Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

YouTube Shorts content is set to explode! 

All the latest tips, tricks, and rock-solid advice you need for this new feature.

YouTube Shorts

Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Six months ago, we told creators to experiment with YouTube Shorts. We advised them to film vertical videos under 60 seconds (as the requirements suggest), post them to YouTube, and create a featured section on their channel to house the content.

Why did we suggest this? In just a few weeks, we saw channels getting thousands of views from Shorts. They mostly came from the YouTube Shorts shelf, a display area where different Shorts are featured. By the time a creator’s video left the shelf, it would have hundreds, thousands, or millions of views.

That’s how powerful Shorts are. With them, you can gain more subscribers in two weeks than you’ve had all year. Without them, you’ll miss a valuable opportunity to get discovered on the platform.

How to Create a YouTube Short: The Complete Beginner's Guide

If you want to know exactly why that is, watch our latest video about Shorts and the competition that’s quickly surrounding them.

The best time to post a Short was months ago. But if you hurry, you can still reap the benefits of creating content that gets played millions of times.

Need a push to get started? Here are three undeniable reasons to experiment with Shorts.

Reason 1: Creators Are Still Getting More Views and Subscribers From YouTube Shorts

The first reason is a little obvious but worth repeating. Extra views from Shorts have helped many channels grow, and they’ve got the numbers to prove it.

. In September 2020, he had 40k total channel views. After posting original, 3D-animated Shorts, he now has more than 3M subscribers and almost 2B views.

How This YouTube Creator Got 1.5 Billion Views In Just 80 Days

Jake isn’t the only creator to reap the benefits of Shorts. There’s also MrBeast, a popular creator who grew his 

 to 4.79M subscribers. Professional YouTube channels such as 

 have Shorts with more than 200k views each. Members of the vidIQ community have seen explosive growth, and some TikTok creators have successfully transitioned to Shorts.

You could be next if you act now. Shorts are viewed 3.5B times each day, so there are plenty of people willing to watch your videos.

Reason 2: Pretty Soon, You’ll Have to Compete With Creators From the U.S.

Did you hear the news? Beginning in March, U.S. creators will get a beta version of the in-app Shorts camera.

The announcement came from Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube. On Feb. 17, he shared the news in a 

“Currently, Shorts is available in beta in India. Since the beginning of December, the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled... In the coming weeks, we'll begin expanding the beta to the U.S., unlocking our tools to even more creators so they can get started with Shorts.”

To be clear, anyone can post a Short today. As long as a video is vertical and under 60 seconds, YouTube will recognize it as a Short. What Mohan is mentioning above refers to a TikTok-style camera that’s only available in India. With it, creators can record, edit, and post Shorts directly inside the app, adding music and other special effects to their content.

When the U.S. market gets the Shorts camera, things are going to get very competitive. More creators will have tools for creating better Shorts. Plus, thousands of people who never posted a Short will do so just because there’s a new feature encouraging it.

In the coming weeks, it’s going to be harder to do what creators like Jake, MrBeast, and LegalEagle have done. Rather than wait, it's better to experiment with Shorts right now.

Reason 3: If YouTube Monetizes Shorts, You Can Make More Money

Right now, there’s no way to monetize Shorts. The Shorts display area doesn't support ads, and advertisers may not want to appear on a seconds-long video.

But if you think about YouTube’s history, things are always changing at the company

Just because creators aren’t making money from

Shorts today, that doesn’t mean they won’t in the next five or 10 years.

It's likely YouTube isn’t doing this for free. With content as popular as Shorts, the platform could be searching for ways to monetize it as we type.

Before that happens, put yourself in a position to earn Shorts revenue. If you start posting them now, you can increase your chance of monetizing that content.

Use These Tools to Start Leveraging YouTube Shorts

Even if you decide to post a few Shorts, you’ll need a way to measure their impact on your channel. When you 

, you’ll find two powerful tools within the Chrome extension – one for tracking Shorts views and another for researching popular Shorts on YouTube.

This dashboard is on the top right corner of all YouTube pages. Hover your mouse over the menu to discover how many Shorts views your channel earned in the last 48 hours. For easy access, click the box beside this metric to add it to your dashboard.

This tool lets you research the most-viewed videos on YouTube for any keyword. To access it, go to the YouTube Studio and click 

Type #Shorts into the search bar, then filter the results to show channels with 1,000 or less subscribers. This will show you all of the small channels on YouTube getting tons of views with Shorts. You can use this as motivation to start posting your Shorts or an idea generator for future Shorts.

Shorts are doing well on YouTube. They’re going to be around for a long time, so don’t wait to post your first vertical, less-than-a-minute video. Do it now to reap the benefits before creators in both India and the U.S. can do the same.

Is it too late to capitalize on the viral nature of YouTube Shorts? No, not yet. But in the coming weeks, it may be harder to stand out with short video content.

3 Reasons to Upload YouTube Shorts Before the Competition Gets Tough

You've done all the hard work. You've shot your video. You've edited it. You've created a great thumbnail. You've uploaded it, and given it an amazing title. So, you just waiting for those views, right? Wrong. The work doesn't stop at the upload. Let's find out why on this episode of TubeTalk.

