Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey guys, welcome to the course. My name is Greta. I started my YouTube channel in 2015, posting makeup tutorials and beauty related videos. From 2016, I began to focus on sharing jewelry making tutorials. Have never imagined that one day I could turn my passion into a career. Now my channel has got more than 100 thousand subscribers and millions of views. However, it was really tough at the beginning. My first few videos barely got any views. My channel has been through some changes and ups and downs. It's not always about happy and successful stories, but also some mistakes have made. So I created this course to share, review several things you need to know and expect if you want to start a YouTube channel. Being a YouTube is like building an online community to share your passion and value with people from all over the world. They challenge you to discover your own potential and be a better person. I hope you will enjoy being on YouTube as much as I do. Thank you for joining this course. Let's get started.
2. The Opportunities and Challenges of Being a YouTuber: His being a YouTube are worth it. Well, it depends. You may hear different answers. My answer is yes. Being a YouTube helped me identify my passion and find fulfillment in my life. However, it takes so much time and effort at the beginning. You may have to wait for a long time to see steady growth on your channel. I'm going to talk about both of the opportunities and challenges of being a YouTubers. Let's start with the opportunities. First, YouTube is the largest video hosting platform with over 2 billion active users each month, is also the second largest search engine in the world. It will be a great platform if you want to build your influence with online videos. If you have skills to teach, a passion to pursue, or a hobby to share, YouTube could bring you opportunities to turn them into a career. And you might get good sponsorship deals from famous brands. Many companies choose to collaborate with YouTubers who they're powerful influence. Even small YouTubers may also have the chance to get sponsorships. In July 2016, I was just a small YouTubers with less than 1000 subscribers. But I began to receive sponsorship offers from some cosmetic companies. Has a small YouTubers. I didn't get paid to use their products. But I got many free products from those companies, which really encouraged me to make more videos. If you already have a business to sell your products or you want to build your own brand. Youtube can help you promote your business to a large audience. I've never promoted my work to my audience. I haven't planned to sell my jewelry pieces, but I still received some comments from the audience asking if I would like to sell my designers or soda materials are used in my videos. So you can see the potential. If you have your own business, YouTube can be agreed and the fried marketing platform to tune your audience into customers. The second opportunity is that your YouTube channel rewards you for creating great content. There are different ways to make money on YouTube. Once you meet the requirements for the YouTube Partner program, you can monetize your videos. There are other ways to make money with your YouTube channel. I'll show you more details later in the course. The third opportunity is that your enjoy the freedom of being a YouTubers. According to your own lifestyle and schedule. You can choose to work on Youtube as a hobby, a part-time job, or a full-time job. You can create content that you are passionate about. This is more creative and motivating them working for others. Now, I'm designing my own jewellery, my channel, and sharing the tutorials. I can put my personality into my designs and creates the styles that I like. The audience who choose to subscribe to my channel are really into my style. So your YouTube channel is like an online community. You and your audience are connected to share something in common. In addition, being a YouTube is kind of like being time and location independent. In recent years, I've been working for my YouTube channel as a part-time job. It keeps me busy. But I think doing YouTube is more flexible than other jobs. First of all, I can freely decide which days of each week to work on a video. I can decide to work at daytime or work at night. If I want to go out to catch up with friends during the day, then I can choose to work at night. If I plan to travel, I can upload the videos before I go and set a release schedule. When it comes to location independence, you can choose to work from home or rent your own office wherever you prefer. If you want to move to another city or country, you didn't have to resign from a company. You can just pack your stuff and go. If you are trouble YouTubers. You can shoot videos while traveling and editing your videos in the hotel. This freedom is a top motivator for many YouTubers. Next, let's talk about the challenges YouTubers we'll face. First of all, it's difficult to stand out from the crowd. There are so many excellent creators on YouTube. The competition is increasing. So you need to figure out a way to stand out. Think about how to be unique in your niche. What are your creative strategies? Everyone is unique. So you need to consider how to combine your unique personality with the content you want to create. Well, you didn't have to worry too much about this at the beginning. I didn't really think about this. When I started my channel. I started as a make-up YouTubers. I thought all my audience watched my videos to get Make-up tips that I began to see some comments telling the really liked to my voice. Some even messaged me through my Facebook to tell me the always listened to my videos before sleep because my voice helped them to feel relaxed. Well, I didn't expect that. I was laughing when I read about. I always hated the sound of my voice and my accent. I thought my audience may complain about listening to me, but actually the helped me to build my confidence in some way. So your audience feedback may help you to find what makes you unique. Sometimes you cannot realize how special you are by yourself. There's one thing you need to