So, you want to begin your Vlogging journey, am I right?

Ok then! This article may help you get a good idea of how you can start with the right foot and get those first views and subs in no time.

I´ve done some thorough research about this topic and come up with ten of the most effective ways for you to grow your vlogging channel on YouTube.

The following tips are not in a fixed priority order sort of way. None the less, they should be interpreted as a helpful guide of steps to follow and closely pay attention to.

¡Do Your Research!

This is where most aspiring Vloggers and YouTubers should always start.

Doing some form of research means searching for the same keywords you´re interested in talking about with your videos, and see what comes out, assessing the competition, doing some niche research, get a macro view on what people´s questions are, etc.

There are many YouTubers that start filming right from the beginning without even thinking about doing some keyword research. A huge mistake!

You´ll end up wasting a lot of time if you just go about doing a couple of videos without doing any research at all because nobody knows you yet or is interested in watching you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner or go about your daily grind.

As you probably already know YouTube is the world’s 2nd most popular search engine, so doing enough research on the platform will ensure your success in the long term if you do it right.

Here´s how.

Use YouTube Autocomplete

Search for the term or keywords you want to be found for and see what other results come up when you type the space bar at the end of your sentence.

It will only suggest popular keywords, basically, YouTube is already telling what to talk about on your videos based on what other people are looking for.

PRO TIP! At the very beginning is always better to go for long-tail keywords, 4 to 5 words at a time might be a good idea, like: “tips to vlog like Casey Neistat” for example.   

You can also use this great Keyword Tool to make your job much easier, it is already featured for YouTube search and it will give a good number of results and/or variations related to your search.

That will give you a good idea of what your first Video ideas could be, depending on the competition analysis you make from each search result. So, let´s talk about that.

Competitor Analysis

One good thing about YouTube that´s pretty different from competing on Google search is that there´s still a lot of room for big keywords.

Now, if you would type some short term you´ll probably compete with the big channels with lots of subscribers who´ve already done a great job answering people´s queries. That´s why I want you to start long-tail keywords that nobody else is making videos for.

Answer people´s most specific questions and you´ll get your first subs in no time!

Do not try to go for major keywords like “how to lose weight doing exercise” right from the start. You´ll end up competing with these guys.

And that´s just the first three results. You´ll get the idea.

Your focus should on beating the smaller channels first and then slowly increase the difficulty as you move forward and start gaining some traction on the platform.

YouTube´s ToolKit

There are great tools like Tube Buddy Chrome Extension, which can help you to analyze things like the tags used by your competitors, or there´s also VidIQ (both software are YouTube certified) that has a keyword research feature specific for YouTube.

Make sure you check them out and use them to increase your ranking odds! it´s key when you´re a brand new channel.

Browse Google

One last thing you can easily do is to type the same keywords on Google and check if any videos come up on the SERPs. If some videos appear that means there´s a chance you do too!

Picture making some of your first videos on some video result keywords that shows both on Google and YouTube, cool right?

Most trends and topics like sports, tutorials, cute things, usually work.

Pick Up a Theme

This means that you have to pick up something! Maybe some hobby you have, preferably something you love to do and want to share more about.

Why? Because vlogging is hard and getting discovered on YouTube is even harder. So, in order to keep a vlogging schedule and stay consistent, get better, improve the quality of your videos, your content, branding, channel design, and so and so forth you NEED to love what you do or talk about.

If you want to go about your life that´s okay too, but keep in mind that you have to provide value in some way, whether is entertaining your audience with funny clips or giving out great tips and information for them to try out you have to keep the viewers interested.

Here are some great quick ideas you can search on in case you have no idea where to start:

• Humor & Comedy
• DIY Channels
• Animated Videos
• Top Tens
• Fashion
• Food Reviews
• Product Reviews
• Pets & Animals
• Vlogs
• How-tos
• Music Channel
• Dance Tutorials
• Tech Channel
• Health & Fitness
• Travel
• Gaming
• Women Lifestyle
• Men Lifestyle
• Online Marketing
• Lifehacks
• Car and/or Bikes
• Compilation Videos
• Celebs Gossip
• Relationships Advice

The truth is that there are tons of channels out there that cover many different topics and current trends, even the weirdest things you could ever imagine.

If there´s a YouTube channel for it there´s an audience willing to watch them. Focus on providing value through a set of helpful videos based on your passion, hobby, or interest. That´s it.

You will put the necessary effort to make it happen if you really like what you´re doing.

