there. What you gonna help the algorithms find your content? And I think if you had a video on this theme and this was your title, you would have a pretty good chance that standing out against other videos that show the same thing because it's a niche and not many channels have many concrete surface preparation tutorials. Let's move on. We have a time lapse clay sculpture of a comic book character. This is obviously a little bit more of an artistic entertainment piece of content. Now what you don't want to do is be vague, especially with comic book characters, because they're fans are ravenous for accuracy. So let's say it's a sculpture of Wolverine from X Men. In fact, you could include that in there because people search X men as well. That's also where that's very easy to identify visually. Now that's gonna be the most interesting part of the title and the content for people who would be most interested in this content. So let's break it up and add the rest of the end. Here we have time lapse clay sculpture. I think this is a pretty good title. I would personally add an exclamation mark at the end here, which makes more sense with a piece of entertainment content than a D. I y tutorial. I wouldn't put too many exclamation marks on what people would consider boring but practical content. And then last but not least, we have an ambitious, episodic travel. Siri's, based in Micronesia for something that's episodic and more narrative driven. Naming something in a series like way can really help the other thing. To keep in mind, too, especially with ambitious, episodic Siri's, is that you're taking people on a journey and you want to evoke the emotion that you're aiming to provide through the Siri's in the title if possible. I guess what I mean by that is, if the travel Siri's is really chaotic and a lot of crazy things happened, you might title it something like Madness in Micronesia. And if that's the title of the Siri's, you'll want to add EP one or part one or something like that and then break it apart visually and in something episodic. I would include something to identify. What part of the story is being told in this video? For example, Passport's missing. Now If you had a title that was ambitious, episodic travel, Siri's based in Micronesia. Most people would agree that and sort of shrug it off. However, if you saw madness in Micronesia Episode one, Passports missing we immediately can see that there's a story that's about to be told, and we might be able to be taken on a ride as well by joining in their adventure nice and early Now, if you really wanted. And if you felt like it was appropriate to use up a little bit more of your economy of words, you could have something at the end here like travel vlog because a lot of people search for and are interested in something like that. A title like this leaves a lot more to the imagination. You want to entice them into perhaps a portion of the story or a highlight, show them that it's a part of a Siri's and around themes that they might be interested in. But it leaves a lot more to the imagination, as opposed to how to clean and paint a concrete surface, obviously targeted at very different kinds, off video searches and video watching. I'm just gonna get rid of the video title sections here and just put the titles and bold so you can see them a bit easier. And, as you can see, if you were browsing these, even without thumb now, as you can look from one of these to another, and your brain will very quickly identify what is being shown and told in the content that would follow. As a result, both people Andi, the mystical YouTube algorithm will be able to find and share your content more easily the end of the day. The most effective way to have your video be found by people is for them to be really good quality. I say that because the algorithms that serve your content don't only take the title into account. They also take into account things like the likability, the retention off, people watching the video and how much they watch and also the level of interaction if they're commenting or sharing a video with other people. All of those things are, of course, more likely to be enhanced if the content itself is good. However, I have found from experience that carefully crafting your titles and thumbnails to be complementary to the content and equally is enticing, a really important part of helping make your content easy for YouTube and for people to find.
6. Find Your Audience: YouTube has over one billion active users. That's over 1/3 off the Internet now, in terms of standing out from a crowd, if that's the crowd, that's a very big crowd to try and stand out from. So in that context, even a big channel doesn't quite stand out in the crowd. However, if you break down YouTube into sub genres, you'll notice that certain channels start to stand out more than others. So here's the trending page of YouTube, and this is what's currently so hot right now on YouTube. Now, if you're just starting a YouTube channel and this is the sort of stuff you enjoy watching and you feel like you want to enter into this fear of content creation, you're gonna have a hard time competing with millions of views on these people who regularly pump out content. So if you're starting off on YouTube, don't worry. This is not your competition, at least not yet. Now I use the word competition in a friendly way because really their potential collaborators, and they're also potential communities that you can engage in. But let's explore a little bit. Let's say you want to start a YouTube channel around fixing cars Toe hope, identify what the market on YouTube related to custom cars is doing. You can simply search custom cause and just browse through what we have immediately coming up. Now the first thing to sort of look out for is repetitions of names we have here. Samuel certain Muto, who appears several times in the top spot. So he's obviously one of the top custom car YouTubers. Let's open these channel because he there he is 20,000 subscribers and obviously specializes in custom cars. Occasionally you'll see a few other people randomly pop up, but it's interesting to notice that people that repeatedly pop up we have whip addict who shows up a few times he has 46,000 subscribers. And if you spend quite a bit of time watching videos that come up in the more broad searches in the niche that you're in, you can familiarize yourself with content creators who are already succeeding in the niece . You want to participate, creating content in, and you can also see what they're doing, that people are really finding, engaging and that really stands out. Maybe get a few tricks or tips or thoughts on how they present their thumbnails and what's making that content or those titles so appealing. And another thing you can do is further narrow. Your search. So Custom Cars is, while a niche are still a pretty broad search. Let's say, for example, we could search for blue Custom sports cars, and we're going to get videos in general that have slightly less views that might be a little hidden miss, but still more targeted towards a very specific niche. And this, again, is a way to find people that pop up multiple times or specialize in a more narrow topic. A Slowly you could potentially identify where a gap in the YouTube content marketplace may be for you and your special brand and type of content. To make an appearance and to claim some ground, consider who your audiences be it gaming, fashion, entertainment of logging, comedy, art and start looking around to see what content is out there and what channels stand out. In my opinion, the best way to stand out is to do something and offer something completely new that people haven't seen before, or, of course, to do something themed around something already popular, but often to them in your own unique perspective or style. The key to building your YouTube channel doesn't lie in outright copying peut pies, videos or commenting in Casey Nice. That's common section saying, Subscribe to my channel Instead, I believe the key lies in discovering and becoming involved in passionate communities centered around the theme off. What you want your channel to be on beyond that thoroughly and enthusiastically engaging with those communities Beav A your own or other people's. Occasionally perhaps try making a video replied to a video that is themed around something . You have a particularly strong Beit agreeing or disagreeing opinion to make yourself known to these communities, but do so in a way that is respectful and not overbearing as you do this effectively toe a smaller scale. And as you grow continuing to try and do so, making the constant effort to be active and involved and a vocal participant in these communities is gonna be the biggest part to establishing and building your authentic communication style with your audience. There's a word that advertisers and marketers and sometimes YouTubers or other social media personalities like to use for people who have influence in thes communities and matters the word influencer. But to a lot of these marketers and advertisers, that word just means views or influential people who can get other people to buy stuff to me and to a lot of other creators that I know the word influencer means less about advertising and marketing and a lot more about community on influences who have respect for their communities. Build those communities upon a foundation off sincerity and mutual respect. That foundation of respect and trust grows from what is initially a very small seed and grows organically. It may take time and a lot of hard working cultivation, but if you don't cheats to build an audience or get views and you do so based on genuinely building authenticity and excitement around the content that you're passionate about, you'll find that a lot more people will come on board and a lot of people will respect what you have to say and how you say it now. That may sound like a really slow start, and in reality it probably will be. But I believe that it is one of the strongest ways to build a foundation off authentic followers
7. Stay Topical and Innovative: two of the best ways of grabbing people's attention is to do something completely new or to do something themed around what people are already interested in and looking for, but in a way that is unique and offers them something new. In short, be innovative or topical. Being topical may involve following trends that up popular among your community or among YouTube is a whole one example that was effective for me personally, was when the trend of people creating draw my life videos was popular. I thought that was a great idea. And I, as an artist with a YouTube channel centered around art and drawing, jumped on board and created my own very personal drawn my life video that a lot of people understood me from. But then beyond that also saw that I was a channel that drew a lot of pictures because the whole content of the video is me drawing. So as a result, people understood the drawer part of my channel and the jazz, a part of my channel and proportionate to the size of my channel of the time. That was my most viral video. Having gotten about 100,000 views in the first day. I believe that result came from me trying something out, that people were already interested in that draw my life trend on presenting that in a way that was a little unique and potentially high quality, too, because I'm an artist and I draw pictures. And I got to really use my strengths to my advantage in that equation. Another example from my own personal experiences, the rise of popularity off our challenges in the community that I'm in. So, for example, where I started off doing a lot of tutorials, our challenge is was sort of this way of adding an entertaining flair to creation on YouTube. Rather than sticking to what I knew and what people had already learned to expect for me, which was regular tutorials, I started to embrace other kinds of content as well as doing my editorials, and added my own irreverent and idiotic twists to the art challenge to just have fun with them and encourage other people to have