5 Tips to Help Grow Your YouTube Channel + Bonus Tip | Ep 05 | Prime Branding

Audio Version

Transcribed from https://youtu.be/p21qXVN1jJQ

What’s going on guys. It’s Mark, from Prime Branding back for episode five, and what’s better than to give you five quick tips to help you grow your YouTube channel, or any social media for that matter when you’re just getting started. So let’s begin.

Number five, get started. If all you do is read books and read articles and watch YouTube videos about how to start a channel, you’re never gonna start. If all you do is pine over gear on Amazon and Best Buy, Oh one day when I get that camera or that microphone or those lights that’s when I’ll get started, you’ll never get started, right.

Most of us have one of these, a phone. We talked about this in the first episode I did, and I recorded the first four episodes I did just with a cell phone, right. The audio is not the best. The picture quality is not the best, but they’re pretty good nowadays. And if you’ve got a good light source, like a big window, you’ve got all you need to get started or go stand outside. I’ve seen people do it in their cars. There’s no excuse.

If you have a phone, you’ve got a recording device. If you don’t have a phone, you go buy a used one on Amazon, go on E-bay, on the local party store. I’m sure they sell something. Get a GoPro, borrow a friend’s. But somebody, or you have a cell phone that can record video. And as long as it’s 720 quality or better, you’re good. So you got your phone.

Next thing to think about is posts often, post regularly, right. Right now I’m doing a once a week video release and then a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday photo inspirational posts across my social networks. So the idea is to stay in front of people. If you can do more than once a week, if you can do once a day, if you can do multiple times a day, you’re going to grow faster, right. Right now, I’ve got a very small following started at zero. Not a lot of people know about me. I need to get content out there and as fast as humanly possible, so people can find me. if I post one or two videos, and then don’t do anything for six months, I’m going to get lost in the algorithm, YouTube is never going to recommend me to anybody because there’s no follow-up, right.

YouTube likes when people can watch your video and then roll into the next video of yours or the next video or something related. And if you only have one piece of content, when there’s a million pieces getting uploaded daily, you’re never going to get noticed. So pick a schedule, stick to that schedule. And the part of the reason why you want to stick to a schedule, is so that when I do get a follower, you get a follower, They know, hey, Monday mornings at 10:00 AM, Eastern time, they can tune into Prime Branding, there’s going to be a new episode. Rest of the week, I get a little inspirational stuff, and later on, when I can do every day at 10:00 AM, I’ll do every day at 10:00 AM. I’ve got clients that do every day at 10:00 AM, Monday through Friday on YouTube and post 15 to 20 times a day between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, because you have to stay in front of your viewer base, your customer base, your audience. And if you stop or slow down, you’re going to lose some of that attention. So you’ve been posting regularly. You’ve been on a set schedule, you’re keeping it up.

Now’s the time to tell people, tell your friends, tell your family, that’ll help get you some of those initial numbers that you need just to not look like a sad puppy with zero constantly on your accounts, right. Most of us have a traditional Facebook page for ourselves and our family. Hey, look at me on vacation, look at the new car I bought, right? Once you’ve got a series of videos produced or podcast produced, or you started that new Facebook page, and you’ve been sharing regularly.

Now, tell your friends and family, right? There’s a back catalog of content. So you’re not going to go, Hey, Aunt Susie, go check out my YouTube channel. I talk about cats and Aunt Susie gets there and you’ve got one video. And she’s like, Oh, that’s so cute, you’re so adorable. And she could care less than she goes away, right. But if she gets there and there’s 15 or 20 videos, now, all of a sudden Auntie Susie, is like, wow, it takes this serious. This might actually be something. Wow, these are good videos. And then they don’t mind subscribing, right? There always be a certain number of friends and family that will subscribe out of obligation. But if there’s legit content and stuff there for people to see, now they take it a little more serious and take you a little more serious and you develop a more loyal fan base, even just out of your own family and friends. But we all have that small niche that we should ask them to grow, right.

It’s really easy to do. So I’ll show you real quick. I’ve got my YouTube channel up. Let’s switch over to Facebook. I’m on my Prime Branding page. You can see it on the screen, right? And it’s something as simple as hit the three dots, you go down, you hit invite friends, you select all, send the invite. Something went wrong, but you get the message, right? That quick, that simple, all those people would normally get, Hey Mark, wants you to like his business page. And that’s fine because I’ve been sharing the same YouTube videos and a slightly modified other content on my Facebook. So if I can get them to one of my social channels, then I can introduce them to the rest of them or where else I’d like them to look out later. But it’s super simple, super easy. There are share buttons on YouTube. So if you want to share through your Twitter, maybe you’re more of Twitter, you can share the links out on anything technically, but get it out there, but make sure you have a back catalog first. If you’re wondering what I keep looking down for, I wrote notes.

The next thing. Ask for subscriptions, right. I didn’t do this, I haven’t done this yet. But down here, usually on YouTube in the bottom left hand corner, that you’re looking at the bottom right, But it’s my left, is a little click now thing. Sometimes it says subscribe, sometimes it’s the logo, somewhere on the screen that says subscribe or follow, or like, please do it. If you want to see this content more content like this, I need to know I’m trying to grow my base. And if I don’t ask, a lot of times people just ignore it and move on, right.

So it should have been the first thing I did, it should have been, Hi, Mark from Prime Branding. I’ve got five quick tips for you, for Instagram and YouTube and LinkedIn and wherever. But before we get started, make sure you hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, follow me on whatever network platform you’re watching this on and let’s get into it. And I didn’t so shame on me, but you need to ask. So do me a favor, click that button wherever it is down there. And I’ll see you in the next episode too, and go check out the old episodes. Cause there is some.

