5 Quick Ways to Super-Charge Your YouTube Channel

YouTube isn’t just a place for sharing your baby’s first steps or your cat’s ability to sing opera. When you’re creating a brand for your business, a YouTube channel is important for helping you connect with your audience in a more personal way… as well as showing them and teaching them things that benefit from a visual demonstration.

You can quickly become a well-respected go-to expert!

Tools like Facebook and Twitter can help you create connections, but YouTube is a place where you talk directly to your audience, establishing rapport, trust, and authenticity.

So once you’ve got your channel setup on YouTube… how do you optimize it to make it as effective as possible for your business

1. Reach Out to Your Audience

One of the little used features in YouTube channels is the moderator feature. All you need to do is to go into your settings and enable this feature to begin asking your audience what they want to see. Go to your “My Channel” settings, then the “Modules” option… here you’ll find the Moderator function and additional options to connect with your audience.

2. Customize Your Channel

You already know that your brand needs to stand out, but so does your YouTube channel home page. Whether you create a new background image or you pay someone to do it, this image will make your channel unique from the others and cause you to be immediately identifiable. Just go into the Advanced Settings of your My Channel menu, via Themes and Colors. There, you can upload your image.

3. Listen to Your Audience

Comments on your YouTube channel help you find out more about your audience. Even when the comments aren’t positive (and hopefully they all are) you’ll learn more about your audience including what appeals to them, what problems they’re facing plus (and this is a BIG one) what LANGUAGE to use when talking to them!

Once you’ve collected this covert research, be sure to respond to the comments too. This shows you’re interested in your audience and encourages continued conversation on your channel.

4. Feature Your Best

When you create a video that’s something special, this should be featured on your YouTube channel. This might just be your most recent video or it can be a video that gives visitors a great introduction to your business.

Whatever you choose, make sure it’s suitable as a great “first impression” for visitors to your channel (and newcomers to your business).

My recommendation? If you post regularly, set your featured video as your most recent upload to highlight how often you update your content. If you don’t post regularly, replace your featured video with a more general introduction to your business.

Bonus Tip: Use testimonials in your introductory video to reinforce your credentials and show you’re the “real deal!”

5. Stay Engaged

You should develop your own channel, but also engage with the YouTube community…

• Subscribe to other YouTube channels. You can subscribe to other YouTube channels to help create connections and opportunities for others to subscribe to you.
• Comment on videos. When you see videos, comment and comment frequently. Networking begins with conversations.
• Post videos from others that you’ve enjoyed. If you find videos that you’ve enjoyed, make sure to share them on your channel too.

Follow the steps above to turn your YouTube channel from “just another collection of videos” to an online destination that truly works to build your business. If you don’t have a YouTube channel yet, follow these steps to set one up the RIGHT way and see the impact it has on your business… both for sending you new customers AND learning about what your customers want!

P.S. The tip about desires and language in part 3 above is one NOT to be missed! Using YouTube as a covert market research tool (you can do this on your videos and your competitors videos) is a VERY effective strategy! And using the same language as your customers when speaking to them will instantly improve your response!

Article by James T Noble

James makes small businesses bigger. He's previously worked with some of the world's largest brands and companies to market their products and services online - including Disney, Microsoft, 20th Century Fox, Virgin, Coca Cola, MTV and many others. Read more about James...