Define Your Target Audience

I would say that your very next step is to define your audience. This could be done by doing some thorough research or even after a couple weeks or months after you´ve got started with the channel.

Using the data compiled by the analytics feature from YouTube should help a lot. Check out where your audience is coming from, their average age range, etc.

You have to use that knowledge combined with what type of videos have more traction so you can refine your strategy as you move forward. That is crucial so you can keep growing on YouTube.

Planning the Content

A great way to keep consistency and craft awesome video is to be prepared and know what your goal is with each video you make.

Plan your content and make a simple script for your videos, that way you won´t get lost with what to say next, and you´ll have a good starting point for each line.

Here are some basic fundamentals YouTube leis out, and that every successful Channel applies.

Conversational Tone

Many of the top YouTube channels speak directly to the audience or create specific content to facilitate a conversation with their audience.

Don´t forget that platform works also as a social network, and ask yourself if your idea has a conversational aspect to it.

Interactivity

Is there a way to involve your audience into your videos? You could incorporate viewers feedback or comments if you ask viewers to tell you what other topics to cover.

The channel Epic Rap Battles of History does a great job doing this! They ask the audience who won the battle and ask for them to comment who should fight next.

Consistency

Are there strong recurring elements on your videos? Do you keep the same upload schedule? Do you have a consistent tone or format you speak to your viewers?

Every way you can add consistency into your format will help keep viewers engaged and coming back for more.

Sustainability

If your audience really likes a video, can you create more of them?

If your videos have higher production value and take longer to make, it might have sense to have a second or third easy to create series to keep your audience engaged.

Perhaps using behind the scenes clips or shoot several videos at once to save time.

Discoverability

Aligning your content with what people are searching for will be a major driver of new views.

As we´ve already talked, doing a quick keyword research right after you have a new video idea is great to asses the competition an see how you can be discovered on the platform.

Accessibility

Ask yourself if every episode of your series of videos can be seen and understood by a new viewer.

Most people are not going to start with video one and work their way through your content library. So, if somebody discovers your video number 50 you want to make sure they´ll understand what´s going on.

Inspiration

And last but not least, I want to say it again cause I never get tired of it, is your idea coming from a place of genuine interest?

Passion really shines through the lens of the camera as you create new content, people can tell. It has to be a great idea for you if you´re going to create a whole lot of content about it.

Choose your idea based on your passion not because you think that you´re going to get views with it.

BuzzFeed Sharability Secret

So, why people share content?

People share content because of what it says about them, they use content to build a community or a personal brand.

“Things that left-handed people hate” is a good example of a building a community share, if you are a left-handed person you might share this.

On the personal brand side, people share content because of how it made them look. They share an educational video because they want to be known as somebody that likes or consumes that type of videos.

BuzzFeed breaks their shareable content down into three different categories.

• The first they call it The Emotional Gift, it´s the type of content that taps into human emotion, changing your mood in some sort of way. The purpose is that the viewer feels something if the viewer feels it they will share it.
• Informational videos – people share this content because it showcases things that they like and/or that their friends like.
• Identity content – people want to be a part of a group, and that group could a lot of different things. It might be their occupation, their location, some particular interest, etc. “How to Piss Off Every New Yorker in 36 Seconds” is a great video example of this. Check it out!

Start With Your Phone

Please, do not wait until you can afford a fancy DSLR Camera, just take out your iPhone and start filming right away!

There are many YouTubers that do a great job at explaining how to record high-quality videos with your phone.

The time that you spend waiting for things to happen, watching an infinite number of videos from people that´s already successful with their channels takes off time that you NEED to invest in practicing the craft.

Learning how to do things wrong so you can do them right, trying different stuff, figuring out how to edit, etc.

It all takes time, you need to start taking action immediately. The sooner you start the sooner you´ll get results. As simple as that.

No DSLR fancy camera will actually help you to film great videos if you don´t have the confidence to talk directly to the lens of the camera and speak your truth to the world, and that takes practice.

Before you spend hundreds of dollars on a camera here are some quick tips you can apply right away when recording with your phone so you can get things rolling.

