Video has become a huge part of the internet experience in the past 5 or so years, much of which can be attributed to YouTube’s growth as one of the most-visited sites on the internet. Unbeknownst to many people, YouTube is actually the second most-used search engine in the world next to Google. I guess you can say it’s a good thing Google bought YouTube in 2006, or they’d likely be facing some fierce competition.
Needless to say, people are searching for videos, and they are doing so at alarming rates. So it would only make sense that business owners and internet marketers would want to produce videos that customers may be searching for. Although this isn’t a post on how to produce high-quality YouTube videos for internet marketing purposes, it will get you started with your overall YouTube marketing efforts.
I’m here today to show you how to create a custom branded YouTube channel quickly and easily in 4 steps.
1. Create Background Image
Your background image is going to make up a very large part of your YouTube channel’s aesthetic appeal, so you want to make sure you have something that looks professional and fits your brand’s color scheme. Now, I’m not going to give you any design device, because I’m not a designer. I will however give you some important tips for your designer and/or the aspiring designer within you.
Size
Make sure that the image you design for your YouTube background is 1800px width x 1298px height and less than 256k in file size. This will ensure that nothing is being cropped out, pixelated, or repeated.
Cool Design Trick
I came across this article on creating a custom YouTube background image and think it’s a really good one when it comes to showing you how to take advantage of all the real estate YouTube gives you. Check it out!
2. ResizeLogos
As part of our YT channel customization process, we will need to get our logos and images ready before we actually upload them to the channel. So open up your logo in Photoshop, or get a hold of your designer, because we have a little tweaking to do.
Size
The main thumbnail image for your YT channel should be 800 x 800 pixels and less than 2mb in size. Use an image editor like photoshop to get the size right. Also, make sure that whatever you put within your thumbnail/logo isn’t too busy. Meaning: limited text, limited images.
Learn from my mistake please. I will likely just put one of the birds in the new thumbnail to keep it simple and clear.
3. Design your YouTube channel
OK, now for the easy parts: styling your YouTube channel within YouTube itself.
Here are the steps to get to the channel editor:
- Login to YouTube
- Click your username in the top-right corner
- Select channel from the drop-down menu
- Click the theme and colors button right under the search bar
- Click the inconspicuous new theme link
- Click show advanced options right next to the new theme link after naming your theme
- Start creating
Now, I could explain what the wrapper color or title text color mean, but it’s probably best if you just play around with it yourself. It’s a visual editor that shows you your changes as soon as you make them, allowing you to see how each aspect of your channel is affected by different colors.
Don’t forget to upload the background image you created in step 1 and select repeat background.
4. Add logo thumbnail
Once you’ve saved all your changes in the previous step, you’ll want to upload he image you created in step 2. The steps are simple:
- Click your username in the top-right corner
- Select settings from the drop-down menu
- In the default overview tab, click change below the default image
- Click change picture
- Upload the image you created in step 2
- Save changes
That’s it!
You now have a customized, branded, YouTube channel. Hopefully that wasn’t too difficult. I know that YouTube can be surprisingly difficult to navigate when it comes to dealing with its channels feature, but I hope this tutorial has cleared things up a bit.