Hey, what's going on everyone?
My name is Marissa Romero, and in today's video we're talking about 10 things that you
need to do before you start your YouTube channel.
Trust me, you're going to want to implement these things.
These are things I wish I knew when I first started my YouTube channel.
I would have grown way faster and seen that much more success in my online business with
YouTube, so definitely don't take these lightly.
Be sure to grab a pen and paper so you could take notes on what I'm about to tell you,
so you could implement this to have a successful channel and set it up the right way the first
time and optimize it for lots of views and subscribers.
All right, so the first thing to do before starting your YouTube channel is to shift
your mindset.
I can't emphasize enough how important this is because you have to be prepared to be in
this thing for the long game.
Making a YouTube channel is difficult.
I'm not even gonna get up here and lie and say "It's easy.
You're going to get famous overnight."
No way in hell.
So I want you to shift your mindset right now to think that this is going to take time,
and you have to think right now that "I'm willing to fight for the end goal," which
is red hot traffic to your offer and leads and to your autoresponder and being the authority
in your niche.
I just want to emphasize you're not going to get famous overnight, probably not even
in six months.
So you have to shift your mindset right now so it can be strong enough to keep going.
When those times get hard, when you're like, "Oh my gosh, I've posted 30 videos and I only
have a hundred subscribers."
You have to keep going.
So shift your mindset now to see the longterm vision and the longterm goal.
Because if you stay consistent and stick with this, I promise the rewards are so great and
your channel will be an extremely powerful asset to your online business.
Really, it's a game changer.
Alright, tip number two before you start your YouTube channel is to pick one niche.
I can't emphasize this enough.
The days are over when you have a channel about random stuff and post things that you
think are cool and that you want to do because it's all about what your audience needs.
And so you have to think about who you are serving and what problem you are solving beforehand
so that you can really niche down.
Because when you niche down, you are going to attract more people, views, and subscribers
that much faster.
A lot of people think that, "Oh, if I niche down on leaving opportunity to serve all these
other people," that is not true.
The more you niche down and get specific about who you are talking to, the faster you are
going to grow.
So the third thing you're going to want to do before starting a YouTube channel is to
get prepared to start with what you have.
If you have a smartphone, you are ready to go to build a YouTube channel.
A lot of people, they get intimidated when they just have a smartphone and they think,
"Oh, I need this 4K camera with this fancy equipment."
That is absolutely not true.
If you have a smartphone and if you have a window like I have right here in front of
me with natural lighting, you are golden.
You are golden to start your YouTube channel.
Do not wait until, "Oh, I have this fancy camera."
It's not about that.
It's about delivering quality value to the people that are going to be watching and coming
to your channel.
The fourth thing to do before starting a YouTube channel is to treat it like a business.
What do I mean by this?
You have to start thinking about now.
Before your channel is even started.
"How am I going to make money on my channel?"
And I could go on and on about this forever.
I've made tons of videos on how to make money on YouTube.
You can check out my playlist after this video, but it is so important to think about "How
will I monetize my channel?"
You can't depend on Google AdSense because that's something that is out of your control,
but what you can control are things like creating your own digital product to sell on your YouTube
channel, getting affiliate links to sell on your YouTube channel, coaching, having a funnel
that leads to one-on-one coaching.
So think about what are you going to sell?
There's tons of things you can sell on your YouTube channel, and you have to be prepared
right away to start promoting those things as soon as you launch your channel.
And so the fifth thing you want to do is to create a brand account.
When you create your Gmail address and set up your YouTube account, that is a personal
YouTube channel, basically.
So the same way that Instagram and Facebook have business page options, it's the same
thing with YouTube.
You're going to want to create a brand account because it is super important as your channel
grows, you're going to need a team to help manage your channel.
Trust me.
If you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, my channel is super small," trust me you're going to
need a team to help you with optimizing, with adding thumbnails, with editing, and so you're
going to have to have different channel managers and it's very important to have a brand account
cause you don't want to give your password and your email address to your team, that
is very unsecure.
So make sure you convert your personal YouTube channel to a brand account.
The sixth thing you're going to want to do before you launch your YouTube channel is
to consider the channel branding.
So what does this mean?
You have to have a good channel icon picture, or the little profile picture of your YouTube
channel.
It's really good practice to make sure that this channel icon picture is a good picture
of your logo or if it's you in a personal branded YouTube channel, make sure that the
channel is a good picture of your face.
You don't want it to be dark and pixely, like if you look at my channel icon, you can see
the background is very high contrasting with bright red, you can clearly see my face, everything
is bright.
So you know that when you land on my channel.
It's clearly me that represents the channel.
So the channel icon is important because it also will show up when you reply to comments
and when you comment on other people's YouTube channels, that is the representation of your
channel.
The other important thing about the channel branding, I cannot emphasize this enough,
is the channel banner.
A lot of NewTubers leave this part blank because I think they don't know that it's an option
to change.
Maybe, I don't know.
But the point is you can easily create a beautiful channel banner in canva.com, it's a free tool
and they have all the correct dimensions for a channel banner.