fun with. There are two. As you build on, cultivate your YouTube channel. I would encourage you to keep an eye out for some trends that a popular both in your smaller communities, and the larger community of YouTube is a hole and see what you identify with. And if there's something that's happening, or if there's some attention moving around, a particular theme on did excites you. Then think about how you can use your strengths to present a unique piece of content that gives people something around. That thing that they're interested in Onda shows you often a really nice like to you. This is Google trends. And to go here you simply type trends dot google dot com and you're presented with a whole bunch off popular or trending topics. And you can see how viral or how interesting they are. Two people at the moment. A lot of people are interested in sports, and we have the Chicago Bulls MBA playoffs here highly of interested people, you know. So see that that's slowly going down while the San Jose Sharks Edmonton Oilers is still going up so you can get an idea as to what direction the interest currently being experienced in different topics is going now. I wouldn't recommend scrolling through and just finding something popular to make content around, but sometimes if a trend is happening and you don't know what's going on. This can also be a clear way to see where it stands against the content or themes happening around the world currently, and it can also help you further break it down. Let's say, for example, you're a YouTube channel who specializes in sports commentary and perhaps a particular kind of sports. You can see that people are more interested in the Chicago Bulls and Bears playoffs than the Atlanta Hawks. Indiana paces or the Utah Jazz searched him. So, yes, we have multiple currently trending themes centered around basketball. But if you have a YouTube channel dedicated to basketball and you interested in what is currently popular in your niche, while the topic you specialize in is experiencing such a burst in activity, this could be a great opportunity to identify or prioritise what kind of content or news or material or entertainment people would be most interested in seeing, or at least more likely to find based on what is currently trending. Take a moment now to think about something you'll really excited about, be it a season of your favorite shows. Starting up for a movie that's coming out in six months. Chances are there are a lot of people who are just Azzan trist ID in that as you Andi, you may have a kind of content, but you can use to your advantage to present your passion on that thing you're excited about to those other people who also excited about it, what a great way to build and connect with other people. Ah, form of communication and a style of presentation that puts you in a bit of a spotlight, which is authentic and doesn't mean seeking ways to catered to an audience that you're not particularly interested in. Follow your heart because if you feel like you're pandering to an audience and making content, you're not particularly enjoying when you're doing it wrong. At the end of the day, it's worth keeping in mind that people are really good lie detectives. And if there's a trend going around YouTube, that's a bit dumb, and people are exploding it because it's funny, whatever, and you don't find passion or excitement in that, then people are going to see through that, and it's also disrespectful to your audience who have come to expect a certain kind of content from you as well. Now let's talk about being innovative. We don't need to talk about this very long because at the end of the day it's all about something unexpected and new, and I may not know what that is yet, but you may. There's less guaranteed traction when you make something new. For example, if people don't know what it is and don't know to look for it, they probably won't find it. But if you make something absolutely different on outstanding, then they will have no choice but to share it and show people because it's unique and fun. Some great examples are music videos by the YouTube is OK Go who make fantastic music videos that go absolutely ballistically viral every time, based on nothing other than great music and really, really ambitious and innovative ways of filming that music video. Another example of this that I love personally is, ah, peace Hold to this Day by Shane Quiz on. This was a really raw and emotional piece that touched me personally very deeply, and I shared a lot and still what from time to time, it's not even really based on something super popular in it. It's not particularly searchable, but because it's so raw and connect to the human experience and our emotions as very emotional people. It was really effective as a piece of content that was very share a bowl. There's also the very well known example of the five people playing one guitar video that skyrocketed their success. And, of course, we have channels like V. Source who, while beginning, is a game sort of focused channel tending to a curiosity focus channel. And that's where Visa was really found. It's nation identity, asking questions no one thought to ask in all of a sudden, enticing people to want to know the answer, Then watch the video and share it barrel some really great examples of new and innovative and interesting, completely different content that came out of the blue. But you can copy them because they've already done it. So now it's up to you to think of something else, I guess the last thing I mentioned in this part, of course, is to recommend doing both find things that you're passionate about, that other people are passionate about two and then get inventing and have some fun
8. Collaborate With Other Creators: So in this section of the course, we're gonna be talking about collaboration. What is it? And is it good? Collaboration can be a great way for two or more channels to mutually increase in, build each other's audiences. I've found that it's often universally positive, but there are elements of balance that a wise to consider ended here, too. I wouldn't recommend reaching out to much bigger YouTube is just because they have big audiences. That being said, it's not uncommon for a channel bigger than you, by double or even triple to be willing to collaborate with you. If, of course, you can show how you will be bringing value to the collaboration. Something I personally think is worth keeping in mind is that if there's a channel you think would be worth collaborating with, based on the audience that they have in the content they create, it's also worth looking at how their audience interacts with them as a whole. In my experience, there have been a few channels that I might have been interested in collaborating with because they covered the same themes and had similar or slightly larger audience numbers and video views. However, sometimes on rare occasions, I have observed a culture of negativity in an audience, be it through the comments sections or the like and dislike ratio and the way vein gauge with the Creator. But I actually don't want to be a part of my channel. So as a result, I opt out off proposing a collaboration or if they come to me, I actually kindly and politely decline the end of the day. Collaborations are sharing your audiences, and you want to be very careful with how openly you welcome people unfamiliar with your content. If they come from a community that is less positive than the community that you've already so carefully created, One of the best ways to collaborate without the creators is to be gentle and slow with your approach. Don't just attack them and say, Make a video with me and collaborate. I can guarantee you especially usual channels with bigger audiences they hear about all the time, and a lot of it is were off a duck's back. Instead, I recommend, in particular, looking at community is very similar to yours at or around, maybe slightly above or below your audience counter and are concurrent video of you count, and if you find a channel that you believe would be a good fit, try and get involved in their community. First actively participate in their activities and engage with them personally on social media. Send them a friendly tweed or a compliment in the comment section of that video. Let it breathe. Don't overwhelm them, but just be a friendly, positive presence. And when the time is right, maybe an opportunity will present itself to bring up in the course of conversation that perhaps you have a great particular idea that you could both work on for a piece of content together, bring the idea to them and ask them what their thoughts are. Be open to their suggestions. Just be super positive and friendly and make sure to work hard to make the collaboration be a really mutually positive experience and then also keep your expectations grounded because people have the right to manage their communities the way that they like to manage them, and some people are a little more closed off or personally curated than others, and that's OK
9. Adsense Strategies: So in this video, we're gonna talk about sitting up monetization on your YouTube channel. This is my wonderful example. New YouTube channel with zero subscribers on video views. So basically, if you click up here in the top right, you can see a little icon, your little identity icon. Here he's the other accounts are there on my actual YouTube channels down there, but we have our example. One. Here and click create a studio, and this brings you to a part of the website, which you want to become very familiar with. This is your home dashboard, where you can see a whole bunch of interesting stuff, which there's currently no data for no info for. But if you go over here to the left and scroll down to Channel, click this little arrow. Now, if your YouTube channel like this skill share, you should example account is brand new. You'll see that like here, monetization shows as ineligible. The reason for that is because you should have changed their standards to disallow channels without a minimum of 10,000 video views. Overall, to monetize when your channel is eligible for monetization, it will look a little different So I'm gonna switch over to my daily vlog channel daily Jazz R, and you can see that it is eligible for monetization. So I'm gonna go through the process of enabling monetization on this of Long Channel, even though my plans don't include monetizing the channel. I just wanted to use this as an example. So I'm going to click enable on monetization, and you can see that it lays it out clearly in steps Number one read to and agreed to the YouTube partner Terms just read through essentially what it means and what the breakdowns are. And then when you've done that, you agree to their terms, you can click, accept, and then the process will continue to move forward. We move on to step two, sign up AdSense click Start here that says you'll be redirected toe AdSense toe linked your existing account or create a new one. If you don't have one yet, click next and it will do that. This is where you're gonna either want to create a Google AdSense account toe link to so you can monetize. And that's where essentially whatever advertisement revenue you get will be sent to or you can sign into an AdSense account now haven't proceeded past step to because I don't actually want to monetize this channel. But basically it just continues on to Step three, where you essentially set your monetization preferences and you can choose what types of ads to run, such as pre rolls or ads beside the video. A little pop up ads that come up in the video and then the final part of the process is a review process where they look at your channel and just make sure it's all good. Give it the thumbs up and then you're enabled for monetization. Now let's switch over to my drawer with jazz a YouTube account and show you the difference here. This is what it looks like when your channel is monetized, so we have the account status monetization enabled. This is for my main YouTube channel, which I do monetize. Once you're monetized, you're gonna want to head over to upload