- Here's how to create a YouTube channel for beginners,
covering the latest YouTube platform updates in 2023.
We're gonna take you through step by step,
starting with how to create a YouTube account
through to the key optimization settings
that most people miss
that will help you maximize your results
and grow your channel faster.
Now, as we're going through,
don't forget to check out
the links in the description box below.
We have a bunch of resources down there
to help you with things like creating your banner image,
your thumbnail images,
and how you can rank your videos on YouTube
once your channel is all set up and running.
Okay, so the first thing you wanna do
is to head over to the youtube.com website.
Come up to the top right hand corner here
where it says Sign in.
So if you already have a Google account
or a Gmail email address,
you wanna log in to that account now.
If you don't have one yet,
then you can click create an account,
and you wanna go ahead and create one of those first.
So you just enter your First name,
your Last name, and email address, create a password,
and you're then good to go with your new Google account.
Once you're signed in,
you wanna come up to the top right-hand corner here.
And if you don't currently have a channel yet,
then this is where you can click Create a channel.
Or if what you're seeing
in this menu up here says Your channel,
then it does mean that you already have a YouTube channel
associated with it.
So you can either start customizing that up
or you can still create a new channel as well
because one Google account
can be linked to multiple channels.
So if you wanna make a new channel
and this is what you're seeing,
and you wanna come down here to Settings,
then go to Add or manage your channels.
And then you wanna click Create a channel here.
Now I wanna quickly describe
the two different types of channels there are.
You've got a choice of a personal YouTube channel
or a brand channel,
and you can switch between them afterwards.
So you don't need to get too stressed about this right now.
But a personal channel
is linked to your personal Google account.
So if you want someone else to have access to it,
you will need to give them your username and password.
So it's not a great idea for that.
Or you want to give people access to your channel,
where they can log in with their username, their password,
and still access your channel,
then that's where you'll want a brand account.
But again, you can easily switch between these
at a later data as well.
For us at Primal Video, we are using a brand channel
so that we can have different people
with access to our channel to help us run it.
So let's come back to our brand new Google account here.
We're gonna hit on our profile picture.
We're gonna come down to Create a channel.
And here, we wanna come up with our channel name.
Now, don't stress about this either.
This is something that you can change down the track.
If you don't know what to call your channel right now,
maybe just start with your name and change it later.
Now, we can also pick our YouTube channel handle
at this point.
Obviously, there's probably quite a few justinbrowns
that's why it's suggesting 3588 at the end of it.
So if you are able to come up with something unique here,
then by all means go with that.
So we could go justinbrownpersonal,
as no one has used that yet.
You can also upload your profile picture from here as well.
So let's click on that.
Let's go ahead and find our file, and we will choose Done.
And let's go Create Channel.
Okay, so our YouTube channel is now created.
And this is what it looks like.
So the next step from here
is to go ahead and customize up your channel.
Now we can either hit here, Customise Channel.
Or at any time, if you're not seeing that button,
you can come up here to your profile picture,
come down to YouTube Studio,
and then you've got this Customisation Button
over here on the side.
Now this area is something
that you will keep coming back to as your channel grows
to be able to create things,
like your channel trailer,
to be able to feature some videos on your channel page,
and even add playlists and things as featured sections
on your YouTube channel.
This is where you can do all of that.
But what we need to jump into first is the Basic info tab
at the top here,
and let's add some more information about our channel.
So we can see here again, our channel name,
and we can change that in here as well,
but it does so that you cannot change your name twice
within 14 days.
But again, know that you can change your channel
as your channel grows.
We've got your handle in here as well,
which you can see, this is the link for our YouTube channel.
Now down here under description this
is where you want to add a few sentences
to tell your viewers what your channel is about
and the types of content they can expect on there.
So for an example, this is our About page,
and you can see how this text is laid out here.
We've got a few sentences talking about our channel.
So we could copy this,
we could then go back to our other window,
and we can paste that in.
Now, you do have the ability to add different languages here
for your description too.
So we can come over here to Add Language.
We can select that our original language here is English,
and we can set a translation language
or a second language, say, if we picked Danish,
we could then enter what our Danish channel name would be
and a description here in Danish.
Now, this is something that we haven't bothered with,
but I think if you are creating a channel
that has multiple languages, then you'd want to set this.
If we keep scrolling down, this is your YouTube channel URL.
This really isn't used too much on YouTube anymore
but it is another direct link to your channel.
The one that is used now is the channel handle.
This link up here,
that's the one that you want to be sharing out
and giving out.
Now, the next one down here, Links.
This is where we can create clickable links
on our YouTube channel and on our YouTube channel banner.
We see, for ours, for example,
at the top here, we've got a link to a free guide,
link to our website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
All of these links are added here in this section.
So we just want to go Add Link.
Link title, let's go Website.
Enter the URL.
Okay, let's add another one.
Instagram, if you're not following me on Instagram,
now would be a good time.
Now, if we keep coming down here,
we can see how those are going to be displayed.
So this is the settings here
for those links on your channel banner.
How many do we want to show?
We can show none of them, the First 1, the First 2.
In this case, there's only two,
so we may as well have this set to the First 2.
But you can see,
you can have up to five links
that are shown on that channel banner.
Contact info, this is a great one
to add a public email address,
so that if any brands, or sponsors,
or other creators wanna reach out and collaborate with you,
that they can connect with you through email.
