How to Create YouTube Channel in 2021
Create Youtube Channel Advanced
In this article we cover how to create a youtube channel, This is the complete a to Z and updated 2021 beginner's guide showing you exactly how to create a YouTube channel, step-by-step, including the key optimization settings that most people miss that will help you maximize your results right now, even if you've already started. Hey, it's Ali Raza, here from Purzouq, So, let's jump into it. So, we all know that YouTube is a really powerful platform, and it's no wonder that more and more people want to get on there and learn how to make a YouTube channel of their own. So, with the right process, and a little up-front optimization of some key channel settings, you can quickly set yourself up, and your new channel up, for success, ready to maximize your views, subscribers, and traffic on YouTube.
So, in this article, I'm going to walk you through how to create a new YouTube channel, along with the key settings that you need to maximize your results. Now, as we go through each section, I'm also going to share with you some of the top tips that we've learned to really help you optimize your channel and your content so that YouTube wants to promote it. And make sure you're checking out the description area, we have pulled together a bunch of tools and resources linked down in the description to help you take things to the next level, to help you dive deeper into some of the things that we're going to run through in this article, to really help you get the most out of your channel, things like creating your channel banner, your thumbnail images, your end screens, and YouTube keyword research to help you come up with topics and ideas of content that people actually want.
So, once you've got your channel set up, make sure you're coming back and checking out that amazing resource down below. All right, so we're over here now on YouTube.com, You want to come up to the top right-hand corner and make sure that you are signed in. So, if you're signed in, you'll already see your little profile picture up here, but if you're not and you're seeing a sign-in like I'm seeing here now, then we'll need to click on this and sign in to a Google account that we want your YouTube channel to be associated with. Now, if you don't have a Google or a Gmail account yet, then you can just click down at the bottom here and create an account, whether it's for you personally, or whether it's for a business.
Now, as for which one you choose, this really isn't going to affect your overall YouTube channel, this is more on the Google side of things. Do you want to have a Gmail account that's going to be under for me, where you'll be using your first name and last name, or if you've got a company website, or a company domain, or you don't want to use your first and last name, then you can choose here to create a business Google account? So, go ahead now and sign in to your Google account, or go through the steps to quickly create one. Now, once you've signed in, you want to come up to your little profile picture at the top here, or for me, it's just got a J, it's a brand new account here that I've set up, and you can see in here if you don't already have a channel created at this point, Then you have the option here to create a channel.
Now, if you already had a Google account previously, then clicking on your profile image here, you might not see Create a channel, in which case you've got to come down to Settings, and then down here to add or manage your channels, then there is a button in here, create a channel. Now, if you do already have other channels associated with your YouTube account, then when you click to create a channel, you will just be presented to create a brand new brand channel, whereas if you don't have any YouTube channels associated with your account yet and you click to create a channel, then this is where, after you hit get started, you'll get the option to choose if you want to create a personal channel, one that's limited to your first name and last name, so you can't name it whatever you would like, that's going to be the name of your channel, or you can choose a brand channel here as well, so here you get to choose a custom name and name your channel whatever you would like. Now, the other advantage that a brand channel has is that it gives you the ability to give access to your channel to someone else.
if you're going to get someone to help you out and upload videos or help you out with your comments, you can give them access to your channel where you don't need to give them your Google username and password, or email address and password. You can just assign them as channel managers if you've got a brand account. So, given that extra flexibility, I'd say that most people probably want to select a custom name here, or a brand channel, so we're going to pick that one now.
Now we get to give our channel a name, The Best Channel Ever. 'Kay, now we're good with that. Now we need to check this little box here and then hit create. That'll go ahead and create your YouTube channel for you. All right, nice work, the channel The Best Channel Ever has been created. So, now you want to go ahead and upload a profile picture, or an avatar, for your channel. So I'm going to hit upload picture, going to go down to pictures, and let's press this one here, my profile picture. Once you've got that in, the next box down here is where you can tell your viewers about your channel. Now, don't worry, with this stuff you can come back and add this in later, but if you already know what your channel is going to be about, then you can add that in here now. So, over here, on our channel now, under about, this is where that text will show up. So you can see, for us, we don't have a lot of text in here, We've got a very quick, "Welcome to Pur Zouq, "where we're all about helping you amplify "your business and brand with video." We then talk about the types of videos
That person will find it on our channel, and we've even got a link to one of our free guides to help people edit videos faster. And what we have done here, to help optimize our YouTube channel, to help YouTube understand what our content is going to be about, is that we've got some keywords and key phrases about the content we're going to create. So we've got video creation here, we've got video editing tutorials, gear reviews, video production tips, video marketing tips, tactics, and strategies, and YouTube ranking tutorials, so this is a good place to include some of those key search terms or key topics, that your potential audience would be searching for that you can then tell YouTube that this is what your channel is about as well. So, let me go ahead and copy and paste that text in here now.
