Essential Skills for YouTube Success: 8 Free Online Courses

8 Free Online Courses for Beginner YouTube Creators

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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There is a lot to learn after you start your YouTube channel and there are many places to get an education. Some places can cost you expensive tuition and other places can lead you to bad advice.

In this article, we highlighted 8 free online on-demand courses that you can take.

Content

• 1. How to Setup a Professional YouTube Channel
• 2. YouTube Creator Academy
• 3. YouTube Influencer 101
• 4. Introduction to Digital Photography
• 5. Social Media Training
• 6. SEO Training Course
• 7. The Secret Power of Brands
• 8. The Affiliate Marketing System

While we encourage you to continue learning and exploring your interests and passions, we feel that it’s all about getting your hands dirty and doing it yourself. These free courses will help you dip your toes into different aspects of YouTube so that you can make better videos, improve your content discovery, and grow your audience.

Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links

If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Creating YouTube Videos with Wondershare Filmora

As one of the best video editing software for YouTubers, Filmora allows you to create videos with templates and effects easily.

1. Amy Landino: How to Setup a Professional YouTube Channel

Amy Landino is a YouTuber, author, and keynote speaker. She is an expert on vlogging and video branding. In this course, she will guide you step-by-step in creating your YouTube channel that follows the best practices right out of the gate. Familiarize yourself with all that YouTube has to offer.

To access the video course, you will need to subscribe to her email newsletter or if you would like the guide without receiving future emails, you can send an email to meg@vlogboss.com .

2. YouTube Creator Academy

Once you’ve got your channel setup and you have a feel for YouTube, it’s time to expand your knowledge of the whole platform. YouTube has generously created a whole Academy to teach you all the fundamentals. From content creation to analytics to brand deals, the YouTube Creator Academy is one of the most valuable free resources. Before you start paying for any course online or in person, review all the content in the Academy first to get yourself to the next level.

Many of the courses featured in YouTube Creator Academy are hosted by well-known YouTube creators, who have built a large following with their content. Some of the courses include: Make money on YouTube, Create great content, Copyright on YouTube, and many more.

3. Jump Cut: YouTube Influencer 101 Crash Course

Jump Cut is founded by Kong and Jesse, two YouTubers who have succeeded on the platform by mastering viral content. Jump Cut offers multiple paid courses, but the initial course is free. This course consists of 4 emails each one with a link to a video where Jesse, the instructor, walks you through 4 ideologies of creating compelling content that expands your reach and grows our channel.

If you are a YouTuber looking to push your content creation capabilities, this is a course you must try. Be warned, after you sign up, the emails and the video have an expiration date and will eventually become unavailable. This is designed to stop you from procrastinating. So this course is serious business.

4. Alison: Introduction to Digital Photography

The principles of good photography are very similar to videography. Understanding how to frame a shot, how a camera functions, and what each feature on the camera does will give you more confidence as you begin to make more videos and gain experience.

The course features 13 modules, teaching the history, technical elements, and file formats of photography. Following the modules, there is an assessment where you can test all that you have learned.

5. Hootsuite: Social Marketing Training

In this free social media course from Hootsuite, you will learn the benefits of spreading your message across multiple social media platforms and increasing the reach of your brand. All you need to do is sign up for a free account to access the material.

As you start making videos for YouTube, you will discover that one of the best ways of sharing them is on social media. The thing is creating content on YouTube is different from Facebook, Twitter, and other channels. Understanding the native content of each platform, the behavior of the audience, and how to best optimize and schedule content on other channels will ensure that you not only get views to your YouTube video but build a lasting fanbase.

6. Moz: SEO Training Course

At the start, one of the most effective ways for your videos to get discovered is through search. Moz, a search engine optimization (SEO) tool, compiled all their instructional videos together for this course, in order to teach you all the basics of how Google determines whether to show your content as number one in the search result page or bury it deep in the basement where it will never see the light of day.

Understanding the fundamentals of SEO will put you leaps and bounds ahead of other YouTubers who are merely creating content out of random ideas they pluck from their heads.

7. FutureLearn: The Secret Power of Brands

After you have found a comfortable niche for your YouTube channel to flourish in, it’s time to start thinking of your channel and your personality as a brand. What is a brand exactly? This free course from FutureLearn highlights some of the most fundamental aspects of branding and gives you a broad understanding of how to brand your channel and how good branding can make all the difference.

This free course gives you 8-weeks of free access, which includes articles, videos, peer reviews, and quizzes.

8. Leadpages: The Affiliate Marketing System

As you grow your audience and have earned some credibility in your field, you will think of ways of monetizing your content. One way of doing that is through affiliate marketing, where you attached a link to a retailer’s website such as Amazon, and should your viewer click on the link and make a purchase, you will get a commission. Sounds wonderfully easy, right? Easy it is not, but with the help of this course from Leadpages, a landing page builder, you will get some strategies and resources to build your affiliate marketing program that earns you a passive income.

Leadpages offers this course in video and audio format, in addition, there are 14 downloadable PDFs.

In this golden age of information, we can learn anything online. Sometimes we have to pay and other times we don’t. Have you discovered any free courses yourself? Share it with the community by leaving a comment below.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

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