YouTube for Beginners: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your First Video

1. Introduction: There, and welcome to this class where I'm going to show you how to start a YouTube channel. My name is Dan. I'm a photographer and a YouTuber who's been creating content for more than ten years. Here is one of my first videos on YouTube, and honestly, it wasn't very good. But on the other hand, this is one of my latest videos, and as you can see, the difference is quite noticeable. So in this course, I'm going to show you everything I've learned in order to get you started. Don't worry if you've never filmed a video or you don't even have an account on the platform because I'm going to guide you through the whole process step by step. Here are some of the topics that we're going to cover in this class. First, I'll help you come up with a niche or topic for your videos, as well as a channel. Then we'll customize and brand your channel by creating things like a banner and a profile image, and we'll move on to cover the basics about lighting, audio, and microphones and camera settings. You'll learn how to create your own scripts and how to come up with video title ideas. I'll also show you how to do basic video editing and thumbnail design using free tools and software. And to finish things off, I'll teach you how to upload and publish your own videos. So hopefully, I'll see you on the other side, and thanks for joining. 2. How to Sign Up: In order to create a new YouTube channel, you're going to need a Google account. So if you already watch videos on YouTube with your own account, you can skip to the next lesson. Otherwise, let me show you how to sign up. First, you're going to open your browser of choice, and you're going to head over to youtube.com. And here in the upper right corner, you can see where it says sign in. You're going to click there, and this window is going to show up. And again, if you already have a YouTube account, you're going to sign in here. But if you want to create a new one, you're going to come down here where it says create account and click there. And you have three options here. In my case, I always choose for my personal use, fill in with your own details. So in my case, then A, I'm going to click Next. You're going to fill in your details once again. Then you're going to click next. And now you have two options. You can either use your existing email or you can create a new Gmail address. In my case, for this example, I'm going to use a temporary email, and then I'm going to click Next, and it's going to send a verification code to verify that that email address belongs to you. As you can see here, this is the email address that I've received. So I'm going to copy the code, and I'm going to paste it here. And then I'm going to click next. It's going to ask me for a password, and I'm going to click next once more, and now it's asking me for a telephone number. Once again, you're going to fill in with your own details, and then you'll get a verification code on your phone, and once that's done, you're going to click next and then your Google account will be set up and you can move on to the next lesson. 3. How to Choose a YouTube Niche: Talk about choosing a niche. The most important thing to be successful on YouTube is being consistent. It's not the audio quality, the image quality or how pretty your background is, but it's showing up every single week, publishing a new video for one year, two years, or even ten years. And in order to be consistent, you need to enjoy the process. Filming videos on topics that you don't know anything about or you're not passionate enough, you're probably going to burn out sooner than later, and you might even quit. But on the other hand, if you have a skill that you can share with other people or you're very passionate about something, you're set up and good to go. And now you might be thinking, Okay, that's great, but how do I come up with a niche? Well, you have to ask yourself one of these three questions. Number one, what am I good at? Number two, what do I enjoy? And number three, what do I want to share with the world? Able to come up with an answer for any of these three questions, you already have your niche. For example, let's say you're very good at math, you could create a YouTube channel teaching math to other people and making it easy for others to understand a difficult subject. Let's imagine the answer for number two is you enjoy cooking. Again, you could start a YouTube channel and show others how to cook or how to be more creative in the kitchen. Maybe you don't know what you're good at yet or you enjoy doing stuff or have some hobbies, but you're not in the mood of filming yourself while you practice those hobbies, you can come up with an answer for number three. What do you want to share with other people? Maybe you just want to press record and start talking about life or your past experiences, or how is it like to move to another country? Or what's your opinion about current events or the last movie that you watch? The possibilities are endless. So I encourage you to brainstorm for five or 10 minutes, come up with your own niche, and then move on to the next lesson. 4. Channel Name Ideas: You can actually start creating our YouTube channel. The first step is to choose a channel name. If you already have a name in mind, that's great, but if you don't, I'm going to show you the tool I use to come up with names for all of my YouTube channels. Once again, you're going to open your browser of choice and you're going to come up here where it says sign in and follow the steps to sign in either with your existing account or with the new account that you created in a previous lesson. What you want to do once you're logged in is come here to the upper right corner and click on your channel icon and scroll down all the way to it says settings and click. This will take you to your account. So youtube.com slash ACCOUT. And what you want to do is click here where it says add or manage your channels, and this takes you to this Window here. I'm going to click here, create a channel, and as you can see, it prompts you to choose a channel name. Again, if you already have a channel name, you can write it down here, but if you don't know what to call your channel, you can use MSame process. What I like to do is take advantage of hATGPT. I'm going to open HAGPT in a new tab, which is this one here. And I'm simply going to come down here to the prompt bar and type the following. I'm creating a new YouTube channel about my trips around the world as a digital nomad. Please help me come up with 25 channel name ideas. Obviously, this is just an example. Here, instead of about my trips around the world, you would type in your niche or your topic. So I'm going to click here or press Enter on my keyboard, and we're going to wait. And as you can see, in a couple of seconds, we have 25 channel name ideas. If I want to add my name, I would tell Cha GPT, now add my name, Dan, and now it click here, and it would come up with 25 new channel name ideas using my I could also tell Cha GPT use funny name ideas, I would click here, and now I have 25 fun and quirky YouTube channel name ideas for the same channel. I could either choose a name from this list here or a funnier name from this list here. Let's say I like this one here, nomad by nature, I'm going to copy and head back and paste the channel name here. You're going to check this box here and then simply click Create and now your channel has officially been created. Congratulations. Now you can move on to the next lesson. 5. Profile Customization: That your channel is live, I'm going to show you how to customize it. And I'm dividing this in three different sections or lessons, basic information, channel branding, and channel layout. So let's begin with basic info. This is the window that appeared once your channel was created. So let's go to the upper right corner and click on the icon of the channel and click here switch account. And at the moment, this shows two channels. So my personal account, which is the account that I used to watch videos on YouTube and down here, the channel that I've created right now. In your case, the name is going to be different, obviously. So what you want to do is click on the name of your new channel. And this is what your channel looks like right now. What you need to do is come here where it says customize channel and click there. This is the window that shows up. If you come here to the left column, you can click on dashboard, and this is your main YouTube dashboard of your new channel. And if you want to go back to customization, you simply scroll down and click here where it says customization. And under Channel customization, we have Profile and Home tab. In this lesson, we're going to focus on some of the items under the Profile tab. What I want you to do is scroll down and here you can see the name of the channel and YouTube tells you you can change your name twice in 14 days. Encourage you to choose a channel name and stick with it. But of course, if you don't like it and you want to change it in the future, you can do so here. Let's scroll down a bit more. And now you can see the handle up here and the channel L down here. So when it comes to the channel URL, this is your channel ID. And this can't be changed. So you can copy this, now that it's copied, you can share your channel, L with other