default, and you're gonna want to change a few of these things Now. As you can see, I have a few basic things are changed to specific parameters, which I would recommend you want your privacy toe automatically go to unlisted. That gives you a chance to review and edit or pre send preview links to people you're collaborating with, but also without it being too restrictive. So you can still share the link. But it's not public, basically the reason for setting all this up. It means every time you click and drag will move and video in tow upload. It's going to assign all of these parameters, and then you can alter them on a per video basis. So moving on, I would recommend allowing all comments and ratings, and then you have this tick box monetized with ads. So if you have enabled monetization, you're gonna want to click monetize with ads and also select the ads you want to monetize with. This enables you essentially to monetize your channel without thinking about it very much, and you may, in retrospect, if you'll channel is monetized after you receive 10,000 channel views. Want to go back and manually monetize each of the videos individually that are up but haven't been monetized yet, and just make sure your upload defaults moving forward are monetizing your videos that we have something called ad breaks where you can automatically admitted rolls to your video. I personally don't do this because my view is that this sort of irritating sometimes it works effectively on channels. But I wouldn't recommend having ad breaks or mid roll ads unless your videos, on average, are like over 20 minutes long and are quite engaging. So people are likely to sit through another ad after 10 15 minutes of watching the video. It was, That's the basic process. You can see a few other things you can get there, but that's essentially how you want to set up your upload default toe enabled monetization and Justin example is to what it looks like in your video manager. I'm gonna click over here in my drawer with jazz video manager, and he can see a bunch of my recent videos. Anything that is monetized has this green little dollar sign on it, which means it's getting ad revenue for the views that it gets. However, any video without monetization shows as not monetize. And that's because in that video, when I open up a new tab, click Edit in monetization, I've disabled adds. I personally tend to disable ads for videos that are much more community based or really personal. For example, this is an update, Thank you video, and I felt like running an ad on it would be a little silly, because it's gonna get less views than my other views, which, as you can see it has. But beyond that, it's also a much more personal and conversational style. Video on isn't particularly ambitious content, so I thought it would be Mawr frustrating to viewers. Toe have ads on that rather than just toe have the conversational piece. And that's the reason, frankly, why I don't monetize my daily vlog channel because I do monetize My main channel on my vlog channel is much more of a conversational style platform. So a few other things to be aware of I just wanted to show you As I scroll down, you can see again another, more conversational style update, which I haven't monetized. But you can see here we have Lord of the Hogwarts Challenge of the Month has a copyright claim and isn't eligible for monetization. What does this mean? What is going wrong will. Essentially, it means it's flagged for copyright music. I can actually check what is being flagged by clicking includes copyrighted content, and it takes you to this page, which shows you the individual songs that are being claimed on who they're being claimed by . In this case, I expected this to happen because I use free music that wasn't enabled for our third party monetization, but essentially wouldn't disallow me to use them. So because I knew this video would get a lower amount of use, which, as you can see, it has. I didn't think that would be a problem, and I just in instead made a video in favor of adding some cool music to it and letting them monetize the video instead of me. However, sometimes you might get a copyright claim for something you have the rights to use which believe in are actually happened on this. My most recent video, Old versus New Art. By the time I recorded this video, of course, that was my most recent video. But as you will be aware, it is no longer April 17th 2017. So how do you deal with this? Will? Essentially I dealt with it how I might if I clicked on this link and went to the claims here and you can do what's called file a Dispute. Now, most cases in which you would filed a dispute where this has happened would be if you have purchased music from a website like audio blocks or from involve market. And in the case that I had a copyright claim recently, which I disputed, I used music that I bought from the inviting Marketplace website. You can actually find it at audio jungle dot net. With every purchase you make on websites like this which have licenses that come with the purchases you make, you can simply file a dispute and submit the text or document, which shows the license details to the dispute that you're claiming. As a result, this video which had a copyright claim on it, which I disputed had monetization then restored, and I have since been able to monetize the failure and the whole turnaround off. That dispute process took about 12 hours, so that's about it for my brief overview about monetization. Now, remember again, if you're a new channel, you won't be able to monetize immediately. But don't worry about that. Like seriously, you're not even losing that much money from needing to have 10,000 unmonitored ized views to qualify. And in the crunching the numbers section of the video, you'll see how much essentially 10,000 views will equate to is basically going to be something like $10 that you're missing out on. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. Focus instead on creating awesome content. And in time, when you've built in audience and you're getting the trajectory flowing and some momentum going for you, you will be able to monetize and over time with a lot of hard work. The monetization on YouTube should be one off a few parts of your diversified revenue structure to help you build a business out of your passion.
10. Making Products: in my opinion, and if done well and with integrity, creating and selling products to your audience is one of the best ways to build sustainable revenue. Separate to relying on YouTube and Google AdSense. I believe that it's an effective way to encourage or more loyal and enthusiastic supporters to monetarily support you at the same time is offering them something off tangible value. Selling digital products could be a great idea because you have very little to no overheads , meaning you lose very little money on each transaction, and you're not spending much money to create and send out and distribute the content or the product. However, regardless off the platform of the way you sell your digital products, you want to ask yourself a simple question. Is this value meaning? If you sell anything especially digitally, you want to make sure that it's something that people want and that they can afford the two ways I can most recommend. Creating and selling digital products are through 1/3 party website like this. This is called Gum Road. This is my gum road shop, which I initially set up and started selling products on. It's pretty simple and straightforward. They have all the hosting and all that stuff. You don't have to pay for an account, but they do take a slightly higher commission than if you set up your own shop. I think it's about 5% actually, just a quick correction. I checked just now and it turns out that they charge $10 a month pair account and that includes unlimited bandwidth. And the payments that they get are 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction or product sale. I personally outgrew gum road and while it was a great place to start off and I do recommend it to people to begin selling digital products on, I then moved on to woo commerce, which is an open source. Plug in for WordPress websites is I think it works with some other websites as well. This handles a huge amount of commerce on the Internet and I think magenta is another one that does a similar sort of thing and this is the result of what my website looks like with Wu Kam s, where people can create their cart. They also have accounts when they go through and they can go back and download their products later on. The reason I migrated to woo Commerce is because it allowed me to have all of my products on my own website and domain, which was pretty important to me, also had more customization in the visual theme and presentation of my products and any alterations or changes I wanted to make. And the commission was low and it adapts as you go. So PayPal takes, I think, by default about 3% or less. It actually might be closer. Teoh 2.5%. And the cool thing about PayPal is the more you earn, the less they take. So if you earn, I think over something like five or $10,000 a month. They go down to, like, 2% or 1.5% and so on and so forth. I think the lowest cut they take is 1% but you have to be earning like hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the point is, aside from the other picks that I mentioned, there is incentive and reward as you grow, so that's worth keeping in mind as well. The final thing, I'll say, is that this method that being implementing a custom shop on your own Web page is much more demanding and taxing of your time and technical knowledge. I've managed to do this on my own with a lot of thought and hard work and practice and some outside help now and then. But if you wanted to go down this route, in most cases, unless you're pretty tech savvy, I would recommend getting some outside help or hiring people who know what they're doing to help at least educate you. If not, set it up and manage it. T shirts and merch could be a great way for your most loyal supporters to show a bit of support to you and where their love of your content with pride. However, while there are loads of on demanding printing websites and shirt printers out there, not all of them a great qualities. So whatever you're selling, especially if it's produced by someone else, I highly recommend buying at first before you sell it. Just so you know what the quality is like because the last thing you want to do is sell anything to audience, which is rubbish quality because they'll never come back and they'll also help spread bad word of mouth, which is not what you want, especially when your entire livelihood is based on what people think of you online. As of recording this course, I personally use T springs for my printed T shirts that I sell people from time to time. And that's because I tried a whole bunch of different shops and they were great communicators and, most importantly, bright T shirts and good good value products. There's plenty more out there, and of course, these things can change over time. So I recommend trying things out for yourself and seeing what you come up with. But at the end of the day, and even if you're a bit tight on money, it's worth saving up and spending to get four or five product samples from different areas to make sure that you're making the right choice before you sell anything, do not sell anything to your audience that you would not by yourself or that if received, you wouldn't be satisfied with the quality off. You want to make sure that your audience feels treated with the respect at every turn and selling products is one of the most crucial areas in which you should act with utmost integrity. When you calculate the price of the product, you're wanting to sell to you already, it's make sure to ask yourself the question. If I bought this, would I feel like I got value for my money? Based on my experience? Would I buy from this seller again in the future? If you can honestly ask yourself those two questions and say yes to both of them and congratulations, you're on your way to a good business model.