A common mistake I see with a lot of YouTubers is that they think that the work is done the second the video is made live, then they sit back waiting for those views. Well, that's not necessarily the case. My guest this week is Antony Ambriz, who is a YouTube growth and content strategist, who has built, managed, and grown multiple YouTube channels for influencers, entrepreneurs, and companies. He’s generated over a billion views and millions of dollars in sales for his clients all through YouTube. In this podcast you will learn:

How to use your videos for mailing list generation

How to provide extra value to your email list subscribers

How to collaborate with your viewers via mailing lists

Why Facebook Groups are so valuable for video creators

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

How to Build Your YouTube Audience on Other Platforms: Full Transcript

Liron Segev: Anthony, thank you for making the time to be with us.

Anthony Ambriz: Oh, I'm excited to be here.

Liron Segev:	This is going to be a very special episode because, well, clearly you've worked something out on YouTube, which is one thing we all want to know how to do. How do I make my channel pop? Where do we begin?

Anthony Ambriz: First thing's first, I would say once you have your content, you have your voice down, you're working on it, you've got that part done, then your optimization is key. You've done everything you can do to really get out there on YouTube and get the exposure that YouTube wants to give you. After that, you sort of have to go outside of YouTube.

Liron Segev:	We're basically assuming at this stage that you know about thumbnails, you know about titles, you know about descriptions. You've done everything you can to optimize yourself on YouTube. Are you saying the work is not done at this stage?

Anthony Ambriz:	Yes, I'm definitely saying that because oftentimes what I see is everyone's putting all their blood, sweat and tears into producing this amazing video. They put it out there. It's optimized. It has the right keywords, everything, the beautiful thumbnail, and then they just sit. They just put it out there and they just sit back and try to rake in the views, but then that's it. There's so much more to do afterwards.

Liron Segev:	Okay. Well, you've opened up this door. Guess what? We're going through this. Okay. Let's start. I've done my thing, where do I begin off YouTube platform?

Anthony Ambriz: The first thing I would say is that the biggest kind of distribution strategies that creators need to focus on is creating that email list.

Anthony Ambriz:	Your channel contains a lot of content. If you were to create a guide of ‘here's my favorite tech’, ‘my top 10 choices for Father's Day’ or for whatever holiday we're going into, for Christmas, you just create this list and you say, "Here's my list. I want to give it to you for free after watching the video," right? You sort of want to entice them at the beginning of the video with "I'm going to go over this tech, but the end, I have something special for you."

Right there you've given the viewer a promise to wait out until the end. They're more geared to watching your whole video for the big reveal. The big reveal is that you have a list that they can download, a guide, a checklist, whatever it is, and then they just have to opt in with their email and then you give them the guide.

Now, I know this might sound complicated because now we're dealing with like landing pages and opt in forms and all those things, but it could be easily set up. Even the guide itself, like if somebody's using a Mac, they can use Pages or Keynotes or if they're using a PC, use PowerPoint or Word, and it's just creating something really simple, export it as a PDF, upload it to something like Google Drive or Dropbox, and then go into a platform like MailChimp.

MailChimp lets you set up landing pages and then set up your hosting for your emails and all that stuff. Then you just set up that link, people put in their email, and then you can send them the guide that they wanted to download and go from there.

Liron Segev:	The steps are not so complicated once you break it down. We have a link in the description. You can call it out in your video. You take them to what you refer to as a landing page, which essentially is just a one pager saying, "Hey, I'd love to send you this guide. I need your email address so I know where to send it to." That's kind of the definition of the landing page. Of course, you can get more complicated as you grow by having pixels and remarketing techniques, but that's a conversation for another time. Let's start with the basics. Now I'm asking for an email address. Behind that you run MailChimp.

MailChimp gets the email address, then sends them the guide. Everybody's happy. Now MailChimp has sent out this email. It's got the attached PDF and the link to download. What do I do now that I've kind of gathered these email addresses?

Anthony Ambriz: Now it's just sending out a welcome email to let them know that they're now part of this newsletter of sorts, and then provide value right off the bat. Give them something else after that. Share with them another really helpful tip that they can use. Then after that, you start to get into this flow of once a week when you have content. Let's say you're doing just one video a week and once a week you share that video with them as soon as you publish it. Right away you have like a locked-in audience from your email subscribers that know you have a new video out on your YouTube channel, and so then they just start to watch it.

You already brought in an audience to YouTube. If we're getting really complicated or very intense here, now you're starting the session watch time off of your video on your channel because you've led them from an email, which then looks good for you.

Liron Segev:	I love that. Essentially, you're in charge of your own notifications if you think about it. We know notifications are a bit weird or wonderful to say the least at the moment, but this way I get to push a button. I get to notify my audience. This is absolutely superb. Then just as a pro tip here, what do you think of an idea of having maybe an unlisted video that's not available to the public, but as your first welcome email, maybe it's an additional three tips that the general public doesn't get to share?

Anthony Ambriz:	Oh, yeah. I think that would be wonderful. Everyone wants to feel like they're in the VIP section. That exclusivity and treating your viewer like that, I think that's fantastic.

Liron Segev:	All right. I'm building my email list. I'm in charge of my own notifications. Of course, you’ve got to comply with the whole opt out. You want to play fair because it's your brand at the end of the day. It's your name on these things. You do all of that. Does MailChimp handle your unsubscribe notices?

Anthony Ambriz:	Yes. They'll put all the legalities in and handle for people to opt out and do all those things, so you don't have to worry too much about that.

Liron Segev:	Okay, fantastic. I've now sent them a notification every time I put a video out. Maybe if I put out three or four times a week a video, do you think maybe one email as a digest will be good enough at the end of the week or should I give them one email per video that goes out?

