Create A Popular YouTube Channel

We expose “The 8 ways to turn you into a YouTube celebrity”.

YouTube has become a source of income and notoriety for thousands of marketers, hopeful celebrities and self made (and often unintentional) Internet stars as of late.

So how powerful has YouTube become? Well, one of the most popular YouTube channels is run by a young man named Ryan Higa, a comedian who has attracted over 6 million subscribers to his channel. While it’s impossible to calculate his YouTube earnings with any accuracy (without knowing his average CPM) he’s certainly made at least a couple million dollars from his 1.35 billion views. Ryan Higa and his fellow YouTube starlets have proven that it’s certainly possible to make a good living from your videos if you can gain enough popularity. But how? What can you do beyond uploading your content and crossing your fingers?

Creating A Popular YouTube Channel

1. Design Your Brand

First you’ll need to create a YouTube channel to upload your videos. Your channel will form the heart of your brand, and once you start to get noticed you’ll see more and more users subscribing to your channel.

At this point in the process you should think hard about the name of your channel. You’ll want to pick something memorable and easy to pronounce, and perhaps a name that’s in some way related to the subject of your videos.

2. Offer Something Professional

These days there are lots of professional, well produced videos on YouTube, but you’ll still have to wade through a pile of grainy flicks that look like they were shot with an iPhone camera during an earthquake.

There’s nothing wrong with shooting with an iPhone if that’s all you have, but for goodness sake hold the camera steady. Make sure the audio is clear (and consider subtitles if you have a thick accent), and make sure the subject is in focus. Nothing turns off viewers more than shoddy production values, and you’ll never make it big with a channel full of fuzzy, out of focus videos with muffled audio.

For an idea of what counts as professional, check out the channel of RayWilliamJohnson. His videos are tight and well edited, and they haven’t hurt his progress to 6 million subscribers one bit.

3. Consider a Video Response

Many YouTube uploaders struggle to get any attention at all. You might be producing awesome videos, but if you have no visibility you’ll be dependent on luck more than anything else, praying that a few great sharers find your work.

A great way to get some quick exposure is to upload a video response to a recent popular video. The more controversial and interesting your response the better, as people will be clicking through to your channel with no idea who you are.

If your response is interesting, insightful, shocking or funny you stand a good chance of picking up a few new subscribers, and at least a few users will check out your other videos.

Make sure you save uploading video responses until you have a few of your own original videos. Your response is the bait rather than the main event.

4. Consider Reviews

Some of the easiest videos to produce (and most reliably popular, if not viral explosion-worthy) are reviews of the random gadgets you have lying around your house. People are always looking for reviews of the latest TVs, video games, cell phones and anything else with a circuit board inside, and they love to see videos of the products they’re considering.

5. Live on YouTube

If you’re not committed to your channel nobody is going to bother following you. You need to be uploading regularly, interacting with your fans and asking them what they’d like to see next. If fans feel you respond to their comments you’ll earn their loyalty. If you blow them off and fail to react to what they’re saying you’ll start losing followers by the day.

Most importantly, simply log on to the site every day. Browse around to search for video ideas, enjoy the work of other and read comments. If you stay away too long you’ll fall out of the habit ofdeveloping your YouTube channel.

6. Set a Schedule

Some of the most popular YouTubers stick like clockwork to a release schedule, and for whatever reason it really seems to work. Fans grow accustomed to returning for the latest video at the same time every week, so if you let them know you’ll be uploading a new video every Friday you’ll find you always get a big bump on the first day to help boost your exposure.

7. Work the Tags

When you upload a video it’s pretty easy to throw in a few apt tags and hope you’ll be found, but in fact tagging your YouTube videos is something of a science. The problem is that the obvious tags are all wildly popular, so if you’ve created a video in which you play guitar you’ll find yourself competing with every single other video tagged ‘guitar’.

Instead, you should think carefully about adding a few more obscure tags: ‘slap bass’, for instance. Think of tags that won’t be so popular, giving you a greater chance to appear at the top of the search results when people look for those slightly out of the mainstream tags.

8. Don’t Spam

Finally, here’s one everybody should heed: don’t spam.

There are lots of ways to get a little attention on YouTube, but all of them require creativity and talent. If you find yourself spamming the Internet to attract hits you should consider the damage to your reputation your behavior will inevitably cause. Trust that people will find you, and find solace in the fact that when they do they’ll be coming to check out your talent, not to post a comment telling you to knock off the annoying spam in their comments section.

Reference:  Wikipedia /Google/ Blog