YouTube channel setup notes
There aren't many occasions one gets a blank sheet on the web. Starting a YouTube channel is one of those occasions and that's what presented itself when I recently set Team Fordzilla up on YouTube.
Here are a few notes on setting up a new YouTube channel. I hope you find it useful 🤓
Home - Channel Art, Branding and Sections
First comes channel art!
The channel art appears across the while channel, but I always consider it a home page feature.
I added a few sections to the home page: mostly playlists, which you need to create before you can add them.
I also added a channel trailer and featured video for subscribed users. Though, as this is a new channel with no subscribers ,I set the same "Who We Are" video for both features.
Videos - More branding
The videos tab shows all public videos on the channel.
Each video has a custom thumbnail.
Currently the main job for these thumbnails is branding and awareness.
Playlists - YouTube secret sauce
The playlist tab shows ..... playlists.
Playlists are the secret sauce for YouTube channels. They help surface more, related content from your channel and should really be built up around themes.
A little used YouTube playlist feature is collaboration.
Collaborate
Team Fordzilla is made up of team captains in a few European countries, who build out their own teams.
Those team captains all have their own presence on YouTube, so the playlist collaborate feature makes a lot of sense to allow us to pull Team Fordzilla content from across other channel together.
My aim is to add the team captains as collaborators for some playlists and they can then add content themselves, both their own Team Fordzilla content and any related videos from their team members.
If this becomes approach chaotic with just one playlist we might split things up into country playlist later on, but first of all I need to establish the collaboration and get people used to the idea of adding videos.
I have already added some channels, and will be adding more team member channels as I am made aware of them.
Hopefully some team members will add the Team Fordzilla channel back from their channels, thus strengthening the network.
About - Description and links
The About tab carries a short Team Fordzilla description, helpful for SEO / search etc and links to other Team Fordzilla social channels and website.
Future & Advanced options
Team Fordzilla is by nature multi-lingual, so I plan on making sure that we take advantage of all YouTube's translation features as much as possible: starting soon with the channel description.
There are also translation opportunities for video titles, descriptions and captions.
So I have already started providing caption files, which team members can translate intio their own language and pass back to me for applying to the videos.
That's all I've done so far. There are a few things I've skipped, such as the community tab, which is only available after a channel has X number of subscribers. So until the channel hits that threshold I have hidden the inferior discussion tab.
Was this helpful? Did I miss anything?
Sound off in the comments! 👍