Anthony Ambriz:	I would say doing a digest is a lot better, but having it highlight maybe your best video, the one that you really want people to pay attention to, and then just making a little note of like there's other videos that they can watch as well.

Liron Segev:	What else do we do with this mailing list?

Anthony Ambriz:	I mean in the end, that's up to you what you want to do with that. I think one of the biggest ones that I like to do with an email list, besides offering courses and things of that nature, is promote upcoming videos. Let's say you want to do a big premiere for one of your videos, right? You're getting that setup, or you want to go live on your channel. When you go live on your channel, that's only going out to your subscribers on YouTube. You can now use this email list as a way to do a live launch. You set it up where you send out an email and you say "Hey, in a week I'm about to go live at this date. I'm going to do a really cool video."

This is where you might run into sending out a couple of emails to do this because you want to keep reminding people that you're going to go live on YouTube. You do an email campaign, and set it up to go out a number of times. You can do five emails. You can do three emails. I usually say if you're just starting out for the first time, maybe just do three emails. One at the very beginning to announce it, one the day before, and one the day of.

All these emails are doing is just announcing you're about to go live and share a really awesome training or an awesome unboxing or whatever type of content you're doing.

Liron Segev:	Could you involve the community at this stage? Like maybe ask for any questions and maybe kind of feature some of these questions on your channel?

Anthony Ambriz:	Oh, definitely, yeah. I think one big factor about going live is that you want to involve the community and saying "I'm going to answer the questions that you ask on this live stream. I have this topic I want to address, but at the same time, we're going to have a section for Q and A. We're just going to have a party. It's going to be fun." If you want to go a little above and beyond, you can do like a giveaway on that live stream, whether it be a discount code to something. If you have merch, giving away some of your merch.

Liron Segev:	Okay, perfect. Even if you don't go live, because a lot of people are still scared of doing that live stream, maybe use this as a way to gather questions from your audience so that you can feature them in a video. Not live video, but you can say, "Hey, so-and-so asked this question, which is a great question. Let me address it," and make maybe a ask me anything kind of video. But again, it's about making your community feel special and in the VIP section.

Anthony Ambriz:	One thing I would say is often times when creators are thinking about collaborating, you can collaborate with your viewers. That is a good example of a way to collaborate with your viewers there. They're the ones offering you content to share in your videos.

Liron Segev:	Okay. A superb approach, collaborate with your viewers. That is beautiful because normally we think collab means others creators. That's kind of the first thing that comes to mind, but people don't think that your viewer is actually a great, great source of information. They're your fans and they're the ones going to keep coming back again and again, especially if you feature them. That is just hot nuggets right there. Love it. Anything else on the email list or we're moving on to tip number two?

Anthony Ambriz: The second one I would say is Facebook Groups. Now, I'm sure a lot of you out there are probably members of Facebook Groups. I think Facebook brought out a stat saying that a billion people a month are active in Facebook Groups. That's one of their biggest things. Facebook Groups are just a fantastic way to get your viewers to really form that community and really build it around the topic that you all love or you could build it around your own personality, right? Your own brand.

Liron Segev:	Okay. Let's unpack that a little bit. Are you saying start your own Facebook Group or you saying join Facebook Groups and have discussions there?

Anthony Ambriz:	I would say do both, but definitely start your own Facebook Group.

Liron Segev: Not everyone's going to have a niche where they can start a Facebook Group where they'll actually get members or maybe that's more of a fear I suppose. Like if I start a knitting Facebook Group, who's going to join that? Well, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe if people are watching my knitting videos, why wouldn't they want to then talk to me on a Facebook Group?

Anthony Ambriz: What's great about Facebook Groups is that if you get viewers from your YouTube channel over to a Facebook Group, and you get to see who they actually are. You get to see their actual names. You get to see their actual profiles. You get to really understand and know your audience, and then a lot of that community starts to build. Again you can get them to start helping you and collaborating, interacting with your content, helping you create new content. Doing a Facebook Group also helps you collect the emails too because you can always setup a question like, "What's your email? I want to send you something.

Liron Segev:	You also mentioned being part of other groups. The problem I see in a lot of these Facebook Groups is that people just spam their links to their videos. That's a no no.

Anthony Ambriz: Again, it's about providing value, right? If you really are genuine and you want to help people out, when you go into those groups, start a conversation. Be a part of other conversations. I think you get noticed more when you join in on other conversations and actually help by answering questions that people have. I've been a part of some groups where the admins never answer any of the questions, but it's just the community really taking over. That gives an opportunity for you to be noticed. When people see who's answering their questions and who's commenting, most people start to see the profile and investigate who this person is.

That way they'll usually find whether it's your own Facebook Group or your YouTube channel. If you're really talking about that on your personal profile on Facebook, they'll find it and then you'll get a new viewer, a new fan.

Liron Segev:	That's also another important tip - to make sure that your own personal profile, the one that you're joining the Facebook Group with, has very clear links to your YouTube channel, very clear links to what you have to offer so people can see it and go, "Oh, here's another click, go to your channel and then maybe subscribe to that because they enjoy your content.

Anthony Ambriz:	You can do that really easily right in your bio of your Facebook profile. It actually allows you to link out to something. It only works on desktop. Mobile it doesn't. The link isn't clickable, but you have spots for website links that are clickable.

Now, this third tip is one that I'm really promoting with people right now because YouTube did this great thing where they added a Community Tab to people's channels. Now, the Community Tab is supposed to act like the Facebook Newsfeed in a way. But I think it's so much more and I've seen people use it in so many different ways. It causes a lot of good engagement from your subscribers, and it could bring in a lot of views as well. What you're able to do there is always promote your video as soon as it comes out.