remember. Don't be afraid of failure. Your videos may not perform well, but your time and effort are not wasted. When you realize where you failed, your figure out how to make progress and find a clearer direction and better solution. The second challenge is that you need patience and persistence to work for a long-term plan. When you first start to make videos, you'll find the videos you've tried your best to make are not getting many views. This is my channels performance of the first six months. You can see at the beginning, my videos barely getting any views. Most new YouTubers have had that experience. After seeing a few videos failed, most people will give up. If you start a YouTube channel, just a forgetting easy and quick success, you are going to be disappointed because you end up wasting a lot of time. This is like the snowball effect is not easy to get started on YouTube and grow your channel. But once your channel has lots of lawyers subscribers and you continue creating great content, then your channel will grow faster and faster. You also need to upload videos constantly. If you always stop uploading new videos, your subscribers may go to other channels to find similar content as challenging and difficult at the beginning. However, if you are willing to keep learning to improve your content, your achievement will outweigh your upfront hard work. So in order to get the opportunities, are you willing to take the challenges?
3. How to Find Your Niche: Before you start to create a channel, you need to find the niche you want to target. Think about what topics you would like to focus on was the purpose of your video content. Here are some tips to help you find your niche. Firstly, start with what you are passionate about. Think about your hobbies and the things you are interested in. So you will be happy with the content you are creating. And you are willing to do that for a long time. Doing a job you love, you will be more motivated and inspired to learn new things and improve what you are doing. Some of my friends said they have no hobbies or anything they are really interested in. But actually, that's not true. They just didn't realize the things they like to do in their daily life. Some of them are really into cooking, tidying up, and decorating their rooms, or growing plants. This can be great ideas to start with. So list everything you like to do and the search for the related topics. You can easily find topics or Youtube. Lets say, if you have making cookies, then search, make cookies on YouTube. You can see a list of related topics people are looking for. This can be good ideas to start with. Being a YouTube VR is a long game. Choosing the niche you actually love should come first. Secondly, you need to niche down. Do not try to reach everybody. One of the common mistakes NEW YouTubers make is that they try to create different kinds of content on the same YouTube channel is further to narrow down your niche and have a clear focus so your audience will not get confused. They can understand what your channel is about. When new viewers watch one of your videos, and I really like the content. They usually will go to check the other videos in your channel. If they find you keep uploading similar content they are willing to watch, then they will subscribe to your channel to watch more of your videos. It's okay to test a few videos to get a clearer direction. You can be a bit experimental. Test a few videos on a broad topic and see which videos can perform well in your channel and what kind of content you are good at creating. Just do not expect every single video to perform well. I uploaded videos about DIY, clear jewelry and paper craft, the jewelry making tutorials. They got much less views than my beating jewelry videos. My subscribers. We're not interested in those content. Then I knew I should focus on beating tutorials. Thirdly, once you find the niche, you want to target his beard to, to stick to your niche, to keep your audience settled. If you upload makeup videos for three months, then began to upload cooking videos for another two months, and later switch to marketing tutorials. Your audience will get confused about what you are going to do. They may leave your channel and look for other channels that have been focused on the specific topics they are interested in. My channel has switched from makeup tutorials to handmade jewelry and accessories tutorials. Now finally, I'm focusing on making beaded jewelry. This is a big change. So I did lose some subscribers. The ones who subscribed to my channel for makeup videos do not watch my beating videos. So please be aware of the fact that you might lose some subscribers if your channel has a dramatic change. Fourthly, try to find a unique niche or be unique in your niche. If you can find a niche that suits your personality and is less competitive, it'll be perfect. But if there are many excellent creators in the niche you want to target, then you need to be unique to stand out if your content or so and personality. For example, if you want to make cooking videos and you have a good sense of humor, maybe you can add these to our videos. Teaching people how to cook nice food and telling them funny stories and jokes while you cook. The audience who like your videos and subscribe to our channel will probably like both of your cooking skills and your personality. Then you can also shoot some family vlogs or food shopping over logs. Your audience may also like them because they are interested in you and it may also be interested in your life. In the end, I'd like to say, don't be afraid to take action. When you check the successful YouTubers early videos, you'll find no one has a perfect start. I don't even want to watch my old videos. I'll feel really embarrassed. But I do respect the early version of myself who was brave enough to start the YouTube journey and make who I am today. Don't be afraid of failure or being laughed at by others. If you failed, at least it proves you have tried to fight for your passion. You have done the hard work. We will get really old one day. And when that day comes, I hope you will be proud of yourself for being brave enough to fight for what you wanted.
