Chapter 21:Promote your music and make money on YouTube

Justin Bieber, Esmee Denters and The Weekend are all artists who have utilised YouTube as a medium of which to promote their music, and I bet that 99% of artists dream of reaching the same dizzying heights of success.

Most people have used YouTube to watch videos and the ease of access and user friendly interface makes it the easy option when it comes to listening to music. Any artists out there who are yet to set up a channel should do it immediately as you are not only missing out on a fantastic way to promote yourself, but also the opportunity to make some money.

Create your channel

Creating a YouTube channel is extremely easy and doesn’t take much time at all. All that you need to get going is a Gmail account and once you have verified your account, you are ready to launch.

Profiles are now totally customisable and allow artists to adapt their space so that is completely embodies their brand and identity as an artist; users name their channel after themselves or their band and use it as a way of keeping their fans updated with what they are getting up to.

Long gone are the days where a YouTube channel just consists of the video and a basic profile for the user, artists can input profile information, create updates for fans and adapt the background and banners exactly how they want.

Create great content

Once you are ready to go with your YouTube channel, make a content plan in order to schedule just what videos you are going to make and when you are going to release them. Don’t generate mediocre videos and treat each new video as if it is the only one that you will ever be able to release; in short, make them count.

People don’t want to waste their time watching boring videos or poorly put together videos from an artist who is trying to make something of themselves; they want to see your potential from the get go, so make your videos look professional and well thought out. Always be thinking about what your brand is and what message you want to deliver when you are recording.

Record some of your songs with different tempos and twists to offer your channel visitors a little bit of diversity, as well as attract other users to see what you are all about.

Think about creating a weekly vlog to go hand in hand with you music video and answer other users questions in it; this is a great way of letting people see how you work as an artist and get a sense of your personality. Signed and established artists go on chat shows and panel shows to show another side to themselves and you can use your YouTube channel to achieve a similar result on a smaller scale.

Be an active member of the community

YouTube is a community driven platform that actively encourages interaction between users. Do a search for artists similar to you and leave comments on their videos to connect not just to them, but to their fans, too.

Look at what they are doing and see if you can use any inspiration for videos of your own; don’t imitate, but look at similar users to yourself to identify trends that their audience are looking for, as well as what kind of videos that they like the most.

You can also post video responses to other videos, adding another layer of communication onto commenting and liking other user’s material.

Create a playlist

Once you have generated a fan base, the will start to check your profile to check your latest videos, as well was your activity away from your own profile on YouTube. If they like you as an artist, they will be interested in what your personal music taste is so create playlists of the videos that you are watching as a YouTube user.

View your statistics

A great tool of YouTube is the ability to view the statistics that your videos generate; you will be able to see where your video is most being watched as well as the demographics of the watchers; this is a great way of helping you to discover what market you appeal to most.

Share and share alike

YouTube gives you the power to share your videos across all of your social media platforms, meaning that non–YouTube users can still watch your videos.

By sharing great content, you are giving yourself the potential for your videos to go viral. Going viral is not a bad thing as the name suggests, but instead it refers to your video reaching a large audience over a number of social media platforms; going viral is always the aim of the game with YouTube videos.

Make money through your YouTube channel

Making money on YouTube is not rocket science and absolutely everybody can monetise their YouTube account by using advertisements before your videos start. When you opt in to use advertisements, you will make money every time that they are watched. If you have a small following, you won’t make shed loads of cash, but some cash is better than no cash and as your subscribers hopefully grow, so will your revenue. You will need to sign up to Google Ad sense in order to withdraw the money that you earn via your video advertisements.

Sharing your videos when you are aiming to monetise them is essential, as the more people that see your video, the more views your advertisement will have. However, don’t overdo it with the advertisements as people will get sick of them and may shy away from viewing your videos as they know they will have to sit through an advert before it starts; apply it to your top viewed videos and let the others do well on their own, without bombarding the user.

Once you have a profile that generates over 15,000 hours of play a month, you can then go on to apply to be a YouTube partner, whereby you can monetise your channel further. Partners can use more tools to promote their videos, as well as liaise with other users who fall into the YouTube partner category in order to devise ways of promotion, as well as support each other.