Start Your YouTube Channel without Looking Like a Newbie | Ep. 97

Stop stalling and start your YouTube channel with confidence! I’ll show you how to look like an expert on YouTube from day one, without expensive equipment or endless practice. Discover the three things you need before you hit record: smart channel settings, a focused YouTube topic strategy, and a launch series that connects with your audience. Want my step-by-step blueprint? Check out the free workshop linked below!

Launch Your Darn Channel Workshop: https://videobrand.link/lydca

YouTube Visibility Report: https://videobrandtoolkit.com/visibility

✨ STILL IGNORED IN YOUR NICHE? GET YOUR YOUTUBE VISIBILITY REPORT: https://meredithmarsh.co/visibility

📹 Be Binge-worthy on YouTube: https://videobrand.link/become-bingeable

🟣 Video Brand Academy: https://videobrand.link/vba 

🎥 CRUSH IT ON CAMERA GUIDE: https://vidpromom.com/crush

🎧 Video Brand Infusion Podcast: http://meredithmarsh.co/podcast 

📲 Download my FREE Video Brand Academy app! 👉 https://videobrand.link/app

👉 Consistent Sales of Your Course with YouTube: https://youtu.be/GBhulsp0s-4 

📹 Follow on YouTube for Video Podcast: https://youtu.be/zkscCExxg9Y?si=B2EAIPxJV0-jEP-7