4. Equipment and Software You May Need: I've tried a lot of equipment and software. So based on my own experience and starting up down our share a list of basic equipment and software. You may need to start a YouTube channel. First is camera. You didn't have to buy the best DSLR mirrorless camera to start shooting your videos. The camera you are going to choose depends on the content you want to create. Many YouTubers started recording videos with their smartphones. Today's smartphones can also record HD videos. If you don't want to invest too much money to start, you can try to record videos with your smartphones. I have bought a mirrorless camera and a compact digital camera. But currently, my jewelry making videos are all recorded with my iPhone. If you are going to shoot travel vlogs for sports videos, then you can get action cameras. They are durable, smaller inside and the can shoot videos in excellent quality. Gopro is a very popular brand that is highly recommended by many travel YouTubers. If you are going to make makeup videos, I suggest using good cameras, such as the SLR cameras, mirrorless cameras, or very good compact digital cameras to get excellent closer up details and the best colour accuracy. My old makeup videos that were recorded with a smartphone, and I edited them with some random apps on my phone. The videos were so blurry. Most of the closer up details were missing. So I got some complaints from my audience. Excellent image quality is very important for makeup videos. Before invest a new camera, it's better to check out some camera reviews from tech channels or blogs. Second, you also need a tripod or gimble stabilizer. There are great tools for stabilizing your photos and videos. A tripod can reduce your camera's movement to avoid shaky videos. If you are doing hand-held shooting, is better to use a Kimball stabilizer to get your camera balanced and smoothing out your videos. Next is lighting equipment. Good lighting gives a good impression of your content. It makes your video look professional. You can shoot more videos with natural daylight. But if there is not enough light, then you need lighting equipment. Or introduce three types of lighting equipment. Soft box. A soft box gives even and soft light for your video shooting. When I started my channel, I bought two soft boxes, put one on each side of me for even lighting while doing makeup or making DIY projects. But my living room was very small. It was not convenient to place the soft boxes. So later, I only use a ring light to shoot my makeup videos and DIY videos. A ring light is kind of a must-have setup for beauty and makeup YouTubers. It creates a even light around your face and minimizes blemishes. There's one more thing you can add to create a good writing, a reflector. It can bounce light towards your subject and reduces shadows. I used my reflector in most of my makeup videos. It gives the skin a glow and it makes people look younger. Next, let's talk about video editing software. It's hard to say which is the best software for video editing. There are so many options on the market, like iMovie, Adobe Premier Pro, and Final Cut Pro, fewer Mora, Adobe Premier Elements, et cetera. These are very popular video editing software. I used Adobe Premier Pro to edit some of my videos. You can search for some editing software reviews. Choose the one suits you the best. You didn't have to spend a lot of time to learn a new editing software. Start from the basic editing techniques and improve it continuously. Actually, many successful YouTubers started their channels without knowing anything about how to edit videos. Unless you have learned filming or video editing before. Otherwise, it is difficult to make your first video Perfect. Next. Microphones and audio editing software. Sometimes audio is even more important than a video image. If a video image had some flaws, like blurry, out-of-focus, you can still watch it if the content of the video is what you are looking for. But if the audio is very unclear with annoying background noise, probably most people were turned it off. The Blue Yeti and the Blue Snowball are recommended by many YouTubers. Both of them offer great sound quality. Again, it depends on what kind of content you are going to make. If you are going to shoot travel vlogs and search for some microphone reviews from travel YouTubers. I used to have a blue snowball. Now I'm using my cell phone to record voice. Even though the audio quality is not that great, I can edit it in Audacity, which is a free audio editing software. And it's very easy for beginners to learn. I use it to remove the background noise and adjust the volume. It can also change the pitch of your voice. If you want to be more professional than Adobe Audition is a good choice. The audio for this course is additive in Audacity by myself.
