Hi everyone. This is Jonathan Goodman. Welcome to another episode of The World of Internet Marketing. Today is the first segment of a multi-part look at How to Create a Business YouTube Channel. Before we get into this, let’s look at what YouTube is.
Viewership
More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube – that’s almost an hour for every person on earth. And 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. According to Nielson, YouTube reaches more U.S. adults ages 18-34 than any cable network. Thousands of channels are making six figures a year, and we’ll talk about what a channel is during this episode. They have more than a million advertisers using Google ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses, which is why we’ll focus on that. Mobile makes up almost 40% of YouTube’s global watch time.
If you want to set up a YouTube business channel, the first thing you need to do is set up a Google account, which automatically creates a Google+ account. Creating a Google account is as easy as signing up for Gmail or Google Calendar or any of those applications. When you have an established Google account, then you can create a YouTube handle. It’s important to look at the big picture. If this is a corporate account you don’t want to build it using your personal Gmail account. Instead be mindful of which email you tie to your business YouTube account.
However, that being said, my YouTube account is Jonathan Goodman not Halyard Consulting. Although the URL is Halyardconsulting, it is under the jgoodman@halyardconsulting.com email. So I didn’t make it have a personal email. It is my professional email which is really run through Google business. Since a lot of the videos are from my podcast, it really should have been called The World of Internet Marketing, but at least it’s not connected to my personal Gmail account.
When starting a new YouTube channel for your business, it’s important to remember there are multiple choices to make, so don’t get overwhelmed at the beginning. Decide on what your purpose for the channel is. Create and upload videos related to that core purpose. Create tailored content that considers what consumers need to know about your products and services.
Dashboard
Let’s take a tour through the Video Manager. We’ll do that by looking at my screen. I only have 14 subscribers, which is completely my fault. I’ve been so focused on promoting this on Spreaker and Blog Talk Radio that I’ve completely forgotten about my numbers of subscribers on YouTube. We started this as a podcast and when it became a videocast, we actually did it in Goggle+ Hangout On Air. What we’ll talk about now is that there is a great integration between YouTube and the on-air version of Goggle+ Hangout.
We’re going to go into Video Manager and to Dashboard. Notice under my name you’ll see I am YouTube Partner. The criteria to become a YouTube Partner is:
Your account is in good standing and hasn’t previously been disabled for monetization.
You upload original, quality content that is advertiser-friendly
Your video content complies with YouTube’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines
You have reviewed their copyright education materials
To be considered a YouTube partner and access promotional and skill-building opportunities, you must have at least one video approved for monetization. We can go in here and see that these are all approved for monetization.
So it’s not really about how many subscribers you have or how people have viewed your videos. It’s really about providing original unique content that is entertaining and informative.
Now let me advise you, if you’re thinking about going onto one of these networks like Fivver and hiring someone to boost your subscriber numbers with fake accounts, it’s important to know that’s strictly violating YouTube’s terms of service agreement with partners. So while I only have 14 subscribers right now, I’m ok with that because I know those number will grow. In fact, within the last 30 days, it went up significantly because now I know that I wasn’t paying attention to my subscribers on YouTube and I want them to be engaged.
I want real subscribers that are going to engage. Think about it this way. Do you want 14 subscribers all of whom are commenting, liking and sharing? Or do you want 10,000 subscribers with only 14 of them commenting, liking and sharing? If YouTube is looking at engagement from a ratio standpoint, then I’d much rather have 100% engagement than .001% engagement
So when we look at the dashboard, you’ll have notifications and they’ll tell you want you need to do. Notice that I still haven’t created a Channel Trailer. I need to do that pretty soon. It’s one of the last things that I have yet to do. Then get noticed on YouTube. There’s ways to increase that. You can work with them to optimize and gain a larger audience.
Then down here, we have a list of videos. These are the last 4 videos that I did. Then you have comments. Finally, you’ll see key statistics from the last 30 days. So in the last 30 days, I’ve had 167 video views and 2 subscribers have changed over the course of the 30 days. I don’t think that’s exactly accurate because I know that when I was writing the dialogue for this episode, I had 7 and I now have 14. So I’ve doubled, which is more than 2.
