Thinking of changing your YouTube video thumbnail?
I bet I can guess why. Let's talk about how to edit your YouTube thumbnail after posting.
And before you get started, let me save you some time by telling you the most important thing you
need to know about editing YouTube thumbnails and I don't want you to fall into the same trap as so
many creators out there so stick to the end of this video for the biggest myths about YouTube
video thumbnails. Here's why you might want to change your video thumbnail. It's really important
for you to split test to find out what works best for your thumbnail and we regularly change out
our thumbnails even change it slightly to see if it's going to perform better than the previous one.
If you see that your click-through rate is low and I'm going to show you exactly where
in the analytics, that's where you should consider changing your thumbnail, especially in the first 48
hours of a video being poste. Your click-through rate is the percentage of how many people are
actually clicking through to your video compared to all the other videos. Now, the goal you want
to aim for is 4%. If your thumbnail click-through rates are less than 4%,
then you might want to consider changing it up. So to find your click-through rates, you're
going to go into your YouTube Studio and into your analytics. This page from your analytics is going
to show you your overall channel analytics and if you go into your reach here, you'll be able to see
your overall click-through rate but we want to see the individual ones for individual videos. We're
going to click on this advanced mode here. This is where we can see your individual videos and
their click-through rate. So as you can see, most of mine here are above 4%, this one's
3.9% so maybe I'll want to change out that thumbnail with a different thumbnail and
see if I can split test that one, see which one's going to get a better result. So, this is why it's
really important to know your numbers because if you have a higher click-through rate, more people
will be finding your videos, more people can watch your videos and maybe those viewers will turn into
buyers. Before I share with you how to edit your thumbnail, have you subscribed to this channel yet?
If not, be sure to hit that big red button below so you can get brand new content marketing strategies,
business acceleration tips and more delivered straight to your YouTube 5 days a week. So,
here's what you need to know about editing your YouTube thumbnails. You can't just edit a thumbnail
after it's been uploaded, you have to change the file entirely. So, I'm going to share with you
how you can do that. You're going to go into your YouTube channel dashboard. So, you're going to get
there by going into your YouTube Studio again but instead of clicking on analytics, we're going to
go into content and from here we can pick any of the videos and click here to edit it. So, from the
back end of the YouTube video, you can change out your title, your description, we're going to scroll
down about halfway to find the YouTube thumbnails and this is why it's so important that you create
customized thumbnails because you'll see that the 3 random options that YouTube chooses,
they're not clearly representing the video, they're not that captivating, they're mostly me in the
middle of a sentence with my mouth hanging open, so it's best for you to design a custom thumbnail.
this is the current thumbnail on the channel but if I wanted to change that out, all I do is click
on these 3 dots here and click change. That will upload a brand new thumbnail and over the
next few days, I would go into the analytics to see what's the click-through rate, has it changed?
Now, that's the freeway to be able to change out your thumbnail but if you want to pay a little bit
to get bigger results, you can use a tool called TubeBuddy, which I put a link in the description
below and TubeBuddy on their legend plan, it's a paid plan, has an AB split testing tool where
you can upload 2 different thumbnails which allows people to be able to put 2 thumbnails
to kind of compete to see which one is going to get the better result and after a certain time
frame, TubeBuddy will decide which one is better and they'll let you select that one to replace
it on the channel. So, if you're here deciding that you want to change out your thumbnail, if you have
a graphic designer, they can be able to change it up or you can go into Canva which is one of
my favorite tools and I have lots of other videos on my channel so again make sure you're subscribed
because there's going to be more videos teaching you how to design beautiful and click-worthy
thumbnails. Which leads me to the 2 biggest myths about YouTube thumbnails. The first one is yes, we
want them to be click-worthy but we don't want them to be click-baity, that's one of the biggest
myths I've heard is how do I make click-baity thumbnails? We don't want your thumbnails to
misrepresent the video because that can actually lead you with a poor reputation if people feel
like they're being baited and switched. So, make sure that your YouTube thumbnail actually aligns
with the content of the video and the 2nd myth that I've heard is that they have to include
the same title, the same words as the video. The thumbnails are really great opportunity to present
an alternate title or some catchy text to intrigue the viewer. If you go to my YouTube channel, you can
see that all of my thumbnails have different words in the thumbnail compared to the title. So, this is
a great opportunity to capture their attention with another phrase in addition to the title of
your video. So, here's some best practices for your YouTube video thumbnail. Make sure that it's bright,
make sure that your face is included and that the text differs from the title and that it's not
too busy and if you need some examples, go to my YouTube channel, you'll be able to scroll through
and see some examples of how we've created our thumbnails. If you're ready to take your content
marketing to the next level and build an evergreen lead generation machine, then click the link below
and reserve your spot in my next free training. This is the exact strategy that my 6, 7 and
8 figure clients use to maximize their cash flow through online content and you could be next.