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

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

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

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 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

What is an MCN, or ‘Multi-Channel Network’? Should a small creator work with one to establish a presence? Should larger YouTube channels stay tied to them as they pick up more sponsorship and brand deals?

Welcome to another episode of TubeTalk. I’m Liron Segev, the Director of Customer Success here at vidIQ, which means every day I help creators, big and small, level up their channels, get more subscribers, and generate more views in less time. One of the coolest parts of my job is meeting amazing creators from around the world and discovering their unique YouTube journey.

When we get to learn from other people's experiences, their mistakes, and the winning strategies they have implemented in the past that just helps us grow and hopefully, avoid the same pitfalls.

, an awesome creator who has worked with MCNs. In this week’s Tubetalk you will learn:

How to understand the different contracts involved in signing up with one

How to understand your YouTube channel’s worth

How to confirm the validity and credibility of an MCN

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:

Everything You wanted to Know About Working with an MCN: Full Transcript

Liron Segev:	So Shannon, welcome to TubeTalk

Shannon:	Aww, you're too sweet. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm super excited to chat about this.

Liron Segev:	I'm so glad we finally managed to get it all together to be able to do this. This is awesome. For those who don't know, who is Shannon in a tweet, what would you say?

Shannon:	So I am a host and producer of multiple YouTube channels. I've been doing it for a decade, and I just started going full-time on my personal YouTube channel, and I'm growing that based on my own experiences from my many years working with networks and other YouTube channels. I love technology.

Liron Segev:	Going full-time on your YouTube, well done. Congratulations. That's awesome.

Shannon, I really want to dive into the conversation we kind of had briefly about your past. So we get so many questions about an MCN. Is it good working with them? Is it not? Does it help you? Does it not? Maybe we can take it kind of from the top because you've got a lot of experience with an MCN. What is an MCN? Let's start there.

Shannon:	Yeah, I do have a lot of experience with MCNs for sure. So MCN stands for multichannel networks, and these are usually some kind of third party company that wants to affiliate with you along with multiple other YouTube channels to help you grow, or at least that's what they advertise.

So an MCN could come to you and offer to sell sponsorships for you or they could help you monetize your channel or deal with digital rights and copyright issues. They could get you connected with a YouTube partnership program or help you with content programming and really get into the nitty-gritty of helping you figure out what your niche is so they could help with audience development.

So MCNs are usually divided into two different types, either you have affiliate channels or owned and operated. An MCN can have two different types of channels underneath whatever their YouTube network is.

So on one hand, they might have affiliate channels, and those are managed pretty much totally by the MCN and they reside in an affiliate content owner type of management by that MCN. On the other hand, we have owned and operated, and those are owned and operated by the MCN solely. So, affiliate channels are what I'm really used to. However, I have a lot of friends who had channels that were owned and operated by the MCN, which means the MCN has full control over what you do on that channel to the point where they could eventually even cancel the channel if it's not doing good.

Liron Segev:	So I have alarm bells ringing all over the place.

Liron Segev:	Us as creators, we want control of absolutely everything, and for us to even outsource an editor or outsource someone for thumbnails, that's already a scary thing. Now we're saying somebody else actually owns my content, owns my channel? I don't know. It sounds scary. Is it? Am I misreading this? Is it true to a point? What would you say?

Shannon:	So from my experience, when I first started with a channel called Hak5, which is a big channel, but when we started it was relatively small, and we had a very, very specific niche, hackers and information security professionals.

We had Discovery Digital Networks come to us, which at the time was called Revision3, and they offered to either purchase our channel, which I won't give dollar amounts, but they offered to either purchase the channel and own the rights to the channel or we could become an affiliate and they would get a percentage of whatever our sponsorships brought in.

So of course, when we came to them and we were like, "Hey, let's have a partnership going on here," we had red flags as well. We didn't want to be owned and operated by the MCN because that means that they would have full rights over the channel. We would feel like sellouts in a sense, even though they were offering us a good amount of money and they would take on full liability for the content.

Well, when it comes to something like hacker content, you may want to sell your channel and have them take full liability and just take the money and run or continue hosting on that channel and have them just take care of all the background of it and then you would basically just get paid by the operator.

On the other hand, since we were a very niche audience since we did come from a very core passionate background of something that we truly loved, we really started delving into the idea of being an affiliate channel with Revision3. So that meant that the MCN came to us, Revision3 came to us, and they said, "Okay. Well, we will offer you a sponsorship deal where we will sell all these sponsorships for you, help you grow your audience, help you do all the creative collaborations. We'll put you on other channels on our network."

