 In this episode, we look at a basketball channel that has its branding on point, or on fleek, or whatever the kids are saying these days. He's doing it right, and it's going to take him far. And you can learn a little bit from it. Man, I just said you better pay attention, because we're trying to go number one in the draft, man. Let's go. We're not playing around out here, man. Fight a two-game on the defensive side of the ball. You know we does that too. And now, a featured YouTube tip from one of you. Hey, what's up guys? My name is Alex Orspector, and a super good YouTube tip to grow and expand your community on YouTube is to play with friends. No matter what you do, once you have a friend or two with you, it just makes it like so much better as a whole. You have more stuff to talk about. You can keep it more entertaining. You can talk about more stuff, and it just overall improves the video. Hey everybody, my name is Adam Ripples-Vox, and welcome back to another Freedom channel review. I've got a bit of a different setup going on again, still trying to hash out the setup and get it the best it can be for this style video. We've got a desktop recording going of the channels that we're going to be reviewing, and we're going to jump right in with Cope Gotti. Cope Gotti is a Freedom partner with 4,000 subscribers. Pretty cool. He was actually under 4,000 before he applied, and he runs an NBA basketball-themed channel, and he said that his goal is to get that gold play button to get 100k subscribers and just make some friends and enjoy his time here on YouTube and share some entertainment and the value of basketball through his video game videos, and seems like he's doing a pretty good job. So I'm featuring Gotti's channel here today for two reasons, or two big things that he's doing right that I wanted to convey. He's got a great sense of branding from his banner to his avatar to his thumbnails to his description text, the hashtag he uses, and the way he talks in his video, and even his in-video assets in terms of his lower third here. We're going to mute this volume. His intro is a generic template I've even used before back in 2011, so I'd say maybe update that, but it still fits with his theme and feel. But if we jump here, his little lower thirds actually fit the sports theme and branding here amazingly well. Like it blends in and looks part of the UI of his NBA game, which is pretty slick. I'm very impressed with the way that he conveys his personal branding and the way that it just kind of all creates a singular identity around his content, his personality, and his channel. And in a similar respect, it's very clear that it conveys his passion for what's going on in his videos, and that can be conveyed just by playing a little bit of his video. He is enthusiastic, he's glad you stopped by to watch his video, and even in some of the comments, if I can find one here, yeah, he's always in the comments just thanking people for the support and using his hashtag GottiFam. Great brand identity here. The ironic part though, however, since he's, I said though and however, okay. The ironic part though, since he is using that hashtag, is his social media presence isn't the best, and he doesn't even have a link for his Twitter. I definitely would recommend getting that fixed out here, Mr. Gotti, but if you head on over to his channel page and head over to his Twitter and Facebook and even Instagram, his name is hashtag GottiFam, but you don't see him using a whole lot of that, and he doesn't even necessarily have a whole lot of content. His Twitter is his best presence, he does seem to tweet quite a bit just some basic text stuff, but he could really be taking advantage of that hashtag GottiFam to incorporate into his videos, and same thing on Facebook. Facebook, it looks like he, okay, he just posted for the first time since August 27th, but your Facebook page is completely just video links. He is using the GottiFam there, hashtag, but it's all video links, which means not only are people going to be bored by that, he only has 13 likes anyway, could get that a little bit boosted. This is an over banner even, that's not even the banner that's on his channel right now. Facebook's much less likely to show people a link to a YouTube video, especially if that's all your posts, and that's not what people are engaging on compared to images and native videos. Cutting out goofy little highlights to tease your videos and then link back to the videos in a comment on the post, posting screenshots like you did to Twitter and like you've done here to Instagram, and same thing with Instagram, not a whole lot of usage going on here. This last post was actually a week ago, so you have a very visually appealing and visually engaging channel, and that's something you could take very much advantage of using Instagram to basically promote your channel a little bit, not like spammy promotion, but just like talking about what's in your videos, talking about cool things that happen in the game, highlighting characters that you like, things like that, keeping that going would help keep your fans engaged off of YouTube. So if you want a channel that clearly just loves what they're doing and just has that great branding and personality just totally on point, check out Cope Goddy here. His thumbnails are fantastic on the whole. They keep his branding, they all look really nice. The problem is they all look about the same, like eventually after a while when you're scrolling through them, it's just kind of like a blur wall of NBA characters, and it'd be kind of nice to see a little bit more contrast in these thumbnails, blur