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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you have a Facebook group and you’re looking to find ways to monetize it. It’s not as easy as you think it would be. If you’ve got a Facebook page, you’re able to jump through hoops, qualified based on engagement metrics and start working with brands.
But a Facebook group is a community of people built around a specific ideal hobby or event.
I am the founder and admin for the Download Festival fan page on Facebook. The Download Festival is a music festival in the UK that is the spiritual child with the monsters of rock festival in the 1980s. That Facebook group has around about 60,000 people, but I don’t monetize the page. I simply spam them with a load of my videos from time to time and build up an audience that way.
But they’re ways that you can monetize a Facebook group.
1) Relevant and related affiliate links.
One is sharing relevant affiliate links. So using this Download Festival fan page, as an example, the festival, there’s music there and there’s campaign and relevant links could be run about a month or two before the festival.
I start sharing out camping equipment, torches, tents, gazebos, rucksacks boots, because you know, this festival is during June in the UK, so normally it is either baking hot with sunburn and hay fever, or you’re drowning.
These affiliate links, you can push towards places like Amazon, or if you have an arrangement with a camping company, my case, then you can push in that way.
But let’s say, you’re talking about Tech in your Facebook group. You can then push them to phones and cameras and laptops. Maybe you’re a filmographer and you’re pushing people towards cameras. Or in my case, on my YouTube channel, I’m helping you figure out what animations you need to use.
So you could use place it down below for intros and in-screens. Or if you’re trying to get subtitles, I’d push it down to something like rev.com, where they can easily subtitle all your content from just $1 to $2 per minute, per video, in any language.
You see, the relevancy matters because if I’m pushing on this channel halfway through teaching you about YouTube, I’m pushing you to go and buy a nightlight for a toddler, or I’m trying to sell you a tent, it’s not relevant and it won’t convert as much, but if you’re pushing relevant links on the page, not only does it mean that it blends in well with the thing, but it adds a value.
People could ask you, “Well, what for man 10 can I use?” And I could go, “Well, here’s 3/10 that you might want to look at, or here’s a torture. Here’s a bundle that they do, because it’s more relevant.”
It might help them do their research and it’s more likely to convert in the long run rather than me selling baby grows in a group that’s dedicated to male bodybuilding.
2) Digital products.
Now this is the next step up from affiliate marketing, where you possibly have a book or a download pack or a training course of some kind, the group is they’re learning about that specific field, so let’s say the group is about cameras.
This digital product could be a user guide menu on how to set a type of camera. It could be tips and tricks on lighting. It could be a download looks pack for grading your colors. It could be 10, 20 backing tracks because you’re there and you’re creating the music.
A digital product could be a great way to monetize that group while still offering them value. Once again, you don’t want to be giving breastfeeding tips to an entire group dedicated to kids’ toys, memorabilia, but a digital product can just float around, it could be connected to the group.
I will be launching one very soon for this channel myself and if it already exists, then there’s a link down below, and it could be something about helping you with your thumbnails or giving you loads of templates to play with.
3) Newsletters.
Now this doesn’t directly monetize the page up point of impact.
But if you get people in your group that are interested in the content that you share to sign up for your newsletter, then you’ve got your way to engage them at a later date, should you have a digital product or should you be promoting in my case, a music festival, in which you can send an affiliate link where you buy your ticket through here and I get paid.
I have a newsletter here, which I’ve handed out a free ebook for ages, right? And then I just engage with news. Once again, I could be much more aggressive with the way I monetize my content, but I don’t.
There’s many people out there that will have it home. They’re selling you online courses, or they’re selling you this, or they’re selling you that, or they’re upgrading your membership.
I prefer to just educate you here, and then hopefully in the long run, if you feel that I can help you, then maybe you contact me and I can coach you, or you trust me enough to use the affiliate links down below. I don’t want to strong arm you, but a newsletter could be a good way to build a contact list of all people that are really interested in that specific niche.
So let’s say you’re really good at knitting, you want to build a mailing list of everyone that’s good at knitting or interested in that hobby. That newsletter can then send out patterns once a month, and then when you’re ready, you can sell a book with the patterns in it, or you can push them towards specific knitting needles, or you can start selling popular patterns.
So that say, here’s how to knit your own granny blanket or face mask or Willy warmer or whatever it happens to be.
