Start YouTube from Scratch (How I Tell My Clients) | Ep. 7

Yes, there are a lot of “moving parts” to starting a YouTube channel, but if you have a course, program, digital product, book or even a service… the steps to starting your channel (from scratch) are pretty clear. Let me tell you what they are! Because it’s a lot easier to set your channel up correctly than have to pivot later…

Links mentioned:

10 Step YouTube Setup: https://www.meredithmarsh.co/start

YouTube Setup: https://www.meredithmarsh.co/youtubesetup
3x4 Method: https://www.meredithmarsh.co/3x4
Channel Banner Template: https://vidpromom.com/youtube-channel-banner-template/

👉 AIT Method: https://www.meredithmarsh.co/aitmethod?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ep1&utm_campaign=Apr_2024&utm_id=apr24  

👀 Watch Video Version:  https://www.youtube.com/@meredithmarsh

📌 The Stupid Fast Way to get LEADS with YouTube (even with a small channel): https://www.meredithmarsh.co/aitmethod?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ep1&utm_campaign=Apr_2024&utm_id=apr24

Follow on YouTube for Video Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@meredithmarsh

👉 CRUSH IT ON CAMERA (new guide): https://vidpromom.com/crush
📹 Become Binge-worthy on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7YtsiYsKtg

Transcript

Meredith  0:00  
If you have a course or a program or digital product, but absolutely no YouTube channel yet, like at all, it might seem like there are a ton of stuff a ton of moving parts and pieces to YouTube to get everything up and running. And I agree. There are a lot of moving parts to YouTube, but a lot of them don't actually play that big of a role when you're starting out in just beginning growing your audience. So what are the 10 key components the 10 critical steps for launching a YouTube channel if you already have a business, selling a digital product, a course a program, even a book or a service. Let's talk about it here on episode number seven of the video brand infusion podcast. My name is Meredith Marsh, and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business for consistent revenue without paying for ads or constantly selling or burning yourself on daily reels and tiktoks. I was at a business conference last week. And we were using some prompts to create some Instagram reels and I didn't actually create an Instagram reel because I'm a YouTube girl. I'm not anti reels or tick tock. But the prompt that I used was, instead of putting your content on Instagram, when the algorithms gonna bury it after 24 hours, why don't you put it on YouTube so that people can find it for days, weeks, months and years into the future? And a lot of people told me, yeah, why aren't I putting my stuff on YouTube, I really want to do that. But there's just so many pieces, like, I don't know how to set it up, I want to make sure that I'm doing right doing everything right. And I just don't know what the steps are. So in my YouTube funnel program, we really dig deep into like getting clarity on your offer and your niche and your messaging and your sales strategy. But if you're totally new to YouTube, and you don't even have a channel yet, it's kind of like jumping off the deep end or jumping off the high dive into the deep end. So instead of uploading videos, and just kind of like letting YouTube doing its do its thing, cross your fingers and hope that you get views and hope that you grow your audience and build your list and generate sales. Let's now the basics. Because one of the hardest things to do on YouTube is pivot. So I want to help you set things up at the basic level. So that in the future, you don't have to say wait, I sort of did this wrong. And now I need to pivot, let's get you headed in the right direction from day one. So I have 10 key steps that I'm going to share with you and I put them all into a downloadable PDF for you. So you can grab that at Meredith marsh.co/start. Or you can hit the link in the show notes. Because sometimes my name is hard to spell. So I'm going to assume that you already have some kind of a business, a service, a digital product course program, even a book, but you don't yet have a YouTube channel or maybe like just started it and you're not quite sure if you have it set up correctly. So if you have that, then obviously you know what you do you know who you help, how you help them. The Who, what, when, where wise of your business, right, you have that, hopefully pretty well solidified. So your objective with YouTube is to make the right people needing the right information. for the right reasons, find your videos at the right time. And when they find you for the first time, you want something to kind of go off in their brain, like Oh, I found my person, I found my resource, who's going to help me do X, Y, and Z, whatever that ultimate objective is that you help people with. But you also need the YouTube algorithm to know oh, maybe I should put your videos in front of more people just like this person because they seem to enjoy your content. And that's kind of how the algorithm works. So I'll talk a little bit about setup, we'll talk about how to figure out the video topics to create on your channel to actually make it grow. And then what the next steps are from there. So setting up your actual YouTube channel is actually really simple. It's actually really quick and easy. You just have to have a Google account a free Google Gmail account. And I'm not going to walk you through the steps for that because those things change a little bit over time but if you You're logged into your Google account or your Gmail account, you go to YouTube, you create a channel, boom, it's there. So before I give you my pointers on the tech setup, and like getting your channel banner all situated, and your about section and your links and all of that stuff, I have best practices for those. But the first thing that I want you to think about with a brand new channel is that in order for the algorithm, the algorithms to understand what your content is about and who it's best suited for, I teach this concept called the spider web strategy or the spider web method. So really simply, if you think about your niche, or niche, and what it is that you do in your business, maybe it's a little bigger than your specific offer. It's like the umbrella that kind of covers everything that you talk about in your business, and break that up into like three or four different categories around your niche or your industry or your business. Those three categories are like the act as a spider web. And the reason why I think of it like a spider web is because the tighter that web is, if the videos that you create are forming this web, the tighter the web is, the easier it is for the right people to find you. Because they literally get caught in the web, the algorithm is like making people get caught in your web, I don't know any other way to explain it. Other than that, so this spider web strategy is like putting your topics into categories, and then covering everything that you can in those categories. And I'm gonna tell you something about that, that you're not gonna want to hear in just a minute. But let me keep going. If you look at the content that's on my channel, aside from this podcast, which is like totally brand new, and it's kind of like its own new section of my spiderweb my spider web consists of, it's basically creating videos. And so the spider webs sections around that are recording videos, gear and set up kind of videos, software and editing kind of videos. Those are all the topics around the main niche of creating videos. Now that I have the podcast, I'm also talking about growing your audience on YouTube and generating revenue with those videos that you are creating on YouTube. If your niche is like postpartum weight loss or something like that, then your spiderweb sections might be like nutrition,

