Nowadays, YouTube has more than 1 billion users. Every minute, 300 hours of new content is uploaded to the network, and half of the views come from mobile devices. Every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours generating billions of views. What about you? Think you're ready to present on this network with your own YouTube channel?
Creating a successful channel is anything but easy, but the following five tips can definitely give a helping hand.
Avoid copying successful YouTubers
This is a fundamental tip, yet also the least applied. It is normal to have big channels and big-name YouTubers as a safe reference point, but copying or making versions of what is already being done is a shot in the foot. People following popular channels are doing so - sometimes more-so than the content - for the person behind it.
So it is important to produce your own content and be yourself. However, it is nevertheless a good idea to know what is popular and what is trending up – for example, an infographic put together by Fried.com shows that 10 of the top 15 earners on YouTube have children between the ages of 1 and 5 years old as their target audience. This kind of information is definitely important and not all that commonly known.
Do not expect to be rich
While it is true that there are several people making huge bucks with YouTube, they are, by far, the minority. Just like everyone else, those people probably entered YouTube with no expectations of reaching the place where they are right now, and that should be your strategy as well.
If you cannot do it for the fun of it, then a YouTube channel is probably not for you.
Find and communicate with your audience
Throughout your YouTube journey, analytics will be your guide throughout the entire process. Do not be lazy about spending hours crossing data and metrics. There, you will be able to see exactly the location, traffic source, playback locations, and data such as the gender and age of your audience.
With this, you will begin to think of better ways of engaging and communicating with your audience.The public also highly values their own opinion and, if they like your content, they will very much like to comment and criticize. The more you listen, respond and even propose things to them, the less far away they get, and the more faithful they will be.
Create engagement
Another very important thing when it comes to planning a channel is to make it as clear as possible to the audience that what you are doing is actually a well thought-out channel and not just sporadic, random videos. Additionally you want the users who bump into your videos to know that, if they are interested, they can subscribe to your channel and follow you on social media (which in itself is another important step – having a social media network).
To do this, use the tools that YouTube provides such as a top notch cover image, in-video ads, channel trailer, channel description and well thought through description of each video. Make sure users are getting and understanding the information you want to pass as a channel, rather than as a single video.