4) Selling advertiser posts.
Now, this is a direct impact on the community that you’ve built there.
I don’t do this for my festival page, but the 60,000 people there, if there was a band that wanted to promote themselves, if there was a product that wanted to be launched, maybe a new camping supplier that wanted to pay me 50, 100, 200, or a thousand pounds to post an advert to have it pinned or to have it promoted, that’s a good way for you to make income based on your group.
You know the engagement that you can get, you know the impact that it might have on your metrics. You have the insights tab on Facebook, so you can drill down and give that juicy info to the possible advertiser.
The best thing is that you’re not giving personal data to the advertisers, so you’re still covered by GDPR, but you access to your community, you get money in return, kind of a win-win.
5) Associated podcasts.
Now I’ve got a podcast for my YouTube channel. It’s called the “Start Creating Podcast” and you can go and see it at “startcreatingpodcasts.com.” It’s hosted by anchor, it’s on Apple and Google Play and Stitcher and in most places that you search for your podcast.
I teach you on there some of my tricks and tips that I shared on here and every now and then I do very deeply personal ones as well. I’m able to break out of the 5-10 minute format here, and I can talk to you for 20, 30, 50 minutes waffling on in a slightly less edited format.
Podcasts can distill the hardcore audience within a page into something that they want to listen. Going back to the camera fanatics idea. You are in a group where there are 20,000 or 30,000 people, or even 200 or 300 people that use that group to learn about cameras.
Each week you could sit down and you could talk about the latest camera, the latest camera news, the latest tech, the latest shots. You could get out the photographers on them. They can tell you how they shoot a wedding, how they shoot action shots, how they do skydiving.
The podcast is the way that you monetize that page because you bring them over to that audience, and then you can start putting adverts in against that podcast or using those metrics to start inviting guests on that may pay you to be on your podcast, or in the long run, pushing people to affiliate things through that podcast because they trust you and are willing to listen to you on a regular basis.
6) Charity fundraisers
Six, you can monetize your Facebook group with charity fundraisers.
Now this doesn’t directly put money in your pocket, but it doesn’t have to, really. Let’s say your group is all about cancer survivors or COVID survivors or Grenfell or MLS,Alzheimer’s, dementia, veterans of war.
Here’s your chance to give back because they’ve given to you with the support. You can put up your charity fundraiser, everyone’s motivated and highly engaged. I’m not suggesting that you do it every day, but you can monetize that audience to help a set cause by just picking a charity fundraiser, promoting it, and hopefully you could have other people that have gone through similar situations.
Final Words
Now, if you want to learn how to monetize your Facebook page, there is a video here. And if you want to learn how to monetize in general using affiliate marketing and passive income, there’s a video here.
Remember to subscribe for regular YouTube, Facebook, social media tutorials, and I’ll see you soon.
Getting together the necessary equipment for YouTubing can pose quite a problem for those of us on a budget.
After all, cameras are expensive, and lighting rigs? What about acoustic treatment? All of these things cost money, and buying low-quality equipment most likely won’t improve the quality of your videos, and may even harm your channel overall.
Still, YouTube is far from a sure thing when it comes to generating an income, so spending significant amounts of cash on cameras and microphones can be hard to justify. Fortunately, “budget” doesn’t have to mean poor quality—you just need to know what you’re looking for. Of course, if it were that easy, there’d be no need for posts like this one!
Now as long as you have mastered YouTube Equipment for beginners – maybe you want some cost effective ideas for some upgrades – let’s get into our guide to the world of YouTube equipment on a budget.
Cameras
Let’s start with your primary bit of kit. Camera’s are not just essential if you want to record video, they can also be the only piece of gear you need if you are trying to make the most of your budget.
Here are three great options for YouTubers on a budget.
Logitech C930e
Starting our list off, we have the Logitech C930e, a webcam. Now, webcams are not the best option when it comes to YouTube… or any kind of video capture situation for that matter.
For reasons perhaps known only to webcam manufacturers, there has been very little improvement in the standards of webcam video quality for nearly a decade. In fact, the only thing webcams really excel at is live-streaming. Still, when it comes to budget video recording equipment, the C930e offers the best bang for your buck, and if you pair it with a decent budget lighting setup, you should be able to get some very respectable video out of it.