So we obviously automatically had that partnership kind of built-in since they had all those connections, which was really cool and then they would just take a percentage of those sponsorships that they brought in as well as YouTube monetization. So we ended up going with the affiliate channel option, which over time, we found that, Oh, turns out we could probably sell this on our own and make the same amount of money.

Liron Segev:	Okay. So it's important to mention two things. They take a percentage of your YouTube AdSense as well as sponsorship deals.*

Liron Segev:	Is that the deals that they bring, or even if you bring a deal, they still get their cuts out of that?

Shannon:	So it was deals that they brought. However, if somebody came directly to us and said, "Hey, we want to sponsor on your channel," we would have to give that company, the MCNs, information. So we would have to forward their information over to the MCN and say, "Hey, we are an affiliate of this network. We have to run all our sponsorships through them."

However, that was just our contract. There's a lot of different options that you can have. When it comes to MCNs, a lot of times, the YouTuber is in control. If an MCN is coming to you, that means that they see some kind of value in your channel. So you are the one that has the power to negotiate. That's what we didn't really understand back in the day.

We didn't understand that we could negotiate. We were overjoyed that a network even wanted to work with us. So we were just like, "Yes, sign that contract and go with it." What we should have done was negotiate harder so that we would be able to take more of our money. Because at the end of the day, we are producing all that content, it is our passion, we are growing our audience.

While they are helping and they are doing a lot of that background work, the audience doesn't come unless they like the hosts. Really, if we weren't the ones on that channel, then it wouldn't have grown in the starting place. So I always felt like we should have negotiated better because we didn't understand our own value at that time.

Liron Segev:	That's what it is. You've got through the experience and then you realize that hold on, the future, should you do this again, you have a much better, stronger negotiating power since it is your channel and people are coming to you at the end of the day.

Liron Segev:	When you say kind of negotiate, without giving exact figures, are they talking about kind of a 50, 60% cut out of your AdSense or are they talking about three or 4%, which is not a big deal.

Shannon:	Yeah, exactly. So it's more like the bigger numbers. So like, you would have a 40-60 cut or a 30--70 cut, something like that. I believe when we started it was closer to like, they got 60% we got 40, or something terrible.

And then over time, as our contract was going to expire each year or every three years or two years, whatever the contractor was on, we were able to go back and negotiate based on how much money we were bringing in for them, because they were taking home a decent share of those sponsorship amounts, and we were able to renegotiate that information with them. So over time, we were able to take control of what we thought we were owed based on our audience size. Now our audience is over 550,000 subscribers strong, and each episode gets really good views and watch time. So I'm quite proud of what we do.

We thought that we were worth it. I think about four years into my career working with that channel and working with a few other content creators, just doing guest hosting and stuff like that, I developed a mentor in one of my friends, my friend Tom merit, I'll totally name him here because he's awesome. He's a great guy, Daily Tech News Show, that's the show.

But I came to him one day and I said, "I have this guest-hosting opportunity, and I'm trying to figure out what I should ask for." I gave him a dollar amount and he was like, "Oh no, no. That's not the right amount." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, am I asking for too much?" And then he said, "Ask for double." So I did, and they accepted it.

So I feel like a lot of times with creating shows on YouTube or just creating media online, we don't value ourselves as much as we really should, and I think a lot of that is imposter syndrome, and we feel like we maybe don't belong or we read too much into YouTube comments or maybe we just hear what other people say and we just take criticism to heart way more than we think we should or way more than we should.

So I started asking for double what I thought I was worth, and I've never had somebody turn me down. I think says a lot about what I valued myself at when I was first starting to what I think of my job now. I think of it more as a career and something that I can negotiate, and I feel much stronger in my power and having that ability than I did back in the day. So I'm pretty proud of what I've developed since then.

Liron Segev:	It makes sense. You've proven it. You've kind of got value, you've got your steps behind you, you can show the brands, you can show the company that you're working with how much value you actually bring. Do you think that maybe someone starting out, maybe they got under 5,000 subscribers, they might not have those views and subs at this stage, are they still in a good position to negotiate and show some ROI, or should they say, "Well, you know what, I'm too small. Let me kind of suck it up for a bit until I get bigger," and then do what you did?