out the backgrounds a little bit. Thumbnails are all about the contrast and separation of subject from background, much like photography on the web, and so blurring out some of these backgrounds just a little bit, just like a few pixels worth of Gaussian blur would help make your thumbnails just pop a little bit more and seem less like just a constant stream of the same thing. But overall, the branding is pretty freaking fantastic, and a lot of you guys could learn from this. Like he doesn't have a whole lot of text in his thumbnails, which is great. When he does, the font is fairly nice. Again, could use some contrast to set the font out from the rest, but it all identifies with what's going on in the video, highlights the player being focused on, usually has some numbers for like, I'm assuming that might be a number for an episode, he did have live stream one or live stream and live stream two going on here. And then he's got goofy little things, OMG, Kapow, that kind of thing. These are pretty good. Like I said, just want to get that contrast going. And then ironically, your background feel or your banner background feels a little too blurred to me, because you can't really fully realize that those are basketball players or anything. But overall, it's still it fits with your branding quite well. I will say that you are a little slow to start off some videos. You use your music and some clips from the game, and you do this kind of like build up into the video, which sort of works. But at the same time, by time you actually start talking and roll your intro and things like that, you've probably you've possibly lost quite a few viewers. And so it's something that I'd recommend definitely throwing in some sort of highlights, some sort of funny clip that happened in the video, or either saying something to kick the video off with a nice hook before you do any sort of intro stuff, then you can still roll the music and things like that. But just to get viewers hooked and not clicking off your video, because if they're watching for the first 32 to 33 seconds, and you haven't even started talking yet, you're dropping viewers. I don't know what your watch time is, I can't actually look at it, but you're likely dropping quite a bit of viewers that you could probably keep around with your personality and enthusiasm, if that was present at the start of the video. Not much else I really want to say here, I would say to go ahead and fluff up your about section a little bit, it's pretty good, but I would throw on a little bit about your schedule or something like that. You've got your follow me on Twitter again, which I guess is all right, it's consistent and you got your PSN names. And then you talk about what you play, I would personally just fix the capitalization a little bit, maybe add an intro right here to just kind of drop it down a little bit, but on the whole, pretty good layout, and maybe just add a little bit more fluff about when you usually post and things like that. And speaking of posting frequency, you seem to post fairly, like you seem to have a consistent schedule of one video per week. You might do yourself some good to post a little more often if you can, or just an extra, like if this is your regular, like you upload this on the same day every week non-stop, and that's what your viewers come to expect, maybe put together, you have fairly lengthy videos for the kind of content that it is, maybe get some short clips every now and then just throw them up there on an off day that you don't normally post just to test the waters and see how your viewers feel about it. Just a little suggestion. So this has been my channel review of Cope Gotti, a channel that has its branding and its personality and its overall, like, feeling down pat. And this is what I look for in channels that I think will become successful, is he seems to make decent content, but he has exactly what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, and how he wants to convey it so locked down that it would greatly surprise me if he doesn't go on to get that gold play button that he's chasing after. You can learn a lot from it, check out his channel, all that jazz, link will be in the description below. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this episode of my channel review series here. Again, if you want to apply, I will have a different kind of form link in the description below. I have to change it up a little bit. I do need contact information from you guys, and I left that out of my last episode, because I'm a big dummy. Along with this, I will also have some upcoming alterations to the show, because it's starting out right now as just being a channel review show, but I plan to do a little bit more with it. I want to get, it's all about educating you guys and bringing you guys the best possible tips and advice that I can give you as my monitor is blocking half my screen here. And so it's going to evolve into more of, more than just a channel review show. That's just how we're starting to get the ball rolling, but I will have some interviews with some of the channels that I've consulted with and that I've helped, and some other kind of tips and pointers integrated into these videos as well. Stay tuned for that here on Freedom Central. If you want to come check me out, go check me out at youtube.com slash ebosvox, and otherwise I will catch you in the next episode. Sorry for the delay. I've been incredibly busy with just a lot of personal stuff and a lot of projects over on my channel. It's been a crazy busy month or so, but I'm doing a few of these now so we can keep the ball rolling with this show.