You clicked on this video to figure out how to create a viral YouTube channel in
2020, okay, perfect you're in the right spot. Well you're looking at a girl, me,
I'm that girl, who, just recently, in the beginning of 2020, pre-pandemic, pre
quarantine days, was ballin out of control and making almost 10k per month
just with Google Adsense, like I was buying the most top-notch Airbnbs and
getting rounds of dollar shots for everybody at the club, yeah that was me.
And so you may be thinking like "Wow Marissa if you are making six figures in
the beginning of 2020, you must be a millionaire by now, right?" Well as a
matter of fact I sure am... NOT. And this is actually what my numbers look like right
now. And so you may be thinking like "Well what on God's green earth happened to you?"
Well long story short, my channel was hacked, not a lie, you can check out this
video to see the full entire story, my channel was hacked and deleted, now it's
back and so you may be thinking to yourself "Have you started from scratch
or not?" The answer is yes, I've started from scratch three times. When I first
started this channel and the second time was when this channel was hacked and
deleted, I started a brand new channel from scratch, and now the third time is
getting this channel back up to where it was, to the six-figure mark, because as you
just saw my numbers right now are negative, my channel disappeared from the
internet for three to four weeks and so I figured "let me go ahead and share
exactly what I'm gonna do to get my video to go back up to the six-figure
mark and the exact steps I'm taking to make this YouTube channel go viral." So
let's head on over and talk about it. So let's go ahead and get started with my
very first tip to creating a YouTube channel in 2020 that can go viral and
that is to protect your channel. You don't want to make the same mistake I
did, what I just mentioned in the first part of this video, and that is to get
your YouTube channel hacked. Being a youtuber nowadays it is a profession.
Maybe five years ago it wasn't looked at as being a profession, but it definitely is.
Youtubers make very big income streams. Yes, as I had mentioned before, I
was making just under ten thousand dollars from google adsense alone and
that doesn't include all of my other youtube income streams like my products,
my affiliate offers, my brand and sponsorship deals, but you want to
protect your channel and in this video I actually go over step-by-step of how you
can protect your channel and what you need to do to really be safe online and
protect yourself from cybercrime, but really, getting hacked is something you
don't want to go through it is very traumatic and detrimental and you could
imagine just what it was like to wake up and have all of your subscribers gone
like, instantly, when you put in years of work, money, your heart and your soul, and
all this invested time so it's really important to protect your channel. And a
couple things you can start to do right away once you set up your Gmail and your
channel on YouTube is make sure you go to your Google account and you turn on
two-factor authentication. You also set up a recovery email and never, ever, ever,
share your Google account email that is connected to your channel with anyone. No
one. Not even when you outsource tasks or hire someone on your team, this is
something that should never ever be shared. And also when you create the
About section, that email that is shown to the public should definitely be
different than the Gmail that is associated with your Google account. So
check out that video after this video to really implement the security measures
in your online business and on your youtube channel today. Step number two to
creating a very successful channel in 2020 it is to choose your type of value.
Now what do I mean by this? This means a couple of things actually, so this is
exploring what type of niche your channel is going to be about and then
once you select the type of niche your channel is going to be about you then
have to figure out okay, well, what type of content am I going to make? What kind
of value am I going to provide to the peoples, right? So are you going to create
videos that are funny or entertaining, are you going to create videos the way I
create videos like tutorials or step by steps for your audience which do do
extremely well with the YouTube algorithm when you're
first growing your channel, so really think about and brainstorm what type of
value you're going to provide to your audience and think about what type of
questions you'll be answering for them and what type of problems they are
trying to solve. So there's such a wide variety of types of channels like gaming
channels, to reaction video channels, to channels like mine that are heavily
educational based, so you really got to think about what type of personality you
have and what type of skill sets you have, like I wish I was funny, I wish I
was a like quirky comedian that could make people laugh on my videos, but I
just can't. I'm really good at teaching and giving value so that's
the lane that I stay in when I'm making my videos, I stick to what I'm good at. So
the third thing you want to think about when starting your brand new channel is
your channel name. So a lot of people get really hung up on should it be
my personal name, or should it be a name that is more of a business name, and
this is a super great question and a lot of times people that have online
businesses who are growing a personal brand tend to lean towards having their
name as the name of their channel. So in my case I use Marissa Romero because I'm
growing my personal brand, it represents my business, and, honestly, I want people
to know who I am, I want people to know my first name. And there's been a couple
creators that are in the same type of business that and I am, online
business, and creating content for people who want to learn about online business
and they've recently switched from having a brand/business name to
going back to having their personal name for that reason. They literally want
people to know who they are and so they rebranded their channels, their website,
and switched it to their first and last name dot com. That's another tip I
have is if you haven't bought your domain name already, go buy that right
away on GoDaddy. You don't want somebody to have your name and for you
to buy it from them, it'll cost like $2,000. That happened with my domain,
somebody was selling it for $2,000 for the first two years I was in business,
then, all of a sudden, they let it go and I was like "Yes!"