• Command Attention! Be informative, entertaining, and keep in mind that the most important aspect of your presentation is how captivating you can be. Be engaged, enthusiastic, and passioned about your topic. People´s attention is more fragmented than ever.
• Face the Camera. Like looking through the lens and speaking to a person. Maintain eye contact with the camera like if it was a person, if you don´t your audience will not be able to connect as you´re talking. More important, it disengages the viewer from the content.
• Forget About the Production. You need to get out of your head all the technical elements that are involved for a while, instead focus on your performance, and all of the things you actually have control on.
• Get to the Point. Don´t risk losing people´s attention, get to the point, be concise. Lack of preparation and polish are both main causes of losing viewership on most beginner YouTubers. A script beforehand and a good editing after makes everything fit together nice and easy.
• Editing is Half the Equation. Sometimes even more than that! You´d be amazed at home much raw footage some YouTubers have to work with until they reach that 10 to 15 minutes of polished material. It is important that in the early stages of your career you master the basics of proper editing.

Great Video Quality on a Budget

• iPhone 6+
• iPhone Headphones
• iMovie
• Boya by M1
• Rode VideoMic
• Arkon iPhone Tripod Mount

Create a Channel

All right, let´s look at how to design your YouTube channel.

There are only about five main parts that you should be concerned with. And that´s gonna be your channel artwork (1), the avatar (2), your subscribe trailer (3), the about section (4), and your channel sections or shelves (5). 

If you don´t have any videos yet then you should do the basics on your channel and focus on your video strategy first.

Now, if you do have some videos organizing them in a meaningful way can help viewers discover the content you´ve already created.

YouTube makes a great job by giving you the right measures to feature cool images in each section and help you out to design your channel according to your own preferences.

A great free tool you can use to do that is Canva. The platform has cool templates specially designed for YouTube channels, great right?

For the subscribe trailer section a lot of YouTubers make a specific video designed to explain what the channel is about and what you can get from watching their videos. Others simply put some of the most popular videos to capture people´s attention.

You can even choose between what video trailer show to new viewer and what can be showed to your subscribers.

Another great feature is the video section which can also be optimized easily on the bottom of the screen. You can add sections like “Popular Videos”, make Playlists, etc.

Last but not least you should go to your About section and make a brief mission statement on what your channel is about and what do you want to accomplish with it. Nice and simple.

Check out some other successful channels within your niche so you can get inspired on how they have organized all of this information and designed their layout.

Stand Out With a Brand

Being yourself and being authentic becomes something really important when it comes to branding.

If people want to build a relationship with you they´ll want to feel some sort of personal connection, this happens even with the big brands.

You´re probably going to choose to be the face of your brand, which is a great idea by the way cause if you´ll be yourself on camera it´s going to be more original and you´re going to differentiate from the competition due to the fact that vlogging is a personality based kind of business.

What´s behind the logo is what makes your brand. The way you communicate and behave, how you present yourself, how you present your content, it´s what makes your brand personality.

Here are some simple tips you can takeaways right now.

• Focus on a Targeted Market. One of the first ways that can determine and help you positioning as a brand is by focusing on a specific group of people. Just keep in mind that your target market can´t be everybody, that´s a sure route to failure.
• Be Yourself. This is one of the first things top musicians and singers say when it comes to making a successful career in the industry, and it also works with YouTube. You can make similar content than other channels but you have to do it in your own way. Being authentic on camera takes practice, don´t worry, you won´t get it on the first tries.
• Create a Message. One great way to connect with people and your audience, in general, is to ask yourself why you do what you do, what´s your purpose, the message you deliver to people. Is that you want to teach people something, you want to entertain, what is it, figure it out. Check out how other YouTubers create their profile on the about section of their channels, that´s their message or goal.

“People don´t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek

Don´t Worry About Monetization Just Yet

The purpose is to create and deliver quality content, provide tons of value, give incredibly helpful and well-researched information first

Monetizing once we´ve got an engaged audience of happy viewers that want more of our videos is really easy to do.

After you´ve established yourself as an authoritative figure within your niche, you´ve helped your audience in more than one way on different occasions and you´ve been doing it for a while, only then, you can ask for something in return.

Gary Vaynerchuck, a great online entrepreneur of today´s marketing world, talks about this on his book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World”, great read by the way in case you´re not familiarized with his content. 

The point is that it´s important to give as much as you can, and once you´ve done that you ask, you pitch, you sell. 

You must realize that both things are key, you have to give, give, give value, and then you connect your hook! In fact, that´s a great ratio to keep in mind. You give, at least, three times as more value than you ask for something.

The point is that you should not worry about monetizing or earning any amount of money just yet, and not for several weeks. This should be your last and final step, in fact, it will be the last thing we´ll address.

