Category: SOCIAL MEDIA

Does YouTube Have an Affiliate Program?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 10 November 2020
3 Comments on Does YouTube Have an Affiliate Program?

Affiliate programs are one of the most popular ways of earning money online; whether it is as a nice side-hustle for a little extra cash or the backbone of a five-figure a month income, they provide a way to earn revenue while doing the things you are already doing.

They can invisibly add additional revenue streams that, in some cases, can even add value for your viewers.

With all of this in mind, it is natural to wonder; does YouTube have an affiliate program of their own.

After all, being profitable is a serious concern for the platform, not to mention the added incentive it would give to content creators.

Does YouTube have an affiliate program? – No, YouTube does not have an affiliate program, but you can monetize your channel with the Partnership Program if/when you meet the 1K subscribers and 4K hours of watch time requirements. However you can still use external affiliate programs to make money on YouTube with click through traffic.

Through using YouTube marketing for your channel, you can grow awareness and drive traffic to your affiliate account.

We’re about to take an in-depth look at affiliate programs and how you can use them on YouTube, so let’s get comfortable.

What is an Affiliate Program?

If you’ve made it this far into the post without knowing what an affiliate program is, don’t worry; we’ve got your back. An affiliate program is a system whereby you can earn a fee in exchange for actions taken by your viewers. With the most popular forms of affiliate programs, this fee often comes in the form a commission of a product or service sale. In some cases, it can be a fixed fee in exchange for a user signing up to something.

By far, the most popular affiliate program for individual YouTubers—and many other content creators—is the Amazon Affiliate program, which allows you to generate a unique link for any product on the Amazon marketplace. If one of your viewers clicks through your link and buys something, you earn a small percentage of the sale.

The other way in which affiliate programs are typically run is when a service that is looking for members will reward people who refer new users to them. Fiverr is an excellent example of this with its affiliate program explicitly designed to reward people for driving traffic to their service.

If you want a hugely in-depth deep dive into how to get started with affiliate marketing, best ways to leverage affiliate marketing and my 10+ years of experience in generating income with affiliate marketing – check out my Affiliate Marketing for Beginners blog post.

Why YouTube Doesn’t Have an Affiliate Program

Once you understand how affiliate programs work, it should be easy to understand why YouTube doesn’t have one.

First of all, they don’t sell any products, so they can’t offer a commission on the sale of those products. But secondly, there is no paid service to subsidise a traffic-driving affiliate program like the one Fiverr has. Granted, there is YouTube Premium, but that is a very narrowly focussed product that would not have much re-use value for any given YouTuber.

With a platform like Fiverr, there are dozens and dozens of different services available, so one person could theoretically want to keep going back, which in turn means there are far more ways in which an affiliate link can be worked into the content that is being created.

As for the non-YouTube Premium content, it doesn’t make much sense for YouTube to incentivise people to drive traffic to their platform, given the sheer number of people who are on that platform attempting to drive to traffic to their own videos already.

YouTube is all about retention—once a new person lands on their site, they aim to keep them there as long as possible, and they’ve gotten very good at that over the years.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a popular YouTube who drives millions of unique views a day to the site, or an unknown YouTuber who is just starting out who might bring three new sets of eyeballs to the platform, YouTube will work to keep those people on the site viewing videos, and that retention just as valuable—if not more so—than bringing in new viewers who might not be so interested in sticking around.

Tips for Using Affiliate Marketing with your YouTube Channel

So, YouTube doesn’t have an affiliate marketing program, that much we’ve made clear.

But what we also made clear was the fact that this doesn’t stop you from running affiliate marketing programs through your YouTube channel in order to increase your revenue, so let’s talk about that.

The strength of affiliate marketing lies in invisibility—when you can provide a link to a service or product that fits seamlessly into your content and provides your viewers with something of value to them, you are on to a winner.

To help you achieve affiliate success, we’ve put together some of our top tips for using affiliate programs in your videos and on your channel.

Full Disclosure

We live in a cynical age, borne of many web services and content creators taking advantage of their audience, more and more people assume that anytime something is hidden from them, it is for negative reasons.

To that end, you should always be upfront about any affiliate links you use, even if all you do is put “(PAID)” next to the link in your description. YouTube viewers are generally accepting of the fact that their content creators need to make money somehow, and will not go out of their way to stop that from happening.

But including affiliate links without disclosing this fact can breed bad blood with your audience—especially if you are reviewing a product or service that you are linking out to through an affiliate program.

Keep it in Context

Google puts a lot of time and effort into figuring out the best ads to show a particular individual at any given time.

This is because merely showing the ad is only part of the battle—if nobody ever clicked those ads, advertisers would stop paying for them.

The same approach should be taken for affiliate links. There is no sense in making a video about guitar building and then including an affiliate link to an eBook on making money online.

Sure, some of the viewers of that video might be interested in the eBook, but it is such a shot in the dark, it would hardly be worth the effort of typing the link.

While we’re not saying there is never a good time for an out of context affiliate link, the best use of these links is within the context of your video. If you are doing a video on the top five sports cameras, have affiliate links to each of the cameras on Amazon in your description. The people watching that video are far more likely to be in the market for a new sports camera than viewers on other videos, and your video might just be the thing that pushes them to pull the trigger.

By including a link to the product, you are saving them the effort of going off and searching for it themselves.

And, as affiliate programmes are almost never more expensive—if anything you can often get a better deal through affiliate links—you are not inconveniencing your viewers in any way.

As an additional note, being in context doesn’t necessarily mean the product or service relates to the subject matter of the video directly. A

s an example, a channel whose content is primarily about how to make better YouTube videos might list off the equipment they use in the description, along with affiliate links to where that gear can be bought. This is useful to that channel’s viewers since “what equipment do you use” is one of the most commonly asked questions that successful YouTubers get asked.

Pick Something you Believe In

I am a huge fan of services like Rev – They help me add captions and foreign language subtitles to my youtube videos at a time fee per minute. I use them personally so I know they are good and that is why I promote them using an affiliate program. It is this personal edge that helps my audience understand that if I use it, its a god product and not just a huge list of products you could grab from Amazon in a blind blog post.

Not every channel creates videos of the top ten latest gadgets that can be easily linked to on Amazon, but that doesn’t mean those channels should miss out on the affiliate marketing train.

Firstly, remember that Amazon—and direct product sales in general—are not the only options when it comes to affiliate marketing. Many digital products and services have affiliate marketing options attached to them. Indeed, services like Clickbank specialise in finding digital products that can be marketed through affiliate linking. There are also services, such as Fiverr, as we mentioned earlier.

Ultimately, if there are no affiliate products or services that you can tie into your content directly, you could go on the hunt for a product or service that you truly believe will be beneficial for your viewers, and promote that instead. For example, for a programming channel, you could promote an ergonomic desk chair. For a yoga channel, you could promote a particular type of yoga mat.

It’s a little like being sponsored by that product, only the people behind the product are not involved. And on that note, you should be careful not imply that you are sponsored, as that can cause problems with the company behind the product or service.

The important thing here is that the product or service you are promoting has some usefulness to your audience, even if it doesn’t directly relate to the content of your video. Again, you might find some people in the audience of a fishing channel who are interested in a mechanical keyboard, but it would be blind luck, and that’s no way to run a business.

Don’t go Overboard

Regardless of the exact method of incorporating affiliate links into your content you choose, it is a universal truth across all mediums that overdoing it will have negative results.

This can be because your affiliate content is overwhelming your actual content, or simply because your audience feels it’s a bit crass.

But, whatever the reason, if you stack your description full of affiliate links and hand out promo codes every two minutes in your video, you’ll almost certainly turn large portions of your audience off.

And affiliate programmes only work when you have an audience to click those links.

Will Affiliate Links Harm my Video?

To answer this question, we first need to understand a few things about the way YouTube works.

Firstly, affiliate links are very much allowed by YouTube, which is one of the main concerns YouTubers tend to have when first venturing into the world of affiliate marketing.

However, merely being allowed to do something does not mean it can’t have negative effects on your channel.

As we touched on above, YouTube is very concerned with viewer retention. Now, we’re not saying they have no interest in bringing new eyeballs to the platform, but they are more concerned with keeping those eyeballs on YouTube once they are there. This is why average watch time is one of the most crucial metrics of a video’s success in the eyes of YouTube because more watch time means that people are spending longer on the site because of that video.

With that in mind, there is no direct association that YouTube will admit to between external links—affiliate or not—and the YouTube algorithm deciding to recommend a video less often. But there may be an indirect association.

YouTube wants people to stay on the site as long as possible. The longer a viewer is on YouTube, the more chance there is to serve them ads, and the more money YouTube can make. But if a lot of users are coming to your video and then leaving the platform altogether and not coming back, that will reflect negatively in the eyes of the algorithm.

It’s something of a catch 22—you need plenty of viewers for your affiliate links to be useful, but if your affiliate links are too effective, YouTube might see that as users coming to your video and then leaving YouTube, which may lead them to recommend your video less, which means fewer viewers to click your affiliate links. Unfortunately, there is no way around this problem, and YouTube is typically quiet about the exact way that they handle things like this.

That being said, affiliate marketing is a game of percentages—you bank on a large enough percentage of your viewers clicking your affiliate links to make it worthwhile while accepting that the overwhelming majority of them won’t.

Many YouTubers have had a great deal of success through affiliate marketing on YouTube, so there’s no reason that you can’t, too. Just remember not to overdo it, and keep the subject of your affiliates in line with the content of your videos.

Tags affiliate marketing, make money on youtube, money, passive income, youtube affiliate, youtube affiliate marketing, youtube affiliate program, youtube income, youtube money, youtube partner program

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How Many Views do you Need to Make Money on YouTube?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 31 October 2020

The numbers surrounding making money on YouTube are not always particularly transparent to those on the outside.

Indeed, even the methods of making that money can sometimes be a little opaque to the uninitiated. If you are one such person, fear not; we’re going to run the whole gamut in this post, from how many views do you need to make money on YouTube to how you can go about making that money.

But for those of you who are a little impatient, the short answer is – assuming your content is advertiser friendly, you need around 30,000 views per day to make money on YouTube. This could make you around $60-90 per day based on a fairly average $2-3 RPM. This can change with seasonal ad prices with winter being more profitable compared to New Year and early spring.

But before you run off to start making videos, you should be aware that there are caveats to that number. For one thing, there is no set-in-stone amount that you earn per view. Some people will be able to make a killing on 30,000 views a day, whereas others might get twice as many views but struggle to get by on their YouTube money alone.

It is also worth knowing how we reached this number. After all, it is possible to make money with far fewer views than 30,000, but, generally speaking, fewer views means less money, so what metric are we working from?

Keep reading, and all will be revealed.

How Much Money is Enough?

In order to make a judgement on how many views it takes to make money on YouTube, we first have to establish our standard for making money.

Technically speaking, if you earn a single cent from your YouTube channel, you are making money.

Granted one cent a month is not exactly cause for celebration, but it is technically money. On the other side of the spectrum, PewDiePie—by far the most popular individual YouTuber in the platform’s history—potentially makes as much as half a million dollars a month from YouTube ads alone! Most people can agree that, while they might like to be making that kind of money, they don’t need that much money.

We should clarify that we don’t know how much money PewDiePie makes, but based on the average YouTube CPM and PewDiePies average monthly views, we can make an educated guess. It’s also worth remembering that we’re just talking about YouTube earnings here—PewDiePie may have sponsorships and brand deals that further increase his earnings.

So, with all that in mind, what numbers are we looking at? Well, we’ll be honest, we’ve picked a relatively arbitrary figure that should represent an amount of money somewhere between the United States’ poverty line and the average salary earned by Americans. We’ve gone with this because we feel confident that no one wants to be on or below the poverty line if they can help it, but you might be prepared to earn a below-average income if it means you get to live the YouTube dream. So what are those numbers?

How we Calculate Our Numbers

According to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), a person in the United States is considered to be in poverty if they are earning less than $12,760 a year.

Meanwhile, the average annual salary for an American is a little over thirty thousand dollars a year. As mentioned above, we have picked a spot roughly in the middle of these figures on the basis that most aspiring YouTubers would be happy to earn a little less than average to chase their YouTube dream, but not perhaps so much less that they are officially in poverty. But how do YouTube views translate to these amounts of money?

And, just to be clear, we are only talking about YouTube Partner Programme money here—money earned directly through ads being served on your videos by Google.

The metric used for measuring the views to earnings ratio is CPM or cost per mille. CPM is a measure of how much you earn per one thousand views, and is used all over the Internet for a variety of audience-related statistics. The actual CPM your channel has will be entirely determined by the type of content you make, how engaged your audience is, how advertiser-friendly your content is, and so on. That being said, the average CPM on YouTube is around $2. That means that, on average, a YouTuber earns two dollars for every thousand views they get.

Using our 30,000 views a day average figure, you would theoretically make somewhere in the region of $22,000, which is almost right in the middle of our poverty and average salaries.

Why It’s Not That Simple

Unfortunately, YouTube CPMs are not nearly that simple. As we stated earlier, some YouTubers will be able to make enough money from far fewer views, while others will struggle with more views.

A great deal of factors come into play when talking about how much your views are worth. Firstly, you have to be part of the YouTube Partner Programme, which has certain eligibility requirements (more on that shortly).

Secondly, your individual videos have to be eligible for monetisation—if you get 50,000 views in one day, but 40,000 of them are on videos that are not eligible to be monetised, you are can only count 10,000 views towards your CPM.

The next factor is the kind of content you are making. CPM is not a static, universal figure that applies to every YouTuber—the actual number is determined by the ads that are shown on those videos, and the ads are targeted based on the audience.

Though it doesn’t necessarily translate directly to YouTube, it can help to think of a salesperson who earns a commission. If a salesperson going door to door selling small items that cost tens of dollars will make a very small amount of money per sale. On the other hand, a salesperson in a flashy showroom selling luxury cars will make a considerable sum of money per sale.

Granted, in this scenario, the door to door salesperson will probably make a lot more sales than the car salesperson, but on YouTube, we are comparing an equal number of views.

So, if you are getting an average of 20,000 views in a niche with a high going rate for ads, you stand to earn a much higher CPM than someone in a niche with low ad rates.

Another factor is the engagement of your audience. As a general rule, pop culture videos tend to have poor CPM because their audience is much more diverse in terms of their interests. They will have come to the video to be entertained and, as a result, are not necessarily interested in any particular product or service that might be advertised at them, even when Google is serving ads targetted to that person specifically. On the other hand, a channel that is specifically about reviewing computer hardware will have an audience that is likely interested in buying computer hardware—hence why they are watching review videos. That audience will be far more likely to view a full ad or click through.

This is the main reason why a channel with a smaller audience can earn more than a larger channel. To go back to our salesperson analogy, the door-to-door salesperson has no idea if the person answering the door is going to be interested in their products, whereas the car salesman can be relatively confident that anyone walking into their showroom is at least partially interested in purchasing a car.

Another critical factor to how high your CPM can be is the length of your videos and your average watch time. Longer videos represent an opportunity for YouTube to show more advertisements, which means the potential for more money.

You can increase your CPM and improve your channel income but you might need to change your content or mindset – for more information on how to boost your channel CPM check out my deep dive blog in how to increase youtube CPM.

