- This is the complete updated 2021 beginner's guide
showing you exactly how to create a YouTube channel,
step-by-step, including the key optimization settings
that most people miss that will help you maximize
your results right now, even if you've already started.
Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you grow an audience
and scale your revenue with online video.
If you're seeing value in this video,
make sure you're giving it a thumbs up,
it really makes a huge difference, and all the links
to everything I cover in this video,
you can find linked in the description box below.
So, let's jump into it.
So, we all know that YouTube is a really powerful platform,
and it's no wonder that more and more people
wanna get on there and learn how
to make a YouTube channel of their own.
So, with the right process, and a little up-front
optimization of some key channel settings,
you can quickly set yourself up,
and your new channel up, for success,
ready to maximize your views, subscribers,
and traffic on YouTube.
So, in this video, I'm gonna step you through
how to create a new YouTube channel,
along with the key settings that you need
to maximize your results.
Now, as we go through each section,
I'm also gonna share with you some of the top tips
that we've learned to really help you
optimize your channel and your content,
so that YouTube wants to promote it.
And make sure you're checking out the description area,
we have pulled together a bunch of tools
and resources linked down in the description
to help you take things to the next level,
to help you dive deeper on some of the things
that we're gonna run through in this video,
to really help you get the most out of your channel,
things like creating your channel banner,
your thumbnail images, your end screens,
and YouTube keyword research to help you come up
with topics and ideas of content that people actually want.
So, once you've got your channel set up,
make sure you're coming back and checking out
that amazing resource down below.
All right, so we're over here now on YouTube.com,
you wanna come up to the top right-hand corner,
and make sure that you are signed in.
So, if you're signed in, you'll already see
your little profile picture up here,
but if you're not and you're seeing sign in,
like I'm seeing here now, then we'll need to click on this
and sign in to a Google account that we want
your YouTube channel to be associated with.
Now, if you don't have a Google or a Gmail account yet,
then you can just click down at the bottom here
and create an account, whether it's for you personally,
or whether it's for a business.
Now, as for which one you choose, this really isn't
going to affect your overall YouTube channel,
this is more on the Google side of things.
Do you wanna have a Gmail account that's going to be under
for myself, where you'll be using your first name
and last name, or if you've got a company website,
or a company domain, or you don't wanna use
your first and last name, then you can choose here
to create a business Google account.
So, go ahead now and sign into your Google account,
or go through the steps to quickly create one.
Now, once you've signed in, you wanna come up
to your little profile picture at the top here,
or for me, it's just got a J, it's a brand new account here
that I've set up, and you can see in here,
if you don't already have a channel created at this point,
then you have the option here to create a channel.
Now, if you already had a Google account previously,
then clicking on your profile image here,
you might not see create a channel,
in which case you've gotta come down to settings,
and then down here to add or manage your channels,
then there is a button in here, create a channel.
Now, if you do already have other channels
associated with your YouTube account,
then when you click create a channel,
you will just be presented to create
a brand new brand channel, whereas if you don't have
any YouTube channels associated with your account yet
and you click create a channel, then this is where,
after you hit get started, you'll get the option
to choose if you wanna create a personal channel,
one that's limited to your first name and last name,
so you can't name it whatever you would like,
that's going to be the name of your channel,
or you can choose a brand channel here as well,
so here you get to choose a custom name,
and name your channel whatever you would like.
Now, the other advantage that a brand channel has
is that it gives you the ability to give access
to your channel to someone else, like if you're gonna get
someone to help you out and upload videos,
or help you out with your comments, you can give them access
to your channel where you don't need to give them
your Google username and password,
or email address and password.
You can just assign them as a channel manager
if you've got a brand account.
So, given that extra flexibility,
I'd say that most people are probably gonna wanna select
a custom name here, or a brand channel,
so we're gonna pick that one now.
Now we get to give our channel a name,
The Best Channel Ever.
'Kay, now we're good with that.
Now we need to check this little box here,
and then hit create.
That'll go ahead and create your YouTube channel for you.