people. However, as you can see, the name is extremely long and quite complicated. That's why YouTube created what's called a YouTube handle. So if you want to share your channel with another person, instead of copying and pasting this URL here, which is extremely long and complicated, you can share your YouTube handle or this your L here. And this can also be changed twice every 14 days. In my case, I don't like the last part of my YouTube bando, so I'm going to click here and press Backspace. And leave it like this, nomad by nature. But as you can see, YouTube tells me this handle isn't available, and it tells me that this one is available instead. But again, I'm not a fan. I don't like it, so I'm simply going to come here to the bar again, and I could type official. And as you can see, this one is available, or if I want to make it shorter, I could type, okay. And this one is available as well. Or I could simply add some numbers 11. And again, this handle is available as well. Every time you change something and you want to save it, you need to remember to come up here and click on publish, and now the changes have been saved. We also have this box here to add a description to your channel. In my opinion, the most important part is the beginning because many people have a short attention span. So unless they're extremely interested in your content, they're probably not going to read your full description. For this example, I'm going to use a short description, but you can change it in the future. If you remember from a previous lesson, I'm creating a travel channel talking about my trips around the world as an example. So in the description box, I'm going to type something simple. I make videos about my life as a digital nomad, and once again, if you don't know what to write here, I recommend that you use Chat GPT, so we can open a new window, and we can come down here and write the following prompt. Please help me come up with a YouTube channel description. This channel is about my trips around the world as a ad, keep the description under 300 characters. I'm going to click here. And as you can see, we have a short description, but that's a bit longer than the one I've used. And if I wanted to use this one, I would simply copy this, go back to YouTube Channel customization window and paste the description here, and I would erase this part here and leave it like that. Again, if I want to save this, I'm going to come up here and click Publish, and now the channel description has been saved. So we've already updated our handle and our channel description. Now, let's scroll down a bit more and as you can see here, we have share external links with your viewers. So if you click at Link, you can add, for example, let's say, Instagram, and you would simply copy and paste your Instagram URL here. And you can delete this at Link, maybe, let's say X or Twitter. And again, you would copy and paste your Twitter or X URL here. And once you've done that, you would come up here and publish. At the moment, it's not showing up because I need to fill in my URL details here. As you can see, it says required. Otherwise, you can't add the link to your channel. Now I'm not going to add anything, but that's the way to do it. And you also have contact info. Let's say your channel starts getting some traction and some companies want to contact you in order to talk about sponsored videos or to send your products, you can add an email address here. In my case, I have a couple of business emails, and I fill in this box with one of those email addresses instead of my personal email account. You see, you can use your personal email address, but keep in mind any person that comes to your YouTube channel or your YouTube profile will be able to see this email address. So I could add here example at GML. And obviously, this is a fake email address. It's not mine, but I could come up here and click Publish, and now my email would show up. And if you want to see how these changes look on your profile, you simply come up here where it says View channel and you click there, and this shows you what your channel looks like so far. Or you have the channel name, the channel handle that we updated, and the channel description. If you click more, they'll be able to read the full description of your channel and also the email address. So if they want to contact you, they're going to click here, view email address. The fake or the example email is going to show up and you can close this here. Again, if you want to keep customizing, you're going to click here. We can close these other windows here, and we're back in the customization window. Now let's move on to the next Essen where we're going to talk about channel branding. 6. YouTube Channel Branding: Let's talk about channel customization. In this esson, I'm going to show you how to create or update your banner, your profile picture, and your video watermark. And the first thing we're going to change is the banner image. As it says here, this image will appear across the top of your channel. And it also tells you the size and dimensions in order to achieve the best results on all devices. So in my case, what I like to use and what I recommend is Canva. So we're going to open Cava in a new tab. If you don't have an account, I recommend that you create one. It's free. It does have a pro or paid version if you want to access some features, but you can totally follow this lesson with a free account, which is what I'm going to use. So what you want to do is come here where it says more to see all of the templates that Cava has and click there. And you can come to this bar here and type in YouTube. And it's going to bring up a list of different templates. And as you can see here, it says YouTube banner. So we're going to click there, and this is going to create a blank new page with the size recommendations from YouTube. And you can either start creating from here or you can use some of these templates on the left column. And remember, for this class, I'm using a brand new channel as an example, and it's a travel channel. So I'm either going to scroll until I find something that catches my attention that is travel related, and I'm going to hover my mouse over each and every one of these. As you can see, some of these have a small crown with the word Pro next to them, and it tells you upgrade to Canva Pro to use this premium template. So again, you wouldn't be able to use these with a free version. If they don't have the crown down here, this means you can use them with a free version. So if I like any of these templates, I would simply click on them, or I'm going to come up here to the search bar, and I'm going to type Travel. And Cava already suggests Travel, YouTube banners or travel or travel and tourism. So I'm going to click the first option Travel YouTube banners. I'm going to wait for them to load, and again, I'm going to scroll down. Let's say I want to choose this banner here. I'm going to click there and this template loads up here. So if I want to change the text of the banner because my channel isn't called Alfredo Torres, I'm simply going to double click and I'm going to type my channel name. And if I don't like this font, I can always come here where it says font, click, and you can choose by scrolling down from a very, very long list of different fonts. So let's say I want to try this one, and as you can see, it changes the font here. Say I like this one, and again, the font changes here. I can also make this bigger by increasing the font size here and clicking, or I can also make this bigger here and here, by clicking, holding and dragging. And I can also move this around by clicking and holding here and placing it wherever I want to. As you can see, while holding and moving, these lines are going to show up so you make sure that the text is centered. And we can also do this here. Instead of log Travel, I can type in travel videos, and down here, I could say every Monday and Thursday. And now I have my channel banner created. If I want to download this, I'm simply going to come up here where it says share and click there, and you want to click here where it says Download, and you can either download this in PNG or JPEG. So I'm going to click JPEG, which is the best for sharing, and I'm going to click Download. And now we can go back to the YouTube tab. We're going to come here where it says Upload and click there, and you're going to search for your YouTube banner. In my case, this shows up in my download folder. I'm going to change the name of the picture. I'm going to type in Nomad by nature, which is the name of my channel that I've created as an example. And I'm going to double click here. As you can see, YouTube shows you how the banner or cover image is going to look on different devices. And because Cava is using a YouTube banner template, you're making sure that the size and the dimensions are the appropriate ones for the platform. Again, instead of travel videos, you could write your channel name here, so you can always cancel and come back to Canva, type in your channel name. Let's make this a bit smaller. Clicking here, decrease font size, so it fits in one single line. And now we could again click Share Download. You can choose either PNG or JPEG. I choose JPEG, Download. Again, Canva will download the image to my computer. I'm going to come back here to the YouTube tab, click on Upload, change the name. Double