Also, you're able to promote other people's content. You're able to tag those people in those posts. You're able to do polls and do a quick survey, and you're able to like post images and share maybe behind the scenes or just maybe do like a poll of like which thumbnail do you like. You can also add gifs.

The Community Tab is fantastic because you can be posting older content and get new viewers to it again. You’ve got to remember, subscribers are coming in all the time and some of them might not have seen your older content. You can do your own Throwback Thursdays again. Bring the throwback to YouTube and you can really engage people that way. What's been fun is I've seen a lot of amazing creators out there, large creators who are sharing some of their audience's own content. I've been able to see that and that's fantastic. I think that's showing the community coming together and helping each other out. One thing about the Community Tab, is that you can share your content alongside the YouTube notification system too.

Liron Segev:	It's a 24 hour world that we're living in. Maybe I address my morning community when I upload the video, but then when the rest of the world is waking up, it's a good time to push another one of these things out, getting some more eyeballs on the same video, or people are at work. They forgot about it, but maybe they get one in the evening and now they might click on it and watch that video. The one thing you did mention is being able to share other people's videos. Is that not a bad strategy because you're basically taking people away from your channel to another creator?

Anthony Ambriz:	I think it's just showing that you are a part of the community, that you are a creator along with your other friends who are creators. I think it's just a great way to highlight other people. That always helps you. When you're helping other people it tends to help you. Not to be selfish, but it's just what happens. It's the side effect, right? The next tip that I want to share, and this is a very old school one, but I think it's now long forgotten because everyone is so busy learning about optimization and all this other stuff. It’s actually using communities like other websites, other blogs.

Maybe if you have your own blog, or use Medium, which is a great blogging platform, or Quora, which is more of a community that people are asking questions on. Then there’s Reddit, and its thousands of Subreddits. There's a world out there that are talking about certain topics that you're creating videos on. They're just writing about it or doing pictures or taking pictures about these topics. But you as a video content creator, you have video to show them and that's going to blow their minds, right?

There's a great community out there to then be able to publish your own articles with your videos embedded or to reach out to those blogs or those subreddits or those communities and say, "Can I offer you my content so you can write about it and feature it and have more rich content on your blog besides just texts, posts and pictures?"

Liron Segev:	Oh, okay. This is a whole other can of worms here. Even though you're a YouTube content creator, that is your center of your universe, you're saying let's look beyond that. Let's look at the Google searches. Let's look where people are hanging out, and they're hanging out on blogs. They're handing out on podcasts. They're hanging out in other forums. In the olden days, we used to call them forums. I'm not sure what they call them these days, but people are kind of hanging out there as well, in which case you should be tapping into those communities and just drawing attention back to you.

Anthony Ambriz:	Yeah, definitely. The thing is you can benefit from those communities as well because they have to produce daily content because of how Google's algorithm works for them.

With YouTube, we don't have to worry about that so much anymore. But yeah, I think you can get some information from those communities and be like, "Oh, they talked about this topic in this way. I've never seen it presented that way. Let me make a video with that concept as well." I think this is also a great way to collab. Let's say you have a writer or an author of that blog post. You can create a video around that post saying where you got the idea from, giving them credit, and then you go back to them and say "Hey, I made a video about your article. Would you want to share that along with your article or highlight it in some way?"

Liron Segev:	Okay, that's cool. As long as this aligns with your YouTube content, then that should work beautifully for you and your channel. It should work for the blogger because now they're getting an additional medium to show their audience. Instead of just an image, now it's actually a video giving them credit. That's amazing. That would work. That would work really, really well. Being a blogger, if someone was going to offer me a video about my own content, why wouldn't I share that? Absolutely. Awesome.

Anthony Ambriz:	Right. I have two more. One is a given. I mean, we're experiencing it right now. Podcasting, right? Be a guest. I'm not saying go start a podcast because that's a whole other world, but try to be a guest on a podcast. I think that's a great way to bring exposure to what you're doing, what you're creating, your expertise. Definitely reach out to two podcasts and see if they want a guest.

Liron Segev:	From this side of the microphone, I can tell you that we are constantly looking for new fresh ideas and new people to chat to. If people start approaching and say, "Hey, listen, I've got a new angle on this. Here's what I could offer your audience," of course, I'm going to take that opportunity. Don't be afraid to reach out. Tell them what you can offer them and their audience. Make it appealing. Make it easy, and then you'll get a guest slot in no time. It's much easier than you think. yeah, definitely second that.

Anthony Ambriz:	I would say for the blogs and communities and podcasts, become a listener, become a reader. Don't just say "Hey, I want to write for you, or I want to share my stuff on your platform," and not know anything about that blog or appear on the podcast and not know anything about the podcast. It's a little rude. But yeah, like actually be a fan. For me, I'm definitely a fan of TubeTalk. I've listened to it since back in the day, and I've seen how it's changed ownerships. I love where it's been progressing, and it's a great podcast.

Liron Segev:	As you heard before, even on this particular podcast, Anthony knew that I have a tech channel. He's done his research. It's just a much easier conversation for us to have when we all are on the same page as opposed to, "So, what do you do?" You know? It just shows that you just didn't take this seriously enough, and then it becomes a very stale kind of conversation.