All right, nice work, the channel The Best Channel Ever
has been created.
So, now you wanna go ahead and upload a profile picture,
or an avatar, for your channel.
So I'm gonna hit upload picture,
gonna go down to pictures, and let's press this one here,
my profile picture.
Once you've got that in, the next box down here
is where you can tell your viewers about your channel.
Now, don't worry, with this stuff you can come back
and add this in later, but if you already know
what your channel is going to be about,
then you can add that in here now.
So, over here, on our channel now, under about,
this is where that text will show up.
So you can see, for us, we don't have a lot of text in here,
we've got a very quick, "Welcome to Primal Video,
"where we're all about helping you amplify
"your business and brand with video."
We then talk about the types of videos
that people will find on our channel,
and we've even got a link off to one of our free guides
to help people edit videos faster.
And what we have done in here, to help optimize
our YouTube channel, to help YouTube understand
what our content is going to be about,
is that we've got some keywords and key phrases
about the content we're going to create.
So we've got video creation here,
we've got video editing tutorials,
gear reviews, video production tips,
video marketing tips, tactics, and strategies,
YouTube ranking tutorials, so this is a good place
to include some of those key search terms,
or key topics, that your potential audience
would be searching for that you can then tell YouTube
that this is what your channel is about as well.
So, let me go ahead and copy and paste
that text in here now.
Then, down from that, is where we can add in some links,
to your website and some of your social profiles as well.
So, let's just go Primal Video, and our website.
Let's also add in Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram,
are going to be the same, and then you just wanna
hit save and continue.
Okay, so our channel now is officially created.
Now, our profile image might take a few minutes or so
to show up in here, but where you wanna go from here
is to go in and customize up your channel
to really get it set up.
So, you're gonna come up the top here
to customize channel, and it's gonna take you over
to your YouTube Studio dashboard area,
down to this customization section.
So, if you wanna access that at any point,
all you need to do is come up to your profile picture,
and then go down to YouTube Studio,
and then down to customization here.
Now, we're gonna go straight across
to the basic info tab here, and this is where we can see
our channel description that we added in
a little bit earlier.
And if we go down a little bit lower,
this is our channel URL, so right now,
it's this big, ugly URL, but once you hit 100 subscribers,
this is where you can claim a custom URL.
So, these are the links that we added in earlier,
we can pick them up and change the order of them,
or we can add more links, by clicking the little button
down the bottom here, and we also get to specify
how many of these links are shown
on our YouTube channel banner,
or the artwork that's on the top of our YouTube channel.
So, the default here is at five, but know that this
is where you can come back in and change that
if you want less links shown.
But the next one down here, this is an important one,
this is one I would recommend that you are adding in,
this is the email address that people can see
so that they can reach out and contact you.
So, the main reason I think you wanna add this in
is so that it's easy for any brands or companies
that wanna work with you, they've got quick access
to an email address, so info@primalvideo.com.
Now, you wanna come up here and hit publish,
to make sure that you are saving your changes,
and then let's go back over here to branding.
Now, I've already added in a profile picture here,
but obviously this is where you can come to change it.
Next one down we're gonna add is a banner image,
so this image is the image that's across the top
of your channel, and you can see here,
they're showing it on a TV, on a laptop,
and on a mobile device, and it does show
a little bit different on each of them.
So, we're just gonna click upload,
I'm gonna go through and just find a image
that we can use here for now,
as kind of a placeholder, we'll go open,
and you can see here, it shows you how it's going
to be viewable to the different devices.
So, this is what it's gonna look like on the TV,
on the desktop it's only gonna show
that small section of it, and in this section here,
on all devices that area is going to be shown.
So, it could be that you're scaling around your picture,
so that it looks good on the smaller devices,
as well as the big ones, and once you're done, hit done.
So, to give you an example of what you can build out,
this is what we're currently using on our YouTube channel.
So, we've got some text on there
about what the channel is about,
we've got the channel name there,
there's a picture of myself and Mike,
and we've also called out with some text
some of those links that we've added
to take people over to our website to download a free guide.
