01.The basics

Not only our audience is on YouTube, but as the internet’s second largest search engine, YouTube can help us improve our SEO and overall brand presence. YouTube allows companies to present unique content that's easy for viewers to consume and share.

The first thing we’ll need to do is actually create our business channel, and YouTube makes it incredibly easy to do. With just a couple of clicks, we’ll be ready to dive into setting up our new channel.

We sign into YouTube and click on the user icon at the top right of the screen

We click on the gear icon to get to our account’s YouTube Settings

We click on create a new channel

Then we choose “Use a business or other name”

We add our Brand name and click create.

02. The about section

If you're wondering how to start a YouTube channel that draws attention to your brand, the next step is to fill out your profile and channel description. This is the first option we see after we have created a channel. Here, we should describe our brand and what viewers can expect to see on our channel. This is also a great place to add links to our website and other social media networks that we use. This description will appear in more than one place on our channel, so we need to be sure to put our best foot forward when filling it out!

03. The Channel Art

When we go to a YouTube channel, we’ll immediately be greeted with a large banner displaying the channel name. This is our cover photo and is prime real estate for introducing our brand.

We can make our cover photo as extravagant or minimal as we’d like, but we just need to make sure that our brand is the focal point, as it’s going to be the first impression someone gets upon entering. Luckily, there are a great assortment of tools to get us started. YouTube recommends uploading oour cover photo at 2560 x 1440 pixels with a maximum file size of 4MB.

04. Know Our Market, Know Our Content Type

Since we’re starting a YouTube channel for our own business, we should have more than enough source material to work with, and we can approach our video content in more than one way.

If we have a complex product and want to empower our customers to learn more about it, video tutorials might be a great avenue for us. If we want to show off great reviews from our customers, testimonials may be the way to go. Even better, we can do both! This way, our channel has a variety of content to consume, which can resonate with different viewers.

We can also create content that’s aimed at our target demographic of our business. This is a powerful inbound marketing technique that draws customers toward our brand. The more that we cater to our target market, the more likely they will want to look into our business services.

05. The Channel Trailer

Like our channel art, we can also create a channel trailer. Channel trailers are usually short and sweet, and are a good introduction for new visitors. We can let your audience know who we are, what our business is all about and what kind of content they can expect to see in the future. Creating a channel trailer will also be good practice leading up to our first video.

06. Uploading Our first video

At this point, we’ve probably done a fair amount of research about our first video, and if we already have our channel trailer, we have a bit of practice as well! Now it’s time to take the next step.

Once we’re done creating and editing our first video, it’s time to upload it. Given that YouTube relies on video uploads, we’ll find the upload option at the top right of the screen when weu log into your account.

07. Optimizing for search

When uploading a video, we’ll be asked to fill in a title, description, and tags. These are essential components to have our video easily discoverable in YouTube search. Much like SEO for our own website, YouTube has its own set of parameters for us to optimize our video for search. we will need to fill these sections out to the best of our ability using keywords to describe the video and our business. A keyword-rich (but not heavy) title and description can go a long way and we’ll be able to see what works for our videos as we progress.

If our video is well optimized for YouTube itself, this can extend to search engines as well. As a Google-owned product, YouTube has tight integration with the search giant. If we play our cards right, we’ll find our videos ranking high on both YouTube and Google.

08. Staying consistent

We can't expect success if we plan to create a YouTube channel, upload one video and then neglect it completely. Creating a successful YouTube channel takes time and effort, and viewers expect consistency from the channels that they subscribe to. After our first video, we need to be sure to plan the next few videos ahead of time.

If we are unsure if we’ll have time to create a video every week or every other week, we can take a day out of our schedule to create more than one video and release them on our own schedule.

09. Integrating our channel in our website and social

We have a website and now a YouTube channel. Now it’s time to share our videos outside of YouTube and our website should be their first stop. Here are a couple of ways that we can use to showcase our videos on our website.

Front and center:
Our videos take time and effort to create, so why not show them off? We can add your YouTube video to the home page on our website so it’s one of the first things that a visitor will see!

Blog all about it:
If we have a blog on our website, then our YouTube videos have a home away from home now. We can embed them right into new blog posts and even tell our website subscribers by sending a newsletter!

We Go Social:
We can take pride in our work and share our content on our business social networks. The more we share, the more exposure, and that’s what this is all about. We Share it everywhere!

10. Engaging With Our Community

YouTube wouldn’t be what it is today without viewers actively viewing and engaging with video content that businesses like ours and people create, so we need to make sure to engage back! This is especially important if we plan to leverage our popularity to promote our business on YouTube.

We will need to build a community around our channel, and engaging with our viewers is a very important step. We need to constantly reply to comments, ask and answer questions, and most importantly, listen to them! Our viewers want to watch our content, so is important to give them what they want.

With a well-nurtured community, we’ll likely get some free word of mouth advertising in the process, too.

11. Analyze, optimize, repeat

Even the best can do better. Once we have a foothold on our channel, it’s time to get a bird’s-eye view of how it’s performing. YouTube Analytics will help us along the way and will guide us in the direction of how we may want to optimize our videos for the future.

Analytics will allow us to get insight on the people who are watching our videos, which allows us to hone into our target demographic even further. It’ll also give us a better idea as to why one video may have performed better than another. It’s a powerful tool for our business channel.

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