That being said, if your viewers regularly only watch the opening few minutes of your videos and then click away, the rest of the video—and the ads that could have been served—are not doing you any good. Though you should always prioritise the quality of your content before that video’s earning potential, it is generally recommended that a video should be at least ten minutes long, as this is the minimum length of time for YouTube to make use of mid-roll ads.

YouTube’s Partner Programme

To make money directly through YouTube, you need to become part of the YouTube Partner Programme, and in order to become part of the YouTube Partner Programme, your channel has to meet certain requirements. Those requirements include;

Living in a region where the YouTube Partner Programme is available
Having more than 4,000 watch-hours over the previous twelve months
Having at least 1,000 subscribers
Having a linked AdSense account

Now, granted, none of these requirements guarantees that you are getting a particular amount of views by the time you qualify for the partner programme, but it would be difficult to reach a point where you are getting 4,000 watch hours a year and have 1,000 subscribers without at least amassing a few hundred—if not thousand—views a day on average.

The truth is, even with these requirements in place, most YouTubers who join the partner programme as soon as they are eligible barely make any money in the beginning. Given that AdSense has a $100 minimum payout threshold, it can easily be many months from you first joining the partner programme before you see any money in your bank account.

Other Methods of Earning

So far, we have been focussing exclusively on the YouTube Partner Programme as a means of earning money from your videos. In reality, the partner programme is not the best way to translate YouTube success into revenue, as CPMs are often too low, and the necessary viewing targets too difficult to achieve to make it a viable source of income. It is also the unfortunate reality of YouTube that, for some YouTubers, the number of views they would need to turn their CPM into a viable income is forever out of their reach. This is not because of any failing on their part, but a natural limitation of the niche they are creating videos in.

The more focussed your niche is, the more value each viewer represents, but the fewer viewers there are. Going back to our salesperson example, the door-to-door salesperson might not know if they are knocking on the door of an interested customer, but they have lots of doors to knock on.

In contrast, the luxury car salesperson knows that people walking in are interested in buying a car, but won’t get many customers walking through the door.

If you assume that you need at least 30,000 views a day and you are creating videos for a niche where there are perhaps a million interested viewers, that means that each of your videos has the potential for a little over thirty days viewing before everyone who is interested has seen it. And, truthfully, you’re unlikely to get a view from everyone who is interested in that niche, regardless of how popular you are.

This is where other methods of earning money from your YouTube success come in, methods like membership platforms, merchandise, and brand deals. With membership platforms—such as Patreon, or YouTube’s in-house solution—your viewers can chip in a small monthly sum to support your content, providing you with additional earnings and a more reliable source of income. Brand deals and sponsorships are less predictable since they can range from a single video for a few hundred dollars all the way up to a multi-video sponsorship for thousands of dollars.

The important part about these alternative methods of earning money is that they are not inherently linked to your number of views. Granted, more views means a bigger audience, and a bigger audience means it is more likely that you will be able to attract members to your membership platform, or brands to offer you a deal.

But viewing figures are not the hard barrier that they are for the YouTube Partner Programme and your earnings through that programme. You are not required to have a certain amount of views before you can sign up for Patreon, nor will a brand refuse to sponsor a video if the view count isn’t high enough when there are other factors at play. Marketing is evolving all the time, and brands are increasingly about quality over quantity.

You could, in theory, convince a brand to sponsor your content before you’ve even uploaded your first video.

You probably won’t succeed… but you could.

Tags how many views do you need, how much do youtbers get paid, make money on youtube, make money online, youtube money

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Best Time to Upload Videos To YouTube for MORE VIEWS

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 26 October 2020
3 Comments on Best Time to Upload Videos To YouTube for MORE VIEWS

YouTube has been around long enough now and made enough people quite wealthy that succeeding on the platform has become something of a science.

People analyse the way the algorithm behaves to try and glean what it considers to be recommendable content. They test different thumbnails styles for better click-through-rates and experiment with alternative titles.

They even consider the placement of their “don’t forget to subscribe” pop-up down to the second. And, yes, they put a great deal of thought into when the best time to upload a video is.

The truth is, all of these things can have a surprisingly large impact on the success of any given video.

In this post, we’re taking a look at those upload times specifically. We’re going to take a deep dive into what factors are at play when you upload in the morning versus when you upload in the evening, and whether the middle of the week is better than a weekend.

Unfortunately, there is no single YouTube best time to upload that we can throw out there as a one-size-fits-all solution. But when people ask “When is the best time to upload videos to YouTube?” I tell them – An upload schedule is unique to each channel. Look at your audience location and age range then match your uploads to their live patterns. For example school kids before and after school, adults more evenings and weekends. Overtime your audience will show you what they like and when.

However, this a complex topic with a lot of moving parts, so make yourself comfortable, and let’s dive in!

Why Are Upload Times Significant?

The first part of this question is simple enough—YouTube places a lot of stock in popularity. If a video is getting lots of views, YouTube is more likely to see it as something worth pushing out to recommendation feeds.

The fleeting nature of viral videos and trends leads to a “strike while the iron is hot” mentality in which YouTube will want to capitalise on the popularity of a video while it is hot so as to avoid missing the window since they don’t know if the interest will still be there in a few days.

So, it pays to get a lot of attention to your video in a short space of time, even if you are making evergreen content that will still be relevant months or years down the line. And the easiest time to get a lot of viewers at once is when you first upload.

YouTube users are typically very liberal with their subscribing finger. For most of the people reading this post, the chances are that if you look in your subscriber list, there are far more subscribers than you actively keep up with.

There’s nothing wrong with this behaviour—most of us do it—but it does mean that notifying you about new videos can be problematic. If you have a hundred channels you are subscribed to (not uncommon) and at least fifty of them upload on a weekly basis, there’s a good chance that some of those videos are going to clash.

The next problem is that we are not looking at our YouTube notifications all day every day, so we don’t always see notifications in real-time.

The problem here is that YouTube does not like bombarding users with notifications. It isn’t very pleasant, and a surefire way to push people to turn their notifications off entirely, and YouTube certainly doesn’t want that.

So, if you open up your YouTube app and there have been eight new videos from channels you are subscribed since the last time you looked, YouTube won’t always show you notifications for all of those videos. Indeed, they might only show you one!

Even getting your subscribers to “ring that bell” is not a guaranteed way of ensuring they are notified since your video could hit the same bottleneck if a subscriber has multiple videos vying for notification attention at the same time.

TV is not a Good Model

In the early days of YouTube, as the platform started to settle into more than just short videos of people visiting the zoo, many YouTubers took a cue from broadcast television when deciding their upload schedule.

TV show schedules have been carefully honed over years of experience, and typically involve saving your best content for the evening. This is when the most people are going to be sat watching their TV.

For the younger members of our audience, it might be worth pointing out that this kind of system was worked out long before video-on-demand services like Netflix, and even before DVR capabilities. There was a time, not too distant, where shows were broadcast live and if you wanted to watch a show, you had to be in front of your TV during that live broadcast, or hope for a rerun in the future.

That may have worked for those early YouTubers, but the paradigm has well and truly shifted since the late 00s. People have come to know YouTube as a new medium that isn’t beholden to the restrictions of TV, rather than a mere extension of it.

And, with YouTube views increasingly coming from mobile devices, the watching habits of users is further skewing away from those traditional TV schedules.

Timing for Noobs

Before we get into any specific talk about when you should post your videos, it’s worth pointing out that none of this really applies to new channels.

If you are just starting out, you almost certainly don’t have an audience you are trying to please, so there is no sense in trying to work out when the best upload times for that audience are.

In the beginning, you should focus on establishing a routine that works for you. Until you have built up an audience, the important thing is consistency, rather maximising your potential.

Pick a time that works for you and try to stick to it so that the viewers you attract can get used to your schedule. As you grow as a channel, you can begin experiment more with the things we are going to go into below.

Knowing Your Audience: Timezone Edition

Before you can determine when the best time to upload for your channel is, you need to establish the timezones of your core audience. Unfortunately, this will be trickier for some channels than it will be for others.

On the plus side of things, this part being trickier is usually a sign that you are doing well as a YouTuber.

If your channel has a very clear audience geographically speaking, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

For example, if your audience is almost entirely UK-based, you can just mark it down as GMT (or BST depending on the time of the year) and move on to working out what the best time of day to upload is.

Unfortunately, if your audience is a little more widespread, things won’t be so simple. For example, English-speaking content that is not geared towards a specific region (people in America probably don’t care about local news in the UK, for example) could theoretically appeal to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—countries that cover a whole gamut of timezones.

Depending on the exact part of each country we are talking, it could be the middle of the night in the US and Canada, early morning in the UK, late afternoon in Australia, and early evening in New Zealand. All at the same time.

Needless to say, working out the best time to upload in this situation is a little more complicated.

The best bet here is to try and determine if you have a primary market. For most YouTubers, it will likely be the region they live in, but if you have one region that consumes your content noticeably more than other areas, it might be worth focussing on that.

And, if you don’t have that one region you can zero in on, you can just pick the one you prefer, or go back to uploading at a time that suits you first and foremost. As we will explore shortly, the exact upload time isn’t the be-all and end-all of YouTube success.

Knowing Your Audience: Age and Habits Edition

We talked a little above about how YouTube has well and truly moved away from those viewing schedules set out by broadcast television, but how does that help you establish your own upload schedule?

Before we get into this, we should clarify that none of these are hard rules—there are always exceptions. Also, we’re leaving out Generation Alpha, which consists of people born between the early 2010s and the mid-2020s.

Given that, at the time of writing, the oldest example of Gen Alpha will be around eight years old, there’s no sense talking about when the best upload times are for them, as there are a whole other set of rules to factor in when making content for children.

Zoomers

Firstly, let’s talk about the Zoomers, also known as Gen Z, which covers people born between the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s. These are children and young adults who have always had the Internet—and mostly had YouTube—their whole lives.

They will usually be in some form of education (unless you’re reading this in ten years) which will put a limit on their viewing time. If your primary audience falls into this bracket, you probably want to focus on early mornings and late afternoons.

This age range is not particularly suited for late-night, as younger Zoomers will likely be in bed, and older ones will be busy being teenagers and young adults.

Millennials

This generation covers people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s and is notable from a YouTube perspective as being the generation that YouTube’s success was built on.

Gen Z may be surpassing them in terms of user numbers, but it was millennials like PewDiePie, Philip DeFranco, TomSka, Jenna Marbles, iJustine, and countless others of that age group that ushered YouTube into the age of success it currently enjoys.

Millennials are mostly out in the world now, meaning they tend to have jobs, and not many jobs allow you to sit and watch YouTube while you’re working.

But, while this generation may remember a time before smartphones and broadband, they have nonetheless grown up with it, and are very comfortable using the technologies that are built around these things. In other words, you may lose your millennial audience during the mornings and afternoons, but you could still catch them on their lunch breaks thanks to the ease with which YouTube can be watched on the phone these days.

Evenings can be a bit hit and miss, however.

The millennial age range is both young enough to still be out socialising on an average night, but also old enough to have slowed down a little, and nights in more than nights out.

Generation X

Generation X, also known as the MTV Generation, the Latchkey Generation, and the Lost Generation, is a generation of people born between 1965 and 1980.

This generation had mostly hit adulthood by the time the Internet started changing the world, and so tend to be less embracing of technology than their younger counterparts.

This generation doesn’t tend to be accessible from a YouTube perspective outside of their downtime, which means you’re far less likely to catch them before early evenings.

You may get some traction in the mornings, but you are unlikely to get a significant amount of Gen X watching YouTube on their phones at lunch breaks.

Baby Boomers, Silent Generation, and Greatest Generation

Though some Baby Boomers are still young enough to be in the regular workforce, we’re lumping these generations together because they are all more or less in the same situation, which is retirement.

For older YouTube viewers, the upload times are far more flexible, Generally speaking, you want to aim for before early evening, but other than that you should be good to go.

Experiment

Where possible, try experimenting with different upload times. Bear in mind that the videos will need to have a similar level of expectation for the experimenting to be effective.

There is no sense comparing a video that you expect to do really well with a video you hope will at least be average.

Ultimately, the congestion caused by multiple video uploads and the unpredictable schedules of individual users will always make the ideal upload time something of a guessing game, so experimenting may be your only surefire way to know.

Tags best time to upload, Best Time To Upload To YouTube, timezones, youtube upload

BUSINESS TIPS HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

4 Books for New Entrepreneurs That All YouTubers Should Read

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 24 October 2020

They teach many subjects at school, but one that I think is missing from the syllabus is entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is the art of turning muck into brass, the practice of taking an idea and nurturing it until it blooms into a money-making powerhouse.

Some people say that you can’t teach entrepreneurship, because you have to have a particular personality or an elusive ‘x-factor’ to have any chance of success. I think they’re wrong.

Entrepreneurship is a skill that can be learned by anyone, and I believe everyone should try to launch a business at least once. So, if you’re a new entrepreneur, and are looking for some help and guidance from those who have tried entrepreneurship and succeeded, here is a selection of books you should consider adding to your bookshelf.

I am much more of an audiobook “reader” as I tend to take it in easier – I even use Amazon’s FREE Audible trials to load up on 2 free books every month.

Book 1: Crushing It!

Author: Gary Vaynerchuk

Number of pages: 288

Published: 2018

Why should you listen to him?: Gary Vaynerchuk is a global social media superstar.

Known affectionately as Gary Vee, Vaynerchuk was born in Belarus in 1975 but emigrated to the USA with his parents at a young age. Raised in New York City, Vaynerchuk showed entrepreneurial spirit as a boy, buying and selling baseball cards at school. He joined his parent’s wine business at 14, and after he took over in 2003, he grew it from $3 million to $60 million a year in revenue.

Vaynerchuk spotted the internet’s potential early, launching a channel on YouTube in 2006 to promote the wine business. Famous for hard work and ‘hustle’, Vaynerchuk now owns a $100 million social media digital agency, VaynerMedia, and gives inspirational speeches internationally about entrepreneurship and social influencing.

Book Synopsis: The book is part motivational and part social media strategy manual. Vaynerchuk explains how personal branding over social media is crucial to success today as an entrepreneur.

The book is in two parts. The first part gets you pumped up for the road ahead and gives you eight foundational principals on which to build your business.

The second part delves deeper into different social media platforms, covering YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and a few others. Vaynerchuk shows you how to use each platform to gain attention and grow your entrepreneurial endeavours. Each chapter is illustrated with real-life case studies from successful small businesses who have followed his framework.

Even though the book is nearly three years old, it’s often found near the top of the charts. It ranks top 10 on Amazon Audible in the categories for Social Media, Web Marketing, and E-commerce. Many people consider it one of the first books to buy when you are thinking about starting a business.

The book is available in several formats. There are the usual hardback and paperback, plus Kindle too. The best way to absorb it is via Amazon Audible, though. Narrated by Vaynerchuk and two other colleagues, you get to understand and learn the book’s lessons via Gary Vee’s unique style of delivery.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 2: Primalbranding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future: Create Belief Systems that Attract Communities.

Author: Patrick Hanlon

Number of pages: 272

Published: 2011

Why should you listen to him?: Patrick Hanlon is a world-renowned branding consultant. He has worked with the likes of Levi’s, PayPal, and Shopify to help them develop their brands and connect with new audiences.