Shannon:	Oh yeah, absolutely. You can absolutely negotiate and get good ROI. Return on investment is what we're talking about here. That's something that a lot of companies are finally beginning to understand, is that micro-influencers are people who have like less than 10,000 subscribers or less than 20,000 depending on the social media network.

They're starting to understand that people who have smaller audiences don't cost as much as the million-plus subscriber channels, but they can bring in a lot more money for that company because the audience that we have developed are tried and true, they're people that have chosen to subscribe to us and continue to do so because they trust us and they trust our transparency.

And the more transparent and the more honest you are with your audience, especially when you're starting off, the stronger that smaller audience is going to be. They're going to be the people that keep on coming back and watching every single video that you do and sticking around for the entire video as opposed to leaving after five to 15 seconds.

So having that return on investment is something that you can absolutely build. Now, of course, if you're starting with zero subscribers, you're not going to have any return on investment that you can show.

Something that I started doing when I didn't know if I had any ROI to show for sponsorships, potential sponsorships, was I tweeted out, "Has anybody ever purchased any tech based on my reviews?" And I got a ton of tweets back. So I use that information and I put it into a media kit and I started sending that out to potential sponsors.

That right there is, I think, what helped me really sell my channel. Even though I've been doing this for 10 years and I just started building up my own personal channel, I only have 20,000 subscribers on there, which to me sounds relatively small given I started with a 500,000 subscriber channel, so big difference there.

But it's my channel, and it's something that a lot of people have come over to from that larger channel because they trust me and they realize how honest I am and how transparent I am and how real I am with them. I always tell people like, I am not a celebrity in any sense. This is my job. When I come home, I'm coming home to two cats and my husband, and I do things that everybody does. I watch Netflix and stuff like that. So I'm not some kind of special person here, I've just figured out how to make my job something that people enjoy, and I truly love to entertain and educate people.

I think in a past life, maybe I was an educator or a teacher. So I try to bring as much of that as I can to these networks and to my YouTube channel so that when I do talk to these sponsors, they do see that passion and they see that ROI with all those tweets that I got as replies and they see that I actually can sell a product just by talking about them on my channel.

Liron Segev:	So you're not with an MCN at the moment on your personal channel?

Shannon:	I am not. I honestly don't think I would go with an MCN, even though it would help me grow, most likely. But I feel like there are a lot of scams out there, and I think there's a lot of things that when you're a new YouTube content creator, you aren't really sure what to look for when it comes to MCNs.

One thing I would ask for is numbers. What kind of numbers can they show you? Since you are the negotiator in here, what kind of numbers can they show you that proves that they know what they are doing? A lot of these companies just want to get in with your channel so that they can get a portion of your money, which is very scary and is a big red flag.

So one thing that I would highly recommend looking for is asking them for their own ROI. What is their return on investment? How can they show you that they have performed over time, and can they give you some referrals or some testimonials from other YouTube content creators so that you can speak to them directly before choosing to sign a contract with an MCN?

Liron Segev:	That's always been my frustration with MCNs, because they could spend zero time with you and simply get a percentage of your revenue. But if they've got another channel that's next to you that's doing 500,000, a million subscribers, doing many more views than you are, that's going to get them more money. Why would they spend time with the newbie when they could be focusing on the cash cow that's bringing them all that revenue?

Liron Segev:	Did you ever find that, that maybe they prioritize the bigger channels even though they've signed you on anyways?

Shannon:	Luckily, that was not something that I had ever experienced, but that's personally. But I do have friends that have experienced that, where they did sign on with the MCN, a multichannel network, and they found that the MCN was focusing on the larger content creators and giving them collabs between each other, but they were not focusing on those smaller content creators, and basically just taking a portion of their money and just expecting them to grow their audience on their own. Even these smaller YouTube channels did not even know where to start.

Liron Segev:	What's the point of the MCN if you're going to join the MCN with the purpose of growing and if they're expecting you to simply do it by yourself and collect their percentage, that seems like a very big scam to me.

Shannon:	It is. It's a huge scam. I was running the show called Tech Thing with my cohost Patrick Norton. The show never hit 100k subscribers on YouTube, but we had very good views, and I think that's what turned a lot of these MCNs into sending us emails. The funny thing is, I can't tell you how many emailed us and just asked us like, "Hey, we would love for you to join our MCN. Go and apply here."

