Chapter 3

Building Your Channel from the Ground Up

In This Chapter

  • Navigating your new channel
  • Customizing your channel
  • Making your channel viewer friendly

A YouTube channel is where the creator can track activity, maintain account settings, and — most importantly for a creator like you — upload videos. The ability to find your way around your channel and understand the different features that YouTube offers is essential to building your audience, and — drumroll, please — obtaining revenue.

Navigating Your Channel

A YouTube channel has two primary purposes. For most users, YouTube is for watching videos. When you log in to your YouTube account, you're met with a page offering a lot of videos for you to watch. You'll also see a large ad — no surprise there — as well as suggestions from YouTube for what you should watch. There are sections for some of the channels you subscribe to, and some guesses at stuff you might like. A lot of the logged-in experience is covered in Chapter 2, but it's time to dig a little deeper and look at what you can do with your channel.

images YouTube's initial page view defaults to the familiar What to Watch tab, but along the left side you'll find the keys to the castle, so to speak — links that lead to all the important channel controls.

The My Channel link

The value of making your channel look really good can't be overestimated. Though your videos are ultimately ...

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