In this week's post, we'll talk about one aspect of setting up your YouTube channel. Be sure and read to the end of the post to learn about something that you may be doing that is hurting another person when you thought that you were helping them.
Depending on your YouTube readiness level, this week's post may be a little out of sequence for you. In our YouTube Thursdays rebooted series, we've been looking at how to start from scratch with video creation. If that's true in your case (starting from scratch), then you aren't quite ready yet to worry about your YouTube channel. However, many reading these posts will already have put some videos on YouTube and so this post will be a good topic to consider: YouTube Banner Cover Images.
In last week's post, I created a list of other ActiveRain members who have established their YouTube channels. Hopefully you had a chance to go check out their channels. Since I had made my rounds on all these various channels, it was a good opportunity for me to snapshot the banners that I saw and thus in turn be able to share some good examples that may inspire what you want to do with your banner. See these examples:
Here's a video that demonstrates how you could use Canva to create a new YouTube banner graphic. In the video, you will learn about "safe zones" where you want to keep your most important text and images. Items out side the safe zones will get cropped off depending on the resolution of the device that you are viewing it on (e.g. desktop vs. mobile vs tablet)
To wrap up this week's post, let's talk about how we can help each other with our YouTube channels. Of course, it is great to get new subscribers. This is especially true when you are first starting out and have very few subscribing so far. So if you want to support fellow ActiveRain members subscribing is a good choice so you can see when they post new videos and support them.
Secondly, when you watch these videos and you feel like they did a good job. You should click the like button on the video. Finally, if you have the time for it, leaving a comment on the video page not only encourages the creator, but it also indicates engagement to the YouTube algorithm. Engagement in views, likes and comments can help push a video higher in the search results and discovery pages in the YouTube algorithm. YouTube wants to promote the better quality videos over the lesser quality videos. Engagement is a big way of determining who gets shown and who doesn't.
Finally, one last but very important point to mention! YouTube uses another metric to determine if a video is quality content, and that is the watch time. In other words, if people come to a video watch 30 seconds and then leave, what is that telling YouTube about the video? It says that it wasn't valuable and thus worth sticking around for. So if you, by being curious about another AR member video, come in for half a minute and then leave, you aren't helping them and in fact could be hurting them. So if you come to watch. Stick around for a little while. And here's a bonus tip for watching informational videos: you can speed up the video. In fact, I watch most all informational videos at 1.5x or 1.75x speed. (click the gear in the bottom right on the video to get to the speed setting) You can even crank it all the way up to 2x speed. This is not recommended for a video that you are really trying to absorb the material, however it will help you add some substantial watch time to a member's video that can help them.
There's so much more to talk about in video creation. We're going to get more into filming and editing, setting up YouTube channels, picking good topics based on SEO. So to help not miss future posts, be sure and click the follow button on my blog. See you next Thursday!
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