They expect you to be excited about it, which we just looked at it as scams. We looked at it as spam email, and we would immediately delete these emails because they didn't offer us any kind of proof, they didn't offer us any kind of monetary gain from the channel. All they showed us was, "Oh, you should be a part of our MCN, it's going to be great," and that was about it. We had nothing to work off of there, so we would immediately delete those.

That's something that I feel like a lot of YouTubers have experienced, where they turn their channel on, they get really good growth, and then all of a sudden all these MCNs come out of the woodwork, and we've never even heard of them, and they just start emailing you. You have no proof whatsoever that they've actually done anything to help any channels that are on their network.

Liron Segev:	You can see at the beginning, it's very flattering. I've just started my channel and these people want to work with me, they want to sign me, which is like a big deal. So you get super, super excited. Their website always looks professional with lots of blah, blah, blah and lots of marketing, and it makes you feel like, "Wow, if I joined this, I could also be the next, whatever big creator you want to name."

Liron Segev:	It’s great for the ego. But I'm wondering if there's still a place for an MCN. I'm finding out doesn't get many, "Wow. I worked with an MCN and it was absolutely amazing," stories.

Shannon:	Yeah. I wouldn't say that it was amazing, but it did bring us opportunities, especially since we were starting to grow. We decided to sign with a very, very smart company. Revision3 was a wonderful MCN for us to work with in the sense that while they did take home a very large portion of our money and we didn't understand how to negotiate with them at the time, they did bring us those partnership opportunities.

There was one time that they flew me out to Chicago to talk with potential advertisers and tell them about my channel one-on-one, which I thought was so cool, because I was able to talk to all these big name brands and discuss how valuable the information security community could be to them.

That's something that I feel like they would not understand, these sponsorships wouldn't understand if they didn't get that one-on-one opportunity with a host. That's something that I still experience to this day, is I build my best sponsorship relationships whenever I'm talking to companies one-on-one.

Because if you just send them your numbers and you say, "Hey, I have a channel with 20,000 subscribers," what are they going to get from that? If I send them my media kit and show them proof of my ROI and I get a chance to talk to them as opposed to going through a third party, like a third party website or an MCN, then they get more of a chance to understand who I am as a creator, know that I know what I'm doing, know that I follow FTC guidelines for example. Stuff like that.

Liron Segev:	It sounds like you had some positive experiences with your MCN and then kind of some, not negative but more of, I wish I had done that smarter. So if you could go back, do you think having renegotiated a good contract, do you think that MCN would've helped you then?

Shannon:	I think so. Well, I think it did help us overall to grow our channel and everything, mostly due to those collaborations and due to the fact that... If we didn't have them helping us sell sponsorships, then we probably wouldn't have been able to live in the San Francisco Bay area because it's very expensive.

It was hard to sell sponsorships on a hacker channel, basically, quite bluntly. So they did help us in that sense. But I do think that we would've been able to get farther with our profits if we had help to negotiate back in the day, which we didn't get.

Another thing that I did want to mention too, and this was not my experience, but when I heard from a very close friend of mine, is, when he signed his contract, he thought that he was doing an affiliate channel, and it turned out, based on the contract, it was owned and operated.

So he ended up selling the rights to his channel, to the MCN, and he didn't realize it, so they got it for an extremely cheap price based on that contract. He was stuck with it. There was nothing that he could do about it because he didn't read his contract when he signed it. It was that excitement that filled him.

He got super excited about being offered this opportunity, and he didn't take the time to take the contract to a lawyer or even go to a website where you can hire a lawyer to read a contract, which is very inexpensive to do, which could have saved him thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. So I highly recommend reading your contract so you don't get screwed. Because a lot of these MCNs, they do kind of screw you in the end.

Liron Segev:	I think it's an important note that you are locked into a period of time. So even though you might kind of be all excited and ready to do this, you are locked in for 12 months, 24 months. Even if they bring you nothing, you're still paying every month, you're paying a portion of your revenue to a company that's doing nothing for you.

This is why we're all super critical of an MCN, and this is why I love the advice of take it to an attorney. Spend a bit of money to make sure that you are getting the deal you think you're getting because they all have that one clause, it doesn't matter what we told you on the phone, it doesn't matter what emails we've sent, this is the contract. Unfortunately, some of these sharks that do swim in these waters are just out to get as much as they can, make their percentage and move on to the next client.

