10 Best YouTube Courses (Free & Paid)

One of the best and fastest ways to learn how YouTube works and why not become a YouTube expert is to follow a good YouTube course.

There are hundreds of online resources to use to become a successful YouTuber. The problem is that If you try to read all blogs or watch any video you find online, you’ll end up losing your time.

We did the hard work and research to find out which are the best YouTube marketing courses worth following, and this is exactly what you’ll learn in this post.

As you’ll see below most courses are free and the time investment is only a couple of hours, so you literally have nothing to lose.

In addition to that, some courses come with a YouTube certification that can be a great addition to your cv.

Why enroll in a YouTube Course?

If you plan on using YouTube as a source of income, then it is in your best interest to take a YouTube video marketing course.

YouTubers generate money by selling influence through product sales and recommendations, and attention through advertising.

To sell successfully, you need to be able to attract a larger audience through marketing.

YouTube marketing courses teach you how to market your channel effectively, grow your audience, and generate more income.

Top 10 YouTube Courses

1. Build a Business on YouTube
2. YouTube Unlocked
3. How to Grow Your YouTube Channel
4. YouTube MasterClass
5. Learning YouTube SEO
6. Stand Out on YouTube
7. Build a Fan Base on YouTube
8. YouTube Beginners Guide
9. The Complete YouTube Course
10. Developing a YouTube Strategy

1. Build a Business on YouTube

Build a Business on YouTube is a free YouTube marketing course. It is offered by YouTube academy and teaches users how to turn their YouTube Channel into a business.

It includes 5 lessons and the total time investment in 2 hours.

The first two lessons cover the stories of two successful YouTube channels. Through their journey, you’ll learn how they managed to go from zero to thousands of subscribers and millions of video views.

While the channels cover different topics, what is common about these stories is how they turned their YouTube success into a business.

In particular, you’ll learn the following:

• Setting up your business (featuring D4Darious, 400K subscribers, 24M Video Views)
• Defining and communicating your brand (featuring AndrewSchrock, 4.2M subscribers, 3 Billion Video Views)
• Operating a business at scale
• Promoting your business
• Advertising your channel

After watching all 5 lessons, you can then take an exam (12 questions multiple-choice) and get your YouTube certification.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

The biggest reason why you should enroll in this YouTube official course is to get inspired by the success of people who managed to build a business on YouTube.

One of the struggles you’ll have to face when starting a YouTube channel is to stay motivated, especially in the beginning when your views and subscriber numbers will are low. This course will help find the inspiration you need.

2. YouTube Unlocked

YouTube Unlocked is a course on YouTube marketing that is offered by Neil Patel, one of the most influential voices in digital marketing. Neil Patel is a leader in marketing and content creation, which are two areas that you need to focus on for success on YouTube.

This course comes in two modules that take two weeks to get through.

It starts at the beginning with foundational content about what YouTube is used for, examples of companies that use it, and background information to give you a better understanding of how YouTube works.

Then, the course goes into the basic knowledge you need in order to plan your channel. This includes what topics to cover, how to do research for your channel, and which types of channels are most effective.

Finally, the second module covers getting more subscribers and advertising your channel. Patel gives you insight into the top 50 channels and what they do right.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this free YouTube marketing course because it is well designed to help a beginner learn how to be successful on YouTube.

Aside from being hosted by Neil Patel, one of the leading digital marketers with almost 1 million YouTube followers, everything in this course is designed to help you understand more than just the basics of how to create YouTube videos.

To be successful on YouTube, you need a firm understanding of how to create content that people want to watch, as well as how to market it effectively.

This course guides you through the process step by step from the beginning so that you can generate content and a YouTube marketing strategy to reach a large audience.

3. How to Grow Your YouTube Channel

How To Grow Your Youtube Channel by HubSpot Academy is a great option for anyone looking for quick training to make their YouTube channel more successful.

While beginners can use it to get help with planning and understanding how to create a YouTube channel, this information may be more useful to YouTubers who want to optimize their channel for performance.

This course focuses on helping YouTubers understand how to optimize their video content for search engines. Since YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, being able to optimize your content for search means that you will be able to reach a larger audience.

How To Grow Your Youtube Channel is relatively short compared to other courses, with a total duration of 1.46 hours.

The course is divided into four individual lessons.

