How to create and set up your YouTube channel (Beginner's step by step YouTube set up guide)

Learn how to create and set up your YouTube channel with my step by step beginners’ guide. From setting up your channel layout and optimizing the channel so you can start seeing results and ranking in YouTube (lots of people miss this!)

➡️ ➡️ ➡️Swipeable YouTube Scripts: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/youtube-swipeable-scripts/

👉Check out my YouTube tutorials playlist for more YouTube training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq0IpnYDS9s&list=PLiqAD0OPX91YKVobcNRl_YXSMCT3gX3gc&t=0s

📽Related videos📽
How to set up your channel banner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UNddgTKybc&t=0s

⏱️Timestamps⏱️

00:00 Start How to create and set up your YouTube channel
1:49 Getting into YouTube studio
2:04 Uploading your profile image
3:37 Channel banner image
5:14 Video watermark
6:43 Basic info
7:20 Adding links
9:19 Contact information
10:07 Playlist
17:07 Featured videos

How to create and set up your YouTube channel – Video Transcript

If you’re looking for a tutorial to walk you through how to create a YouTube channel, you’re in the right place. In this video, I’m going to share a step by step what you need to create a YouTube channel so you can have it up and ready to start your fabulous YouTube journey.

Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen, and on this channel, I’ll help you grow your business using video with ease. If you’re new here consider subscribing for more YouTube tutorials, tips and training every week. I wanted to show you the complete process to set up your YouTube channel, including all of the settings and technical things you need to do.

There are lots of bits and pieces, so it’s easy to miss adding a feature, so I want to make sure you’re using everything available to you. I’m also here to make it as easy as possible. Make sure you check out the time stamps in the description so you can jump forward or back to any section if you need to.

Let’s go over to my computer and let’s get started setting up your YouTube channel. Let us have a look at how to set up your YouTube channel and customise the branding and layout. We’re going to look at how you get your channel banner up and running, your profile image, the links on your homepage, the videos laid out on your home page so that people can see what your channel is all about.

We’re also going to look at all of the other features, such as setting up your playlists, setting up the content in your about information so that you can have it optimised and utilise this space the best as possible. To customise your YouTube channel, we want to get into YouTube Studio.

We’re going to make sure that you’re logged into your YouTube or Google account in the top right-hand corner, click on your profile image and then go down to YouTube Studio. From here we want to go on the left-hand side down to customisation, and here’s where we will be able to customise the profile picture, the banner image and the video watermark.

Now let’s get started with customising your profile picture. If you’ve already uploaded a picture like I have, you’ll see that it’s here and you have the option to change it or remove it. If you haven’t uploaded a profile picture, this is what it will look like and you will see the upload button.

Your profile image needs to be at least 98 by 98 pixels and it needs to be under four megabytes and it can also be a PNG file or gif, but it cannot be animated. I recommend that you get a nice high res square image typically 1080p by 1080p and you upload that and the image or your profile picture should ideally be either a picture of yourself, or if you are a business, of your logo or your brand.

But I like using face pictures here because this will appear in the YouTube search results next to your actual video. It’s a good idea to have a face for your actual profile image. To upload your profile image, Select Upload and then choose the image from your computer location.

Youtube will allow you to slightly customise it in terms of drag it around and resize it. And once you’re happy with it, Select Done and then YouTube will swap out the image. You need to Select Publish on the top right-hand corner for the changes to actually apply.

And now that I’ve refreshed the page, I can see that the profile image is now changed on the channel. Now let’s go ahead and set up the banner image. This is still in the branding section just underneath the profile picture, you’ll see a banner image.

Once again, if you’ve already uploaded one, it will give you the option to change and remove it. If you have an uploaded one, you’ll see what you see here where it says upload. Size wise, you want your banner image to be at least 2048 by 1152 pixels and it needs to be less than six megabytes.

You’ll see that there’s a link below this video which explains all the intricacies of the layout and size of a banner image so that you can watch that one if you haven’t already created your banner image. Now to upload your banner image, we’re going to Select Upload, and then we can select the image from our computer that we’ve already prepared for our channel banner image.

Once we’ve done that, you’ll be able to see that YouTube gives you a preview of the actual image and you’ll be able to see the sections where it’s viewable on all devices. Viewable on desktop, which is this outer one and viewable on TV. And if you need to resize the image, then you can cancel and go out of this.

Otherwise, you can select done for it to upload. As usual with everything you want to select publish for the changes to actually take place. And you can see in this little preview here that they’ve got an image where it shows you what it will look like on computer, on a television screen and also on a mobile device as well.

