- Setting up your gaming channel's home page is just
a quick and easy win, if you're looking to grow
here on the platform in a very competitive space.
By the end of this video, the optimizations we make
to your channel page will set you up
for a long time to come.
(lively techno music)
Hello, I'm Dan and welcome back to VidIQ.
So, how much thought and effort have you put
into your channel layout?
Let us know in the comments below.
When somebody is considering subscribing to your channel,
and, thus, joining your community,
it's important to have your channel set up properly.
You need a banner, you need a filled out About section,
you're going to need a trailer,
and some playlists to show off your best work.
The goal here, of course, is to get
anybody looking at this home page
to hit that red subscribe button
without (bell dings) any further hesitation,
and today I'm going to help you meet that very goal.
And for this demonstration, we're gonna be doing, I guess,
a bit of channel auditing on my own gaming channel here,
which isn't perfect, but I think a good example
of what you could be doing wrong and right on your channels.
Let's start with your channel banner.
Now, why should you even have one of these
in the first place?
Well, I want you to think of this as the thumbnail
for your entire channel.
It's going to help new visitors understand
what you're all about, and if they're in the right place
for the type of content they enjoy watching.
It's important to have a strong value proposition,
and, honestly, mine here could be just a little bit better.
However, it is, one I see, quite a bit.
New videos weekly, or new videos daily.
Instead, for me, I could try something
like showing you the best Minecraft mods weekly.
As for your channel's avatar, it may seem silly,
but just remember that it shows up as a circle.
So if you have any important information in the corners,
they likely will get cut off.
Remember that this is also a very small image,
and it appears especially small around YouTube,
such as the comments section.
More importantly, though, make sure that your avatar
and your banner are consistent with the branding
across your channel.
The more consistent your branding, the more serious you look
as a content creator.
Now, perhaps the most important thing I'm going to show you
here today on this channel are going to be the playlists,
and selecting the right ones to have on the front page.
But, before we get there, let's talk really quick
about my channel trailer.
Now you could go one of two ways with the channel trailer:
you could make a video that kind of breaks the fourth wall,
and simply explains the type of videos you make all the time
on your YouTube channel; a lot of people do that.
I decided to go with one of the videos
that I worked really hard on, and I was really excited about
and it did relatively well on my channel.
And sometimes I'll actually change this out,
if I feel like I make something a little bit better
or more engaging.
This one's probably in need of some updating,
but it's basically a video where I take people
through the top five mods in Minecraft for that month.
As long as your video is short and engaging,
you don't necessarily have to sit in front of your camera
and just talk about the things you're going to do.
Why not just show them with one of your best videos?
Where the real strategy comes in here, though,
is when we get down to the playlists that we feature
on our front page.
Now, the very first one here is
a New to this Channel playlist.
This is another form of, I guess, a trailer,
something that I'm going to show my audience as a way
of giving them a taste of all the different types
of content that I make.
I'm gonna go into a little more detail on this later,
but let's keep going down the list here.
I have my uploads here, which is optional;
a lot of channels may choose not to use uploads
and instead let people just simply navigate
to the videos tab once they want to see
what all has been uploaded recently.
And from there, I've broken out the rest of my playlists
into the different series that I'm running on my channel,
starting with some Minecraft mod spotlights,
and then any time I do a Top 5 video, a listicle,
it'll go in this playlist, and then, of course,
at the bottom here I have my popular uploads,
which
I'm just kind of proud of.
They don't really necessarily need to be there,
but, that's why it's at the very bottom of my list.
Speaking of playlists, it's also crucial
that you bother to put a description on your playlists,
and, that it should be human-readable.
What I mean by that is, don't just put a bunch of key words.
You'll notice, in my description here
I actually have put quite a few keyword phrases,
but in way that a person could read it
and not get totally confused.
Playlist descriptions help your playlists rank in search,
which is a thing that can happen,
so, don't count this feature out.
This playlist that I've titled
New to this Channel, Start Here! is actually
somewhat of a tip that came from our own YouTube coaches
here at VidIQ,
which, by the way, if you didn't know,
VidIQ does offer channel coaching.
