How to upload a YouTube video for beginners - complete YouTube tutorial 2021 // step by step guide

How do you upload videos to your YouTube channel the right way so that your videos can be found in search? In this video, I’m going to show you exactly what you need to do and common mistakes to avoid in the process as well.

➡️ ➡️ ➡️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

⏱️Timestamps⏱️
00:00 Start
1:24 Uploading the video from YouTube studio
2:22 Adding your YouTube title (What to write)
3:59 YouTube description
5:00 Adding YouTube timestamps
6:14 Adding clickable links
7:32 Adding emojis
8:06 Add your affiliate disclaimer (if relevant)
8:27 Add hashtags
8:48 Add more descriptive text
9:31 Add your video link
10:31 Your YouTube thumbnail
10:50 YouTube thumbnail dimensions
11:47 Audience (made for kids?)
12:26 Paid promotion box
12:49 YouTube tags
16:10 Adding subtitles
17:45 Add your end screen elements
19:26 Adding your cards
21:39 Save as unlisted
22:33 Checking your video before you publish
22:57 Playlist
25:55 Scheduling or publishing your uploaded YouTube video

How to upload a YouTube video for beginners – Video Transcript

Hey, 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 like this every week. After you’ve finished filming and editing your video, the next step is to get it up on YouTube and set up correctly so that you can get the best chance of being found in YouTube search.

I want to walk you through all of the steps so that you don’t miss any. Make sure you also 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 now and get started with uploading your video to YouTube.

Let’s get this party started with uploading a YouTube video. From YouTube, you want to be logged into your Google
account or your YouTube account and then from the top right-hand corner where it has a picture of your little profile image, you want to click on that and you want to go down to YouTube studio.

Then we’re in YouTube studio and back in the right-hand corner, still here, we want to click on Create, and it has that little red camera with a plus icon. Click on that and we’re going to go to Upload videos.

Now what we can do, is we can either select the files and then choose the file from the location on your computer or we can drag the file into this section. I’m going to drag the video file that I want to upload and I’m going to drag it right here.

And then here is where YouTube would then upload it. What we’re going to do here is we’re going to allow for YouTube to upload it. You don’t have to wait until they’ve completely finished to start adding all the components to the actual video. You can start making the changes here and go to next.

And also keep in mind that as you’re making these changes, if you make a mistake, it’s okay. You don’t have to commit to this permanently. You can save it as a draft and then make edits to it before you actually publish. It’s going to be okay.

It’s going to be okay. Now that we’ve got the video uploaded and YouTube is in the process of uploading it, the first thing that I want you to work on is your title. Now with your title, YouTube will typically take the name of the video file.

I name this video file Canva link in bio tutorial clickable landing page. You can see here that what I’ve done with the name of the file is I put keywords in there. There’s a big debate on whether this helps or not.

I think it’s a little bit of work that can not do any harm, and I think it’s worth doing it. And it also helps to put a couple of key words in there as well. I just name it and add a couple of key words that I want to rank for as the file name as well.

So keep in mind with your YouTube title that you have a hundred characters, including spaces here. And after 70 characters, you’ll see that within the search results within both YouTube and Google that it will be shortened.

It will still exist, but it will be cut off. I highly recommend that you use all 100 characters, including spaces. And the title, the format of the title, typically, what you want to have in here is your keyword. Plus, you want to make it enticing for people to want to click on your video.

I’m going to give you an example here of something I prepared earlier. I’m going to put how to create a clickable landing page for your Instagram Link in bio with Canva – Canva tutorials. I’ve got a couple of main keywords here.

Canva tutorial, clickable landing page. Instagram link in bio and I’ve used 90 out of a 100. I’m pretty happy with the fact that I’ve used as much as possible here and I’ve got my key words in here. Now, the next part that we want to work on is the description.