Liron Segev:	It's great. Now I have an email list. I've got a Facebook kind of strategy I'm thinking of. I'm going to reach out to other communities in terms of forums, blogs, kind of create my own content, and then start using my own Community Tab to promote my stuff, my channel. Will this help me if I have a channel that I haven't been posting for awhile, and maybe I'm thinking of reviving it. Are these strategies good for a dormant channel as well as an active channel or should this only be done if you're active already?

Anthony Ambriz:	I think this works very well for a dormant channel as well because it's bringing new life to it. Because with the YouTube's algorithm and the way they're going to do their notifications, when you upload that new video, who knows where it's going to go, to how many of your subscribers. You're going to need to bring that audience from somewhere, and I think these methods help with that. I do have one more tip.

This one requires a lot of courage though because this requires you to meet with people in real life. This is do meetups. Hold an event. It doesn't have to be like a big conference workshop type of thing. It just can be a hangout event where you bring in like-minded creators or fans to a location and you just hang out, get to know each other, maybe have a topic or a presentation. But I think doing an in-person meetup really builds even greater fans and builds friendships and really builds a community outside just of YouTube.

Liron Segev:	I fully support meetups. It costs money, but wow, does it pay you back in bucket loads. Nothing better than a handshake. That's all I can say.

Anthony Ambriz:	Definitely. Yeah. If you're hosting your own meetups, you're collecting emails again.

Liron Segev:	We have another email gathering technique. I mean, fill that email bucket with any opportunity that you can because that is still the one application that we check every single day. I mean, no matter which social media we're on and what we love and what we hate, guess what? Email is still the thing that's required every single day. Okay. I'm assuming we've used up all your bonus tips now, since you've done so much more than what we were expecting. Tell me what have you got going on if people want to get a hold of you, if people want to learn more. What's happening in your life?

Anthony Ambriz:	Yeah. I'm going out from behind the curtain, from behind the scenes. I'm working with so many different channels and influencers and entrepreneurs, and I've finally created my own channel. I say everyone go check it out. It's called 

. I'm experiencing it from the other side now as a creator myself.

Liron Segev:	It's amazing how many content strategists and YouTube strategists are taking that step. It's easy to help a client out because you can instantly see what's right, what's wrong. But when you do it for yourself, you're so overthinking these things that it takes you forever to push that button. Well done. I'm glad that you're doing it. Of course ,guys, everything will be in the show notes in case you missed any of those links. I'll have them all in here. Anthony, thank you for spending some time with us sharing this insane amount of information. If you just do one of these, you're going to be so much better than just simply relying on YouTube, simply relying on notification. Your work is not complete once you push the upload button. Anthony, thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Your work as a YouTuber isn't finished just because you've uploaded that video. Find out how to build your audience on other platforms on this week's episode of TubeTalk.

How to Build Your YouTube Audience on Other Platforms: TubeTalk 181 with Anthony Ambriz

To be successful in YouTube in any niche, you have to have discipline, you have to have the commitment, and you have to have the vision. Today's guest has those in spades, and it's no wonder some of the world's biggest brands want to work with him. Let's dive in and get in behind the scenes and see what we can learn for our YouTube channel.

On this week’s episode of TubeTalk I’m joined by Dave Maze of 

, the go-to YouTube channel for anything to do with cameras, reviews, tips and tricks. In this podcast you will learn:

Why it's never too late to start a YouTube channel

Why being a single brand ambassador might harm you in the long run

How a running list of content ideas will keep you productive

How to find a balance between creativity and analytics

How to Grow a YouTube Channel: A Creator Story: Full Transcript

Liron Segev: Dave, thanks for hanging out with us. I've got to start by telling you, I have seen your content grow. I've seen your content mature. What took so long to get onto YouTube? Do you think by waiting, you actually have an advantage when you did switch over to YouTube?

Dave Maze:	Some of that maturity, like over those 10 years before I became a YouTuber, has all helped me now. If I just started straight out of high school from being a magician to figuring out how to be a filmmaker, like I don't know, part of me is like I should've started earlier, but then the other side is like, there's a lot of maturity that happened.

To answer your question, I think anybody can start where they are, if they have the awareness of, "I want to be a YouTuber." I just never thought YouTube was anything. I just saw Ryan Connolly on Film Riot and I was like, that's awesome that he's doing that. I don't really care to do that. I just want to be a filmmaker. You mentioned that everybody brings up Casey Neistat, but I think he really, for a lot of filmmakers, changed our perspective on YouTube, because now we have people like Levi Allen, obviously Peter McKinnon, Matti Haapoja now. These are real freelance, DPs, directors who traditionally, 20 years ago, probably would have done commercials, maybe music videos and films, and because Casey's showing us as a filmmaker, I can be a YouTuber, it's okay.

By the way, you can actually make a good living doing it. You can actually do what you want to do. Just lower the production value a little bit. We've seen a big kind of influx of filmmakers transitioning over to being YouTubers.

Liron Segev:	Again, you don't have to be perfect. People have got lots of forgiveness on YouTube, and they want to see the raw element of this and they want to see the bloopers and they want to see that not everything is perfect. If you're living in a van in the middle of the desert and people come out with full makeup, you know they haven't showered in three days, you know it's fake and people don't respond. They don't respond to that. They respond to someone being real. Being real, I think, is a big, big thing on YouTube. Do you believe that's an important kind of element of finding your space in this world?

