Seeing What Makes a YouTube Channel Unique
Four walls do not make a home — but it does provide a good start. How you adorn those walls and furnish those halls is what makes it uniquely yours — uniquely your home, in other words. Well, your YouTube channel isn’t much different.
When you first create a YouTube channel, it’s nothing more than an empty tem- plate on a page. Over time, you add videos, organize videos into playlists, and create channel art with your own logo, designs, and branding. Obviously, your video content plays a big part in what makes your channel special, but so does the channel’s look and feel. Everything from the layout and font color to the type of content and its subscribers helps set one channel apart from the others.
Though this book takes pride in describing effective ways to create and maintain your YouTube channel for the next couple of hundred pages, let’s look at some basics first:
» Have people fi your channel. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it fall, does it make a sound? Who knows? More appropriately, if you create a YouTube channel and nobody visits it, it’s a safe bet to say that all your good work has come to nothing.
Viewers have to know that your channel exists before they can visit. The main way you have of letting people know you exist is by making sure your content shows up high in the search results of both Google and YouTube itself. (Don’t forget that YouTube is the second-most-popular search engine, just behind Google.) To get those high rankings, you have titles, tags, and descriptive text to associate tons of search-engine-friendly keywords with each of your
videos — doing that will bring viewers searching for content in contact with your content rather than with someone else’s content. It’s also important that viewers watch, like, comment on, and share your video — yet more indica- tions to the search engines and YouTube’s algorithms that your content and channel are important. For good measure, use social media to prep your audience for content that’s coming down the pike — just like a movie studio creates a buzz for a big summer blockbuster by teasing you with previews and trailers weeks before release.
Users often take advantage of YouTube’s personalized video recommenda- tions, such as the home screen Recommended feed (see Figure 1-4) and the Up Next feature. If a user clicks on your video and enjoys the content, there’s
a good chance they’ll visit your channel to see what else you have to off The more appealing your channel looks at fi glance, the more likely a viewer will be to stop and spend some time exploring your channel and your other videos.
» Connect with your viewers. You defi want to build a community of followers, and for that to happen, you need to actively communicate with them. That means everything from having them subscribe to your channel, engaging with them in your channel’s Comments section and on the Community tab, and exposing them to your other social media accounts.
You can do all this directly on your channel page.
» Provide them with a clear description of your channel. When viewers know what your channel has to off and if it appeals to their interests, they’re more likely to visit often, and maybe even subscribe to it. But you need to get the word out.
FIGURE 1-4:
The YouTube Recommended
feed.