How to Build Your Brand on YouTube – (Full Course)

Key Takeaways:

• Build your brand using just a cell phone for consistent YouTube presence
• Optimize your YouTube profile with consistent images across all social platforms
• Create welcome videos and playlists to build relationships and increase watch time
• Start with one video per week and scale gradually (I went from 1 to 6 videos weekly)
• Use YouTube ads with $5/day budget to accelerate brand growth
• Distribute content across multiple channels for SEO benefits and backlinks

Building a brand on YouTube requires optimizing your profile, creating consistent content, and distributing videos across multiple platforms for maximum reach and SEO benefits.



Time Required: Start with 1 video per week, scaling gradually over time

Best For: Business owners and entrepreneurs looking to build personal brand authority

I was able to build my brand just using my cell phone for the last seven years on YouTube and a few other social channels. My name is Brad Smith, owner of Automation Links. I've been doing this marketing stuff for the last 10 years, worked with over 2,500 brands.

Step 1: Optimize Your YouTube Profile for Brand Recognition

The foundation of building your brand starts with your YouTube profile optimization. First, go and create something that has your username in there under your settings. Once you click on your bio and you go to YouTube Studio, you'll be able to go and make some edits there.

Why Consistent Profile Images Build Trust

Your profile picture must be the same across all your social media networks. When you're building a brand, people need to remember you. They need to remember your face. As you can see, my LinkedIn bio has that same picture. My Twitter bio has that same picture. And now, when somebody sees me on any channel like Instagram and TikTok even, they're going to recognize me.

Once you start going and changing your picture and making every social channel different, people won't remember you. They'll think you're someone else and it won't be recognizable.

Matching Banner, Website, and Social Branding

I like to make the bio, the banner picture pretty similar to your branding. As you see in our website, it's going to be the same colors. It's going to be the same branding, and it's also going to be the same images. These are the images I share on my X account, my LinkedIn account, my Instagram, showing our frameworks on how to build a brand and how to follow up with people. That's something that I post about all the time. So, I want that to be relatable.

Creating a Consistent Upload Schedule That Works

The next thing I want to do is really focus in on my bio. I want to tell people exactly who I am, what I believe in, and when I'm posting. When you're building up your brand, you want to be consistent. You want to share your message on a consistent basis and then let people know when they should tune in.

Quick tip: I recommend just starting with one video per week and you can build up on that. I started 7 years ago, 850 videos later, now I'm doing three to six a week. But for you, start slow. Start with just one per week. Add some relevant links for people to go learn more and follow you from there.

Step 2: Create a Welcome Video That Builds Relationships

What Your Welcome Video Should Include

The next thing when you're building the brand is to create a welcome video. The welcome video is a video that you can place in your email signature on links in other channels and it's a good way for you to introduce yourself, tell people who you are and build that relationship.

As an example, my welcome video, I recommended at the beginning when I introduce myself. I'm Brad Smith. I put the link up here. This is a good place to link back so after somebody learns something from you or watches any other videos, they can go learn more about you, see who you are, see your personality, build that relationship.

Why Playlists Keep People Learning From You

The next thing I want to recommend is add a playlist. So this is a playlist where people can come back and continue learning or watching other videos around the topic that you are talking about. If you're building a brand, you should be out there helping and providing value. You can do this by a series of 8, 10, or 12 videos talking about a similar topic.

I'm talking about YouTube and YouTube ads today. So, I'm going to put this in my YouTube marketing playlist. So, you can go and watch other YouTube videos at the end of this video that are related to this topic. It's really easy to do.

Step 3: Set Up Your YouTube Channel Properly

Setting Up Your YouTube Channel Properly

Once you go here and you've created your channel, you can click on the gear icon and click on YouTube Studio. Once you're in your studio, click on customization. And this is where you're going to change that banner.

Quick tip: I recommend just using something like Canva to help you create the perfect size to get the right image into your profile. This is where you can upload your picture and your bio so people recognize you. Like I mentioned, make it sure it's relevant across all channels.

How to Claim a Matching Username or Handle

Choose your name so people can start remembering your name. Also, try to get the user handle to be the same as your name or as similar as possible. This is for SEO. So, when somebody types into Google and they look for Brad Smith, I've got some competition. Microsoft CEO is Brad Smith. There's some athletes called Brad Smith. So, what I need to do is continue putting my name in all my videos, keeping my name relevant so I start showing up higher and higher.