Obviously, there are some physical limitations with a webcam. If you want to shoot videos on the move, you’re going to need something that can operate standalone, and this isn’t it.
So, on to our next pick.
GoPro Hero6 or Hero7
GoPro has made a name for themselves in the sports footage market. They are typically the first name to come to mind whenever someone wants to strap a camera to their head and jump off a mountain, or something similar. What doesn’t always get as much attention is just how good it is as a pure camera.
You’re going to be looking at 3-4x the cost of the c930e, but that is still around half the half to a third of the cost of a Canon EOS 80D with a lens, which is a popular camera for YouTubers who aren’t on a budget. And the difference in quality is significant.
Furthermore, the Hero is much better at getting a great shot out of any environment and lighting situation.
Canon T7i
We’re stretching the definition of “budget” here. Still, given that the next tier of cameras easily crosses into the four digits in the price department, we think it’s fair to include this one as a higher-end budget camera.
The Canon T7i is a fully-fledged DSLR, which is the top dog when it comes to camera quality. While this may be a budget DSLR, it will still produce better results than just about anything you might find cheaper.
It should be noted that DSLRs are a little more involved than something like a webcam, or a GoPro. For one thing, you need to buy lenses for your camera. If you hit eBay and find a T7i that’s heavily discounted over the average price, you might be buying one without a lens. Like the GoPro, these cameras are standalone, so you can take them out for shooting on location.
Cameras like this are designed to handle a range of additional components, such as camera-mounted lighting, and external audio sources, making them ideal for portable filming setups.
Comparison Table
Product
Max Resolution
Standalone?
Approx. Cost
Logitch c930e
1080 @ 30fps
No
£100
GoPro Hero 7
4K @ 60fps
Yes
£280
Canon T7i
1080 @ 60fps
Yes
£500
For further cameras and equipment suggestions check out my equipment lists on my resources page – I list all my current equipment and some killer discounts on cheap starter gear.
Microphones
It’s important to remember that all of the above suggestions for cameras have their own built-in microphone. Now, these are far from the best audio ever recorded, but they are more than serviceable if you can’t afford to pair them with a separate audio setup.
However, if you are looking to maximise your quality, you will want to get yourself a microphone.
Unlike our camera picks, all of our microphones are approximately equal in price. They are, however, considerably different in execution. Don’t worry; we’ll explain as we go.
Blue Snowball
Our first pick goes to the Blue Snowball, a distinctive looking USB microphone that produces excellent audio quality. The advantages of the Snowball mainly lie in its simplicity of use. You simply plug the mic into your computer, let the drivers automatically install, and you’re good to go. This makes it an ideal pairing with something like the Logitech C930e we mentioned above.
The downside is that you cannot plug a USB mic into something like the Canon T7i. If you want to go portable with the Snowball, you’re going to need to take a laptop with you.
The Snowball is available in a few different variants and supports several pick up patterns. If your YouTube setup never leaves your desk, this is a great microphone to have.
BM-Condenser Microphone plus Preamp
The BM-800 is a little tricky to explain. This microphone is actually an unbranded Chinese product. Sellers in various parts of the world buy this product in bulk, often with their own branding, and resell it. We’re explaining this because if you Google “BM-800 Microphone”, you could get a dozen different brands selling identical looking microphones. It doesn’t make a difference, however; they’re all the same product.
But onto the mic itself. The BM-800 is a condenser microphone that uses an XLR connection. That XLR connection means you will need other hardware to get the mic up and running, but don’t worry, the mic itself typically goes for a third of what the Snowball costs. What’s more, it often comes with extras, like pop shields and shock mounts. Once you have coupled it with a cheap audio interface or microphone preamp, then the price will level out at around the same as the Snowball.
Like the Snowball, you won’t be able to connect this mic to something like a GoPro or T7i, and while it can be portable, it’s not ideal.
This kind of setup is ideal for YouTubers who make music since you can easily swap out your microphone for a different style, or get an audio interface with multiple channels for recording more than one mic at a time.
Rode VideoMic Go
The VideoMic is an on-camera mic. This is a particular kind of microphone that sits on top of your camera, making it ideal for portable setups. Unfortunately, that means it only works with compatible cameras. For reference, only the Canon T7i would be compatible out of the cameras we suggested above.