We’re going to break this down because we want to use this space to communicate with our viewers. And once again with the YouTube algorithm to let both of these key stakeholders know what the video is about. It’s not about stuffing keywords.

It’s about being quite strategic about this. And the first thing that I want you to do is in the first three sentences or the first three lines is tell your viewers what the video is about. Here is an example that I’ve got and I explain here that in this video I’m going to show you how to create a clickable landing page for your Instagram link in bio using Canva.

I’ve got the keywords once again, I’m telling people what it’s about and I’m telling YouTube what it’s about. Incorporate keywords that you want to rank for and also add complementary keywords here as well. Now, the next thing that I want you to add in the description section here is you can add your time stamp.

Time stamps are a great thing to add. I know that YouTube has the option to add it automatically. I do it manually so that I can incorporate the keywords that I want YouTube to add, not have YouTube kind of guess what my keywords
are.

With the time stamps, I’m going to paste an example here, you need to first of all have a 00:00 and then that’s the first one. You have to have this in order for it to trigger time stamps to appear and time stamps will break up your video into chapter so that people can scroll through and jump to it as well.

That’s the first one that you need to have. The other thing with time stamps is that you need to have at least three for them to work. You can’t just have one time stamp. And it also, ideally, needs to be at least 10 seconds per chapter.

Go through time stamp your video. The first one’s typically start and then break it up into chapters so that people can see and YouTube can see what your video is actually about. That’s the next thing that you want to have in your description.

Now, after your time stamps are added there, what you want to do is use this space to add your links. Right. And there are lots of different links that you can add. I highly recommend that you add at the very least, a link to your playlist or another video on YouTube related video on YouTube.

I recommend that you add a link as it’s relevant to take people off YouTube, and this may be a little controversial,
but for me, what I do and I’ll just paste it here so that you can see, is I’ll always have a link to another video or another playlist on YouTube to keep people on YouTube.

But then I’ll have other links. In this case, I’ve got a link to my free download, and I’ve also got a link to a free trial because it’s an affiliate link. It’s always about giving people options. Add your links, and if you want your link to be clickable, which you do, make sure that you add the Https if it is secure colon slash slash and this will make sure that your link is actually clickable and not just text in the actual section.

You want to do that to make sure that it actually plays nicely. There the other little tip that I have for you with your description, this section here, is you can see that I’ve got emojis, and I like using emojis to break up the text. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of text, right?

It breaks up the text when people are scrolling through it or just scanning it as people do, it will catch their eye. And use which ever emojis you want, whatever kind of emojis you want. But these are the ones that I use, and I think this adds a nice little touch to give people a bit of a visual cue and also to break up all of the text as they’re scrolling through it.

I want you to also, if you are using affiliate links to make sure that you put your affiliate disclaimer, just chuck it somewhere in the description box. I’m going to add it there, but it’s very important as part of YouTube’s Terms of service, if you are providing affiliate links that you have your affiliate disclaimer here as well.

Now, a couple more things that I recommend that you do add to the description section, and the next thing is hashtags. With hashtags, you can add a couple of related hashtags so that it can help viewers find your videos when they’re searching using this actual hashtag.

I just add them to the bottom of the description section here. And then the last thing that I recommend that you do is use this space really to add more of a description to tell the YouTube algorithm, to tell Google search what your video is actually about.

You’ve got 5000 characters here. Here, I’m going to paste pretty much a bit of a summary of the benefits of what this
tutorial is about what you can do from it. And once again, it’s using related keywords in a couple of paragraphs describing the video and what people will get from the video.

And this is at the very bottom because this isn’t necessarily for the viewer. If the viewer sees it that’s okay. But this is more for YouTube and the Google algorithm to pick up these keywords here. Now, last but not least, what I definitely highly recommend that you do, and this is just something that I’ve done after learning it from someone else, is with the actual link of your video which you’ll see here, I always add it to the bottom of the description.

