- You want to pay attention to your videos,
but what about your channel homepage
and what it says about you?
Are you scaring people away or can you do a few quick fixes
to attract more subscribers? Let's talk about it.
(electronic flourish)
Hello TubeBddies, welcome or welcome back to the channel.
A lot of people will spend a lot of time obsessing
over individual videos,
and that, of course, makes sense
and is completely understandable.
But if someone accepts the invitation to your house
after seeing your videos a few times
and comes to your channel page,
what kind of experience are they having?
And can you do something that will tweak that experience
that will make it more inviting for people
to want to stay part of your online family?
We're going to talk about a lot of common mistakes
that we see on a lot of YouTube channels, including this,
where it says channel has no content.
And you're like, what the heck? I know I've made videos.
And a lot of people forget that you have to go
to your homepage and customize your settings
so that it will actually show the videos
that you've worked so hard on.
Let's go ahead
and talk about how you structure your front page
of your channel.
Something that does get overlooked a lot is
actually making sure that your channel banner is up to date.
If you have a specific schedule that you'd like to keep,
you may want to call that out here.
You may want to give a few keywords
about what kind of videos or themes and topics
that your channel might be covering
for people who are newer to your channel.
So, example, if you are a deep sea fishing channel,
then you would want to say, "Deep Sea Fishing Adventures,"
new videos, Wednesdays and Fridays,
or whatever the case may be.
By doing this,
anyone who comes to your channel
and sees this is going to be able
to know what kind of videos to expect and on what cadence.
This is very important
because a lot of the time people will choose whether
or not to subscribe based on the type of video,
as well as the frequency.
The next thing that is going to be
in your channel banner header is going to be the option
to have little clickable links that include everything
from your subscribe button, for your channel,
all the way up to other social media profiles,
or perhaps your own website.
These items are configured
and you can choose how many that will show up
on your profile.
Now, a lot of the time
when you are a new channel starting out,
it can be really enticing.
and you think it's a great idea
to lead people off the platform
and follow you on other social,
such as Twitter or Instagram, but a lot of the time,
unless you're a big channel,
you may want to stick
with keeping it as the subscribe button
and keep people on the platform that they're already on.
Now, of course,
you still want people to follow you on your other social.
So one thing that you can do is
actually create an upload template that's going to include
all of your social media links that you can insert
into all of your descriptions.
If you have multiple types of shows
and you want to have
different types of upload defaults,
you can configure that
inside of TubeBuddy
and have multiple different upload defaults.
So one thing you do want to check is
when you have social media handles
or other websites linked in your description,
that you click those links occasionally
and make sure that they are all valid and still work.
If you do come across a broken link or a social media handle
that you would need to update,
you can always
use the TubeBuddy bulk find/replace append tool
to go ahead and change it all with one click of button.
Now, if you are a channel that has multiple themes
as part of your topics on your channel,
one thing that you could do is easily separate these out
with individual playlists that could be stacked horizontally
across the front of your channel page.
And the great thing about this is,
if you talk about Instagram,
you also talk about Twitter
and you talk about another social media site,
you could group your videos by interest and topic
and people who come to your channel can come
and binge watch a whole bunch of playlists
that are about the same topic.
Some channels will even go as far as
to have certain templates or color schemes
for certain topics that they have on their channel.
Perhaps one day,
if they talk about Photoshop and it's purple,
and then the next they talk about a different program
and it's blue,
you could see those different topics on their channel
and in a color coordinate fashion on their front homepage.
Now, while some people may think it's given a leg up
to the competition
in putting other people's channels
in the feature channels section,
a lot of the time this could be a great way
for you to collaborate with other channels,
where you guys can actually promote each other's channels
in that featured section.
This can actually accomplish
a few things that people don't think about.
One, it trains the behavior of viewers to know
about similar channels and similar topics.
And, as they start to watch,
YouTube picks up on these signals
and they can actually start suggesting channels
because of the follow pattern from people going
from one channel to another
and still having these positive signs of enjoyment
and actually watching the videos.
So now you're not only training the behavior of yours,
but you're training, then therefore,
the behavior of YouTube to start seeing links
between your channels or genres and topics.
Now, something that actually gets overlooked commonly is
having a different video for people who are new
to your channel and have not yet subscribed
and returning subscribers.
So the first one is going to be for people
who are not familiar with your channel.
A lot of people will do a channel trailer.
And if you're at the very beginning of your channel,
you can create a video
that's going to be what you're going to make videos
about and who you are as a quick introduction.
These videos should be short
because you don't have a lot of time always
when people are coming to your channel,
to have them understand what your channel is going
to be about and who you are.
Now, if you have been making videos for awhile,
you can take some snippets from your best performing videos
and put them together
and say, "Hey, these are the types of videos
that I do make on my channel.
Make sure you subscribe,
if you're interested in stuff like this."
Another method that you could do is here,
you could place a video
that has gotten you the most subscribers
that has gotten you the most watch time,
or has the most views.
Now, similarly, to a video for people who are new
to your channel,
you have the opportunity to have one
for returning subscribers.
So this should be something else
that's probably a little bit more personal in nature.
They don't need to get to know you as much
because they're already subscribed to your channel.
So really the video that you choose to put here,
should really be most about the satisfaction
of the viewers who are returning.
Now, something people forget is that by having playlist
on your channel,
it counts as content creation
and it can drive in views from search.
So not only when you're doing your playlist,
you can still fill out a description
and you can use keywords in your description so
that they will show up in search.
And your playlist could be suggested in search
as well as your videos.
Now, since the onscreen real estate is very limited,
you really want to make sure to take the time
and try and organize your playlist,
that you're going to put on your front channel page
into an order that is most attractive to viewers
and getting them to subscribe.
One tool that I think is an absolute gem
and people don't use enough is going to be
inside of TubeBuddy, the playlist action.
So once you're in a playlist,
you can go in there and organize them
in an order based on either most views
or got you the most subs or some other type of metric
so that you have your strongest performing videos
at the front.
I want to take a second to put on screen
the comment of the video.
Thank you so much for interacting with our last video.
If you would like your comment to be the next one featured
in a video, make sure you comment down below on this video.
Now, typically I'd have a question of the day for you,
but today I have homework for you.
I know, I'm sorry.
Who am I?
Go to your channel homepage
and look at it through the eyes of a brand new viewer.
Do you still think
that you're doing absolutely everything correctly
and there's nothing that you would change?
Then come back. You can comment it on this video.
Thank you so much for hanging out with us, TubeBddies.
We hope this gave you a few new ways
to spice up your channel homepage
or a few new ways to think about it.
We'll see in the next one. Bye.