Meredith  8:02  
fitness or exercise. And one might actually be like recipes, or even food reviews or different products, supplements, things like that, can you see how those are their own individual topics, but they're kind of surrounding the the niche of postpartum weight loss. And a really big mistake that I see people making is thinking, Oh, if my niche is postpartum weight loss, I want to make sure that anyone searching for postpartum weight loss is going to find my channel, and you make every video about postpartum weight loss. And eventually, you're going to run out of ideas. I mean, you're gonna run out of topics like real quick, that's the whole point of this spiderweb. You're not creating videos about your niche, you're creating videos around your niche. And all of those videos, make up this niche that you're creating for yourself. On your channel. Your Niche is a space that you create, for your ideal audience. It's not a topic that you stick to religiously. Now I mentioned there was something that you're not going to like about this whole spiderweb thing. And this is where I get a lot of pushback from people. And that is, if your channel is totally brand new, you should pick one of those sections of your spiderweb and hit it hard. Put everything you can into that one section, instead of bouncing around from topic to topic to topic. And you might think well, doesn't that kind of pigeonhole me into only talking about that one topic? And I can see why you might think that way. But if you're truly creating a space for your ideal audience, you're creating that niche space, then your ideal audience is going to want to hear about those other topics in your other spiderweb sections, eventually, but the algorithm isn't going to know who to put your videos in front of, because you're bouncing around from topic to topic to topic. So if you're afraid of being known for only one thing, keep in mind that in order to be known for more than one thing, you first have to like be known for something to start with. Plus, if you're anything like me, it's easier to plan out topics that are related to each other.

