Oh, good! You clicked on it. I'm glad you're here
okay so today we're talking about how to add a thumbnail to a YouTube video.
Custom thumbnails are pretty important. We're going to talk about some reasons why. But I'm
quickly going to dive into showing you how to design it both in Canva and in photoshop so
you'll see how we do that there. I'll then show you how to upload the thumbnail to YouTube. And
then we'll talk about a/b or split testing and show you different examples and how you can make
your thumbnails perform better. Thumbnails have really become important in YouTube.
If you don't have a good thumbnail or a custom thumbnail, you can just count on your video
not getting views. So, let's talk about what a thumbnail is. Okay, you open up the YouTube page
and you see this whole menu of all the videos that you can choose from. There's a still image.
That still image is what we call the thumbnail. So, if you upload a video to YouTube, YouTube
will just randomly pick moments throughout your video. Typically it picks three and it chooses
one of them and it sets that as the thumbnail of your video. It's always bad. You can count on it
being bad and not creating really good curiosity. It doesn't really convey what the video is about
unless your video is aiming at the right thing the whole time. So, creating a custom thumbnail
is very important. Let's say you invested a lot of money and a lot of time into a video. I mean,
I'm crazy man. Let's say you spend 100 grand on a single episode. But if you don't create a custom
thumbnail, it won't get viewed. That makes sense? We want to create curiosity. We want something to
look very interesting so that people who would enjoy the video there it will catch their eye
and they'll be likely to click on it and come and watch. Now, when you look in the YouTube
analytics, the staff that you're going to want to look for is click through rate.
So, it's a percentage. If you had a hundred people see your thumbnail and you have a click-through
rate of 6.89%, out of 10 thousand, 689 would have clicked on it, right? What's a good click-through
rate? Well, a 1% is pretty bad, a 10% is pretty awesome. In between there, it really depends on
your audience, your content, what your channel is used to. On one of my channels, if I get 4 or
5 percent, I'm actually pretty happy. On another channel, I want 7 or 8 percent before I'm happy.
And anytime I get 10%, I'm super excited about it. We're going to jump in and design some thumbnails.
The one rule I want to tell you right off the bat is if you do use text on your thumbnail, you don't
want it to be the title of your video. On this channel, I talk a lot about the keyword research
and finding those leaf titles. 8-9 word phrases that people are searching for that you choose
as the title of your video, you don't want to use that on your thumbnail. The reason being
the thumbnail and the title, they're always shown together. So, it's redundant. It doesn't help to
put the text the same in 2 places. So, if you have a video how to get rid of strep throat without
antibiotics then in the thumbnail, you might be holding something weird and looking at it
and saying, you know, the text next to you would say, "This works". Something like that. Something
that creates curiosity instead of just repeating the same text there. So, let's go dive right in.
I'm on the website canva.com. I'm going to come in here and type in YouTube thumbnail template. Okay,
we got a lot of thumbnails here. Okay. I'm looking for something... Why don't we just try something
basic like this one, okay? It's got a picture, it's got some lightning bolts. Maybe you could
utilize those. And then it's got text. Okay. So, I've got a photo here that I want to use.
I'll just drag it over. Alright. And I'm going to send it back.
Alright. So, that's kind of where I want it. Now, I got to resize it. So,
it's pretty self-explanatory. I think I actually want to make it bigger so that I can then
have more space on the side. So, I'm going to change the text. Alright. So, this gets clicks
and i can resize that. That's pretty handy. And I'm going to use these lightning bolts.
Alright. Is there any shadow that I can add? Effects.. Let's see.
Alright. So, that makes the text a little bit easier to read. Okay, I want to see what type of
effects they have on my photo if I want to actually enhance
the photo itself. So, if I go... Okay, I can do all different types of filters.
So now, what I want to do is download it. Saving it as a png is perfect. Wait a minute. I just
noticed you're watching this video and you haven't yet subscribed. Click that red button
down there. Click it. Okay, let's get back to it. I've opened up photoshop here. And I've got
a thumbnail from one of my previous videos. I love starting with the template because I know that the
dimensions are perfect. And if there's any of the assets that I want to reuse, I can. In this case,
I'm going to reuse my permanent assets. So, if I turn that off, you see that the border and the
logo disappears. So, I'm going to use the same border and logo. But I'm probably not going to
use anything else. In another tab, I've got this nifty photo that I've taken. I'm going to come
here to select all and then hit copy. So, when I come in here... Alright, I'm going to highlight
this area right here. It's called background. And I'll just paste it right above that. Okay. So,
I need to shrink that way down let me come in here and do a transform scale. So, I'm going to do
some color correcting on this photo now. So, I'm going to come into camera raw filter. I love this
in photoshop. And what it allows you to do is really manipulate anything you want.
Okay. So, I'm going to hit ok. Oh, I like also coming in here to history.
And just going before, after and just making sure that I like it. Because I can always go in and
try it again. Now, let's take a look at text. The text
is pretty bold. Let's just try adding some new text. And what should I say?
Alright. So, it's really hard to see right now. Okay. So, that font looks a lot better. But we
need to make that really stand out. And I'm going to add some boxes below it. So, I will go maybe
something like that, purple. Alright. So, now I'm going to just change the shape of it a bit.
Okay. And I'm going to copy this layer. This gets... Okay. So, what do you think about
that? Okay. So, I like it. The one thing that I notice is the text like looks so far,
in front of that picture. So, I wonder if I'm going to group all these together.
