Part 3: Growing and Knowing Your Audience
After understanding how to build your channel and fill it with great content, it’s time to concentrate on building your audience. The chapters in this part can help you find your way to building a healthy following.
Part 4: YouTube Channels Are Serious Business
This part covers what you need to get started with the business side of YouTube. Whether you’re looking to raise brand awareness or considering collaboration with your fellow YouTubers, the chapters in this part can help you get the job done.
Part 5: The Part of Tens
The For Dummies version of a top ten list found in this part of the book provides insight into the common and not-so-common aspects of mastering your YouTube channel. More specifically, you’ll find out all about the steps you can take to improve your YouTube search results so that viewers are better able to track down your masterpiece. You’ll also find out ten things everyone should know about copyright so that you can keep the lawyers off your back.
Icons Used in This Book
What’s a For Dummies book without icons pointing you in the direction of truly helpful information that’s sure to help you along your way? In this section, we briefly describe each icon used in this book.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the pages you’re reading right now, this book comes with a free access-anywhere cheat sheet that offers a number of YouTube-related pearls of wisdom. To get this cheat sheet, visit www.dummies.com and type youtube for dummies cheat sheet in the Search box.
Where to Go from Here
You can either read this book straight through or skip from chapter to chapter. If you need to brush up on some of the YouTube basics, turn the page. If tips on producing that great YouTube video is what you’re looking for, go straight to Part 2. Use this book to find out how you, too, can create and manage great content on the YouTube platform.
Part 1
Getting Started with YouTube
IN THIS PART …
Find out how to set up a home on YouTube.
Master all the YouTube basics.
See what’s involved in building your own YouTube channel.
Chapter 1
Making a Home on YouTube
IN THIS CHAPTER
YouTube is the new business-and-entertainment frontier, which means there’s as much excitement and creativity associated with creating and managing a YouTube channel these days as was the case during the early days of television, when the sky seemed the limit. YouTube — like television before it — is caught up in the same adventure that comes from defining its target audience as well as finding out what audiences are willing to watch.
For television, the adventurous nature of its early endeavors could be traced to the fact that TV was so new that audiences really didn’t know what they wanted. For YouTube, working in today’s market, it’s much more about meeting the diverse interests and needs of an audience that attracts more than a billion people from all over the planet.
Anyone who wants to show off their video prowess or share their vision with the world can hang a virtual shingle on YouTube by starting their own channel. Of course, when television began, we humans had more toes than the TV had channels. These days, YouTube has billions of users. That makes running a successful YouTube channel seem a bit more daunting.
Having more than 2 billion monthly active users can make getting noticed on your channel feel like searching for a virtual needle in an online haystack. Yet regardless of the steep increase in competition, the intention has always been the same — get people to watch your channel. But it’s not all bad news: You also have an advantage over your counterpart in the 1940s. Back then, it took a great deal of capital to get started on television. Today? Not so much. In fact, if you just want a platform for presenting some of your video work, YouTube can make that possible without your having to fork over one thin dime.
Knowing that YouTube is free to use should reduce some of your worries — at least from a financial perspective. Couple that with the size and diversity of the YouTube audience — and the endless number of topics that interest them — and it’s easy to believe that you have a fair chance of success for your channel. That’s true, up to a point — if the point is you want your channel to thrive, you need to provide your viewers with compelling content.
Saying that your channel needs to host solid content that people actually want to see seems as glaringly obvious as saying a hamburger joint must make a good burger in order to survive. But content merely makes up the first part of the equation. The rest depends on how you bring viewers to that content: While YouTube is free, video production certainly is not. Unless you want to shell out money from your own pocket, you need to generate some funds to produce high quality content for your channel. In the world of YouTube, one major way to generate such funds is with advertising revenue — and it should come as no surprise that the more viewers you can attract, the greater your potential to generate advertising revenue. How much depends on your needs and ambitions, but increased revenue can lead to better production values, which brings it all back to more revenue.
But before you start worrying about all that money you’re going to make, let’s take a look at what it takes to get started on a YouTube channel for you or your business.
The YouTube Phenomenon: Why You Need to Be on YouTube
Like snowflakes on a winter day, or episodes of The Simpsons,