Now, let’s have a look at your video watermark or your branding watermark. Basically, the branding watermark allows you to add a branded image, which can typically be a logo to all of the videos on your channel, and when someone clicks on it, the watermark allows people to subscribe to your channel from the video itself.

It’s a handy little feature for you to make the most of. Ideally, you want it to be an image that is 150 by 150 pixels, and you want to use a format that’s either PNG or GIF with no animations, and it needs to be under one megabyte.

Once you’ve created that, and ideally, as I said, you want it to be either a logo or an image of yourself or something telling people to subscribe to your channel. I’m going to click upload to add my one. I’m going to select the image that I’ve already prepared.

It says subscribe here, and I’m going to then add it. And then I can see this is what it will look like. And then I get to choose whether I want it to display at the end of the video at a custom start time, either the first minute or second minute or whatever I choose all throughout the entire video.

You choose which works for you. I might add it for the entire video for the purposes of this demonstration. And then once again, I’m going to hit that Publish button on the top right-hand corner to make sure that the changes actually apply.

Now let’s have a look at adding all of the information in the Basic Info section or your about page. From the customisation tab, we’re going to go to Basic Info and select that. And here’s where we’re able to add a description. Here’s where you want to tell your viewers what the channel is actually about and what they’ll actually get from sticking around.

You have a thousand characters, which is a plenty of space for you to talk about who you are, what you do, and how you help people and what people can expect from your channel. Once you’ve added the text there, Select Publish for the changes to apply.

Now let’s have a look at adding links. You can add five links which will appear across the top of your YouTube channel banner, as well as in the Basic Information section. We’re still in the same space. We’re in Customisation and Basic info, and we’re down at this section that says links.

I want you to click on add link and here is where you can add a link title. For example, I may want to link to my Facebook page. I’m going to put the title as Facebook, and then I’m going to copy and paste the link to my Facebook page, and then I’m going to select add link to continue adding more links that I want to appear on the actual page.

I’m going to also add my Instagram page, and as I said, you get five links in total. And what you can do once you’ve added them is that you can drag them to change the order of them around. I would recommend that you have the most important links first and then subsequently the other links to follow.

I’m going to go ahead and add all of the links that I want to appear. And now that I’ve added all of the links and I’ve rearranged them to be in the order from most important, I can then hit Publish for the changes to apply. And when I go to my channel page, I can see the links that I’ve added here across the top of the channel banner image.

They go over that. As well as underneath in the about page. I can see these are the links that I’ve also added as well. I also have the option to indicate how many links you want to appear on the banner of your homepage. Let’s say I’ve got four links here, but I only want two links to actually appear across the top here.

I can do that. What I would do is I would select underneath the link section where it says links on Banner. I would choose however many link. The first two links, first three links I would choose that and then Select Publish. Now let’s have a look at contact information.

This is where you can add an email address to your actual channel to allow people to make business inquiries. This here simply is an email address that you want to appear, and I would recommend that you don’t put your actual personal email address here.

You create an email address, whether that’s a Gmail account or some other account for it. Specifically for YouTube inquiries. Add that to the Contact Information email section here and then Select Publish. And then you’ll see on your actual channel, in the about section where it says details with business inquiries, if they click on View email address, that email address will be here.

Let’s talk a little bit about playlists. These are playlist that I have on my channel and you can see here. I’ve grouped my playlist into categories of videos that are kind on a similar topic. I’ve got ones on YouTube training, on Streamyard tutorials, I’ve got ones on Restream, I’ve got a whole bunch of them.

And what I’ve tried to do here is create categories where I can create lots of different videos within this topic. And what it does is, I’m going to open up this design tutorials Canva playlist, is that it has all of the videos that I’ve got that I’ve added to this playlist and these are all Canva related.

And what happens here is that viewers can watch the specific videos and then they can watch all related videos that are Canva tutorials as well. It really helps to add to watch time. It really helps to establish you as an authority within this category because you’ve got so many videos within this topic and it’s really important that you add it to your channel.

How do you set up playlists? Within YouTube studio, you want to go to playlist and from here it will list all of the playlist if you have them. And then if you want to add some more, you can do that from here and you would go to new playlist.

You would have to add the title of the playlist. Let’s just say I’m going to add a Canva tutorial playlist. I want to try in the playlist title to include as many key words as possible. Design Tutorials, Canva Tutorials put as many keywords there as possible.

You’ve got 150 characters. Try to use them to the best of your ability. In terms of visibility you definitely want to make public if this is going to be one that you want to appear on your channel, and then you would Select Create. Now once this is in this section, you can edit it, and once we go into this section, this is where we really want to make use of the space that we have.

