#YouTubeNashville Workshop Wisdom

If you haven't heard, YouTube is in Nashville this week at the Starstruck offices! We went to the happy hour hangs on Tuesday night, and went to the workshop on Channel Optimization today. For #WisdomWednesday we wanted to share 5 easy takeaways from the workshop that you can do now to start optimizing your channel and connecting with your audience. 

1. Playlist Curation

From my experience optimizing channels, and per the support team at YouTube, playlist curation is one of the easiest ways you can quickly make your channel look more professional. In the Creator Studio, you're able to pick and choose what playlists are featured on your home page, so that you control what fans see first and what's served up to them. Create a playlist for interviews and add in videos from other channels, create a playlist for songs you've covered or create a playlist for all your live videos and add in fan's videos as well! This is a great way to pull in videos outside your channel, help fans easily choose which type of videos they want to see and to control which video is served to your fans next. 

2. Branding

Another easy way to make your channel look professional is to create banner art that's on brand, as well as a profile photo. Your channel banner can promote your tour, a record you're releasing or suggest which video your fans should watch. Create your image in whatever photo program you want, make sure it's around 2560 x 1440 pixels and upload it to your channel to start promoting whatever it is you want to promote! 

3. Post regularly

The ideal posting schedule is once every two weeks. Oftentimes as an artist, you won't be releasing music with that frequency, so this is an area where you'll have to get creative. Figure out what works for your brand and for you as a human! Do you love going on long tirades about different types of dogs you love? Great! Release that once a month as one type of series. Do covers perform well on your page? Perfect! Release one cover video a month. Do you have an important release coming up in the future? Wild! Release a short teaser video to entice fans. 

4. Optimize your titles 

One valuable thing I didn't realize is that in your YouTube video titles, the first phrase or word in your title should be the most searchable. For instance, Jill Andrew's song "Tell That Devil" is the theme song for the Syfy TV show Wynona Earp, and her video is titled "Wynonna Earp Theme Song Syfy 'Tell That Devil' by Jill Andrews" so that fans of the show can easily search and find her video for the song. 

5. Dig into your analytics

Analytics are helpful no matter the platform, and YouTube is no different. In your creator studio, you can poke around in the traffic sources section to figure out how fans are finding your videos, so you can strategize about what content is working and how best to optimize your videos based on that info.