I was able to buy my domain name for $11.99 on GoDaddy.
Also something to consider when you're thinking about your channel name is to
think about, long-term, what your goal is with the channel. I plan to have my
channel for the rest of my life and to create content as long as I can and so,
therefore, I never plan on selling my channel. Now, if I was growing a channel
specifically on gadgets or technology or something where I know
that I could sell it in the future and maybe not brand myself so heavily, then I
would consider leaning towards a business name as opposed to your
personal name because, in the future, it's a lot harder to sell your channel when
it's branded with your name because all the videos will have your name and it
just won't make as much sense as opposed to having a name like Millennial Gadgets
or, I don't know, whatever you want to name it. So definitely consider it what
your long-term goals are when you're creating your channel name. The fourth
thing that is extremely, extremely important to starting out your new
youtube channel is the branding. Now let me explain what this means. So there's a
couple of elements on your channel that are crucial to have from day one when
you have zero and that is the channel icon, the YouTube banner, and your
thumbnails. These are so important! I can't express enough how important these
things are. So let's start with the channel icon. That is the picture that
represents your channel. My channel icon is a picture of me and the background is
red and you can see my face clearly, what I highly recommend is to have a clear
picture of your logo or of you if the channel is a personal branded channel,
and make sure it's clear and people know what the image is because this is going
to reflect when you respond to comments, when somebody clicks on your channel
they'll be clicking on your channel icon, and so it's really important for it to
be clear on who the channel belongs to. The other thing is the banner, that's
that big image, the long image, at the top of your channel. That space is extremely
crucial to use because that's going to tell your visitor or your viewer, within
the first few seconds of them landing on your channel, what your channel is about.
And so a couple of things that I really recommend that you have
in that banner is an image, so an image of you or an image of something that
represents your brand, three pillars of what your channel is about, or maybe a
tagline of what your channel is about, and also try to include the frequency of
how many times you're going to be posting. So maybe you're posting every
Sunday and Thursday, put that in the banner. Another thing you could include
in the banner is a call to action so that way on the right-hand side you can
have a call to action for people to subscribe to your channel, opt-in to your
lead magnet, or whatever else you want them to do. And the last thing I
mentioned about thumbnails, so the thumbnail is the image that is first
seen on your video before people even click, it is the make-or-break, literally,
of people clicking on your video. Thumbnails are super important because
it's the image that represents the video. So if you're looking on mobile and you
see a bunch of thumbnails on different videos you want to watch, you're gonna
click on the thumbnail that catches your attention, right? And so that's why it's
super important to make sure your thumbnails are good. What's a good
thumbnail? Make sure you have a close-up image of yourself, the object, maybe if
you're a food channel you'll have a close-up image of a hamburger, something
super enticing and also a few words, between three to four words, of what your
video is about. Also, number five, I just thought about
this, I'm gonna add this in there. You have to pay attention to your YouTube
studio. Now, don't freak out when I say the word studio. All I mean by studio is
what you see in the background of my video, that is basically your YouTube
"studio," right? And so you're gonna want to think about this, what part of your house,
or maybe it's outside, and maybe you have a garden outside or something where
you're gonna film, right? Some tips for the studio is you don't want anything
crazy in the background. Notice in the background I don't have any trash, I
don't have any dishes in the background that have old crusty food on it, or I
don't have anything controversial like sports teams, I'm sorry, I know
there's a lot of die-hard fans of a bunch of sports. Things that are
controversial can be the make or break of somebody becoming a
viewer, then a subscriber, then from a subscriber to a lead, and then from a
lead to a buyer. If you can exclude it from your background, just do it.