Transcript

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So if you've been stalling at finally launching your YouTube channel or going all in on YouTube as a coach, a consultant, a course creator, an author, you've been putting it off because you just don't want to show up looking like a newbie, like a complete noob to the YouTube platform. Let me tell you how I would launch a channel that looks pro, looks legit, positions you as an authority and an expert in your industry from day one. No fancy gear, no big on-camera glow-up, no years of practicing talking to the camera, whether you've never published a YouTube video before in your life, or you have some videos on your channel that have been collecting dust for the last couple of years. Because showing up with videos to an audience of zero and looking like a newbie on YouTube has very little to do with your setup or how polished you are. It comes down to three things, and most people never set up any of them. And in a moment, I'm also gonna tell you where you can get my exact blueprint for launching or relaunching a client-attracting YouTube channel, even if you are starting from scratch. This is a specific channel launch series that I'm teaching to my video brand academy students, but I'm gonna tell you where to get your hands on it yourself. So stick with me here. My name is Meredith and I'm here to help you look good, sound good, and feel good on camera and build your binge-worthy video brand. I teach online business owners how to market themselves with YouTube. So this isn't about becoming a, you know, famous YouTuber or anything. If that's what you're looking for, this video is not for you. But if you're a business owner who already knows that YouTube is the most powerful way to grow your audience online, welcome. And the number one thing I want you to take away from this video is that looking pro on YouTube, establishing yourself as a business owner who is legit, who knows what they're talking about, who has expertise in your industry, isn't about polish or charisma or experience talking to the camera. It's about three things that you set up before you even hit record. And those three things are your channel settings, your topic strategy, and your launch series. Which is not the same as make better videos or just make a hundred crappy videos until you've, you know, magically figure it out. A newbie with a really good camera and great lighting still comes off as a newbie without the structure and the strategy that establishes them as a go-to expert in their nature industry. Newbies wing it the whole time and treat every single video as a Hail Mary that maybe something's gonna take off. What real business owners do is build an ecosystem with their YouTube channel. So let me explain what I mean by this. I've always been a figure it out as I go type of person. But when I first started my YouTube channel, which was a long time ago at this point, when I first started my YouTube channel, I just did what logically made sense to me as someone whose background is in web design, which is figure out what my target audience is searching for. Like what are the things they're going and typing into the search bar, and then creating the content that specifically targets that question and answering the question or solving the problem or teaching the thing that they're trying to learn. And yes, YouTube has changed features and things here and there, but the basis of how the algorithms work, because the algorithms are based on viewer behavior, they're based on serving the users, not serving you, the creator of the content, that hasn't changed. And what I see a lot of um, I get a lot of questions or I see questions um around the internet about like, well, this person says that um you know long-form content on YouTube has to be polished. You have to have this like high production production value. Um, and then I see other people say, oh, just like get out your phone and just be authentic and be natural and um and it doesn't matter, like it doesn't matter your lighting and all that stuff, two things can be true at once, but neither of those things is a strategy for growing your audience. Neither of those things is going to help or hurt you. And so if you focus on the what sounds like advice from the YouTube educators out there, instead of focusing on these three things, your settings, your strategy, and your launch series, you're going to end up creating content that doesn't actually pay off, that doesn't actually grow your channel. So let me get you started in the right direction. Let's talk about your channel settings. This is like the technical kind of like nitty-gritty stuff. It's it's weirdly weird that to like set up your YouTube channel to actually like hit like start YouTube channel. There's a button, right? You log in on YouTube and it's like create YouTube channel, pick a name, and there it is. That's it. Like there's literally one setting, which is like choose the channel name. Even choosing the channel name can sometimes send you into a spiral of like, well, what should the name be? Should it be my name? Should should it be my business's name? Should it be like an SEO keyword or something? You can change it later. So don't overthink about the name of your channel. Just hit the button that says create channel. And then you can, of course, add a profile picture, which I recommend to be a picture of yourself because humans want to interact with other humans. And you can upload a channel banner, but you know what? You don't even have to do that. You know, I sometimes think that my clients open up like Adobe Express or however they're creating their channel banner and they're spending a lot of time and a lot of energy getting it right and making it pretty, and they're doing that instead of making the videos. The videos on your channel are the best possible branding you could ever do on your channel. So don't even worry about the banner at this point, but I do want you to take a look at the bio or the the about section of your channel because this is where you have an opportunity to have one really good descriptor, one really good line that tells a potential viewer or a potential subscriber or a potential client exactly who this channel is for. Not necessarily what this channel is about, and not who you are as the creator, but who this channel is for. Now, um, a couple days ago inside of Video Brand Academy, we had a meetup and Lisa came on. Lisa is one of our members. She came on to share her recent results with growing her channel. She's at about 13,000 subscribers now. Six months ago, she had a little over 2,000. I'm hoping to get Lisa on to the channel with an interview. But I just want to point out as an example, Lisa is helping people learn how to repair sewing machines on her channel. It's a very niche niche, you know I love a niche niche. The video she published eight days ago has 92,000 views. Okay, so this is a niche people are interested in. But her bio, the line in her bio says, whether you stitch, quilt, teach, or dream, this space is for modern makers. Then dot dot dot. And then you can go in and like read the rest of the bio. So if you want to check that out, just check out Lisa Seemswell on YouTube. And again, I'm I hope I'm gonna get her here so that I can deep dive on exactly how um and like what transpired to make her channel blow up just recently because this is really exciting. But see how her line is whether you stitch, quilt, teach, or dream, this space is for modern makers. One line tells you exactly who this channel is for. That's the kind of thing that I mean when I talk about having your settings right on your channel. Now there are a few more settings that I want to walk you through, but they get kind of tedious in a regular YouTube video. And that's why I'm hosting a new workshop that I'm calling just launch your darn channel already. Yeah, I know. That's the name. Even if you already have a YouTube channel, there still might be settings that you didn't know about or they were like buried somewhere that you might want to learn about. So come to the workshop and let's let's solve those things together. Next thing, the next thing is strategy. And unless you're totally new here, which