Promoting Your Art on YouTube

Connect with new and existing fans, as well as other artists by promoting your art on YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing platform. When anyone wants to watch or share a video, YouTube is the place they go. Art videos have become especially popular in recent years, with everyone, from world-famous sculptors to painters to museums curating their own channels. If you’re new to this marketing technique, creating videos of yourself might seem like a daunting task, but fans and buyers will appreciate your insights and expertise. You just have to be yourself and do what feels right for you and your brand, and you’ll soon join other artists reaping the rewards from having their own YouTube channel.

Benefits of using YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine and third most visited site in the world. It’s available in 88 countries and 76 languages on a multitude of devices, from PCs to smartphones or tablets. As an artist with your own YouTube channel, you’ll have exposure to more than 1.5 billion monthly visitors who are watching over an hour of content a day!

In addition to high traffic numbers and worldwide exposure, promoting your art on a YouTube channel provides many viral marketing opportunities. Videos are easily embeddable on websites and shared on other social media sites. This helps increase your rank on search engines, the number of views on your videos, and subscribers to your channel.

In addition to helping you attract fans and buyers to sell your art to, YouTube also allows you to generate income from your channel itself. Once you’ve reached 4,000 hours of watch time and gained 1,000 subscribers, you can monetize your account with ads.

Customizing your channel

Setting up a channel on YouTube is easy and completely free – you just need a Google account. After you sign in, follow the prompt to create your own channel. Then it’s time to show off your creativity to help viewers understand who you are and what kind of art you make. YouTube has several features which you can utilize to reflect your style and branding.

• Channel name
  The first thing you need to decide is what you want to name your channel. You could choose to go by your own name, or your business name, but you should keep it consistent with your brand to ensure maximum visibility in search results.
• Channel icon
  The circle that appears next to your name should contain an image that is most recognizable to fans and clients, whether it is a photo of yourself or your business logo. It’s one of the first things viewers will see on your channel page and will appear every time you comment on or upload a video.
• Banner art
  The image across the top of your channel is a great way to show viewers what kind of art you make and you can change it periodically to promote exhibitions or new projects that you’re working on.
• Channel trailer
  The video that sits at the top of your channel page can be used to showcase your most popular video or your most recent upload. If your channel is new, consider using the space to introduce yourself to give viewers a sense of what kind of videos they can expect to see.
• Featured channels
  Channels that you choose to highlight will appear on the right side of your channel page. This is a great way to cross-promote artists you like, are inspired by and/or collaborate with.
• Channel sections
  You can visually organize your videos into different categories and give them descriptive names, which will appear in sections on your channel page.
• About section
  Be sure to fill in a description of your channel and links to your website and other social media profiles in the ‘About’ section of your channel page. Viewers will click here to see your channel stats and send messages to you.