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How to PUBLISH & GROW when starting out // Getting started on YouTube in 2021 (Pt. 4 )
In this last episode of my series on getting started on YouTube in 2021, I talk about how to publish your first video and then how to grow your channel. You will learn how to create a create title, how to write a description, the importance of good SEO, how to create a thumbnail and finally what statistics to look at.
📕 Complete Script https://geni.us/dji-mavic-air-script
📹 Final Video https://youtu.be/_l3gIrggkIY
1️⃣ How to plan https://youtu.be/KvBZXJtZJPI
2️⃣ How to shoot https://youtu.be/KvBZXJtZJPI
3️⃣ How to edit https://youtu.be/2-GDwy4Y-gg
🎞 Original Footage https://1drv.ms/u/s!AohbiZbX_aR5pu8xhqT_PyiPoloplA?e=0HglgH
#growyourchannel #gettingstartedonyoutube #firstvideo
✋ COME SAY HI!! ✋
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford (http://bit.ly/lba_instagram)
- TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@loic.bellemare.alford
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/loic294
- Facebook: https://fb.com/lbaphotographie
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:31 - The truth about starting out a YouTube channel
01:35 - Titles, descriptions & SEO
03:39 - Bonus must know facts!
04:42 - Thumbnails
07:21 - Should you follow a strict schedule?
07:47 - Analytics
10:25 - Closing words
🖼 SHOP FOR PRINTS 🖼
- My online store: https://store.lbaphotographie.ca
🎶 MY MUSIC 🎶
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/iu5gau/
📸 GEAR I USE ON YOUTUBE 📸
https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card https://geni.us/sandisk-extreme-128gb
- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD https://geni.us/vanguard-veo-265cb
- DJI MAVIC AIR https://geni.us/lba-dji-mavic-air
🌍 MY PERSONAL WEBSITE 🌍
Welcome to the final episode of my series on how to get started on YouTube. In this video, we're going to talk about how to publish a video and how to make your channel grow. Let's roll the intro. For those of you who are new to this channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this site. In the first three episodes, we talked about how to plan, shoot, and edit the video. So I highly suggest you go watch them out before watching this video to get a better understanding of what we're going to be talking about. Before talking, how to publish your view and how to grow on YouTube, I wanted to have a little emotional moment because it's actually really hard starting in 2021 on YouTube. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot of fun creating these videos, but you're gonna have to work really hard. There's going to be some up and downs. So it's really important that you're inside of this for the, long-term not just for quick growth or to get some money quickly. My most recent videos haven't been performing as well, but it doesn't mean that I'm doing anything wrong, it simply means I have to wait and continue producing more content for the algorithm to pick up something like it did in the past. My most popular video has over 178,000 views. And I have a few other videos that have over 50,000 views, but I also have some recent videos that only got a few hundred views. So it really depends on the videos that you're publishing and it's really going to be up and down of this would say that you really need to concentrate on the long-term and not be here for instant growth on YouTube. Oh, and also just forget about getting 1 million views in one year. That's basically impossible these days to get on YouTube. Probably the most important thing when publishing a video is having a good title and a good description. I guess that most of you don't know that YouTube is actually the second largest search engine after Google. If you search for Google pixel 4a versus DSLR, my most popular video is actually going to appear in the first place on Google and YouTube. If you're asking yourself how I did it, it's actually pretty simple. The answer is good SEO or search engine optimization. Here what I did is adding the keywords that are most important instead of the title and the first phrase of my description to let know the search engine, what they should be targeting when you do a search. So in this case, the important keywords are Google pixel 4a versus, and DSLR. For example, video, we're making a review of the DJI Mavic Air, and here we're going to want to go inside of YouTube studio to change a title because it uses a default title that is inside of the video file. So here we're going to rename it to DJI Mavic air. And we definitely want to have this inside of the title, because this is the most likely phrase that people are going to use when searching for our video. So this is very important to think about what people are going to type when searching for the topic. You're talking about. For our title we are allowed to add up to a hundred characters. So I definitely suggest that you use as many as you think is useful to add more information, because this is where YouTube is going to be looking for more keywords and where the users are going to be looking to see if it's worth looking at your video or not. So in my case, we can add here still worth buying in 2021. And this will know both the algorithm and also the users that this video is still valid in 2021, even though the drone was released three years ago. For the description, we're going to want to explain what is inside of the video in two phrases, but not more than that in my experience, most users never read the description. So you're not retargeting for them. It's more targeted for the algorithm to let know the other than exactly what is inside the video, not just what is the main topic of the video, so it can help targeting afterwards the video to divide people. So I'm going to do it right now and we're going to see the result. The next few points are very important. So first of all, don't use clickbaity titles. This was a trend a while back on YouTube, but