 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today, I'm going to show you how you can start your own data YouTube channel. Now I've been making content for this YouTube channel for over three and a half years and I have learned so much along the way. One of the biggest things I learned is that I should have been doing this way before I actually felt like I was ready to do it. So let me tell you the three biggest reasons that you should start a YouTube channel and what you can get out of it. The first and the most obvious is you're building a brand. You're going to demonstrate to employers or potential clients that you know what you're doing. And so you're building this brand of Alex Freeberg knows data analytics and he's really good at it. If you're applying to jobs, you have your YouTube channel on your LinkedIn, that might be a conversation piece or something that you can really sell yourself on. The second thing is that it demonstrates your skills. So if you're building full projects and you're posting that on your YouTube channel or you're posting tutorials or really anything that kind of shows your technical skills, it can show that you're really good at that skill. Lastly, it's a fantastic way to continuously learn. I thought a new sequel and Python really well until I started making YouTube videos and I was like, Whoa, there are so many other things that I need to be including. So I had to really dive into these skills and go even further than what I was just comfortable using to really understand it well and then teach other people. The last thing that I wanted was to kind of miss an important piece that everybody was like, Alex, how do you not know that and look really stupid? So I kind of just pushed myself to really continuously learn and get better and better at these skills. And here's kind of a bonus fourth reason. This is the reason why I started my channel, which is just to give back and be part of that open source community, help other people out who are trying to do what you're doing. Now, all of that sounds great, but it may seem a little bit daunting to start a YouTube channel, really putting yourself out there. But I'm going to show you how you can do it. Now, I'm going to try to be as concise as I possibly can. But the first thing that you need to do is just find what you want to make videos on. I will call this one finding your niche. And it doesn't have to be anything new, whether you really like SQL or Python, you can make tutorials or projects on that. If you like data analyst or data engineering, you can give tips and tricks on how to get into those things. You don't have to reinvent the wheel here. It just has to be something that you enjoy and that you want to talk about. The next step is to actually plan your content. So let's head over to my screen. I'll show you what I do. All right. So this is like my master Excel spreadsheet that I use for tracking all my stuff. I've been doing this for three and a half years. I didn't want to transition to a new system, which would be much better, honestly. But these are all video ideas that I've had in the past. And you can see I've highlighted a bunch of them. These are a lot that I've done. If you scroll down or if you kind of pause us at any moment, you'll notice that I've done a ton of these. And so a lot of these things are just ideas that I've had. And I kind of like brainstorm. I just write everything down. I'm like, this could be a video idea. Whether I do it or not, you know, it's really interesting. After I brainstorm the content that I want, I'll kind of take that idea and then kind of just write a general outline. If you look right here, this is the general outline of the entire video that I'm making today, which is I have my intro. I talk about finding your niche, planning your content. And then in just a little bit, I'm going to talk about these things, how you can create your channel, the equipment that you need, and then uploading your first video and then growing your channel. These are all things that we're about to talk about. And I already had all this planned out, so I kind of know what I'm already going to talk about. The next thing you need to do is actually create a profile. This is by far the easiest part. You're just going to come over here. You're going to create a channel and then you can select what your name is going to be. We can name it anything. I'll just name it temp profile. This isn't real. I'll delete this in a little bit. But we're going to go ahead and create this channel. After you create your channel, you're going to have something called a YouTube studio. We're going to go ahead and look in here. We're going to close this. And this is where you can add all of your content. So we're going to come over here to content. This is where we can start uploading videos. Now, just a second, I'm going to show you how you can record these videos and upload them. The simplest and probably the cheapest way that you can create a YouTube video is just using your phone. And that's how I started out. I used an iPhone 6 and I didn't make a lot of money, so I didn't have a nice phone. But if you have a phone, you should be able to create really good video. You don't really need any external mics these days. Even this, if you're close enough, should do the trick. Now, if you want to, you can buy one of these for about 10 bucks. I use this for making my like TikTok and Instagram content. And then you can just put your phone in here and it stays there and it kind of has this little stand that you can put it on. Or you can do what I did, which I just put it on a bunch of books. That was my free option. But if you want to spend a little bit of money, you can. When you're actually recording, make sure that it is horizontal. That's how YouTube videos are. Don't do the vertical ones like this, where you have it and it's up and down. That's mostly going to be for things like TikTok and Instagram shorts or YouTube shorts. And if that's the content you want to make, do that. But if you want to make a regular YouTube video, you definitely want it to be like this. Another option is not showing your face at all. And that's what I do for a lot of tutorials. Now I use a free software. I've never paid for any screen capture software. It's just called OBS. So if you search for OBS and you download it, it's going to get something exactly like this. Now, in order to set this up, you really don't have to do much. I have a road mic that I use above my head. And then I have this display capture. All you have to do is come down here, click on this plus button, and then say display capture. And you'll just use your built in mic in your computer. And so that's all you have to do. And then you can really capture anything that's on your screen. You never even have to show your face. We could come over here and we could do some Python tutorial on web scraping, or we could really build whatever we want, whether it's SQL or Python or a project, whatever you'd want to build. OBS is