Customize YouTube Channel - How to customize the layout of your YouTube channel (easy tutorial)

Let me show you how to customize your YouTube channel so you can have a well-optimized channel that gets more viewers and subscribers.

🕒Timestamps🕒
00:00 Start
2:48 Getting into YouTube Studio
2:55 Looking at the layout section
3:47 Adding a channel trailer or featured video
5:55 Featured sections
8:10 Adding a playlist
9:34 Branding section (channel banner, profile image and watermark)
11:49 Basic Info section
12:50 What links to add
14:16 Adding contact info

😊Grab the YouTube Creator Blueprint here😊:
https://saranguyenonline.com/special/youtube-blue-print/

Related video: How to create a YouTube Channel banner: https://youtu.be/5UNddgTKybc

Customize YouTube Channel – Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay. In this video, I’m going to be walking you through how to customize your YouTube channel.

This is a really important tutorial because I’m going to show you what you need to do to set up your channel and optimise it so that when people land on your channel home page, they can get to the content that they need to quickly and find it as well as understand at a glance what you and your channel are about so that they can hit that subscribe button so you can grow your channel, get more views and all of that beautiful, beautiful stuff.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help you build your business using video on social media with ease. Whether you are live now, or if you’re watching the replay, if you have any questions, please drop them in the chat or in the description.

And I’ll answer them at the end of the live stream. And as usual for everything, links will be in the description to the timestamps, as well as any resources that I mentioned in this video. I’m going to get right to the good bits right now.

Let’s go over to my computer and let’s have a look at how you customize your YouTube channel. And I’m talking specifically about your channel home page, as well as the about section and these are the immediate things that I want you to kind of look at doing, because I see a lot of the times when creators start their channels, they kind of just leave their homepage with the default settings that YouTube give them.

And this is okay, but you’re missing out on structuring your channel to get the most out of it. I’m going to walk you through how you can do things, like see I’m live now and it’s got on my homepage, my current live video, which is an important thing that a lot of people don’t do.

A lot of people who live stream tell people on Instagram or tell people on Twitter, ‘Hey, I’m going to, I’m going to go live on the channel, join me there.’ And then they go to the channel and they can’t find that live video. It’s like, that’s a missed opportunity, right?

That they go searching for it. And sometimes it’s really hard to find. How do you get the live stream to show that it’s currently live? How do you get upcoming live streams to show so that people who reach your channel know, Hey, this is coming up soon. And they can either hit that set reminder button.

How do you get all these playlist to appear like this? How do you get the channel banner? How do you get the about info? I’m going to walk you through how to do all of that. Now to customize your YouTube channel, you want to go into your YouTube studio, right?

That’s in the top right-hand corner and you want to go to YouTube studio, then what you want to do after you’ve gone. There is you’ll see, on the left-hand side, it will say customization. I want you to go to that section after you’ve gone into YouTube studio, and then you’ll see that there are three sections, right?

There are layout branding and basic info. And we’re going to walk through all of these sections and what you need to know to customize your channel within these sections, and this is something that not a lot of people do, because as I said, they just leave it as the default settings that YouTube has and they miss out on being able to do all of these things.

Within the layout section here we go back to my channel for a minute. You see at the moment I’m live now so it’s showing the current live video, but what you can do on your channel is you can have a video show for both people who haven’t subscribed, so a specific video of yours, it could be a channel trailer, it could be one of your best YouTube videos.

Whatever it is, you can have a specific video show just for people who haven’t subscribed. And then you can also have another video show for people who are returning subscribers, right? You can choose that to be the same video or different video it’s up to you, but you can do that in this section here.

And it will appear on the homepage. I’m live now, so you can’t see it, but it will appear here on the homepage, just above all of your playlist. This is a really good thing to do because it kind of sets the tone of, you know, you can tell people what you’re about, or they can see your best stuff upfront.

And in order to do that, so mine’s already got stuff, your channel may look like this, right? If you haven’t added anything like this or anything yet, it would look like this.

And what you would simply do is like for the channel, for the video that you want people to view, if they haven’t subscribed, you would simply simply click on add, and then it will allow you to choose the video from your uploads or your live streams and the same deal for future video for returning subscribers. Now, if I go here, I’ll show you what that looks like.

You simply click on add, and then it will bring up either all of your videos, or you can even search for another video on YouTube. It doesn’t have to be from your channel either, but you get to choose, right.

Let’s just say, I choose, take a break from YouTube, and then it will add that to that section there. And you would simply hit publish and that would add it to your channel, right? That’s what you would do.