Meredith  10:34  
You know, the time that you put into creating the videos and planning the videos, and getting them done and out there, it's just easier when they're kind of like all tightly related to each other. And it really helps to establish your channel and your topics and your niche and your target audience in the algorithm so that the algorithm can get your videos out in front of as many people as possible. So number two, now that you have your spider web sections, your categories, and you decide which section that you want to start with building your channel. What exactly are you going to put on it? Like? What are the videos? What are the topics? How do you figure that out? Are we doing keyword research? Are we doing SEO? Are we using tools like to buddy and vid IQ? Are we just pulling topics out of thin air the easiest place when you're just starting a channel? To figure out what topics to create on your channel that are going to grow your channel are without a doubt frequently asked questions. What are your clients and customers asking you? What are the people who want to work with you asking you what are the DMS that you get? What are the comments that you're getting on other social media platforms? That it just keeps kind of like come they come up again? And again? If one person is asking you every single week, the same question then you know, 1000s of people are typing that question into Google and YouTube to find answers to that question. So we want your content to show up as a search result and answer that question for those 1000s of people. Plus, if you do have an audience on other platforms, or you do have people really frequently contacting you with the same questions over and over, it's really helpful to have some place to send them here, go watch my YouTube channel, here's a video where I explain everything. And now you have a new YouTube viewer and probably a new YouTube subscriber as well. Now there's another really great brainstorming tool for coming up with topics on your channel that you can be really confident are our videos that people are searching for that they want to watch and will actually grow your channel with your ideal clients and customers. And I call it the three by four method. I'm not going to go super into detail with that here in this video. But I will link that up for you down in the description below. Because it has to do with building a library of binge worthy videos on your channel. So that the algorithm can push your videos out to as many people as it can, you know, among the two and a half billion people here. And so the three by four method, I'll link it down below. But it's a way of really quickly coming up with enough videos to cover yourself for like three months on your channel. And if you know your niche, and you know, your offer in, you know your frequently asked questions already, it'll be really easy to create some really good hooks, and some really good topics that are going to be really juicy and compelling that people are actually going to want to watch and your channel will grow. So you have your spider web categories, you have a single category that you're going to start working on, and some ways to generate ideas for that category. Number three, this is something that I don't hear anybody who any YouTube videos talking about starting a channel, none of them mentioned this. And that's because most of them are talking about how to start a channel so that you have a channel not how to start a channel so that you can generate business with your YouTube channel. So if you have a course or program you probably have a lead magnet or a freebie or something that you want your audience to opt into. Right? So think about what are people searching for? Or watching what are the topics people are watching. Where your freebie your opt in or even your offer is the next logical step for them. Where are they at right before your freebie shows up? As the The ideal like next solution. So in addition to answering frequently asked questions, and doing a little bit of research on what people are searching for, we also want to get people on your list, we're not just growing your channel, we want to get people on your list as well. So when it comes to your offer, or your lead magnet or freebie, what are the like the top of mind topics, the problems people are having the things that people are struggling with and searching for solutions to where you have the solution to it. And think about the content that you can create that will attract those the right customers, your literally your ideal viewers, are your ideal customers. Number four, a big question that I get is How long should my videos be? So I want to make sure that I'm being very clear. When I'm talking about growing your YouTube channel, starting your YouTube channel, generating revenue from your channel, growing your list from your channel, I'm talking about creating long form videos, not shorts, shorts are 59 seconds or less. And they are their own special little beast that I don't think really offer the best strategy for growing an engaged audience long term. And believe me, I if they did, if it works, that we could all just create shorts, and everyone is happy and our channels grow. And our businesses grow than Heck, yeah, I would advocate for making shorts. But that's just not the case. If you're trying to grow an engaged audience, that you want to stick around long term, and you want them to want to hear from you again, there's so much more of a deeper connection that you make when somebody is watching for four minutes, five minutes, six minutes, then for five or six seconds, shorts are much more of a like a flash in the pan kind of a thing. So we're talking about long form videos, five to 15 minutes, answer one question, cover one topic, make it interesting, make it SEO optimized, we'll talk about that in just a second. Just one video at a time, once a week long form between five and 15 minutes. Now if you're like I can't possibly talk about one topic for five to 15 minutes, Meredith, then let me give you my I guess you could call it a formula for how I structure my videos and how I teach my clients and students to structure their videos because this is number five. By the way, this is number five on my list. There's more to a YouTube video than just the meat of the video. Like the body of the video, there's an intro, there's an outro there's some other stuff in there, like maybe you want to talk about your freebie at some point. Or maybe you want to interject a little bit of storytelling or something creating YouTube videos is one part art and one part science. It's art because creating videos is art, you're creating something with a video camera and editing software. So if a camera is involved, it's art. But it's also science because you need people to find your videos. And that has to do with the algorithm. And that has to do with a whole lot of math. And you need them to keep watching your videos, which has to do with a whole lot of science, like psychology, and keeping people interested in keeping people watching. And I could do probably a whole lot more than a podcast episode, I could probably start a whole new podcast talking about this. But let me just kind of keep it simple. And break it down for you. You should start your videos off with a short hook. My podcast episodes are maybe a little bit of a longer hook. But that's because these are podcasts. And video podcasting is the wild wild west right now. So I kind of feel like I can do whatever I want. But usually for my regular YouTube videos, I start off with a question. And it's a one sentence maybe two sentences at the most kind of a hook. And then I start getting right into the topic. So no more one minute intro of why you're creating the video and why what you have to say is really important. And talking about what you're going to be talking about, and having a 15 second like logo animation thing. You don't have to do any of that. In fact, you should not be doing any of that. This isn't like a an in person presentation where you're on stage where you introduce a topic. You know there's the old formula of you Tell them what you're going to talk about. And then you talk about what you're going to talk about. And then you tell them what you talked about. It's like your intro and your body. And you know, the ending. It's not really like that on YouTube. And it can become really repetitive to the point that people are like, bored. And with so many billions of other videos out there to watch, you have to give people reason to keep watching your videos. So keep your intros short, because that's the biggest drop off point is the first 1020 30 seconds of your videos. And then you obviously you have the the meat of the content that you're going to share. And then this is very important. At the end of your video, all you have to do is tell people what to go watch next. You don't have to say thanks for watching, this has been really great. Now you know how to do XY and Z, I often end my videos saying now that you know how to do XY and Z, you might be wondering how to do A, B and C and I have a video about it. But that's really as simple as it is. There is no big long outro because as soon as people know, this is the end of the video, there's nothing left to see here, I'm gonna go watch something else. And you want that something else that they're going to watch to be one of your videos, because that is a positive signal to the algorithm, that your videos are valuable people like them, people want to watch them, because people keep watching them once they're on one of them. So short hook body of your topic, and then a real quick outro, where you're handing off to another one of your videos. Now, because creating videos is part art. How you actually record and edit is, it's really like, it's a personal choice, I have a whole series on my channel, crush it on camera series, where I walk through how to choose the camera, how to set up the camera, the lighting, the microphones, there's a guide that you can download. So you can buy all the same stuff that I have, and create what I call a YouTube a goal for yourself so that you can create, you know good looking videos, so you can look good, sound good and feel good on camera. But what I want you to think about is that your videos don't have to look extremely professional. If the content that you're sharing is valuable and interesting. To your ideal viewers, it's much more important to connect with your audience, your niche, the space you're creating for your ideal audience. And as long as you're providing value, and you're giving really good insights and really good information. And people feel good watching your videos, and they feel like they've actually got something out of it, then they will keep coming back for more. It's not the fancy microphone, the lighting, the camera it like, those things are great. Those are part of the art of creating videos. But you can you could have the best looking videos in the world and not ever grow your audience or generate any revenue because you didn't do the groundwork of really connecting with your niche and really getting clear on who it is that you're serving and what your offer is. And like what do people really want to learn from you on YouTube. So before you go and upload your videos, we're going to talk about optimizing your title and your description, and how to help YouTube with some of the algorithm heavy lifting so it knows who to put your videos in front of because that's an important aspect I don't want you to overlook. But before we get there, let me just hit on number six here because there's some setup stuff that it's like, not going to help your channel grow, but you kind of need to have it in place. And one of those things is your channel banner and your profile image. So if you go to the front part of my channel, you're gonna see I have a channel banner, I have a profile image. So best practices were profile images, I think are always like use your face, not your logo. People connect with faces, not logo. So that's pretty simple, pretty easy. Your banner is slightly more complicated, but I don't want you to overcomplicate I don't want you to overthink it, because nothing you put in your banner is going to help you grow your channel if you don't ever get to creating your videos and I have a template for creating a channel banner because the dimensions of the banner aren't the aren't what they seem with YouTube. So I have a whole Canva template I will link to that down in the description below this video and my video kind of like explaining how that works. But you could just put your name, or your business name or even your logo in your channel banner and just let it be for a little bit, you don't have to have a tagline, you don't have to get fancy, you're gonna see a tagline in my banner. I've been on YouTube for nine years, and I've only just been using that for like less than a year. So you don't have to get fancy with your banner image. Number seven, I want to touch on also, which is your about section. Don't overlook this either. Because when people find you for the first time on YouTube, maybe they go they find a video, they check out your channel, they're gonna see the banner, they're gonna see the profile image, they're gonna see the name of your channel, they're also going to see the top part of your YouTube description, your channel description. So go to your description settings, and make sure you have like the top part is really clear. And maybe who your channel is for what you cover why people should be there be paying attention to your channel. And then you can use the rest of that channel description, to maybe talk about your top topics, your most popular topics, what you do, who you are, why you're here. And then there's also a Links section. And this works a little bit like what you see on like Instagram, or Tiktok, for example. But YouTube gives you multiple links. But that very top link is going to be the one that's actually visible. When somebody is looking at your channel, like looking at just the main front part of your channel, your channel homepage. So my best advice for your banner, your profile image, your links, your description is Don't overthink it. But don't leave it blank don't make it look like your channel was born yesterday. You know what I mean? So number eight, let's talk about optimizing those titles. And those descriptions. In the very first list of items that I talked about, I said you need to have, you need to create this spiderweb around your niche and have these sections of the spiderweb. Right. And each video that you put into each of those sections are videos about their own individual topic, right. So whatever the topic is, that you want people to find your video for, you want to make sure you put that in your title. And there's two ways that I like to think about this. There's like the traditional SEO keyword way of optimizing your title. And there's also the