11. Working With Sponsors: Okay, so let's talk about sponsorship. What is it? To put it simply, sponsorship usually means that a brand uses you as a spokesperson to help market their product or service the exchange essentially being payment or products being provided for the attention of your audience, which then feed back to them in the form of sales or commissions or subscriptions that they want to keep that cycle going so that they can keep providing their products and subscriptions and grows a business. And you can keep expanding and growing your audience while serving valuable content and products and services to them. In the case that a brand approaches you for promotion. In most of my experiences, that usually begins in the expectation off a free exchange, meaning they give you a product to promote and you shouted out or showing off in a video. Now, this might not be a bad thing if what they're giving you is a value to you and to your audience. In my personal experience, I began working with Wacom digital tablets, and our business relationship began with them providing me free products that I needed or wanted for my business, and to share with my audience on. Of course, they got the advertisement for a very low cost of them. On the other hand, I've been approached by developers of card games or headphones that don't necessarily fit my audiences expectations of my content and definitely aren't really something I'm personally interested in. And in those situations, whether they're offering money or not, I say no because it's not worth disrespecting your audiences attention and your channels integrity for a paycheck because that exchange detrimentally damages the trust of your audience, which is the most valuable asset to you, a content creator. The other kind of sponsorship comes about when you contact a potential sponsor, and in most cases that I've worked in this capacity. I've usually worked for a lower fee because it's something that I'm searching for for my content or often in exchange for a product itself. An example of this is at a particular time. I needed some new microphone equipment for my videos, which would help bring up the quality of my channel and help me produce stuff. I also thought that I could create some content themed around and highlighting the use of microphones by teaching through a tutorial. How my audience 10 record professional quality audio and voice over for themselves as content creators. I took this as a proposal idea to road microphones who are really high quality microphone producer here in Australia and asked for three specific microphones that I wanted in exchange for creating some promotional content. They sent the move, and everyone was happy because my audience learned something about recording while being presented with a particular brand that I found a value. I got some equipment that would have cost me 5 $600 to upgrade, and the brand got exposure toe over 100,000 people for very little cost. So that was a really good example off finding a sponsor without a paid exchange in particular on a result where everyone's sort of better off in the end as well. Most of my long term sponsorship relationships, especially if I initiated thumb, begin in this sort of casual capacity, where over time I can show them the impact of the videos, I creating the attention I can bring to them and the loyalty I can help them build. And this has fortunately evolved in some situations where they release a new product and want to promote something, and I let them know what my fears. So it's a bit of an organic process, but it's important to keep in mind you're actually dealing with people, not brands. So it's important to be a real and communicative and professional person. Andi, don't be intimidated by the brands or sponsors you're dealing with. Just be professional and offer them as much value as you can without selling yourself short or letting yourself be taken advantage off. Be particularly careful of that because that can happen to something to keep in mind regarding sponsors is if you're starting off a YouTube channel or quite young, don't rush it. You don't need sponsors to get things going. It's better to focus on your audience. And to be honest, a lot of sponsorships don't really come about until your past 20,000 maybe 50,000 subscribers. That's when the Balkan stop to roll a bit more, but you really don't want to rush it. And if you need some help, you confined to some resources on Google. As far as what you can charge. Often, people charge a CPV for a dedicated via which is an estimated cost purview. I'll go into all of that in the crunching the numbers section of this course, and hopefully that will help you to understand what the value of these views and things like that are. The other thing I'll mention is to not push it with old minded marketers. What I mean by that is Internet marketing and YouTube influencer Marketing is a pretty new thing, and a lot of people in these bigger, older companies are used to television advertisements, billboards, even website pre roles. But dont understand a lot of the value that we offer, and we do offer a lot of value. If you're trying to communicate your value to a brand that doesn't understand it, no matter how hard you explain, just let it go, go kick us and eventually they'll come find you and say, Hey, maybe you can help us out. At least that's my perspective and that has happened to me on a number of occasions where I have made believers out of nonbelievers and sometimes that has happened by respectfully and politely walking away and leaving the door open for them to come back if they want to have a conversation in the future. I'm gonna share some best practices I keep in mind when working with sponsors. I usually open up with a proposal, be it with a sponsor I want to pitch an idea to or a sponsor who comes to me and wants me to create content for their product or service. In that proposal, I clearly outlined a few options for them to pick from. Also like to provide some realistic view estimates for what they can expect to get from the content I create. Once a proposal is accepted in your both on board with what the content will be, I like to create something called a deal sheet, which is kind of like a contract, but a little more relaxed. Basically, you just want a very clearly outlined, perhaps in dot point for all of the things that you, as a content creator, will be providing to the sponsor specifically, the video you'll create when it will be created, when it will be uploaded and a window of opportunity that the sponsor will have to have some suggestions or feedback so that the content can represent their identity fairly. Sometimes you'll need something from the sponsorship being approvals. Or perhaps they're providing a product or service is a give away to your audience. That sort of stuff should all be included in the deal shoot. It's also worth creating what's called an event report where, one month after the release of the video for their campaign, you essentially go through your analytics and compile some interesting things like video views, watch time and like to dislike ratio. Perhaps, um, comment highlights in the comments section of your video to help demonstrate the final result in the value that was gained in the first month of producing the content for them. More important things to do included communicating often and clearly with the sponsor. You don't want any room for doubt. You don't want anyone to feel like they're left in the dark, and you want to reply and communicate promptly. Now, the prices and what you can charge for a piece of sponsored content can vary based on a number of factors, for example, production value of the content the audience reach or, in other words, the number of video views, the quantifiable level of conversion, meaning how many subscriptions that they might have gained on their website or how many products that they sold, as well as how organically your content on their product or service fit together. Now we won't go into numbers in this chapter. But if you're interested in rough ideas of how to price your content for sponsors in a marketing capacity, join me in the next lesson crunching numbers and we'll go into further detail If you're in doubt as to whether a particular sponsor or sponsorship is a good idea or not. I recommend asking yourself if it fits what I call the Golden Triangle of value a magical golden triangle where each of the three sides represents the three parties in the relationship, those being you, the sponsor and your audience in a good sponsorship, the value offered to you should be a fair monetary compensation for your audiences, Attention and your time. We're of course, product or services that you find valuable and need for your business or production. The value your sponsor should be able to expect is the respect and attention off your audience and a fair representation of their product or service, and last but not least in in my opinion. Most importantly, the value offered to your audience should be interesting and engaging content around a theme or topic they would have come to expect or want from your channel having subscribed and being offered something of real value that they would want in that video, be it a special offer or interesting and new and engaging content that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise, or, of course, information on the product or service that you believe they would genuinely find useful.