Video Manager
Now we’ll go into the Video Manager. First you have Video Uploads. You see that these are the videos that I’ve uploaded. Some of them are more popular than others. Scott Jangro, which is really incredibly popular, has 102 views. Danny Dover has 66 views and 3 likes. Scott Jangro has 3 likes. So those are good. Obviously, this is a small YouTube channel. It’s not huge, but when we’re talking about small business, unique content is important. It doesn’t have to be hundreds of thousands of people.
Then you have Live Events. We are actually running a live event. As I said in the beginning, this is different from how I’d previously done this, which was to go to Google+ On Air Hangout, build out the session and then go live. Now the way Google wants you do to this – and I don’t know if too many people know about this – they want you to go onto YouTube, go to your channel, do a live event and then that moves you over to your Goggle+ On Air Hangout. YouTube went from partners needing 1,000 subscribers down to just needing 100 subscribers, but at end the of last year it opened it up to all verified accounts in good standing, regardless of the number of followers. This whole integration with Google+ is really fantastic because what’s even better is you can now create a live event in YouTube and have it run as a Google+ Hangout.
Next we have Playlists. Playlists are a group of YouTube videos that play in order, one after the other. When one video finishes, the next starts automatically. Playlists are a great addition to your channel strategy. They increase watch time and the playlist creates another asset that appears in search results and in Suggested Videos. You see that I quickly created a playlist of all the videos done before actually videocasting.
I took the 14 audio tapes from Spreaker that were on YouTube and made them into a playlist. So if you wanted to listen to the first 6 hours of audio that don’t have any kind of video element to them, you could go in and listen to this playlist. At some point, I’ll create a video optimization playlist and I’ll start categorizing these playlists. What’s great is that it engages the user. If somebody likes the material and listens to it for 40 minutes and they still want to listen to the rest of that idea and that concept, you can have them listen to more and more within that playlist. So you get more activity and more plays.
Next we have Tags, Search History and Likes. These are my likes. But what’s interesting is that these should really be under Analytics because they just provide data about videos – videos that I liked, search history, the tags that are used within my videos. So they don’t really belong under Video Manager. There’s nothing that you can actually do. Or you could do this. Let’s choose a good one. lcharts. You see that this is a tag that shows up in 3 videos that I did. This is Playing Catch Up, Final Edit. This is Playing Catch Up 1 and Playing Catch Up 2, which had errors in them.
At some point, I should go in and delete these. But I could say for this video, I don’t want the tags to be lcharts and I could remove that tag. I could also tag it with other things. So there is a little bit of work and that would take a lot of time to integrage and do. But again, I think this is much more of an analytics tool than a video manager tool.
Community
When we look at Community, we have Comment Settings and Inbox. So here’s Comment Settings. It lets you pre-approve and ban users comments as well as blacklist specific words you deem inappropriate. There is also universal default settings for approvals of comments. So you see this on your new videos. Do you want to allow all comments, all comments for review or disable comments? Of course, you as the person who’s managing the Channel, will get notification when somebody puts in a comment anyway. I don’t have hundreds and hundreds of comments on my videos, so I’m able to monitor it by just looking at the ones that come in.
At some point, if this grows – or if you’re working with a controversial topic or if people are upset by a video you made – then you might want to go into the blacklist and add keywords that you don’t want allowed. You can ban certain users and you can disable the comments or hold all comments. But comments are important because they show that you’re engaged with readers. If someone comments, you want to comment back and have a dialogue with them. That really helps.
Here in the Inbox. When someone sends you an email through YouTube, it will end up here. You’re going to get emails from people. You’re going to get emails that they commented, and this is the area where you can manage it. I’ve deleted all my emails because I already responded to them and they were just hanging out and I don’t need them. You’ll get an email to your attached Gmail account as well.
Channel Settings
Channel settings lets you manage the way that you handle your channels. The Features allows you to enable additional features. You see that my Paid Subscriptions isn’t enabled because I need at least 10,000 subscribers, but everything else is enabled. I am Partner Verified, so I don’t know why that didn’t show up earlier. I will tell you that it was here last night. I do have two accounts. I have a Jonathan Goodman account and a Halyard Consulting account. All the videos that I was working on are in the Jonathan Goodman account and the Halyard Consulting account had no videos. So I actually went in and deleted that. I have to make sure now that YouTube didn’t somehow screw up my partnership with them. But here it does show that I’m a verified partner in good standing.