Meredith  28:00  
click worthy psychology way of optimizing your title. And I like to kind of marry these two things together. So let me give you an example based on the previous example that I gave, so I'm not just talking about my own niche. So in the previous spiderweb example, I said if you had a weight loss, like a postpartum weight loss niche, you would have, you know all of your different spider web sections, let's say it's like, postpartum yoga, okay, you want people who are searching for postpartum yoga to find the video, but you also want it to look like an interesting video to watch. So if you just call it postpartum yoga, then like, okay, that's not that exciting. So if it was like, easy, postpartum yoga for women, in the authorities or something like that, like it's a little bit more specific, it's a little bit more like, oh, yeah, she's definitely talking to me, or easy postpartum yoga you can do in just 10 minutes, you still want people to find it for your specific keyword. But you want to make that title sound like doable and interesting and intriguing. Same thing with your description, but people aren't really going to read your description. The algorithm is going to read your description. So whatever your keywords are, you want to make sure you put those in the description, write them like a human use AI if you want, but make sure it sounds like a human. You're not just listing keywords in your description, that's probably not going to work out that well for you. At the end of the day. It is human beings that you want to watch your videos. So you want to optimize for the algorithm. But like ultimately, you really want to optimize for the human beings that you're creating your content for inside of my thriving creator society membership. We have a document of 52 Click worthy title hooks, so you can basically kind of take pretty much any keyword or any topic, and plug it into a hook that makes it sound a lot more interesting. And along with your title and your description is also your thumbnail, which is incredibly important. However, it's like more than I could cover in a podcast episode because it's very visual. So if you're not very well acquainted with graphic design, or Canva templates, one of my favorite things to do is just open up YouTube and see the thumbnails that are on the homepage, it doesn't matter what the topic is, or what the niches are. Look at those thumbnails. And you probably notice a lot of emotion in those thumbnails, sad faces, happy faces, shocked faces, you know, I like to,