click, and now you have the channel name here. Once you're happy with the result, you're going to click Done. Remember, every time you make a change, you want to make sure you come here and click Publish, change is published, and you can click here, Go to Channel. And now you can see that your banner or your cover image has been created. Now, we can close this tab here and we're going to do the same for the profile picture. YouTube tells you a PNG or a gift file. Once more, we're going to come back here to the Canva tab and click on these three lines to open the menu. And you're going to click here where it says, create a design, and we're going to come here to the search bar and type YouTube profile. And this one already shows up, YouTube profile picture. So we're going to click there. And again, now we have a blank page, and we have some templates here on the left. So let's say I like this one here, I'm going to click there. I want to change the picture that shows in the middle and the center. Can click on it, and then I'm going to click on the trash can to delete it, and I'm going to click Delete Image. And now, what I want to do is add an image of my own to the center of the frame. In order to do that, you need to come here to the left column. You're going to click where it says uploads and upload files. In this case, because this is a travel channel, I'm going to use a picture that I took on one of my trips. I'm going to double click here. And as you can see, the image is going to start uploading here what you want to do now is click and hold on the image to the center of the frame. Remember, I'm clicking ends to holding. So if I move this here, it's going to show in the background. If I move this here, it's going to show in the center. Once you make sure that the image is in the center, you're going to let go of the mouse. And as you can see, now the image is showing in the center. Again, if I'm happy with the result, I'm going to come to the upper right and click Share. And remember, this time, you need to click Download, but you have to make sure this is a PNG or a GIF. If you forgot, always double check by going back to the YouTube Tab and reading what YouTube tells you. Use a PNG or GIF with no animations. So again, let's go back to Canva, make sure you selected PNG, and then click on Download. Canva is going to download the image on your computer. And once again, let's go to the YouTube tab, click on Upload, and we're going to locate the profile picture that we just created. Double click, and this is what your profile picture is going to look like. If you're happy with the Result and you like it, you're going to click Done. Again, if you don't like this, you simply click Remove or you click Change and you upload a new profile picture. Let's come to the upper right corner and click Publish, so you make sure that the changes have been saved. Once those have been saved, you click Go to Channel. And as you can see now, we have the banner and the profile picture. If you take a closer look, you can click the camera icon, and this takes you one more time to the channel customization window. And now let's finish the customization process by changing the video watermark. So you need to scroll down all the way to the end. We have some size and dimension recommendations. Once again, we're going to the Cava tab. And we're going to come here to the upper left open menu, create a design one more time, and we're going to come to the search bar and type YouTube icon, but as you can see, this doesn't show up. So Canva doesn't have the YouTube icon template. You're simply going to come here to the left column and click Custom Size, and you're going to type in the size. So 150 times 150, and you want to make sure this is pixels, and you're going to click Create New Design. Canva is going to create a page. And again, we already have some templates in the left column and we can scroll down and choose between the templates that are free or the paid ones if you have a Pro account, I want to use this one here. I'm going to click there. In your case, you need to change this with your channel name or any kind of text you want to use. Remember for this class, I'm using a new fake channel as an example, and the channel is called nomad by nature. But obviously, this is too big, so I'm going to come here and click on decrease font size. Going to leave it like this. I could click here, press Enter on my keyboard, and this looks good to me. Obviously, this is not a design studio, so I can click here and I can either change the text or I can simply click the trash icon to delete it. I'm also going to delete this one, delete, and I can change this one, Travel videos. If the upper part of the circle looks too empty, what you can do is come here to the left column and click on elements, and you can search, Travel. Press Enter on your keyboard. Let's click on C A. And as you can see, many of them are paid icons or assets, but there are also many that are free. So if I want to use this one here, I'm going to click. It's going to show up here. I'm going to click and drag, and I'm going to make it smaller by clicking and dragging this. And again, I'm going to click and drag and as you can see, Cava snaps this into the middle. Once again, let's click here, Download, change this to JPEG, and click on Download. The image has been downloaded. Let's go back to the YouTube tab, click on Upload. You're going to look for the image your computer, double click first to change the name. So nomad by nature, and double click. And this is the Channel Watermark. Let's click Done. And now the channel watermark is going to show here every time you play a video. And as you can see, we have three options. You can choose when to display the video watermark. So at the end of the video, you can choose a custom start time or the entire video. My case, I always choose entire video, and I recommend that you do the same. And again, as always, you can either change or remove the video watermark if you don't like it. And as always, remember to come here to the upper right corner and click Publish to make sure that your changes have been saved. Now, you can go to channel, and now we can move on to the next lesson. 7. Channel Layout: Let's take a look at the channel layout. This is what new visitors and subscribers are going to see when they check out your profile or your channel page. As usual, you're going to open YouTube and navigate to the upper right corner and click on your profile icon and scroll down to where it says YouTube studio and click there, and you're going to come here to the left column and scroll down and click on customization. And if you remember from the previous sesson, this is the Channel branding tab. In this case, you're going to click this one instead, which is the Home tab. So you can either choose to show or hide the Home tab. In my case, I prefer to turn this on, and I recommend that you do the same because this allows you to as it tells you here, to highlight and showcase content for your audience. By default, this is what shows up. So a for you section, videos, short videos, pass live streams and created playlists. If you hover your mouse over any of these sections, you'll notice these three dots show up, and if you click there, you have an option to remove this section. Right now, if you click here, view channel going to show you what your channel looks like. But as you can see, nothing is showing up here because we haven't created and published any kind of video yet. Once you start publishing videos, they are going to show up here, and by customizing the channel layout, your visitors are going to see different types of content here. So if we open a new YouTube tab and we search for a channel, let's say, in this case, I'm going to take a look at MKBHD, which is one of the best known content creators on the platform. If we click on his profile, you can see we have a channel trailer up here, and if you keep scrolling down, have the for section, the video section, other channels that MKBHD recommends, and more playlists. So if we go back to our channel and you click here, again, customized channel, and we close these two tabs, this takes you back to the customization options. Again, let's click on Home tab. If you click here, you can remove a section. Let's remove everything and start completely from scratch. So you can add and you can choose between all of these options by scrolling down. Let's add a videos section. As it says here, this section will appear when a video has been uploaded. Let's add a different one a popular videos. If you want to. Let's add a different section. Let's click feature Channels. And now you can type in a name here. So friends, for example, and you can click the search bar and search for any channel on YouTube. Again, let's say MKBHD. And you're going to select this one here, click Done and Marquez's channel is going to show here. You can then come to the three dots here and either remove or edit the section contents. Let's click here. And let's go back to the search bar and search for a different channel. For example, Ali Ab Da, which is also another content creator and a huge inspiration for me. Click here, Ali Abdo and we can search for one more. Let's say, Mr. Us the boss. Click here and then click Done. Again, remember you always need to click Publish to save the changes made. And now you can click on View channel. And again, because at