Having a YouTube channel is a great way to reach out to your audience, and potentially earn money. You can repurpose content you’ve already created in to videos, or create new, short videos for your niche.
There’s a lot of great advice on how to grow a YouTube channel. Content Marketing Institute highlights having a compelling intro, doing keyword research (YouTube is a search engine), and of course, telling stories.
For growing your channel, vidIQ recommends making sure you have “juicy and intriguing” titles for your videos, starting with niche content, and getting familiar with how SEO and good thumbnails work on the platform. By following these guidelines, it can make it easier grow your audience faster.
Last, you don’t necessarily have to show your face in your videos. Better Marketing shares about creating compilation channels, where you curate “the best stuff in that niche” and faceless YouTube channels, where you create slideshow type videos with your voice over, explaining a topic.
I’m working on all these guidelines myself, for the I Know Dino channel I create with my husband. It’s an extension of our weekly podcast, and mostly we repurpose our episodes and segments from our episodes so our listeners have more options when it comes to how they want to learn about dinosaurs.
We have in the past created short videos (some of them are factual, some are fun, and some of them highlight our dinosaur-related adventures). Just like the guidelines recommend, we’ve had some of the best success for our videos with catchy titles, eye-popping thumbnails, and strong SEO. Plus they were really relevant to our audience, like our video about all the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
As an author, you have lots of options when it comes videos. If you write non-fiction, you can create short videos that answer questions around your topic. If you write fiction, you can put together slideshows and give information about your setting, or events related to your book. You can even share character sketches and other information about your book or series that may not have made it to the final book or books.
Have ideas for videos? Share what works best for you in the comments!
Editor’s note: This was originally published November 2021.