That’s the first thing you want to make sure that you have the videos or people who haven’t subscribed in the videos for people who have subscribed there. The other reason that you want to do this is if they hit your home page and this video will auto-play. It gives you a couple of extra views. That’s a little tip there.

It helps get you more views on your videos as well. And it’s important about setting the tone about what your channel is about. Now, the next section within layout, and this is the important part that I see a lot of people miss and to be honest, it’s very easy to miss, this is the featured sections, right?

What you see here. I’ve got live now so that people know that I’m live if they hit the homepage. I’ve got upcoming live streams so people know when I’m going live. And you may be saying, well, what if I’m not live?

Or what if I don’t have upcoming live streams set up yet? Then these just won’t be there. It’s okay. You don’t have to worry about it, but when you do have them, it’ll be magically appearing for you on your channel.

And then I’ve got my playlist, right? And I’ve got my playlist set up deliberately so it tells people what the channel is about. Right? Very important that you do that because it sets the tone of this is you’re giving people reasons to subscribe to you.

At a glance, they’ve come to my homepage. They can see the upcoming live streams. Then they can see a bunch of live streaming tutorials. They can see a bunch of tech reviews, right? And they can see my social media videos.

They can see all my Canva tutorials as well, so they can tell these are the videos that will be on the channel and it helps them understand this is what I’m all about. What you would do is you would hit this featured sections, add section button, and this gives you the opportunity to add your playlist as well as all the other things as well.

I’m going to show you here. See? When I hit that there, it allows me to add a playlist, single playlist, multiple playlist, as well as, you know, I’ve already added it so it’s grayed out, but it says live now, past live streams, upcoming live streams.

That’s a big hint, make sure that you use that if you are live streaming so that people know when you’re live and when you’re going to be live. I like adding the past live streams to the channel as well, because I always tell people on Instagram.

Now this video is now live. I just had this live stream, if you missed that catch the replay. Link is in bio. And when they go to the channel, they can see, oh, okay, past live streams. And that helps them get to the content faster once again.

Just make sure that you, you know, utilise these as they are relevant to you. And then add your playlist. Now let’s talk a little bit about playlist. How do you add playlist?

Once again, within your YouTube studio, if you go to scroll playlist on the left-hand side here, this will allow you to add and edit all of your playlist. And playlist are simply a combination of your videos so that people can watch them, right?

This is an example of my Canva playlist, and I’ve got all of my Canva tutorials here and people can binge them in, or they can see all of them in one place. That’s the purpose of that. To add them, you would simply click on new playlist, name it, and then you can add all of the videos that you want to appear in that playlist.

And it can be your videos as well as videos from other channels on YouTube, as well as it’s relevant to you. That’s how you would, or that’s where you would go to add your actual playlist. And then you would be able to back to the layout section here and add them to the featured sections.

And this will appear on your homepage. Now, the other thing to note is that with your layout, you’ve only got 12, right? So be strategic with what you use. Only got 12. You’ve got 12. You’ve got 12 good sections.

Think about the playlist that you want to appeal and think about, you know, what’s best in terms of what do you want people to get to quickly on your channel and add them there? That’s the first part. That is the layout tab. Now, let’s go to the next section.

The next section I’m going to talk about is the branding tab, right? We’re still in YouTube studio, we’re still in the customization section, but now we switched over to the branding tab. This is what mine looks like, because it’s already filled out.

If you haven’t filled yours out, it will look a little like this. It would just be empty and you’ll be able to upload your profile picture, your channel banner, and a video watermark that appears in the bottom corner of the actual video. Now, let’s talk a little bit about what you need to do.

I highly suggest for your profile picture that you do add a picture of yourself, right? Because that helps to personalise your channel. That helps people see that there is someone real behind the channel.

It’s not just some spammy bot of a channel that just puts out not very great content so they can see that there’s a person behind it. I highly recommend and highly suggest you put a profile picture. You’ll be able to add that there.

And, you know, it’s quite straightforward. The other thing is I’ll put a link in the description to my tutorial on how to create a YouTube channel banner. That is the beautiful picture that you see here.

And I walk you through how to create it in Canva, as well as what you need to know in terms of sizing, so that it appears as optimised as possible across desktop, across mobile and across larger devices, such as the television.

That’s where you would add your channel banner. And then the video watermark, so all that needs to be is a little image and I have currently have this subscribe button, as you can see here, it’s really, really small, but I have this subscribe button.

I play between having the subscribe button and my logo and a picture of my face. And I just change it out just to see, you know, if there’s an increase in subscribers online, there isn’t, so choose whatever works for you, but that’s where you would go to add the little watermark that will appear.

