Most Helpful YouTube Resources for Aspiring Video Producers
You don’t need a huge production budget to make YouTube videos. However, as the popularity of the site grows, you are much more likely to be noticed with higher quality. Luckily, YouTube itself has tons of tools to help you stand out and make your videos worth watching.
Learn YouTube best practices at the Creator Academy
Ever since YouTube came along, many people thought that all they had to do was do something funny on camera, upload, and then become an Internet star. While this can sometimes be due to silly luck, most producers have to work a lot behind the scenes to make this happen. The YouTube Creator Academy has tons of tutorials to teach you all the tricky things your favorite YouTube doesn’t mention.
It actually puts the cart a bit ahead of the horse since we didn’t even have time to film the video. However, it is worth mentioning first because it provides a good overview of what a successful YouTube channel entails. Here are just a few lessons:
- The Art of Engaging Viewers : These tutorials explain how (and why) to upload branded images to your channel page, custom video icons, channel trailers, and more.
- Expand your audience : This collection explains how videos will spread to your subscribers, how to associate links with annotations, and how to organize your videos using playlists and sections.
- Make money . Advertising brings with it a whole host of complications. Uploading videos to YouTube and randomly posting ads is not as easy as it sounds. These tutorials will help you explain how YouTube advertising tools work and how to best use them.
If this all sounds too much like a second job: good. YouTube is a great platform for sharing videos with friends, family, or building a huge audience around the world. However, it can be a very tricky process if you really want to work with it. And most likely, someone there will do the same thing that you want to do, who is ready to go through all this work. Therefore, before you start, decide what kind of YouTube producer you want to become. This will help you know what tools you need and how many lessons you can skip.
Make basic edits with YouTube video editor
If you are not downloading the raw footage from your mobile, you will need some kind of video editor to turn those footage into the right video. While there are more powerful video editors out there , YouTube’s built-in editor offers the basics without downloading any additional software. You don’t even need to manage your video library. Just upload your videos as private and you can start merging them.
Google has a basic editor guide here . It allows you to trim clips, combine multiple other videos, add titles, music, and a small set of effects. If you don’t have a video editor, start here. It’s great for practice, and more importantly, you get to know what you need pretty quickly from the editor when you go looking for a new one. It’s also great if you need to quickly edit existing videos.
Get free music and sound effects from your audio library
Once you start shooting video at any level of professionalism, you will run into licensing issues pretty quickly . YouTube is especially good at downloading videos containing copyrighted soundtracks. To avoid this, YouTube has a collection of music that is either free or comes with licenses to use it.
Most of the time, free music libraries are shoddy low-quality material that can make your videos sound worse than silence. However, YouTube is also a music service , so it has a special relationship with artists. The ad-supported section of the library includes popular, recognizable songs that can be used under certain conditions. In some cases, your videos may be blocked from certain countries. In most (if not all) cases, you may not be able to monetize your video. However, this means you can legally use songs fromGangnam Style toChandelier without deleting the video.
There is also a section for sound effects that you can import into your videos. The collection is vast and organized into categories including cars, sirens, gunshots, animals, and even general science fiction sounds. You can mark the sound effects you are using as favorites so that it is easier to find them later.
Track user responses with Google Analytics
Even if you don’t choose to use YouTube videos, site analytics can provide fun and useful insights into the people who watch your videos. You can track the traffic of an entire channel or individual videos and see how it changes over time. Of course, this is not all. After all, it’s Google. Here are just some of the insights you can glean from your video analytics:
- Estimated number of views in minutes: Not all views are created equal. Google collects data not only on how many times viewers have watched, but also on how long they stayed. The estimated number of watch minutes shows which videos viewers spend the most time on.
- Breakdown by location: You can see where viewers are coming from, by region, country, or even state. The details are so good that you can see how many minutes each state has spent watching your videos.
- Play Sources: The built-in YouTube player allows viewers to watch your videos without ever visiting your site. Analytics allows you to see how many people are watching your videos on your YouTube page compared to the player on other sites.
- Activity of subscribers, likes and comments. How many people interact with your videos is just as important as how much they watch. You can use these trackers to see how much your viewers are forced to interact with you after watching a video and how they prefer to do it.
Analytics can be a complex topic in and of itself, and you can spend your entire life trying to guess what they mean and still be wrong. It is best to use analytics as a feedback tool, rather than as a fortune-telling rod that tells you what “goes viral.” However, when used correctly, they are a valuable asset.