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- [Marley Baird] Being the successful YouTuber that
you are, you already know how important it is to have
the perfect YouTube thumbnail.
And you might also know how time consuming,
and tricky it might be.
But today I'm showing you how you can make the perfect
YouTube thumbnail using Canva.
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I love Canva.
I use it daily in my business.
From everything from social media posts,
to business cards, to like I said, YouTube thumbnails.
Even your YouTube cover art banner, which I also have
a video on that that you should go check out,
and my guide in the link below because the cover art
can be pretty tricky.
But what I want to talk to you about today
is the thumbnails.
So your thumbnail is the first thing that people see
before they come and click on your video.
And it can be even the deciding factor for them to
click on your video.
When you look in your YouTube analytics,
one of the very important, but most overlooked statistic is;
What's your click through rate?
Are people actually clicking through when they see
your thumbnail to watch the video?
And a good number that you want to aim for is at
least 4%, and if you see that any of your click through
rates are less than 4%, this is evidence that you
should go and design a new one.
So when you are designing a YouTube thumbnail,
you wanna make sure that the face or the subjects,
me for example, or you, are the face of your videos
you should be big onscreen in that thumbnail.
And text, very big, also next to that as well.
You also don't have to have the full title of the
video of the text, you can have something that's
like a few words, or a question, or something
that's posing that will bring them to wanting
to watch your video.
So, for example, I have a video that I put out
recently that's called;
'The Option You Didn't Know You Had Will Change Your Life',
and on the video, instead of putting all of that text,
'cause that's a pretty long sentence,
it says 'Change Your Life'.
So you don't necessarily need to have the full words,
the full text on the screen,
it's actually better if you don't.
So let's jump right into Canva,
where I'm actually gonna show you how you can make
your thumbnails so easily with what Canva has to offer.
Canva is a free graphic design tool, and it's also
browser based, which I really like so I don't have to
download it, and put it on my computer,
because I don't know about you but I get those
notifications all the time showing me that I'm
running low on disk space.
So I love that I can just go into Canva.com,
login to my account, you can use a free account
or a paid account, I used it for free for a very long time
before I started needing that extra functionality.
And to make a YouTube thumbnail, you don't need
that extra functionality.
So when you login to Canva, I'm logged into my account,
as you can see everything that I've worked on before
is all right here, right on my account.
So this is super nice that even if you use another
computer, or you're somewhere else, you can access
all of your images.
No matter what computer, no matter where you are.
So when you login, you can see that there are
some templates that you can use here.
You can even start to type into the search bar
'YouTube', and it will show you it has different
thumbnails with the custom dimensions for YouTube
channel art, which I talked about, and I have a link
in the description below for a guide on how to make
the channel art, because it's kinda tricky.
And the YouTube thumbnail.
So I'm gonna make a YouTube thumbnail.
I'm just gonna click right here, open up a brand new one,
and as you'll see as Canvas starts to load,
you'll see that they have a lot of templates and guides
for what you can actually use, and just repurpose it
into your brand name, your own title, pop your own
picture on it.
Which makes things so, so easy because I don't know
about you, but I struggle sometimes with creativity.
It's almost like writer's block, but for design.
So, as you can see here, there's a whole bunch of
different thumbnails, even for different genres
or industries.
So this one's for like, music YouTube thumbnails.
Food, beauty, tutorials.
So awesome that you can just take these exact thumbnails
that they've made for you, and just redesign it
into your own.
So let's say, even if we wanted to like, take this one,
and I can even swap out this picture.
I can change the text here to say, like;
'Video from Marley Baird'.
I can change this to.. Canva,
let's make that bold, Canva Tutorial.
And then if I wanna swap out this image,
what I'm gonna do is if I hover over it,
and I just click the delete button, it's gonna delete that.
And I can go into my uploads, or my folder,
so if you wanna upload one of the images
you can actually just drag and drop it right on here,
or upload it from any of your folders.
So if you click 'uploads', you can click here to
upload an image.
These are all of my previous images that I've uploaded.
You can see I've been working on a lot of wedding
design recently.
You can also go into your folders,
where you can categorize them into the different,
so for example, like, I have different clients
that I've sorted all of their images.