So, this is what you can build out over time.
Now, we have a dedicated tutorial,
taking you through how you can create your own
amazing looking channel banner art
for your YouTube channel, completely for free.
And again, that will be linked in the description box below.
All right, so we've got your profile picture,
your banner image, the next one down here
is your video watermark.
Now essentially, this is a little subscribe button
that pops up on desktop, it's shown on mobile,
but it's not clickable, but on desktop,
when someone clicks that little button,
they'll be presented with a subscribe button.
So, we wanna go ahead and upload a small graphic,
150 by 150 pixels, that we can use
as a button on our videos.
So, let me go ahead and grab one now,
so this is an example of what we use on our channel,
and we'll go done, and that's now added on there.
Now again, if you wanna make something like this,
I'll have another tutorial linked
where we take you through creating your own video watermark
to use on your channel as well,
and it's super quick, and free.
Now, with your video watermark here,
you get to choose if it's only displayed
at the end of your video, so the last 15 seconds,
if it's shown for the entire video,
or you can actually specify a custom start time,
so that it appears on your video after
a certain amount of time.
So, for us, we normally sit this around the 30 second mark
so that it only appears 30 seconds into the video.
Again, once we're done with our changes on here,
you wanna hit publish, make sure those have been saved,
and now let's click up here to view our channel,
just so we can see what it's looking like already.
So, you can see we've got our banner art in there,
we've got our links across the top here,
our little profile picture here still isn't showing yet,
but we know that it's added, because if we click on this,
we can see that it is there, so it can take
a little bit of time to show up.
And if we head over to our about page,
then we have all of our text and, and our email address,
and everything is in here.
So, let's jump back, and let's keep going.
Now, let's go over to the layout tab.
Now, we don't need to do anything in here now,
but just know that in this layout section
is where you can go ahead and upload a channel trailer,
a short little video telling people
what your channel is about and why they should subscribe
and watch your content.
It's not something that's super important,
but over time, when you do create that video,
this is where you can add it.
Let's go down here to settings.
Now, straight away you can see here,
you get to specify your currency,
so you can select whichever your currency is here
from that dropdown box, then over here under channel
is where we get to provide more information
about our channel.
So, we're gonna go ahead and select
our country of residence, for me, I'm in Australia,
so I'm gonna pick Australia.
Now, even with our main YouTube channel,
we still have this set to Australia,
even though the bulk of our audience is in America.
So, it says here, "Choose the country
"where you're currently based."
And then the next one down here, keywords,
this is where we can add any keywords or key phrases
that are related to our channel.
Now, don't add in random ones in here,
only things that are going to be related to your channel,
and the content you're going to be creating.
I would be adding in my name, comma,
Primal Video, and then some of the topics we cover,
video creation, content creation,
video marketing, YouTube growth, video editing,
and there's an amazing tool called TubeBuddy
that can help you out with this.
So, if you're struggling as to what words,
or what tags, or what keywords you should be adding in here,
and using on your entire channel,
then that's something that TubeBuddy can help you with,
even on their free plan.
So, you wanna go ahead and add your keywords in there,
then we're gonna come up here to the advanced setting here.
Now, this is a requirement, you will need to tell YouTube
if the content you're creating is made for kids or not.
So, we can do this across the entire channel,
saying, "Yes, this channel is made for kids,
"and I always upload content that's made for children,"
that would be here, yes, or "No, set this channel
"as not made for kids," or you can actually manually pick
for every video you upload.
So, for me, my channel is not made for kids,
so we can go ahead and hit no.
Now, something a lot of people miss
is that this is actually a scrollable area,
so there is more settings if you scroll down,
so you have the ability, in here,
to link a Google Ads account, not super important
unless you're gonna be running ads,
keep going down, then you have the ability in here
to turn on or off your subscriber account,
so whether it's publicly visible
for people to go to your channel
that they can see how many subscribers you have.
So, if you don't want people to see
how many subscribers you have, then you can uncheck
that little box there.
Now let's come up here to feature eligibility,
now this is where you will want to verify your channel
so that you're unlocking more features
for your YouTube channel.
