When you start using YouTube for marketing or to create an additional revenue stream, one of the first things to think about is setting goals for your YouTube channel and creating some expectations for what you are going to get out of YouTube. First of all you need to decide, are you using YouTube for marketing or you are using it for monetization, or a little bit of both?
It may be easier to focus on one of the two if you’re just starting out. If you are going to be using YouTube for marketing here are some focus points that you should think about when setting your goals and expectations. One of the most important things in marketing in general and especially using YouTube for marketing is brand recognition. When you are uploading your content to YouTube, you want to make sure that the users know what the product or service they’re being promoted is, who the company is and where they can go to find out more information, whether its to a website or a social media channel, something related to the brand. When you’re focusing on marketing on YouTube, you want to try and create as much viral content as possible.
You want your content to be compelling, to the point where people are sharing it and giving it a thumbs up on YouTube. Hopefully they’ll also tell their friends and coworkers about it and do some additional marketing for you.
This brings us to the next point, social sharing. Put some call to actions in your marketing videos on YouTube for people to share the content or to tell their friends about it, so that if they didn’t think about doing that themselves, maybe your reminder in the video will prompt them to let others know about product or service. We’re also going to focus on subscribers, a focus point that’s important in both marketing and monetization. Subscribers are really important on YouTube. You’re not going to start out with 100,000 subscribers, but as you gain more and more subscribers, each video that you publish is going to reach a wider audience, so it’s always a good idea to focus on subscribers on YouTube, because that means that the content you publish in the future is just going to get more views, your message is going to get to more people and if your goal is to make money, this will help increase your earnings as well.
Let’s talk about monetization specifically and what some of those focus points should be. For monetization, we want to produce content that provides value to the end user and that value can come in a number of different ways. It might be solving a problem for the user or it might just be producing something that’s funny or entertaining and providing value to the user by helping them relieve stress. Also, remember, subscribers are a really important aspect of YouTube and that goes for monetization as well. Ig your goal is to make money on YouTube, the more subscribers you have, the more money you’re going to make. You also want to try and create content that’s advertiser-friendly.
There are certain subjects and topics that advertisers will pay more money to advertise in front of. For example, lets talk about a video of a cute kitten. It may provide value to a user, because it’s cute, right? But hoe many advertisers are going to want to get in front of that video. Whereas if you’re talking about a specific business solution on YouTube, advertisers that are in the same industry or in horizontal industries, related industries, might say, wow, that is the perfect content for me to get in front of. I know what the target market is, I know what the business solution is and I’m trying ti get in front of the same audience. So when you’re looking to monetize on YouTube, you want to try and create content that advertisers are going to want to get in front of and that will help to increase your revenue.
Another huge aspect to monetization on YouTube is getting repeat viewers. When you’re publishing videos to YouTube, in each video that you publish, give your viewers a preview of what you next video is going to be, so that they come back again looking for it. For marketing you want views and repeat views won’t hurt. But you may have accomplished your goal the first time the viewers saw your video and a second view isn’t adding any value to your marketing plans. With monetization, however, each additional view means additional revenue. So, you really want to focus on getting repeat viewers and building that loyalty on YouTube. Subscribers are incredibly important.
Another good monetization strategy is to create what’s called evergreen content. Evergreen content is the content that never gets old. In five years, that content will be just as relevant as it is today. Because if your goal is to make money and you’re producing content that’s going to be outdated tomorrow, you may earn a little bit of money on that video today, but when tomorrow comes, that video’s out of date and you’re not going to make any more money off of it. So focusing on evergreen content, content that never gets old, can be really beneficial if you are trying to make money using YouTube.
When we talk about setting goals for your channel, there are few things that you can look at and look towards to try and get the most out of the YouTube channel. It’s a good idea to get some subscriber milestones. We talked about subscribers being important for both monetization and marketing so take a look at some other channels that are in the same industry, or maybe you already have a YouTube channel and you have a certain amount of subscribers. Think about what next milestone might be. It might be 100 subscribers, it might be 1,000, it might be 10,000. It’s going to be relative to your channel and your business. But it’s important to set these goals to give you something to work towards on YouTube. You can also set view milestones. It could be views for your entire channel or just views for a particular video. Maybe you published your first video and it had 100 views. Now you’re going to publish your second video and you want to get thousand views. So, view milestones are important as well.
If you’re using YouTube for monetization, you obviously want to get some monetary milestones. Maybe you made $10 your first month. Try and make 20 or 30 in your second month. Another important goal to set is one that you have more control over when using YouTube. It’s how many videos that you’re going to publish, either per week or per month, because YouTube viewers like consistency. They like to be able to expect that you’re going to publish at least a video per week or three videos per week. Once you start a certain trend, maybe you published four videos in the second month as well. Set some goals and expectations for how much content that you’re actually going to put on YouTube.
It’s really important when you are setting your goals and expectations for YouTube that you research the competition and the community. If you’re just getting started on YouTube, take a look at somebody in the same industry that’s been on YouTube for a while. See how many subscribers they have, how many views their channel has, how many average views their videos get and that’s going to help you determine what your own goals should be. It’s also a great way to get some ideas on what works really well on YouTube and maybe what doesn’t work on well.