Shannon:	I'm glad you mentioned it doesn't matter what you say on the phone. We actually ended up getting our opportunity with Revision3 because we went to a live show of one of their channels, one of their current shows. We went to a live show in New York, saw the show, we're super excited.

Somehow, maybe we socially engineered our way in, but somehow we ended up in the VIP section, and we ended up talking to the CEO. We had no clue if he would remember what was happening the next morning, but he did. He ended up getting the phone number and calling this guy straight up and saying, "Hey, we talked about this last night. Do you remember?" He was like, "Let's get this in writing."

So we ended up getting the contracted writing. Myself and my other cohost, we had no clue that this was happening until the next morning when he was like, "Hey, we might be on Revision3." And we were like, "What? That's awesome."

But we had no clue what was going on. So there was a lot of like inopportune moments there, but there were also some good opportunities that we had that just happened very happenstance. If we had not gone to that live show in New York, we probably wouldn't have ended up on Revision3.

Liron Segev:	Yep, makes sense. So again, a very important note is you sometimes do have to get out of your comfort zone.

Shannon, if I'm thinking about this, you didn't go with an MCN with your new channel, but you've got all this wealth of experience, you know what you need to do to be able to get those brand deals. Regardless of the size of the channel, you're able to operate.

Liron Segev:	A new channel that is up and running at the moment, and they're saying, "Look, I'm getting no AdSense anyway or very little, I'm getting zero brand deals at the moment." Should they maybe take a chance and find an MCN that they're happy with, get their contracts negotiated and written up and all the stuff we've mentioned, but perhaps maybe suck it up for a year or two years and really help build that audience not looking at the money at all, because you're doing it for longterm gain? Would you advise that it as potentially an opportunity?

Shannon:	You could absolutely do that, yes. I could definitely see that as an opportunity. In fact, Hak5 didn't make any money for the first five years, that was from 2005 to 2010. We signed our contract with Revision3, I think it was around 2009. So that first year, we were just getting started to get monetized with the MCN and we made a little bit of money, enough to move out here to the San Francisco Bay Area and kind of get our toes wet in the pool.

So I would say from that experience, it's fine to do a show with an MCN and not make money when you're first getting started, and that might happen when they're just starting to understand you and you're building that relationship with your MCN.

But make sure that that's a short contract. Make sure that it's not something that has you tied in for five years because you may find that after they have helped you grow your audience, you may be able to make more money if you aren't with that MCN, especially if they are taking a large percentage of your take-home money from YouTube monetization as well as sponsorships. So I would definitely consider it. It would really depend on your own experiences and what you are currently experiencing. But yeah, consider it.

But definitely, definitely make sure that you have everything in writing, and that you have a lawyer look at your contracts so you're not getting completely screwed.

Are you a YouTuber thinking about signing up with an MCN? We discuss the pros and cons of this strategy on this week's episode of TubeTalk!

Everything You Wanted to Know About Working with an MCN: TubeTalk 198 with Shannon Morse

Did you know that more than one person can manage a YouTube channel? And I'm going to show you exactly how to set those different roles up.

But first, there's an important distinction to make here, there are two types of channels. Personal YouTube channels, and brand accounts. Let's start with the personal channels first.

From most YouTube screens, click on your profile image in the top right-hand corner, and go to the YouTube studio.

From the new YouTube studio screen, you want to click on the settings button in the bottom left-hand corner.

And from this pop-up, you should see a permissions tab to the left. This will show you who has access to your YouTube channel To invite a new manager, click on the invite button in the top right-hand corner and type out email addresses to invite them to manage your channel.

Below that is an access drop-down which gives you four options. These access levels pretty much explain themselves. So, do make sure you trust the person you are inviting to your channel to do what these permissions give them access to. And just to clarify, since it's not 100% obvious here, __editor and above access means that these managers can upload videos to your YouTube channel. __

Once you are satisfied with your selection, click done, and the invitee should receive an email that they can accept within 30 days to become a manager of your YouTube channel.

On the same permissions page, you can update the access rights a manager has, by clicking on their current role. From this drop-down, you can also remove them as a manager from your YouTube channel completely.

That's how to add managers for personal accounts. But what about brand accounts? Well, first of all, you have to convert your YouTube channel into a brand account. And we've done a full tutorial on how to do this and the benefits of doing so. Take a watch now:

Let's take a look at how you add managers for a brand account:

We will start in the YouTube studio this time. But when you go to settings, you won't find a permissions tab on the left-hand side. Instead, you must go to the channel tab, followed by advanced settings at the top of this section, then down the bottom of this screen, you will want to choose manage your YouTube account.