5. Get to Know Youtube Analytics: In this lesson, I'll show you how to check the performance of your channel and videos in YouTube analytics. Then you'll be ready to learn about the YouTube algorithm for the next lesson. Look into your YouTube account. Find your profile photo. Left-click it. Then click Youtube Studio. You'll see the channel dashboard. Here you can see the performance of your latest video. You can see how it ranks against your last ten videos and how many views it has got. Here is click-through rate and average duration. You can click go to a video analytics to see all the additional analytics of this video. The overview tab shows the views and watch time of this video. How many people subscribed to our channel afterwards, this video, if you've joined the YouTube Partner Program, you see how much ad revenue this video has earned. The rich tab tells you impressions and click-through rate. Impressions, meaning the total number of times your video thumbnail was shown to viewers since the video was published. Click-through rate measures how often viewers watched this video after seeing its thumbnail. Here you can see the traffic source types of this video. In the engagement tab. You can see the water time, average view duration, and audience retention. In the audience tab. You'll see the percentage of wartime from both of subscribers and non subscribers. Here's the information of the audience, age groups, and gender, and the countries they are from. Once you joined the YouTube Partner Program, you'll see the Revenue tab. It tells you how much ad revenue your video has made. Here you can search a title of your videos and quick, the analytics of that video. It will take you to the videos analytics page. Let's go back to the dashboard. Here shows your overall channel analytics. You lost 28 days. How many subscribers have you got? How much wartime and ad revenue Have you got? Quick go-to channel analytics. You will see the overall analytics of your channel. Here you can change the date range. You can custom the date range as well. There's a lot to explore. Your Youtube Studio analytics have showed you a few metrics that I'm going to talk about in the next lesson to explain the YouTube algorithm.
6. How does the YouTube Algorithm Work: The YouTube algorithm is a very complicated machine learning system, is constantly changing and improving. The goal of the YouTube algorithm is to help with their audience, find the right videos, and get them to keep watching more of what they like. So the algorithm follows the audience. Now let us see some factors that affect the YouTube algorithm to rank your videos. First is click-through rate. You can check each videos. Click through rate your Youtube Studio, as shown in the previous lesson. It tells you how likely people are to click on your video after seeing it. When one of your videos appears on the page, along with many other videos to potential viewers. How do you make the viewers click on your video? You need to have a nice thumbnail and title that can deliver the message to the potential viewers about what content is in your video. Look at one of my videos. After it being published for more than a year, I decided to change its thumbnail. This is the thumbnail of this video. I uploaded a new thumbnail to replace the old one, and I didn't change anything else. Then the viewers of this video suddenly increased. It seems that more people chose to click on this video after seeing the new thumbnail image. We YouTube users browse on YouTube. Thumbnails are usually the first thing to grab their attention. If they are interested in the thumbnail, they may click on the video straight away. Or they may also check the title of the video to see if they are willing to watch it. So you need that eye-catching thumbnail to get their attention. And a title with keywords to tell people what to expect in your video. Your videos thumbnail and title should work as a team to get the potential audience to click on your video. In addition, you need to add the relevant keywords to your video's description and tags. Because the keywords in your title, description and tags should reflect your content accurately. To let the YouTube algorithm Understand what your video is about. So it can recommend your video to the right potential viewers. When you upload a new video, use a few key words to accurately describe your content in title and videos description. Let's see one of my videos, the instructions in my video, I in two languages, English and mentoring. So I put these two languages in my title and description. The keywords that describe my contents of this video are beaded necklace, the wedding jewelry, and beating tutorial. Then I repeated this keywords in the video description. So YouTube will know these keywords are relevant to my video or channel. Then scroll down the page. You can add tags with more keywords that are relevant to our video. They are not as important as the title and description, but still can help a bit. The second factor is audience engagement. Watch time is a key metric. Your videos watch time is the total amount of time that the viewers spend watching your video. Water time divided by views equals average view duration. Audience retention is calculated based on percentage watched. And all of these analytics will be collected by the YouTube algorithm. If your videos can get tons of wartime long average view duration and high retention rates than YouTube will rank those videos higher in their search. And the recommendation