Still, if you do a lot of filming in different locations and tend to hold your camera rather than set it on a tripod, a microphone like this (on a compatible camera) is the only practical solution. If you do get a camera like the Canon T7i, there really isn’t a compelling reason to go with any other kind of microphone.
Lighting
After your camera and your microphone, lighting is probably the most significant piece of hardware you can buy for your YouTube setup.
If you feel your video quality isn’t what it should be, but you can’t afford to step up your camera game, take a look at your lighting. You’d be surprised at how much difference it makes.
Newer 18-Inch Ring Light
Ring lights, as the name suggests, are ring-shaped lights that are ideal for vloggers, and any situation where the subject is directly facing the camera. They cast a smooth, even light directly in front of them. This ring light comes with a stand and smartphone holder, as well as two different filters.
Newer CN-216
The CN-216 is a compact LED panel light that can be mounted on top of a compatible camera, making it an ideal camera for portable filming setups. Of course, you can still mount it on a stand or tripod. It has an adjustable colour temperature and a removable diffusion screen, and clocks in at a ridiculously low price.
Natural Light
It might sound like a bit of a cop-out, but natural light is one of the best lighting sources for your videos there is, and it’s free! Of course, it puts some limitations on when and where you can film, but if natural light is a practical option for your videos, it is by far the best option for YouTuber’s on a budget.
Your Phone
For those of us with a relatively modern smartphone—which is most people these days—our phone represents quite possibly the best quality video and audio for the cheapest cost: free. Well, not free, but unless you bought your phone just to film YouTube videos, it is effectively free.
The cameras in modern phones are something of a marvel, making use of various tricks on the software end to make up for the shortcomings of the hardware, a decent phone will blast most budget options out of the water. And some higher-end phones can even record in 4K at a full 60fps.
Of course, your phone isn’t ideal. You can’t see what you’re shooting unless you use the weaker camera on the front. You have to worry about the available storage space when most higher-end phones don’t accept memory cards anymore. Not to mention you may want to use your phone during filming.
But, for all of its shortcomings, your existing phone may well produce a better quality video than the best cameras you can afford. If you find that to be the case, use your phone for now and save up for a better camera, rather than wasting your money on something you can afford that is not very good.
And the Rest
There are plenty of other things you could be spending your money on when it comes to getting your YouTube setup ready, with varying degrees of importance.
For example – as I noted in my deep dive into soundproofing for youtubers blog – if the space you are recording in is extremely echoey, it might be worth a little of your hard-earned cash to put it right. Acoustic foam tiles are relatively inexpensive, and you don’t need to plaster the whole room with them to get the desired results.
With a bit of research and a little experimentation, you should be able to make a pack of twenty-four go a long way. Failing that, you could always borrow some thick blankets from the cupboard and put them to good use.
Another area that can sometimes get overlooked is the software department. If you are doing anything more than cutting up pieces of footage, you will need some software to do it in. There are free options available for several of the less complex tasks, such as transitions and titles.
However, Adobe is the industry standard for a reason, and its popularity ensures there will always be plenty of resources to help you get started. Before you panic at the thought of hundreds of pounds worth of software, Adobe has long-since switched to a subscription model, which is not as expensive as you might think.
Conclusions
Finding the best hardware is always a little tricky, as you might have noticed with some of our suggestions.
Be sure to weigh up all the features of any equipment you might be considering purchasing. Price is important, but even a cheap camera is too expensive if it is not suitable for your specific circumstances.
Internet security has never been as prevalent in the public consciousness as it is now. With significant data breaches a seemingly regular occurrence in the news, double factor authentication increasingly becoming a minimum requirement, and restrictions on how your passwords can be structured making them almost impossible to remember, it’s clear that security is important.
But staying safe online is not just about secure passwords. We have never been more visible than we are right now. We have pages and pages of tweets and Facebook posts and Instagram pics, and much of it is public. Now, be honest with yourself—do you consider the full privacy implications of your social media posts before you hit send?
This post is about YouTube, so you may wonder why we’re talking about Facebook and Twitter, but all will become clear soon enough.
Still, is it safe to have a YouTube channel? Yes, if you are careful. As you grow make sure you think of privacy long term. Always pick safe secure passwords and try not to post your entirely life on the internet – that’s when it gets extremely risky.