12. Crunching the Numbers: Okay, So in this video, we're going to take a direct look at numbers, which should be interesting. But it's also gonna be one of these things where I need at a whole bunch of disclaimers, because this is gonna be sorry different for everyone individually, and the answers are never the same. It's never as cut and dry as a certain amount of views equals a set amount of dollars. Neither is it as simple as videos in the same category owning the same amount. It's very individual. We're going to be as explicit as I can in these different forms of diversifying revenue on how to effectively use each of them or all of them in an effective way to build a sustainable business. Now, the reason that we're doing this in this way and looking at monthly income and yearly salary is because people don't often look at YouTube, especially if they're standing off and want to turn it into something into an ongoing and goal driven thing. They often see how it's going and try and get somewhere. But often if things are doing well, they sort of consider that the way things are gonna go and they don't prepare for a downfall. So I'm gonna start off by talking about a few things to remember and one that I actually haven't put here is one I'm going to put here now. And that is quite simply, what goes up always comes down. So if you have a great month or if your channels going viral, don't expect that to last forever. In fact, it's wiser to prepare for when it comes down my personal approaches, especially because my main source of income is a whole bunch of these different things in combination with each other. I like to prepare for the future. I have a wife and child. So things like having savings accounts and using offsets to mortgages, putting money aside for rainy days and for college and all this stuff because I know way, way too many people who earned a good living over a year thought it was going to keep going and spent it on crap on toys and gadgets. Onda. It'll disappeared, you know, the next year and all of a sudden they couldn't pay their rent. So don't make that mistake. You want to be wise, and you want toe approach. This, like a business, might prepare for the downfalls up, but also make the most that you can. While things are going well. Let's run through a few more of these little disclaimers I have here. We're gonna talk about diversifying your revenue will break this down in detail in this video, but you can see that we have add revenue alongside product sales, sponsorship crowdfunding and so on and so forth. If you want to build financial stability out of your YouTube channel, you're gonna want to diversify your revenue. Say that you don't rely on one source of income. For example, ad revenue always reliably goes up in November, December and drops dramatically in January and that simply due to the advertisers paying MAWR and wanting MAWR ads over the Christmas or holiday period on then, having spent their budgets by the new financial year, they're all of a sudden sort of pulling back and re calibrating and establishing there new marketing plans so their money isn't going into advertising as much. But if you don't diversify your revenue, you can, for example, put a little more emphasis on products with sponsorships or work harder to get donations rather than relying on ad revenue. And then, all of a sudden you're left with less than half of your revenue the next month. When he January next, we're gonna talk about building value over time. This sort of ties in with what goes up must come down. You want to push for a long term upwards trajectory rather than working for spikes of attention that may fall inevitably later on or very quickly. So you actually want to focus on long term, have long term plans and continue to build value and offer better and better content. And that's going to give you the longest value that you can over the longest time that you can push it to next. Disclaim are prioritized giving Don't over ask. Essentially all of these categories ask of something from your audience. Ad revenue asks of their time and attention. When you run the ads, Product sales asks for their direct support in the form of supporting your products. Sponsorships asks off their time and attention when viewing or having patients for the sponsors that you work with. Hopefully, you're bringing them good value in your sponsorships, and then, of course, crowd funding and donations is essentially just directly asking for money. So while you want to diversify your your revenue and build a stable source of income in as many ways as possible, you also don't want to bombard your audience with requests for money. It's going to make them disengage in and essentially hate your content for it. Keep it appropriate. Alternate where and when you ask. And don't always ask for something. If anything, prioritize giving them mawr than you ask, so that when you do ask for something, they really feel like they want to support you. Or they're happy that you have that sponsorship or that ad running. And then last but not least, we have this phrase. Don't judge a book by its cover. The reason I put that there is because while we are going to talk about imaginary but specific examples and give some ideas as to what channels might earn, it's important to understand. But channels earn at different rates. Some channels with smaller subscriber ships of your ships might make great money, and some with huge audiences and video views might make next to nothing. And that does happen. It might be because the top of the content they have can't be monetized and doesn't easily get sponsorships. But the point I'm trying to make is even though we have this table here and we can roughly figure out some examples, you won't be able to you as a result of this video, look at other YouTube channels and assume what money they earn as a result of making up Aaron examples here. Everyone runs that business differently. Everyone monetize is differently or less were more effectively than other people. Any other thing to remember as well is that while it might be exciting to imagine being a channel getting a lot of monetization again, what goes up must come down. So even if you earn $100,000 in like a couple of years, it's still less reliable and stable than having a 9 to 5 job that you can basically depend on working out for 10 to 20 years and building up that long term stability. So just remember, don't judge a book by its cover and follow these golden rules. So channel. Example. One. Let's just talk first off about relying on AdSense AdSense, of course, which you can only start monetizing after 10,000 views. Now you'll notice here that my ad revenue has popped in $15. Why does it say $15? Well, that is just a rough estimation. Sometimes ad rates are higher or lower. I'm multiplying the number on the left by a 0.15 meaning essentially these example. Channels are making roughly $1.50 per 1000 views. Like I said, this could go up and down. But that's a pretty rough estimation off what a channel could expect. So, for example, if you have a channel that regularly receives, let's say, 50,000 monthly views. While that may be seen as quite impressive by some table, you can say that the ad revenue being $75 is hardly a sustainable income. So let's look at the channel that people might assume could become a viable business. So let's assume that channel has something like 100,000 subscribers they released two years a week at a rate off 20,000 views per video eye socket maths. So I'm gonna bring this thing in, and let's say that's 40,000 views per week times roughly four weeks per month. That's 160,000 views per month. As you can see, that's $240 a month roughly ad revenue on then. Every channel has its costs, believe it or not. Now we're not going to account for time because all the time you invest in your channel is par for the course of having YouTube channel. But let's say this is, for example, a cooking channel where you actually need materials for each video that you make. It might actually cost you $200 a month. Teoh run the channel and create the content. Maybe on a budget, let's say 150 then all of a sudden your monthly income is $90 a month with a $1000 a year salary. All of a sudden, a channel with 100,000 subscribers and 20,000 regular video views isn't that impressive as a job, and people assume too quickly how much money YouTube channels can make. But like we always say, ad revenue generally sucks. Let's take the same channel stats. Let's go 160,000 monthly views with the same costs per month to produce the content with difference off product sales. Let's say, for example, this food channel sells online templates for cake, cut outs or designs. How could we calculate how much money someone might make from product sells? Well, let's say off those 160,000 views 1% of people by a let's, say, $5 product that equates to 1600 sales. I hope I'm getting my master right through this, by the way, is my math actually sucks. So let's imagine that 1600 purchases and the products are $6 apiece. All of a sudden, that's 9636 so we can put that in product sales. 9636 This, of course, adds to the production cost. Let's say they're selling them on Gun Road for $10 a month, which brings this up to 160. But all of a sudden the income is drastically different. The monthly income is $9700 on the yearly salary is $116,000 Now. This, of course, equates to quite high product sells. But it's a very quick example to the idea that if this person offers great value in that process and in each of those videos is able to convert the audience into believers and have perhaps 1% of them want that product. All of a sudden, this is a world away from what an equivalent channel might be earning. Do keep in mind the estimates I'm using pretty rough, and this also accounts for 100% off the monthly views, essentially attempting to sell that product so it is unrealistic. But at the same time, it does make a point. Now let's be much more realistic and say they sell about $1000 worth of product month, which is somewhat realistic. With a channel with over 160,000 views per month that is still $1000 a month and a $12,000 salary Now. I would consider this to be more realistic than the example I used before, because people aren't gonna advertise a product in 100% of their videos or have the same turnaround in 100% of their videos. But this does give you a clear ideas to that jump that you might expect if you start to push a product of value that people actually want. Now let's look at another channel. Let's go a channel with very high views. Let's say this channel has a 1,000,000 views per month. Apple of sudden ad revenue has jumped up quite a bit, and with a 1,000,000 average monthly views, sponsorship starts become a more viable option. Let's divide this by four, meaning the four weeks of the month and then the divide this further again by three meaningless channel uploads. Three videos a week. That's an average off 83,000 views per video, which isn't unrealistic for someone getting a 1,000,000 views per month. So this is going to start to get a little more complicated. So I'm gonna bring in Microsoft Word here. We're gonna talk about sponsorship rights. This is one of those eternally difficult questions. What do you charge sponsors? And it could be scary because, saying a number, let's say I want to charge $5000 for this sponsorship video. You don't know whether that's under charging or overcharging. Well, I'm gonna help you out with a magical little formula or a few ideas at least that you can use to help see what is a reasonable rate to charge. You find things saying that industry standard rates can range from somewhere between 0.52 point 15 CPV. This essentially means cost purview. Now let's say you want a video sponsored that can expect 100,000 views to find how much that would be in dollars by this industry standard, right, you can essentially multiply this by 0.5 equals we have $5000.2.15 have $15,000. Now here's the thing I have never, ever gotten away with charging that as a CPV, and I've been doing this for a long time. So I don't know where these industry standard rates come from, and they may be quoting top channels that can actually get away with it because they have a killer audience and they also set the terms. But the reality is that doesn't hold from most YouTube channels. And a lot of old world marketers just can't come to terms with these numbers. So more realistically, I find that in my case and many other people's cases, the rial standard tends to be between 0.22 point 04 CPV essentially meaning if I were to pitch to a sponsor and they could expect 100,000 views confidently, that would be a range off between 2000 to $4000. Now, this is what I would consider more realistic. That is 100,000 very valuable views. People who are paying close attention and to market is that's essentially what they want. They're paying for attention and 2 to $4000 to reach 100,000 people from locking standpoint is very reasonable, if not extremely financially wise on their part and helpful to you. That being said, there is another category I want ad here, and that is the relationship price. What I mean by that is, if you're working with a sponsor you want to continue to work with on a long term basis, you might charge a much lower rate on offer toe work on a long term basis. So here's an example of a rate. I'm my charge for someone I wanted to work with on the long term. Obviously, 100,000 views then equates to about $500 to $1000. Now that can seem like a rip off compared to the numbers listed above. But what you want to keep in mind is that these a long term relationship. So you're not wanting them to sponsor a one video. You want them to stick around and maybe sponsor two videos a month on a six month agreement for a total sponsorship off roughly 10 to $12,000. Now, isn't that interesting, because the industry standard quote unquote would get you that with one video. But that's just simply not realistic. And if you want to create