How to Make Travel Videos for YouTube (and Grow Your Channel)

Travel videos are among the most liked genres on YouTube, simply because of the life-like experience they offer viewers. So, what makes travel videos so special? They bring all the action and fun of exploring a destination alive. Moreover, you get to listen to the narration and feel the emotions of the vlogger, while they capture all the fascinating scenes along their journey.

If you are a globetrotter, you can compile videos of different places and create a YouTube channel to share your experience with others. You can also take a step further to grow your YouTube channel and monetize it.

This article will give you a step-by-step guideline on how to make travel videos for YouTube and grow your channel.

Here are some of the basic steps in creating travel videos for vlogging.

• Tell Your Story:

Before creating any video content, you must first define your story in a clear and concise manner. A good story will create a great impact on the minds of the viewers by keeping them engaged. Travel videos that can be categorized into four different types as given below.

1. Travel Vlogs

You can create a Travel Vlog (Video blogs) to  share your personal experiences with the audience. This is similar to a blog post, where the main motive is to build trust with the viewers by offering them helpful tips such as places to stay and restaurants to dine at. You can even skip the editing and retain a majority of raw footage to keep the video’s originality and reveal your personality to the audience.

2. Travel Guide Videos

You can also create destination videos that help people travel to certain locations. Travel guide videos require lots of planning and editing to get the best result. These videos also inspire and encourage people to travel to the mentioned destination.

3. Niche Videos

Your niche can be anything that is part of your travel such as food, adventure, culture, etc. It is recommended that you focus on one particular niche that comes to you naturally or the one that you are passionate about.

4. Marketing Videos

You can do marketing of your own channel by posting a variety of videos about what you do, which can be really useful in building trust and credibility among viewers.

• Capture Video:

The next most important step is creating quality videos. You can capture videos using a good smartphone or use a professional handy cam to capture a more detailed video with better color balance. You can also utilize a monopod, tripod or joby gorilla pod to avoid recording shaky videos. Additionally, you can also carry a shotgun microphone to record audio by attaching it on your camera.

There are two ways of capturing video; with you in it or not. It can be a bit unnerving to be in front of the camera, but it is highly recommended that you make your presence in the video clip once in a while as this will help the viewers to feel your personality and connect with you instantly.

• Edit the Video Content:

Now that you have captured some brilliant footage, it is time to put it together and present it to the world. You can edit your video using professional editing software that comes with plenty of features and simply use online editing tools such as YouTube Video Editorto create the final output.

You can also add voice-overs and background music to make the video more exciting and entertaining. Furthermore, you also need to ensure that the video is short, ideally not more than 10 minutes, as longer videos can be a bit boring to viewers. You can get the best output by breaking the video into four parts: introduction, your brand, the body, ending and call to action.

The introduction and ending of the video should be given 10 seconds each, whereas the body of the content can take more than 8 minutes. You can restrict the brand promotion to under 5 seconds to get the best viewing experience. All this can be done online using YouTube Video Editor or by using professional editing software tools.

• Upload, Post and Promote:

The last step is to upload your video on YouTube. If you are uploading your first video, then you can opt to upload as “private” so that you can add all the necessary texts such as keywords, descriptions, etc., before publishing it to the public.

How to grow your YouTube channel:

Now that you have learnt to make travel videos for YouTube, it is time to understand how to grow your YouTube channel. Uploading your well-crafted travel video to YouTube is only half the job done. You need to optimize your video for better reach. Here’s how to optimize your YouTube video and grow your channel.

• Keywords: You can improve the ranking of your travel video by adding appropriate keywords to your content. This can be done in YouTube Video Editorby adding the necessary text in the basic info section of the editor before publishing the video. Some examples of keywords are “Kerala Houseboats”, “Malabar Cuisine”, etc.
• Metadata: Provide an appropriate file name for the video, which includes a combination of your keywords along with some metadata.
• Video Title: You need to give a catchy phrase or a title that captures the viewer’s attention. Additionally, ensure that the chosen keywords are also in the title.
• Description: You can give a brief description about the content of the video in 100 words. This will give better insight of the content to the viewers.
• Subtitles and Captions: Subtitles help in translating content to your viewers, but this can be a time-consuming process. If you are looking to improve the ranking of your video, then adding subtitles and captions is necessary.

Conclusion:

Creating travel videos involve considerable hard work, but with the help of online editing tools such as YouTube Video Editor,you can quickly and easily create travel vlogs and guides in no time. By optimizing your video, you can gain more subscribers, which will in turn help grow your channel. In addition to that, you can also use certain features such as watch time, video schedule, playlists and comments to get the best out of your travel video post.