How to effectively choose a Youtube channel name

A lot of people choose usernames for personal reasons and that is fine, but if you want to build a business with your Youtube channel you need to choose a name that is going to help you in search engine results.

My original Partner channel was 'jfreedan'. I eventually realized this is not a great keyword, so I moved my gaming content over to an account named TheRPGFanatic, because the name of my show on jfreedan was 'The RPG Fanatic'.

Today I am making a new Youtube channel for a series of cosplay tutorials I am producing so I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain the process I use to choose channel user names.

By using the AdWords keyword tool I can see that "cosplay" receives 4 million global searches, with 1 million of these searches performed by users who are local to my geographical area.

I can also see related keywords, such as "costume". That keyword receives 37 million global searches, with 16 million of them from users local to me.

Additionally, "What is cosplay" and "how to cosplay" receive 4 million global searches. These are all keywords I should be incorporating into my Youtube video descriptions and channel description area.

Unfortunately the username that would be most ideal for my show, "HowtoCosplay" already exists; http://www.youtube.com/howtocosplay

It is also under-utilized, but it does have a video on it that has 25k views.

My first instinct is to reach out to the owner of the channel and ask to purchase the channel. This would actually save me some trouble because the channel already has some presence and lots of activity. But is the channel even for sale and if so, at a price I can afford? Probably not.

The channel http://www.youtube.com/user/cosplaytutorials also exists, but has been abandoned for over a year. The chances of being able to purchase this channel are rather low because the owner has not logged into the account since August 2011.

On the other hand, http://www.youtube.com/user/whatiscosplay does not exist so the channel name is available.

So I will create a Youtube channel with that username. This is because even though it isn't the most ideal channel name, the keyword "what is cosplay" receives 4 million global searches per month on Google.

The next step is to optimize the channel for appearing in search engine results related to the keyword "cosplay". For this we edit the channel info,

I will post the text here so you can see what I wrote and why,

"On this channel you can learn how to cosplay and receive costume ideas. We will teach you how to make lots of amazing anime costumes! You will also be able to purchase items from our costume shop! Happy cosplaying!"

Every underlined phrase is a keyword that was recommended by the Google AdWords keyword tool. 

The tags for the channel are also selected from the recommendations of the tool.

This is the process I use to create channel names for Youtube. I hope this article has helped you. 

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