The theory is that this create a back link to the video within the video itself. It’s just one of those things that I do. Not only the link of the actual video in the video description, I’ll put more key words there as well.

We’re just trying to help the YouTube algorithm and the YouTube AI pick up what this video is about and also to just make it as really clear as possible for the viewers as well if you have any information to add them all to the description at this point.

I think you’ve got 5000 characters, which is plenty of space. You may as well use it to your advantage and add all of these components as you can. Now, the next thing that we want to do is we want to upload your YouTube thumbnail.

Typically, you’ll see that YouTube will have a couple of stills from your actual video and 99% of the time I find that they’re always picking the worst still of my face. You want to upload a thumbnail the dimensions for your thumbnail,
are 1920 wide by 1080 pixels high.

This is the size that you want to have for your thumbnail. And ideally once again, you want to make sure that your thumbnail has big fonts is really easy to read and people can understand what your video is about at a quick glance.

I’m going to click on upload thumbnail, and then I’m going to select the image which is on my desktop that I prepared earlier. And there it is. There’s the image that I’ve uploaded there. With your thumbnail, you want to keep it simple, big bold text.

This is not the space for cursive text. We want to have ideally an image either your face, big picture of your beautiful face, or a relevant image to give people context of what the video is actually about.

Now I’m going to skip playlist in this section and we’re going to come back to that later in the video. But the one that we need to select here now is audience and whether this video is made for kids or not. Now I get a lot of questions on is my video made for kids or isn’t it?

And you are really the person who can answer that. For me, mine are tutorials, and they’re not necessarily made specifically for kids. But if you are a kids channel and you do storytelling or you do toy reviews for kids, the answer is probably going to be yes, but choose which one that is relevant for you.

Whether it’s made for kids or not. I’m going to click on Show more and then you will be able to see some more features that you can incorporate. If your video is a sponsored video, someone has paid you, you have a brand deal for you to actually create the video, Then you need to select the paid promotion box.

If not, then you can just leave this. Here’s the option here to add automatic chapters. I’m going to not allow that because I’ve already added my own. But then here’s the part where we really want to focus on a little bit. And this is your tags.

Your Tags are very, very important because once again, they’re helping the YouTube algorithm. They’re helping the YouTube AI understand what your video is about on one point. And the second point is what I want you to think about here is what words are people using when they’re trying to get to a video of your topic?

I see people make big mistakes in the tag section where they’re just throwing in random keywords of what’s included in the actual video. But that’s not how I want you to play this. I want you to be really strategic and for you to kind of think about and do the keyword research using tools such as VIDIQ, using Tubebuddy, using Keywords Everywhere
to help you find relevant Tags.

And once again, it’s about having clues to help the YouTube algorithm show your video to people and to also surface the video for people when they’re trying to find videos on your actual topic. For me, I prepared a bunch of tags.

You’ve got 500 characters here. Use them all the best you can. I’m going to paste my Tags here and woo-hoo! I’ve got exactly 500 characters here. But you can see in this case, for my Canva tutorial about creating a link in Bio page and landing pages.

I’ve got variations of things that I feel that people are searching for and I know that there’s traffic for these keywords because I’ve done the keyword research. Canva link in bio, Canva landing page, Canva tips, Canva website, as well as
Instagram landing page Canva.

There’s variations of what people are searching for in relation to this actual topic. Go ahead, do your keyword research and put all of the Tags in here. There’s another school of thought that believes that you should add the most important keywords that you want to rank for first.

Go ahead and try that, but definitely use all of the space that is available to you. As we scroll past the tag section, select your video language whichever language that you’ve recorded the video in. For me, I’m going to select English UK because that’s the English that I use.

I don’t typically feel in recording date and location. I don’t really feel that it adds any value or its relevant. In terms of license. I usually use this standard license. Use whichever license type is appropriate for your video.