He gives talks and lectures internationally on the topic of branding, is a contributor to the major news networks, and owns several consulting businesses which offer advice on branding in the digital age.

Book Synopsis: How do some companies like Tesla, create a horde of devoted followers while other businesses, despite access to the same level of resources, struggle or even become objects of scorn?

Hanlon argues that companies like Tesla succeed because they build a following of people who become true believers and advocates for their brand.

Primalbranding identifies the seven pieces of ‘primal code’ that humans instinctively use to form groups. He then applies this to branding and shows you how you can use these hardwired human dynamics and apply them to shape your brand and attract a legion of followers.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section explains the seven elements of the primal code. Including concepts such as ‘the creation story’, ‘the rituals’, and ‘the leader’. Hanlon then shows how these parts come together to foster ‘primal belonging’.

Sections two and three then show how these immutable traits can be used by just about anyone or anything to market and promote their products.

The book is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle and also as an MP3 CD (hello 2011!). If you want to build a following that will shout your name from the rooftops and promote your brand freely, it’s an essential one for your reading list.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 3: Innovation from Desperation: The Unfiltered Failures & Successes of an OG Social Media Marketer

Author: Desiree Martinez

Number of pages: 234

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to her?: Desiree Martinez is an entrepreneur, YouTuber, and all-round social media guru. As a military spouse, a life moving from base to base with her Air Force husband left her with few career opportunities and forced her to act for herself and think entrepreneurially.

She was surprised to learn that Facebook, a platform she knew well from her college days, was becoming an essential platform for businesses. So she started a social media consulting firm and has since helped hundreds of businesses shape their social presence.

Book Synopsis:

My 5* review for this book which I posted to Amazon reads:

“A real heartfelt walk through the ups and downs of working in media and social media in this current age. Running a business, raising a family and growing a brand is not easy. This is a warts and all story sharing some truly inspirational lessons. Well worth a read!”

The book is part autobiography and part how to launch your own business. It provides an unfiltered account of the ups and downs of launching a business with little support and no roadmap.

There are many lessons to learn from the book. Desiree covers topics like becoming a better content creator, what to do when a new social media platform becomes hot, and how to keep on going when everything seems to conspire against you.

Released in 2020, it also contains a chapter covering the impact of the pandemic. It’s a book to read if you can’t see yourself in any of the thousands of books available about entrepreneurship. Desiree says that she was the girl at school you who would never think could launch their own business, never mind write a book!

If that sounds like you, then this is a book worth reading.

The book is available in paperback and on Kindle, and it’s one I really recommend that you read.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 4: The 4-Hour Workweek

Author: Tim Ferris

Number of pages: 416

Published: 2011

Why should you listen to him?: Tim Ferris is a writer, podcaster, investor, and entrepreneur. Many know him today for his podcast about lifestyle and smart working, but it was this book – The 4-hour Work Week – that propelled him onto the global stage.

He has advised or invested in many well know internet startups, like Evernote, Stumbleupon, and Uber.

Book Synopsis: One of the best books about entrepreneurship available to read.

Ferris argues in this now-famous book about how you should strive to avoid the 9-5 and instead choose to live life on your terms by building lifestyle businesses.

Ferris writes about how he started work after college and found himself working 80 hours a week for $40,000 a year. After a little experimentation with various business ideas and working strategies, he launched his own brand of supplements and soon started earning $40,000 every month, working just 4 hours per week.

Ferris achieved his success by working smartly. He used the 80/20 principle made famous by Italian economist Pareto and outsourced most menial tasks to cheap virtual assistants overseas.

The 4-hour Work Week gives you the tools and the inspiration to build a business of your own, and enjoy the benefits while you are still young by taking ‘mini-retirements’.

Essentially, you design and launch a business that can operate day-to-day without your presence. Something that earns money on autopilot so you can head out into the world and seek out unforgettable experiences.

The book is in four parts; Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. Each step in the framework guides you through his approach to building a lifestyle business and contains lots of real-life examples to illustrate the points.

The book is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and audio CD. It’s become a classic of the genre and regularly makes it into top-10s of books about entrepreneurship.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

I hope you find this list of books useful.

Remember, if you sometimes struggle to find the time actually to sit down and read; there is an alternative. You can listen to a book when you are out and about—maybe travelling to work or out getting coffee.

You can download and listen to many useful books about YouTube and entrepreneurship using Amazon Audible. Every month for a small monthly subscription, you can listen to a book often narrated by the author themselves.

Educating yourself is the single best thing you can do for your career, so why not try listening to two of the books mentioned above with a 30-day trial of Amazon Audible.

Tags books for entrepreneurs, business advice for entrepreneurs, business lessons for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, how to avoid burnout as an entrepreneur, make money on youtube

HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Grow Your YouTube Channel’s Audience with THESE 4 Books!

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 20 October 2020
1 Comment on Grow Your YouTube Channel’s Audience with THESE 4 Books!

Launched a YouTube Channel and it’s not going so well?

Perhaps you are not getting the clicks in the search results you think you deserve. Maybe you lay awake at night wondering how your competitors get recommended in suggested videos, and you don’t.

It just isn’t fair!

Well, it may be that they are doing things a little different to you. It often only needs a tweak here or a small improvement there to make the difference between failure and success for a video.

So if you think you have what it takes, but think you are missing a piece of the puzzle, here are four books that should have useful information to help you along. Information that turns the tide on your lacklustre performance and increases your subscribers and views.

I am much more of an audiobook “reader” as I tend to take it in easier – I even use Amazon’s FREE Audible trials to load up on 2 free books every month.

Book 1: YOUTUBE MASTERY MARKETING 2020

Author: Robert Grow

Number of pages: 114

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to him?: Robert Grow is an author who regularly writes about social media and marketing. His has written six books about optimising your online social media presence. This book is part of a series that also includes marketing guidance for Instagram and Facebook.

Book Synopsis: In this short book, Robert Grow looks at how you can optimise your YouTube channel for more views and subscribers. Grow argues that to become successful on YouTube, you need first to understand how the YouTube algorithm works, which he explains in a manner that all should comprehend.

Building on this knowledge, the book details the tools used by some of the most successful channels, and how you can use them yourself to give your channel a boost.

YouTube is a search engine, so the book covers the SEO rules you should be aware of and the tweaks you can make to optimise your content for ranking.

Unlike some of the more basic YouTube introduction books, YouTube Mastery Marketing addresses more advance YouTube concepts. Broadcasting live and promoting your own branded merchandise from your channel, both have their own dedicated chapter.

Robert Grow also provides useful information on the video quantity vs quality debate and underlines how important consistency is.

The book is divided into 18 easily digestible chapters and is available on Kindle, paperback, and Amazon Audible. The book has also been well received, rating 4.8 out of 5 on the Amazon store.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 2: YouTube Optimization: The Complete Guide

Author: Tom Martin

Number of pages: 116

Published: 2018

Why should you listen to him?: Tom Martin is a certified YouTube Growth specialist who previously managed the YouTube channel for BBC Worldwide for several years. He has managed YouTube channels that collectively have had billions of views.

Tom now runs a specialist consultancy firm that works with YouTubers to help improve their channels and expand their audience. You can consider Tom Martin as an expert on YouTube.

Book Synopsis: The books full title is; YouTube Optimization – The Complete Guide: Get more YouTube subscribers, views and revenue by optimizing like the pros. Which demonstrates the actionable information you can derive from this book.

Tom Martin has lengthened his book title for Amazon, containing benefits and keywords to make sure he appears in many different keyword searches. YouTube Optimization teaches you similar tactics the pros use on their videos to draw in the viewers and increase their subscribers.

Tom Martin argues that even small changes can have a significant impact on your channel. And the book sets out strategies you can learn and apply yourself.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can then make subtle changes to your content and reap greater success. Tom says that by applying his lessons, you can turn a video that gets 10 views into a video with 1000 – an exponential impact.

The book is divided into ten chapters, and each chapter deals with a YouTube attribute, like watch time or tags, and shows you how to improve on the metric or optimise the content.

From your title, tags, and thumbnail; to your intro, content, and outro; Tom shows you how to improve on your output. Don’t be put off by the age of the book either. The tactics Tom teaches are evergreen strategies. It’s an essential book for anyone looking to improve their channels standing.

The book is available in Kindle and paperback formats and is rated 4.5 out of 5 by its readers on Amazon.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 3: Vlog Like a Boss: How to Kill It Online with Video Blogging

Author: Amy Landino (nee Schmittauer)

Number of pages: 220

Published: 2017

Why should you listen to her?: Amy Landino is an American lifestyle entrepreneur who runs the website SavvySexySocial.com and owns the YouTube channel, Amy Landino. Amy has 388k subscribers and vlogs regularly on productivity and entrepreneurship. Her easy-going vlogging style has won her legions of fans.

Book Synopsis: When you see Gary Vaynerchuk’s name on the front cover giving a testimonial, you know Amy Landino is something special. It doesn’t end there, Tony Robbins’ social media manager also says she is ‘the most authoritative voice in the how-to vlogging space’.

So why is she so good at what she does?

Some skills come to some people easily, and it appears Amy Landino is a natural when it comes to speaking in front of the camera. But, presenting a vlog is a skill you can learn. Amy sets out to show you how you can improve your presenting style, and help make your videos more pleasing to watch.

You won’t find in-depth coverage of YouTube’s algorithm or the importance of tagging here; it’s not that kind of book. Instead, in a witty and engaging manner, Amy Landino explains how you can best develop the confidence and poise to present your content and how to promote it via social media.

Amy Landino dares you to step outside of your comfort zone, launch a vlogging business, and go after your dreams.

Vlog Like A Boss is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Amazon Audible – narrated by the author. It currently rates 4.6 out of 5 from hundreds of Amazon reviews and is in the top 30 books for video production.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 4: Read This if You Want to Be YouTube Famous

Author: Will Eagle

Number of pages: 128

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to him?: This book is part of a series about creative endeavours. The main attraction of the book is that Will Eagle (a former brand strategist at Google) has interviewed 45 of the top creators on YouTube and distilled their wisdom and tips for aspiring YouTubers into a single book. Each creator also shares their favourite video and favourite other YouTube creators.

Book Synopsis: Don’t judge a book by its cover. The plain dull cover, criticised by many reviewers, hides a good treasure trove of informative tips.

The book’s central premise is 45 of the top, and influential YouTubers share actionable tips for you to make the most of the videos that you create. Included in the book are YouTubers with vast numbers of subscribers, like The Icing Artist (4.1million) and Gizzy Gazza (2.1million).

It’s a bit of an arty coffee table book in some ways, and the design and layout are modern and cool. But it takes you along the journey of some famous creatives, from their first videos shot in a dingy bedroom to the polished productions they make now.

It also reminds the reader that you have to commit to the process (many YouTubers take years to find success). While it can be a little repetitive, because each creator is asked the same questions, it does underline that vlogging is a learned skill.

All in all, it contains some valuable insight into the minds of successful YouTubers and is a source of inspiration for those still on the path to success.

The book is only available in the coffee-table paperback format, currently priced at just £8.99.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

So that concludes the list of books for YouTubers who want to grow their audience. I hope you find some of the recommendations useful.

Educating yourself is the single best thing you can do for your career, so why not try listening to two of the books mentioned above with a 30-day trial of Amazon Audible.

Tags books, books for youtubers, booktube, youtube books, youtuber books

SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

YouTube Tips for Teenagers

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 4 October 2020

Whether you are a parent with children who are just hitting those teenage years, or a teenager yourself, YouTube can be something of a daunting prospect.

Although we’ll admit that worrying about things like YouTube is typically more of a parent thing. And it shows by the number of posts and guides there are online aimed at parents.

While it’s not a bad thing that parents have ample resources to help them guide their children through potentially sticky areas of life, there comes the point where those children start taking on a little autonomy and making decisions without their parent’s input, and it is important that there are resources for those children as well.

For most people, that time is during their teenage years, when they are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. YouTube do have their own little section on staying safe as a teen, though “little” is the operative word there.

Now, teenagers are not necessarily known for their willingness to listen to older generations’ advice, something that has been true for teenagers throughout history. Still, there is advice to give, and it should be there when it is needed.

With that in mind, we’ve put together these YouTube tips for teenagers, both for teenagers who are going to start making videos and teenagers who are just watching.

The Standard Common Sense Talk

The chances are, you’ve had some version of this message through your life—or at least we hope you have—but it amounts to using your common sense when it comes to your own actions.

It can be easy to get swept up in things, whether its peer pressure from your friends or wanting to be part of a global Internet trend. It is crucial that you take a step back and ask yourself if whatever action you are considering taking is wise.

Could you hurt yourself? Could you hurt others? Are their lasting ramifications of what you intend to do?

Though it’s not a hard rule, it can help to ask yourself if you would do the thing you are doing without a YouTube audience. If the answer is no, explore all of the reasons why it is no, and try to judge if those reasons outweigh getting views on YouTube objectively.

A perfect example of this is the “Tide Pod Challenge“, where a concerning number of people—granted, not all teenagers—chowed down on dishwasher detergent pods for a ridiculous Internet challenge that, as far as anyone can tell, started because the pods in question look a bit like candy.

Unfortunately, the whole area of Internet challenges is one that requires you to use your judgement, and judgement is subjective.

For example, while it may be a bit daft, the Planking trend that swept across the Internet in the early 2010s—which involved people laying face-down in strange and unusual places—was relatively harmless… depending on where you chose to lay face down. Similarly, the “Cinamon Challenge“, while a little riskier than planking due to the possibility of choking, was more or less safe, if not a little embarrassing. We’ll get to embarrassment later, by the way.

From those somewhat innocuous examples, there have been far more dangerous trends that have involved eating corn on a cob using an electric drill, and the detergent chomping we mentioned above. These are not safe and innocuous examples of Internet challenges, and can (and have) caused injury, all for the sake of trying to get a viral video.

These are cases where judgement has failed people. Dishwasher detergent is not meant to be ingested, and can cause serious harm. Most people know this, and that is why they would not choose to do that outside of a silly Internet challenge.

As desirable as a high-profile YouTube career may be, it is not worth risking your health—and possibly your life—over.

The Internet Lasts Forever

This particular point is a hard one for younger people—not just teenagers—to come to terms with.

We, as a species, struggle to plan long term, and this is more evident among our young than anywhere else. It is why we feel invincible when we are young, and why we are willing to take risks that, as an older person, we would never dream of taking.

Unfortunately for the current generation of children, teenagers, and young adults, not thinking long term is a luxury they can’t really afford to have.

The phrase, “the Internet lasts forever” refers to the fact that once something has been posted online, you can never truly be sure that it can be removed.

Sure, if you post a video to YouTube that gets zero views and you delete it, you can probably feel confident that the video is gone. If, on the other hand, you post a video that goes viral, that video will never leave the Internet, even if you later come to regret it and take the video down, it will exist in hundreds of other places across the web.

And you don’t have to be a viral sensation for this to happen.

We talked about long term planning because it is difficult for teenagers to muster up the concern for how something like an offensive or silly video might affect their life ten or twenty years down the line, but that is exactly what you have to consider.

It is already hard enough to judge what is safe, given that things that were a bit “edgy” ten—and even five and sometimes less—years ago are now getting people cancelled, but there are plenty of things you can be sure are not going to play well at any time. For example, discriminatory content, even for comedic purposes, can come back to bite you, regardless of who the discrimination is against, and there are many examples of this happening.

