Mike Stott

Happy Sunday! Today I wanted to share the three things I learned when creating my YouTube channel banner.

Customising your YouTube Channel is something I’ve recently discovered and really helps your channel look that bit better. There’s a few different things you can do in your YouTube channel customiser:-

• Spotlight a video for people who haven’t subscribed
• Spotlight a video for returning subscribers
• Feature some sections (e.g. Playlists)
• Choose a picture, a banner image and a video watermark
• Description and useful links

Fill all of these in. The video watermark in particular is a good one (it can show up on all your videos and on hover lets people subscribe).

But, probably the most important and eye-catching is your YouTube channel banner. Here’s three things I learned through the process of creating mine:-

1. Find a starter banner and online editor

There’s plenty of these knocking around. I found a nice vector from here then edited it to my liking. I started off trying to make my own from the dimensions YouTube give you

I ran into issues here on how it looked on the other devices. So using a template really helped me focus the image in the correct area that’s visible on all devices.

2. Make it clear what your channel is about

With mine, my channel is mainly about me, so personal branding is important. Then under that my tagline of start, build, grow your idea. It’s a little bit like how you’d set your website title and description in WordPress.

3. Add some call outs / call to action

While these aren’t clickable – what they do is give a suggestion of what you’d like people to do and when they can expect new videos. New Videos Every Friday OK cool, I have a reason to subscribe (and that’s what the little subscribe button is drawing you to think too).

Final banner (notice the link?)

Here’s how it looks. Do you notice the link bottom right? That’s the link I put into the channel Basic Info – and you can add additional links in there too.

That’s all there is to it. Hopefully with this you can take your YouTube channel and make it look just that little bit nicer.