something that I've been using for the past three and a half years. It's been fantastic. It gives good quality. It's clear. And so if you have a computer and you just want to do that, I would use OBS. Now, all you're going to do is connect your phone to your computer. You're going to upload that video onto your actual computer so that you can edit it using some better software than what's usually on your phone. Although there are some good apps that you can find for free on your phone as well. I just prefer doing it on my laptop. The one that you can use for absolutely free is on Canva. It's a really good one. This is actually one that I started using for a while before I started paying for something because I wanted my videos to look a lot better. But this is a great place to start. What you can do is come over here. You can go to upload files and then I can come over here. I can select my video. It's going to take a little bit to upload. And then I'm going to drag it over here. And I'm just going to make it look good just like that. Now I'm going to pause this. But now you can come in here. You can edit your video. You can add music. You can really do anything you want. You can find a thousand tutorials on YouTube on how to edit videos. So if you really want to dive into that, you can. But really, you just come in here and you take out what you want. You leave what you want. And that's as simple as it gets with editing. If you guys have seen my videos, I edit as simply as I possibly can. I just don't spend a ton of time on the editing. I more think about the content. Now, if you're curious, the video editing that I use is called Adobe Premiere Rush. I'll just come over here and create a new project. I'll go down to downloads and I'll bring in my video. This costs about 20 bucks a month. For me, it's invaluable. I use this all the time. It speeds up my processes. But if you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to. There's tons of free stuff that you can use. Now, once we get done with editing, we're going to come back here to our channel. We're going to go to upload videos. And then we're going to select our files. And then we're going to come right in here. And let's pretend this is our edited video. And we're going to open this up. All we have to do is give this a title and we'll say this is a Power BI tutorial. And I don't know what it actually is. But then you can say, watch my video. You can also update the thumbnail if you would like. You can add it to playlists. You can say if it's made for kids or not. And I guess I have to say no, it's not made for kids unless kids love Power BI, which is fine. We'll go ahead and select next. We'll go ahead and select next again. And then you can make it either private or you can make it public for anyone to see. If you have it private, only you can see it. But if you have it public, everyone will be able to see it, which is most likely what you're looking for. But for now, I'm just going to make it private because this isn't something I actually want to upload to the world. So now you've uploaded your very first YouTube video, what you're going to want to do is share that content. Now you can do this in many ways, but here are the ways that I did it when I started out that really helped me grow and the ways that still helped me today. First is just posting it on all of your social media accounts. So if you use Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, you can just post a picture or post the link so that people can go and check out your video. The other thing that really helped me when I was first starting out was finding communities on places like Facebook and LinkedIn that I could actually go and post that were specific to the video I was making. As an example, when I first started out, I made a whole series on SQL Server, just how to use it all the way up from beginner to advanced. And every single week when I posted a video, I would go into SQL Server, you know, communities on Facebook and LinkedIn, and I would post it there because those are people that are going to care about that video. I recommend posting at least once a week. That's what I do. I've been doing that for the past three and a half years, and it's worked really well for me, but it genuinely depends on the type of content that you have, how much time you have to spend doing it. So I think once a week is very doable for a lot of people, maybe even once every other week. But if you can do more, that always helps. Now that I'm thinking about it, one other big thing that I learned when making YouTube videos was how to present on camera. I don't know about you, but I do a lot of Zoom calls and I don't think I was the best presenter in the world. But YouTube definitely helped me, especially when you watch yourself back, you're like, Oh, geez, I do that weird thing with my hair. I don't have hair, but you might. But I do this weird thing or I have this weird tick or I say a thousand times when you watch your video back and you're editing it, you were going to realize a ton of stuff about yourself, most likely not all great things because nobody really likes watching themselves on a video or hearing their voice. But that's just another benefit of making videos. I really do wish I'd started making YouTube videos even sooner on this. I just didn't know that I would be good at it or that I would like it until I really started doing it. But I think I could have added so much about creating projects and applying to jobs and, you know, building my resume, even though I wasn't an expert in the field, I think people would have found it interesting. So if you're not an expert, that's okay. You don't have to be. I don't think I was an absolute expert when I first started out YouTube. I would consider myself more of an expert now because I have a lot more experience. But three and a half years ago, I was just kind of like a mid-level analyst, whereas now I feel like I have a lot more experience. So I hope that was helpful. I've had a ton of people reach out to me asking how they can start a YouTube channel because they want to do stuff like this as well. And so this is my video for you. I hope this is helpful. You don't have to necessarily make a YouTube channel, right? It could be other things. Maybe you want to do TikTok or you want to be YouTube shorts or you could do Instagram. Wherever you want to make content is really fantastic. I just personally really liked doing stuff on YouTube. That's definitely where kind of my niche is. With all that being said, I hope that was really helpful. I know I went through it quick, but you know, that's not what my channel is. I'm not like how to start a YouTube channel kind of YouTube channel. I'm a data analyst YouTube channel. But there are a lot of people asking me how to do it. So I thought I would make a quick video on how I do it and how you can do it as well. So thank you so much for watching. If you like this video, be sure to like and subscribe below and I'll see you in the next video.