Let’s get into it.
How Can Youtube be Dangerous?
There are different ways in which YouTube could be considered dangerous to the YouTuber posting videos, and it is essential to understand what these ways are if you have any hope of avoiding them. Let’s start with the least sinister one.
Putting All Your Eggs in the YouTube Monetisation Basket
YouTube has a patchy history when it comes to monetisation. It has made a lot of people rich, but it is also notoriously unreliable as an income source. If you’ve been in the YouTube stratosphere for a while, you’ll have heard of the “adpocalypse”.
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll have heard of multiple adpocalypses.
This is the label name given to the various times that YouTube has made profound, seismic changes to its advertising policies and algorithms. These changes tend to negatively affect YouTuber revenue across the board, and even wipe it out entirely in some cases. One of the more recent adpocalypse’s (the fourth one, if we’re counting) saw many political punditry channels lose all of their revenue more or less overnight. And we’re talking channels with millions of subscribers here.
More recent changes have hit channels whose primary audience is children, with offensive and hateful content being targeted quite early on.
Whether you feel YouTube is overreacting in any of these cases or not isn’t the point here. The point is that in each of these cases, YouTube made significant changes—often without warning—that wiped out entire revenue streams overnight, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again. So what’s the danger here?
The danger lies in your YouTube success reaching a point where you can afford to go full time, and rushing into it. Many people would happily scrape by as a YouTuber rather than make a comfortable wage doing a job they don’t like, but if you take that plunge before you are ready, and YouTube makes changes that hit your channel, you may find yourself in a very sticky situation.
How to Avoid This
First and foremost, don’t rush into a fulltime YouTube career. Be sure to weigh up your options properly, and discuss things with anyone who is likely to be affected by your decision, such as a partner you live with.
If you decide to take the leap, take your time with the transition. Try to build up a reserve of savings if you don’t already have one—at least enough money to cover a few months of living expenses—and the more, the better. That way, if things go wrong, you’ve got a bit breathing room to decide what your next move will be.
Going forward, always be on the lookout for ways to diversify your revenue streams. If you are getting your income from multiple sources, then the sudden disappearance of YouTube monetisation will not hit you as hard. Consider things like Patreon and merchandise sales. Brand deals are another way to monetise your videos without having to worry about what YouTube is planning.
Affiliate marketing can be a great long term source of income but can be a little confusing. I wrote a huge deep dive into affiliate marketing for beginners which will help you with everything you need to know about to
Personal Data
While not strictly a YouTube problem, the opportunities to inadvertently give away potentially damaging personal data as a YouTuber are greater—especially if you are or become popular.
The kinds of personal data we are talking about here include any information that could be used to commit fraud against you.
Let’s look at an example.
You know those security questions you often have to fill out? Things like “What was your mother’s maiden name?”, and, “What was the name of your first pet?”. If you use the real answers to those questions, and you happen to mention that bit of information in a video, you could be providing someone with a vital piece of the puzzle if they want to break into your accounts. It is easily done. After all—what’s the harm in mentioning that your first pet was a cat called Fluffy, right?
Another example of this kind of danger would be inadvertently showing a password or other sensitive information in your video. One example might be doing an unboxing video and having a clear shot of the address label. Another might be signing up for something in the video and typing a password in clear text that you use for other accounts.
How to Avoid This
Try to avoid the possibility of situations like those mentioned above happening in the first place. If you are doing an unboxing video, make sure any labels are covered up, that way you don’t have to worry about whether they end up in the shot.
The best way to prevent any of this from getting to your channel, of course, it a watchful eye in the editing process. If you don’t have an editing process, it might be time to develop one. Even if you only watch the video through to check for problems like this, you should always give your footage the once over before publishing. If nothing else it is a matter of quality control, but it also allows you to make absolutely sure you haven’t inadvertently filmed a clear shot of your credit card!
Personal Safety
We mentioned the word “sinister” earlier on in the post, and with good reason. It is an unfortunate reality of the human experience that there are deeply unpleasant people out there. These may be people you know from your real life, such as abusive family members or people who have a grudge against you, but the Internet has its fair share of unpleasant strangers as well.