Customizing the Homepage Layout for Your Audience

This is where you're going to add your description and any additional links. Once you have all of this and you've got your video set up, your welcome video, you're going to go to your home tab and this is where you're going to add those videos.

This is where you can create your welcome video. That way, when somebody's new and they haven't subscribed, they can come watch this video and learn more about you like we spoke about. Now, after somebody subscribes, I like making a blueprint video that somebody can go learn. It's almost like a pillar piece that you can direct people to once they find out about you. They can go learn more about your business, your processes, and that's where you want to feature a video for any returning subscribers.

From there, you can then organize your playlist and what you want to show at the top. I use for you at the top because what it is is based on my viewers interest. So any other videos you might have watched from other channels, other videos you've watched from me, it'll recommend other videos that are similar to what you're interested in. And then from there is where you can add those playlist so people can easily go find the videos for them.

Step 4: Maintain Consistent Branding in Your Content

Keeping Thumbnail Style Consistent

Now that you've got your channel set up and you've got your branding in there, you want to start making sure when you upload your videos that they're consistent. I like to keep consistent thumbnails so that way people recognize my different thumbnails. Now, I've changed these pretty often, but now I'm keeping to the same style for a few months so people remember my thumbnail and my face. The goal is to have people remember you and your brand.

How to Use My Free System Guide for Branding

Then, what you want to do is introduce yourself. I always like to put a strong hook in my descriptions. I like to put a link at the top and then I like to introduce myself for those SEO purposes. So, my name and my business name always shows up at the top. I always like to give a quick lesson just in case people like to read while they watch the videos. And then you always want to make sure your timestamp's perfect.

Now, if you grab my system in the guide, it tells you how to get this description. You can actually plug my AI prompt into chat GPT, take the transcription from your video. It'll give you this exact description for your videos.

Automating Content Thumbnails and Visuals

From there, you want to make sure that you always add a good thumbnail. You can use Canva or you can use a software like Fiverr where you can get freelancers to make you thumbnails for 10, 15, $20 per thumbnail. If you decide to use Fiverr, sign up for a free account with my affiliate link and I'll introduce you to my freelancer who makes all my thumbnails. That way, they can make three different posts for you, thumbnails for you. And YouTube now has a way to split test that. So, you'll be able to go and view your report and it'll show you which thumbnail actually got the most clicks and optimize for that.

Step 5: Optimize Your Content for Search

Adding Language, Location, and SEO Tags

You're going to go ahead and choose the playlist you want this video to be recommended on. And a quick tip, YouTube starting to crack down on AI content. So, you always want to make sure you say no that this content is not altered by AI.

Now, from there, I like to put some tags so people so the algorithm knows exactly what the video is about. I like to put my language that I speak. I like to put the location on where I recorded it. And a quick tip is I like to make my videos education style. So these are like how-to videos. And what you can do is go optimize these for SEO to show up if somebody searches on Google or YouTube that your video will show you based on these questions people ask in the search.

Why YouTube Is Your Best Branding Channel

Now, talking about search, once you build your personal brand, you're going to start seeing yourself on other channels. So don't just build your YouTube channel and stop there. What you want to do is build your YouTube channel and then you want to start putting that video in your blog post. You want to put that video on your LinkedIn, on your X, on Medium, on Reddit. You want to start distributing that video everywhere so you can get links and build up the brand on other channels.

How I'm Ranking #1 on Google with This System

What as an example, I've got this exact video showing you how to create YouTube playlists, which I'll probably recommend at the end of this one. I went ahead and I went to my blog. I created a full blog post about it and then I embedded my YouTube video in my blog. And now, as you can see, I'm ranking number one on Google. And most of the traffic for this video is actually coming from Google.

Now, once YouTube starts seeing that other channels are sending you traffic, they're going to start bumping you up and showing your videos to more people. Those are called backlinks. You're linking your videos on other channels and building trust with YouTube.

For more strategies on video content optimization, check out how to use playlists to grow your YouTube channel.

Step 6: Accelerate Growth with YouTube Ads

How to Use YouTube Ads to Drive Cold Traffic

The next thing we're going to dive into is setting up some YouTube ads to get this thing started quickly. Now, if you want to give yourself a boost start, you can start running YouTube ads to try to get more people to find your videos quicker so you can start building up your personal brand even more on YouTube.