Monetization allows you to enable and disable universally. My account is completely enabled. If I wanted to go in and disable for certain videos, let’s say Playing Catchup, Part 2, we can play with these because I’m eventually going to delete them. Here I can go in and un-monetize this. And you can choose the thumbnails. This is all easy to do. You can build your own custom thumbnail. So here I have monetization. You have your choices, as always, in building up your basic info, monetization and advanced settings. So you turn off monetize with ads. You save that and then you can go back into the Video Manager and see that it’s not monetized.
Let’s go back up to Channel Settings and we’re going to look at Defaults. This is Universal Defaults and we’ll go through the list. You can make all of your videos private or public or unlisted. It’s really important to choose a category. I know that it’s really hard. I wish that they had a Business category and they just don’t, so I have to go with Science & Technology. The other option that I could have done was How To, but that’s really like how to do your hair, how to dance, etc. I could have chosen Entertainment, but it’s not really that or News & Politics. So I had to go with Science & Technology, but I really wish they had a Business category. They do have Education. So the category you choose depends what your industry is. Stand YouTube license because my content is my content. I don’t want to make it Creative Comments. Creative Comments with Attribution means that somebody could take your content and put it somewhere and make money off of it. Or depending on the attribution that you have, they could use it for their stuff. And I don’t really want that because the content that I create is important.
The title is The World of Internet Marketing. I have a little description here. This is critically important. I mention my name. I mention my company. I mention my book. I talk about what the majority of the videos are going to be about. You have tags, just like you would have tags of keywords. So we have Internet Marketing, Podcasts, Search Engine Optimization, Halyard Consulting, New Jersey, Schema, Social Media, Analytics and Helpouts. What this does is that when you create a new video, they already pre-populate this content. Let’s say I just wanted to create a new video and I went into that end where it lets me fill out the title, description and tags, this will already be here for me. Always. So if I do a video really fast and I just wanted to put it up. And I could go back in and change the title, description and tags later. But for this one, I went back in and I changed The World of Internet Marketing to read How to Create a YouTube Business Channel. And then I put the description of what this episode is going to be about and then I add a tag. I left some tags in and I took other tags out.
Comments and Responses. Yeah, I want comments and responses. I want all my ads monetized. Here’s the universal for monetized ads. Ad format. Overlaid video ads and tributes. Sure, why not until I see one making money over the other. Then I’ll choose both. Caption certification. Yes. The content is never aired on television in the U.S. I feel this is important. I feel that it should always be there. The other choices here are Content Has Only Aired on Television with U.S. Captions and there’s a whole series of these. But I always feel that it’s important to note, hey, this has never been on television and this is unique content that you won’t see anywhere else.
Suggested Video Improvement. I don’t need that. I find them to be aggravating at best and time-consuming at worst. Video Location. They’ve got my longitude and latitude, which is really great. Video Statistics. I don’t necessarily want to make those public right now. When I have 1,000 subscribers and I have hundreds of people looking at this, maybe. But even then, I don’t know. But I know a lot of people that do make it public. I guess it does help is you’re getting thousands of video views and a lot of likes. Then if you show that, people will think, oh, this is positive and this is really important. Actually, now that I say that, I’m actually going to make a change and make it public. I will show it. And then save it after you make the change.
InVideo Program They’ve got Featured Video and Add a Watermark. Now Add a Watermark is a lot of work. You have to do transparency and it can only allow for one color. So while they have person space, I’ll show you. See this is not good. This is okay. This is one color. And this is one color. ‘For best results, use transparency and just one color. The uploaded watermark will be overlaid with a 70% capacity on all your uploads. Making good use of transparency ensures that the image will be less distracting, especially on small screens like mobile phones.’ And the maximum file size is 1 MB. So it’s kind of like your Avatar image, right? And then it’s all the way up in the corner. I just don’t think this is needed. Maybe if you have good logo that fits into a very small space and it’s black and white. Maybe then you might want to add a watermark, but other than that, I don’t recommend it.
