While there are several platforms you can host your videos on, you cannot deny the leader in the video space is YouTube. Even though other platforms can be perceived as more professional or you may even have more control of ads appearing or not and recommended videos appearing or not, remember what I said about convenience, convenience, convenience? Look quickly at the mobile apps included in your new smartphone and you’ll see that YouTube is already there.
What Content is Best for Your Brand
I’ll leave the topic of content that you are actually sharing on your video to other experts. There are countless pieces of advice of what to share, how to share it in bits and pieces and even advice on the best angle, camera or lights.
I’m not going to focus on any of those in this post. I will focus on the visual and the components of your channel today.
- Spend time on your channel art
When you layout your channel art, you will be shown how it looks like on different devices. It’s important that your art must be readable on a mobile phone. If it’s cluttered or if the type is too small, no one will be able to read it. In fact, nothing less than a 14 font size type is recommended on anything read on mobile. This includes the font of blog posts and emails.
Your channel art needs to showcase who you are, what you do and how often you will post a new video on your channel. Just like a blog suffers in traffic and visibility when it’s inconsistent on publishing regular post, your YouTube channel will also suffer. The key to maximize visibility of any content publishing is consistency.
Your profile picture needs to also reflect the tone of what you’ll communicate on the channel.
- Link your social accounts
At the bottom right hand side of the channel art at the top of the channel, you’ll see icons that link to your social sites. You will need to enter those in. If you don’t, then the icons will not appear there. The key is that you need to also enter those same sites in the custom link section of the site. Remember, we want to maximize your discoverability factor which means more than click-thru icons you need to list your text links.
- Complete your About Section
Your About Section needs to not only effectively communicate who you are, what makes you unique and how you benefit others, it also needs to communicate how often you will publish a new video.
It’s also important to fully understand how people search for you. Study your keywords. Take a look at Google trends. Ask people who have found you how they found you. Or, if you’re wanting to be found for certain search terms then make sure those words are in your About Section.
- Title your sections
Creating playlists of your own videos can be highlighted as sections of your channel. Think of them like shelves where your videos are displayed. Group them together by similar topics or perhaps even under one topic. When you select that new videos added to the list should be placed at the top of your list, you’re letting YouTube know that you’re creating a series on your channel. It’s kind of like a TV series and Google likes to showcase series.
- Make a list of Featured Channels
You’re not maximizing the reach of your channel if you don’t feature at least 20 other channels. This is where your offline networking skills can be used to energize your online connections. Reach out to people you know online via email, direct tweet or a private message on Facebook and let them know that you’re featuring their channel on your channel and ask if they will do the same. The featured channel list is housed on the right hand side of a YouTube channel and more often than not channel owners do not use this function.