is which is fine, welcome, hit that subscribe button. You've probably heard me talk about the spider web strategy for growing on YouTube. And this is a way to kind of plan out all of the possible videos that you could post on YouTube and then figuring out which ones are the most viable when you're just starting out, and then sticking to some closely related clusters of topics that you kind of like build out over time. It's it creates this snowball effect where your videos can be found in search from like new people who've never heard of you. They're just searching for solutions, they're searching for questions, and you show up with the answers. But because of the nature of the tightly woven web of content, it also makes it really easy for the YouTube algorithm to basically promote your videos for you. It's like free advertising on YouTube. So you're getting the best of both worlds, the search algorithm and the recommendation algorithm. And that's the magic of why I say YouTube is the most powerful way to grow your audience online. You're not reliant on just one or the other type of viewer behavior. And that's the basis of building an ecosystem. It's getting the traction and the traffic and the viewers from day one. And with a spider web strategy, I like to say you make it stupid easy for the algorithm to know who your target audience is so that your audience continues to grow and grow and grow. Now we have to be careful as a business owner that we're not just growing the YouTube channel, right? You're attracting ideal clients, ideal students, ideal customers, right? And so there's a nuance to simply just making videos for what people are searching for and just going after views and subscribers versus going after target clients and customers. And this is exactly what I mean by building a YouTube ecosystem because it's not just a channel, it's an ecosystem that supports your business. You're creating an asset for your business with YouTube. So a newbie on YouTube without a strategy, without the settings, without a launch series is going to take videos, video ideas off the top of their head, the things that they want to talk about, the things that they want to be known for, and they're going to make videos on those topics and put them on their channel and think that that's going to make them look like the expert that they are. The problem with that, and this is where a real pro on YouTube is going to do it a little different, is that the topics that are just coming off the top of your head, the things that you want to be known for, aren't necessarily the things that your ideal clients and customers want to watch, which can be hard to hear if you're if you're a coach, if you're an expert, if you know what you're talking about. You know what people need to do. You know what people need to know to get the desired results that your business exists to help people get. You know what people need. People don't know what you know. People are sitting here in pain, in frustration, in wondering what do I do about this and how do I solve this problem? And they're going to YouTube and searching and and and seeking videos that simply solve the problems or the pain that they're in. Because they don't know what you know. This is why you could post the same video as somebody else in your niche where you you feel like you're basically saying the same thing. You're basically conveying the same information, but your video doesn't get views and theirs takes off. And it's not because the information is different and it's not because you, you know, your video wasn't good enough or like your lighting was bad or something. It's simply how they approached that topic from the perspective and the angle of what their clients and customers are really wanting. And what's at stake if you get it wrong is that if you launch your channel with a strategy where you're attracting the wrong audience and putting that in air quotes because wrong audience might just be wrong for you, like wrong for your channel, wrong for your offers. Like they're not your ideal clients or customers. If you make it really hard for YouTube to know who you're here for, then it's gonna be really hard to get the right people to show up in your comment section, on your channel, in your email subscriber list, like in your business. So starting off with a strategy uh with an intentional client attraction strategy, a spider web strategy from the get-go, then you avoid having to like figure out how do I fix it down the road, right? Number three, a series. Now, I've always been a big fan of creating seriesified content on YouTube. Um, I've gotten away from it recently, and I I keep saying, and maybe I said this in a couple, a couple videos ago. I keep saying, like, I'm gonna go back to this. Um, but I'm a big fan of seriesifying your content. It's how I started my channel. It helped me in my brain kind of see the bigger picture of what I was doing before I really knew what I was doing at the time, right? And so I created like a series of six videos on um how to edit videos in GoPro Studio. I created a 30-day series on um like how to use a GoPro camera. Like 30 days of GoPro. And I teach a couple of different series in Video Brand Academy, the Save Me series, the Ultimate User Guide, I like to call it. And when I was sitting here thinking about, well, like of the series and the strategies that I already teach inside of VBA, if I could take everything I know that's already working or everything I know that does work to you, grow your channel, what could I hand pick from those series to launch a channel from scratch, from zero, so that you actually get subscribers, viewers, um, email subscribers, like from day one. And that's exactly what I'm gonna be teaching in the launch your darn channel already workshop that I put a link to down in the description below. It's a completely free workshop. This is a launch series of seven videos. I'm calling it the Magnificent Seven uh because that's just the words that came into my brain for it. I'm gonna walk through the Magnificent Seven, exactly what to post, where to find those topics. And if you haven't used the YouTube visibility report that I have linked down in the description yet, we're going to use the results from that report to create your Magnificent Seven in the Launcher Darn Channel Already workshop. What we want to do is launch a channel for your business that not only grows the channel from zero, meaning views subscribers, but also starts to build your email list. Also starts to bring in email subscribers from those initial videos to create this um like foundation. I think of it as like the foundation of the spider web that you then build on. It's just like a snowball. It's like the foundation of that snowball that you then build on over time. So that as you keep adding more videos, one long form video a week. Long form, by the way, is anything over three minutes technically. I recommend like eight minutes or more. Um, so think how-to videos, tutorials, podcasts, yapping videos. We are thinking about content that establishes you as the expert in your niche, as the authority in your niche, right? This is videos for your business. So we're talking about long form because long form means long term. Short form equals short term. You want long term growth, long-term results, long-term business. We want a sustainable ecosystem here, right? So I'm excited to teach you the exact blueprint, the exact launch strategy or relaunch strategy if you've got a channel that just hasn't been doing much for you, so that you're not posting one-off videos or repurposing stuff that you're doing elsewhere or just kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that the magic of YouTube is just gonna somehow rub off on your content. You're not posting videos where nothing connects together, nothing connects to your business, nothing connects to your lead magnets and your freebies. My goal for you is to set up a YouTube ecosystem that works for your business, that works without you having to post three to ten times a day on social media. So if you want to join me for the just launch your darn channel already workshop, I'll put a link down in the description below this video and hope to see you there.