The YouTube Strategy for Success

If you want to be able to make money on YouTube, having a strategy that you will use will help immensely. It will keep you focused and on track for exactly what you need to do at any point in time. If you want to be able to create that sort of success, you need to know what you are doing and how it will all work together to create your brand in such a way that you will be able to make money with ease. All you have to do is stick to it and be confident in your ability.

Within this post, we will define several key ways that you can begin to set up your own personal brand for success. Through following along with these different steps that we can utilize to ensure that you are making the most out of your time and abilities.

Define Your Brand

First, you must make sure that you define your brand. You need to know what it is that you want to make videos about and who your target audience is. Who is it that you want to reach? Some people make videos aimed toward children—they find that creating videos teaching children things is what they prefer. Others choose to make use of tutorials, explaining the different things that they love and how they create them in hopes of making sure that the other people that watch also learn something valuable.

Your channel will need to have a strong brand identity. This means that you will need to make it distinctive somehow so that people know that they are looking at your channel. You will need to do this in several steps over time:

1. Choose a target audience

You need to know who you are reaching out to. Are you making videos about space for children? Are you creating music videos? Making fancy animations aimed toward teens or adults? Figure this out and then think about what they would want. Do research on similar niches and see what they are doing. Pay special attention to the logos, channel names, and general structures of what they are doing.

2. Define your brand

Then, you want to make sure that you have a solid grasp on what you are doing. Make sure that you know what you are trying to convey. Create a name for your channel and start thinking of gimmicks and logos that you can use. You will need some sort of logo or artwork to really brand yourself.

3. Adding channel icon

You will need to do this step on a computer—channel images cannot be edited from mobile devices. Then, you can upload a channel icon, which typically is the logo for the brand that you are pushing. Typically, they recommend that you use an image that is 800 x 800 pixels to create your icon because it will scale down nicely to 98 x 98 pixels.

4. Adding channel banner

You will also want to create a banner image that you can use for your channel as well, with this recommended at 2,560 x 1,440 pixels. This banner can be changed—it usually has something to do with whatever is important to your channel in the moment and may change periodically.

5. Adding links to channel banner

You can also link back to your channel’s social media from the banner image as well and that is highly powerful.

6. Create your channel structure

When you’ve got some videos that you have posted, you can start to organize the channel as well. You can have videos organized in playlists, or sort them into different categories, depending upon the channel that you have and what you want to do with it.

7. Create a channel trailer

You also want to make sure that you  have a channel trailer as well—this is a short video that you use as a welcome to your channel. It is meant to showcase your channel in one quick video to try to win over people for the future.

Create Content that Takes Longer to Watch

While YouTube was originally home to short clips that were meant to entertain people in just a few minutes, you can actually have a lot of success with longer videos. Many YouTubers intentionally aim for certain lengths for their videos.

PewDiePie, for example, typically tries to make his videos at least 10 minutes long. Other people have longer videos. On average, YouTube videos last for 11.7 minutes. However, certain video categories tend to be much longer. Gaming videos tend to last roughly 25 minutes on average while music videos last for on average 6.

However, you don’t have to make your videos short. There is a lot of success in having videos that tend to be longer. You could be perfectly content creating 10 minute videos. Being able to create those longer videos, you may actually get plenty of views. While originally, people went to YouTube for those short minute videos, nowadays, people prefer longer videos. They prefer videos where they can sit back and watch it for longer than just a minute or two.

Maintain Consistency

You must also make use of consistency. If you want to make sure that you can actually begin to get that success with your channel, you need to start working on consistency. When you set up your channel, you want to choose a pattern for your video releases. For example, maybe you consistently release videos on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This is perfect—when people know when to expect more of your videos, they are more likely to come back sooner.

They will be able to count on the fact that you will choose to provide more and they will turn back to your channel with more consistency. If you want repeat viewers, this consistency will be key. You don’t have to release daily to maintain that consistency either—so long as you are getting consistent videos at regular intervals, whether daily, weekly, or even monthly, you can start to build up an audience.

Create a Community

Through maintaining your consistency, you will be able to create a community as well. You will be able to get those repeat viewers that you know that you can count on just by virtue of the fact that you are posting videos regularly. Quick videos are easy to use to lure people in, but you also need to find a way to encourage that community. Encourage comments. Acknowledge comments in your videos and your viewers. Don’t treat the videos as if you and they are in two completely separate planes that never intersect. Remember, you do not have a channel if you don’t have a community to go along with it.

When you do this, you will be able to ensure that you are building that sort of camaraderie. You can also use catchphrases and general branding to start to create a sort of community mindset. By having this, you encourage the others that are interested in your videos to feel that same sort of camaraderie with each other as well. They get the inside jokes that you share and that builds a community of followers as well. That community of followers will then be able to encourage further engagement. Think about it—if you have a community of followers interacting with your Facebook page, you will start to see all sorts of other people discovering your content as well. This is because of the fact that when someone posts something on a page, it is usually visible to all of their friends as well. You also may have your followers sharing your videos on their own social media, allowing for further advertising this way as well.

Call to Action

You must also call to action. This refers to prompting your followers to leave comments or otherwise interact with your material. In doing so, you can help encourage and promote loyalty from your viewers. That interaction helps to secure that attachment between you and those around you, meaning that you will be able to better commit. When you do this enough, you can see that through these various calls to action, you start to see that other people are willing to engage. They will build that community mindset and that will help your channel to thrive.

Advertising Your Channel on Social Media

With just over 3 out of every 4 people being prevalent on social media in some way, shape, or form, it is clearly one of the best options that you have to provide yourself with advertisements.

YouTube itself cites that over 500 years of content is viewed daily, just on Facebook each and every day, and of that, 40% of those that view it tend to share videos with their friends and family. This means that through utilizing Facebook and other social media venues, you can actually make a pretty penny with ease.

Being able to do things such as share your own videos on Facebook, or even paying for ads on Facebook, can help you attract all sorts of followers while generating traffic to your channel as well.

Similarly, you can utilize other social media giants to try to build up views on your social media as well. Through doing this over and over again, you will find that you can actually make great progress on boosting those views up as soon as possible.