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 guide, 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.

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.

Research Methodology

I built this guide following the methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of YouTube Marketing courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.

Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.

Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content, comprehensive curriculum, affordability, up-to-date content, and good ratings. Besides that, they have to cover one of the main topics to you need to learn YouTube Marketing:

• 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.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some aggregate stats about the ranking:

• Together, they account for 106,664 enrollments and over 37,000 YouTube views.
• The single most popular course in the ranking has over 90k views enrollments.
• 1 course is free and 3 are paid.

Now, let’s go through the top picks.

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 for SEO: Grow You 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 2023
• 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)