Our coaches have taken channels that were in the 1000s
of subscribers and brought them to the hundreds of 1000s
of subscribers.
It's a service we offer for people who are really serious
about growing on YouTube, and I'll be sure to link it
down below, in case you want to check it out for yourself.
Remember when I said that my channel trailer was, kind of,
just one of my best videos I was really proud of?
Well, that's what you want to be doing
with this New to this Channel playlist that we've created.
Comprise this playlist of your six to 10 best videos.
The videos that have, over time, had
a lot of people turn out
to become subscribers of yours after they watched them.
If you have VidIQ installed in your Chrome
or Firefox browsers, setting up
this New to this Channel playlist is actually really easy,
'cause all you need to do is scroll here on the left
to the channel audit tool, and then from there,
you can get an idea of just some of the videos
that are bringing in a lot of your subscribers.
By making sure this playlist is full of videos
that help people actually decide
to subscribe to your channel,
you're making it really difficult for anyone
who dares to watch this playlist not to subscribe.
You'll also notice that the length
on these videos is actually pretty short.
They're all under five minutes, and the idea is that
people will watch a bunch of them, before they realize
"Holy Cow, I'm addicted to this channel,
and I'm going to need to subscribe so I can see more."
And now that you have an idea of the types
of videos and playlists that you should be displaying
on your homepage, let's talk about the structure,
because there's actually a lot of strategy
around the way I've structured my channel's layout.
If we come back into YouTube and scroll at the top,
we can simply hit the Customize Channel button,
as long as we're logged into our account,
and now we get to see how the sausage is made.
So, as I showed you before, I have my channel trailer
up here, and then I have my featured video
for returning subscribers.
This one is of a little consequence.
If I make a video that I'm really proud of,
I may put it here, but in my experience
it almost doesn't matter what you put here,
just something that you want to show
your returning subscribers that, maybe,
they didn't see before.
As we scroll down, you can start to see
the different featured sections,
and, what you might notice, is that
my New to this Channel playlist is actually not
the very first thing, even though I told you it should be.
That's because different sections will actually show up
depending on different circumstances.
So, my very first section here is actually short videos.
These are the new YouTube shorts; I've given myself
my very own short shelf, and it'll only show up on mobile,
so when people visit my channel on a mobile device,
they will see all the short videos I've made.
The next section down below that is Live Now.
I do live streams from time to time on my channel,
so I decided to make sure Live Now popped up
above everything else, when I was actually live now.
And then underneath that, any upcoming streams
that I have scheduled will show up above everything else.
Then, of course, as we scroll down, all of the playlists
we saw earlier are present.
While we're here, the branding tab is where you can upload
your channel's avatar and banner image,
but let's quickly check out basic info.
This is where you're going to update your About section,
and it's really important to fill this out properly.
Time and time again, we see gaming channels
that simply say
"hey, subscribe to my channel for more videos,"
and they don't really talk about why you should subscribe,
the types of videos they're going to see on a regular basis.
It's also worth noting that your channel's description
in the About section can help rank your channel
on YouTube itself.
And as we scroll down, you can actually post links
to different places you live on the internet.
So, for me, I put Discord, Twitter, and Twitch,
and this will actually show up on my channel's homepage.
If you ever wondered how people get these links
here in the corner, that's how you do it.
If you've managed to get over 1000 subscribers,
you may already have the community tab unlocked,
and that's one of the last things here on the front page
I want to show you.
Community tab posts show up on both desktop and mobile,
and you can get a lot of interaction from these,
which will help overall grow your channel,
because people are gonna start to see who you are
maybe in different ways; maybe if they didn't get
a video pushed to them, one of your polls will show up.
I want to encourage you to post on the community tab
at least a couple times a week,
if not more.
As you can see, your YouTube homepage can be optimized
in a ton of different ways.
So, I hope you found this helpful; if you did,
don't forget to leave a like, and we'll see you
in the next one.