Dave Maze:	I think so. I worked for a guy named Dave Ramsey. That was my corporate job that I had. If you're not familiar with Dave Ramsey, millions of people listen to his radio show. He teaches people how to get out of debt and stuff like this, but there's actually some polarizing things that he believes in his messaging that a lot of people sometimes agree with, sometimes disagree with, but he doesn't care. He sticks to his opinion. When I started doing these tech reviews, I saw some people being a little wishy-washy, being maybe manipulated by, I want to please this brand, or whatever.

It was actually a guy named Caleb Pike, DSLR video shooter, who told me "I don't work for the camera companies. I will not receive anything from them. I am working for my audience. That's who matters. It's not Canon or Sony or Nikon.” Sure, I can be friendly with the employees, I don't want to be a jerk, but I'm not here to please them. I'm here to give my opinion and have a true opinion and stick to it and give that to my audience," because that's first off, people are attracted to people with an opinion whether they agree or disagree.

It doesn't matter because if you disagree, you're going to let me know in the comments, which boosts my engagement. If they agree, they become a fan, right? That's kind of the big realization I had was I need to have an opinion on something, stick to it and not be a jerk about it. But that will gather a niche following of people who agree with me, but then also people who disagree. They can comment if they want and leave a dislike. There's always dislikes, like no matter what. I post a video and then in five minutes, there's like two dislikes.

Liron Segev:	How do you balance between working with a brand, and you have to do a review on their competitor. Do you find it a bit awkward because you're like loyal to the one brand because you really love their gear, but you still want to give a fair review of their competitor?

Dave Maze:	Sure. Well, I think there's two answers to that. First off, if you're somebody like Jason Vong, who's a good friend of mine, he's kind of like the Sony guy. If he picked up a GH5 or a Canon, his audience would kind of be like, "What the heck?" He actually told me that he reviewed the GH5 and everybody was like, "Why are you doing this?" There is that aspect of it. If you're a Canon guy, like Peter McKinnon who chooses to switch to Sony, like ... Well first off, that would blow up the internet. Everybody would freak out, but it's almost like you wouldn't see that happen.

Because I'm an unbiased ... I feel like I'm a journalist rather than I'm dedicated to one brand. I hope that people understand that as a journalist it's my job to just kind of be unbiased.

Liron Segev:	At the end of the day, like on my channel, I do tech reviews, right? I've got to remember, just as you do, people are going to make a buying decision, or you're going to help someone make a buying decision, either for or against. I always say, look, in my experience, and this is my use case for it, this worked really well, and that stuff really didn't work well.

Now if somebody else has got a different user experience or use case, that may or may not work for them, but at least I'm giving it from a perspective. Now you've got enough information to say, "Okay, I can kind of lean in towards one direction." I think it would be very disingenuous of both of us to say, "Well, brand X sent me this gear, so it's amazing and there isn't a single negative." It doesn't really kind of work that way.

Dave Maze:	Exactly. I don't just put something negative in for the sake of negativity. I might go at it with an angle that might be attractive story-wise, but overall, if there's something that's really bad, I'm going to point it out. If it's really good, I'm going to point out too. I think a lot of people in my niche accuse us of being paid by these companies, and it's just not true. The truth is that once you get to a certain level, it is easy to get a hold of gear, but it doesn't mean that you're going to keep it.

I have a deal with B&H and they send me pretty much whatever I want, which is great because B&H is kind of an unbiased entity. I really like working with them because it's not Sony giving me a camera. It's B&H giving me a camera and they're unbiased. They sell everything.

Liron Segev:	Do you find that companies appreciate the fact that you've pointed something out and maybe they'll fix it in the next firmware upgrade, things of that nature?

Dave Maze:	Yeah, absolutely. It's actually really amazing to see what is happening in the industry right now. For example, we just brought this camera up, the G7 X Mark III from Canon, that's been one of the most popular vlogging cameras for the last couple of years. They haven't updated it in a long time. I think it's been three years or something, but this new iteration is clearly designed with the suggestions that YouTubers gave. The screen has been reinforced because people were breaking the screen. They added a mic input jack, which everybody in the whole wide world wanted. They're actually doing things.

I see that with Sony. They added a flip screen with the new a6400. Everybody wants a flip screen. It's interesting to see people make changes because these cameras are made by engineers, very smart, brilliant engineers. They're not necessarily using the camera daily. When we have, "Hey, when I use this camera, it overheats and this thing happens or whatever," they're like, "Oh, cool." If a bunch of people say that, then hopefully they can address it. It's pretty cool.

Liron Segev:	It makes sense for them to do it because they're getting feedback from their customers who just want a better product. When they make the better product, odds are pretty darn good that if this is the eight things you wanted fixed and they are fixed, you're going to buy that next product. It just kind of makes complete sense.

When you're planning out your content, how much of your analytics and your audience and your comments do you take into account versus like your content schedule that you already have set?

Dave Maze:	It's amazing how fluid my schedule is. I have a Trello board with a list of six videos for the month. I've discovered that I could have a list of 100 ideas and I never even look at the board. I actually minimalized my ideal list to only six.

If I come up with a new idea, I'll actually remove one. I always have a running list of six ideas. As soon as something happens, like say, the G7 X came out last week, that just bumped up to top priority. Basically, a lot of my decisions are based around what is trending, what is popular. I can see that through the analytics. I can see that through just like literally searching for stuff on YouTube. For example, this E-M1 Mark II camera that I'm shooting on, it's not going to get any views, I know it, because nobody's searching for it. Nobody cares about it, but I personally care about it. I try to balance it with like, here's one for me. You've heard this, one for me, one for

I probably do more for them and maybe once a month one for me, but I'm looking at my engagement. I now am looking through at the click-through rate. It’s great that we have that analytic now. Obviously Mr. Beast is really showing everybody how important that is. That's a new thing I'm going to start implementing, but we were looking at our analytics. I had this really nice little 15-second intro video on the beginning of every video. We lost 40% of retention as soon as that happened. So, we just took it out and it fixed it. Now we actually have retention all the way through at a much better percentage.