the moment, we don't have any kind of videos published, this is the only thing that's showing up, but once we start publishing content, the videos are going to show up first, and then right below the recommended channels or the friends list is going to show up. Anytime you want to customize something on your channel, you're going to click here and you can either change your branding or your layout here. 8. Lighting Setup: We start filming our videos, we need to take care about two very important things lighting and audio. So let's begin talking about light. If you're filming videos outside, let's say you're a travel blogger or a model blogger or you don't want to spend any kind of money, you can always count on the sun as your light source because it's free and widely available. But the sun, generally speaking, produces what's called hard light. So my recommendation if you're going to use natural light is to film at sunrise or at sunset. This way, you'll make sure you're filming with the softest light possible, which is much more flattering on a person's face. Of course, if you can't film at Sunrise or Sunset due to your schedule I recommend is that you film in the shade. Now, let's say you're like me and you film talking head videos or product reviews inside, you have two different options. Again, you can start by using natural light without spending any kind of money. In my case, I use what's called window lighting. So in this case, to my right side, I have a very big window that helps me diffuse that sunlight, make it softer. Using natural light inside has some drawbacks, mainly you can't control that light. If it's sunny outside, but then suddenly a cloud comes by, your lighting is going to change. Usually cameras and smartphones these days are extremely smart and know how to compensate for that. But in my case, because I like to control that light and sometimes I film at night, what I need is external lighting. I could buy something like this. Which is an external light, I paid $250 for that light, and it gives me amazing results. But again, you need to spend extra money to buy a light stand to hold the light in place and a soft box, which is a piece of special material to soften and diffuse that light. So if you're on a budget or you don't want to spend that much a light, you can do what I did and buy a pack or a bundle for more or less $50. Which is what I'm using to film this video. I have a light right there in front of me, which cost me $50, including the light sand and the diffusion pan. You can buy these online on many different online stores, and they do a great job. Obviously, there are hundreds of lights available on the market. Again, I paid $250, but there are lights that cost thousands of dollars. If you want to take things seriously, you can spend a bit more money, but you don't need to do so. I filmed a ton of content and many different projects using only this $50 light here. And if you're going to use one light like this setup here, you want to make sure you're placing it in front of you, but a bit to the side. Lighting is one of the most important aspects when it comes to filming video, but even more important than lights is audio. So let's move on to the next lesson where I'm going to talk about how to film high quality audio. 9. Audio Setup: Lesson, we're going to talk about audio, which is as if not more important than image quality itself. Because a person is going to watch a video that doesn't look very good but sounds good, but they're not going to watch a video that has the best image quality, but sounds terrible. So keep that in mind. A tip, recommendation or key takeaway from this lesson is that you want to try and keep the microphone as close as possible to the sound source. So in this case, I'm filming a talking head video, and as you can see, my microphone is very close to my mouth in order to get the best audio quality possible. That is why many YouTubers use external microphone. Because the internal microphones of the cameras is not very good also because in this case, my camera is three feet away. We're going to briefly switch to the internal microphone on the camera so you can hear how it sounds. Right now, you're listening to the internal microphone on my camera and I'm having to raise my voice because it's very far we switch back to this microphone here again, because it's very close to my face, it sounds better. It's also a higher quality microphone than the one found inside my camera, but it only cost me $70. It's a USB microphone, so it's plugged in directly to my computer. But now, let's say you don't want to have a big microphone in your face or in the frame or the videos that you film for your YouTube channel are generally filmed outside. In those cases, I like to use wireless microphone like this one here. This here is a wireless Bluetooth microphone and I can clip this thing onto my shirt. Like this. And now, as you can see, this microphone is closer to my mouth than my camera or my smartphone. So this is the transmitter, and this is a receiver. This receiver connects directly to my camera or a smartphone with an adapter that comes included. So now let me connect this microphone here and this transmitter here to my camera and briefly switch to it so you can see and hear how it sounds. What you're listening to right now is the audio being recorded with this microphone which is clipped onto my shirt. And the main benefit of using a wireless Bluetooth microphone is, as the name implies, that the sound is being transmitted wirelessly. So I can move around in the frame. And even if I move around and I come back here, you're still going to hear me. As you can see, there are different options when it comes to recording audio. In my case, I don't mind having a microphone like this one in the frame close to my mouth because I think the sound quality is very good. But obviously, this will depend on your YouTube channel, your niche, and how you film your videos. And now we can move on to the next lesson. 10. Camera Settings: Let's talk briefly about camera settings. This could be a whole class in itself, and I don't want to confuse you or overwhelm you. We're simply going to cover the basics. My recommendation if you're just getting started or you don't know anything about filming is to use auto or automatic mode. In the majority of digital cameras, there's going to be a dial on top with a couple of letters. You need to select automatic. And if you're going to record videos with your phone, there's a high chance that it's also going to be an auto or automatic automatic mode is letting the camera or your phone decide which settings are the best for each scene, so you don't have to worry about them. You simply press record and start filming. Now, if further down the line, you want to learn more about filming videos or you want to get creative, you want to use manual mode or manual exposure. On the majority of digital cameras, you do this by selecting letter M on the in many smartphones, there is a promde or third party apps that you can download in order to access those manual features. If you're going to use your smartphone, I recommend one that's called Black Magic camera app, which at least at the moment of filming this video is completely free. But before finishing this lesson, I want to talk about one very specific setting which is recording quality. I'm going to share my phone screen and how to set this up will depend on the smartphone that you're using. What you want to do is go into the settings of your phone to where it says camera and click there. And a long list of camera settings shows up and we're going to tap on the first option, which in my case is record video. You want to choosetween two different options, ten ADP, HD or four K. If you want the highest quality recording possible, you're going to choose four K. However, you have to keep in mind that four K files are much bigger and you're probably going to need a more powerful computer in order to edit those files. The majority of people nowadays consume content on their phones and a smartphone screen is very, very small, so you don't need to film in four K. That's completely up to you. Now we can move on to the next lesson. 11. How to Script a YouTube Video: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to script a YouTube video, but I want you to understand that this is not required, it's not mandatory. For example, in my case, I've never scripted a video in more than ten years creating content. Of course, this is your choice. I don't enjoy scripting my videos because I feel no scripting is much more natural. I'm not reading from my screen or from a teleprompter. But on the other hand, the majority of YouTubers that I personally know do script their videos. So in this case, I'm going to show you how to do that. And once again, we're going to be using Chat GPT for that purpose. We're going to open Chachi PT in a new window, and let's use my new fake channel as an example once more. And I want to make a video about the five best places to buy or to taste a croissant. And this is the prompt that I'm going to type. Hi there. I'm filming a YouTube video about the five best places to eat at Croissant in Paris. Please help me write the script for this video. And I'm going to click the arrow. And as you can see, it tells you that the intro is on location in Paris with a picturesque backdrop. So you would have to memorize this, look into the camera and start saying this paragraph out also even tells you to hold up a croissant to make it more engaging with your viewers. And after giving you the intro, it also tells you five of the best places to taste or to buy a croissant. So you could go to Dupin e de side, film this Bro, which would be a close up of the croissant, the exterior street. Then again, you would memorize this paragraph and talk about this place during the video. You would do exactly the same with number two, number three, number four and number five. ChaGPT also gives you an outtro and it tells you you should film standing by this place with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Remember, you can always come down here to the promptoi and tell ha GPT to make this funnier or any other information that you want to give ChachiPT. In my opinion, this script is pretty much done, but again, that's personal choice. Now we can move on to the next lesson. 