It is one thing receiving a threat of physical violence from a stranger on the Internet when they know nothing about you, but it’s an entirely different prospect when that stranger has managed to piece together your home address from the information you’ve sprinkled throughout your videos. This is something that the popular YouTuber and Twitch streamer Sweet Anita has had to deal with recently. Her situation has progressed to the point that she even had to take a restraining order out against one unhinged individual who figured out where she lived and even moved to her town permanently.
Of course, this is an extreme example, but it is not nearly as uncommon as it should be, and while most threats of violence are just that—threats—it is something that every YouTuber should be aware of going in.
How to Avoid This
The kinds of people who behave like this are not particularly prone to reason, so there is no sense in attempting to moderate your content so as not to attract the attention of dangerous individuals.
Unfortunately, the only way to really protect against this kind of thing is to keep an airtight lockdown on your personal information. Don’t let any private information become public. Doing this means careful consideration of your actions outside of YouTube, but that’s where our next topic comes in…
Keeping Your Private Information Private
Okay, most of us know not to go sharing bank details through random links, and to use a password that isn’t easily guessable, but there are many ways to inadvertently give away your personal data that are not as obvious.
For example, when you register a domain name, the name and address you register it under is publicly available and easy to find unless you pay for domain privacy protection.
Another way you might not have considered is geotagged information. For example; location data on your pictures, or routes from your latest run. It can be very tempting to share your latest Strava personal best but have you considered what information your route gives away. If you started and finished at your home, that’s not going to take much deciphering. Still, any run in your local area will allow nefarious actors to narrow down your location.
Do you use your real name on YouTube and also have a LinkedIn profile that lists your current employer? What about pictures from your home where distinguishable landmarks are visible in the shot?
Of course, there is such a thing as being paranoid, and there is only so much you can reasonably do to keep yourself safe before it becomes more practical just to stop being on YouTube altogether. A significant portion of this is knowing the risks, even if you don’t plan to mitigate all of them.
Tips for Staying Safe
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post, so we thought it would be nice to break down some of the more actionable tips for keeping yourself safe as a YouTuber.
This is not necessarily a “bare minimum” situation since every action you take should be subjectively judged on what is best for you, but these are some of the more fundamental aspects of YouTube safety. In other words, make sure you have a good reason for not doing any of the following.
Keep Your Residence Private
For most of us, our home is our set. Having a separate “studio” is a luxury that many can’t justify. Still, that doesn’t mean your home has to be recognisable.
Try to limit filming to areas where nothing distinguishable is around. For example, if you live in an apartment in New York with the Empire State Building behind you, avoid shooting with the window behind you.
Of course, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t give out your address.
Do Not Let Trackable Information Become Public
We have mentioned avoiding things like packing labels being visible in your video, but there are other ways information like that can get out. For example, if you accept packages from viewers, do not use your home address for the delivery of those packages. PO boxes may cost money, but they should be considered essential if you want to give your viewers a mailing address.
Consider using services like Google Voice instead of any landline phone numbers.
And, finally, while it may not seem like a big deal, consider keeping your birthday private, especially if your full name is public. A lot of information can be uncovered about someone with just their full name and a birthday.
Do Not Make Travel Plans Public
This tip is more of a general Internet safety tip, rather than a YouTube specific one, but announcing to the world that your house will be empty for two weeks is not a great plan.
Especially if you are a notable figure on YouTube. If you’ve handled yourself carefully, it won’t matter because no one will know your home address, but it’s better not to run the risk and come home to a ransacked house.
Google Yourself
We know it’s generally considered vain and narcissistic to Google your own name, but you will be doing it for a good reason. Your aim is to try and stalk yourself and see what you can find out.
Remember, unless you’re a cyber-security expert, the chances are there will be people out there who can find more than you can. So, if you manage to uncover personal information about yourself through a bit of intensive Googling, you can bet others can as well.
Use this information to shut down any leaks in your online privacy, and keep you and your loved ones safe.
Faster, easier to worth with and smaller files in Adobe Premiere Pro with these 4K Export Settings!
Today we are going to deep dive into what 4K video is, why it’s slowly replacing 1080p and what settings to use to make it painless to use!
Just because you’re shooting in 4K, that doesn’t mean you have to work in 4K. For many projects, 1080p is good enough.
The benefit of shooting in 4K is a quadrupled resolution, allowing you to zoom in cleanly since you have a much better source video to work with.
