In this video you're going to learn how to create customized YouTube thumbnails so that you can really
stand out in the search results from competing videos and get a lot more clicks to your videos and rank
higher in the search results.
The best thing is that on your show you had to do it very quickly and to do it for free in less than
five minutes.
So the first thing that you want to do is go ahead and log into Kanva dot com This is a free ad designed
tool very easy to use.
Much simpler than something like Photoshop which costs a lot of money.
And personally I find pretty difficult because was free.
You can sign up if you don't have an account with Facebook or your Gmail.
So just log in and then come up and click on create a design.
And the cool thing about Kanva is that they have templates for YouTube thumbnails so you can really
create a common thumbnail very quickly using these templates and in the perfect dimensions that's going
to fit exactly on YouTube.
So come in and then click on YouTube thumbnail you'll see down here in the left hand side that there
are a lot of templates that you can just choose from.
Now as you can see they're geared towards different type of videos.
Make up more business.
Maybe something to do with a puppy.
Fitness food.
So there's a lot of cool templates here that you can just take and apply and if you do want to use a
particular template you can just drag and drop it across and you can start to use this.
Now in this example you can see that this background image is actually a paid image.
This is how can they make their money.
They can charge usually a dollar for each of these images but if you don't want to use these images
that's fine.
You can just take this as an idea delete this and then come and upload your own images to here.
You can find those images or upload them from your computer or you can actually search for royalty free
images and there are some great Web sites like pick's eBay or pestles dot com where you can get royalty
free images that you can use in your YouTube videos etc..
What I'm actually going to do is just create a thumbnail from scratch just to show you how it's done.
So we can really just use this template.
So we have the dimensions but I'm really going to use my own background image which I've uploaded previously.
So you just want to scale that.
Very easy to do as you can see to fit the exact dimensions.
Now when I leave a little bit of space up here so that I can input my text and make sure that this looks
good.
Now my advice for YouTube thumbnails would be to keep it as simple as possible you can see this top
ranking thumbnail here.
It says you analytics.
It's very simple.
Although the title says a little bit more the thumbnail itself is just very simple and I'm going to
model that for my thumbnail because remember text on these thumbnails can be very hard to read especially
on a mobile device.
So you're better off I think just keeping it down to one or two words.
I really just get across the topic and then even in the title and description you can get a little bit
more specific about what the video is about.
You can see that some of these thumbnails for me personally are just too much information.
I'm really looking at YouTube to learn how to do something quickly and easily and simply.
Now if I see a lot of text there I'm probably not as likely to click on it rather than a just a simple
thumbnail like this.
So my advice would be always to keep it simple and keep in mind that people will be seeing this on mobile
devices whether it will be very very small.
So that's why I'm just using a similar image to the one there I want to bring across my youtube logo
which I have uploaded before I make it a thumbnail here about each video and you can see it's very easy
to size this up and then you probably don't want to keep it right at the edges but just leave it there
you can zoom in and zoom out.
Now I can also add in some text so I can just drag and drop this across into it line it up and I can
really change the text to whatever I want.
So I'm making a video of YouTube analytics.
I want the thumbnail to really just communicate change the seismic 56 scale this up a little bit as
well.
So everything's in line.
May want to change the font as well try and get it to match up with the logo.
It's very easy to use as you can see very accessible.
One of the one of the things I really like about it.
OK.
So I've got my railway techs going to make the bold and make this use this space a little bit more
OK I think that looks pretty good.
Now maybe you want to change the color.
You can do this for any text as well.
Just click on this icon and you can select it here.
I'm going to make this gray and maybe you can make that a little bit darker.
So you can just move those around there.
So I think that looks pretty good.
I might just play around with a little bit.
That looks pretty good.
OK.
I'm happy with that.
And there are many styles of thumbnails that you can make to include images.
Again that's very very simple to do just drag and drop them in as you please.
Once you are happy with your toenail you maybe just want to change the name and include the key word
or phrase that you want to reinforce so
you analytics
and click done.
Then you can click download and if you want to keep it as a ngi file so the quality is high and then
quick down load.
Now once you've created your thumbnail you can open up your video in youtube and just come to customize
thumbnail.
It's on my desktop so I can import this here.
And you can see I think this looks a lot better than the video thumbnail that was set.
So I am just going to save those changes.
So as you can see I think that looks a lot better than it was before.
And that's really going to help me stand out in the search results.
I get a lot more clicks.
So now it's your turn.
Go ahead into Kanva dot com.
Use one of the templates and create a customized thumbnail so you can get more clicks to your video.