Speaker 1  30:50  
I like to talk about the stupid YouTube face. You

Meredith  30:54  
know, with the mouth open, I try not to use those anymore. But just like with your banner in your about section, don't overthink your thumbnails, they really need to be simple, in order to be effective. And I like to say that the thumbnail is there to get people's attention. And the title is there to get people's interest. So you want to get people's attention, you want them to notice your video, and then see the title. And then now they're intrigued, and they want to click through and watch. So the title and thumbnail kind of play off each other there, I have a lot of training inside of my membership on thumbnails and titles and how they work together. But let's talk about number nine. Because this is really important. You could create the best videos on the best topics and your channel could grow, you're getting views, you're getting opt ins, you're generating sales and everything. And if you never ever opened up your YouTube studio and looked at your analytics, then you might not realize that there's a whole lot of topics you could be creating that you already kind of have a head start on. Because once the algorithm knows your audience knows who to put your videos in front of your YouTube analytics will reflect that. And you'll be able to make much better decisions about what to create moving forward on your channel so that you're not just relying on SEO for people to find your videos. But the algorithm is really doing the heavy lifting for you. Because if you just think about this for a moment, there's way more people watching YouTube videos than are searching for things to watch on YouTube. So SEO is great for getting started. But long term, that's kind of like a beginner YouTube strategy. I still use SEO, but it's a sort of like a beginner YouTube strategy. Whereas getting your videos on people's home pages and in the suggested algorithm, like that's where the power of the YouTube algorithm really is. That's what makes YouTube so much more powerful than all of the other platforms. Because the content that you create actually gets more views, the longer it's out there. The other video platforms don't do that. Right, they like they die off after a while. And so using your analytics can help you make decisions about what to create moving forward. So you're not just doing keyword research, and SEO and relying on people searching for stuff as you grow your channel. So number 10. I can't end this podcast without mentioning if you are building a YouTube channel to generate revenue and actually make sales of your course program or digital product, building a set it and forget it YouTube funnel is the simplest way to generate consistent sales of your online offers. And in episode one, I covered exactly how you set that up. And everything that I covered in this episode lines up perfectly for what you'll learn in episode one, if you have not listened to that yet, because I'm showing you how my YouTube funnel system works, what it looks like and how you can create one for your course so that your course can sell itself. But the magic and the simplicity of organic evergreen traffic from YouTube. So all of the hard work that you put into creating the videos and going through these 10 steps and optimizing and recording and editing. The algorithm is actually driving traffic to your paid offers so that you can generate consistent revenue in your business and if I left you feeling confused or overwhelmed or you still have questions about how to start a YouTube channel from scratch when you already have a business you in place let me know down in the comments of the YouTube video for this episode because I'm always looking for ideas to add to my list to create more episodes about in the future so make sure you follow me here and I'll see you again soon