So you’ve come up with a topic and a name for your channel (if you haven’t yet, click here and follow along), what would be the first step to start it up?
First step – Coming up with a plan
First thing’s first, it’s been tested that planning your channel ahead of launch yields a higher probablity for success. This is due to the fact that you will already have the goals, the first step, and the overall theme of your channel mapped out.
So I would suggest starting with planning first. This is not a necessity that without it you will fail, nope, but it will definitely increase your chances while saving you some time on wasted efforts.
Branding
In the previous post I talked about coming up with a topic and a name, but that’s not all. I also gave a lot of thought to what would be the theme of the channel. What does that mean, theme? That means that there would be a certain flow for the channel, that everything will revolve around. This is basically the creation of your brand, which in turn, strengthens your connection with your audience.
The connection with the audience is the most important thing. You see that in sport teams, games, book series, you have the super fans, that just the mention of their team brings strong emotions into play.
Emotions are the way to keep the audience engaged. If they’re not emotionally involved, there’s not much to hold on to.
Let’s compare that to a relationship for a moment – An emotionless relationship is a mere trade of benefits, and once that’s gone, the relationship breaks. But! If there are emotions involved, people have a much harder time to break that relationship, and will stick to it for longer.
Same goes for audiences – Strong bonds takes longer to untie.
Brand fruition
So I’ve decided on a theme, now what?
For me the brand was “Board At Hell” for a board games channel and it incorporates fire, board games motives, and some creativity. My first step to bring that to life was to think how I want the channel to look and feel. I’ve done that long before I even uploaded a single video.
Keep in mind that this step is optional, but it helps a lot in focusing your efforts to the right place.
As I said in Branding section, by having a theme you can connect better, and you provide a higher quality of video production, as it seems more professional.
First step
In order to bring my brand to life, I started thinking how would I bring those motives into the look and feel of the channel. That’s how I envisioned it – board games’ pieces running on a chess board road coming down a hill with a firey background.
I started by drawing my draft for the channel’s picture, here’s my result:
As you can see, I’m no artist. The important part of this was putting it down on paper and bringing it to life.
Putting it down on paper helps us focus, and it gives us pride of our creation, even if it’s not the best. After having the initial idea you continue to change and see the problems with your current design. That’s when I decided that this paper version is not enough. From there, I took it to photoshop and messed around to get this result:
Second attempt
So here it was still a poor attempt to perfect the idea with no success. I’m no graphic designer either.
I have basic photoshop skills, and I can crop, edit, and manipulate images pretty well. The profile creation from scratch is a big undertaking for me. I gave it a go as any attempt helps me get a clearer vision.
I needed some more help.
Final attempt
The cool thing about having internet access is that there’s people that can help. There’s accessible professionals that will bring our ideas to life… properly. I turned to the Fiverr to find an artist that will get my vision to fruition.
I looked through quite a few artists and styles, until I found someone that had a style that’s similar to my vision.
Made contact, shared my previous attempts and vision, and started working with her.
It feels great getting someone else to create your dream. A few days later, I had the first draft ready, which looked way beyond what I envisioned. Just a small change request, a few more days, and bam! My channel picture is complete. Here’s the final result:
I was ecstatic. Finishing this part of the channel felt like a huge step. It gave me a feeling that this time, I’m going into this more professionally. This sensetion gave me the drive and pat on the back, that I’m doing things right this time.
Conclusion
Start by planning your channels look and feel.
If you’ve got nothing, look for successful channels in your topic to give you some ideas. Never copy, just get some ideas as what currently works and what speaks to you.
Circle around your idea and find how it fits into the look and feel for your channel.
If you can – create your own channel picture, if not, turn to Fiverr and get a professional to help you with that. It’s pretty cheap and gets amazing results as you can see above.
Let me know about your progress.
Until the next post,
Dekel