Now, to make sure you're saving your settings here,
you do wanna come up the top here and hit Publish.
Now, let's just go ahead and hit View Channel here
so we can see what it looks like already.
So if we go over to this About page,
you can see we've got our description,
we have our email address added here,
and we do have these links that are added too,
but they're not gonna show up the top
until we have our channel banner image added.
So if we come back over to our settings here,
and now we're gonna go up the top to Branding.
So this again is where you can add
or change your profile picture,
but you can also do your banner image
and your video watermark in here too.
And it even gives you all the details or requirements
for the different image sizes and things
on the side here too.
So we're gonna go Banner image, we're gonna choose Upload.
I'm gonna pick our Primal video banner image.
And it gives you a little preview here
on how this is going to be displayed on different devices.
So Viewable on TV will be the entire graphic.
If we go Viewable on desktop,
we'll see just that middle section.
And Viewable on all devices,
so smaller screens, like your phones,
this is the section that will be displayed.
Now, again, don't forget to check out
the links in the description
where we take you through how you can create a banner image,
whether you're on a computer or even your smartphone,
we've got tutorials there to help you.
I'm gonna come down to Done.
Let's come up here to Publish.
Let's go back and refresh our page.
And we can see that our channel banner is now on there,
and we have our links showing up on our front page here too.
Now, if we come back here to channel Customisation,
a video watermark is really an optional thing.
This is a little graphic
that sits down the bottom right-hand corner of a video
while it is playing,
and it is a link for people to subscribe to your video.
So I'm gonna choose Upload here.
We're going to pick our YouTube watermark,
a little square image that looks like this,
just saying subscribe.
I'm gonna choose Done.
And then we get to choose when this is shown.
If it's just at the end of the video,
if it's for the entire video,
or you can actually specify a custom start time
for when this is gonna show up.
So I'm gonna set this to about 30 seconds
so that is not popping up straight away.
It's only gonna show for viewers that watch past that time.
And then again, we're gonna save our settings here
by hearing Publish.
Now from here,
we wanna quickly run through our YouTube channel Settings.
So we wanna come down to the bottom left-corner here,
and this is where we can set up some default stuff
for our channel, like our currency.
So ours is currently set here to US Dollars.
We've then got our Channel settings here,
which is where we can set
the country of residence of our channel.
So I'm gonna choose Australia.
We can also add some keywords about our channel.
So what keywords or phrases
do you want your channel associated with?
Where we go, Justin Brown.
Let's put in a comma here
so it separates that out as a new tag.
Primal Video, Filming on Smartphone, how to edit video.
You get the idea.
And you can see that you've got up to 500 characters
that you can add in here
to help YouTube understand what your channel is about.
Now, if you come up here to Advance settings,
you will need to specify to YouTube
if your content is Made for Kids.
This is a legal thing
all around the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
or COPPA.
So you do need to specify either as your entire channel,
"Yes, this channel is Made for Kids,"
or, "No, this channel is not Made for Kids."
Or you can actually do it on a video per video basis.
So I'm gonna go, "No, this channel is not Made for Kids."
Now, if we scroll down,
you can link your Google Ads account in here
if you have one.
I do think it's a good idea to check this box here
so it doesn't show potentially inappropriate words
in any captions that are generated on your videos.
If we come down to the bottom one, Clips,
this is another one that I personally leave enabled.
This will allow other viewers
to create clips from your content.
But if you want to disable that,
you can just uncheck that box.
Next, we wanna come up here to feature eligibility,
and this is where we want to verify our channel
so that we're not just stuck
with the standard YouTube features,
we can unlock the intermediate features,
which are things like videos over 15 minutes,
custom thumbnails, and a bunch of other settings.
So you just wanna hit the little dropdown arrow here
and come down, and we want to verify our YouTube channel.
And it's gonna do it here with a phone number.
So when you click on that, this will pop up.
We can choose whether to get a text message or a phone call.
Gonna enter my phone number and hit Get Code.
Enter the code.
And we can see that it is now verified.
So if we come back now to our channel features here,
we can see that we've now got intermediate features
that are enabled.
Now, if we come down here to Advanced Features,
this is something that you can apply for straightaway
to unlock more features here on YouTube,
or it's something that can happen automatically
after a few months on the platform.
But if we select here, Access Features,
then we can see that we've got three different ways
to verify that we are a real human
and this is a real legit YouTube channel.
All of this is to help limit the amount of spam comments
and fake accounts on YouTube.
So we can use video verification,
we can use your valid ID,
or we can also apply
once we've got a bunch of videos on the channel,
but does say that this approval time
is usually up to two months.
Now, I really do think it's a good idea
to run through this verification process,
but it doesn't need to be done immediately.
The intermediate features here
are probably all you're gonna need to use right away,
but it is a good idea
to unlock all the features accessible to you
when you have the opportunity.
So if we hit on close, we come back up here to View Channel.
We can see that our channel is created.
It is set up.
It's now ready for you to start uploading some videos.
In which case, all you need to do
is hit this button down here,
or there's always this plus button up the top
where you can choose Upload video.
Now that you've got your channel set up,
I've got two videos linked on screen for you.
One of them will help you grow
from 0 to 1000 subscribers on YouTube.
And the second one is all around YouTube monetization
and how you can start making money
from your YouTube channel today.
I'll see you in there.