system, if people click on your video, because it has an eye-catching thumbnail, a brick title, and description. But most of people who didn't watch your video for long or the stopped watching your video at the very beginning, then this will affect your videos ranking in a negative way because these signals show that your video was not great enough to hold your audience's attention. In addition to what time. Other reactions from your audience are also important, such as how many of your subscribers chose to watch your new video after it's been uploaded. How many likes and comments has your video God, from the audience? Did they share your video on other Websites? Did they add your video to their own playlist? How many new viewers decided to subscribe to our channel after watching your video. There are so many factors that are being measured by the YouTube algorithm to rank your videos. In summary, the key words you are using in titles and descriptions of your videos should be accurate and informative so that YouTube algorithm will promote your videos, right? Potential viewers, your thumbnail images and titles should grab potential viewers attention and get them to click on your videos. At the same time. Your videos should deliver the expectations and great value to keep viewers engaged. Always remember, even though the YouTube algorithm is very complicated and always changing, it follows the audience. If your audience loves your videos, the algorithm will rank those videos higher and promotes them to more potential viewers.
7. Different ways to Monetize Your Channel: In this lesson, I'm going to introduce different ways to make money with your YouTube channel. First is the YouTube Partner Program. Why pp? This program allows creators to monetize their videos. Once you join IIPP, you can turn on advertisements for your videos and earn revenue. Ad revenue might be a steady and a reliable, passive income. But you are not guaranteed to make a certain amount of money on YouTube. It depends on your niche and the amount of views you can get, and so many other factors to draw you away. Pp, your channel needs a minimum of one hundred, ten hundred subscribers and 4 thousand and watch ours in the past 12 months. So it does take a bit of time to get there. If you really enjoy what you are creating on YouTube, this will not be a problem. Once your channel, MS. Visa requirements. Youtube will review the channel to make sure it follows all of their policies, guidelines, and terms. I'll put some links to those articles in the discussion board. They tell you all the things you need to know to monetize your videos. When you are in the YouTube Partner Program, you also have access to other income streams. Click monetization in your YouTube studio. Here each tab explains a different feature to monetize your channel. The second way to make money with your Youtube channel is affiliate marketing. When you join, accompanies affiliate program, you'll get unique products links from that company. When someone clicks one of your links and a buys a product from that link, you'll get credit for it and earn the commission from that sale. You may see many YouTubers put some affiliate links in their videos description. If you are a new YouTubers and haven't meets the requirements of the YouTube Partner program. You can still share affiliate links to earn commission. There are many websites that have affiliate programs you can apply for. Let's take Amazon.com for example. Usually just scroll down the website's homepage and you can see the affiliate option at the bottom. There are many types of products you can promote. Anything related to a niche. If you want to make good money from affiliate links, your videos should deliver great value and abused connections with your audience. So they will trust what you recommend. Create great content first, the money will follow. The third way to make money with your Youtube channel is collaborating with brands. You may receive emails from some companies, you inviting you to collaborate with them. Bigger YouTubers can get really good sponsorship deals to collaborate with some top brands. Small YouTubers also can receive some companies collaboration requests for training and reviewing their products. Those companies usually offer small YouTubers products instead of money. As a YouTubers, you should only promote the products that you really like. If you try to promote something that does not meet customers expectations, you may lose your audience forever. So try to grow your channel with a long-term plan. Once you get big on YouTube, you will have plenty of opportunities to collaborate with your favorite brands. The next way to make money with your channel is selling your own products or surveys. I know some creators who are making the jewelry tutorials have their own always stores selling the craft supplies. Some YouTubers who have financed backgrounds are sharing their investment knowledge and giving their audience valuable tips in their videos. The audience who really trusted their advice may pay them for professional investments, surveys, many makeup YouTubers and fashion YouTubers have built their own brands or started their own product lines after their success on YouTube. They've got many lawyers, subscribers to support their business. There are many opportunities there. It takes lots of time and effort to be able to make a living or YouTube. But every great video you create, every subscriber you'll get. We'll take it one step further to Yoko.