This is perfect for cutting to close-ups, effectively eliminating jump-cuts from your finished product entirely.
This effect can commonly be seen in single-camera interviews, where the perspective shifts between a wide full-body shot and a close-up shot of the interviewee talking. Pull it off well and it can be used for dramatic effect to add emphasis and connect better with the subject.
Even if your end product will be 1080p, shooting 4K will deliver a higher quality down-sampled image.
Capturing four times the amount of information you need won’t produce an image that’s four times better looking, but the end result will be noticeably sharper.
You’ll also reduce the chance of color banding, since most cameras record 4K at a higher bitrate. That means more color detail is captured, which will vastly improve gradual changes, like deep blue skies or other solid colors.
Sometimes the camera makes all the difference. Many modern mirrorless, digital SLR, and cinema cameras shoot 4K using larger sensors, effectively down-sampling a 6K or 8K image to 4K (like the relatively cheap Sony a6300, above). The Panasonic GH5 even does 6K video and 4K video at a bit-rate of 400 megabits-per-second.
Yes, there are many 1080p cameras that will shoot better HD footage than a cheap 4K camera.
What Is 4K? Do I need 4K Video?
We hear the word 4K every day in several places such as on youtube picture quality, gaming, in the specification of electronic devices like cameras, television, laptop, etc.
But what did this term mean? 4K means a digital resolution of approximately 4000 pixels; there are several different resolutions in 4K. 4K aka UHD (Ultra-high Definition), has a standard resolution as a 4K digital television of 3840*2160 with narrow borders, or 4096*2160 without borders – as popular in movies.
The picture quality of 4K content is very sharp, colorful, and professional; 4k quality enhances the user experience. It highlights every detail of the videos, let us have a quick eye on some of the advantages and disadvantages of 4K picture quality.
4K YouTube Videos vs 1080p YouTube Videos
4K is known as Ultra High Definition (UHD), whilst 1080P is simply labelled High Definition. As their names imply, 4K UHD has a considerably higher resolution than 1080P HD video. 4K resolution is exactly 3840 x 2160 pixels, whilst 1080P consists of 1920 x 1080 pixels.
The 4K designation refers to the close to 4000 horizontal pixels. Traditionally, resolution had been labelled according to vertical pixels and in the case of 1080P, 1080 vertical lines make up that high definition resolution. By comparison, 4K features 2160 pixels vertically; a considerable increase.
At an aspect ratio of 16:9, 4K contains almost four times the number of pixels on a screen compared with 1080P technology – more than eight million pixels for 4K and just two million pixels for 1080P.
This massive difference brings about some important advantages for 4K when one compares it to the quality of a 1080P video.
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.
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.
You have a YouTube channel all up and running and you’ve been uploading your new YouTube videos and content to your channel, but the views aren’t coming? Need help with the best places to share YouTube videos for more views?
Sharing your your YouTube videos on social media can be a great way to boost exposure, grow your audience and seed links back to your videos. The more social networks you can post to the more likely you are to figure out what social platform is best suited to your content. Try Instagram, Reddit, Forums, Facebook Groups, Mix and learn what works best for you, then double down.
Time to set the foundations for finding the best places to share YouTube videos for more views.
Once that’s completed it’s time to share your videos. You can create the content but if you don’t tell people where to find it you may as well be talking to yourself.
Here are the best places you absolutely must share your new YouTube videos after clicking publish:
Utilise your social media channels
Whether you’re a standalone YouTube vlogger, or you’re using videos and blogging separately, you should have all your other social media channels aligned, I recommend having at least a Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Whenever you publish a new video on YouTube make sure you share it across all your channels. It is important you tailor the content, embed the videos but leave your audience wanting more.
Different types of people utilise different social media channels, but the key is to drive them to your YouTube channel so make your content enticing, show clips from the full video, and make clear click-through. These are call to actions will obvious value explained before they click on the,
As your channel grows, your promotion should grow too.
The most important place to share your YouTube videos is on your other social media channels, on a regularly basis. There are hundreds of social media schedulers available to help you with this such as Hootsuite or SocialOomph.
I recommend using a social media scheduler as you can then plan and set how often you would like a specific video to be repromoted on your social media channel. I personally use MeetEdgar to push out 30-40 social media posts every day.