The first lesson is on how to understand the overall strategy behind creating content for YouTube. More specifically, it focuses on showing you how the YouTube algorithm works and the basic things that you can do to be more appealing to it.

The second and third lessons focus on how to create content for YouTube. There are YouTube SEO techniques that you can use to make your content more attractive to YouTube search for specific niches.

The final lesson focuses on taking the YouTube channel that you’ve built and scaling it by implementing methods to reach a wider audience.

If done successfully, you’ll be able to create content that will show up in search results more easily and be able to expand your channel rapidly by reaching a targeted audience.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this course to learn how to make effective video content and implement strategies that can make your YouTube channel more popular.

The end goal of creating a YouTube channel is to be able to sell attention or influence. To acquire both, you need to be able to market yourself.

One of the best ways to do that is through organic YouTube traffic. Billions of people use YouTube every day to find videos about content that they are interested in.

If you can rise to the top of the organic results, you have a much better chance of bringing in more traffic and at the same time grow your subscribers.

4. YouTube MasterClass

YouTube MasterClass is our choice for the top paid YouTube training course. This course is focused on teaching people how to create effective YouTube content and build a brand on YouTube.

Anyone can take this course and benefit from it regardless of how far they are into their YouTube journey. However, the course frames everything from the view of a complete beginner.

It is offered by Udemy, one of the leading online learning platforms. The course is more than 5 hours long and covers the following topics:

• How to create a YouTube channel
• How to build a brand around your YouTube channel
• How to get more YouTube views and subscribers
• How to make high-quality videos without breaking the bank
• How to optimize your video titles, descriptions, and meta tags for great SEO visibility.
• How to create video thumbnails that get more views
• How to monetize a YouTube channel

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this course if you want to learn how to make better content for YouTube. The focus of this course is on how to make content that people want to watch while also attracting search engines, advertisers, and sponsors.

There are specific methods that you can use to make your content fit your goals. This course walks you through how to align your content with those goals so that you can be more successful.

5. Learning YouTube SEO

Learning YouTube SEO is a great choice for anyone that wants to learn about YouTube SEO best practices in detail. Focusing on SEO is one of the best ways to grow your YouTube channel without spending money on advertising.

This course does more than teaching you the basics of YouTube SEO. It goes into detail about making specific choices that lead to better results.

For example, it teaches you how to choose the right title for your videos, how long to make your video titles, etc. It is this level of fine detail that makes a big difference between top-ranking channels.

One thing that makes this course stand out is that a part of the course is dedicated to teaching you how to use TubeBuddy, which is a digital marketing tool that helps you manage and optimize your YouTube channel.

Using a tool like TubeBuddy, setting up your content will be much more efficient and you won’t waste effort on creating videos that will not rank well.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this YouTube marketing workshop because it focuses on helping you make your videos more accessible. The easier you can make it to find your videos, the more likely you are to attract a large audience.

This course goes into the details of using YouTube’s SEO algorithm to make your videos more popular, which is a skill every person needs when creating and trying to grow a YouTube channel.

6. Stand Out on YouTube

Stand Out on YouTube is a YouTube marketing course offered by SkillShare. This course serves as a general guide to setting up your YouTube channel for success.

From the beginning, this course will walk you through the different steps to establish a YouTube channel, including choosing your niche, setting up your channel, and finding topics to create videos about.

One of the things that makes this course stand out more than others is its focus on helping you understand potential problems with your YouTube channel.

For example, one of the lessons focuses on explaining what clickbait is and how you can avoid it. By showing you how to avoid such problems, you can limit your chances of running into serious problems like demonetization for putting up the wrong type of content.

Another reason why the course stands out is that it helps you find ways of staying relevant on YouTube. While most courses focus on choosing topics to post about or selecting the right niche for your channel, this course focuses on helping you make choices that will keep you relevant and influential on YouTube.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this course because it can teach you the strategies you need to keep your YouTube channel running over the long term.

Most courses focus on helping you set up your channel and start creating content, but this course is focused more on showing you what back-end strategies will help you stay popular.

This course sets you up for long-term success by ensuring that you understand how YouTube algorithms work.

7. Build a Fan Base on YouTube

The most important part of your YouTube channel experience is building a fan base. While everyone understands that this is the goal, most people don’t really understand how to create a solid fan base.