I'm constantly looking at those things. I think as a creative, as a filmmaker, as an artist or whatever you want to call it, and it sounds really pretentious, but I always have to remember that I did start out as an artist. That's the whole point. Sometimes art doesn't necessarily go in with analytics. If I have a lead-in or a scene that people are going to drop off, but it adds to the story in a way that I like, then maybe I'll just leave it in anyway, because at the end of the day I want to have my YouTube channel serve my longterm career, which is to continue to direct, to create, to produce.

It's not always about the YouTube stuff for me because in 30 years I might not want to be a YouTuber anymore and I might want to produce shows. I might want to produce other things. Everything I'm doing is serving that goal of like I want this to be art. I don't want it to necessarily be all numbers, but at the same time, I look at the numbers too.

Liron Segev:	It's a balance. This is why I'm finding, and maybe you are finding as well, that it's always a struggle between the algorithm and creativity. Sometimes I do think that YouTube is killing creativity because we are so busy playing to the algorithm and that's a problem.

Dave Maze:	Well, that's why I'm starting this other channel, my personal channel, just 

. I'm just going to do comedy stuff and I'm not even going to look at the numbers. I'm going to do what I do. I'm going to know what is trending. I'm going to know what will hit, but there are a lot of YouTubers like Jacksfilms who he'll make a 45 second video about him coughing on a loop and it's got millions of views. It's a stupid video. It's really short. It's not 10 minutes. There's no subscribe at the beginning. Yet, he's doing really well. There's a balance of that. Liron Segev:	There's a balance somewhere.

I want to experiment with that because with Kinotika, I really am following more of the format of a traditional tech reviewer, but trying to add a comedy flair to it, but making it my own.

Liron Segev:	At the end of the day, to stand out in this very crowded space, you've got to bring your own voice. All right, so as we wrap up here, this is my plug myself moment dot com here. Where can people find you?

Dave Maze:	Sure. Well, obviously the big tech channel is called 

. It was created by a Chinese man who is also Russian. The spelling of it's a little peculiar, but it's special. It's different. It's unique. Yeah, Kinotika. I also host a podcast called Golden Hour. Just search in Apple podcasts or wherever you get podcasts, 

Dave Maze:	I interview influencers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, different people. Then on 

Liron Segev:	It has to have that underscore.

Dave Maze:	The people took it. I'll get it eventually, probably. One of them is dead. The other one is like a porn account so don't go there. Thankfully I've had enough tweets now where if you search my name, that doesn't come up. Hopefully Twitter will give that to me one day, but for now, just avoid it.

Liron Segev:	Again, everything will be in the show notes, so we'll make sure we'll send you to the right account. Dave, thank you very much. Really appreciate your story and sharing with us kind of the journey, because it's not simple. There's not a straightforward ... It's not a linear line. They're going to be ups, there's going to be downs.

Liron Segev:	It's just a ride. You've got to enjoy that ride as you're doing it because if you're not enjoying it, then it's work. Dave, thank you very much again.

It's always fascinating to hear how a creator has built a thriving YouTube channel out of a particular skill or passion. On this week's TubeTalk we talk to Dave Maze who did just that!

How to Grow a YouTube Channel: A Creators Story | TubeTalk 187 with Dave Maze

Let's talk about merchandise and the opportunities around it for YouTube creators. And not just the big YouTubers, even smaller channels can offer merch to their subscribers.

But what kind of products should you be selling? Do all products work or do some work better than others? Which merchandising platform should you use? Are they all created equally or do some offer better products and services? These are your merchandise questions. We have merchandise answers on today's episode of TubeTalk.

Our guest on this episode is someone who is going to help us navigate through these treacherous waters. Davin “Dave” Higashi is the Co-Founder and CEO of 

, a premier merchandise service company for YouTube creators. Previous to founding Crowdmade, Dave grew his career in e-commerce at eBay as a corporate finance professional working across multiple business units including eBay, Paypal, and Stubhub. In this episode you will learn:

Why building engagement and a community is the key to merch success

How to get started selling the kind of merch that sells

How to avoid expensive merch design & production mistakes

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast

Don't forget to leave us a review if you love the show!

How to Make Money from Selling Merchandise on YouTube: The Full Transcript

 Dave, welcome to TubeTalk. Okay, so since you've teased us a little bit, and I've also teased everybody a little bit, can you tell us who are some of your creators that you work with?

 Oh, sure, we have a lot. Some of my favorite ones are Jackfilms, it seems like many people know who he is. Simply Nailogical. In recent days we've been working with a lot of top tier animators like GingerPale and Tabbes and Emirichu. Just amazing names, and we're so lucky to work with them.

 So let's start kind of right at the top. There's a reason that a lot of these top tier creators have literally millions of subscribers in some cases, and yet, they're still turning around and saying, hey, I want to do this merch thing. Why are creators turning to merch?

 They have different reasons at different stages of their careers. In earlier stages, a lot of them are trying to establish their brand. And merchandise is just an incredible way to connect with fans in a more physical fashion. Later in their career as they get larger, so it can be a significant source of income for some of them. And this is what Crowdmade is about. Is about making sure that we work with them at all stages to identify what their goals are, and do our best to help them get there.