12. Video Title Ideas: Video, I'm going to show you how to come up with video title ideas. If your title is eye catching, engaging or interesting, there's a higher chance of a viewer watching your videos. But first, two recommendations. Number one is you want to use words that are related to the content of your video. Because if you use eye catching words or sentences that have nothing to do with the content or topic that you're talking about during the video, viewer is going to click on the video, but they're going to leave early. YouTube is going to understand that your video is not good enough. So you want to try to use words or phrases that are interesting and eye catching, but make sure that the title and the content are related. And the second recommendation is that you want to keep your video title 70 characters or less. If your video title is longer than 70 characters, it's going to be shortened, meaning that a word or a sentence is going to finish with those three dots at the end. So the viewer will have to hover the mouse over the title in order to read it completely. In my case, I try to keep my titles as close as possible to 40 characters. You'll notice some of your favorite YouTubers usually have titles that are 55 characters long, 40, and even less sometimes. So now I'm going to show you the tools I use to come up with video title ideas and to make sure they're 40 characters or less. As usual, I'm going to open Chachi PT, and let's imagine for this example, I have a fitness channel, so I'm going to type the following in the prompt bar. Please help me come up with ten video title ideas for a YouTube fitness channel, and I'm going to press Enter on my keyboard. And as you can see in a couple of seconds, we have ten video title ideas for this fitness channel. Now, let's say I want to create a video for number three, which is beginner's guide to weight lifting, start Building Muscle today. I'm going to copy this title. I'm going to use this website here, which is capitalized M title, and this is the URL, capitalize mytitle.com. This helps you make sure that you're writing your title properly. If I start typing here, this is a test, it automatically helps you write the title or the words with title cases, upper cases, and lower cases. Now, let's delete this and I'm going to copy and paste the title from hachPT you can see down here, it tells you how many words and how many characters this title has. As I told you before, you want to keep your title 70 characters or less. But in my case, I prefer to keep them as close as possible to 40 characters. So I'm going to come back to ChachiPT and type the following in the promptobr. Please rewrite number three and make it 40 characters or less. And as you can see, ChachiPT gives me this new title, weightlifting Basics, build muscle fast. So I'm going to copy this title here. I'm going to come back to capitalize my title, paste the new title. Right now we have five words and 40 characters. Now let's try with one more title. Let's come back to Cha HiPT. Let's copy number nine, full body Dumble workout. Build strength in 20 minutes. Let's come back to capitalizemtitle.com, delete this one. We're going to paste the new title. Again, this is eight words and 56 characters. If you like this video title, you could totally use it because it's less than 70 characters long, but let's try to make this shorter once more. Let's come back to ChachiPT and once again, scroll down and tell ChachiPTPlease rewrite number nine, make it shorter. And it comes up with this title 20 minute full Body Dumbo Workout. And again, if we copy this title here and go back to the other tab, let's paste this title, and now it's 33 characters, which is less than 40. And, of course, we could leave the title as is. But if you feel that this is too short, you could also add a couple more words, for example, at home. And now the title is 41 characters long, which is very close to 40, and it also helps you create more content because now you could create a video for this workout at home and then another one. At the gym. And now we can move on to the next lesson where we're going to start filming YouTube video. 13. How to Film a YouTube Video: Lesson, I'm going to show you how to film a YouTube video, which is pretty much what you're watching right now. I've pressed the record button on my camera. I've turned on my light, and I'm recording my audio with my computer. What I recommend right before starting to film is to drink a bit of water because if you have a dry mouth, it's going to sound a bit unpleasant on the microphone. And once that's done, you would start filming. Now, as I said, I don't script my videos. I simply come up with a title and a few bullet points that I write down on my phone, and more or less, I have an idea of what I'm going to say during the recording. Obviously, if you have a script, there's a higher chance of not making that many mistakes. But if you make any kind of mistake or you mispronounce something or you forget a word or a whole sentence, it's okay. It doesn't matter. Just start that sentence over again. So as an example, let's imagine right now I'm filming a YouTube video, I'm doing a product review. I'm going to count down. Hi, everyone. In this video, we're going to talk about these wireless earbuds here. These are very comfortable to use, and they're compatible both with Android and Apple devices. As you can see, I'm placing these inside of my ears. And even if I shake my head up and down left to right, they stay in place. The case is magnetic. So once I take them from my ears and place them here, they snap into place. At the moment of filming this video, I paid 100 so now I made a mistake. At the moment of filming this video, these are available for $160. There's a pro newer version for $200, but in my opinion, the base model is good enough. And again, this is a quick example. Obviously, if you have a script, the video is going to be longer, and if I was filming a product review, it would also be longer. What I would do now, I would stop recording on my computer. I would turn off the light, press the record button on my camera to stop recording, and then I would dump the footage onto my computer and start editing. So now we can move on to excession where I'm going to show you how to do. 14. Basic Video Editing Tutorial: Going to show you how to edit a YouTube video. This could be a whole class in itself and it can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but don't worry, I'm going to cover the basics step by step. There are quite a few video editing programs or software both free and paid, but for this esson we're going to be using Capcod for two reasons. Number one, it's free at least at the moment of filming this video, and number two, it's multi platform. Meaning you can edit videos on your smartphone or a computer, both Mac and PC. Now let's jump into my computer so you can see my screen and follow along. Once you download the program on your computer and you launch it, this is the window that you're going to get. You're going to click here where it says Create Project. This is the main interface of Capcot. We basically have four different panels or sections. Here on the left, we have our media panel where we're going to import our videos, audios and images, and also where we're going to be able to add things like text, transitions, stickers, and so on. Here in the middle, we have the video player. So once we import footage and we start playing or editing that footage, we're going to be able to see a live preview here. Here to the right, we have the adjustment panel. At the moment, it's simply showing a bit of information. But again, once we import our footage and start editing, we're going to be able to adjust some settings and features here. Down here, we have what's called the timeline. Once we import our footage and drop it here on the timeline, this is where we're going to edit our video. And you can see we have a couple of icons here and we're going to talk about them as we move along. Video editing is basically trying to enhance your footage. So we want to remove unnecessary bits and add images, text, or other clips in order to make the video more interesting. So let's start by importing our media here. I'm going to click here where it says Import. Remember, I created a travel channel as an example for this lesson. I'm going to import a couple of videos and images that I took on one of my trips. I'm going to click here open and I'm going to click