So, if we come down here, default features,
they're all enabled, but if you wanna enable
some more features, then we're gonna come down
to this second box here, and we need to verify our channel
using a phone number.
So, this is gonna give you access to uploading videos
that are longer than 15 minutes,
creating custom thumbnails, livestreaming,
and also the ability to appeal any content ID claims.
So, we're gonna click this button here
and verify with a phone number.
You wanna choose your country,
and then you get to choose whether they're gonna call you
with an automated voice message,
or whether you're gonna get a text message from them.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and do this now, text message,
and once that's done, it says, "Congratulations!
"Your YouTube account is now verified."
Let's close out of this window here,
and that page will refresh, and you can see now
that these extra features have now been enabled.
Now, let's just hit save on this here,
just so everything is saved.
And let's open that back up and go to settings.
Now we were up to channel, we just ran
through those settings, so the next one down here
is upload defaults.
So this is where you can set some default settings
that are gonna apply to every video you're uploading.
So, this area here can save you a ton of time.
So for us, every time we upload a video,
we're uploading it as private,
then getting it all set up before we switch
it over to public.
So, for us, we have upload defaults set to private.
And in here, again, we can add any tags
that are gonna be added to every one of our videos.
And again, in here, you only wanna be adding things
that are relevant to every one of our videos.
So again, this would be things like my name, comma,
Primal Video.
And any other things that are going to be related
to each individual video on our channel.
Then up here, under advanced,
this is again where you can further dial in
some more advanced settings in here
as default settings for videos you're going to upload.
So, things like your video category,
now this one isn't really super important,
I mean, for our channel, we fit under film and animation,
we fit under people and blogs,
we definitely don't fit under comedy,
I am not funny at all, but we also fit
under how to and style, so it really doesn't make
a big difference, I'm gonna choose film and animation,
but down here under comments is where you get to choose
how YouTube is gonna treat comments
on your videos by default, whether you're going
to allow all comments through, spam ones, bad ones as well,
hold potentially inappropriate comments for review,
this is what we have ours set to,
this is the default setting.
So, anything YouTube thinks might be inappropriate
kind of gets put to the side,
and you get to approve it, or review it.
You get to choose if you want all comments held for review,
or you can actually disable comments as well.
So, we're gonna leave this one here
as hold potentially inappropriate ones for review.
Now, from here, we're gonna head over
to this community area here, and this is where
we get to add in our channel moderators,
so it says if there's anyone you wanna help
moderate your comments or chat feed while you're live,
you can paste the URL of a user to add them in here
as a moderator.
You can also do things in here like hide users
from your channel, so if you're getting
repeat spam comments through from certain users,
then you can add them in here as well,
and their comments won't be shown.
Now, in here is where you can create a list of words
that you want to block in your comments.
So, it could be things like sub for sub,
hug for hug, or any swear words and those sorts of things
that you don't want showing up on your comment feed,
and this is where you can create a list
of all of those words, and they will be filtered out.
Now up here under default, I do like to check
this box here, hold potentially inappropriate
chat messages for review.
So, if you are live, and you're getting
some messages and things through
that could be bad, then at least this will let YouTube
filter those out for you, and you can always
allow those messages, or permit them to actually
come through while you're live quite easily.
And then once you're done in here,
you just wanna hit save, again, to make sure it's all saved.
Then you can go back over to your channel.
You can see that we've got our profile picture
showing up in here now as well,
and our channel is now good to go.
So your next step from here is to create
some videos to upload, and when you've got those
ready to go, you wanna come up here
to this little create button, and choose upload video,
and you'll be good to go.
So, now that you've got your channel set up,
make sure you're clicking the link on screen
and grabbing your free copy of our YouTube Ranking Guide.
This will take you through all the key steps
to help you come up with high traffic,
low competition search terms that you can use
to optimize not just your content,
but your YouTube channel as well.
So, it's an amazing resource,
make sure you're grabbing your free copy linked on screen
and below in the description,
and I'll see you in the next one.