 So it's goal orientated, but there isn't a magic number, there isn't when I hit a certain number of subscribers, I must do this merch thing. Some people never do it. Some people do it much smaller. Is there a way for us to kind of look at our own channels? Is there any signals that we would look at to say, okay, the time has come to take that step?

 Great question. Obviously we have limited resources, so we're not able to work with every single YouTube creator there is, but we do our best. So we tend to look for three major signals. The first being size, if you're not of a certain size, it's really tough to make meaningful amounts of sales. And again, it depends on your goals. But for it to be a meaningful number, normally around 100,000 subscribers is about the place where merch is more meaningful, it doesn't mean it's not useful for the business, but it is more meaningful. The second thing we look for is engagement. Engagement is a really clear indicator of how deeply the fans care about that channel, or how well that creator has been at activating their audience to do things, which is just a wonderful way of looking at things. So they might not have the most views or the most subscribers, but they have just an incredible level of engagement as a percentage of their views. That's a really important metric.

And then the last one that I think is discounted by not just the creators, but also the industry players out there at merchandise, is how good is that creator promoting. And this is the wild card. If they are a huge, huge creator, and we've worked with some in the double digit millions who have had trouble selling significant or meaningful numbers of units. Because the promotion wasn't good. And we've had very small creators who just absolutely astounded us, because their promotion is incredible. And thus, it's the wild card, and we are always trying to decide when we're working with the creator, can we help them improve their promotion, because that will help at every stage of their career. So for us, the big three are size, engagement, and promotion.

 Okay, I'm trying so hard not to make a size doesn't count joke. It's just so difficult. But I'm resisting. But at the end of the day, what you're saying is true, it's that you could have a million subscribers, but there's no community feel, people are there just for the content, but they aren't really connecting with you. That's going to perform very differently to maybe a much, much smaller channel, maybe even at 50,000 who have got such a great audience. And they hang on to every word, they comment, and they reply, and they have entire conversations with the creator. That's going to way outperform someone who's ... Well it's just another revenue stream. I'm not even going to bother to do anything about that.

Okay, so now let's put ourselves into this mindset. I've got my channel, I've got a community, I'm starting to get some traction, they're loving kind of what I'm doing, I want to give back to the community. Where do I start to kind of thinking along the merchandising game? Do I start with something small, like a coffee mug? Or is there a limit? Maybe when somebody approaches you, and they say, "Hey, I'd really like to work with you." Where do you start?

 The answer to that would really depend on where they're looking for and what they're hoping to do. So with some of the other players in the industry, like the self-serve platforms, like Teespring, it's probably a really good example. They're really good at what they do, if we're honest. And they can print shirts, they can do a handful of things. And there are some creators out there who prefer to try things on their own and test things. And it's not a bad place to do it.

But the thing I always tell creators, the first thing when I have my first call with them is that it's really, really, really easy to do bad merch. There's just so many things that can go wrong. So when they are first getting started with us, we have to make a call and decide, okay, based on what we know about your channel, and your goals and what you're trying to do, what is the scope of recent ability of what we can do because Crowdmade can make almost anything. There are no limitations on what we can make. We've made some very strange things in the past year.

So we need to decide what is the best approach. And so depending on the stage of their career, do they have experience with merchandise? Let's say they don't. And they're just starting out, we are just kind of eclipsing at 40,000 sub-range and okay, it might make a lot of sense to do some merchandise now. Tell me what you're trying to accomplish. That is actually the first goal. And if it is branding, then the way to approach it is, do I have design, or do I not have design and how do I work through that? And working with Crowdmade if you don't have design that is something we work on with you. We have a lot of design experts. And we found that, that's kind of the primary bottleneck for our creators, is the design. And having great design, because just because you have a good design doesn't mean it translates well to a print on a shirt.

 Oh well, that's very, very important. I think we got to reemphasize that point. Just because you got a cool design doesn't mean it's wearable on a shirt. Okay, so I've got this really funky logo, I think it's awesome, people tell me they love it, do some things just simply not translate well to a shirt.

 Yes. And there are actually two dimensions to that translation to a shirt. One is the wearability, which we have done this for a long time. And we have a good feel for the YouTube audience. But the other is actual printability. There are a lot of providers out there who will take any piece of art that you give them, and they will print it, but most of them do not sample it. And even though most of us use essentially the same technologies, knowing how to adjust the piece of art so that the hot pink that you put in, that neon glowing sign, actually prints because the answer is it doesn't, is what we do as well to make sure that we can maintain very high quality standards. Because the worst thing that could happen is that a creator puts something that they're really happy about and what the fan actually gets is very different, and they're disappointed by that. That is a complete mess on all parts, and we make sure that we never do something like that.

 Okay, because at the end of the day, the fans could be young, they could be saving their pocket money, they could be a Christmas gift that they've been kind of dying to get. And this thing arrives in the mail, they're so excited. And then it goes south very, very quickly, whether it's bad print, bad quality, too long, too short, just they're disappointed and nothing is worse for a creator than to disappoint their fans.

 Yes, absolutely. And so we take it really seriously.

 Okay, so I have a design, I have an idea, do I work with your designers to kind of bring it out to life? Or do I have to supply you with exactly what I'm looking for, and you'll kind of say, yes, this will work or not?

Did you know? Selling merch can be even more lucrative for a YouTuber than a brand deal? Find out more on this week's episode of TubeTalk.

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