YouTube is really cracking down on this. It's actually really easy for YouTube to know if you have a clickbaity title, because if people click on the video, but don't watch it for very long, this is a clear sign that you're using a clickbait title, and they're going to shut down your video really fast. The second point is don't lie. You might not know, but YouTube creates automatically some subtitles for every single video that is uploaded. And the reason is not just for better accessibility. It's actually for YouTube to know what's the content inside of the video. So if your title and description says one thing, but the content of the video says something else, do we know that you're lying instead of your title and description, so they're probably not going to promote as much as video. And the third thing is you shouldn't overthink it too much. The fact is that if you use something that is simple for the title and simple description is going to be easy for users, your viewers, and also the algorithm to understand what is inside of the video and allow them to understand if they want to watch it or not in the end. The next most important thing is thumbnails. Gone are the days where you simply take your frame from inside the video these days, if you don't have a thumbnail, you are going to lose people right away because most people don't even read the title or the description of the video. So your thumbnail needs to grab attention and also tell very clearly what the video is about. To create this thumbnail, we're going to be using Canva. I personally use Photoshop for most of my thumbnails, but it's a little bit overkill when you're starting out. So we could appear inside of Canva, create a new design search for YouTube inside of the search bar right here and select YouTube Thumbnail from there. So now it's going to open it right away and it took a picture of using my Google pixel 4a and the portrait mode of the drone to get a nice shot of the drone, where we get a blurry background. So you really have this subject as being a drone and come here, upload the image. Okay. So now that the photo uploaded, we can add it to our design and just bring it up. It's not a subject of our video is pretty clear using this image, but if we're not grabbing the attention of people, so for this, we're going to come inside of the text tool here at a text. So I do like this one right here. So we're simply going to click on it to add it here. We're going to resize it, put it on the side of here. And we're going to add our question that we were asking. So we're going to ask right here, if it's worth buying in 2021. So now to add a bit more contrast between the text and the background. We're going to go into the text here and add a drop shadow so you could use something else, but this is actually going to allow us to just make the background a little bit more clear and have a bit of separation between the text and the background. So now if you come back here, we just want to make sure that the last thing is that we can actually see it even when it's really small. So we're going to bring it down. And I can see that even when our design is small, the text is still very clear, and this is important because most people are going to be seeing your thumbnail on their mobile device. So you need to make sure that it's still visible when it's at a smaller size, because now we can upload our imag here. So we will, come here, switch our thumbnail. U se a custom thumbnail, uploaded here, select, and now we're done. So the last thing we have to do for publishing the video is actually decided how we're going to publish it. So usually what I like doing is uploading the videos a few days in advance, just to make sure that everything works out and there's no problem with ads or with subtitles or anything like that. And then I'm going to go inside of schedule here and just select the date and the time I want to have it published, let's say tomorrow, and it could be a Saturday and at, let's say 8:00 AM. So we're going to select 8:00 AM for the time to be published. And now we're ready. So we're just going to save this and it's going to automatically publish tomorrow at 8:00 AM. I know one very popular piece of advice on YouTube is actually to use a schedule and publish your videos every single time, every single week. But I think that if you need more time to work on a video, or if you have a video that is ready before your scheduled plan, I think it's better to publish them. Because as long as you publish a lot of videos on YouTube and always continue publishing some, your channel is going to grow. And it doesn't really matter if you're publishing them every single time, every single week. Now let's end by talking about which statistics you should be looking for instead of videos, because looking only at views, don't tell you much, instead of you should be looking at CTR, which is click-through rate or retention rate for your videos. So click through rate or CTR tells you how many people clicked on the video when they see it inside of YouTube. So this is if they see it and in your homepage, if they see it, when they're doing a search, YouTube is going to count how many people clicked on it versus how many people just scrolled away without looking at it. My normal click through rate is about five to 10%, but on very good videos, it can go up to 15 or even 20% in very extreme cases. But if yours is lower, it's not a big deal to increase the click through rate you want to focus on two things. So the first one is have a better from now in a second. One is changing your title. So my rule of thumb is that usually if after six or 10 hours of putting the video, it's not performing as I expected. I mentioned the title or the familial or both and wa it and under five to 10 hours. And shoot it again. If it's still not performing the things that you don't want to be changing it every single hours, because it doesn't leave enough time for the algorithm to try and