YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Registering Your Account

Registering a YouTube account is simple. Although many of YouTube's functions are available to unregistered guests, such as video searches and watching videos, registering an account offers many benefits. As mentioned, your YouTube account is your home on the site. Without an account, you are simply a spectator. This book isn't for spectators; this book is for those who want to be seen. Don't just watch the media. Be the media.

Registering an account allows you to leave comments and rate the videos you watch; it also allows you to subscribe to your favorite video makers and upload your own videos for others to watch and comment on. Before you register your account, however, you need to think about your username.

Choose Your Username Carefully

Your username is almost important enough to deserve its own chapter. The username you choose when you register is your permanent username. There is no way to change this later. Be very careful when selecting a username. Make sure it's readable. Make sure that if someone were to mention it in a video, others would be able to type it into their browser window and find you. Make sure it isn't too similar to other popular users so you can avoid confusion.

Take this from someone who regrets his username every day. fallofautumndistro is too long, it's unpronounceable for many, and, for those who can say it, it is hard to spell correctly. When I registered my account, I never planned on using it for anything other than online video storage. I embedded the videos on my personal website (an online zine distro called Fall of Autumn, which is how I chose the name) and forgot about my account until my first video, a documentary about offset-printing techniques, was featured in the DIY and HowTo category (now called the DIY and Fashion category).

By the time I realized my username was difficult to remember, spell, and say, it was too late; I had already received a number of views and subscribers and was stuck with it. Don't repeat my mistake; keep your username short, readable, and free of any numerical characters attached to the end.

Michael Dean's username is kittyfeet69. He also says he wishes he'd picked a different name. ("kittyfeet" is from one of his websites, and "69" is the street address of his childhood home. He picked it because the username Michaeldean was already taken—by someone who has never uploaded a video! Michael thought he could pick a different username later, because on many social networking sites, you can change your username.)

If you later really want to change your username, you can simply create a new channel, in other words, a new account. YouTube allows you to create as many accounts as you'd like with the same email address. I advise against this if you have already built up your channel, though. It's a lot of hard work to build your brand, and you wouldn't want that work wasted by moving to a new, and empty, channel.

Usernames are not case-sensitive. Thus, fallofautumndistro will point to the same page as Fallfautumndistro or FallOfAutumnDistro or even FALLOFAUTUMNDISTRO. But it can be confusing to newcomers to put a lot of capital letters in the middle of your name, because they may think they have to type them.

One consideration is that it sometimes is prudent to use a capital letter at the start of the name, because it's your name on YouTube, and there is a psychological effect to this, as in "I take myself seriously enough to put a capital letter at the start of my name because I am a proper noun." But again, people won't have to type that letter as a capital letter; it will work typed as a capital or lowercase letter.

Sign Up for Your Account

The sign-up process is straightforward; you'll be asked to provide some minimum information to set up your account. Once your account is set up, you'll be able to provide more detailed information for your profile to display. (Much of this information is optional, but providing it makes people take you more seriously, because they will feel they know more about you. Channels with just a username, no photo, and no info almost never get many subscribers.)

So, let's get started.

First, click the Sign Up link found at the top of any YouTube page (Figure 4-1).

Figure 4-1. Click Sign Up to get started.

After clicking the Sign Up link, you'll be taken to the registration page (Figure 4-2).

Figure 4-2. Registering a new account is quick and painless.

You will first be asked for your email address. YouTube uses this email address to confirm your account, so make sure you've entered your correct email address with no typos. YouTube will also automatically send notices of new subscribers, new video comments, and other optional alerts to this email address, so make sure it's one you check often. (You can change your email address later if you want, for instance, if you get a new email address or if you start getting so popular on YouTube that you want to set up a dedicated Gmail address for YouTube-only communications to make it easier to manage all your incoming information. You can also later set up when you get email alerts if you feel overwhelmed.)

Next, you will be asked to create a password. Your password should be something difficult to guess, so don't make it your first name, your hometown, or anything that could be guessed by possible hackers. It's best to combine letters and numbers for your password. YouTube automatically rates your password's strength as you type it and requires you to type it twice to ensure that you entered it correctly.

• Example of a horrible password: password

• Example of a weak password: magic

• Example of an OK password: mag9ic5

• Example of a very strong password: 83ka0j3Ahm29n30

Then, it's time for the all-important username we discussed a moment ago. Again, take a moment before committing to a username. Think about it, because you're going to have to live with it.