But the banner is a big space that should show and right away say to your audience what
your channel is about.
So, of course, you need to have your name or the name of your channel.
I also recommend having three pillars about what your channel is about.
So if you're a vegan fitness coach, maybe say that your channel is about veganism, nutrition
of veganism, and workouts for vegans or something like that.
So make it clear what your channel's about.
The other thing I recommend is to have a posting frequency letting your viewers know that,
"Hey, I'll be posting a video every Sunday and Thursday at blahblahblah time."
So you commit to not only doing that, but to letting your viewers know, "Hey, I'm consistent.
I'm showing up.
This is when you can expect to see me on YouTube."
And so another thing you can consider putting on the channel banner is on the bottom right.
You can put a call to action of what your link is in the banner, so if it's an Instagram
link, your website link, put a call to action there so that people can also see that and
take action and download or subscribe or whatever you want them to do.
The seventh thing that I think is very, very essential is once you've picked your niche,
you need to select your first 20 video titles.
Now you may be thinking, "Oh my God, that's so many video titles."
You'll thank me later because this is really going to help you hone in on what you'll be
talking about and your first three months of video titles and topics are already planned
out.
And the other thing that's really important is to make sure your titles have good keywords
in the title.
So keywords are basically the SEO or search engine optimization for YouTube and it's the
way that YouTube helps identify what your video is about.
So I recommend using TubeBuddy.
It's my number one recommended tool, I love TubeBuddy, and there's a link in the description
for my TubeBuddy.
And if you were to get the paid version of TubeBuddy, I have a discount code in the description,
but TubeBuddy is a game changer for your YouTube channel.
It'll help you grow very fast because it helps you identify what keywords are poor, fair,
good, and excellent so you could use those keywords in your video titles.
So the eighth thing I recommend you do before starting your channel is to have the correct
settings and optimizations.
So when you go into your YouTube studio and then you go on the left hand side and click
on settings, when you go to channel, you're going to see different settings where you
can put in channel keywords.
Putting in channel keywords is very important because it'll help the algorithm identify
what your channel is about.
So make sure to put keywords there that relate to your channel.
You can, there's a limit, but make sure to populate those channel keywords as much as
you can because it'll help the YouTube algorithm say, "Oh yeah, Marissa's channel is about
vegans, vegan recipes, vegan fitness," and if you leave this blank, it'll slow the process
of having viewers coming to your channel.
The other thing that is really cool about the settings and optimization is you could
have upload defaults.
So this helps streamline your workflow when you're uploading videos.
So you can have tags in there already that you know you're frequently going to use, you
can have links in the description that you know you're already going to use, maybe your
bio, maybe your social media links that already be auto-populated there.
So the upload defaults is really important because this will help you save time in the
long run.
So if you are loving this video and getting major value, be sure to hit the like button
and join the family, subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell because I'm
uploading videos like these every single week.
If you're interested in learning how you can build a six figure YouTube channel for your
online business, please download my six step blueprint.
It'll be the first link in the description, and that blueprint is extremely useful in
setting up a successful YouTube channel and monetizing your channel.
So coming in at number nine is to pick a posting frequency.
So you're going to want to think realistically, "How many times a week can I post?"
If it's one time a week, that's perfectly fine, I recommend all NewTubers to post, minimum,
once per week when they are starting their channel because any less, it'll be very, very,
very hard to grow.
So if you're somebody who thinks that you can post twice a week pick Sunday and Monday,
or Monday and Friday, whenever you want to post, and stick with it.
Do not miss a day because the posting frequency, especially in the very beginning, is crucial
to your growth.
The tenth thing, you're going to want to prepare yourself for is to stop the self judgment.
This may sound a little weird, but trust me, we all judge ourselves so tough.
In the beginning, I could not stand to hear my voice.
You're going to criticize yourself so much, but just, just stop.
Just don't do it.
Just appreciate the journey because your first 10 videos, 50 videos, are going to be your
beginning videos and they're going to be the benchmark you set for yourself to keep improving
and improving, and you're going to look back at your first videos and smile and think,
wow, I've come such a long way and improved so much.
So I know it's going to be hard with the self judgment, but just be prepared, tone it down,
and love and enjoy the process.
So I'm throwing in one more tip.
Coming in at number 11 is to start thinking about the editing software that you're going
to use to edit your videos because I highly recommend that when you do film videos, filming
in sections is the best thing cause you don't want to film one big video at once.
It's going to really be very hard the first time.
So film the video in sections and think about if you have a Mac or, yeah, Mac book pro,
you could use IMovie, if you have a PC a lot of my students before have used Camtasia for
their PC, but there are free editing softwares for both Mac and PC.
So consider which one you're going to use to start editing your videos.
So if you're liking this video, I guarantee you'll like this video where I go a little
bit more in depth to other things you need to do when you start your YouTube channel
and a full YouTube channel tutorial for beginners.
So that video is coming up next and it starts right now.
This video we're going to go over how to build a YouTube channel when you feel like your
channel is not getting views.
Don't give up.
You got this.
You can do it.
There's a checklist once you upload of best practices that you need.