Get Better & Comfortable

There are a few things that you have total control of and that can improve your viewership numbers and engagement drastically if you do it right.

Titles, Description, and Tags

Crafting an optimized title, description, and tag for your content can highly increase your videos discoverability within search and related videos on YouTube.

Starting with your Title, you want to make it “searchable” by adding some of the keywords we´ve already found in the previous steps described. Any brand or personal names should be left for the end of any title.

If it is an episode of a series of videos make sure you let the audience know by adding a number right after the main keywords.

Moving on to the Description, keep in mind that the first two lines are the most important ones because they´ll be shown without having to click the “show more” button.

Include your most important links within that section or right after it. The link where people can subscribe for example, or where they can go to your blog or landing page, whatever it may be.

Don´t add a pile of tags to your description, if people click on the “show more” button they want more info on your channel or video, not repetitive words that won´t add any value to them. Save your tags for the Tags section.

Go back to the tools we´ve talked about before, VidIQ and/or Tube Buddy will help to find the right ones through a competition analysis.

You should add somewhere between 5 to 15 tags, and mix them up a bit, meaning some general and broader tags with some specific terms related to your video.

Video Thumbnails

We´ve all heard the phrase “never judge a book by its cover”, well videos are no books, and your Thumbnail is your cover and it will certainly be judged by it!

Thumbnails are very important because they´ll show up in the search results as within the related content that YouTube may suggest you.

First things first, upload a custom image, do not let the YouTube default thumbnail options. Bright colors and high contrast tend to perform well.

Also, faces tend to get more clicks! Whether is your face showing up on your thumbnails or other people´s it doesn´t matter. People love watching other people, what can I tell you? 🙂

Study your competition to get a feel for what other people in the industry or genre that you are in might be doing.

Be consistent, maybe using a template to make the whole process easier for you and so that people can recognize your brand.

¡Using Playlists!

Not many newbies know that Playlists are another great way you can be found on the search results.

Once you´ve uploaded a couple of videos that are related to each other in some way, you can create a playlist with a title that´s optimized for any given keyword you want to be found for.

You can even improve your Playlists by adding more and more videos to them, which will result in more watch time for your channel.

Annotations

They are clickable overlays that you can easily add to your videos to help support your video´s call to action or drive viewers to other related videos or playlists you have related to that same topic.

A common example of this is the “subscribe” annotation. You can add annotations by clicking on the “Edit” button of each video you´ve uploaded.

Interactive Cards are similar to annotations but they work on mobile devices (that´s right, annotations don´t) and are another great way to support a call to action, so make sure to check them out.

Monitor Effectiveness

YouTuve provides a lot of data on how your videos are performing, so knowing what reports to look at can help you to measure your success much more accurately.

Go to the Analytics section on your Creator Studio tab, a take a quick look at “Overview”. In case you had some doubts about how important watch time is, you´ll notice where its placed here.

So, to monitor the health and wellbeing of your channel look at the Traffic Sources Report seeing from where all of your traffic is coming from, to see what works and what doesn´t.

You can also check out what keywords are driving traffic to your channel!

The Audience Retention Report is great to take a closer look at some of your videos individually.

You have also an Annotations Report to get a hint on how many clicks some of your annotations are having. Again, to see what´s working and what´s not working. The same goes for interactive cards.

You don´t need to spend hours checking out your data, maybe once in a while, or once a month would suffice to get an idea of how things are evolving and what changes should you make, if any.

Get Inspired by Pro Vloggers

Doing a better job when editing is, for example, a great way to improve drastically the quality of your videos.

You should look for inspiration and ideas from other great YouTubers, is a fast way to get better and motivated at the same time.

I do not mean that you go with only the best of the best, there are thousands of middle-range and even low-range vlogger channels that create killer videos explaining topics that may interest you.

That being said, watching a couple of videos from the great Casey Neistat and/or Peter Mckinnon won´t hurt, those guys know their craft.

Professional Video Gear Examples

Do Some Collaborations

Is there room in your idea to feature other creators?

Your channel and/or ideas are going to spread a lot faster if you develop a few good ones to be shared with other YouTubers.

First of all, you need to have a foundation, meaning that you have created a nice channel, have uploaded content consistently, and you have an audience, it doesn´t need to be gigantic but you should probably have around one thousand or so.

If your audience isn´t big you can look at what value can you add to the other person channel.

For example, do you have access to production resources that the collaborator doesn´t? Or maybe you have an especial talent you can add to the mix or access to a certain region or area, maybe your specific audience is one that the collaborator wants to reach to.