Here is what YouTube ads looks like. You have to build set up a Google Ads account. Once your Google Ads account set up, you can create campaigns specifically for your YouTube channel. I've got other videos in my YouTube playlist showing how to set up YouTube ads for yourself. So, if you can just go reference those, I'll put those in the description below.

Setting Up Your First YouTube Ad Campaign

But what you're going to do is go and create a brand new campaign. And all you have to do is hit this plus icon and click new campaign. Once you start there, you're going to go ahead and create your objective without a guidance. Now, it once you become more advanced or hire an agency to do this, they're going to set up these objectives here for you so they're all set up properly and you get the best results. But for today's video, you can just set this up on your own. You can start here.

The next thing you're going to do is choose your video. And you're going to go ahead and scroll down. It's going to give you all these different options. Now, step number one is you want to start with video views for people that have never heard of you before. This will allow you to put in specific keywords. That way, you show up when somebody's searching for something.

Budget and Targeting Strategy

Now, you can start here. This brings in a cold audience, but then when you're ready to actually get signups and conversions, you're going to want to set up a second campaign where you're going to click on something like subscriptions and engagement and or drive conversions. But for today's video, what we want to do is just start getting more people to come to our videos, learn more about us, watch our videos, and hopefully subscribe to our channel.

All right, once you're there, go ahead and name it whatever you want. And then what I like to do is keep it in feed ads only. So skippable instreams are the videos that show up before they can watch someone else's video. I don't like those. I can't wait to hit skip. You are probably the same way. Hopefully there wasn't an ad before this video.

From there, you can pretty much skip all of this. I like to change my budget to daily and we can just start off with something like $5 a day so the campaign can start learning about us. Choose your location, your languages, and then from there you can add a few things like any other related videos you have around your topic.

Keyword Targeting for Maximum Reach

From there, you can go ahead and scroll down and you can choose different audiences, demographics, and interests. But for today's video, I like to keep this simple. In order to set up something simple, you can do add keywords. And as an example, I'm going to go ahead and use the video that we used before.

And I'm going to type in something like how to use playlists on YouTube. That way, if anyone is looking on how to create a playlist for their YouTube channel, I'm going to answer that in this video. Now, this is going to be for any of these words. So, if somebody just types into Google or YouTube playlist, I'm going to show up for that.

What I want to do is be a little more specific. So, we're going to add quotes from there. Now, it's going to be any order. How to use playlist on YouTube or it could say how to use YouTube for playlist. Basically, any order of these words. But if we want to be super specific, we need to add brackets. Once we add brackets, they have to type this in exactly how it's shown here.

From there, you can choose different things like your topics and playlists. But what we're going to do is we're going to just go grab this video and we're going to plug it in here. From there, what I like to do is go back to my channel, and I like to put in my URL for my channel, and we're going to paste it in here. So that way when somebody comes and watches my video and they click, it's just going to ask them to subscribe.

From there, you're going to post in a few headlines. This can be headlines like how to use playlist to grow your channel and whatever else you'd like to put here in the description. From there, you're going to add your cost per view bid. So, they're going to give you a recommendation. I like to bump that up just a little bit more, maybe 2 cents more, so I'm more likely to show up over my competitors.

For detailed guidance on YouTube advertising strategies, explore our YouTube ads course.

Conclusion: Start Building Your YouTube Brand Today

I really hope you decide to build your brand on YouTube. It's something that has been one of the most beneficial things for me in my business is building my brand, helping people, educating them, and giving easy step-by-step guides like this. I hope that you learn from this. I hope that you go implement it.

Building your brand on YouTube using just a phone and consistent effort has transformed my business over seven years. Start with one video per week, optimize your profile for consistency across all platforms, create welcome videos that build relationships, and use playlists to keep people engaged with your content.

Remember to distribute your videos across multiple channels for SEO benefits – I'm ranking number one on Google for many topics because of this strategy. When you're ready to accelerate growth, start with $5/day YouTube ads targeting specific keywords related to your expertise.

Key Takeaway: Consistency and relationship-building through educational content is what builds lasting brand authority on YouTube. Start simple, stay consistent, and scale gradually.

For personalized help implementing these strategies, feel free to schedule a consultation or grab my complete system guide with AI prompts to accelerate your YouTube brand building journey.

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