One thing you can also do on Facebook is join niche groups and pages, this gives you an opportunity to share your videos and leverage your content.
Make sure what you’re sharing is useful and relevant to your viewers, but lets say for example you’re making a YouTube channel about cleaning, there are hundreds of Cleaning Facebook groups with an active audience who would be interested in your video.
Make sure you read individual group rules regarding self-promotion, but most are happy for you to share useful content within their groups.
If you need help in making your videos look great, or promoting your videos on social media, check out my resources page, for some great tools and equipment guides.
Guest Posting to Get More Views
Look around your Vlog niche and start making friends.
Is there anyone who’s open to a guest blog / vlog? Anyone who you could do a promotion exchange with?
By working closely with people in your niche you can access their audience too. There are enough people to go around especially in terms of YouTube views.
If people are watching a video in your niche chances are, they would also be interested in your content. Send people a message and see if you could host a guest video or write a guest blog for them which will in turn promote you and your YouTube Channel.
Mix Your YouTube Videos
Mix used to be known as StumbleUpon, it still has excellent reach and is extremely easy to utilise, just download the add on to your browser and ‘mix’ your content.
This basically adds it to a database of content, if a person has selected interests that coincide with yours whenever they click the mix button, they have a chance of arriving at your content.
If they enjoyed your content, they would then remix this. The more people like your content, the more people the algorithm will push your content too thus increasing your reach and views.
Reddit
Like Facebook groups, reddit is subdivided into lots of different categories and niches, it makes sense for you to create an account and engage with niche groups like the YouTube content you are creating.
There are general video subreddits you can push your video to, but the smaller more niche groups should provide a better audience.
While the users of each forum maybe smaller the value of that audience is higher than someone without a continued interest in your videos, they’re more likely to subscribe and stick around to see other content
YouTube Ad Network – Use YouTube Ads To Get More Video Views
While I would not recommend throwing money at ads in the beginning, it can be an advantage to get the ball rolling with a new video.
YouTube own integrated ad network works out at 2p per view and these are genuine people and real viewers not bots.
This can also trigger a spiral, if the viewers you have promoted to like your content they could share it further and subscribe so play around with the ad network and see if you feel its worthwhile for your business or not.
Most importantly create good high-quality content that people want to talk about, they want to share with friends, and they want to see more of.
You can publish and share a hundred times over but if the content isn’t watchable, interesting or provide ‘something’ for your audience they’re unlikely to return so make sure you hone in on your content skills and the rest should follow accordingly
Where do you share your YouTube videos? I love to embed them into my blogs – Maybe its time for you to start your own blog! – Here is an article I wrote to explain how to start started with blogging.
How To Open A Facebook Fan Page is a question we are asked on a Regular basis. Creating a Facebook Page for your business or brand is a great step towards building a social media brand.
Facebook is the largest social media platform online and is easily the most recognisable brand that you can adopt to share your own business and brand with possible future clients.
Facebook Pages can be a very powerful tool to get your name out there and expand the reach of your companies brand.
You and advertise upcoming events, publish recent blogs, share achievements and sell products directly to a marketplace. The best thing about Facebook and its huge client reach potential? — IT’S FREE!!!
1080pMost people use 1080p of Full HD to upload to YouTube. Its easy to use, fast to render in and good for uploads. But did you know that you can make it faster to upload to YouTube and small files sizes with a few tweaks.
My YouTube export settings for Adobe Premier Pro CC to guarantee maximum quality, faster tendering times, quick uploads and smaller files.
Resolution and aspect ratio
The standard aspect ratio for YouTube on a computer is 16:9. When uploading other aspect ratios (vertical, square, etc.), the player automatically adapts itself to the size of the video, giving the best viewing experience based on the aspect ratio and device.
Content should be encoded and uploaded using the same frame rate that was used during recording.
Common frame rates include: 24, 25, 30, 48, 50 and 60 frames per second (other frame rates are also acceptable).
Interlaced content should be deinterlaced before uploading. For example, 1080i60 content should be deinterlaced to 1080p30. 60 interlaced fields per second should be deinterlaced to 30 progressive frames per second.
The bitrates below are recommendations for uploads. Audio playback bitrate is not related to video resolution.
Recommended video bitrates for SDR uploads
To view new 4K uploads in 4K, use a browser or device that supports VP9.
