If you only do one thing today, you should create a YouTube account for your business. As the rise of visual video content marketing grows, YouTube and other video platforms are going to be vital for your business’s future growth.
Since YouTube is the second largest search engine, its a no brainer. You should be taking advantage of the massive audience that YouTube has to offer.
In this guide, I will show you how to quickly and easily create a YouTube account for your business, blog, or website. I’ve included step by step screenshots, along with a video tutorial I recorded.
Why should you Create a YouTube account for your company?
There are many benefits of using YouTube for business:
- Video marketing is the future: People are gravitating towards consuming videos more than written content. Just look at the growth of recent social video platforms like Vine, Periscope, and Snapchat.
- Blog posts are a dime a dozen: There were over 64,000,000 blog posts this month on WordPress.com alone. You could image how many blog posts there are on all platforms. Needless to say, blog posts are a dime a dozen (unless they stand out).
- Competitive advantage: Writing blog posts can get lost in a sea of other blog posts. Video is a great way to stand out, and it gives your company a competitive advantage. While everyone else is pumping out blog posts, you should be doing blog posts and video.
- YouTube is the second largest search engine: Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the search engine world. Guess what the second largest search engine is? YouTube. This means, you should be focusing on SEO (through blogging) and Video marketing (through YouTube) to maximize your reach.
- YouTube is less competitive: Because Google is king in the search engine world, most people who want to market their content focus on SEO and Google. YouTube is the second largest search engine, yet it is typically less competitive than trying to rank for a lot of terms on Google search results.
Should you create a YouTube business channel or YouTube business account?
You may be wondering if there is a difference between a YouTube business account and a YouTube business channel? Its more of a matter of semantics but there are two different approaches you could take.
- YouTube business channel: You could use your main Google account to create and manage your YouTube business channels.
- YouTube business account: you could create a completely separate Google account and only run that one company through that one google account.
The benefits of creating a separate YouTube account for your business are apparent if you ever decide to sell your company.
In the following steps, I will show you how to create a YouTube channel for your business, using your personal Gmail account. If you wanted to create a separate account solely for your company, just create a new Google account.
Steps to create a YouTube account for business
- Sign into YouTube (with Gmail credentials)
- Go to My Channel
- Click Use a business or other name
- Create Google plus brand page
1. Sign into YouTube
To create a YouTube channel for a business, blog or website, it’s pretty simple.
Start by heading over to YouTube and signing in with your Gmail account information. If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can create one here.
2. Go to My Channel
If you don’t already have a YouTube channel associated with your main Gmail account, click my channel.
3. Click Use a business or other name
It will then ask if you want to use YouTube as your main personal account. Since we want to create a YouTube channel for business, you want to click the link that says use a business or other name.
Alternative Method
You can also get to that by clicking on the upper right corner – on your profile icon. Then just click on the YouTube settings icon:
Then click create a channel.
From here, it’s the same thing – you want to click on use a business or other name.
4. Create Google plus brand page
You have a couple options to create your youtube channel.
Option 1 – create a youtube channel first
The first option is to create a YouTube channel for your business, blog or website without having a Google plus page for your business. Google will automatically create a Google plus page for you when you create your YouTube channel for your business.
Option 2 – create a google plus page first
The second option is to create a Google plus page for your business blog or website first (before creating a youtube channel). Then when you come back into here to create a youtube channel (after you create plus page) it will show under brand accounts.
All you need to do at this point is just click on the business under brand accounts, and it will create a youtube channel associated with that Google Plus page.
The way I do it, is I usually just starting off by creating a Google Plus page first. For the following steps, I had already set up a Google plus page Beforehand. If you need help doing that I created a step-by-step video on how to set up a Google plus page.
So all I need to do now, is go under where it says brand accounts and just click on Create channel on your associated Google plus business page:
From here we’re just going to click okay.
That’s it! You have now created a YouTube channel for your brand, business, or website.
How to use your YouTube channel?
Channel description
This next step is important for video SEO on YouTube. You will want to create a description for your channel that includes some of your industries keywords, or specific keywords that you want to rank for.
These will typically be general in history terms, rather than specific longtail keywords that your videos may contain.
To start editing your channel description, click channel description:
I recommend doing a little short description of what your channels about – like what kind of videos you are going to upload or the type of content you’re going to cover.
When you do this, it may help you rank for different keywords that you want to rank for.
Uploading videos
To upload videos all you need to do is click upload in the upper right corner.
From here you can just drag-and-drop your video files or click upload.
Changing between your YouTube business accounts
If you have several different blogs or websites in different niches, you don’t want to have all your videos in channel. I would recommend having a different channel for each niche that you occupy.
If you want to change between your different channels and upload videos to different channels, just click your icon in the upper right corner to choose your other channels.
One thing you want remember before going off and creating a ton of videos on your new YouTube business account (or channel rather), is to always link back to your website!
Using YouTube to accomplish specific goals for your business
You always want to direct YouTube traffic to your website to accomplish some predefined goal for your blog or business.
Typically, you will also want to measure these conversions for each of your businesses goals (email sign up, registration, selling a product, etc.).
You always want to own your audience, and with a YouTube business channel, you don’t own your own traffic. YouTube always had a say in how they control the traffic and your audience.
That’s why I always recommend YouTube as a platform to build an audience that you will transition to your visitors, using email capture or website traffic.