From this screen, click on the add or remove managers link, and then click on the manage permissions button from this screen.

Now the next screen depends on what role you have on the channel. And it will give what you can actually do on this screen.

Those with owner access have full access to the YouTube channel, and can also change the permission of other managers on the channel. Managers have full access to the YouTube channel, while communication managers appear to be a bit redundant, as they have no access to YouTube at all.

I think in this instance, channel moderators would be classed as communication managers.

And of course, in the top right-hand corner of the permissions pop-up screen, you can invite new managers through email, and set up their permissions here as well from the drop-down.

The Difference Between YouTube Management Roles

Now a couple more tidbits to add to what you've already learned here. Managers on personal accounts can add and remove others. They are similar to owners in brand accounts. Yes, I know this gets a little bit complicated.

Also, managers for personal accounts cannot yet access the live control room, and they cannot access the personal account through the mobile studio app.

And one more thing for all types of channels, for the person who is invited to be a manager of a channel, make sure that you check the email is from YouTube before you click any links. There are all sorts of 

, make sure you don't fall for foul of one.

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

Did you know that more than one person can manage a YouTube channel, and that you can assign different permissions and roles depending on your needs? We show you how.

How to Add, Edit and Remove YouTube Channel Managers & Owners

Let's be honest. Running a YouTube channel takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, and can actually 

 you money. You have equipment to buy, you have business trips that you need to get to, plus all sorts of other expenses. What can you do to generate revenue beyond the brand deals, beyond the affiliate links, and beyond YouTube AdSense?

My guest on this episode of TubeTalk is Jess Catorc from 

, who's got an amazing option that we should all be exploring. In this podcast you will learn:

How to create courses for your YouTube audience

How to make the most of your expertise and skills via selling an online course

To take advantage of your considerable content creations skills

Why creating and selling an online course could be a major revenue stream

Why you don't need to be a teacher or educator to create a course - entertainment works too!

How to Make Money as a YouTuber by Creating Courses: Full Transcript

Jess Catorc: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Liron Segev: Let's start with the beginning. What do you do? What is teachable.com for people who don't know?

Jess Catorc: Teachable is an online course hosting platform, so it's really a platform that allows anyone to sell courses, accept students, enroll students, and share their knowledge. I lead partnerships on the Teachable team, but I've also created courses myself. I've kind of been on both sides of the aisle.

I'm really excited to talk about courses because it's crazy to see just how much this industry has grown and how people are not just becoming course creators, but they're incorporating this concept of sharing their knowledge and diversifying what they're doing in their business with their existing model.

Liron Segev: This is why I love this because one of the common questions that we get is about monetization. As you know, content creators on YouTube, they get monetized based on ad revenue. Maybe they'll do some brand deals, but they've got the skills. We know how to shoot, we know how to edit, we know how to cut scenes, we know how to produce an outline for a shot list for the way that we produce content. Surely, there's a different way that we can take the same skills and then rehome that elsewhere.

Jess Catorc: The nice thing is that I'm not here to say like everyone needs to stop doing brand deals and stop monetize with the way that you're currently doing it.

The nice thing with courses is that you can do it in addition. Really, the whole concept of it is you're diversifying your income because we know when we're searching for brand deals that you're constantly looking for the next deal, you're constantly looking for the next package that you're going to be able to offer, or you're reliant on the algorithm to show your videos, or even for YouTube to determine if your video is ad-friendly or not.

Sometimes videos get demonetized for the wrong reasons and then they put it back up again. Really, this is just creating like a holistic approach to your business that you don't just rely on one or two streams of income, you have more and you're also giving value to your audience.

Liron Segev: You're speaking our language because everything you've just mentioned is pretty hard-hitting. The algorithm makes a change, views take a dive, ad revenue takes a dive. You're constantly on the hunt for that next brand deal, as opposed to just being able to have something that's more reliable, something that you can actually base some prediction on. Is this where a course would maybe come into play?

Jess Catorc: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing with YouTube, and I'm a huge fan of YouTube as a platform, but it is no different to any other social platform, which is that you also don't have direct access to your audience.

I have a friend who had quite a large following on YouTube, and for some reason, something happened where she deleted her account and she lost her entire channel. There was absolutely no way for her to get it back. It's nice too, in addition to what you're doing on YouTube, when you incorporate courses, you're also growing an email list, so you have direct access to your audience. You can even contact them with your new videos. It just expands what you're currently doing.

