Before you start promoting your YouTube channel: analyze your niche

Before you start promoting a YouTube channel on a specific topic, study the video in the TOP. This will help you figure out best practices and spot your competitors’ weaknesses.

Pay attention to the following points:

— Content type: reviews, interviews, how-to, webinars.
— Duration of videos.
— Channel owners: companies or private specialists.
— Audience engagement techniques: discussion in the comments, links to subscriptions, contests, etc.
— Comments to videos — from them you can glean frequently asked questions, unopened topics, pain points of the audience.

Accumulate data in Excel, Google Sheets, Trello, mindmap. The main thing is that they are structured and help organize the content on your channel.

Prepare your channel for promotion

Let’s start with some statistics. According to research by Ahrefs, the most popular YouTube searches are related to music and video games: they are the names of tracks or bands, the names of musicians. People come to YouTube mostly for entertainment, a worldwide trend.

We conclude: if you do not have a narrow-fish channel for microbiologists, you need to present your content in the most attractive, structured, “watchable” form. The personality of the speaker plays an important role — his command of the word, appearance, ability to keep the audience’s attention. This is a basic guideline for video content.

Here are the basic channel design work you need to do for effective promotion.

1. Badge and cover (banner). The logo is used as an icon for the company’s channel, and his photo is used for the expert’s channel. In any case, this is an image of 800×800 pixels.

The maximum size for a cover image is 2560 × 1440 pixels. But here it is important to take into account the so-called safe zone — 1546 × 423 pixels. This is the area where the most important information (channel name, short description, links to other resources) should be placed. it will display correctly on all devices.

The banner should be made in a corporate style or have a design relevant to the business. In addition to the name of the channel, you can specify one or more basic services, a short description, links to the site and / or social networks.