There may be situations where risky content like this is not a problem, such as would be the case for someone who makes a career out of outrageous and offensive comedy.

But we humans are not traditionally very good at picking out a career path early on and sticking to it, and the number of career paths that an offensive video resurfacing wouldn’t harm is pretty small.

With that in mind, it is generally best just to steer clear of anything that might be considered offensive or particularly silly in a dangerous kind of way.

Viral isn’t Viral Anymore

Asking yourself if you would do something without an audience is a good starting point for making a sound judgement about whether something is a good idea.

However, we know that the Internet would be a boring place if people only ever made videos of them doing things that they would be comfortable doing alone.

For example, we can fully believe that the guys behind the channel How Ridiculous might be dropping things from great heights purely for fun if they weren’t making viral videos out of it, but it’s safe to say they probably wouldn’t be dropping cars onto giant axes were it not on camera.

However, the thing about viral videos is that “viral” does not mean what it once did. In the earlier days of the Internet—and of Youtube specifically—a viral video would take over the Internet.

It would be all people were talking about for a short period. These days, viral videos may rake in the millions of views that they used to do, but they are just one viral video in a sea of other viral videos, since lots of people and organisations are trying to make viral videos. Furthermore, they are not worth nearly as much as you might think in terms of monetary value.

There are instances of YouTubers having viral hits that get millions and millions of views, only to make a few hundred dollars from it.

The reason we are going over all this is that when you make those judgements we were talking about, you should have a realistic idea of the benefits. Internet fame can be incredibly fleeting, especially when it is off the back of a viral video.

Seriously consider if what you are planning is worth the potential rewards, even in the best-case scenarios. This is especially true for the trends we mentioned above. For something like the Tide Pod Challenge, lots of people (unfortunately) were attempting the challenge, which means that any boost the videos got would have been minor since they would effectively have been shared between all the other Tide Pod videos.

In other words, people were risking severe injury for what amounted to a relatively minor bump in viewership.

It’s also worth noting that a viral video alone does not usually translate into many new subscribers, so, for most of those people, it was risking serious injury for a one-time minor bump in views.

Mental Health

So far, we’ve been focussing mainly on teenagers who are looking to create content, but this section applies to both teenage YouTubers and teenagers who just watch YouTube.

Firstly, the comments. YouTube has a well-deserved reputation for not always being the most welcoming of communities. Some YouTubers actively work to keep toxic voices out of their comments and chats, but there are a lot of users on YouTube, and a lot of those users are not nice people.

The best-case scenario would be if you could mentally shield yourself from mean comments, or discriminatory language that affects you.

If you can dismiss those comments as the unsavoury ramblings of a troubled person, you will be safe from this kind of attack on your mental health, whatever platform you are on. If, on the other hand, you just can’t get that barrier up, don’t go looking for trouble.

There is no way to block people as a user, and YouTubers can only opt to hide certain users from their channel’s comments. If you are likely to be affected by offensive comments, it may be best to steer clear of the comments altogether, and certainly on videos where the community is known to be less than friendly.

As a viewer, it is also important to remember that what you see on YouTube is not necessarily real life.

If you are watching vloggers in their picture-perfect bedrooms with their faces perfectly lit and their hair looking immaculate, try to remember that regardless of how perfect their life looks on YouTube, they are real people with problems that don’t necessarily make it onto their channel.

Work to better your life in your own ways, and don’t compare it to unrealistic representations of Internet strangers’ lives.

Teenagers on YouTube

YouTube is not presently allowed to track children (those under thirteen years of age), so statistics on demographics aren’t necessarily comprehensive. That being said, in 2019, 81% of 15-25-year-olds in America used YouTube.

What’s more, YouTube is fifteen years old (at the time of writing this post in 2020) meaning that all of the teenagers alive today either grew up with YouTube or are too young to remember a time before YouTube.

What this may mean for the future is for smarter people to predict, but it is interesting to note that today’s children and teenagers will be the first generation of kids to grow up with YouTube. They will have significantly more opportunities to make their lives harder through unwise YouTube-use.

But at the same time, they will have a lot more examples of the consequences of misusing YouTube than anyone who came before they did. Millennials grew up in a proto-Internet world and were taken somewhat off-guard by the always-on nature of the modern Internet, that is mostly why we see YouTubers who became popular during the early days of the platform getting cancelled for things they did a decade ago.

Children today can learn from those experiences.

YouTube Tips for Teenagers Careers

For the first time in history, “YouTuber” is seen as a valid career choice. And, unlike actors and pop stars, it is something that you can achieve through hard work and smart decisions alone, rather than relying on luck.

There are no guarantees that you’ll become the next DanTDM or Zoella, but you can very realistically pay your bills with a moderately successful YouTube channel.

Just try not to live and die by the validation of your channel; there is more to life than YouTube.

Tags start a youtube channel, teenage youtubers, teens, tennagers, tips for teens, youtube teenagers, youtube teens, youtune tips for teens

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How to Add Captions to YouTube Videos

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 5 September 2020

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to add captions to your YouTube videos beyond mere accessibility. Which is not to say, making your content more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people is not a good enough reason alone.

We won’t try and tell you that adding captions to a video—especially a long video with a lot of words—is an easy task, but YouTube does make the process as frictionless as possible for you.

In this post we’ll go through the process with you, as well as laying out the reasons why captioning your videos is a good idea, and how you can make your life a little easier in the captioning process.

How to Add Captions to YouTube Videos

Captions can be added to your YouTube videos from within YouTube Studio.

Log in
Head over to the left-hand menu and click on “Subtitles”
Find the video you want to caption and give it a click.
Click “Add Language”
Next, click “Add” and begin scrubbing through your video, adding subtitles at the appropriate points.
Once you are done, simply click “Publish”

The subtitles editor features several shortcut keys to make your life a little bit easier, and you can find a full list of those on YouTube’s subtitles help page.

There are other options available, such as auto-syncing, which lets you add your transcription without any timecode information.

From there, YouTube uses speech recognition and your transcription to put all of the subtitles in the correct place. This is a very useful and time-saving option, but it does rely on speech recognition technology, which means it is only available for subtitles in the same language as the video.

For the same reason, it is not an ideal option for videos with poor audio quality, or where the words being said are not clear. YouTube also states that it is not recommended for videos that are over an hour long.

Another option available is to upload a closed caption file that already has the timecode information sorted. Of course, you will still have to create that closed caption file before you can upload it, but this option at least means you can use other applications to do that if YouTube’s built-in system is not to your liking. You can find details about what kind of closed caption files YouTube accepts through the subtitles help page linked above.

And, finally, YouTube has the option to caption your videos using speech recognition technology automatically. Automatic captioning has the obvious advantage of it requiring considerably less effort on your part; however, there is a tradeoff.

Speech recognition has made immense leaps and bounds in terms of accuracy over recent years, but it is not perfect, and the chances of it transcribing your video with 100% accuracy are minimal.

And, of course, the accuracy of this process will fall if the video’s audio quality is poor, or the spoken words are not particularly clear.

Bonus Method: Captioning Services

If you have a bit of money to spend on your YouTube channel, or if your channel is already at a stage where it is making money and you want to reinvest some of that in your channel.

You might consider a captioning service like Rev – I use them for all of my YouTube videos and can help boost audience retention and build on international audiences.

For a modest sum—typically around $1-2 per minute of video—you can have your videos captioned for you, getting all of the benefits of automatic captioning, while significantly reducing the inaccuracy rate you would expect from Google’s automatic option.

Captioning OTHER People’s Videos on YouTube

In some cases, you can also caption other people’s videos, which can be a great way to give a little back to a creator you like.

This is also an excellent opportunity to flex your bilingual muscles if you speak (or write) more than one language, or if your native language is different from that of the language used in the video.

The YouTuber in question has to allow subtitle contributions, so this is not an option on every video. For those videos where it is an option, simply head over to that video and click the menu button below the video (the three dots). In there you should see an option to “Add Translations”. Clicking that will take you to the same transcriptions editor we talked about above, with the difference that this will show any previously added or auto-generated transcriptions.

Up top you should see a “Switch Language” link which will allow you to select the language you want to add subtitles for, and, once you are ready, you can click edit and get transcribing!

Making Captioning Easier

Unfortunately, there is no way around the fact that captioning is something of a long and laborious process—especially for longer videos—but you can make your life a little easier with a bit of forward-thinking.

For example, many YouTubers plan their videos out in advance. And, if they don’t write an actual script, they at least tend to sketch out the beats of what they are going to say when the camera starts rolling.

If this is you, consider extending this process to a full script, and stick to that script when you record the video. In doing so, you will already have a transcription for your subtitles ready to go when you have uploaded your video. Remember; YouTube’s speech recognition may not be perfect, but it is incredibly close when given the correct words to use.

Writing a proper script may also help you tighten up your content, making the video more concise and digestible, while also reducing the amount of time you have to spend editing slip-ups and tangents out of your footage.

Of course, scripted videos are not for everyone. Some people are far more comfortable turning the camera on with little more than a vague shape of what needs to be said in their mind and letting the creative juices flow. We would not recommend forcing a script upon yourself if you are this kind of YouTuber.

But if you are already scripting—or partially scripting—your videos, you are most of the way there to captioning your content.

Why Should I Caption My YouTube Videos?

There is an ethical element to consider in the sense that, as a civilised society, it could be argued that we have a responsibility to help those who need a little extra help whenever possible.

Captioning your videos makes it possible for people who are deaf and hard of hearing—two groups of people who fall into that category of occasionally needing a little extra help—to consume your content.

However, if the ethical argument doesn’t do it for you, there are also some numbers to consider. For example, around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing problems. While it’s true that not all of those people will be on YouTube, it still represents a sizable portion of a potential audience that you could be reading. And this doesn’t count fringe cases, such as people who just find it easier to watch content with subtitles, or people who do not speak your language but can read it.

Another reason is search engine optimisation (SEO).

There is only so much information you can organically pack into your video descriptions, and formatting it in a way that is useful to your viewers doesn’t always lend itself to SEO.

However, the actual content of your video is as pure as it gets in terms of SEO, and research has shown that Google likely indexes YouTube subtitles, with captioned videos seeing a noticeable increase in views over videos without captions.

The final reason we will give you for captioning your videos is environmental factors. No, not the environment, we’re talking about the environment your potential viewer is in at the time they might want to watch your video.

If you’ve noticed all those videos that pop up on Facebook and Twitter that have captions burned in, you might have reached the natural conclusion that this trend implies. That is trend is more people watching videos in situations where they can’t have sound on. This could be on a busy commute when they have forgotten to bring headphones, or in a situation where they are not, strictly speaking, supposed to be checking their phone.

Viral video makers have cottoned on to this trend, and that is why they burn subtitles into those social media clips.

Putting captions on your videos allows people to consume your content in those situations where they can’t listen to it, which, for the right type of video, may represent a significant amount of views.

How Much of a Benefit is Video Captioning?

We teased you with talk of increasing your audience through video captioning, so it’s only natural to want to know what kind of increase we’re talking. After all, captioning can be hard work, as we’ve explained, so you may want to do a cost-benefit analysis on whether the additional work is worth your time.

Studies have shown that adequately captioned videos can see as much as a 13% boost in the first two weeks—with a 7% increase over the lifetime of video—over uncaptioned videos.

While we’re not talking about doubling your audience here, a potential increase of around 10% is nothing to be sneezed at. For a video that gets 100k views, that would mean an extra 10k views.

Of course, pure view count would be a limited way to consider the benefits of captioned videos. Those additional views also represent potential subscribers and long term viewers. Especially when you consider that people who need captions in order to enjoy content on YouTube have far fewer options available to them owed to the fact that so many YouTubers don’t caption their videos. In this respect, captioned videos are something of an underserved market.

Not quite a niche, as the interests of people who need closed captioning are just as diverse as those who don’t, but a market that will welcome additional content regardless.

Foreign Languages

Before putting the time and effort into translating—or paying someone else to translate—your content into other languages, take a moment to consider the usefulness of the video to the people who speak those other languages.

Generally speaking, you can assume that someone living in a particular country will at least have a basic grasp of the native language of that country.

Of course, there will always be exceptions, but you usually assume that content that is specific to a certain country doesn’t necessarily need translating to languages other than the primary language of that country.

As an example, a video about how to apply for a building permit in Texas, America, is unlikely to get many views from people in central Europe. That means it would not be the best use of your resources to have your video translated into German, as all of the countries where German is the primary language are located in central Europe.

This is not to say you should actively avoid translating your content, of course. If you have money or time to burn, it certainly won’t hurt your channel to have it translated into as many languages as possible.

But if you are having to weigh up the pros and cons of translating it to other languages, consider where those languages are spoken, and how likely your content is to be viewed in those regions.

That being said, the reverse can also be true.

As a counter-example, a video about how to obtain a building permit in Los Angeles would greatly benefit from being translated into Spanish, due to the large Mexican population there. In this case, the content is specific to a relatively small geographical region, but that region can be considered bilingual.

As with many things on YouTube, it is all a matter of doing your research and knowing your audience. You don’t need to become an expert in foreign languages to determine best when and when not to have your videos translated; a simple Google search should be enough.

Tags add captions, add subtitles, rev, rev.com, rev.vom, transcription, youtube captions, youtube subtitles

SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS VIDEO YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

How To Add A Watermark To YouTube Videos

Post author By Michel Gerard
Post date 19 August 2020

Watermarks, the little thing down here that help grow your YouTube channel. You can now add them in the new YouTube studio. That’s what we talk about today.

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcU1cV4XS2g[/embedyt]

How To Add A Watermark To YouTube Videos

Hello and welcome back to another video, I’m Alan Spicer, your YouTube certified expert.

If you’re looking to start a YouTube channel, grow your YouTube channel, or push your brand out there, it’s the second largest search engine on the Internet.

You should click “Subscribe,” and start creating.

Now, my videos, around about the 22nd mark, there’s a little box that pops up here that says you can subscribe. It is a nice additional way on desktop to urge people to subscribe, to place some branding, to push out the chances and make it even easier for people to join your community.

It’s available in the new YouTube studio. So, let’s go to the computer and I’ll show you how you can use it.

But before we deep dive into this, this video is sponsored by TubeBuddy which is an online browser based plugin that can help optimize your titles, your descriptions, your tags, get you more views, get you more subscribers, and generally take away the grind, the day-to-day tasks that you just can’t be bothered with.

It also links up with their mobile phone app in which you can check your stats on the go, communicate with people and just generally level up your YouTube game.

This is a link here on how to install it for free.

Okay, so when you’re first adding your video watermark, you arrive here in your YouTube studio. You’re used to this place by now, it has your stats, your subscribers, how well your last video is doing, but we’re focusing on the option on the left-hand side that says “Settings.”

You want to click on “Channel,” and then “Branding.”

So, you’ll see here that I’ve already got my watermark set up. It shows up in the bottom right-hand corner, or even being the bottom right-hand corner of this video.

You can see here the display settings, whether you wanted to show it in the last part of the video, a specific time in the video or the entire video.

I start mine at about 20 seconds in, that way, all of the waffling and the branding disappears when it pops up.

To remove it, you click “Remove.”

