YouTube is a powerful personal branding channel. Establishing a presence on YouTube gives you the opportunity to expand your audience, create content in an engaging video format, and create content that can be shared and embedded across other personal brand channels, like social media, websites, and email newsletters.
In order to add YouTube to your personal brand strategy, you will need to follow key personal branding tips, like focusing on your niche audience, creating content consistently, and bringing value to people.
To help you meet these challenges, we’ve come up with 10 YouTube personal branding content ideas to get your started.
If you are just starting a YouTube channel, a simple and effective idea for one of your first videos is to create an introduction video for your channel. Introduce yourself, explain who your channel is for, and describe the value your audience will receive by subscribing and coming back for future content.
Not only will this be one of your first pieces of content to get the ball rolling on your YouTube content creation journey, you can also pin this video to your YouTube channel to welcome new viewers.
For example, Kevin Espiritu from Epic Gardening recorded a “channel trailer” for his YouTube channel that is pinned as the first video you see when you hit his channel. The video explains how Epic Gardening is for people who want to learn how to grow plants and improve their green thumb.
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A few years ago Gary Vaynerchuk started “DailyVee” — a daily vlog series where Vaynerchuk records his life as an entrepreneur and content creator. His vlogs enable him to demonstrate how he runs his businesses, teach his audience about business strategy, and show an intentionally unpolished view of him as a person as he records his daily life. In addition to serving as compelling content, he leverages DailyVee to ensure he is consistently publishing content and keeping himself accountable — a key personal branding tip.
Try starting your own “day in the life” vlogs as a way to start consistently adding engaging content to your YouTube channel. You can decide the cadence that matches your content calendar and the time you have available by setting mini goals that stack up to your personal brand goals. For example, if one of your personal brand goals is to gain your first 100 YouTube subscribers this year, you might set a mini goal of publishing a vlog once per week to help you get there.
Every niche has skills people need to learn. Offering legal advice as a lawyer, explaining ecommerce strategies as an entrepreneur, or providing personal development tips as a coach are all examples of ways people from different professions can find how-to style content ideas and apply them to their YouTube strategy.
Think about lessons you’ve learned, tasks you know how to complete, and complex ideas you can explain — these all make for great “how-to” style content. If you are having trouble getting started, think of the task you want to teach and write an outline for the steps it takes to complete it as if you were writing an outline for a blog post. Then record yourself walking through those steps in your own words.
Bonus tip: if you are teaching a hands-on task like using software or building something, record video clips of you actually completing the task and cut those into your video. DIY style videos like this are all over YouTube for topics ranging from cooking to home improvement, and receive good engagement because of the tangible value they provide viewers.
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Another great option among the possible YouTube personal branding content ideas is using your YouTube channel as a place where you host video interviews. For example, reaching out to a fellow entrepreneur in your niche and asking them to come discuss an aspect of running their business would make for great content for your audience. While it is certainly an ask, and not everyone will say yes, this opportunity creates value for the person you are interviewing, too, as it will help to promote their own personal brand.
If you have an existing podcast that you publish on another channel you can republish those podcast videos as YouTube videos. Or, if you do not have a podcast, you could start one with YouTube as your primary publishing channel. This will give you another content pillar in your content calendar that offers consistency in terms of having content topics that you can publish consistently.
Similar to the one-off interview idea above, you could do a podcast series where you invite customers, colleagues, industry peers, and anyone else in your niche to join you for an episode. In these episodes you can discuss industry trends, discuss case studies of successful personal brands and business brands in your niche, and debate your industry’s biggest questions.
This will get easier and drive more value over time once your channel starts growing, as you will be able to get people with larger followings to join your videos, and you will receive channel growth thanks to the network effect of your guest promoting your video.
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Product and service reviews are a popular content type across social media channels like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. This same strategy can be applied to YouTube in a video format, as you can provide real-time reviews and unboxing videos of your favorite products, or explain the benefits and features of your favorite services.
Give detailed explanations for the products or services you review, and include your experience using them. This type of first-hand perspective is immensely helpful for people looking to cut through marketing and advertising content and to get honest product reviews from people who have actually used a brand’s products or services.