long term relationships with sponsors, which will also be more comfortable for your audience and you're not exploiting them. Instead, you're building relationships with brands they're comfortable with on creating value for those brands while still having some long term, sustainable additional revenue. These bottom two examples, in my opinion, are the way to go. Another thing to keep in mind is that you won't be able to expect most channels to be getting this regularly anyway, because sponsorships come and go. It's also never clear what they get for certain sponsorship. Sometimes people do sponsored videos for very little money. For example, I've worked with brands like Adobe in welcome in the past and done a lot of things for free or for very low prices, simply because I love their products with brands so much amongst occasionally having some campaigns where I'm able to get a little bit of revenue on the side or something like this . So let's assume this Channel three gets 80,000 views per video. Let's multiply that by a real standard somewhere between point to 1.4. So 0.3 equals we have $2400. We can put that in sponsorship 2400 perhaps this channel doesn't have as many costs. They just have a website and hosting and things that might come to about $40 a month. All of a sudden there monthly income is $3860 a month, or $46,000 a year. Keep in mind that 38 60 per month is up from 1500 a month, which is quite a big jump. But also those sponsorships can't be 100%. Relied on companies you worked with will have different marketing plan, so this is just a rough example based on a long term relationship basis or a channel that can work effectively with brands and is proactive in that regard. So let's work with another example of a channel. Let's think of something like an animation channel, where they get three million views per month now, while this ad revenue immediately seems pretty cool, where action and bring this down to, let's say, 30.8 Enter on, that's going to cut it almost in half compared to the other ad revenue, and that's simply because these views have a lower watch time. Now that's the thing that we haven't really gone into very much, and I don't want to spend too much time on this. But just keep in mind that monthly views isn't how you can really estimate money. It's more about watch time. I just find that multiplying it by double 015 is pretty good for most YouTube channels. But for high production value, channels like short form content are skipped comedy and animation. I would actually tend to bring the revenue estimates down simply because there's lower watch time. The videos my average Teoh between 3 to 5 minutes per video as opposed to 10 to 20 minutes per video. So how can an animation channel survive on $2400 a month, a yearly salary of under $30,000? If this is something they want to make their full time job, even though they're making three million monthly views, maybe that might be on the basis of one video a month. Because they take so long to make. They're not making enough money to justify that as a full time job. So how can we change that? Well, they're an animation channel. They have products they can sell with their characters. So let's say they have a shop where they sell T shirts and hoodies. And let's say they make $1 pair products sold on that shop. And if amongst those three million views, there's a turnaround off, I don't 30.1%. That's 3000 times one. So let's say that's $3000 a month that we can add to the revenue off this animation channel . If at the end of each of their animations, they say, check out my stuff, you can buy a hoodie or blah, blah, blah. Sponsorships are less likely because there's, ah slower turnaround, and it's harder to really create a worthwhile sponsorship relationship with high production value content, at least in a regular fashion. So we're just gonna leave that for now. But let's move on to Crowdfunding. Let's say this channel has a patri on. Let's say their patron has built up to around $3000 per month or per video. This example channels costs quite low. Let's keep it to something like $80 a month. All of a sudden we have a salary that's going up from under $30,000 a year to close to $100,000 a year, with a monthly income of $8300. Again, this is an example of a very active, highly monetized and very highly engaged in YouTube channel averaging three million views per video. And it might be a channel that has over a 1,000,000 or two million subscribers to actually be able to achieve this. But this, I would say, is something of a realistic estimate as to how they might turn it into more of a business. As you can see, having a patri on and some product sales without them being overbearing makes the difference between it being a sustainable full time job and something they can build on, as opposed to barely being able to pay the bills. For our final example, let's talk about a smaller channel who wants to diversify revenue and build it in a long term way but doesn't quite have the monthly views to pack. The same punch is a lot of these videos or channels up here, ignoring the first example, which isn't monetizing much at all. Let's say we're talking about a channel that has an average of 50,000 views per month. That's $75 ad revenue a month. What could we realistically expect from all of these little areas here? What can we fill in here? Let's talk about product sales. Perhaps this channel, while small, is a very targeted Mitch, something like craft or sewing, the kind of thing that the people watching it would be really passionate about and invested in, by the way, their time and energy and resources funky products targeted at that niche, like a T shirt that says Eat, drink. So sleep or something like that. Feel free to use it and give me credit later might have a higher turnaround than a general T shirt based on a cartoon character. Like just because a fan base is really small compared to a channel with millions of concurrent views doesn't mean that they're less able to monetize. If anything, I really tighten it. And passionate community sometimes has a higher proportionate turnover up her video view or per audience member, then these larger audiences. So how can we make a realistic estimate? Well, let's assume off those 50,000 monthly views. Let's say 2% of people buy a product, so times 0.2 equals. Let's say the profit of these purchases equate to something like, I don't know, let's say, 50 cents per purchase. Maybe this person selling badges or stickers or something like that. That's a total off an additional $500 per month. As far as product sales compared, toa ad revenue goes. This is actually, I believe, a realistic sort of estimate. A channel with 50,000 monthly views could make $500 a month in product sales if they had a great product andan audience that was engaged and interested sponsorships a bit different, especially with smaller channels I wouldn't realistically think you could get our any long term paying sponsors for anything in there. But there are things like, let's say, commission based sponsorships, where you link to Amazon through affiliate links or kick starters through affiliates where you own a proportion off sales. So let's say you linked to products on Amazon for sewing or books on sewing that you regularly plug. You could realistically make something like, I don't know what $100 per month on not these affiliate links. If this person pumps out three videos a weekend, the people watching a really interested in a book that's reviewed or used by the The Channel creator now crowdfunding donations, Let's say, rather than something like a patriot on, Let's Say they live stream their creation process while they're sewing or doing craftwork. While this is a less reliable form of donations, if they do requests or directly respond to donators in the stream, that could be an effective way of encouraging donations on. We might expect something like another worth $150 a month of additional revenue from that, and that might just be $20. Maybe every couple of days from someone who says, I love what you did something like him, twitch, creative or on YouTube Live are accepting those live donations. And then, of course, being a craft or something channel, there are gonna be costs. Um, it might be something like, let's say, $150 a month for supplies and materials. Even with that cost, our monthly income is around $675 a month, and a yearly salary is $8100. For a fledgling YouTube channel. That three ad revenue alone could only expect $75 a month. Having a monthly income of $675 into a yearly salary of an additional $8000 is a pretty realistic and pretty cool sort of example as to how you can turn a small channel into a great supplement to your hobby that you'd be doing anyway for a great way to help further monetize a business you want to reach new audiences with and engage in new forms of monetization for so I hope these examples have been interesting to you and show you different ways of thinking about monetization rather than just the good old ad revenue and also hopefully give you some realistic expectations that not all sponsors or crowdfunding or products are created equal, and they all have different effects or are affected by different things. But finding the right combination, especially in conjunction with what your regular monthly views are, can absolutely affect the income and sustainability off what you create on your usual channel.
13. Additional Thoughts on Money: Okay, so I have a few other thoughts on Cem Alternative supplementary methods of building your sustainable income. One of those on YouTube is known as M, CNN's or multi channel networks. I won't go into much detail here because I have a very strong opinion and that is that their parasitic and worthless. That is my opinion from experience. I have a video are actually talk about it. So if you go to my YouTube channel, drill with Gazza and just type M. C N in the search function, you'll find that video and see that I have strong feelings on it, so that's a little safer now. But I do want to take a moment to talk about another thing, which people ask about it. We'll talk about often, which is crowdfunding, and this is an interesting topic because there are lots of answers and none of right or wrong, and it isn't a necessarily good or bad thing to do. I believe crowdfunding can be a great way to bring the community together and to connect and deliver more and more value, and to allow your audience to show their faith in you and for you to deliver on that faith . But it can also be easy to get wrong and easy to do and not realize. The work that is involved in delivering is also whether remembering people have some pretty strong emotional reactions to the thought of CROWDFUNDING. Sometimes people see Kickstarter or patri on, and they just ignore it because of stories that hurt or experiences they've had, even if what you have is a genuine request or a proposition of value. So it's worth keeping many mind and being ultra sensitive to that while showing very clearly and transparently what it's about, what they get, a value from a crowd funded proposition that you making on how you're going to be delivering it and what you get from their funding and what you'll be putting it towards. I personally feel like a lot of patri on pages feel a bit like begging, sort of like asking for money to do something but you doing anyway. And it doesn't really sell you very well. And the other thing to keep in mind, too, is that money is public on these crowdfunding platforms again. That could be a good thing cause it could be away for a community to come together to reach ah unified goal. But it can also be detrimental, meaning that people make a decision to not support you based on what you already have, all the fact that you already don't have very much. So why bother? The point I'm trying to make? Is it very complicated? My answer, usually in the past in particular, has been to steer away from it. But in some exceptional cases, I think it can be amazing and powerful. And my opinion on this has changed very recently because as of recording this skill share course only last week I initiated my first ever Indiegogo campaign to repair my shed, to turn it into an additional studio to make even more ambitious content from my YouTube channel. I had pretty low expectations of it and I planned on that. But the campaign over delivered and we tripled our funding goal in the first week. That, to me, is an amazing example of how crowd funding can be brilliant and amazing and it can unify a community. But that being said it was also based on me asking for their help after I had delivered five years of consistent content and also very clearly laid out what would be done with the funding, what they get for it. And what would we done if we exceeded the funding, which we did. So that was a very long ramble about crowdfunding, but I hope it was helpful, and I hope it helps you carefully consider a few of the factors that are most important to look at if you consider going through avenues like Patri on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The final point I'd like to finish on is a philosophy I respect by an entrepreneur by the name off Gary Vaynerchuk, who uses the phrase jab, jab, jab right hook, which represents the act of giving, giving, giving than asking. Now that is an interesting equation because it alludes to the idea of giving more than you ask, which I believe works and is important. But it also communicates the importance off, asking that right hook finishing off with a strong punch. That philosophy entails the idea that if you're serving and enthusiastically loving and giving to your audience, that when you ask for something that it's a fair exchange and not only will they be willing to give to you. They will want to. They will want to support your product will be excited for you for having that sponsorship as long as your priority has been serving them with integrity and working hard to give to them before you ask.