Try to find a channel that has a compatible format or type and/or similar audience type/size, yeah you can aim for more, but if you have 1000 subs don´t expect much from pitching to channels with more than 100,000 people subscribed.

Last but not least, find a collaborator who actually makes content that you like, or you´re not going to be very excited with the final product of your collaboration.

¡Craft a Pitch!

You can´t say “Hey, wanna collab?” and expect anything to happen. Instead, take the time to craft a winning pitch, start by showing that you´re a fan or at least familiar with their channel. (Like, “I´ve really enjoyed your latest business tips video series…”)

Then, provide a collaboration idea that may interest the creator and share the value that you´ll provide to the project (“I´ll do all the animation, voice over, sound effects, etc”) and set a time to connect and refine the idea together.

Promote on Social Media

Uploading a video on YouTube and crossing your fingers may not be a really good promotion strategy.

Here´s an interesting data that you can get your head around, and that most people don´t know about, 50% of all YouTube videos have less than 500 views! So we have to do a little bit more work to be on the other side of that pie. 

First of all, we should use our social media sites to help upload our content so it´s shared by some of our friends.

Although some of the most common that comes to mind are Facebook, Twitter, or Google +, you might want to consider expanding those networks to kickstart your views within the first 48 hours.

Bookmarking Sites are another great strategy to share your videos. Sites where people go to browse content and discover new things, sites like Reddit, Pinterest, or StumbleUpon are all great places to submit your videos.

If you´re doing a How-to type of content you can look for How-to sites, like WonderHowTo, where you can sign up, write your own articles and embed your own videos there, which is a great way to reach another audience and kickstart your videos view count.

Paid Promotion

When it comes to paid media there are a few sources you can trust to boost your viewership.

Be worry about companies that look too good to be true, they probably are. Any sites that promise thousands upon thousands of views for a really cheap price is probably not driving real people to your videos.

Another site I´d strongly recommend to stay away from is Fiverr.

If you want to reach out to real people and build a true viewership by making an investment my suggestion would be to use the YouTube True View Advertising platform. It is basically the same thing as AdWords.

You can control your budget and bids so you don´t need to pay a single extra dime to do it.

¡Time to Earn!

Yes! Monetization time!

This is, to me, the easiest part to do. Once you´ve reached a certain audience level, not just in number but also in the quality of content and engagement of your videos, you can think about earning some money from your channel.

First and for most, and the quickest way is to join the Adsense Program if you haven´t already. It is pretty easy to do and the platform does a good job at leading your efforts towards this type of earning.

Now, the second most common and used way to monetize an audience is Affiliate Marketing.

It is basically selling other people´s product and getting a commision (percentage of each sell) out of it.

Then you have companies like Patreon, who makes a great job of allowing you to create a membership area for your fans to join and for you to create a recurring revenue from your work.

One big plus is that they have low fees for you to access, you´ll own your content and you can focus on creating quality stuff while they take care of the rest.

Now, another good way to make money out of your viewership is through Sponsorship, in fact, nowadays you have a really convenient option to connect with great brands, there´s a company called FameBit that makes the whole process easier.

You will have access to a variety of sponsorships, flexibility, and ways to manage your rates, you even have payment protection, secure workflow, super fast payments, and top-notch support team that can help with everything you need.

Last but not least there´s the possibility to create your own way to earn an income from your audience, and that´s by creating some form of informational or knowledge that you possess and can be sold for the right price.

For that, you have a few options, like creating an Online Course where people can join and access to some lessons, or maybe you could write an E-book, whatever it may be you want to always keep in mind that to monetize an audience you´d have to be a great value provider.

Teachable has a very well designed platform that lets you do this for a small fee.

Giving great value upfront makes or breaks your bank account, quite literally.

Wrapping up here are key points you should always keep in mind when it comes to generating a trusted source of income for yourself.

• DIVERSIFY your revenue through different sources, at least three of the previous mentioned.
• Build VALUE over TIME. That means that you have to know at all times that you need to provide good quality content and give as much value as you can to your audience. That alone will lead up to money eventually, don´t try to rush the process and focus on content delivery.
• Prioritize GIVING, don´t over ask. What I mean is that if you´re starting a YouTube channel you shouldn´t be worried right from the get-go on how you´re going to make money with it. Your main concern should be how you can give more value to people. Nobody wants to see selly and/or promotional videos that don´t provide almost any sort of useful information.