Import again. I'm going to click this one open. And one more time, Import, and I'm going to bring in this image open. And as you can see here, we have the two videos that I've just imported, as well as one image. Now, if you click on top of any of these clips or images, as I told you before, you're going to be able to see a live preview here. This is an image, and this is a video. It starts playing automatically. So I'm going to click here to pause, and you can always click here to play again to see the live preview and pause whenever you want. Session, you won't be able to hear the audio that was recorded in these clips because I want you to hear my voice so you can follow along. But when you're editing your own videos, you will be able to hear the audio track. So what I'm going to do now is click here and drag and drop onto the timeline. We have our clip down here, and as you can see now, here on the right, we have the adjustment panel, and we have quite a few different tabs where we can change some settings and make different adjustments. So now I could come here and make this bigger by clicking and dragging or smaller. I could also rotate here. Obviously, this doesn't look very good. So anytime you make a mistake or you want to revert to the original video. You can always come up here to this icon and click there to reset. And as you can see, this takes the video to its original state. You can also scroll down and see that there are many more options, but if you noticed, it says Pro next to the feature. That's a paid version of the program, so you can't use these options with a free version, but it's not necessary to use the paid version in order to edit videos. But if you want those special features, you can come here, click Join Pro and have access to them. And now let's come down here to the timeline where we're going to actually edit our video. Going to click here, these three dots, and I'm going to change the track height to tall to make this bigger so we can see things a bit better. What you can also do is come here to this icon to zoom in or Zoom out. So if you click and drag to the right, you're zooming in, and if you click and drag to the left, you're zooming out. So let's leave it like this for now. And as you can see, we have the video here and the audio track here or the audio wave. Again, for this example, I'm going to lower the volume so you can hear my voice. So I would click here in the middle and drag down to lower the volume or drag up if I want to make this louder. But for now, I'm going to bring this all the way down. Now, as I told you before, you usually want to remove bits that you don't need from a clip. So now I'm going to play the video for a bit so you can see what I recorded, and I'm going to remove the parts that I don't want or I don't like. So in order to play and pause, remember you can click here to play and click here again to pause. Or you can also use keyboard shortcuts. You can always check them out here where it says shortcuts. If I click here, what you're seeing right now has been personalized to my taste. If you want to change some of these letters or some of these functions, you can see that when you hover your mouse over them, it tells you that you can click to modify the shortcut. I can click here and either delete it or type in a letter, and then I'm changing the short. You make a mistake or you want to go back to the original shortcuts, you can always come down here and click on Reset. And once you're done editing the shortcuts, you're going to click here, save. And the shortcuts will be saved. So when it comes to playing and pausing, the keyboard shortcut to do that is simply pressing the spacebar. So I'm going to press the spacebar to play, and I'm going to press the spacebar again to pause. So as you saw, this line here starts moving when we play and pause. This is called the playhead, and we can move it around by clicking and dragging to scroll through the video or we can also click on any empty space to move the playhead to the desired part of the video. So obviously, clicking here is much quicker, but if you want more precise editing, I recommend that you click and drag. So let's imagine instead of starting the video here, I want to start the video here. I'm going to click now I need to split this clip into two different pieces. In order to do that, again, there are two methods. We can either use our mouse and come to this icon here, as you can see, if you hover your mouse over it, it tells you select or split. Right now, we have the select option, and as the name implies, we can select things so I can click and drag and move this around. If we click on this arrow here, you can see that we have different icons. I could choose the split option. Now if we over our mouse on the timeline, you can see that the icon isn't an arrow anymore. This is the split tool or the blade tool. If I wanted to split this clip here into two different pieces, you can see that if I click on top of the playhead, now the clip has been split in the middle. If we move the playhead can see that there's a white line in the middle. But again, as I told you, this is quite slow. So what I like to do is come here, click on the arrow, keep the select option selected, and I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut to split. In my case, the split or blade tool is the B key on my keyboard, so I can move my playhead around, and when I want to split, I simply press Letter B. As you can see, that split the clip into two different pieces here. Again, I can click anywhere, press Biki on my keyboard and split. Now let's imagine I want to remove this clip here or this bit. I'm going to select it, and I could either right click and then click Delete. Or I could go back by clicking this icon here, Undo, or as you can see, it tells you that the shortcut is Control Z or Command Z on Mac. I could press Control Z to undo that step. Again, with the clip selected, if I want to delete it, instead of right clicking and then clicking Delete, I could use a keyboard shortcut, and as you can see, I've deleted that clip. Again, you can customize your shortcuts however you want to suit your own you know how to cut your footage. What you can also do is trim your footage instead of cutting. And in order to do that, let's move the playhead here so you can see things better. You can hover your mouse over the edge of a clip, and as you can see, when you do that, the icon changes into these arrows. So I can click and hold, and now I can drag to the left to trim this footage, or I can click and drag to the right to bring it back. We can also do this here. Let's select this clip and hover the mouse over the edge. We can click and hold. Drag to the right or drag to the left. And that's how you trim your footage. Anytime you make a mistake, you can click this icon here or Control Z on your keyboard to undo or this icon here to redo. Now that we know how to trim and cut, let's add a transition, which as the name implies, is going to transition from one clip to another. In order to do that, we're going to come up here where it says transitions and click Capcut is going to load a ton of different transitions. So if you scroll down, you're going to see we have literally hundreds of them. If you take a look here, it says Pro, P and P, which means that you need CapcutP in order to use those transitions. For this example, we're going to be using this transition here. In order to add it to a video, you're going to click and hold and drag onto the timeline, and you want to drop it in the middle of two clips. So where there's a cut, you can add a transition. For example, here in the middle or here. So let's add it here. I'm going to lick of my mouse. As you can see, the transition has been added right in the middle. Now let's see how this would look like. Let's click here on this empty space to move the playhead, and you need to take a look here on the media panel to see how this transition looks like. So I'm going to play And as you can see, that is much smoother. Now you've learned how to trim, how to cut, and how to add transitions. Let's add an image to the video. Right now, we're in the transition stab. So what you want to do is click here where it says Import to go back to where you imported your media. And if you remember, at the beginning, I added this image. So I'm simply going to click and drag and drop it on the timeline right on top of the first track. And now as you can see the image is on top of the video. What you can also see is that we have some dots here in the corners. You can either click and drag from any of these dots in order to change the scale of the image, or you can also use the slider here to make it smaller or bigger. And what you can also do is click and move it around and you can place it anywhere on the frame. And as you can see, cap cut shows you these guidelines. So you can make sure that the image is right in the middle. Let's say we want to change how this image looks. You're going to come here to the adjustment tab, and you're going to scroll down and as you can see here, we have many different sliders that allow us to change the look of this image. So we can change the temperature by bringing it down and making it cooler or warmer. We can also increase the saturation or decrease the saturation and make it black and white. We can also increase the exposure, contrast, and so on and so forth. So if I want to remove this