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YouTube

How to start a YouTube channel in South Africa

YouTube can be a powerful source of earning passive income or making money online. More and more South Africans are turning to YouTube, this is because a lot more people have access to the internet and data prices have gone down.

Here is how you can start a YouTube Channel in South Africa.

1. Pick a niche

A niche is basically the topic that your channel focuses on. You can’t create a YouTube channel that focuses on everything, that will just make it hard to pull a loyal subscriber base. People mainly subscribe to channels because those channels produce the type of content that they enjoy.

Pick a niche and focus on it, your channel can focus on cars, make up, fashion, money, pranks, anything.

2. Setup your channel

You need a Google account to have a YouTube channel, a lot of regular YouTube users already have a Google account. All you need to do is click on the icon of your Google account and you will see a drop-down menu, there is a link titled “Your channel”.

The link takes you to a dashboard where you can see your videos, playlists, and discussion happening on your channel. The default channel name will be the name that you used when creating a Google account. It might be your name and surname, which you might want to change to a name that is more suitable for your channel.

At the top right there is an option to customize your channel, that is where you will be working on most of the time. You will get to see how your channel is performing through analytics. The name of the channel can be changed on the “customize” page.

3. Produce quality content

By quality content, we mean; produce content that your subscribers will find valuable. If you are in a niche that is information based then provide thorough and quality information on your niche. If you are in a niche that is all about entertainment then do your best to provide high quality entertainment.

4. Be consistent

Don’t post 10 videos today and nothing tomorrow, have a consistent posting schedule. YouTube can be a passive income source if you are able to create a ton of videos in advance and release them periodically. Maybe release a video once or twice per week. The days in which you release your videos should be predictable. This makes it easier for your audience to remember when to check out your channel.

5. Understand YouTube SEO

It’s much easier for bloggers to succeed in YouTube, that’s because most bloggers understand the importance of SEO. Doing YouTube SEO will grow your channel faster than anything.

You have to optimize your videos to rank on YouTube when people are searching for things. This starts with your titles; your titles should match what an average person searching for information related to your video would type in the search bar. Your titles should also be enticing, use hash tags related to the video.

6. Thumbnails

Thumbnails are super important on YouTube, they’re usually the main contributing factor on whether someone clicks on your videos or not. For this reason, some YouTubers go overboard and create thumbnails that are misleading, this is known as clickbait. The thumbnail is usually exaggerated and misleading, that is clickbait and it gets a lot of people to click on the video.

If you do click bait for long enough then people are going to start avoiding your videos. The thumbnail must be super attractive and encourage people to click on your videos but it must not be clickbait.

No one will ever click on a thumbnail that is not interesting, do your best to make sure that your thumbnail is as interesting as your video.

7. Make money from YouTube

You need to have at least 1 000 subscribers and 4 000 video watch time to start making money from YouTube. This might seem like a lot but it’s not, your channel would not make that much money without hitting those milestones even if it was approved for monetization.

Getting one thousand subscribers is not hard, this is something that can be done in a week and 4 000 watch time seems hard to reach but it’s not.

8. Equipment

You can get started with your phone; it’s not recommended to buy high quality gear until you reach at least 200 subscribers. Just start recording and uploading videos. Your quality will have to improve as your channel grows, invest in quality gear that will produce high quality videos.

Conclusion

This was a complete guide on how to start a YouTube channel in South Africa. If you are not sure about YouTube then you can try blogging, which is just as powerful as YouTube. Do you have any thoughts or questions? Comment below.

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