Then, down from that, is where we can add some links, to your website and some of your social profiles as well. So, let's just go to Purzouq and our website. Let's also add that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are going to be the same, and then you just want to hit save and continue. Okay, so our channel now is officially created. Now, our profile image might take a few minutes or so to show up here, but where you want to go from here is to go in and customize your channel to really get it set up. So, you're going to come up to the top here to customize your channel, and it's going to take you over to your YouTube Studio dashboard area, down to this customization section. So, if you want to access that at any point, all you need to do is come up to your profile picture, then go down to YouTube Studio, And then down to customization here.
Now, we're going to go straight across to the basic info tab here, and this is where we can see our channel description that we added a little bit earlier. And if we go down a little bit lower, this is our channel URL, so right now, it's this big, ugly URL, but once you hit 100 subscribers, this is where you can claim a custom URL. So, these are the links that we added earlier, we can pick them up and change the order of them, or we can add more links, by clicking the little button down the bottom here, and we also get to specify how many of these links are shown on our YouTube channel banner or the artwork that's on the top of our YouTube channel. So, the default here is at five.
But know that this is where you can come back in and change that if you want fewer links shown. But the next one down here is an important one, This is one I would recommend that you add in, this is the email address that people can see so that they can reach out and contact you. So, the main reason I think you want to add this in is so that it's easy for any brands or companies that want to work with you, they've got quick access to an email address, So Now, you want to come up here and hit publish, to make sure that you are saving your changes, and then let's go back over here to branding. Now, I've already added a profile picture here, but obviously, this is where you can come to change it. The next one down we're going to add is a banner image, so this image is the image that's across the top of your channel, and you can see here, that they're showing it on a TV, on a laptop, and on a mobile device, and it does show a little bit different on each of them.
So, we're just going to click upload, I'm going to go through and just find an image that we can use here for now, as kind of a placeholder, we'll go open, and you can see here, it shows you how it's going to be viewable to the different devices. So, this is what it's going to look like on the TV, On the desktop, it's only going to show that small section of it, and in this section here, on all devices that area is going to be shown. So, it could be that you're scaling around your picture so that it looks good on the smaller devices, as well as the big ones, and once you're done, hit done. So, to give you an example of what you can build out, this is what we're currently using on our YouTube channel.
So, we've got some text on there about what the channel is about, we've got the channel name there, there's a picture of myself and Mike, and we've also called out with some text some of those links that we've added to take people over to our website to download a free guide. So, this is what you can build out over time. Now, we have a dedicated tutorial, taking you through how you can create your own amazing-looking channel banner art for your YouTube channel, completely for free. Again, that will be linked in the description box below. All right, so we've got your profile picture, and your banner image, The next one down here is your video watermark.
Now essentially, this is a little subscribe button that pops up on the desktop, It's shown on mobile, but it's not clickable, but on desktop, when someone clicks that little button, they'll be presented with a subscribe button. So, we want to go ahead and upload a small graphic, 150 by 150 pixels, that we can use as a button on our videos. So, let me go ahead and grab one now, so this is an example of what we use on our channel, and we'll go do it, and that's now added on there. Now again, if you want to make something like this, I'll have another tutorial linked where we take you through creating your own video watermark to use on your channel as well, and it's super quick and free.
Now, with your video watermark here, you get to choose if it's only displayed at the end of your video, so the last 15 seconds, if it's shown for the entire video, or you can actually specify a custom start time so that it appears on your video after a certain amount of time. So, for us, we normally sit this around the 30-second mark so that it only appears 30 seconds into the video. Again, once we're done with our changes on here, you want to hit publish, make sure those have been saved, and now let's click here to view our channel just so we can see what it's looking like already. So, you can see we've got our banner art in there, we've got our links across the top here, and our little profile picture here still isn't showing yet, but we know that it's added because if we click on this, we can see that it is there, so it can take a little bit of time to show up. And if we head over to our About page, then we have all of our text and, and our email address, and everything is in here. So, let's jump back, and let's keep going. Now, let's go over to the layout tab.
Now, we don't need to do anything here but just know that this layout section is where you can go ahead and upload a channel trailer, a short little video telling people what your channel is about and why they should subscribe and watch your content. It's not something that's super important, but over time, when you do create that video, this is where you can add it. Let's go down here to settings. Now, straight away you can see here, that you get to specify your currency, so you can select whichever your currency is here from that drop-down box, Then over here under channel is where we get to provide more information about our channel. So, we're going to go ahead and select our country of residence, for me,
I'm in Australia, so I'm going to pick Australia. Now, even with our main YouTube channel, we still have this set to Australia, even though the bulk of our audience is in America. So, it says here, "Choose the country "where you're currently based." And then the next one down here, keywords, is where we can add any keywords or key phrases that are related to our channel. Now, don't add in random ones in here, only things that are going to be related to your channel, and the content you're going to be creating. I would be adding in my name, Ali Raza, Pur Zouq, and then some of the topics we cover, video creation, content creation, video marketing, YouTube growth, video editing, and there's an amazing tool called Tube Buddy that can help you out with this.