I allow embedding, I allow published to subscriptions feed and notify subscribers. I don’t allow people to sample
this content for shorts. That’s just my personal preference. In terms of the category, this is a category that you choose for me majority of mine are either educational or how to style, but you choose the category that your video best fits into.

I’m going to put this in how to and style. In terms of comments and ratings, I always have it as whole potentially inappropriate comments for review. And I always allow people to see the like and dislike ratio as well. Then we’re going to select next.

What we’re going to do here now is we’re going to add subtitles. I’m a big believer that you should add subtitles to your video for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that subtitles and captions allow you to share your videos with a larger audience, people who are deaf or hard of hearing viewers and viewers who speak another language.

It’s about accessibility and it’s about, for me, inclusion. It also helps the YouTube algorithm to understand the content of your video. You have two options here. You can either have a subtitle file created using a service such as Rev.com or you can do what I do and I have an actual transcriber who transcribed all of my automatic subtitles, or you can manually edit the captions yourself in YouTube, that YouTube generates.

I found this very consuming and I don’t personally prefer it, but add your subtitles here. I’m going to go to add. I’m going to now go to upload a file and I’m going to select a file with timing and select continue and I’m going to just pick that file which is here.

It’s a .srt file. I’m going to open it here. And now, my subtitle file is open and I can just scroll through here and I can see that it’s all happening nicely here. Then I’m going to click done and this will add my subtitle file to the actual video.

The next thing that you can add here now is the endscreen. Endscreen can generally be added to a video in the last
five to 20 seconds of the video. And here I find it’s an opportunity for you to drive people to two things, either another video or a playlist of yours on YouTube or an external link to your website.

So let’s go ahead and click Add for an endscreen. And here’s the options here. In the last 20 seconds, YouTube have a couple of elements that you can use, so you can have a– you can link to an endscreen with a video or the subscribe button, or they’ve got a couple of combinations and lay out.

I’m going to go and click on Element and I’m going to link to a video. I can either link to my most recent upload or choose a specific video that I want to link to. This can either be one of my videos or it can be another video on YouTube. You would simply select it and then you would lay it where you want it to appear on the actual screen within the boundaries that YouTube gives you.

One will be a video and the second element I’m going to have, subscribe. I’m going to have the subscribe icon and I’m going to move it to the right here. And then you also get the option to choose if you want it to come in for the whole 20 seconds or which period of time here, and you would simply just, on the timeline section here, just drag it either to be shorter or you can drag it along to suit you and what you have as your preference there.

Once you’ve added your end screen elements, click Save. We also have the option now to add cards. And cards typically will appear in the top right-hand corner of your video on both mobile and desktop. And if people click on that, then it will open up some more information that will take people to another video of yours and drive traffic
to a video or another playlist.

When I click on cards and you want to use this where relevant and you want to put cards throughout the video if it’s appropriate. I’ve clicked on the cards and I have the chance to add a card for a video, a playlist, a channel, or a link.

So choose the one that you want to add a card to, and then you get to choose where you want to place it. I’m going to choose to put one after a minute and I’m going to link to another video of mine. See how it’s added the card here?

You’ve got the option to customise the text and change the teaser text so that when people click over it, they see a specific message. You can have something like check out my latest video and you can see that it just appears here as I type it there.

Click now. Just play around with those and keep adding cards as they are appropriate throughout your actual video and then select Save and this will add the cards to your actual video. If we continue along and select that next button here’s where YouTube will do some checks for you.

We highly recommend that if you are going to upload a YouTube video that you go through this process so that if here are Copyright claims or Copyright strikes, then you can identify them before the video is actually published.

Ideally, this is where during the process of upload that YouTube will actually flag it if there is an actual Copyright claim or Copyright issue that they have with your video because you’ve used music that they’ve identified or the AI has picked up music which has issues.

There’s none here. I’m going to continue with next. If there are some there, you will need to address them by either removing it from the video or adding music on top of it. Then here we have the option to go ahead and either publish if you’re done or if you’re not done like what most people are.

