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So now you have decided to have your own Youtube channel. What should you name it? Nate Woodbury and Valerie Morris weigh-in on what you should consider before naming your channel.
So, you’re wondering what to name your YouTube channel? I mean what should it be? Right? Should it be your name? Should it be your company name? So, it’d be a cool name. I have a very specific opinion on this. And I’m going to share that with you. So, I’ve got Valerie Morris here. She is building her YouTube channel. -Yep. -She’s expert on influence. She wrote the book on influence. We’re All Ears. You can find it on Amazon and you’ve got several questions about this. Wondering what to name it. So, tell me. Tell me in your words what’s your question? -Well, I’m just curious kind of what are the biggest factors that people should have, you know… And the top of their mind, as they’re thinking about naming their channel. -In most cases, there’s always going to be exceptions. So, I’m going to talk in general. And I work with a lot of influencers. So, that’s where my answers are coming from. You don’t want to use a company name. -Okay. -In most cases, you want to just use your own individual name because people want to connect with someone. -Okay. -And the more that they’ll see a company brand or a business name or a logo or something, the more they realize, “Oh, I might be getting pitched to.” Now, your videos could be identical. But just because that’s the first thing that they see versus if they, if they see your name Valerie Morris. Or I’m thinking like MarieTV. She’s got her whole… Whole company. But yet, it’s it’s Marie, right? That’s the first recommendation I give is generally it’s just going to be your name. -Great. Okay, so you mentioned Marie TV. I see a lot of people putting TV behind their name. What do you think about that? Is that a positive thing? Is that a negative thing? I think with Marie it rhymes. It’s catchy. We’ve done it. We used to have Limitless TV. And then we recognized, “You know what? We really want it to be branded more around Kris Krohn.” That’s his name. And so we’ve just been transitioning away from Limitless TV. So right now, if you find the channel at the filming of this video, it says Kris Krohn – Limitless TV. Because we’re so long people got familiar with the name limitless. We just put TV in there because it sounded cool. I don’t know that… People call it, “Yeah, limitless TV. It’s a… It’s a show. But because of the importance and the value of building around the brand Kris Krohn in his name, we were making that transition. There’s no longer do you see the logo of Limitless anymore. And we’re ready now. So, any day now, we’ll be deleting the Limitless TV part of that. Kind of a weird way to answer question but it just it sounds like a catchy name is why we called it that. -Okay. So, I’ve noticed that you know. you talked a lot about keywords. Obviously you put the keywords in the video title but what about the channel name? Do you want to have any specific keywords in that the title of or the name of your channel? -You don’t need to worry about that at all. And I’ll also relate this to your website. Because originally when we started doing SEO for for websites, you wanted to get a domain name (.com) that had a keyword in it. -Yeah. -So, like publicspeaker.com or lifecoach.com or socialmediamaster.com. -Yeah. -That really stopped working many many years ago. -Okay. -And on YouTube… I mean, you can. There’s some strategy in it. But what it does is it it kind of paints you into a corner. Let’s say that I call it YouTube corner. Okay? I’m literally in the corner of YouTube. What if I wanted to talk about LinkedIn or I wanted to talk about Instagram or I wanted to talk more in general about influence? People would be coming to the YouTube corner. “What? you’re talking about something else?” So again, there is… There is some reasons why that could be advantageous to go into a direction of a topic like that around some type of keyword that you want to rank for. In Kris’s case, you know, we originally called the channel back before his Limitless TV. We called it RE investor TV. He loves personal development. He loves belief breakthrough in mindset. And he so wants… And we were making a lot of money in the real estate niche. But he loves putting on events like Tony Robbins. I mean, he has people walk on broken glass and do all this crazy stuff. And people love his events. But on YouTube, he’s not really known for that. So, he really wants to step into that territory. And I think just by consistently mixing that in with the realist content, will eventually get there. We won’t be able to do that if we just kept the name of the channel real estate investor TV. -Right. You kind of target yourself so much that you can’t do other things. -Another example is my own. I’ve experimented with vlogging. And vlogging is a lot of fun. It’s a whole lot of work. And so, I’ve recognized that I don’t want to have a separate channel that’s a vlog. But