Just exclude the controversial stuff, keep your background simple and not too
distracting so that way, in the future, if you want to add different cool effects
like titles or pop-ups or whatever, there's not a bunch of distraction in
your background so it'll be a lot simpler to do. So the sixth tip I have for
you guys is to choose your first twenty video titles, and the reason why I say
twenty is so that when you're first starting out as a content creator you
don't have to think about "Oh what video am I going to do next?" It's already
planned out and all you have to do is script the video, right? And so when I
tell my students and my clients to write down their first 20 video titles, I tell
them also to do it with a tool called TubeBuddy. Now TubeBuddy is very, very
important to making SEO or search engine optimization for YouTube very, very
simple. The way you're going to get your videos
in front of people fast and eventually to make them go viral is to use search
engine optimization and to be smart about what titles you are choosing for
your videos. For example, if you have a Travel Channel and you want to make a
video about Rome, you're not going to title that video "My family vacation in
Rome" because no one is going to search "My family vacation to Rome," I promise you.
They're going to search something instead "The top 20 things to do in
Rome as a family," or something like that. They're not going to search like "My
brother's wedding." So TubeBuddy is an extremely helpful tool that will help
you find titles that are very rich in good keywords and that will help put
your channel on the map. The 7th thing you need to make sure you do before
starting your viral YouTube channel is to create a branded account. So think of
a branded account for your YouTube channel as like a facebook fanpage. So it
is like the official business type of channel for your YouTube channel. And the
reason why this is so important, it goes back to the
protection piece I was talking about for tip number one, because, as your youtube
channel grows, trust me, you're going to need a team to help you with
uploading thumbnails, with editing videos and uploading, with responding to
comments, just all types of stuff, and so what a branded channel allows you to do
is to add team members to your channel. And these team members do not know your
login credentials to your channel, they basically have their own logins where
they can go and do whatever job they're assigned to do on the channel,
and it makes the YouTube workflows for your team that much more simpler. And
also your channel is protected that much more. So the eighth tip I have for you
guys when starting a viral YouTube channel in 2020 is to script your videos.
Now, a lot of people say to me like "Well, I have no idea what I'm gonna say
when I get in front of the camera." Well of course you don't,
why? Because you haven't scripted your videos and talked about what you're
going to say before you get on camera. Trust me, scripting makes life as a
youtuber so much easier because you get in front of the camera and you're like
"Boom I'm going to talk about this in the intro, and I'm going to give
these six tips," and you just do it and it flows so much easier. So what I recommend
is to take a half hour and figure out what you're going to say. You don't
have to script your videos word-for-word but definitely write down some bullet
points and some notes that are gonna help you remember your most important
tips. Another thing scripting helps do is increase the watch time
because if your viewer has a really great experience with your video then
that is going to help increase the watch time and that is going to help push your
video out even more to get more views and subscribers and eventually more
sales. The next tip I have for starting a successful YouTube channel is to get out
of your own head. Now you may be thinking "What? This isn't- what does this have
to do with the channel?" I'm sure that the majority of you that are watching this
video right now are telling yourself still some limiting
things that are either keeping you from getting started, keeping you from
continuing, maybe you've started your channel already and you stopped. And this
is super important because you're probably telling yourself a lot of
negative self-talk like "Oh, my videos suck. Oh, who's going to watch my channel?
Oh, no one's even learning anything from me." And that is really, really bad
that negative self-talk is really, really detrimental to you moving forward
as a creator. And news flash for you, your first 10 videos are gonna suck. Probably
your first 50! Being a YouTuber is hard and it takes practice and I can't
emphasize enough that you're not entitled to being a bomb-ass youtuber
and being super good in front of the camera your first 50 videos. It's going
to take time for you to develop yourself and develop your flow in front
of the camera and to get comfortable hearing yourself. That was a huge thing
for me, I hated hearing myself when I first was a YouTuber. I'm like "Ah! Ah! Turn
it off! Turn it off! I don't want to hear Marissa talk." It's really important
to just get out of your own head and just enjoy the process of you becoming a
really good creator. Remember that you are the expert. You are the expert and that
is why you are starting this YouTube channel, because you have something to
teach and you are positioning yourself as the authority in your niche and you
are gonna be the go-to person for people that are looking for whatever topic your
channel is going to be about, and they're going to trust you and believe in you
and depend on you and that's what the most important thing is, getting your
value out there. So if you're enjoying this video about how to start a viral
YouTube channel in 2020, I guarantee you're going to love this video which
talks more about the income piece of YouTube and six side hustles you can
start with your YouTube channel and that video is up next starting right now.
I love teaching about YouTube and so this video is going to give you several
ideas on how, not only you could make