image, I'm going to right click Delete. And let's say I want to change the look of the video itself. I'm going to click on this clip here. And again, the adjustment panel shows up, scroll down and I could increase the exposure. I could also increase the contrast. I could also bring down the highlights so we can see more of the sky. We could bring the shadows up a bit, and we can add a bit of sharpness and clarity and so on and so forth. And that's how you add images and how you make adjustments to both images and videos. And now let me show you one more thing, which is how to add text to your videos. We can come here to these icons and click on text, and we have this default here or you can also click here, ex or text templates. In my case, I usually use either the default text or the ex. I'm going to click here, and again, Capcod is going to load many different templates. Let's say for this example, we're going to be using this one here. Again, you're going to click and drag and drop it wherever you want on top. Let's say here, we're going to move the playhead on top of the text so you can see how this looks like in a preview panel and you can click and drag anywhere around the frame, let's leave it in the middle. And if you want to change the text, you're going to come here to the adjustment panel, select the whole text and change it to whatever you want. We can also make the text bigger by increasing the font size or smaller. And as usual, if we scroll down, we have more options. So we could change the color to any color that we like. We could also click here, make it green or blue. Let's keep scrolling down. We have some presets here, and again, I'm going to keep scrolling down. We can also lower the opacity of the text and so on and so forth. That's how you do basic video editing. Once you're happy with how the video looks, you're going to export your project. In order to do that, you're going to click here where it says Export, you can change different settings of the video. We can give it a name test video. You can click here on the folder icon to choose where you're going to save it. In my case, I'm going to save it on my desktop. You can change the resolution, from four ADP all the way up to four K, in my case, I almost always film in ten ADP, so I export at the same resolution as how I filmed. The bit rate, if you know what you're doing, you can click here. And select Custom and change the bit rate to whatever you like. In my case, I usually choose higher and I leave it like that. Codec, I always choose h264 because as it says here, it's the most common compression method format, you can choose between MOV or P four. I choose mp four. And again, frame rate, you can select any of these. And once more, I recommend that you export in the same frame rate that you recorded your video in. And those are the only options that I change. As you can see down here, it tells you the duration of the video and also the approximate size. Once you're done, you're going to click here on Export, and it's going to take a couple of seconds, and the video and I don't choose any of these options here, I simply click Cancel or Open folder in order to see where the video has been exported. And as you can see, we have the video here. And that's how you edit a video for YouTube. After editing, we're going to publish the video. But before that, I'm going to show you how to create and design your own thumbnails. So now we can move on to the next lesson. 15. How to Make a YouTube Thumbnail: Previous esson I told you that titles are one of the most important things when it comes to getting new viewers on YouTube. But as important or more are your thumbnails. Even if your videos are amazing, if your titles and thumbnails aren't eye catching or interesting, there's a high chance that people won't even click on your video. This doesn't mean you need to be a graphic designer, but the key takeaway is that you have to spend time on your thumbnails. So in this esson, I'm going to show you how I design my ow thumbnails and how you can do the same. So we're going to open Canva in a new window, and what we're going to do is click here where it says YouTube thumbnail. If this doesn't show up, you can always come here to the search bar and type in YouTube thumbnail. And this option shows up, so you want to click there, and Canva is going to show you hundreds of different Sumnil templates. If you of your mouse over these, you can see that the crown icon is only for Cava Pro users, and there are some templates that are paid, but if they don't have any kind of icon in the lower right corner, that means that template is free. So you could either scroll down and look for a template that you like, or you can also scroll back up and click here, create a blank YouTube. And this allows me to start from scratch, but I still have all of the templates here in the left column. And what I'm going to do is click here in the search bar. And remember, I created a Travel channel as an example. So I'm going to type in Travel, Thumbnail, and press Enter on my keyboard. And as you can see, automatically Canva shows you, again, hundreds of thumbnails related with travel or a travel channel. Let me click on this template here. Now you can customize this template to your own liking. For example, instead of Travel blog Episode six, you could double click here, change Episode six to Episode ten. You could also change this title here by double clicking. And instead of trip, you can say Japanese temples, and obviously, you want to make this smaller. So you're going to come here, decrease font size and start clicking until you reach the desired font size, or you can also come down here and click and drag to make this smaller. And now let's click here right at the edge, click and drag, and now this turns into one line instead of two, and click and hold to move it to the middle. And we're also going to click here. Again, you would double click and type the name of your channel. The sample channel that I created was called Nomad by nature. And let's say I like this font, but I don't like the ellipse, I'm simply going to click on it and click on the garbage can. And as you can see, now it looks much cleaner. You could also double click here to change the date, for example, say, May 2024 if you traveled in May 2024. But now let's imagine you want to change one of these pictures here. For example, this one. What you can do is click to select, and now you can click the garbage can once again, and you can choose between deleting the image or deleting the frame. In my case, I'm going to choose delete the image. That way, it keeps the frame like this empty, but you can add your own image. So if you want to do that, you can come back here to the left column and click on uploads. Let's imagine this picture was taken in Japan. I can always click and drag while holding until it fits perfectly in the frame. Then I'm going to let off my mouse. And if you want to add things like elements, for example, you can come to the left column and click on elements, and you could search for, let's say, Japan. Here you have some assets that are only available in Canva Pro, so the paid upgrade, but you can also click here, see all and you can scroll down and find the ones that are free. This one, for example, is free. So if I would like to add Mount Fuji here, I would simply click on it, and as you can see, this shows up inside of the thumbnail, and I can resize this and move it around. Let's say I want to drop it here or bring it to this side for this thumbnail, I'm simply going to remove this because, in my opinion, it doesn't look that good, but that's how you add other acids to your thumbnail. And this something looks okay, but I'm not a big fan of this font and this font. I prefer this one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click here and I'm going to see that this font is called Yellow Tail. And what I want to do now is click on this font and change it to Yellow Tail. As you can see, the document fonts already show up here. So we simply have to click on Yellow Tail, and as you can see now, the font has been changed. You can also do that for this text here, click and again, click on Yellow Tao and Cava changes it automatically. If you don't like having that text, obviously, you can click on it and delete and click here and delete and we could make this text a bit bigger by either increasing the font size here or clicking and dragging from one of these dots. And again, either clicking and dragging here or double clicking on this arrow now dragging to make it bigger and clicking here and dragging to move it around. Now we've created our own Sumnil. The last step is to click here, share, and download, and you can either select PNG or JPEG. On YouTube, you can use both JPEG or PNG. And once you select the one that you want, you're going to click here, Download and Canvas going to download the image to your computer. If we want to take a look at the result, we're going to click here, and this is what the Sumnil looks like. And now we can move on to the next lesson. 