Underneath this title, we have a description section here. We want to click on the pencil to add the actual description and you’ve got lots of space here. We’ve got 5000 characters, and we want to use this space to tell people what they will find in the playlist as well as what you actually cover.

You’ve got so much space to tell people all of the things that you cover and use keywords here. The benefit of doing that is that, it will help not only your playlists surface within YouTube, because that happens as well, when people search for topics sometimes the playlist will come up in addition to the video as well.

You want to put as many keywords that make sense as possible here, and you can even go as far ahead as putting descriptions of all of the videos with the keywords as well, because you’ve got so many characters here. Make sure that you fill out the title to have keywords with the main keywords that you are trying to rank for as well as the description section here, and you use the space to the best of your ability and then Select Save.

Then how do you actually add videos to the playlist? There are a couple of ways to do this. From the playlist section itself, if you click on the three dots here, you can select add videos, and this will allow you to add videos from your own channel in addition to other videos within YouTube as well.

If I wanted to search for other Canva tutorials and this will bring up 4 different videos from different creators and different channels which I can add to the playlist if I wanted to as well. You can add your videos here and you can choose which ones that you’ve already uploaded to add to them, or you can add other ones from YouTube.

The other way to add videos to the playlist is from the video itself. If you select this save section here, you have the ability to save it directly to your playlist from the front of the video. And the other way to do it is in the backend when you’re editing your video and setting up your video.

Underneath the thumbnail section, you’ll see this playlist section here, and it has this drop down, which allows you once again to add the video by selecting the little tick box here if you want to add it to that specific playlist. That’s how you would go ahead and add videos to your actual playlist.

Now, after you’ve set up your playlist, you then have the ability to rearrange the order that they appear on your YouTube home page. What ideally you want to do is you want to add your playlist and you get a total of 12 playlist altogether which you can display.

You want to arrange them so that the most important ones are the ones that have the most views and are the most popular are at the top, and then you can just rearrange them and stack them according to the other ones afterwards.
To do that, we want to go back into your YouTube studio and go into customisation, and in the layout tab, this is where the action happens.

In the featured sections, here is where you get to add the playlist to your homepage and you get twelve of them that you can add. You would select add section and you’ll have the ability to add your playlist here. In addition to adding my playlist, I use this section to add my current live streams as well as upcoming live streams and past live streams.

And I do that by going to add section, and as you can see here, I can choose Live Now, past live streams and upcoming live streams. Then underneath that, I’ve got my single playlist. I’ve got my YouTube training playlist and my tech reviews as well as my Canva tutorials.

What I can do here as well is I can drag them around so I can move this one to be on top of the YouTube training. I can move the Canva one to be lower in the list or higher in the list simply by dragging and dropping it. And once I’m happy with the changes after adding the sections and adding the playlist, then I would simply hit publish.

The thing that I can also do is I can remove a playlist. I would remove a playlist by selecting on the three dots here and then remove a section. And if I wanted to it add back or add a new one, I would go to add section. I would go to single playlist, and then here I can see all of my own playlist from my channel and I can add whichever one I want to appear.

I’m going to click on this content strategy one and it’s added it here and then I’m going to move it up one as well. Then hit publish, and this will apply the changes to the actual channel. Let’s talk about adding a featured video. Now on your YouTube channel, what you can do is on the homepage and you can choose to select a video for people who haven’t subscribed and also a different video for people who have subscribed and are returning viewers.

It’s up to you on whether you want to add a channel trailer or you want to add a featured video, but this is the video that appears on the homepage in the home tab in the first section. To do that, you would go to your YouTube studio page customisation and layout.

And in video spotlight, this is the place where you can add or change the video. You don’t have to be permanently stuck with one video for the rest of your YouTube life. And to add the video, if you haven’t added one already, you would simply Select Add and then you would choose the video that you want to actually appear.

I’m going to select this one and as you can see, it’s appeared here. And the same for the featured video. You can change it here if you’ve already got one, by selecting these three dots and I can change the video and then select another video from my actual YouTube channel.

And then once I’m happy with that, I simply Select Publish and this will change out the videos for people to see when they haven’t subscribed and the video will also be different if they have subscribed and are a returning subscribers. I hope you got so much value out of this video.

And if you did, please hit the like button for me. And let me know in the comments section below, what other YouTube training would you like to learn about? I love making these videos for you. In the meanwhile, why don’t you check out my YouTube playlist for more YouTube tutorials?

Or if you’re struggling to come up with what to say in your YouTube videos, you’ll definitely want my five swipeable YouTube scripts. They’ll help you come up with the content for your videos that grabs your viewers’ attention and increases your YouTube watch time.

You can check them out by clicking on the links on the screen and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye for now.