target other peoples afterwards. But if I have to change it two or three times, they do still doesn't perform. I just stopped changing it. Cause that's just probably a video that won't perform. And I just stopped stressing about it and start my next video retention really is how long people have been watching your videos. And this is very important because the longer people are watching the video, the better it is for YouTube, because they can sell more ads in the end to increase your retention rate. You're probably, I want to look at other pretty important metrics. Like where are your viewers coming from? What are the spikes and distance at the video? So where are you losing video people instead of video over people are watching a video, whereas what's your audience or is it people younger, older, and all kinds of things like that can really help you build some better content for your next video. There's also a kind of balance you have to find between click-through rate and also retention rate because one, if one or the other is really high, but the other one is low. YouTube is not going to be happy because they're going to think that something is up bit fishing center, your video, and it's going to stop promoting it as much. So I want to try and find a balance where both are higher, but that there's not just one it's very high. And the other one is very low. This is just very tricky to find the right balance. You also should never compare yourself to other people because every single people on YouTube has different click through rates, have different retention rates. And this is just perfectly normal that everybody hasn't been different because it really depends on the niche, the type of video you're creating your audience and all kind of things like that to depend on how your video is going to perform in the end on YouTube. I hope this little series on getting started on YouTube helped you create your first video or at least inspired you to create your first one. I want to end this series by saying that growth or even the numbers of you on your videos really isn't the most important part. What is the most important, it is that you enjoy the process of creating videos. If you enjoy the process, it can be able to come out with more videos and the movie is going to come out. The more your channel is going to grow over time. So this is very important. If you want to be able to sustain your channel, if you enjoyed this video, please let me know by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing by hitting the big red button too, for more content or photography and filmmaking. See you. The next one bye-bye.
Video Links
- 📕 Complete Script
- 📹 Final Video
- 1️⃣ How to plan
- 2️⃣ How to shoot
- 3️⃣ How to edit
- 🎞 Original Footage
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
This is the final episode in my series on getting started on YouTube, and I'm going to walk you through the publishing side of things—the part that actually gets your video seen. We've covered planning, shooting, and editing in the first three episodes, so now it's time to focus on what happens after you hit that upload button.
I want to start by being real with you: starting a YouTube channel in 2021 (or any year, really) is tough. It's fun, but it requires serious commitment. You're going to see ups and downs, and you need to be in it for the long haul. I've had videos get over 178,000 views, but I've also had recent uploads that only got a few hundred. The point is to focus on consistency and long-term growth, not overnight success.
The biggest factor in getting your video found is having a strong title and description. YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google, so SEO matters. I put my most important keywords at the front of the title and in the opening phrase of the description—this tells both the algorithm and viewers what your video is actually about. You get up to 100 characters for a title, so use that space thoughtfully. For descriptions, I keep the first couple of lines focused on what the video contains, because most people skip past that anyway. The description is really for the algorithm.
Then there are some hard truths: don't use clickbait titles (YouTube can tell when people click and immediately leave), don't lie about your content (YouTube auto-generates subtitles to verify what you're actually saying), and don't overthink it. Keep things simple so both your audience and the algorithm understand what they're getting.
Thumbnails are critical. Gone are the days of just grabbing a frame from your video. Your thumbnail needs to grab attention and clearly communicate what the video is about, since most people won't read your title or description. I show you how to create one in Canva, and the key is making sure it's still readable when it's small—because most viewers will see it on their phone.
On the publishing side, I recommend uploading a few days early and scheduling publication. This gives you time to check for issues with ads or subtitles. As for publishing schedules—yes, consistency matters, but if you need more time or finish a video early, publish it. Regular uploads matter more than rigid timing.
Finally, look at the right metrics. Views alone don't tell you much. Instead, focus on CTR (click-through rate) and retention rate. CTR shows how many people clicked when they saw your thumbnail; I aim for 5-10%, with really good videos hitting 15-20%. Retention is how long viewers stay in the video—longer is better. Both need to be reasonably strong; if one is high and the other is low, YouTube won't promote it. Look for patterns in where viewers drop off, where they come from, and who they are.
But here's the thing: don't compare yourself to others. Everyone's metrics are different depending on their niche, audience, and content style. Most importantly, enjoy the process. If you love making videos, you'll keep making them, and that consistency is what drives channel growth. That's the real secret.