16. How to Upload and Publish a Video: You've finished filming, editing, and creating your thumbnails, it's time for the last step, which is publishing your video to YouTube. As I said at the beginning of this class, don't worry about what other people think because it's going to be okay. And the more videos you publish, the easier the process is going to become. To publish your video, you're going to open youtube.com, and as you can see right here, very close to your profile channel icon, there's a plus symbol. And if you hover your mouse over it, it says, create, you're going to click there, and you're going to click here, upload video, and this window is going to show. You can see, it tells you to drag and drop video files to upload or to select files. If you remember from a previous esson, I exported my edited video to my desktop, which is here, and this video was filmed in Japan. So what I could do before uploading is double click, rename and type something like the best beach in Japan. And now I could click and drag and drop it here. Let's maximize this window again. YouTube starts to upload the video, and it tells you down here the percentage. So we already have the title here, the best beach in Japan. And now, as you can see here, we also need to add a description. I've noticed many people neglect this bit, but I encourage you to spend a bit of time creating a description for the video. You can always use something like HAHIPT. So let's open a new tab. Open JachPT, come down here to the prompt bar and simply write something like I've created a video about the Best Beach in Japan. I'm uploading it to YouTube. This video was filmed in Kamakura. Please help me write a 200 word description. I'm going to click here or the Enter key on my keyboard. And as usual, hGPT is going to start writing this description. Let's say for this example, I'm going to copy this paragraph here and I'm going to go back to YouTube and paste it. You need to read this description because here it says, you also catch a glimpse of nearby attractions, and actually this video doesn't show that. So in this case, I wouldn't add this, I would simply delete it. But what I would do is go back to Chat GPT and copy this paragraph here, right click Copy and go back to YouTube. Press Enter on my keyboard and now Control V or right click Paste. And now this looks much better. So now we have our title, and we also have our description. What you want to do is keep scrolling down. And as you can see here, you can upload your own thumbnail. YouTube automatically generates or detects some frame from the video and uses it as a thumbnail. But again, remember we designed our own, which in my opinion, you should do. Click Upload File. I have it here. And again, you could double click to upload this thumbnail, but another tip is to use the title of the video as the title of the thumbnail. The best peach in Japan. And now I'm going to click open down here. And as you can see, the thumbnail has been updated. Now, let's keep scrolling down on your playlist. There's nothing at the moment because we haven't created any playlist yet, but if you want to create a playlist, you would click here new playlist. For now, for this example, let's simply click Done. Under audience, you need to select if this video is made for kids or not. This is required, and it's very important. So take your time to read this paragraph here and this paragraph here. In my case, I never create content of that nature, and the channel that we're using as an example is a travel channel. So no, it's not made for kids, and we're going to click here, show more. If your channel grows big enough and sponsors start to contact you when you're uploading or creating a sponsored video, you would click here. For this example, we're not going to check the box. Let's keep scrolling down. Altered content. This is quite new. A lot of people are using AI to create content for their videos. If you're using AI or things like altered footage, you would click. In my case, I'm going to click No because the video was filmed by myself, and it shows a real place. Let's keep scrolling down. You can allow YouTube to create automatic chapters and key moments, and as it says here, you can overwrite them by creating your own. So you would go back to the description and, for example, come down here and type Intro Beach ending. In that way, when someone starts playing the video, they're going to see that it's divided into three different chapters. In this case, we're not going to use this because it's simply an example. So let's delete this, scroll back down. And again, you can let YouTube create automatic chapters or leave unchecked. I usually uncheck this box, and if I want to add chapters, I add them manually. Featured places, YouTube automatically detects. Some places I don't check this box, and I also don't check allow automatic concepts. And what we want to do now is add video tags. So if you're creating a travel video, you could start typing different words. For example, Japan, travel, Travel Guide, Japanese Travel Guide, best Beach in Japan, Japanese beaches. And my recommendation is that you add more or less 15 different tags. So let's scroll down. Here, language and captions, you can either leave this blank or select the video language. I'm going to click here, select and here English, US, and all of the others. I don't touch them. I leave them like this. None, nothing license. We're going to use the standard YouTube license Allow embedding. If you don't know what this is, you can always hover over and it tells you this allows others to embed your video in their sites. This is obviously personal choice. In my case, I do allow them to embed my content because it increases the chances of getting more views to my video. And you need to make sure that this is checked to notify your subscribers when you publish a new video, and you can also select to allow or not to allow other people to use your content to create shorts. This example, I'm not going to allow it under category. You can open this drop down menu and select the one that fits your video. So obviously, if this is a travel video, I would not select autos and vehicles or comedy. And if you can't find the exact category, choose the one that's the most similar to the video topic. For now, let's choose this one, travel and events. You can turn comments on or off. In my case, I always leave it on because you want that interaction on your videos. The more likes comments and shares that your video gets the better. And I also check this box, show how many viewers like this video. Once that's done, you're going to click next. And as you can see now, we have video elements. You can add subtitles. If you have them, you would click here, add, and you can come here to upload a file, or you can type them manually. For this video, we're not going to do this. So I'm going to click here, close because YouTube nowadays does a very good job with automatic subtitles. Sometimes it makes mistakes, but it's getting better. So here at screen, this allows you to promote other content at the end of your video. But because this is the first video of the channel, we don't have any other videos to promote. So I'm going to click here next. YouTube is going to automatically check if there are any copyright issues. In this case, there's none because, again, this video was filmed by myself and I'm not using any copyrighted material. I'm going to click here next. And this is the most important part visibility. You can either save or publish your video. You can select between these three options. So private, only you and the people that you choose can watch the video unlisted that allows anyone with a video link to watch the video or public. In my case, I always choose public when I'm ready to publish the video, and once that's done, you would click here, publish. Again, this is simply a test channel, but for now, in order to show you what this would look like, I'm going to click here, publish, now the video has officially been published to YouTube. The platform gives you a video link. You can click here to copy the video link and send it to other people, or you can simply share the link directly to Whatsapp, Facebook, X, email, and so on and so forth. In my case, I usually copy the video link. I click here, Close. As you can see, now the video has been published, and if you made a mistake and you want to change something from the video, you can always hover your mouse over the video itself and click here details, and this takes you back here where you can rewrite the description or click here on the thumbnail, where it says options and change the thumbnail or and compare. So you would create a second thumbnail and you two would test between those two, which one is better. So let's click here to go back. And now let's click here dashboard, and this is the summary of your video performance because this is the first video, there are no views. And obviously, there are no subscribers because it's a completely new channel, and it's just a sample channel that I've created. But on your channel, as time goes by, you're probably going to gain new subscribers and also start getting views. You can always upload from this button here, create or also from this arrow here, upload videos. I can click here. And again, you would restart the whole process. Let's click here. And now we can move on to the last lesson. 17. Class Recommendations: Finishing this class, just a quick reminder if you check on my profile on Skill Share, you'll be able to find classes on other topics and dive deeper into things like video editing, photo editing, and other content creation tools. Once again, thank you very much for joining. Congratulations on making it to the end, and hopefully I'll see you soon. Take care.