The number one thing that you need to do on your videos, is to take some time and optimize them, right? I’m going to go back here to my YouTube channel. When you make a post or make a YouTube video, there’s content, you got to fill out, the title, the description, keywords. What’s the channel about, it all takes time, but all makes a difference. If I just upload a video and I don’t fill out any of the information, YouTube doesn’t know what it is. My viewers don’t know what it’s about. And it’s useless. I wasted all the time of filming and uploading for nobody to know anything.

So find a title, make it something that’s relevant to the video. Relevancy is important. If I say win a million dollars in this video as the title, and I never talk about giving away money, you’re just going to be mad at me. So make sure it’s relevant. It’s not super click baity deliver, deliver on your promise. So that goes for the title, that goes for the thumbnail, a catchy thumbnail. Don’t just grab a frame from the video, do something to add at a bigger text, add some color, something to make it stand out and keep those thumbnails consistent so that when you do build a fan base and they’re scanning through their page on the homepage, it’s real easy for them to notice your thumbnails versus somebody else’s.

So you go through here. First one on the screen here, there’s a cartoonist Kayfabe. Great example, they always have that little yellow icon with the book open. I know it’s one of their videos. I don’t even have to read the description, I’m a fan. I just collect, and I see what the next episode is. And that goes for a lot of these, right? These guys… some of these guys have a certain look and you can tell who it is from what they shared. Your descriptions important. I mean, all that stuff needs to be filled out, but don’t just ignore. Do those and ignore everything else. Go all the way down to the bottom. Hit that show more, and go through the tags and add some tags that talk about again, what the video is about. It doesn’t have to be direct words lifted from the description or the title of the video. You can embellish a little bit more.

If I say, Hey, I’m unboxing this new Google phone in the tags. Make sure you put unboxing, unbagging, reveals terms that may or may not be using the description, you can put them there as long as they’re still relevant to the content of the video, right. I’m not gonna make a video about unboxing the phone and then call it Disney princesses going on vacation, right. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s not relevant.

Now I know, or maybe you didn’t notice ’cause you didn’t watch the first couple of videos we’re in a new set, right. Christmas, is coming up or it’s really close anyway, can’t use the upstairs, can’t use the window. So I set up a little thing. Show you guys just a quick spin of what I’m looking at before I give you the bonus tip. So here’s my laptop that I’m recording on, my little notebook, got a camera in the background there, you can see yourselves, and some giant lights, and we’ll go through all this in the future video. I just wanted you guys to have a quick sneak peek, but a bonus tip time. And then the reason I did a bonus tip is because, Hey, top six tips, didn’t really sound that great. So top five always works.

So six tips, it’s a kind of taboo. It’s not something that people talk about a lot on YouTube. Everybody’s very gung ho about I’m gonna go viral. I’m going to do it organically, I don’t need any help. I can do it, I can do it. This is going to be great. And then they wonder why they didn’t grow. Especially if you’re not posting that often, but a secret, a tip, a trick, I guess it’s not really any of those, but people don’t want to talk about it.

Advertise, pay to boost your views, right. I know, I really don’t appear to have, you’re not buying views, right? There’s people that like, don’t ever buy views, those are bad. Yeah, don’t go to Fiverr and find the guy overseas that says, he’ll guarantee you 5,000 subscribers, if you pay him 20 bucks, because a lot of those are fake they’re dead people, they’re fraudulent and YouTube will eventually catch up, boot them all, and you’re gonna be no better off than you were. And because they’re not real viewers, they’re not watching your content anyway.

What I’m talking about is once you’ve got a catalog of content, again, you go on the screen and pull it up real quick. So you see I’ve got the four videos right now. Find one that you like, you got the three dots, click that, click promote. It’s going to take you to the ads section. Let me see, get started, takes a second to load. And it’s going to give me the option to pick the video that I selected. Now, I can either choose it to be a pre-roll. We’ve all seen those pre-rolls right. Hey, five seconds hit, skip, or I can do it as a thumbnail next to related videos. So what that means is, sometimes on the homepage, you’ll see the very first box. We’ll say, let me pull it up. So you can see on the homepage here, we’ve got a FEMA is hiring in your area, right? So that’s an ad, but it blends in with the rest of the content on the homepage. So I can pay to have my video there as well as in sub categories and areas. So if you’re looking for other marketing and tech advice, you might see my thumbnail has a brief description and I’m hoping you’ll click on it because you might not have ever found it otherwise, especially when you’re starting off.

The other option, like I said, is the pre-roll and we all know the pre-rolls they come on. But if I’ve got a six minute video that I want you to watch, running a pre-roll where most people are just trying to get to the content they actually want might not be the best choice.

I like doing the one makes it’s an ad, but it appears just as a thumbnail amongst everybody else’s videos, because that I’m hoping the merit of my thumbnail and the brief description I can put in will entice you to click. And I can get some earlier views, I’m not forcing you, I’m not tricking you. It’s not being shoved down your throat. It’s there as an option. It’s relatively inexpensive. Google will allow you to set your budget on how much you want to spend a day, pick your categories, pick your age demographics, locations, and hit submit, right. If you were going to do a pre-roll, then I would recommend filming a separate video that only is a five or ten second highlight reel, something where I might flash a couple of different videos and say, to learn more about social media marketing, follow me and click the ad. And hopefully it drives them to my channel, and then they subscribe.

I would never take this video or another video that’s five to 10 minutes long and send that as a pre-roll knowing that nobody’s ever going to watch it all the way through. And most likely they’re just going to be upset with me, whereas this thumbnail option where they call it the related videos and on the homepage. I think that works out pretty well.

So hate it like it, I don’t know. Give the video a thumbs up, thumbs down, leave a comment. If you want me to talk about something specific. If you’ve got some extra insight about this video and the topics in it alone. And thanks for watching, stay tuned. We’ll be doing more, see you.