Then you’ll see here, it says, “Adding a watermark is a great way to improve brand awareness and channel recognition.

It needs to be a PNG or a GIF file format of 150 pixels by 150 pixels, and less than one megabyte in size. Images with one or two colors and a transparent background works best.

So, to choose the image you click “Choose Image,” and then choose your image from your computer, and upload it.

It will see that it’s there, and then when you’re ready, you click “Save” and you are done.

Final Words

For your hidden tricks, tips and gems, I’ve done a playlist up here.

Hit that “Subscribe“ button for regular YouTube videos from me.

Go out there, start creating.

Tags add watermark to youtube video, watermark, youtube watermark

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE MARKETING SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS VIDEO YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

How To Monetize A Facebook Page without Ads

Post author By Michel Gerard
Post date 19 August 2020

How would you monetize your Facebook page without adverts?

Now, if you hit a certain threshold on Facebook, you can start integrating brand deals with your Facebook page, but not everyone’s jumped through those hoops just yet, and you can make money without Facebook’s help.

[embedyt]https://youtu.be/qM9SeS_-F64[/embedyt]

How To Monetize A Facebook Page without Ads

1) Use relevant affiliate links

I’m a YouTube creator that talks about YouTube. So maybe I post up a post about what camera I’m using and I link through to that product on Amazon. If I’m really smart and I’m hunting out a specific brand, maybe I can talk to that brand before hand, to get a better deal, and then push it out there.

For example, maybe I’m talking about how you can subtitle your videos, and then I want to promote it on Facebook saying, go and use rev.com.That way you can subtitle all of your videos with captions that are in English or French or German or any language that you wish.

You simply click on the link in the description, or https://alanspicer.com/rev.

That’s a relevant affiliate marketing link, and you can do that in your descriptions on Facebook,

2) Add digital products

Now I have a digital product that I hardly promote, and it’s 75 thumbnails for YouTube. If you’re not quite sure on how to start, how a thumbnail should look, just click this link, it goes through my digital products.

That’s a product that hopefully helps you and is relevant to my audience. I’m not going to sell baby monitors to people that want to learn how to do YouTube.

So if you have a digital product, let’s say an ebook on how to knit because you do knitting, or a recipe book because you’re a cooking channel, that’s a good place to promote it on your specific Facebook page.

I also push out my services like a channel audit and coaching call consultation, but you can also be sending your products, or pots and pans set, some cute little crochet things.

By the way, if you’d like that, this is the link to “Oh Sew Cute.”

3) Consider a newsletter

This is your way of harvesting people from your page, and then collecting them into — I really hate this word — but a funnel.

If they’re engaged enough to actively choose to be on a newsletter with you to hear more from you, to see more videos from you, or see your blogs from you, then they’re more likely to be more engaged than any random human to possibly listen to your advice on buying a product or a service.

I know you said it to me as your slow cooker of leads. As you collect more and more people in there and you hone the art of talking to them and building up a relationship, they’re more likely to convert in the long run because you’ve kept them warm for eight, nine hours smelling sexy minted lamb hot pot.

Anyway, back on point…

4) Selling advertised posts

Maybe you have a huge audience. Maybe you have 20, 30, 50, or a million followers on your page. This is your chance to flip the script. People will want to advertise in front of your audience.

So, charge them for it.

5) Starts an associated podcast

I’ve got the “Start Creating Podcast” at http://startcreatingpodcast.com/, where I talk about my experiences as a YouTuber, and growing and marketing and branding.

It gives me a little bit more leeway, I can talk about more things, less heavily edited. In the long run, you can invite people in to talk about your specific niche, interview people, and associated podcasts gives you a chance to place adverts against that podcast, also affiliate links in the description.

As you grow a podcast audience, it can also become fairly passive once the contents is out there, it will remain out there forever. And when was the last time you started a podcast, and then went back and binged watched everything else that was already on that podcast playlist.

Just try to make them evergreen rather than “This week on July the 30th, 2020,” whatever.

If you think of the longevity of the content and you answer and solve a problem with each podcast, people are more likely to go back and finish them. A good example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk or Tube Talk from vidIQ.

6) Raising money for a charity

You don’t have to monetize your Facebook page to make you money. You can also monetize your Facebook page to make charities, money.

You might have an audience that’s quite tuned in with you and your feelings and your sentiments, your political leaning, or your empathy towards specific topics.

Right now we’re in the middle of an unprecedented worldwide situation. So, if you wanted to raise money for that illness, that’s causing a lot of problems around the world, nothing’s stopping you throwing up a charity post that people can donate.

Or you reflect on something in four or five years time, maybe someone near and dear to you dies of some horrible disease, or struggles with a mental illness, depression, anxiety.

There’s nothing wrong with you raising money for a charity.

Final Words

Now, if you want help on monetizing your Facebook group, there’s a video here. And if you need help on monetizing your Facebook page through Facebook, there’s a video here.

Tags monetize, monetize facebook page, youtube channel

SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS VIDEO YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

THIS WILL DOUBLE YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL GROWTH

Post author By Michel Gerard
Post date 19 August 2020
2 Comments on THIS WILL DOUBLE YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL GROWTH

Today, we’re going to double your channel growth with these simple tricks. Here we go. If you’ve already thrown up 10, 20 or 30 videos, you’ve already got enough base there to start doing some analytic diving.

[embedyt]https://youtu.be/IsY2dM2rfsY[/embedyt]

THIS WILL DOUBLE YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL GROWTH

It will take a while for you to create 30 videos initially, vomited 30 videos onto your YouTube channel in day one, which by the way, I highly suggest you do not do. If you take your time and you’ve uploaded two, three, four videos a week, or maybe even one video a week for, I don’t know, half a year, you will start to see shoots or signals and signs of growth.

This is when we dive into analytics. If you flip through your analytics and having a look at your most popular videos, you search them in descending order, the most important ones at the top, you will see that there are videos there that have got you the most views on your channel.

No matter how old or how new your YouTube channel is, there will be a clear hierarchy of some videos doing better than others.

This is your chance to start gaging what your channel and your channel audience wants from you, what you are expected to do.

Let’s say your top video happens to be about a tutorial, teaching people how to get the best weapon in the game that you’re playing and that you are a gaming channel.

In fact, your whole channel could be about that game, but for whatever reason, that video did better than others, you need to identify why. If you haven’t looked at that video, see if there was a good retention rate.

Did people watch all the way through all? Is it a hot topic? Is it the fact that it is a tutorial teaching people that makes them watch all the way through? Or is there a trend?

Do you notice that when you do class videos, for example, how to set up a certain character or how to do a specific mission or how to mean max your player stats, in other words, the most attack or the most defense, is it when you deep dive into those kinds of things that you get more attention or is it when you make funny compilations? Is that when you do live streams?

Only you will tell because everybody’s channel is different. There’s no point in you looking at somebody else who’s doing well, his channel always get so many thousands of views more for his live streams compared to yours. That’s because that’s their own ecosystem.

You should never compare yourself to anybody else outside your bubble.

You should compare yourself with you.

So, have a looking at your analytics, your first five or ten videos, see if there’s a pattern. If you notice that two or three of the top five are tutorials or that the comedy stuff works more, start leaning into that direction. See if there’s anything that you can twist or tweak or change, or if they’re really old videos.

So for example, my case, I did a video two years ago on how to generate a YouTube playlist, if that’s really good and doing really well, maybe you could update it with a newer version.

So I made a video on three ways to make a YouTube playlist and I went through the new dashboard, and I showed you how to add a mobile.

That way, I’m leaning in on the thing that got me the most views, or tapping into the thing that is most popular or has the most support or traffic through my channel, my authority.

Now, if you’re looking to grow your subscribers, you can do exactly the same, instead of going for views, you go to the “Subscribers” tab, and then you order it in the order of the videos that got you the most subscribers.

This uses a similar technique. You look at the ones that got you in the most subscribers, and you see if there’s a pattern between the top 10 or the top 20.

Did the ones that do more favorably have a certain length? Was there a certain presenting style?

You’ll notice with mine at the start of my videos, on some of them I flash up the text here, or on some of my videos, I just have screenshots of me doing a specific tutorial.

Does my business rants do better than my YouTube brands?

Have a look at the ones that got you the most subscribers, and then see if you can, once again, replicates or add or make a better version or update those, see if you can compliment it.

So if one of my videos did really well, which was “How to add in-screens,” I could then teach you how to add in-screens on mobile, or how to add certain aspects of the in-screens, whether it’s best for videos, whether it’s the latest videos, whether it’s a specific playlist or a link to a website, maybe I’m talking about how fantastic vidIQ is, and I’m telling you, “Oh, go and get this specific tool.

But then, I can make other videos about certain features within that software.

How to do a thumbnail preview, how to search for video tags, how to translate your videos. All of these are still related to that topic, but you could then pile them into a playlist. Or you can link them together using keywords and putting videos in the top of the video comments, consult, feeding bubbles between them, feeding traffic, because they wanted that specific topic.

They came to you to learn, in this case, about how you vidIQ, and instead of being a generalized video, they can learn in five videos, a much broader picture.

Well for you, it could be that they really, really liked how to knit that jumper, but they also want to learn how to knit that jumper in red and knit that jumper with an embroidery logo and knit that jumper and a hoodie.

Or maybe you’re a gamer and they really liked how to get that specific weapon, and then they need to learn how to get a better version of that weapon, or get the adults or how to aim it or how to use it most effectively.

Your stats is the magic secret sauce just for only you that nobody else can use, because you’ve already proved that you presenting that type of content gets that audience.

Well, you now need to do reverse engineer that and say, “I want this audience, so what do I need to do to get them again over and over and over again, until it becomes a habit?”

It forms it in the brain of YouTube that, “Ah, every time that video is made by Alan, we serve that to those people.”

It makes it easy for YouTube to suggest you against other content, and then, all you need to do is nail the content in the best, most engaging way possible.

Final Words

There’s a video here to tell you exactly how you do that. Remember to subscribe for regular deep dive videos and tutorials, and I’ll see you soon.

Tags fast youtube growth, get more youtube subscribers, get more youtube views, how to use youtube analytics

SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS VIDEO YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

How To Turn On / Off Restricted Mode in NEW YouTube Studio

Post author By Michel Gerard
Post date 19 August 2020

The YouTube restricted mode can hide some content from some people. Is this affecting you or do you just want to check to see if maybe your content has been restricted by everybody else and that you might need to dial it back?

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfNnBWjKgDw[/embedyt]

How To Turn On / Off Restricted Mode in NEW YouTube Studio

Today I’m going to teach you how to turn on and off the YouTube restricted mode, and show you why that’s important. Here we go.

Hello and welcome back to another video. I’m Alan Spicer, your YouTube certified expert and if you’re looking to start a YouTube channel, grow a YouTube channel, or push your brand out there on the second largest search engine on the Internet, you should click “Subscribe“ and start creating.

YouTube has implemented in the last two, three years, very strict practices to hide adult content, hide inappropriate information, hide some things that just aren’t advertiser friendly. And in some cases it can be a little bit strict, dirty humor, profanity, or even games that include violence like shooting.

What is general gameplay?

In fact, in some cases it’s even deemed wrestling content to be non-advertiser friendly and placed it behind some restricted filters.

Okay, so let’s start on PewDiePie’s channel.

Right now, I have the restricted mode activated. What does this mean?

Well, if you scroll through his last videos, you’ll notice that although he posts daily, you can see videos from two days ago, five days ago, three weeks ago, one month ago, then a couple of months ago.

Now that seems normal, right?

Well, if I turn off restricted mode, you will see that there’s a few videos that have now reappeared. So the “Jake Paul scam,” right? And a few others you’ll notice that he’s now posting daily again, 22 hours, one day, two days, three days, four days, and five days.

What restricted mode does is hide videos that YouTube have deemed a bit dodgy, a bit risky. Maybe they’re demonetized, maybe they’re not. Or they just happen to have some key words that are a bit sensitive.

So why would you do this?

Well, if your kids are in control of your computer, maybe you want to turn on restricted mode, or you might want to check your own videos to see which videos are being hidden behind restrictions, and then maybe tweak those videos to make them more user friendly in the future.

Now there’s two ways of turning on restrictive mode.

First of all, this case, you go to the top avatar and go to the bottom right-hand corner. You’ll see “Restricted Mode Off,” click on there.

It gives you the option to toggle it on and it will now reload the page for you.

Once again, we’re now on this page, we’ll see that the scam videos disappeared again, and the Thanos video has disappeared again and a few of his videos. So, that’s the restricted mode on.

If you go back up here and you click “Restricted Mode On,” your also have the option to lock it on this browser.

What this means is that if you are a parent and you want to completely lock on this and matter what, right? Only 100% stuff that is family friendly will be seen, but then you can lock it on the browser.

Now for some of you that may be still stuck in the YouTube classic mode, all you have to do is go to the dashboard and scroll down to the bottom, and the options are down here.

You’ve got language, your location, history, and “Restricted Mode On.”

You get the same kind of option. You can even lock it directly or click “Off,” then click “Save,” and you are done.

Use this tool to your advantage. If you’re a parent, use it to hide any content that you just don’t want them to stumble across just yet, or as a creator, check out your videos, and if they are restricted, maybe dial back on the profanity, maybe dial back on the sensitive topics, maybe dial back on specific graphic gameplay.

If it’s behind the restricted filter, it might affect your CPMs. You might lose money or you might get less cost per click per thousand views.

These are things that you need to consider if you’re building a business going forward, or are you willing to take that hit if it’s something that’s personal to you?

You’ve now got a way to check, filter and understand if you are being affected.

Final Words

But if you are advertiser friendly and you want to get more views there is a playlist up here, and of course for more YouTube tricks and tip tutorials, hit that “Subscribe“ button, hit that notification icon to know every time I go live.

Go out there, start creating!

Tags disable restricted mode, how to turn off restricted mode, restricted mode off, youtube restricted mode

HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Live Stream with Zoom [YouTube, Facebook & More]

Post author By Michel Gerard
Post date 17 August 2020

Zoom is a powerful tool that you may be using for meetings, but did you know that you can use Zoom to live stream to YouTube, Facebook and other places as well?

[embedyt]https://youtu.be/JqS0T6oWFJs[/embedyt]

HOW TO LIVE STREAM WITH ZOOM

Hello, I’m Alan Spicer, your YouTube certified expert, and I use Zoom all the time to do channel audits with vidIQ.

It’s a meeting platform where you host a meeting, they join in, you can video chat, you can even share screens, but did you know you could live stream that meeting or even use Zoom as your platform for you to live stream yourself, share your screen, do your own channel audits, maybe show your recipes, that kind of thing?

Using Zoom gives you the opportunity to screen share, show what you’re doing, share to the world generally how you’re feeling, maybe walk your way through a process, a tutorial or webinar.

Let’s go to the computer. You started the click new meeting.

At this point, you get to see my fluffy face. Now we get to go full screen, so you get to see my face. I’m talking to the webcam and this is Zoom.

Now, if you’ve never used Zoom before, that’s perfectly fine. Most people ever found it pretty much in the last month. Now you do.

If you go down to the bar down here, what you can do is have a look at what participants is in here.

You can invite people, you can control who happens to be in here.