Once you type in the username you've chosen, YouTube will check its availability. If it's already taken, you'll have to pick another one. If you're really set on the name, you can just add some numbers at the end of it, but check first to see whether the person who's taken it is very popular. If they have a lot of subscribers, you might want to not use a derivative of that name; you might want to pick something completely unrelated.

(I used alanawesome in the example shown in Figure 4-2 as my username. I had to go through the account creation process and set up a new account to show you how it's done, but I'm not going to use this account for anything.)

Next, YouTube will ask for your location, postal code, and date of birth. It does this to confirm your age. YouTube's terms of use state you must be 13 years old or older to register an account. Those who are younger than 13 years old should have their parents set up and administer their accounts.

LOCATION AND PRIVACY

If you live in a very small town and are worried about people finding and bothering you (especially if you're female or already a little famous), you might want to enter a general location rather than a specific location. Michael Dean does this. He's an odd bird…very into being in the public eye but also a very private person. This is partially because he has had fans of his books and bands show up on his doorstep uninvited. On YouTube, he used "Los Angeles Area" rather than the very small town an hour or two outside Los Angeles where he actually lives.

Back when he was on MySpace, which shows your actual town based on the ZIP code you enter, he entered a ZIP code of a town a few towns over. But on YouTube, you can just enter your area. Many people will put the nearest large city that people have heard of if they live in a small town.

While many people like to put a place near where they're from to give viewers some idea of where they're from, you don't have to do so. I use "selloutville," and I've seen many people give answers like "Funky Town," "Anytown," "Smallville," "Middle Earth," or "Deep Space 9."

You also might not want to enter your real hometown, because "place of birth" is one of about four pieces of information someone needs to steal your identity. And don't say "I don't have enough money to make it worth someone's while to steal my identity," because identity thieves often steal identities of broke people and just use their information to get credit. Even if you have bad credit, criminals can steal your identity and use it to their advantage. Don't give them help doing this. And don't give potential stalkers help finding you or people close to you.

You will then be asked to provide your gender. Providing this information has no effect on your account; it is simply for demographic purposes. Word verification is next; this is a form of the CAPTCHA code, which will be discussed later in this book. In short, entering this code proves you're a human registering your account, not a computer program attempting to register numerous accounts.

You then see two checkboxes; the first is optional and allows users to find your channel by searching your email address if they know it. We're here to be seen, so I suggest making it easy for anyone to find your account. Go ahead and turn on this box if it isn't already. And finally, you must turn on the box that says you agree to YouTube's terms of use before you can create your account.

YouTube's Terms of Use

I'm not a lawyer, so I will not try to explain or summarize YouTube's terms of use in any official fashion. I will just tell you what worked for me. I strongly suggest you read YouTube's terms of use before registering your account. The terms of use provide many of the rules you have to follow while on the site. Because you turn on this box while registering an account, you can't claim ignorance should YouTube suspend you for violating one of its terms of use. I know it's a lot of fine print, but at least take a look at it to make sure you know what you can and can't do before proceeding. And please realize that these terms of use change at YouTube's discretion, without warning. Tips I may suggest in this book may not violate YouTube's terms while I'm writing this but may at some later date if YouTube adds terms. Books are set in stone (well, they are when still printed on paper), but the Internet is a moving target. Please keep this in mind. After turning on the "I agree…" box, you can now create your account.

Once your account is created, you will automatically be logged in and taken to the screen shown in Figure 4-3, which will instruct you to confirm your email address.

Figure 4-3. You must confirm your email address after registering.

Log in to your email address and find the email YouTube sent you.

Note

If the confirmation email doesn't arrive after a few minutes, check your spam folder, your junk folder, and your trash folder. Some overly aggressive spam blockers will send any automatically generated emails into the refuse heap—"Send them to the corner to think about what they've done." If this is the case, mark it "not spam." Let's hope your overly vigilant spam program will learn its lesson and not send future emails from YouTube to the trash. If you have this problem over and over, add *@youtube.com to your whitelist. (The asterisk is a wildcard. It means "allow any address at this domain to get through.)

Figure 4-4. Your email from YouTube should look similar to this message.

Open the confirmation email and you'll find a clickable link to confirm your account (Figure 4-4). Clicking this link returns you to YouTube, and a "Your email has been confirmed" message appears (Figure 4-5). Now we're ready to customize your channel. The look and feel of your channel should be unique to you, so I'll show you how to access features, but I won't tell you which colors, images, or fonts to choose.