14. Helpful Websites: So in this part of the course, where I'm gonna recommend different helpful websites, I want to start off with skill share. The main reason, of course, is because it's awesome. And that's why I made, of course here, but also because there's stuff that I wasn't able to cover that I would recommend learning on a website like this from people who have some experience and carefully craft their courses and projects for your learning benefit. So let's say, for example, as I mentioned, this isn't a video production course that you're watching now, but you could right now type video production in the search bar, and you're met with a whole bunch of different examples that might be editing with premiere , pro or composition or lighting film cutting dissolves and a whole bunch of stuff. But you could refine your cut. Let's say you want to learn a little bit more about film composition. You could write film composition, and you can learn a little bit about how to frame your pieces or use lighting in your imagery or your videos. Let's say you want to learn how toe light your videos. If you type lighting in here you'll see that there are some different tutorials on how to set up and lay out different lighting plans for different effects. I guess my main point is, if it comes to any questions you have on this course, let's say you want to make your own logo. Since you are watching this video, you already have some premium access to the website, so you might as well search through and see what you confined to get the best bang for your buck. Because you can learn how to make your own logos and branding, you can learn how to cut and edit on film your videos effectively. I, for example, want to learn more about camera lenses because that's something I'm interested in, perhaps having a little more control over. So as you can see by typing and lens, you have some courses here about people who walk you through different techniques When it comes to lenders, this guy here has a whole bunch of lenses behind him, so maybe I'll check out that cause. But as you can see, you can also view by their popularity and their rating, and also what theme there in now, often photography and video will be pretty cross compatible because if a good lens or good lighting set up works for photos, it'll work well for video. The next website I want to talk about his social blade. I have shown this a little bit in the course so far is useful because you can see your own stats. And in particular, it's interesting to look at future projections. If you want to see what the predictions are for your upcoming subscriber marks, based on the growth and trajectory you're experiencing, you know. So click similar channels and you'll be presented with a bunch of different channels you can look at and see what they make, or at least see why Social Blade has selected them as channel similar to yours. Perhaps their audiences engaged with them in a similar way or the create similar content. I have these social blades stats for different platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Twitter, and something also find interesting is you can click compare, and you can compare YouTube channels toe one another. So let's say you want to compare your own YouTube channel against another YouTube channel. I don't know. Let's say peut pie quick compare, and you will see the growth and the statistics directly measured against one another. And, oh boy, I guess I guess pretty pies. Maybe slightly more popular than me. That's Ah, that's unfortunate. This website is called Social Blue Book. It's currently the expressed as being in beta, but it has been for years, and it's still a very useful tool, so I recommend checking it out at social blue book dot com. Sign up Onda connected to whatever social account it serves that you are interested in seeing the stats for the most interesting thing about this is that they show suggested prices that you can potentially use as a guide for sponsors or sponsorship arrangements, dedicated videos or product placement spells. Or have some other interesting stats in there that you can see from average video views. Two average likes per upload, average comments per upload and urine level of engagement. However, the suggested pricings are usually pretty high, So if you're looking at this as a tool to charge for sponsorships, I would stay to charging under the low estimate, to be honest, but not too too far away from it. Maybe half what the low estimate is is what I tend to find is more realistic, but it still gives you some pretty cool tools that you can use and on different platforms. Another popular analytics website is called Vid Stat X. As you can see, he can see popular growing channels. This is very similar to social. Blade, however, has a few differences about it. A bit to explore here. I'm not hugely familiar with it, but I know a lot of people that swear by it, so it's worth checking out. You can also find ways to categorize the currently most being subscribed to channels or things that are trending or channels or videos that are trending so this stuff to check out there. But I'm not hugely familiar with it next. And while this technically isn't a website, is something you should be very very familiar with. As you head into creating YouTube content, this is your YouTube analytics. This is the overview page, where you can see what your last 30 days of watch time average, huge aeration views and estimated revenue listed in, and you can fiddle around with a lot of stuff. In particular, you can change the time that it shows the duration off, and you can also go into separate things like demographics, which might be interesting information to share with potential sponsors, or at least no who your audience is. Traffic sources is useful if videos are being quite popular at the moment, and you're not exactly sure where it's coming from. Devices, perhaps to know what sort of devices your audiences of watching your content on if it's more mobile arm or desktop computer in the whole bunch of other stuff. I've most look at subscribers and also like to keep track of my ad revenue through Google Analytics. You can just access this by being logged into your YouTube channel account going into the Creator studio section, where you have a whole bunch of stuff and you have analytics here on the left. Aside from me, I would access a whole bunch of other stuff in a whole bunch of settings we won't go into in this course. You can also click here to create section, where they actually have an audio library and sound effects at a free for you to use in your videos. So that's really useful to our thought. I'd mention that for you, if you're wondering where a lot of people get their background music from without paying or if you're looking for a particular sound effect, this is a really useful part of the website that you can use that a lot of people don't even actually know about, which is hugely helpful. Google Trends is a website. We've gone into another part of the course, which, like I said, is useful to find what's currently trending, but also to compare people or themes or words of interest that you can either use for search engine optimization to pick the right words or even track your own popularity on YouTube or on the Web compared to other things. And we have themed websites where communities have their own little thing going on. This is new grounds dot com. This is a website where you can make and share and view games, movies, audio art on de so on and so forth. It's a very community based place, and you can also find people to collaborate with other websites like this include Devi in art or tumbler. There also subreddit it's that might be really relevant to your content or that you already invested in that could be useful. The reason I mentioned websites like this is that they come with communities, and if you're already involved in communities and have their trust in interest, it could be a good way to help them become familiar with the fact that you're making regular and quality content on YouTube. One of the last things I'll mention is twitch dot tv, which is where you can stream games and now creative activities. And as you can see, we have Sambre media. He is currently playing a game, but you can actually go to his profile and you'll see that he is an artist who often streams the creation of his art. Adam Phillips is also currently streaming animation and game art concept painting, and this is really cool because you can use the time that you would usually use quietly to develop content or art or something creative. Let's say you're making a YouTube video about sculpture. You can live, stream the whole process and even monetize and build your audience while you're creating content to later refine and then share and then monetize and build an audience with on YouTube you don't have to stick to just YouTube. You can build a following a multiple platforms all at once. YouTube isn't a vacuum, and it's hard to succeed on YouTube alone. However, if you're building Twitter accounts on INSTAGRAM accounts, twitch profiles or Facebook pages all at the same time, whichever is most useful and relevant Andi Organic to you and your method of content creation this can help create a web off, self sustaining audience, growth and content creation and curation that is very useful. So it's worth thinking outside of just YouTube when you want to make your usual channel work.
15. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for watching this skill share. Course. I hope you found that useful and enjoyable. I'm gonna wrap up with a bit of a by thought section, which is gonna be a lot less scripted than the rest of the course. Really? Is just going to be me talking about my experience on YouTube, my thoughts on the platform as a whole and where it's going on what potential snakes in the grass might be there if things go well or don't go well and how you can prepare for that or how I'm personally preparing for that and then a few final words at the end. So I'm going to start off with my personal experience from YouTube. I started off with a little bit of an audience on other parts of the intent. When I say a little bit, I mean, a couple 100 maybe 2 1000 2000 And that's after four or five years off, creating animations and games on the Internet. That was a really big advantage to me starting off on YouTube, which is why I sort of mentioned that earlier on it is useful to bring people from other platforms that you're already invested in to your new YouTube channel, which I would recommend doing if you're part of other already established communities. My Egypt Channel has gone through a bit of an interesting but very organic growth process, and it wasn't anything like this to start off with. It was just me and my webcam on my computer in my bedroom. Years ago, there were a few things I saw that made me pay attention and start a YouTube channel. One of them was that I had an old YouTube channel called Jazz a Studio. It was a bit of a mixed bag. I just put up content I made. Sometimes it was an animation or a music video or a tutorial, but I noticed that the tutorials, the animation tutorials and the drawing tutorials had pretty regularly high views, even though they were really badly made and by high views, I mean about 10,000 views, which at the time was kind of a big deal. Now that channel wasn't very bigger established or anything like that, and I think it was because it did so many things. People didn't know what they were getting. If they went to that YouTube channel so no one really subscribed. Having realized that, I also looked around YouTube and saw that the tutorial aspect of YouTube when it came toe art and animation was pretty much empty. There really wasn't anything on there and where you looked up a tutorial on arter animation . Usually you'd get something with really bad audio or super loud music, so you couldn't hear the presenter or no order your music at all, and you just see text telling you badly what to do. So I started a YouTube channel where toward art and animation in a personal way with the Webcam, where I was always present and just kept it really light and casual and interactive. And I got to act like myself and have fun with the process, and people started to watch and have fun with me, learning in the process with me. Even though I wasn't a perfect teacher. I feel like my earlier audience started to build and grow because off that personal interaction and the fact that it was a fun experience and it was casual and there was no pressure, there were a few interesting changes of the path to my YouTube channel becoming sustainable over time. Rather than uploading want tutorial a week, I started to invest a little bit more of my time and uploaded two, sometimes three and at a point in the middle, like five videos a week. But the point is, I started to invest myself. Maurin the content in making as much as I could end up providing as much value my audience and in return, more and more, the audience began to build. Now, when I say that even though I currently have well, over a 1,000,000 subscribe is it took me over a year to get over 5000 subscribers. So the growth was exponential, and I believe that that is the organic way that YouTube works. So when I say it's a slow start, it really is a slow start. And again, I had a bit of a head start because of my other communities that I came from. Over the years, my channel has transitioned through some different types of content and into a different, and I think more solid content focus. It began as a tutorial outlet, and over time it evolved into more of a community and themed around having fun with art, while I still do tutorials from time to time. I also believe that tutorials are no longer a scarcity on YouTube, but also a lot of people come to YouTube specifically for entertainment. So as the platform itself has adapted, I have adapted my channel to best fit and serve content to the people looking for interesting stuff, themed around art and animation over the years. Another thing that I'll point out is that over those years of gradual changes in generations on my personal YouTube channel, is that the level of monetary investment to add and make a more professional production value for my audience has been very incremental and partially aided through sponsorships, either for free product or for enough money to upgrade my camera or something like that. So you really don't need to feel like you should have the most whiz bang four K camera and super awesome audio. If you're starting your YouTube channel, you can get a lot of bang for very little buck and just invest a lot of heart and a lot of time and hard work and innovative thinking into creating something really cool And then over time, your audience and your revenue streams will reward you in such a way that you can feed back into the process and increase your production value, which then serves your audience even better. And then that, I believe, is a bit of a continuous cycle. I share my experience of my YouTube channels evolution because I believe that no matter what your content on YouTube is, if you have a long term relationship with the YouTube channel that you're working on, that there are a lot of factors that always gonna be similar. That is that slow and steady wins the race mentality off, being wise and slowly investing and just constantly seeking to provide as much heart and value and awesome content to the Internet into YouTube into your audience as possible. The other thing I'll talk about briefly is YouTube itself. YouTube has gone through some interesting changes. Earlier on, I think was around 2011 or 2012. YouTube changes algorithm in monetization from rewarding views to rewarding watch time, this disadvantaged a particular group off creators and advantaged another. So, for example, I used to make a lot of animation and stuff. And ah, a lot of animators I know made a living off of YouTube when this algorithm changed it disadvantaged a lot of people making short form animated content because of the time it takes to make a very short length piece of content. However, vloggers and game is, and people who create long form content a lot more rapidly, got rewarded and could build Audience is easier and, of course, make money easier. Question is, was that a bad move or a good move? Depends who you ask. I believe that it's it's the move that was made. And if you're a content creator, you either adapt or you die on the market or the platform that your on doesn't care about how you feel, and it's a blunt truth to here. But it's true. And if you're gonna be a content creator and the algorithms that benefit you one day no longer benefit you the next day or even disadvantaged you, it's your job to look at the problem and find a way that you can turn it into an advantage that can take a lot of emotional transitioning and a lot of hard work. But it could be done, and I know people who have done it. I believe that I have done it from time to time, and I hope to be able to do that in the future. But it is a constant battle, and you're never safe. Another more recent way. The algorithms on YouTube have changed have been to favor regular views over just the watch time things. So essentially YouTube channels that can afford to upload 2 to 3 to four times a week. Gonna b'more favored by an algorithm than people who upload once a week or once a fortnight . Again, That sort of adds the speed to the treadmill and adds a lot of pressure to content creators again. Is it a bad mover? A good move. It was a move that was made, and the result is if you want to live on the platform and thrive on the platform, you just need a work hard and make it work. All these things being said and of course, my hopes that the platform remains to be a helpful place for people like me to thrive and keep creating content and, of course, for you to do so. it may change. And in realizing that it's important to try and think outside the box and always have a bit of a safety net in place and ways to transition to creating other content and just serving multiple platforms while focusing on YouTube, I don't believe you Tube is going to die any day soon. I think it's here to stay. The question is, how can we, as creators dominate and create to serve an audience and have them find and love us? YouTube is one part off a broad social media equation. It is one of the largest parts of that equation, but it is important to know that there are still other pieces of play. So I would recommend being an active participant in whatever social platforms that complement YouTube on complement your personal communication style. So I, for example, we use Facebook occasionally and mostly also twitter, instagram and twitch. To do live streaming and connect with my community, you might find that instagram or Pinterest a great supplements to your YouTube channel. Perhaps musically, or Snapchat hope you build your narrative and communicate directly with your audience. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's a bit of a Web and where there may be one solid focus, which, of course, for me is personally and most definitely YouTube don't cut out the other ideas of working with these other platforms. In fact, they can really help build each other and create a really nice, self sustaining little ecosystem of communication with you in your audience. The other thing I'll reiterate is, of course, to diversify revenue so you're not solely focused on and reliant upon, For example, Google AdSense. We talked about all of that in the monetization section off this course, but I just thought I'd bring that up again when it comes to building this stability. And then the last thing I want to talk about when it comes to the evolution off the platform and your safety in and off of it is just to keep your eye on the metrics and always be watching not only your channel but other people's channel. Whether due to a bad reception of the way your content has evolved, or perhaps even the way an algorithm is finding in distributing your content, the numbers are going to be the most important wait for you to understand what's happening . I refer you again to the useful websites part of this course, and I believe they are the most useful ways for you to look at those numbers and help you interpret them. But basically, I just wanted to re emphasize this in my final thought section, because it really is important. Then I'm looking at mine numbers in a broader sense, as often as possible and every day, and not just my numbers, but people in and outside of the niche that I'm in because it's really important to understand the organic nature off the content and the content creators that surround you because you're not an island, you're part of a vast ecosystem off creators and platforms that respond to each other. The very last thing I want to talk about in my final thoughts section Onda you better be damn sure it's gonna be profound. Is that YouTube is about you Onda having people subscribe to you or like a video or comment . It all comes down to who you are and how you're communicating yourself. And it might be how you're creating your comedy content in sketches or how you play games, whether it be through skills or comedy. It may be how you create art or how you express yourself artistically, how you cook or how you play. But the end of the day, all of the lessons we've talked about on this course really come down to you being true to yourself on being willing to adapt and grow. Have some thick skin sometimes, but also be willing to recognize where things and comments aren't useful to absorb and, most of all, being present and willing to interact with. And careful your audience because your YouTube channel is nothing without them. Thank you so much for watching my skills here. Of course, I hope it was valuable to you. Once again, check out the project section off this course where you can share your YouTube channel and get some advice or feedback. Be open and be receptive to the feedback that is going to be beneficial to you. Whether it's easy to hear are not and, of course, be willing to share your insights into the YouTube channels of other people that are sharing their channels in the project section. Try and be respectful, but be honest and constructive, And I believe that through this course and through our little community of classmates here , we can build each other up and create a nice little ecosystem off people thriving and working together to make their own YouTube channels on YouTube is a hole more positive Mawr entertaining, more educational and more awesome overall, Thank you for watching, and until next time we'll see you light up.
Josiah (Jazza) Brooks, Artist, YouTuber and Entrepreneur