So if there’s someone in the meeting, you want to mute them. If you just want to talk to yourself, then you can do so.

You can screen share by using the little button down here and you pick a screen.

This is available. You will see in this case, it moves me to the right-hand side of the screen and I can draw things, so anyone in the meeting will be able to see this.

Or if I have a screen open like Facebook, for example, or a browser, I can share that browser, and then once again, I am in the top right-hand corner, you can see all my tabs and stuff like that. You can see my channel analytics.

Now, one thing you can do is live stream. What you do is go into your settings, go to “Profile” and “View Advanced Features.”

Now in your settings, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, just above the email settings, keep going, keep going, keep going. There’s an email notification and just above you see: “Allow live streaming meetings.”

You click over, you can choose what platforms you want to live stream to. Facebook, for example, or YouTube. You can do Facebook and YouTube, or you could do “Workplace by Facebook,” or you can use a custom-streaming service, which is here.

See, I’m going to click “Facebook” for this time and I click “Save.”

I’ll go back to the Zoom. I click “New Meeting.”

I enter full screen. You will now see under more options “Live on Facebook.”

So once you’ve got everybody in, you’ve invited them in, you are ready, you’ve got all of your graphics and stuff like that, you click “Live on Facebook.”

It will ask you to choose what timeline you want to share it onto, your timeline, a group, an event, share to a page that you manage.

I’m going to share on my timeline, then it connects Zoom to Facebook Live.

And if you use the new Live producer, when you click “Next,” you can use a key stream, you can use paired encoder.

Click “Next” and “Done.”

You will now see here, this is what I was talking about two or three seconds ago.

You can see here that the audio quality is 126.4 kilobytes per second. You can see the video is 2.1 megabits per second, and as you click on the arrow down here, you can have a look at all of the important coding settings.

My stream is in the bottom right-hand corner, and as you can see here, it goes.

What you would do on the left-hand side is fill in the name, the title and the description of the live stream.

You choose whether or not it goes to Friends or to Public, and where you want to share it to: Timeline, page you manage, or a group.

When you’re ready to live stream from Zoom to Facebook or YouTube, or anywhere else, you click “Go Live” and you are done.

Final Words

For more tips on how to live stream, I’ve done a playlist here and on tips on how to grow your business using YouTube, there is a playlist here.

Now, remember to subscribe for regular YouTube tricks and tips tutorials and business tutorials. Hit that notification icon to see every time a video goes live, and I’ll see you soon.

Tags facebook live stream, live streaming, youtube live stream, zoom, zoom tutorial

SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS VIDEO YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

HOW TO ADD TIME STAMP CHAPTERS TO YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Post author By Michel Gerard
Post date 14 August 2020

YouTube has added new chapters inside your videos, where you can bookmark certain areas within your content to make it easier, to jump to. A fantastic way to pack in keywords and possibly win that snippet on Google search results.

[embedyt]https://youtu.be/9coVVqAoff8[/embedyt]

HOW TO ADD TIME STAMP CHAPTERS TO YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Let’s go to the computer.

Now, these chapters on videos help break up the video and hopefully help it index in Google search.

As you will see, each one of them have a mini subheading and a scrollable bar along the bottom.

As you jump to specific places, the chapter subtotal total changes next to the time stamp, and it’s a good way to cram in some keywords.

But, if you don’t have them, it’s one long bar that you just scrubbed through slightly blind, and there is no subheading underneath, next to it.

So, you can see the one could be very helpful.

To get started, from your homepage, you click on your avatar and click on “YouTube Studio.”

You go to “Videos” and you find the video that you want to add chapters to.

What I’m going to do is deliberately add chapters to this video, so you can see the difference.

I’m going to take the name of the video. I’m going to search it here. We’re gonna to click “Edit,” and it loads you into the “Video details” page.

The important thing that you need to know here is those chapters are set by time stamps.

Now, I’m going to write, “Timestamp” here, but you don’t have to. The most important thing is starting the time stamps from 0:00.

The next step is to use the mini player here, scrub through the video and make time gaps.

Maybe at the start, I’m talking about how I got to VidCon, maybe in the middle I’m talking about my experience with VidCon, and at the end, maybe I’m wrapping it up.

So I could make time stamps like this.

Now, these can be much more keyword rich. Obviously, if you’re doing a tutorial, it could go through just like a blog. That could be your subtitles.

If I click “Save,” and then I load the video from the link here or any other link for that matter, you will see immediately, the chapters are now added like instantly.

You can see that I can scrub through, each one’s got a mini subheading and it’s ready for you.

Compared to the original one, which once again, didn’t have those chapters.

Final Words

For more helpful YouTube features, there’s a playlist here. Or if you want to know how to self-certify your YouTube videos, let’s say for ads on YouTube, there’s a video here.

Tags time stamps, youtube chapters, youtube videos

SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Am I Too Old to Start a YouTube Channel?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 7 August 2020

Absolutely not.

Okay, that’s not really the end of the post; we’ll dive into this topic as we do with all things YouTube, but if you’re looking for the quick answer to “am I too old to start a YouTube channel?”; – No. You are not too old to start a YouTube channel. Whatever your age. As the saying goes, “It’s never too late to start something new”.

It is, however, perfectly natural to worry about being too old to jump into something that, from the outside, looks very much like a young person’s game.

There several reasons why you might think it’s not for you, and we’re going to lay the biggest ones out for all to see, and then tell you exactly why they shouldn’t stop you from starting up your own channel.

Let’s Talk Numbers

It can help to get over your fear of being “too old” for YouTube if you know some of the numbers around age on the platform. For example, even though YouTube is thought of as a very young person’s platform, you might be surprised to learn that the average age of a YouTuber is closer to thirty. Twenty-seven, to be exact.

Of course, that’s still pretty young, but remember; that’s the average age. That includes extremely popular YouTuber’s that are as young as 16. And, though not strictly in keeping with YouTube’s terms of service, there are YouTuber’s like EthanGamer, who started his channel at seven years of age and had hit a million subscribers by the age of ten!

We realise that highlighting these incredibly young YouTubers may seem counter-intuitive to the point of this post, but remember, we’re discussing the average here. YouTuber’s like Ethan—who even now is only fourteen years old, bring that average age down considerably. For the average to be up around twenty-seven years old, there has to older YouTubers to balance it out.

YouTubers like ThePianoGuys—one of whom is over fifty years old—and Adam Savage—fifty-three years old—prove that you don’t need to be a baby to get going on YouTube. And those are just popular examples. ThePianoGuys rank inside the top 100 YouTube channels (discounting organisations like VEVO), and Adam Savage has over five million subscribers.

There are YouTubers like Gamer Grandma who has a much more modest—yet still very impressive—410k subscribers for her gaming channel. She is ninety years old. And there are many more YouTubers like her who, while not as successful in terms of subscribers counts, are nevertheless enjoying plenty of popularity in a wide range of niches, such as Peter Oakley, an eighty-six-year-old autobiographical vlogger.

It’s also worth noting that YouTube’s reputation as a platform for younger people stems from the earlier days when it really was a platform for younger people. But YouTube has been around for a while now, and those more youthful people have grown up. For example, YouTube veteran, Philip DeFranco, started YouTubing at the tender age of twenty-one years old.

These days he is thirty-four years old and still going strong. To illustrate this, we’ve picked out a few YouTubers from the top fifty channels by subscriber count. Obviously, we’ve left out the large organisations and YouTube channels for big celebrities. Nobody should be looking at T-Series, Eminem, or Ed Sheeran for examples of how to succeed on YouTube.

Who?	Age	Subscriber Count (2020)
PewDiePie	31	106 Million
Knondzilla	31	58 Million
HoySoyGerman	30	41 Million
Filipe Neto	32	39 Million
Fernanfloo	27	36 Million
Luisito Comunica	29	33 Million

So, let’s get to those reasons why you might feel too old to start a YouTube channel, and why you shouldn’t let them stop you.

Personality Clash

As we get older, we tend to become more conservative. Not in a political sense—well, actually, in a political sense as well—but in the sense that we become more introverted as time goes on.

It’s perfectly natural, and it happens to most of us, but on a platform full of bright-eyed, cheerful souls all gleefully welcoming viewers to their videos with bubbly optimism, it is easy to feel intimidated by the prospect of joining that world yourself.

Fortunately, there are many ways to put your videos together, and there is absolutely space for more introverted YouTubers. Many successful channels feature quiet, reserved personalities, people who don’t show themselves on camera, even videos where the YouTuber in question never features at all!

The main ingredient to a successful YouTube channel is providing content that people want to see, and the way you deliver that content is the seasoning. Your particular seasoning maybe to some people’s taste and not to others, but it is the main ingredients that will be the primary determiner of success. So, focus on those main ingredients, and don’t worry about whether you come across as cheerful enough.

And, besides, putting on a personality that just isn’t you is a surefire way to burnout and lost the desire to make videos altogether.

Viewer Demographics

Even if YouTubers themselves are trending older, the people watching YouTube are still young, right?

One of the key aspects of building an audience is being able to appeal to that audience, and there has always been a natural culture-gap between younger and older people.

Not an insurmountable one, of course, and as we mentioned above, the main content of your videos is a more significant factor than the way you deliver it, but it is there nonetheless.

It is certainly not impossible to appeal to people outside of your age bracket, but you might be surprised to learn that 35+ and 55+ are two of the fastest-growing demographics when it comes to people watching YouTube.

Again, it is not impossible to appeal to other age groups than your own, but if you are firmly locked into your own age demographic, there are plenty of viewers for you attract.

Topics

Another reason older people might be dissuaded from creating a YouTube channel is the lack of ideas for engaging content.

Some of the most popular videos on YouTube involve young, handsome people dropping heavy things onto trampolines from a great height, or makeup tutorials, gaming videos, or any number of other things that are decidedly younger in scope.

It can be very easy to look at these videos and think that you have nothing to offer.

However if you need some guidance I have pulled together a list of “older” youtubers within the silver surfer bracket that command huge audiences and prove that age is merely a number and not a road block.

The first point of order here is that you should not let arbitrary limitations hold you back. We’re not saying start-up a parkour channel at the grand old age of eighty-five, but anything you are physically capable of doing should not be considered off the table. Grandma Gamer, who we mentioned earlier, is a prime example of that.

That being said, even if you don’t want to tackle something that might be considered a little young for you, there is no shortage of topics and ideas and niches on YouTube. We mentioned earlier about the growing number of older watchers, and those older YouTube viewers have interests that are similarly skewed.

Don’t get bogged down trying to appeal to a younger audience if what that audience wants isn’t something you are interested in. YouTube viewers span a broad spectrum of interests, from gaming channels to life hacks, from keyboard modding videos to reviews of historical military rations.

Finding Your Place

We have talked about not getting held back by misconceptions of age on YouTube, and what kind of content you could make, but how do you go about finding your voice and choosing your niche on YouTube?

The first thing to address is why you want to make content in the first place. If you have no clear motive, you will struggle to maintain any kind of momentum in your YouTube career. It would, of course, be immensely helpful if that motive aligned with your own interests.

Not only are you far more likely to stick at it if you are genuinely interested in your content, but you are also more likely to make more engaging content in the first place.

Now, there may be other factors in play as to why you are starting a YouTube channel. Perhaps it is a companion channel to something else, such as a blog, a podcast, or a business. Unfortunately, not every venture is a labour of love.

And even if you are making content around a subject you are passionate about; it might sometimes feel like hard work, but there is no sense in making life harder for yourself than it has to be.

There are also people who just enjoy the act of making YouTube content itself, and perhaps you are one of them. People like this often end up vlogging because talking about yourself is a subject we can all be experts in. However, combine a simple desire to make YouTube content with the introverts we mentioned above, and you have a recipe for internal conflict.

If it is the process of making content that appeals to you, but the thought of sitting in front of a camera and talking about yourself a few times a week is unappealing, consider making your videos about something you like, even if you are not an expert in that thing.

YouTube viewers can be very forgiving as long as you are honest with them. And, if you are open about your lack of expertise, you may even find viewers helping you out from time to time.

It can help to do your research before getting started. If you have a particular type of content in mind, find successful channels that are making that kind of content and see what they are doing. Of course, you shouldn’t be looking to copy anyone, but if you see common themes across different channels in your desired niche, there may be a reason for it. That being said, don’t blindly copy themes just because you’ve seen them crop up a lot.

Always try to understand why people are doing what they are doing before using that method yourself.

And, since age is the focal point of this post, it may help to study channels by other YouTubers your age, and see what they are doing. Do they have a young audience? And if so, how are they engaging that audience? Or, if their audience is more on par with their own age, how are they approaching things differently to the younger content creators?

YouTube may still be young, but has been around for a long time in Internet terms, and there it is full of examples of success from all walks of life.

Also, while we would never advocate you starting a channel on something you don’t like, if you do like something that might be considered a typically younger interest, there is plenty of clout to be had in the novelty factor of older people doing younger things, as people like former Vine star and current YouTuber, Jason Nash, have shown.

Jason has essentially made a successful career out of being “too old”, and now has a very popular channel, as shown by the three million subscribers he currently has. In this case, Jason’s age has not only not held him back, but it has also played an active part in his success.

Embrace Your Age

Growing older is a natural part of life, and one we all have to come to terms with eventually.

However—continued advances in medical science, not to mention a much better awareness of health concerns in the workplace and at home—have led to us not only living longer lives on average but living fuller lives in our later years.

People are increasingly taking up—and excelling at—new professions in their forties and fifties. Pensioners are discovering new hobbies in their retirement. And we’ve already talked about the eighty years and up YouTubers who are enjoying great success on the platform.

The paradigm of working your whole life so that you could enjoy a few nice holidays in your retirement are long past, and lots of people are finding fulfillment in their golden years.

If you suspect YouTube could be part of that fulfillment for you, don’t let any stigma about your age get in the way.

Tags oap, oap youtuber, oaptuber, old, older youtuber, silver surfer, too old, too old for youtube, too young for youtube, too young for youtuber, youtube, youtuber

HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SEO SOCIAL MEDIA YOUTUBE

YouTube Channel Keywords Tips: What They Are and How To Set Them.

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 6 August 2020

Getting more views on YouTube is the ultimate aim for all YouTubers.

More views equal more money from the YouTube partner program. So you should seek out ways to get an edge over your competition and get more views for your content.

One way to get more views for your channel is to get the YouTube algorithm to recommend your videos. YouTube attempts to keep viewers on its platform by suggesting another video on the same topic to keep the user watching.

If YouTube can work out the content topic of your channel, then your videos have a better chance of recommendation to a viewer.

One way to assist YouTube in understanding your channel content topic is by adding keywords (tags) to your YouTube channel.

This article explains what YouTube channel keywords are, how you can choose the best ones for your channel, how you add them in YouTube Studio.

YouTube Keywords – Video vs Channel.

You probably already know that when you upload a video to your YouTube channel, it’s good practice to add some tags or keywords. YouTube uses these keywords to help it understand the topic of the video content.

So when you enter a title and add in the tags for your video, choose keyword phrases that someone might use when searching for your video topic.

For example, I made a video all about adding tags to YouTube videos. I made sure to use the keywords ‘YouTube video tags for search’ and ‘how I tag my YouTube videos’. These are potential keyphrases people might type in the YouTube search bar.