So, I just called the group text. And now, I'm going to add a shadow. Let's try first just a
drop shadow, turn that opacity way down. Alright. So, if I go in my history and I... Before, after.
Before or after. Yeah, it's subtle enough that I like that.
I think I want to go back into the photo now. And I want to modify the camera raw filter again
and just turn up the exposure a bit just slightly. Okay, I like that a lot better. Let's go into the
history. We can just look before and after. So, I'm happy with this thumbnail. And that is how
I design a thumbnail in photoshop. Okay. So, the next step is to upload the thumbnail
to YouTube. Now, we've got a dilemma because I've got 2 thumbnails. One created in Canva,
one created in photoshop. And I actually like them both. I actually like the lightning bolts. I think
they're really simple. But I like the font of the text. And I think the lightning bolts go with the
photo. And the other one's got my blue border. It's got my logo on it. It's got purple and so
the text will stand out a little bit more. It'd be cool to do an a/b split test to see which one
performed better. That's a little foreshadowing for you. So, I'm in my creator studio and I
want to upload the thumbnail to a YouTube video. I'm going to show you how to do that.
The real video that this thumbnail is going to go on isn't finished yet. I'm still talking to you,
right? So, I'm just going to choose another video that's unlisted or that
it's basically private to the public. So, let me hit edit on that and you'll see right here,
upload thumbnail. So, it's as easy as that. When I hit upload, I can simply navigate to it.
Okay. So, there it is. This gets clicks and it's not saved yet. So, as long as I hit
save... There we go. Now, you can see it's a pretty simple process to upload a custom
thumbnail once you've gotten it designed. Now, I want to show you something really cool. It's a way
that you can compare thumbnails together and see which one performs better. You can call the split
testing or a/b testing. That's just what it's also called. So, here are 2 examples. Kris Krohn in the
thumbnail there. The top one is the original, the bottom one is the variation. And notice that all
we changed were the words on that thumbnail. So, we went from "How do you know for sure?"
to "Realtors never tell you this". Now, right off the bat, which one of those sounds like it creates
more curiosity? For me, definitely the second one. Let me zoom out a bit here. You can see that the
click-through rate on the original was 7.25. The variation was 9.53. So, just changing those words
a little bit got 2 more percent click-through rate. So, here's another example. My screenshot
is a little weird. So, ignore that line that says a/b test status. But the top thumbnail says,
"Can you invest one thousand dollars?" We changed it to "You'll be surprised", okay? Sometimes those
can be a little bit overused if you use phrases like that too much. But if they really will be
surprised then that could be some good text to use. Notice that changed the click-through rate
from 3.9 up to 7.2. When you do a/b testing like this, if you really want to learn from it, you've
got to change just one variable at a time. If you change multiple things, you don't really know what
change you made that made the biggest improvement, okay? So, this next example is kind of what not
to do if you want to learn from it, okay? We had a great performing original thumbnail. The top
one's the original, 8.26. That is awesome. That's an awesome click-through rate especially on this
channel. But we had an idea. And so, my design team changed just about everything. I mean, it's
a different picture of Paul. The warmth of Paul's skin is different. The color of the text and is
different and it's a different position. The whole background is changed. In fact, there's a girl
in there that's embarrassed covering her eyes. The logo was black up in the top corner. Now,
it's white down in the opposite corner. So, we changed a whole bunch of variables. You'll see
that it did work. We went from an 8.26 up to a 10.3. So, we're very happy about that.
We knew that we weren't going to learn exactly what it was. But we had a new idea. I think
it's because the girl's in there. But the only way that we'll know that for sure is by just changing
one variable at a time. If we would have left everything the same and then put the girl back
there the challenge is... See, there wasn't room. So, we kind of had to move the text around and
do some other things in order to make that work. Okay, this is a fun example that I like to tease.
Because here in Utah, there's a college rivalry. There's Brigham Young University which is blue
and there's University of Utah which is red. And I'm a BYU fan. I'm a BYU graduate and alumni.
So, I love that blue beats red in this example. Red had a 6.64 click-through rate whereas blue
had the 8.33. Isn't it interesting? How just changing a little bit of color like that can
have such a drastic impact on the click-through rate. So, in this case with the variation, all my
team did is add some icons and that increased the click-through rate. One more example that shows
curiosity. And keep in mind the title for both these videos is the same. It's only the text
on the thumbnail that we're changing here. So, the original thumbnail said How To Find Great Filipino
Writers. okay? That's 6 words long. We cut that in half down to three words. "My secret revealed",
okay? That took us from a 7.9 which is pretty good up to a 9.63. So, in the beginning, you just
want to take your best guess create a thumbnail that you believe will create a lot of curiosity.
And then as your channel starts to build momentum and when you launch a video in the first week gets
a hundred views or a couple hundred views. that's enough volume that you can do a/b testing. Now,
the software that I demonstrated earlier is tubebuddy. TUBEBUDDY.com. They're not sponsoring
this video or anything I have a free gift for you that I believe you're going to love. It's
called my influencer almanac. So, in this video, I just taught you about YouTube thumbnails. My
influencer almanac, I go into way in depth of all these resources and all these strategies on how to
really leverage YouTube to grow your influence and really how to get results on YouTube,
how to get a lot of views, how to get a lot of subscribers and how to make money in your business
leveraging YouTube. So, go check it out. The link is below. My free resource, The Influencer Almanac