Featured Video allows you to drive your audience to a specific video you want to highlight. So right here, I’ve added video optimization with Danny Dover on LifeListed and I’ve said, okay, at the end of all of my videos, I want you to show this other really great video that I did with Danny Dover and put it in the last 10 seconds of the video. And I added a custom message saying “Check out other episodes.”
Fan Finder. With Fan Finder, YouTube will promote your channel to specific viewers that watch similar videos to the ones you’re producing. The catch is that you need 1,000 subscribers so they can match the data. I’ve got 14, so I’m working on building up to 1,000. But once you get 1,000 subscribers, then YouTube can analyze the type of person that is watching your videos, and obviously my videos are about Internet marketing and SEO. They’ll promote your videos and you see that at the end of videos. They show you other video swats. They also put it into the right-hand column. I’ve got these two cued up because these are my two most popular. We’ve got Scott Jangro of Sharelist and that’s doing really well in both Spreaker and iTunes. So as soon as I reach 1,000 subscribers, this will be activated and running.
Advanced. Now let’s go through Advanced. I’ve got my name in there and I can of course change this by editing channel name. Your channel name is linked to your connected Google+ account. It’s on Goggle+. It may take a few minutes to show on your channel. You should really do this when setting this all up. I could have done Jonathan Edward Goodman. I could have done Halyard Consulting. I could have done The World of Internet Marketing. I’m going to leave it the way that it is. This is the video. I’m in the United States. My key channel categories, my keywords, are similar to those that are already put in when I do these videos. Allow advertisements to be displayed alongside my videos? Sure. LinkedIn and AdWords for video account. I did try to do this.
First of all, I don’t work in AdWords. I much prefer Facebook. I’m getting a little bit into Linked In, but I really think that Facebook is a much better return on investment value than AdWords. I just feel there’s a lot of corruption in AdWords and I don’t want to get into that whole thing. My AdWords account is actually an agency account, so I had been managing other client’s AdWord accounts. I don’t do that anymore because that’s not something that I really want to specialize in. But in trying to link the AdWords account to the agency account, it wouldn’t let me do that. So I’d have go back in and connect it to either a client or I’d have to a Halyard Consulting account within that agency account. Then associated websites, this is Halyard Consulting so it’s successfully connected.
Analytics
Let’s look at the Analytics. There is a lot of information in here. It’s really great information. It’s equal to data we get from the Google Analytics accounts. We can see here that I have 36 videos. I’m going to take 2 out at the end of this. I started back on April 9, 2012. Lifetime use is 702. This is the channel itself. For the performance in the last 30 days (that’s February 27 to March 8), I’ve had 171 views, the estimated minutes watched is 1,261 minutes, 21 hours and one minute. That’s a 63.45% increase compared to the previous period. That’s really quite incredible.
So if we go back and look at February, I only had 826 minutes and down from the previous period of January. And if I go back and look at the last 30 days, we’re up significantly. Am I producing better content? Am I reaching a larger audience? Yeah, very possibly. We can look and see what the top 10 videos were in the last 30 days. The Scott Jangro one was done January 17, 2014. So it was done several months ago, whereas the Danny Dover one was March 7, which is very recent. I’m still getting a lot of runs on Scott’s piece, but right now Danny’s piece is the most popular. He’s very popular and he has a good audience. Even Cory’s piece, which was done afterwards, only has 25 views in the past month. His was done March 14, so his is fairly new, whereas Danny’s is March 7. So he’s got a full week on him. What’s great and what really proves why we need to do videos, podcasting and put these things out through social media is look at this: This was done at the beginning of the year. We’re now three months into the year and there’s still traction on these videos.
Estimated watch is 38 minutes. That means that those four people didn’t watch the entire episode. In fact, the duration of the episode is 33 minutes, so each person watched about 10 minutes. We can click in and look at what people were viewing, so we know that they didn’t watch the entire thing. This is down 75% compared to the previous period. The more recent the content, the more you’re going to get out of it. It still drags, but it never completely zeroes out. There’s always somebody watching, even it’s just for a minute or two. You can put this into playlist. Let’s say that I create a playlist of top 10 videos of all time in 2014. I put Scott in there, I put Danny in there and I put Corey in there. What will happen is that people will watch that playlist and they’ll click around in that playlist. So the playlist now becomes an element that is analyzed and reviewed with data in the analytics.
