You want to grow your YouTube channel or create ads for the platform but don’t know where to start? In this article, I’ll share the best resources to learn exactly that.

In this Best Courses Guide (BCG), you’ll find the best online learning YouTube Marketing courses that will teach you how to make your audience find your content. Let’s start from the beginning with creating your channel, optimizing your content for search, and collaborating with influencers and content creators. The recommended courses will cover:

• The basics: how to set up your channel, uploading content, etc
• Understanding SEO: how to optimize your content for search
• YouTube Ads: creating ads to promote your business or grow your channel
• Influencer Marketing: working with influencers and content creators.

Keep in mind that YouTube is constantly changing, so for starters, YouTube Help documentation should always be your go-to place to keep you updated. I also recommend checking out Creator Tips.

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• Top Picks
• Courses Overview
• Additional Resources
• Why You Should Trust Us
• How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them

Here are our top picks

Click on one to skip to the course details:

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Courses Overview

• Courses in this guide have more than 169K enrollments and views
• The single most popular course in the ranking has over 100K views
• 1 course is free and 4 are paid
• The YouTube Marketing subject is followed by 20.5K learners on Class Central

Best for Complete Beginners: YouTube 101 with Dan Britain

Even though YouTube official documentation covers what you need to get you started, going over it can be tiring and oftentimes frustrating. Having someone to tell you exactly what to do and in which order can be quite helpful. If that’s your case, you should consider taking YouTube Academy 2023: Complete Beginner to Pro Step-by-Step course with Dan Britain on Udemy.

This paid course will guide you through the ins and outs of setting up your account, using analytics to grow your channel, and how to optimize titles, keywords, and thumbnails for discovery. This course doesn’t cover some more recent tools and features such as YouTube Shorts, but it is perfect to get you started.

Best YouTube Marketing Course with Live Sessions (Noble Desktop)

If you prefer instructor-led learning, Noble Desktop’s YouTube Marketing course offers real-time feedback and accountability that pre-recorded courses can’t match.

What I find interesting is that this program runs both in-person (NYC campus) and online (Zoom). Even if you’re attending online, you’ll have individual attention and can see other students in the classroom. You’ll be able to interact with instructors, receive feedback, and ask questions during sessions. Plus, you’ll get access to class recordings and workbooks – pretty helpful for catching up if you miss a class or reviewing what you learned.

Key Benefits

• Small class sizes (8-15 students)
• Certificate of completion to showcase achievements
• Free retake within one year
• Detailed class files with real-world projects

Noble Desktop knows what they’re doing – they’ve been around for over three decades providing instruction with industry experts. So you can rest assured your mentorship will not be with someone who just finished the course. Don’t take my word for it – student reviews on Yelp and Google praise their practical approach and instructor quality.

What You’ll Learn

• Identify and engage your target audience to build a strong following
• Develop a video content strategy with clear goals and success metrics
• Create YouTube content, from vlogs to playlists, with SEO-optimized titles
• Professional editing, eye-catching thumbnails, and YouTube Studio tools
• Monetization and integration with Shopify to showcase your brand or products

Flexible Schedule Options

• 1 day full-time (weekdays)
• 2 days part-time (evenings)

“JJ did an outstanding job explaining the information in detail, making it easy to understand, and pointing out real-life examples of YouTube marketing.” – Michael S.

Best for SEO: Grow Your Channel with SEO and Ads by Ahrefs

Now it’s time to make sure your audience sees the content you are producing. At this point learning about SEO and Ads will come in handy. In this playlist, YouTube SEO by Ahrefs, you will learn how the research, creation, and experimentation process of building ads for YouTube works and how to implement it in your own creative process.

The playlist also covers study cases and useful tools that will teach you how to create YouTube ads that result in higher engagement rate and watch time, how to get more subscribers, rank your videos by using SEO optimization, video marketing, YouTube keyword research, and how to edit your videos for high engagement. Each lesson is about 15-minutes long and can be watched as stand-alone tutorials; you can go to the ones you consider most important first and watch them in any order you want.

Best for Campaigns: Promote Your Business Beyond YouTube with Jun Wu

If your goal is to generate traffic to your business through YouTube Ads, Easy YouTube Google Ads – Marketing and Advertising Traffic with Jun Wu on Udemy is a great course to set you on a good path. This course provides a well-structured seven steps syllabus to guide you throughout the process of Ad creation, from creating an account, to keyword research, creating a video based on that, tracking, and setting up your ad campaign.

Differently from Ahref’s course, Jun Wu’s content is focused on increasing traffic to your business campaigns, not in growing your channel specifically. So keep your specific business goals in mind when deciding which of these two courses better address your needs.

Best for Influencer Marketing: Working with Creators and Influencers with Alejandra Gonzalez

Working with creators can be a great way to promote your business and reach your audience, but deciding which creators to partner with, how to approach them and how to measure results can be quite confusing. In Influencer Marketing: Create Social Media Campaigns, Alejandra Gonzales, brings her years of expertise in projects with brands and creators to teach you the basics on how to build successful influencer marketing campaigns.

During the course you’ll learn how the influencer marketing ecosystem works, how to create an influencer marketing strategy and how to find the right influencer to partner with. You’ll also learn the fundamentals to develop and measure your influencer marketing campaigns.

Additional Resources

There are a ton of great tutorials, guides, and creators out there. Here are the most popular resources for learning YouTube marketing. If you have any recommendations, leave a comment below.

Justin Brown

• YouTube 101: How To Create A YouTube Channel! (2023 Beginner’s Guide)
• Youtube Shorts 101: Complete Guide on YouTube Shorts
• Writing a Script: How To Write A Script For A YouTube Video (5-Step Template!)

ThinkMedia

• Basics of Research: If you have ZERO Subscribers, Do THIS First!
• Advanced Research Techniques: How to Start a YouTube Channel for Beginners in 2024
• Writing a Script: How to Write a Script for a YouTube Video (Made Easy!)

Shopify

• Influencer Marketing: How To Launch An INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGN in 7 Simple Steps (Strategy, Outreach and Examples)

Why You Should Trust Us

Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 60 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 200,000 online courses and 200,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.

How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them

Trying to find “the best” can be daunting, even for those of us who live and breathe online courses. Here’s how I approached this task.

First, I combed through Class Central’s Catalog and the internet to find a variety of free and paid open courses, some with certificates. You don’t need to enroll in a university to learn about YouTube Marketing.

When choosing courses, I considered the following factors:

• Renowned Institutions: I looked for recognized institutions in YouTube Marketing
• Instructor experience: I sought instructors with extensive experience in YouTube Marketing and engaging presentation styles
• Popularity: I checked numbers of enrollments and views to find popular courses
• Course content: I examined courses that covered a range of topics and presentation styles, including the basics and more advanced topics. I watched some course videos to sample courses I hadn’t already taken
• Learner reviews: I read learner reviews (when available) to get a sense of the quality of each course, leveraging the Class Central database with its thousands of course ratings and reviews written by our users as well as available course provider reviews.

Then, I defined the scope for these recommendations. A YouTube Marketing course can cover various topics, so I chose top courses from a range of sub-fields.

Ultimately, I used a combination of data and my own judgment to make these picks. I’m confident these recommendations will be a reliable way to learn about YouTube Marketing.