As for the tags, I took those keyword phrases and mixed them up to use as a start point for my video. Here they are:

As you can see, video tags get very specific about the content of the video. And I make my videos with a singular focus on purpose, so that they provide educational information on a narrow, niche, subject.

It helps viewers to find my videos and get the exact information they need.

So, What Are YouTube Channel Keywords?

For YouTube channel keywords (tags), you need to be painting with a much broader brush. If you make videos about cooking pasta dishes, then your video tags may contain words like ‘penne’, ‘farfalle’, and ‘linguini’, depending on the recipe you are cooking.

But your channel keywords need to communicate the overall topic of cooking pasta dishes. So you should use broader keywords like ‘cooking pasta’, ‘Italian food’, and ‘Italian cuisine’.

This also highlights the importance to you of focusing your YouTube channel on one general topic. There is no point on uploading a video on cooking pasta one day and one on growing tomatoes the next day. Those are two separate topics.

Uploading content for a number of topics to your channel will confuse YouTube. It works against how the algorithm operates when it suggests videos to viewers to watch next.

If you want to create videos on a different topic, create another channel. You can easily set up a second channel under the same Google account.

How to Choose YouTube Channel Keywords

OK, so now you understand that your channel keywords should be broad–how do you find YouTube channel keywords?

If you have access to a keyword tool, then you can perform a search to come up with ideas for keywords to use. But, you don’t need to over analyse selecting your keywords. You’re telling YouTube what your channel is about, not trying to rank a page in the search engines.

Browse similar channels to yours and pick up broad keywords, create a list, then add in others that you can think of.

Next circle the ones that best describe the overall topic of your videos.

Seriously, don’t overthink this.

How Many YouTube Channel Keywords Should You Use?

Don’t go overboard on the number of keyword tags you use for your channel either. Choose 5-7 keywords that are most appropriate for describing the overall topic of your channel.

It has been suggested that the more keywords you choose the more this dilutes the effectiveness of each individual one. In the example below, the channel owner has used too many diverse keywords to describe their channel.

Is the channel about music, massage, yoga, or even fresh air!? Keep your keywords on message, so they communicate the central topic of your channel.

So now you know what to put in YouTube channel keywords, next we’ll look at how to add them to your channel.

How to Add YouTube Channel Keywords

Make sure you have logged into YouTube with your Google account and select the icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

From the drop-down menu, select ‘YouTube Studio’.

When the YouTube Studio screen loads, select ‘Settings’ at the bottom of the menu on the left.

In the window that pops-up select ‘Channel’.

In the next screen, you will find the box to add your keywords. Add your 5 – 7 chosen keyphrases by typing them in and hitting enter after each one.

Once you have entered them all, hit save, and you’re all set.

If you want to check on, or change, your YouTube channel’s keywords, simply navigate back to the above screen to repeat the process.

YouTube Channel Keywords Tips Conclusion

Entering some YouTube Channel tags, or keywords is best practice. The tags help YouTube understand your channel topic, which should make it easier for them to suggest your videos to viewers.

Most of the videos watched on YouTube are as a result of the YouTube suggestions. So if you want more views, and more Partner Program earnings, set your channel tags today.

Here is a handy summary of what you have just learned.

Keep your channel tags/keywords broad and on topic.

Only use 5-7 keyphrases so as not to confuse YouTube or dilute effectiveness.

You can use a YouTube keyword generator, but it is not necessary.

Tags channel keywords, channel tags, keywords, meta tags, seo, tags, youtube channel keywords, youtube keywords, youtube seo

HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Why Do YouTubers Ask for Likes?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 4 August 2020
1 Comment on Why Do YouTubers Ask for Likes?

You’ve seen a million YouTubers doing it—”please like and subscribe and ring that bell!”.

Whether it’s a verbal reminder at the end of the video, a graphical popup part-way through, or something else, it seems every YouTuber on the platform wants you to like their video.

But why do YouTubers ask for likes? Likes play a significant role in the success of a YouTube channel. Likes, comments, shares and even dislikes are a form of engagement and is a positive sign that plays into the youtube ranking algorithm.

Reason 2 – Simple validation would be a sensible enough explanation. After all, social media is largely predicated on the fact that people are constantly seeking external validation.

Now, we’re not saying that those YouTubers who ask you to like their video aren’t still seeking that juicy external validation—they very well maybe—but that’s almost certainly not all there is to it.

Well, actually, yes. But, as always, we’re not going to just skim the surface of this topic, so let’s dive a little deeper.

Do Likes Make YouTuber’s Money?

It’s reasonable to assume that, if asking for likes is not purely a vanity thing, it must be a monetary thing. The truth about this aspect of YouTube is a little fuzzier than you might think. We can say, quite clearly, that likes do not make YouTubers money.

Kind of.

When you click like, the YouTuber you are watching doesn’t get a few cents dropped into their Adsense account.

However; you are improving the standing of that channel in the eyes of the almighty YouTube algorithm, and that makes their channel more likely to succeed financially going forward. To understand how this works, it helps to understand what YouTube looks for in its content creators.

Engagement Is King

YouTube is in the business of watch time and engagement.

Even a rudimentary understanding of online marketing will tell you that having a smaller number of engaged fans/viewers/customers is far better than a more significant amount of disinterested ones.

This is why business owners are willing to pay extra for targeted advertising—because they know a hundred ad impressions with the right people are more valuable than a thousand ad impressions with random viewers. Those hundred ad impressions are far more likely to yield leads because the people watching the ad are already predisposed to want the thing you are advertising.

YouTube think along the same lines when it comes to viewers. Now, at the end of the day, an ad impression is an ad impression. YouTube get paid if someone watches an ad regardless of whether that viewer was engaged.

But they place far less value on viewers who are not engaged than they do on ones who are. In short, it is the engaged viewers that YouTube are looking for, and it is the channels that create those engaged viewers that YouTube likes to promote the most.

How Do Likes Help With Engagement?

Simply put, a like is an engagement because it is an extra action that the viewer takes that they didn’t have to.

Sure, it’s not a particularly intensive action—it doesn’t take much effort to click a button—but it does take some effort, and that effort shows that the viewer is more engaged than the millions of viewers who don’t click like.

Also, a significant amount of viewers just don’t think about the like button when they are browsing. It is not a statement on the content they are watching; it just doesn’t occur to them to like the video.

When, like YouTube, you are dealing with two billion users a month, even small changes in the percentage of users that like videos can represent a ridiculous number of people.

Do Dislikes Hurt a Video?

The next question that usually follows this discussion is, if likes are so good for a video, are dislikes bad for the video? And, actually, no. At least; not inherently.

Sure, if someone dislikes your video, closes the tab, and never comes back to YouTube, that will reflect poorly on your content, and YouTube’s algorithm will factor that in. However, the action of disliking a video when considered in a vacuum is still engagement.

That means that if your viewers give your video the thumbs down, but then go on to watch more videos, it’s all good as far as YouTube is concerned. They still see that as engagement, and, as the viewer stuck around, there’s no downside.

Where it could be considered detrimental to a channel to dislike a video, however, is in your personal recommendations. Those videos YouTube put down the side when you’re watching something; they’re based on a lot of data, including your likes.

If you repeatedly like a particular kind of video, you will see more of that kind of video. If you like a lot of videos by a certain YouTuber, you will see more videos by that YouTuber.

Naturally, if you dislike videos, you are less likely to see that kind of video in future, or the YouTuber behind it. How much an individual dislike affects a video’s overall recommendation is unclear, but it certainly affects whether or not it will be recommended to you.

Watch Time Matters

Of course, there’s more to it than merely liking and disliking videos. YouTube wants to see that engagement, whether it is liking, disliking, or leaving comments, but watch time is the ultimate gatekeeper to a YouTuber’s success.

You see, it is watch time that is YouTube’s endgame metric when it comes to measuring success.

The more time people spend on YouTube, the more opportunities there are to serve those people advertisements and the more money YouTube makes.

Watch time is the single, most important metric in the YouTube algorithm’s decision-making process.

The more time people spend viewing a specific channel’s videos; the more YouTube will push that channel because they know they can rely on it to keep viewers on the site.

This is why we specified that dislikes are not harmful in a vacuum. There is nothing inherently damaging about getting a thumbs down, but there may be damaging implications.

If a viewer dislikes your video and then leaves the site altogether, the fact that they left YouTube from your content will count against you in the eyes of the algorithm, even if the thumbs down itself doesn’t.

Why is Engagement Important?

So, if watch time is so important, why does engagement matter at all? Well, it’s true that watch time is the significant metric that YouTube covets above all, but engagement is still an important part of their decision making processes.

Engagement shows that a YouTuber is not just drawing in casual, disinterested viewers, but active viewers who are involved in the platform. These viewers are far more likely to pay attention to advertisements and, as a result, click on them when they see one they like.

It is also the case that engagement is only possible from a signed-in YouTube account. YouTube does count views and watch time from anonymous viewers, but it is considerably more challenging to provide relevant advertisements to these viewers.

And, as we covered earlier in the post, it is the highly targeted advertisements that companies prefer to pay for since they yield better results.

If you want to know how to book that yield and get better cpm advertising rates, helping you make more money from your videos, check out my deep dive blog into how to increase youtube video cpm.

High levels of engagement are an indication that your videos are attracting logged-in YouTube users who can be served relevant ads based on their preferences and watch history, and that makes YouTube happy since targeted advertisements are both worth more and more likely to be clicked.

It Works

All of this is digging a little deeper than most YouTubers are thinking, however.

While there are plenty of YouTubers that are fully informed about the intricacies of YouTube’s algorithm, there are far more that don’t concern themselves with that level of detail, but nevertheless know that likes are a good thing for their channel.

And, of course, a good number of YouTubers that are purely after that external validation we mentioned earlier. So, for those YouTubers, why bother asking their viewers to like the content?

Quite simply; because it works. YouTuber after YouTuber has experimented with asking viewers to like a particular video as a way of testing if it makes a difference, and they invariably find that it does. It may be because a lot of viewers simply don’t think about liking until they are prompted, or that they didn’t think liking was that important to this particular YouTuber.

Whatever the reason, asking viewers to like a video has been proven time and time again to be effective. So regardless of why a specific YouTubers wants those likes, they know that asking for them will usually get them.

Tips on Asking for Likes

As silly as it might sound, there is something of an art to asking for likes in a YouTube video.

Doing it incorrectly most of the time will just be ineffective; however, there is also a chance you could actively put viewers off of liking your video or even watching future videos.

One of the first recommendations we would make is to avoid asking people to like (and subscribe, for that matter) right up top. In the case of subscribing, at least wait until you’ve introduced your channel, so the viewer knows if your content is the kind of thing they would even want to subscribe to.

In the case of likes, however, it is often seen as presumptuous to ask your viewers to like a video they haven’t even seen yet. This can create a sense of resentfulness and may even result in viewers refusing to like the video even if they did find the content useful or entertaining.

It is good practice to wait until approximately halfway through the video before considering using any visual cues, such as a “like and subscribe” graphical popup, and to wait until the sign off to verbally ask your viewers to like the video. By this time, your viewers will know whether they do, in fact, like the content.

Another tip is to ask, rather than tell. If you just say, “like the video” once again it can be seen as a bit presumptive. Instead, say something like, “if you liked the video, consider giving it a thumbs up”. That way, you are merely giving your viewers a polite, gentle reminder that the like button is there, but leaving it entirely up to them to decide if they think you have earned it.

Which brings us to the final suggestion we can make for getting those likes; earn it. All the YouTube science in the world won’t help you with subpar content. Before worrying about reminding viewers to click the like button, make sure you have worked out all of the major kinks in your videos. Your content doesn’t have to be perfect—few YouTube channels are—but any glaring problems should be addressed before you start asking people to give you a thumbs up.

Conclusions

There was a lot to cover there, but the basic theory behind likes can be summed up easily.

Likes are a significant metric that YouTube uses to determine which content to recommend to people, though they are by no means the only metric. They play a vital role in personal recommendations.

That is, if you like a particular type of video a lot, YouTube will endeavour to show you more of that kind of video. Dislikes can also play a positive role in your channel’s exposure, as can comments (regardless of the content).

All of it is as seen as engagement that your content is creating, and YouTube likes to see plenty of engagement.

All of this is secondary watch time, however. The longer people spend on YouTube, the better. And if they happen to be spending vast amounts of time on your videos, that will reflect very well for you in the YouTube algorithm.

Finally, don’t be presumptive about your viewer’s opinions. Ask them to like your videos, don’t tell them to. And only do so at a point in your video where there has been enough content for your viewer to judge if they do actually like it.

None of this guarantees you likes, of course. The only thing that can do that is quality content. But by knowing how the system works, you are better placed to leverage that quality content when you make it.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare

I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.

Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.

I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.

5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Tags ask for likes, asking for likes, click that like button, engagement, instagram likes 2019, like, likes, likes on youtube, thumbs up, why ask for likes, youtube likes

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Is it Dangerous to be a YouTuber?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 2 August 2020

Doing anything online these carries with it an inherent amount of risk, whether it is risk in the form of identity theft or risk in the form of abuse and harassment.

YouTube is a fantastic platform, but it is not exempt from these dangers.

Indeed, anyone who has spent enough time in a YouTube comments section could be forgiven for feeling that YouTube might be one of the worst examples of online dangers. At least when it comes to abuse and harassment.

The dangers a platform like YouTube poses are not only varied by their intent, but also by the person using YouTube. For example, an eleven-year-old child faces a largely different set of risks compared to an adult.

Is it dangerous to be a YouTuber? As with many things on the Internet, all but the most sinister of dangers can be mitigated by or avoided entirely by your behaviour. To borrow an example from email etiquette—you can’t get a virus from an unknown link if you don’t click on unknown links.

In this post, we’re going to look at the various ways in which YouTube can be dangerous, explore what YouTube do to prevent this, and look at how you can keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

Is it Dangerous to be a Child YouTuber?

We’re starting with children because, despite the sensitive nature of online safety for children, this is actually the most straightforward aspect of this topic to cover.

Firstly, children under the age of thirteen are not allowed to have a regular YouTube account under YouTube’s terms of service.

The only way a young child could be a YouTuber (without breaking the rules) is if they are YouTubing with an adult, such as their parent.

The child could appear in the adult’s videos, or the child could entirely run the channel while the adult manages things from behind the scenes. Either way, there will be an adult there who can guide the child through various Internet pitfalls they might otherwise have fallen down. Most social media platforms have similar rules regarding age, meaning you shouldn’t have to worry about your child being exposed to the less savoury denizens of the web.

They could lie about their age, of course. Sites like Twitter don’t have any kind of age verification, how you handle that will be down to your own parenting style.

Once your children are older than thirteen, however, they are allowed to sign up for a wide range of platforms, like YouTube and Facebook. However, they will still be a minor under your care, and you would still be legally within your rights to prevent them from doing so.

Again, this is a decision that would have to be made by you based on your parenting style. You an read my blog on setting up a YouTube channel for your child here.

If you choose to allow your child onto the Internet, you must prepare them for what they may find. Have a real conversation with them about the risks, and about how people on the Internet can be less than pleasant sometimes.

Give them a thorough grounding in the basics, such as not giving usernames and passwords out, and how to spot a shady site. These are all things that your child will need to learn regardless, so getting a head start can’t hurt.