And you have the choice of having that watermark appear for the entire video at a certain stop time or at the end of the video. And that’s where you would add that setting there. We’re smashing it along.

Now, let’s talk about the next part. The next part that we’re going to talk about is the about tab. This is the information that appears in the about section on your actual channel.

All of the description section here, the details, if you want to add an email address, as well as links, as well as these links that appear on the actual banner, top banner section as well. To access this section, it is in customization once again and basic info, right?

This is what it looks like if you haven’t filled it out yet. And literally it’s a space for you to add some text, to tell people what the channel is about. And it’s a space for you to add links and you may be thinking, well, what links would I actually add?

I would add links to like what I’ve got here, so in this section here, I’ve got the description and I tell people who I am, what I do, where I’m from, who I help. And then I have a link to my website in the description, but then I’ve also got in my links here, links to Facebook, I’ve got links to my Instagram and links to my Twitter, right.

And I’ve got links to my free sign in as well. And you get to choose whether you have no links, one, two, three, four, or five links to appear across this top section here. I say use as many as relevant to you. I don’t know if more is better.

I think it’s more about having as many relevant ones as possible. If you don’t have, you know, four or five links and you’ve only got three, but they’re your Instagram that you use all the time, they’re your Facebook page and they’re your website, that’s enough as well.

Don’t add things just for the sake of feeling it, make sure it’s relevant. You would simply to add a link click on this add link section here, put in the title so let’s just say Snapchat, even though I’m not on Snapchat and then you would paste in the actual link to whatever site it is there, right?

And then that’s how you would do it and then you would hit publish. And that would be how you would actually add that link. You could also move things around if you wanted to as well. And if you wanted to delete it, you would simply click remove like that as well.

That’s how you would simply customize your YouTube channel. We’ve covered quite a few things. There’s one more thing that I want to cover. In these contact info here, and this is something that I see a lot of people miss as well.

When people come to your channel and let’s just say, we’re talking specifically about brands, we’re talking about potential clients, we’re talking about those really qualified people. And if they go to your channel and they’re clicking all through the tabs, and then you don’t have a way for them to email you or contact you and they have to do a couple of extra clicks, it’s possible that you may have lost a potential lead.

It’s possible that you may have lost a potential brand deal because it’s hard to get your information. Now, I think for the most part, if the brand really wants to work with you, they’ll probably stalk your Instagram or stalk whatever links that you have here, but to make it easy for them.

I do suggest that you put an email address here, and I understand the hesitation because I get emails every single day from YouTube, but the way that I’ve addressed this so that they they’re not, well, it doesn’t seem like they’re spamming me directly is that in this actual section, as you can see, this is a generic– oh, no you can’t see, let’s see.

As you can see here in this context section here, this is a generic Gmail address. This isn’t my direct, you know, quote “business or work” email. I have an email address that, you know, an email address and this gets forwarded to my personal contact, right? People don’t in a way directly have contact to me.

They have access to an email address. Then I get to choose if I respond or not. And there’s a lot of crap that comes through. I’m not going to lie. I get emails pretty much every single day from lots of people who want free, free reviews of their software or who want me to review their products.

And, you know, it’s not great, but then I do get legitimate clients. I do get legitimate brands. I do get legitimate inquiries that lead to, you know, deals that lead to things that grow my business and grow the channel.

Having contact info in this section really helps and really makes a big difference. That basically wraps us up today because I wanted to walk you through as quickly as possible, all the things that you need to know to set up your YouTube channel, to optimise the homepage and to optimise the key sections within your channel.

I walked you through how to set up your home page so that you can, so that you have all of your top videos that you want to appear, so that you have your upcoming live stream, so that you have your current live streams, as well as all of your playlist.

I walked you through how to set up, you know, the channel banner, as well as all the links and also the about information so that people understand what you’re about and can get to you as well. That basically wraps up the tutorial today.

And, I just wanted to thank everyone for coming, and hopefully that’s been really helpful to you because I remember when I first started my channel, I was a bit like, where do you put, where do you put where?

And so hopefully this has given you a snapshot into everything that you need to know. With that said, if you found this video useful, please give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already.

And if you haven’t got a copy of it yet, please, the link is in the description, make sure you grab a copy of my YouTube blueprint. I’ll show you how to go from struggling and overwhelmed and confused on YouTube to having everything that you need to know to get to that stage.

The link to that is in the description. Thanks for joining me today. It’s been a blast and I will see you in the next live stream. Bye for now.