This content is not only an engaging video type, but it also establishes you as an authority as you review products and services in your niche, and you can also monetize these videos by posting affiliate links in your video descriptions for the products that you are reviewing.
Bonus tip: Make sure you actually use and stand by the products and services you review on YouTube, as you are establishing trust with your audience and you don’t want to abuse that by promoting products you wouldn’t use yourself.
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As you build your personal brand and establish yourself as an authority in your niche, you’ll notice that people will start asking you questions via comments on your posts, and direct messages to your profiles on social media. It is a best practice to always respond to these comments for several reasons, such as boosting the reach and impressions of your posts.
However, there is an opportunity to take this a step further and develop YouTube personal branding content ideas by gathering these questions and creating a series of Q&A videos. For example, you could show screenshots of questions from your audience on the screen while delivering audio explaining your answer.
Creating Q&A video content helps you connect with your current followers while boosting your online presence by giving you a relatively easy content idea that can be reused. Q&A sessions are also a way to show attention to your followers by letting them ask you questions related to your experience and your niche.
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Sharing predictions provides a nearly endless pool of YouTube personal branding content ideas. You will see this strategy used with prevalent thought leaders and influencers, as they frequently share future predictions for their industry.
Identifying trends, business opportunities, and upcoming challenges people will face in your niche puts you in a position of being a thought leader. Not only will this content come across as valuable insight for your audience, it also has the chance of sparking conversation, as your followers will weigh in on these trends in the comments section of your videos.
For the marketing industry, an example would be predicting that SMS, voice, AI and automated customer experience technologies will grow in popularity among marketers in the next year. Think about parallel predictions like those examples for your own industry, and share them in a YouTube video.
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A content topic that you can use within your YouTube personal branding strategy is behind-the-scenes content. Just as businesses often share an inside look at their day-to-day operations to build brand loyalty with their customers, you can share your own behind-the-scenes updates as a creator, entrepreneur, student, or business professional in your respective field.
An example of this strategy being applied on Twitter went viral when Yehong Zhu, founder of Zette, posted a Twitter thread that offered a behind the scenes look at what her day is usually like as a startup founder in Silicon Valley. This content idea was well received, as her peers were able to relate, and other members of her audience were able to learn about what it’s like having that job role.
In addition to creating behind the scenes content about your niche, an interesting and ironic trend in the creator space is creating content about the art of creating. The idea is that once you’ve become an established creator, you can start adding tips about content creation as one of the topics your personal brand is known for.
Easlo is someone we cover frequently on our blog as an example of a creator and entrepreneur with a great personal brand. He has made a portion of his personal brand content focused on creating content on Twitter and growing on the platform, for example.
Try applying this strategy on YouTube by showing your audience how you record and edit your videos, sharing your content planning process, or giving tips for overcoming imposter syndrome and other common fears associated with creating video content. Using this strategy will strengthen your relationship with your followers even further as you help people in your niche build their own personal brands.
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YouTube offers ample opportunity for visual branding. Try creating simple graphics to include within your videos and on your YouTube channel to up your YouTube personal branding game.
YouTube Visual Branding Opportunities
Try taking advantage of these visual branding opportunities within your personal branding content strategy:
Now these do not technically qualify as YouTube personal branding content ideas for your own YouTube channel, but being featured in videos on other creator’s channels is another great way to drive personal brand awareness on YouTube.
This one is as straightforward as it sounds. You have to find people in your niche that host a podcast, reach out to them and let them know you’d be interested in being a guest if they’d ever consider it.
Note that this will be easier and you will be able to get on more podcasts (and bigger podcasts) as your personal brand grows. For example, participating in a podcast from a top influencer in your industry will likely be difficult given that they are selective about who they include. But this is not to discourage, as 1. There are plenty of smaller podcasts that would be happy to have you as you’re getting started, and 2. There’s no harm in asking, because the potential benefits of personal brand exposure are well worth it.
YouTube is an excellent channel for personal branding. It can serve as your primary channel, or as a supplementary channel that generates video content you can share on other mediums. Consider the YouTube personal branding content ideas covered in this blog post to give your new channel a jump start, or to add additional content as you scale your existing personal brand on YouTube.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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