You can see that over here we have earnings reports and estimated earnings reports. It’s totally zero, which is fine. Ad performance is a new report. Let’s head back to the main thing. We’ve had 5 likes, we’ve had 4 shares, 1 favorites, down 2 subscribers. That’s not counting the new 7 subscribers that we got over the last 48 hours, so we’ll probably see that coming up in the next two days. Let’s look at views. This is really great data because I don’t even have to do the math. I can look for Scott’s views. Here’s Scott’s right here. The average view is 9 minutes, 26 seconds. So nearly 10 minutes per person. We’ve got the increases and the decreases and it really has great data.
What’s great here is that you can now look at this. Let’s say I wanted to make a change to the The World of Internet Marketing handle. I would say, what has continually gotten full views all the time for the entire time? If we go back to the Dread Pirates Roberts episode, even though there’s only one, the estimated watch time is 20 minutes and the show is actually 19 minutes, 36 seconds. Now if we look at it over the lifetime, we see that this is continually popping up. Even though it’s only one or two people every month, it’s still information that is interesting and unique to someone. Realize that this was not a videocast. This was purely audio from before we started doing video. The estimated minutes watched is 67. We know that the show is 20 minutes, so some people are watching the entire thing, but the average is 5 minutes watch time. Remember this has no video. If you add video, people are willing to watch more than if they were are watching just one frame.
Let’s go back to the full thing. Demographics: There’s not enough data. That’s fine. I bet if we looked at lifetime, we’d see something. Yes. When we look at lifetime, we see that I don’t have anyone in the younger demographics (ages 13-17 and 18 to 24). This is all boring stuff to them. The viewers were 63% male and 37% female. The 35 to 44 age group is my right demographic. That’s exactly where I want to be. And a little more to 44 to 54 age group. So that’s perfect. This is exactly where I want to be. And nearly 100% are from the United States, which is perfect.
Playback Locations: ‘Data from this report is incomplete or missing. Traffic source and playback location classification was updated on March 1st. To better collect mobile traffic and other site change data for average view duration and estimated minutes watched is not available before September 1st.’ That’s totally fine. This data is over the lifetime. You see that 68% are watching on YouTube and 27% are watching in embedded player or other websites. I put the video up on Facebook. I put the video up on Halyard Consulting. That means it’s generating traffic from those other areas.
Let’s look at this. Watch page is individual video page on YouTube.com and YouTube apps. Most common viewing page is on YouTube. I’m not sure what YouTube other would be. But here’s mobile devices. So I don’t have as big a pull on mobile devices, probably because the show is so long. It’s 40 minutes. If I broke this up – and I talked with Ed Siemienkowicz about breaking up these videos into smaller segments of 10 minutes – then people might be willing to watch on their mobile devices.
Here’s something interesting. From 2012 through now, look at the increase. That’s really staggering. In the last 3 months, there’s been so much change in the amount of traffic we’re getting. Part of that is that we’re now doing videocasts instead of podcasts, so there’s a dynamic element to it. Let’s look at traffic sources. Again, this is run by Google and Google turned off direct, so you don’t see any of that stuff. So we’re not exactly sure how 195 got there. Views of unknown referral on mobile apps and direct traffic on the YouTube watch and channel fan pages. Possible origins of direct traffic include email and instant message clients or copy and pasting of viewing into the browser. We know that this is embed and we do know that I do MailChimp, I put it up on Facebook, I put it up on the Halyard Consulting website, so embedded players is understandable. We don’t really need a breakdown of that. We know that 26% are coming in through that.
YouTube search. That’s great. External website. Maybe this is Halyard Consulting. It’s hard to tell. Or maybe it’s another link from somewhere else. Channel page. Suggested video. Other features. This is good data. Devices. Not expecting any here, but as mobile becomes more predominant, there will be more information in there. Audience retention. This is really good. The average of all of my shows is 5 minutes, 52 seconds and 17% are watching at least 5 minutes, 52 seconds. That is good to know because it means I really need to bang it out of the park within those first 5 minutes and engage the user and the audience. Otherwise, I’m going to lose them. If I could now modify this and change how long people are watching and make it more engaging and go from 5 minutes on average to 10 or 20 minutes, then I’d know I’ve got a good show.