Is it Dangerous to be an Adult YouTuber?

The dangers of being a YouTuber as an adult are not much different from the general dangers of being on the Internet. Things like identity theft, fraud, and general mental well-being are all things to look out for.

If, however, you become a famous YouTuber, you should be prepared for the responsibility that brings. A person with a few thousand subscribers can make an ill-advised statement or be rude to someone, or let a bit of personal information slip out, and the world will keep turning.

A YouTuber with perhaps a few hundred thousand subscribers may see significant consequences from such behaviour. And a YouTuber with a few million subscribers could make mainstream media headlines from it.

While we understand the desire to rush to success, building a following as you would have with a successful YouTube channel is best done slowly for several reasons, not least of which is it gives you time to grow and adapt to your newfound popularity.

Another way in which being a YouTuber can be dangerous is in the real world implications of your content.

Granted, this probably won’t affect someone who is making inoffensive life hack videos, but if you have opinions of a controversial nature, and you are voicing them in your videos, it could have harmful side effects. In today’s reactionary world, your job could literally be at stake. And, while we might all have the dream of going full time with our YouTube channel, most of us still have to work a day job in the beginning.

What Can YouTubers do to Keep the Negativity Away?

Beyond simply ignoring negative comments, there are things you can do as a YouTuber to keep yourself, your channel, and your community as safe as possible.

Obviously, shutting down comments entirely and not having a presence on other social media platforms will all but eliminate the opportunity for bad faith actors; however, it will also hamper your ability to grow as a channel since community involvement is crucial in the early stages of your YouTube adventure.

So, with that in mind, we’re going to assume that you don’t plan to lock your channel and social media down altogether.

Set the Tone From the Start

Think of unwanted audience behaviour like a bad habit. It is much easier to cut it off at the start than it is to deal with once it has had time to take root and become ingrained. If you make it clear from the beginning that particular behaviour will not be tolerated, and enforce those standards wherever you can, it will be far less likely that you will have a problematic audience when you start to grow as a channel.

Of course, what one channel considers unacceptable may be fine for another channel. Swearing is an example of something that can be fine depending on the channel and the community.

The point is that by setting the tone early on, you’ll have less to deal with as you grow. You may even reach a point where your community polices itself.

If it is established that you do not allow profanity in your comments section, your audience will likely start letting newcomers know when they are behaving in a manner that is not in keeping with your community.

This also applies to behaviour that, while perhaps not offensive in nature, is nonetheless a bad precedent to set. For example, while getting involved with your community is a great way to grow your audience early on, it’s important to establish boundaries.

If you make yourself too available—beyond any reasonable expectation your viewers should have—you set the expectation that you will be similarly available in the future. And, as your audience grows, it will become more challenging to devote enough time to these kinds of interactions. This can lead to a negative reaction from your viewers, who feel they are being snubbed.

Separate Your Online Life From Your Real Life

Being a YouTuber can sometimes lead to problems in your real life. Those problems may be small, such as mild embarrassment over a family member seeing one of your videos, or very serious, such as your employer seeing you say or do something controversial that leads to your firing.

You may not feel like you have anything to hide from your real life, and you may be entirely correct. However, it can still sometimes be good practice to separate your YouTube personality from real life if possible. You can do this using a pseudonym, or being virtually faceless on your channel (though this can have longer-term branding implications).

You can also keep the two separate by not sharing YouTube things on your personal accounts, and not linking personal things to your YouTube account. A common practice is to have a private Facebook page where you can communicate with friends and family online, reserving places like Twitter for your “YouTube persona”.

Take Extra Care With Your Personal Data

There is a myriad of ways in which sensitive personal data can find its way into the public domain. For example, did you know that when you register a domain name, the details of the owner are publicly available unless you pay extra to keep them private? What’s worse is this data typically includes your address.

Another example would be giving out your address to receive packages from viewers, or sending a package to a viewer and having your home as the return address.

It is also worth putting a little extra effort into making sure your videos are free from any sensitive information. For example, if you do an unboxing video, make sure the packing label is removed or covered up before you start filming.

Preparing Yourself Mentally

While the material risks of being a YouTuber are very real, many dangers are less obvious and can creep up on you if you are not prepared for them.

Lack of Privacy

It may seem silly to think that a lack of privacy could be an issue for someone who chooses to put themselves online in a very public way, but as we mentioned above, there should be boundaries.

Still, even with firm boundaries in place, you are putting yourself out there, and there is an unavoidable degree of vulnerability about that.

Criticism

Following directly on from that, there is the criticism. There will always be a negative contingent online who are looking to say unhelpful and hurtful things. As a YouTuber, you need to become proficient at recognising the line between criticism and insults.

Legitimate criticism should be taken on board, as it can help your channel grow, whereas insults and general hurtful behaviour serve no purpose. If a person is looking to hurt you and nothing more, you won’t gain anything by attempting to mollify them, and their words should be dismissed as they have no objective merit.

Or, to put it another way, you wouldn’t ask a friend who hates Chinese food for recommendations on where to get Chinese, so why would you listen to opinions about your YouTube channel from someone who just doesn’t like your channel.

Lack of Understanding

While YouTube has become huge over the last decade or so, and made many people very rich and very famous, it is still covered by the shadow of scepticism when it comes to people who do not spend much time on the Internet. Unfortunately, for many of us, our families and friends will include a certain number of these sceptics.

Explaining what you do and gaining the understanding of people like this can be difficult. This is especially the case if you are hoping for a supportive reaction from your friends and family if you decide to move into YouTubing full time.

The best you can do in these situations is explain things as honestly as you can, let them know how important it is to you, and then try to move past it if they refuse to take it seriously. Try not to hold grudges—YouTube is relatively new, and the idea of a YouTube career is even newer. It’s not entirely unreasonable of them to have a little skepticism about it.

Lack of Patience

Unlike the last one, this one is on you. Succeeding on YouTube takes time. Attempts to cheat the system and speed things along usually end in YouTube redressing the balance—sometimes by deleting your subscribers—so there is no quick fix to success.

If you do not have the patience for the YouTube long haul, there is a very real danger that you will run out of steam and quit.

It can help to visualise your goals, but never be anything less than brutally honest with yourself about the rate of growth you can expect. That way, you won’t be disappointed when you aren’t an overnight success.

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DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE MARKETING SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Can I Create A Youtube Account For My Child?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 1 August 2020
1 Comment on Can I Create A Youtube Account For My Child?

A whole generation of kids are growing up with YouTube for the first time in history. Remember, there was no such thing as YouTube as little as fifteen years ago.

So while being a professional YouTuber may seem like an unusual and exotic career choice for those of us born… let’s say “a little earlier”, it is an established industry for today’s children. It makes sense, then, that kids might aspire to become a YouTuber.

At the same time, it is perfectly natural for you, the parent, to have concerns about the safety and legalities of setting up a YouTube channel for your child. The Internet has proven to be a very useful tool for those who are prepared to harm children, be it through written or verbal abuse, or something far more sinister.

If you find yourself asking, “can I create a YouTube account for my child?”, then you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to give you all the information you need about this topic. Unfortunately, we can’t give you a clear cut answer up top—something we like to do whenever possible—because the answer is yes… and no. It depends on the child.

Can I Create a YouTube Account for My Child?

Most people would agree that a thirteen-year-old is a child—they certainly are in the eyes of the law. YouTube may not see a thirteen-year-old as an adult, but that is the age where they deem a child old enough to have their own YouTube account, though they still require parental permission up to the age of seventeen.

So, yes, you can create an account for your child—if that child is over the age of thirteen. This applies regardless of whether your child will be just watching YouTube, or actively making videos.

If you are only looking to set up a YouTube account for your child so that they can watch content, all is not lost. YouTube Kids is designed specifically for this purpose.

As a signed-in parent, you can create a kids profile that will allow you to set viewing preferences and recommendations, which is great for families with more than one child. YouTube Kids profiles are not merely about keeping inappropriate content away from young eyes—though that is an important part of it.

It is also about COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule) regulations, and not storing specific data about underage users. That is why YouTube will not allow you to set up a full account for your under-thirteen child, even if you were willing to disregard any safety or privacy concerns that might arise. This also extends to the YouTube browser experience.

If your child is signed in and attempts to go to youtube.com, they will be told that they can only access YouTube Kids. They will also be told that YouTube Kids is not available in-browser, which can be irritating for some parents who don’t necessarily want their child staring at a tiny phone screen for too long.

If, on the other hand, you do want to set the account up so that your child can make videos, you will have to wait until they are over thirteen, as YouTube Kids accounts cannot upload video.

We wouldn’t advise lying about your child’s age to open an account early, as that could lead to the account being banned if you are found out.

Are Their Loopholes?

There are plenty of YouTube channels that do—or have in the past—featured under-thirteens. Depending on the situation, there are varying degrees of risk to these potentially grey areas.

The Sidekick

The first example we are going to use, and probably the safest in terms of running afoul of YouTube rules on underage YouTubers, is that of Andy Schrock. In this case, the channel is unquestionably Andy’s. The content revolves around him and his business, and there is no ambiguity that the channel belongs to an adult.

However, a good deal of the content on Andy’s channel involves his young children. In this manner, his children—his eldest son in particular—have been able to experience making YouTube videos entirely within the terms of YouTube’s rules on children.

This way of introducing your child to YouTube allows you to fully control your child’s exposure, while also being there with them to guide them as they get to grips with being on-camera.

The Family Model

Our next example is HobbyFamilyTV, formally HobbyKidsTV. The channel has been around for several years now, and features a range of video types involving the “HobbyFamily”, but as you may have guessed from the previous name of the channel, the focus of the videos used to be the children primarily.

In this case, the channel did not belong to the children, but the children nevertheless were the stars of the show.

The method of allowing your children to become YouTubers has the advantage of you being there to essentially chaperone their journey, while still giving them the independence of making their own content.

The Hands-Off Model

Understand that, when we say “hands-off”, we are not talking in a literal sense. If you have a YouTuber child, whether they are old enough to do it alone or not, we recommend maintaining a watchful eye over them, both to protect them from the unpleasantness of the Internet, and prevent them saying or doing things they might later regret.

Our example for this kind of YouTuber is EthanGamer, formally known as EthanGamerTV. Though he is now old enough to have his own YouTube account, Ethan joined YouTube at the astoundingly young age of seven years old. Clearly, that violates YouTube’s current rules on underage accounts.

The way Ethan’s parents handled this was to be hands-on in the management of the channel (along with any other social media) while leaving the actual content of the channel to Ethan. This allowed Ethan to essentially run the channel as though it were his (we can’t say how much editorial control his parents exercised) while technically not violating YouTube’s under-thirteen policy, because it wasn’t his.

Now, we class this one as a bit of a grey area. It clearly worked for Ethan, who is now a very successful YouTuber with over two and a half million subscribers, but YouTube’s rules were not so strict throughout most of his YouTube career. We can’t say with confidence that a similarly run account wouldn’t be shut down today.

Guidance Is Critical

However you choose to approach letting your child become a YouTuber, it is critical that you don’t leave them to do it alone.

The Internet is seemingly filling up with stories of influencers getting “cancelled” after some poorly judged joke or insensitive comment from when they were a lot younger surfaced. Children, by their very nature, are not good judges of things like proprietary.

They are still learning and need guidance as they learn. They should be allowed to make mistakes, but on camera in front potentially millions of people is not the place to make those mistakes.

YouTube Restrictions

Like any good parent, you’ll want to be fully informed about letting your child travel down the YouTube path, and that includes knowing how monetisation works for these kinds of channels.

Unless the content being produced by or with your child is being made for adults, it will likely fall afoul of YouTube’s COPPA restrictions. This means several things, among which are disabled comments and no targeted advertisements.

YouTube is not allowed to keep data on children, which means they cannot serve personalised advertisements to them. This, in turn, discourages advertisers from running their ads on these kinds of videos, since they want their ads to be as laser-focused as possible. After all, the more relevant the audience, the better the chance of their ads generating leads.

The restrictions on advertising do not mean your child’s channel cannot be monetised, but the potential revenue that monetisation can generate is significantly reduced when compared to a channel whose content is not aimed at children. There are other options for monetisation, of course, but that is a substantial topic in its own right.

Keeping Your Child Safe

The dangers of the Internet as it pertains to young children is well known, and it is no different for YouTubers. There is also emotional wellbeing to consider, as YouTube is notorious for having many commenters who are not exactly positive and full of praise.

As it turns out, YouTube’s policies do a lot to mitigate this kind of problem by disabling comments on content aimed at children.

However, if your child is on other social media networks, you should consider keeping an eye on the interactions they have through those channels.

Naturally, you’ll want to ensure your child’s safety against online predators, but there are no YouTube-specific measures to take in that regard. All of the good practice and common sense that is recommended for other parts of the Internet apply here.

Is it dangerous to be on YouTube? – Check out my deep dive blog into all the things you need to thing about when becoming a YouTube.

Tip for Starting a YouTube Channel for Your Child

If you decide to let your child start their own YouTube channel, either with a full account as they are over thirteen, or using one of the methods mentioned above for under-thirteens, we have some tips for getting started.

Try getting them some kid friendly equipment to get them started – I have a list of all the equipment and software I use to run my youtube channel on my resources page.

Pilot Episodes!

Well, not actual pilot episodes.

We assume you’re not trying to get picked up by a TV network here.

But don’t feel like anything you film has to be put online.

Watch your content back as objectively as you can before it ever sees a YouTube upload box. Get close friends and family to cast their opinions on it. If you’re not happy, go again and try to fix the things that weren’t working.

If your child is going solo, insist they do the same.

Many people have had to learn to live with the stuff they put on the Internet when they were younger without fully understanding the implications; you don’t want your child to be one of them.

Talk About It

Perhaps one of the best things you can do if you intend to let your child use the Internet in any form, especially as a YouTuber, is to have a conversation with them about the risks and dangers of being online.

If your child is not yet at a point where they can grasp the things you need to talk about, it may be a sign that they are not yet ready for this kind of step.

Create a Plan

Things invariably go more smoothly when there is a plan guiding the process, and there’s no reason to think things work any differently when creating a YouTube channel.

If your child wants to do their own thing, have them develop a plan of action first. If they are too young to do it without your help, make the plan with them.

Talk about things like how often videos will be posted, who the intended audience is, what kind of content they plan to make. How will they go about learning the necessary skills to create, edit, and upload content by themselves?

If equipment is a factor, talk about money. Will you be helping them buy the equipment, and are there stipulations? If not, how do they plan to afford what they need?

Having a conversation like this not only ensures your child knows exactly what they are getting into, it also tests how much they really want to do it.

Find Your Balance

One of the hardest things to do as a parent of a YouTuber child—and in parenting in general—is finding the right balance between protecting your child and letting them spread their wings.

As they get older and more comfortable with their life as a YouTuber, you need to find a healthy balance between keeping an eye them as they continue to develop and letting them grow and explore without your presence bearing down on them.

It can be challenging to step back, but your child must gain a sense of independence as they grow, and that applies to YouTube as much as it does to life in general.

And, when they’re old enough to go it alone entirely, you will have prepared them as best you can.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare

I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.

Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.

I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.

5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Tags can i make a channel for my kid, kid channels, kids on youtube, kids with youtube, youtube account for kids, youtube for kids