Build a Fan Base on YouTube teaches you how to build a fanbase and maintain it so that you can increase your popularity and reach a larger audience.

As your audience grows, you’ll be able to leverage it into product sales or advertising revenue.

This online course is best used by people who already have an established YouTube channel. Rather than focusing on the basics of getting started on YouTube, the course focuses on expanding an audience from an established channel.

The course is divided into two parts, an introduction, and the main class. Essentially, it offers strategies for increasing your channel subscribers so that you can exert more influence on a larger audience.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this course because it is an affordable way to learn how your YouTube subscribers.

One of the areas that YouTubers struggle with the most is increasing the number of subscribers. It is not enough to be able to attract a person for one video, you need to be able to keep them coming back to your channel regularly.

Once you have more subscribers, you can seek sponsorships and advertising deals with other brands. It also makes it easier to apply to affiliate marketing and other programs so that you can better monetize your channel.

8. YouTube Beginners Guide

Anyone can start a YouTube channel, but most people fail to do that for fear of what they do not understand. The YouTube Beginner’s Guide can help you overcome that fear by showing you the details and the overall process of establishing your YouTube channel from nothing.

This course takes a granular look at the steps to creating your YouTube channel, including detailed instructions on how to use YouTube studio. This makes it easier to take advantage of the back-end tools that YouTube makes available for its content creators.

This course also shows you how to monetize your channel using AdSense and other tools, as well as helping you understand how to use comments and other integrated systems to improve audience engagement.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this course because it gives you a detailed walkthrough of how to set up your YouTube channel.

Although many courses explain how to set up a YouTube channel, they don’t go into as much detail about the actual tools that you have to use to do that.

This can be a detriment to people who are new to YouTube and video creation as they could experience problems trying to use YouTube’s tools to get things started.

9. The Complete YouTube Course

The Complete YouTube Course is a comprehensive course on how to use YouTube to generate money. While it does explain how to use YouTube in different ways, its main focus is helping you understand how to make viral videos and spin those successes into other revenue-generating practices.

For example, part of the class focuses on taking your instructional videos and turning them into Udemy classes to generate ongoing revenue. Another part of the course focuses on how to use Patreon (membership platform) to monetize your channel.

The course also gives you in-depth strategies for creating content that will rank at the top of YouTube search results.

Overall, this course is a comprehensive guide on how to make money on YouTube.

The course is divided into 51 topics, including strategies on how to improve your video rankings, case studies, monetization strategies, and tutorials on how to create the different elements of your videos for maximum effect.

Each segment is relatively short, but the overall course gives you six hours of content to go through.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should enroll in this YouTube course because it shows you how to monetize your channel and how to move your videos to the top of the organic search rankings.

Monetization can be difficult for content creators who are unfamiliar with generating revenue online. This course ensures that you are able to generate some level of income to sustain your YouTube channel.

10. Developing a YouTube Strategy

Developing a YouTube Strategy is a course dedicated to learning strategies to help you be successful on YouTube. It focuses on creating a content strategy that will let you create videos that people want to watch.

There’s also a lesson that focuses on managing the production process so that you can consistently post new videos while maintaining a specific level of quality control.

This course is relatively short with only two lessons. However, the content may be exactly what you need to be successful on YouTube.

Where many YouTubers struggle the most is on developing strategies that help them be successful in earning money and gaining viewers. This course outlines strategies used by successful content creators that you can replicate to create your own success.

Why enroll in this YouTube course?

You should sign up for this course because it helps you with the strategy behind creating a successful YouTube channel. More than anything else, your background strategies for content creation and marketing will determine how successful you are.

How to Choose the Best YouTube Course?

Choosing the best YouTube course depends on your channel status and knowledge level.

If you are a complete beginner, then a course designed for beginners is best. It will help you learn the basics and get started the right way.

If you already have a channel, then look for a course that focuses on specific aspects of YouTube development. That way, you can refine your skills and work on growing your channel.

Unlike other digital marketing courses, YouTube courses are relatively short so the time investment should not be an issue.

I have followed all courses listed above and there is something to be gained from each course. I suggest you start with the free courses first and then continue with a YouTube certified paid course.

The table below shows the top free and paid YouTube courses.

Any good YouTube online course missing from the above list? Let me know in the comments below.