When it comes to courses, the nice thing is that you can really give a clear cut outcome to your audience. You can say like, "In this course, I'm going to show you how to do X", and you can deliver on a set outcome or a transformation. It's really great for building a relationship with your audience too because you're helping them get to an outcome or to overcome a pain point that they currently have, in addition to the videos that you're currently releasing on your channel.

Liron Segev: Trying to build my relationship with my community, but on the other platforms, I may not have a way to press the button and send my subscribers a message. I don't have that at all. At best, I can rely on YouTube notifications, which are, let's be honest, not as reliable as they need to be. Mailing lists are always a priority. We've been teaching mailing lists for a long time. They just need it to happen.

Let's move to the course itself. Now you convinced me. I have an opportunity. I have my YouTube channel, that doesn't stop, but I'm doing this in addition to that. The first question that comes to mind is, can anyone create a course? In other words, if my channel maybe isn't a teaching channel, I don't teach how to get more views on YouTube, I don't teach a specific skill, I am more of entertainment, can I convert that into a course? Can I think along those lines?

Jess Catorc: Absolutely. The interesting thing is even people who have channels where they're teaching a specific topic or a specific thing, we all have very different skills or unique skill sets. For example, let's say that you are a travel blogger and you're like, "I'm not really showing people how to travel. I'm just documenting my journey and people love following me in the process."

There are a lot of skills that you are consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously using, which is like you're great at video, you're great at maybe traveling on a budget, or maybe you're great at taking beautiful Instagram photos.

What I would say though is rather than just kind of picking a topic that you think people will want a course on, open up the conversation with your audience. I would say this even if you are 99% sure you know what your topic is going to be. It's so important to validate that before you go in and spend all this time creating your videos and marketing your course. Some things that you can do is you can look at certain videos if you're getting more engagement when you're discussing certain topics or there's certain things that people seem to engage with more.

Other things that you can do is just like hop on the phone in a Zoom call with people or do a survey and ask people like, "You follow my channel. You seem to really enjoy the videos I'm making, but I'm curious, is there anything that you're currently struggling with that you think I might be able to help you with, or something you've seen me do that you would love to learn how to do yourself?"

It's the best way because you're taking the guesswork out. Also, you want to have people along for the journey. I don't know if you followed the Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star series but it's such a great example of the power of taking your audience along for the journey before you launch a product. The very first point is deciding on what do people want to know. It's like they feel like they're a part of creating that course with you, and then when you launch, it's like they feel like they've already been there.

Liron Segev: And they've helped you craft it, so of course they're going to jump on that because it's a part of their journey too now.

Liron Segev: I also love the point that you made, even though you're a travel blogger, you don't have to think of a course to do with the travel per se, but you may be able to work things around it, like how to travel on a budget. Maybe you're really good at that. Maybe that's what your audience wants to know. Your course is related to your YouTube channel, but it isn't the top five places to visit in Cancun, for example.

Liron Segev: Okay. I like it. Now I have a topic. I have an idea that I want to do, but then I kind of asked myself the question, "Why would someone pay for a course when I'm giving them all this amazing value on my channel for free?"

Generating revenue from your content is one of the biggest goals for most YouTubers. But how do you monetize beyond AdSense or brand deals? If you've asked yourself that question, we have a solution for you on this week's TubeTalk

Everything You Wanted to Know About Working with an MCN: TubeTalk 198 with Sh...

Liron Segev

How to Add, Edit and Remove YouTube Channel Managers & Owners

Rob Wilson

How to Make Money as a YouTuber by Creating Courses: TubeTalk 199 with Jess C...

Liron Segev

13 MISTAKES New YouTubers Like YOU Make - and How To Avoid Them

Rob Wilson

How to Get More YouTube Views With Shoutouts to MrBeast, PewDiePie or vidIQ!

Rob Wilson

How to Get Your First 1000 YouTube Subscribers

Rob Wilson

How Do YouTube Videos Actually Get Discovered by Viewers?

Carla Marshall

How to Get More YouTube Views by Understanding These New CRUCIAL Analytics

Rob Wilson

Fortnite to Allow Gamers to Mute Emotes to Avoid Copyright Strikes

Carla Marshall

How to Get More Views On YouTube From Your Channel Subscribers

Rob Wilson