occasionally, I just want to put vlogs in there. And if my channel were more branded or more focused around a keyword, it wouldn’t relate. But hey this is the Nate Woodbury Channel. I could talk about whatever I want. I can vlog, I can… I mean, I’ve… I’ve gone mountain biking at slickrock and Moab Utah. I put that on this channel. If people don’t like those, fine. It’s a Nate Woobury channel. -So, what are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen with people when they’ve named their channel? And is it okay to make a mistake? How do you… Is it easy to change? -Well, certainly. I think… I think I’ve covered some of those mistakes of naming a channel so maybe I could also talk about the mistakes people make when naming videos. -Okay. -But also… If you don’t like your name, you can change it. -Okay. -The biggest mistake people make in naming the titles of their videos is that they don’t do keyword research first. -Okay. -They’ll often name it like they’ll name their show. So, let’s say it’s the influence show with Valerie episode 6. Podcaster I’ve often named that way too. It’s a terrible mistake because people who are searching for your content will never find it. -Right. -You know, you’ve named it something way broad and it’s just episode this. It doesn’t go really really specific. So, of course, I talked a lot about keyword research on this channel. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why and that’s one of the biggest mistakes I see. When people come to me and say, “Hey, can you do an analysis of my YouTube channel and give me some advice?” I’ll open it up. I’ll bring up the whole spread of videos in front of me. And several things that I look at. One of the first is what are these titles? You know, are they… Are they specific? Are they searchable or are they just episode 57? Episode 58. That’s a huge mistake. Another one is not really taking advantage of custom thumbnails. It’s custom thumbnails or what are the first thing that people see. We just talked about judging a book by it’s cover. -Right. -Cover on YouTube is that thumbnail. And that title like you’ve got to put energy into designing a better thumbnail that’s going to encourage people to click you really want to create curiosity. And I do encourage some type of consistency. So that if there’s a whole list of thumbnails that video choices that YouTube’s recommending and people like you, if they see a brand new thumbnail for me can they recognize instantly, maybe it’s your face. Maybe that’s the thing that’s consistent is that your face is always in the thumbnail. Or maybe you know, there’s a blue circle on the on the side of every thumbnail. And so that’s got to be one from Valerie. You know? So, something like that is good to have. And it’s a mistake that most people they don’t even pay attention to stuff like that. -Wow. Well, I think you know, as far as like starting off a new channel. I feel a lot more confident to go and figure out what my name is going to be. -Mm-hmm. -And a little bit more comfortable to use my name. -Good. Now, some people have heard to spell names. I mean you think of Gary Vaynerchuk. -Yeah. -He went… He just chose to go Gary V. And he regrets spelling it out “V” because he’s like why don’t I ever do that? It’s just been the letter Gary V. And so I think that’s what he’s doing now. You can play around. Marie TV? I don’t know what her last name is. But maybe it’s a hard name. Maybe that’s why she just shortened it to Marie TV. So, there’s… There’s different things to consider. I don’t know anyone personally that’s actually changed and made up a pen name. But you know, that’s that’s always something to consider. Because it is, it is a person. And people like, was Elvis was that his real name? -I don’t even know? Look at… Comment below was Elvis, Elvis’s real name? I don’t know. -Now, what about if you create more than 1 channel? Do you want them both to be named your name? How do you differentiate? -So, it takes so much work and and so much time and energy to make one channel successful. -Yeah. -That having 2 channels is double the amount of work. Double attention and focus. It’s going to be a rare occasion that I’ll actually recommend that somebody has 2 separate channels. There’s got to be a real specific reason to do that. If you’ve got one channel that’s your name then the other channel could probably be something else. Maybe it’s a secondary channel or maybe that one is more business-focused. Or… Or more. It’s just for family or something like that. If anyone watching here has a specific scenario of I really do think I should do 2 separate channels. Maybe I’ve got 2 different companies. One’s a restaurant and one’s an auto mechanic place. I mean maybe you don’t put videos or content on the same Channel. But you’ve got 2 different businesses. This business has one focus of one channel. So what’s that helpful? -Oh, yeah. Absolutely. -So, hopefully that answered some of your questions. And if you have any others, please comment below. And we’ll see in the next episode.