Guess what?
You don't need these amazing photoshop skills to create an effective and highly clickable
thumbnail for your YouTube video.
In today's video, I wanna show you how to make a thumbnail on canva free and very user-friendly design platform.
So, why do you want to make a good YouTube thumbnail?
I mean, everyone's doing it, why not?
So, here's the thing, you may not know this but YouTube actually measures something in
your thumbnails to decide if your YouTube video is going to be successful or not.
If you get this rate, YouTube is gonna put your videos in front of more people and your
channel could grow to the thousands to the hundreds of thousands.
So you wanna get this right.
I'm gonna tell you how to do this, why it matters, and how to take advantage of this
tool so you can get more eyeballs on your content, and I will tell you everything you
need to know about using canva to create awesome YouTube thumbnails.
So here's the thing that happens.
When you create a YouTube video.
YouTube will choose a randomly generated spot in your YouTube video to select as your thumbnail
and it could be like the weirdest thing.
It could be you with your mouth hanging open.
It could be an action shot or you look like just a blur.
It could be something that doesn't actually portray what you're talking about in this
video, and when you search for videos on YouTube.
I'm sure that the design of the thumbnail is something that captures your attention, right?
Usually, it's the one that looks like some effort actually went to it.
So if you wanna grow your channel.
I recommend you put this effort into it.
But let me ease any fear right now.
You do not have to be a highly trained graphic designer because you have a tool that is
at your fingertips.
It is free and it can make you look like you paid up pro hundreds of dollars to be able
to design this thumbnail for you.
But you can do it for free and within minutes.
YouTube when deciding how successful your video is going to be.
They measure your click-through rate, of all the thumbnails that your audience will see.
When they search for the topic that your videos are on.
Are they picking your thumbnail or other people's?
So, that click-through rate is really important to see that when people are searching they're
actually clicking on to your video, and it's measure by comparing how many people clicked
on other videos compared to yours.
Now, a good click-through rate is 4%.
If you have more than 4% on your thumbnails that's great.
If you find that your thumbnail are getting less than 4%, I'd play around with the design
of your YouTube thumbnail.
I'll tell you what goes into a good YouTube thumbnail design.
But I also tell you, you can use a tool called Tubebuddy which I'll link in the description below.
Where you can split test your thumbnail.
You can actually put up two different options for thumbnails and it will test and show you
after a specified period of time.
Which thumbnail one and you can decide which one you want to be the winning thumbnail for
your video to attract more people to watch it.
So, let's get to the basics.
When you're creating a YouTube thumbnail, how do you do?
Well, first of all, let me tell you how to get your channel verified.
Meaning, YouTube just wants to know that you're not a robot.
So just got to youtube.com/verify, be logged in to your account and its gonna send an email
or text your phone to just confirm like I said that you're not a robot.
Very simple, takes seconds.
Then the next thing is well, let's design your thumbnail.
Let's start with what are the dimensions of a YouTube thumbnail.
The dimensions of a YouTube thumbnail are 1280x720 and they can be uploaded to YouTube
as a JPEG or a PNG and I'll show you on canva they have tons of templates that you can use
for your YouTube thumbnails.
But before we get into that.
I noticed you haven't subscribed to this channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button.
Subscribe to this channel because I'm putting out videos like this every single week to
teach you how to grow your YouTube and scale your business.
So let's go into canva and I'm gonna search for YouTube thumbnail and you'll see...
there it is the 1280x720.
The correct dimensions that were looking for and as you can see there are of options here
that we can be inspired by.
We can actually use some of this exactly as they are.
Maybe we just swap out what the picture is there with the picture of us or a picture
of whatever the thing that we're talking about.
Maybe we wanna change the colors to match our branding.
As much as I love some of these pinks and yellows.
My branding is gold and white and black.
So, I wanna make sure that anything that I create is more in alignment with my branding.
But before we actually go ahead and design our own thumbnail.
Let me point out what's consistent on all of these designs.
What makes a good YouTube thumbnail?
When you look at these examples, what stands out to you?
To me, I see that the subject in every image is taking up about half of the image.
They're really making the person make up most of the image.
Because people connect to people and people wanna see you as the person in the video.
So, whatever your thumbnail is, I would recommend having a big picture of you and whether it's
you smiling or whether it's you, you know responding to whatever the topic of the video
is.
To capture that intrigue and curiosity and make you the friendly face of that video.
In this video thumbnail as you saw I was making like a big crazy face.
Like, you know, here's my thumbnail.
That's why I want you to click on this.
You can see it, you can learn from me and learn by example.
Look at my thumbnails there's a ton of examples there.
How you can see where I'm being the face of the thumbnail.
Maybe I'm pointing to the words.
If I'm asking a question in the title of the video maybe I'm doing some of these faces.
So think about that for you and the thumbnails that you make to reflect the title of your video.
You'll also see in a lot of these YouTube thumbnail templates.
The title of the video or the topic of the video is laid out in this big text.
Look at this "Total Core Workout", that's taking up half of the thumbnail.
One thing that I wouldn't recommend is having small text.
So see here, this is a very tiny thumbnail and I can't hardly read the text said, episode
three... you know, I can hardly read that.
So know, when you are creating your thumbnail.
Yes, we want a big picture of you or whatever the subject is on the video.
We wanna have some big text and it doesn't have to be the entire title of the video.
Again, if you go to my YouTube channel.
Some of it don't even say the title of the video.
Some of it might say something different that is also creating some sort of a captivating hook.
Still related to the title but not using the exact title.
The text on the thumbnail could be more hooky.
It could create more curiosity than using the actual search engine optimized title.
All in all just make sure that the thumbnail isn't to busy, it's not too distracting, it's
to the point, it's aligned with your messaging and your branding, and that it's not deceiving.
Sometimes on YouTube people will talk about clickbait and yes we want to bait them that
they'll click on it.
But not in a way that it's click baitey and deceiving that they like, "This isn't what
I came here for."
Because that can actually lose trust with your audience and now you're gonna have low
watch time, if they don't watch the video all the way through.
Which is gonna hurt your ranking and your authority on YouTube.
So, I were to design a thumbnail based on one of these templates.
Maybe I'll just choose this one just to be easy and it stood out to me.
I love the colors, I love the design of it.
What I would do is I would pretty much keep the same layout but I would just replace the
words, the imaging, and the colors with my own.
So I can go into my uploads and maybe I drag one of my pictures into here.
I'm gonna expand it all the way across and I move it more into place.
I'm gonna position it backward so that I can get those cool designs back in place and now
see how that layout.
I'm gonna move that picture, make me a little bit bigger and I'll change this color to be
more of my branding colors.
So I use a lot of gold and black and white.
Cool, and I might change it to be whatever the title of my video is.
So, viola, see how me designing that thumbnail literally took me 30 seconds.
I didn't have to start from scratch.
I didn't have to wrack my brain thinking, "How am I gonna design this?".
I took what canva has as a template.
I switch out the colors for mine and I switch out the text for mine and I switch out the
picture for one of me.
Look how easy that was.
I hope you try it out, canva is amazing it's free.
You can use the paid version but everything I did right there is using all the free functionality
that you would ever need.
If you wanna learn more about creating content that converts into cashflow I just have a
training for you.
You can click the link below and get access to that today for free.
I will see you in the next video.