So, if you're struggling as to what words, what tags, or what keywords you should be adding in here, and using on your entire channel, then that's something that Tube Buddy can help you with, even on their free plan. So, you want to go ahead and add your keywords in there, and then we're going to come up here to the advanced setting. Now, this is a requirement, you will need to tell YouTube if the content you're creating is made for kids or not. So, we can do this across the entire channel, saying, "Yes, this channel is made for kids, "and I always upload content that's made for children, "that would be here, yes, or "No, set this channel "as not made for kids," or you can actually manually pick for every video you upload.
So, for me, my channel is not made for kids, so we can go ahead and hit no. Now, something a lot of people miss is that this is actually a scrollable area, so there are more settings if you scroll down, so you have the ability, in here, to link a Google Ads account, not super important unless you're going to be running ads, keep going down, then you have the ability in here to turn on or off your subscriber account, so whether it's publicly visible for people to go to your channel that they can see how many subscribers you have. So, if you don't want people to see how many subscribers you have, then you can uncheck that little box there. Now let's come up here to feature eligibility.
Now this is where you will want to verify your channel so that you're unlocking more features for your YouTube channel. So, if we come down here, default features, they're all enabled, but if you want to enable some more features, then we're going to come down to this second box here, and we need to verify our channel using a phone number. So, this is going to give you access to uploading videos that are longer than 15 minutes, creating custom thumbnails, live streaming, and the ability to appeal to any content ID claims. So, we're going to click this button here and verify with a phone number. You want to choose your country, and then you get to choose whether they're going to call you with an automated voice message, or whether you're going to get a text message from them.
So, I'm going to go ahead and do this now, text message, and once that's done, it says, "Congratulations!"Your YouTube account is now verified." Let's close out of this window here, and that page will refresh, and you can see now that these extra features have now been enabled. Now, let's just hit save on this here, just so everything is saved. And let's open that backup and go to settings. Now we were up to channel, we just ran through those settings, so the next one down here is upload defaults. So this is where you can set some default settings that are going to apply to every video you're uploading.
So, this area here can save you a ton of time. So for us, every time we upload a video, we're uploading it as private, then getting it all set up before we switch it over to the public. So, for us, we have upload defaults set to private. And here, again, we can add any tags that are going to be added to every one of our videos. And again, here, you only want to add things that are relevant to every one of our videos. So again, this would be things like my name, comma, and Pur Zouq. And any other things that are going to be related to each individual video on our channel.
Then up here, under advanced, is again where you can further dial in some more advanced settings here as default settings for videos you're going to upload. So, things like your video category, now this one isn't really super important, I mean, for our channel, we fit under film and animation, we fit under people and blogs, and we definitely don't fit under comedy, I am not funny at all, but we also fit under how-to and style, so it really doesn't make a big difference, I'm going to choose film and animation, but down here under comments is where you get to choose how YouTube is going to treat comments on your videos by default, whether you're going to allow all comments through, spam ones, bad ones as well, hold potentially inappropriate comments for review, this is what we have ours set to, this is the default setting.
So, anything YouTube thinks might be inappropriate kind of gets put to the side, and you get to approve it or review it. You get to choose if you want all comments held for review, or you can actually disable comments as well. So, we're going to leave this one here as hold potentially inappropriate ones for review. Now, from here, we're going to head over to this community are here, and this is where we get to add our channel moderators,
So it says if there's anyone you want to help moderate your comments or chat feed while you're living, you can paste the URL of a user to add them in here as a moderator. You can also do things in here like hide users from your channel, so if you're getting repeat spam comments through from certain users, then you can add them in here as well, and their comments won't be shown. Now, here is where you can create a list of words that you want to block in your comments. So, it could be things like sub for sub, a hug for a hug, or any swear words and those sorts of things that you don't want showing up on your comment feed, and this is where you can create a list of all of those words, and they will be filtered out.
Now up here under default, I do like to check this box here and hold potentially inappropriate chat messages for review. So, if you are living, and you're getting some messages and things through that could be bad, then at least this will let YouTube filter those out for you, and you can always allow those messages, or permit them to actually come through while you're live quite easily. And then once you're done in here, you just want to hit save, again, to make sure it's all saved. Then you can go back over to your channel.
You can see that we've got our profile picture showing up here now as well, and our channel is now good to go. So your next step from here is to create some videos to upload, and when you've got those ready to go, you want to come up here to this little create button and choose upload video, and you'll be good to go. So, now that you've got your channel set up, make sure you're clicking the link on the screen and grabbing your free copy of our YouTube Ranking Guide. This will take you through all the key steps to help you come up with high traffic and low competition search terms that you can use to optimize not just your content, but your YouTube channel as well. So, it's an amazing resource, Make sure you're grabbing your free copy linked on screen and below in the description, and I'll see you in the next one.
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