Subscribers we already know is 7 subscribers and 7 gain, so we’re up to 14. As far as likes and dislikes for the show, again Scott Jangro has the most likes. Not that much engagement, but it is enough to monitor. Not that many favorites, but this is still good data if you want to review all this. We have some comments. The Billions Rising. That’s an outlier because you’d think it would be Scott Jangro, but Scott Jangro doesn’t have any comments. Danny Dover has some comments. But Billions Rising is in there, so what happened in Billions Rising that there was that much engagement? That’s really good. Sharing, again Billions Rising. That could simply be that the person I was interviewing wanted to share this information and get this out. And her group and the people she was connected to wanted to share it and get it out. That’s really good.
Creation Tools
Then there’s Creation Tools, so let’s pull that up. These are interesting features. We’ve got Audio Library and we’ve got Video Editor. I don’t really know who is using this or how they’re integrating this, but it is free music. I use a very cool tool that I love. I’ll bring it up for you. It’s WeVideo. It’s currently disconnected, so we’ll connect it back up. I do a lot of editing for one of my clients and we put up a lot of information. This is for A Call 4 Paws. You can create a new project. You can break this down. That’s really where I do my video editing and they have a great library, so I don’t use this. Obviously, I could. Video editing tools are so easy now to use and integrate with music and just transitions. So regardless of what you use and whether you use the YouTube video editor and audio library, there’s no reason to just have a silly little video that isn’t well-defined with a beginning and an end.
My Channel
My Channel. This is important. I want to show you in the About section here. These are featured channels. You can add a channel for one of your partners, a different department of your company or your individual employees. And that will make it available. It pushes the popular channels on YouTube down and you can add. Like, I might add Danny Dover and Danny adds me. So someone who wants to take in all the information that you have will look at that featured channel and say “so this is more information about this topic” or this is somehow integrated in with what you’re doing.
Tips and Tricks
I wanted to wrap things up with a couple of tips and tricks. You will not be able to upload mp3 or JPEG images by themselves to YouTube. You will need to convert to a video slideshow. The common accepted files are MPEG, MOV and AVI files.
Final Thoughts
Keep an open mind when beginning your design. Take the opportunity to test out different designs and different elements. I didn’t really talk about that. So this is your channel art. It’s a very large file and it needs to be done correctly. I’m going to hire a designer to get this done. And you can add your Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, LinkedIn. I’ve got all those connected and that shows up over here when you’re looking at this. Do as I say, not as I do. It was blank a couple of days ago and I decided to put this in. So keep that in mind and see what works well for your brand.
Remember to ask everyone to subscribe to your channel. It sounds a little funny coming from me because I actually haven’t asked people to subscribe to my YouTube channel in the past because I was so focused on Spreaker and Google Hangouts, but after doing this exercise I realize how important it is. So need to get my numbers up.
Keep at it. Don’t stop creating things of value for your customers even if they don’t immediately flock to your page by the millions. Don’t set your expectations too high when you first get started. I know that when I first started my podcast, if I’d said, ‘I’m going to get 100 people to listen every week and otherwise, I’ll stop it,’ that wouldn’t have worked. One video isn’t going to gain a million viewers. You have to work to establish an audience.
In the next session, we’ll talk about marketing your YouTube channel. We’ll look at things like YouTube certification, advertising on YouTube and how to get social media involved in all of that. I was really excited that Spreaker numbers are growing great, but I’m going to give you all a challenge. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and tell everybody you know who listens to this to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thank you everyone.
Outro
Again, this is Jonathan Goodman and this is the World of Internet Marketing. You can follow me @HalyardConsult on Twitter. New episodes of the World of Internet Marketing can be heard every
Friday. You can access the archives of my previous shows on Spreaker.com – user name Jonathan Goodman. The podcast is also available with transcription at halyardconsulting.com and geekcast.fm one week after the episode airs. Thank you all for listening to another episode of The World of Internet Marketing. Don’t forget to pick up my book The World of Internet Marketing on Amazon, and if you like this podcast please share it with your network of friends and family. Have a great week.