If you simply click on private or unlisted, then this allows you to continue to edit the settings and edit the sections of your video before it actually publishers. I’m going to put it as unlisted and then I’m going to Select Save and it says
video published, but don’t freak out.

It’s not actually published. I’m going to close this. And when I go back to YouTube studio and go to the content section, I can see the video here that I’ve uploaded and the visibility is unlisted. It’s not public yet, but if I share this link then people who have the link will be able to see it.

Now, I’m going to Hover over it and then it will expose this little pencil and I’m going to click on that so I can continue to edit it. And all the things that you saw in the dialogue box before are exactly in this section here.

That’s why I said don’t freak out if you haven’t got everything perfect, just continue along and we can go back and we can edit the title, we can edit the description section here. We can tidy it up and remove some space and we can add all the things. I’m going to continue now.

And what we’re going to look at here is playlist. This is an example of my Canva tutorial playlist, and as you can see here, I’ve added all of the tutorials that I’ve created that are Canva related, and what this allows my viewer to do is for them to see all of the videos that are related to Canva in one place.

They can have a Netflix Binge experience and watch other videos related to Canva if that’s what they want to do. Adding your videos to a playlist makes sense, particularly if you want to establish authority
for a particular topic.

You can create these playlists that are really beneficial for your channel and help really position you as that authority. Now, if you don’t have any playlist, then what will happen is when you go to add the playlist, it will say no playlist available.

Then you can Select Create playlist. And then you can title it. I’m going to call this Canva Design Tutorials and make it public and select Create. And now, this video will be added to this playlist and once you add more playlists, you can add your video to multiple playlists if it’s relevant to do.

Then, I’m going to select done. Now that we’ve done that, what we can do is we can go back to the video and check that we’ve added everything before we actually hit the public button or we schedule the video to publish.

We’ve got our title here, we’ve got our description with all of the elements, we’ve got the introductory sentences, time stamps, links that have the complete link so that it’s clickable, we have our Disclaimer, we’ve got our hashtags in the description as well as the additional text so that we can help train the YouTube algorithm or YouTube AI to understand what the video is about.

We’ve got our thumbnail selected, you’ve got the video added to a playlist, we’ve chosen whether the audience is made for kids or not, then we have selected if it’s a paid promotion or not, and we’ve also added all of our Tags. We’ve selected the video language, and we’ve selected the license.

I’ve allowed embedding, I’ve allowed published to subscriptions feed, I’ve chosen my category, I’ve chosen to show how many viewers like and dislike the video. Now if you scroll back up, I know that I have added the subtitles. I’ve added my end screen.

If I wanted to check any of these, I would click on them. I would click on subtitles and I can see Yup, they’re definitely all added here. If I needed to make edits, I would go ahead and make edits to them there. I can check the end screen.

I can see, Yup, these are the end screen elements that I’ve added. And also the cards. I’ve added the cards and I can see them here as well. With that I can then go ahead and publish the video. Uploaded the entire video and it’s ready now to be published.

I would click on Visibility and here’s where I can, if I select Publish and then save, this will push the video to be live right away or I can select schedule and I can then set it to publish at a specific time. If I didn’t want to go right now and I wanted to schedule it to publish it, let’s just say 09:00 a.m. And I had an appointment.

I didn’t want to, I wasn’t able to do it manually. I can choose to do it that way. It really depends on how you want to publish. The other option that you have is to set as Premiere. And basically what happens there, as you can see here,
is that when you set the video to publish at a time.

If you set it as premiere, then what will happen, the chat box will also appear so that you can chat with your viewers as the video is released as well. It’s just another option for you to consider. Those are the options that you have in terms of uploading your video and setting it to publish.

You can schedule it for a later date at a very specific time. And once you’ve done that and you hit save, your video is uploaded, it is either published or scheduled to publish and that’s how you upload a YouTube from start to finish.

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.