8. Should You Quit Your Current Job: Should you quit your current job to be a full-time YouTubers, to enjoy the freedom. That sounds like many new universe dream. I have tried to that. So I want to share with you some thoughts on this. Being a YouTube is also a job. And every job has its pros and cons. If you want to enjoy its benefits, then you need to accept its negatives. In 2018, I quit my full-time retail job to go full-time or YouTube. I was really enjoying creating videos for my channel, but I felt time always flew by so fast. I began to work from home from early in the morning to late at night every day, sitting in front of computer all the time, all with skipping meals. Because I always had the fear of not working enough to grow my channel and omega leaving. After a couple of weeks. I felt my life was getting really unhealthy because of that bath lifestyle and stress. At the same time, I began to get nervous when talking with other people. Because of working from home, made me get used to that social isolation. Then I decided to continue to do a retail job for a couple of days each week. So on those days, I can stand and walk around in the store and talk with people. Other days of the week, I would just focus on my YouTube channel to make videos and learn new things with much less stress, then I felt physically and emotionally balanced. So it's a personal choice if you want to go full-time or YouTube. Most YouTubers started their channels while doing their traditional daily jobs because they need a stable income to pay bills. So they were doing two jobs at the beginning. One is to make a leaving. The other one is to pursue their dream on YouTube. What do you need to know is that your videos performance and income will fluctuate. There will be ups and downs. It's not as stable as the traditional jobs, which may affect your emotions. So it takes time to make YouTube a full-time job. Actually, you will know when you are ready. If you always feel inspired and you can generate lots of new ideas within your niche to be able to upload the videos on a regular basis. Most of your videos are performing well enough to gain new subscribers fast. And the money you made from your channel is always more than your daily expenses, then you will be confident enough to quit your job and pursue your dream or YouTube. But before that, it's better to keep your daily job. At least it can support your wife. Make your chase your dream without financial stress. Once you begin to do YouTube full-time, you will be working alone and all the success will belong to you. But at the same time, you'll be responsible for all the mistakes and bad decisions you've made. If you want to find a way to interact with people at work, you can rent a co-working place or join some digital nomad communities. And activities. Being a YouTube VR is not an easy way out. It brings you different challenges compared to traditional jobs. There's a lot of issues to think about before you make that decision. And you need to make a long-term, realistic terms.
9. Final Thoughts: As your channel gross, you may find that you are on a journey of self-discovery to find who you are and what your dreams, values, and talents. Maybe it's not easy to grow your channel from 0. You may need to learn many new skills to make great videos. You'll make mistakes, face so many challenges, and cope with a lot of stress. But all of these will help you cultivate a growth mindset to see how special you are finding fulfillment in your life. I hope you will enjoy this meaningful journey.
Greta Lan, Jewelry & Accessory Designer, YouTuber