So let's say if I wanna find an image of myself,
I'll go into one of these folders, and I can just
drag and drop it right into places.
So, let's find...
Like this one.
All I do is just drag it right there,
and I can expand it to go across the whole screen,
and now see, it covered up this pink part.
So what I'm gonna do, is I'll still have it move into
place there, and then when I click on position,
if I move it backwards, see how now it's moved
right behind this.
And then if I wanted to, because pink or this salmon color,
isn't really my branding color, I can click on this
and see how the color option comes up here.
Maybe I want it turned into a blue,
I can even click on this and change the fonts to
whatever I need.
You can actually upload your own fonts, so you don't
have to just use whatever Canva's given you.
You can go in and upload, say, one of your fonts that's
in your branding isn't already there,
all you do is just upload it right here.
So I'll just change those fonts to a different font.
There we go.
And that's all we need to do.
So you can play around with that, you can use any
of their templates.
And then to download it, all you're gonna do is
click this download button in the corner.
It will let you download it in different, you can use,
download it as a PNG, a JPEG, whatever.
The other really cool thing about Canva,
although you don't need it in this circumstance,
is that it will publish directly to your social media.
Which is just such an awesome functionality.
This is brand new with Canva 2.0.
But I'm just gonna download this to my computer
so that I can upload it as a thumbnail
to my YouTube Channel.
I'm gonna download that.
PNG is good, but it'll also let you download as a JPEG.
For PDFs, you can't upload a PDF to YouTube,
so it has to be JPEG or PNG.
So, I'm gonna do that, I don't need the
transparent background, so I'm just gonna click
download, and download that to my computer.
Now while that's downloading,
I wanna let you know that you can only upload
custom thumbnails to YouTube if you have verified
your account.
This is super easy to do, don't worry about it.
Just go to youtube.com/verify,
it's gonna ask you to put in your phone number,
it's gonna send you a text to that phone number,
with a verification code, you pop that in,
and then it will allow you to put in a custom thumbnail.
This is really important, because otherwise,
YouTube just gives you three random options from your video.
And most of the time, they don't make sense.
It'll be you with, like, your mouth hanging open,
or it'll be you with, like,
just in action.
So it doesn't actually, it doesn't look appealing.
'Cause remember, YouTube wants you to put in good
thumbnails that people are gonna click through and watch.
You wanna have a click through rate of at least 4%,
and the way to do this is by following my guidelines
of having a big picture of yourself,
or whatever the subject is, big text related to the
title of your video,
and make it engaging.
And of course, go with your analytics.
If you see that people aren't really clicking through,
go ahead and redesign it.
Test that one out, see how that one works better.
Before we jump into actually designing thumbnails
in Canva, I'm gonna show you some examples of
amazing thumbnails.
My mentor, Russell Brunson, is dominating at the
thumbnail game, so take a look.
Here you'll see how he has a big image of himself in every
video, even, here's a video with him and Gary Vaynerchuk.
So Gary Vaynerchuk is also featured in that because,
him being a dominant player, someone that a lot of
entrepreneurs look up to, even seeing his face in the
video is gonna really catch attention.
As you can see, it has a lot of views
for a very short amount of time.
It was only uploaded a day ago.
So you can see how there's always a picture of Russell.
He always has a facial expression
that gets people interested, and then the words
next to it are also really engaging when it's
relating to the title.
So for example, this one is about MLM, and the title
is 'How To Succeed At Network Marketing With An MLM
Sales Funnel', and the words on the thumbnail is,
'No One is Doing This'.
So instead of titling the video 'No One is Doing This',
because people aren't searching for that, he puts
that in the thumbnail so it gets people engaged
about, 'Well what is no one doing?'.
They want to see that, so that will help
them to click through.
So, this is a great example, if you want to
start studying the science of thumbnails,
look at Russell Brunson's channel.
So that was my Canva tutorial, and again I have some
freebies on the link below.
My most used Canva tools for video creation,
and my guide for creating YouTube channel art,
Because.. It's a science to that, too.
Thanks for watching!
If you liked this video, hit the thumbs up,
comment below,
and of course, subscribe for more weekly videos.
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