YouTube For Beginners: Getting Started Step By Step Guide

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, My name is Crystal and I'm an online entrepreneur from the UK that has been filming YouTube videos for over three years. During that time, I've learned about every aspect for when it comes to creating online content. And by now, I think I have a really good idea on what works well and some of the things that you should probably avoid. So it'd be enrolled in my class today. I'm gonna be taking you through my simple ten step plan that will take you from creating your channel all the way through to uploading your first video. I'll be covering areas like how to plan and film your videos, how to build an affordable YouTube setup. And I will also be sharing some top secrets on how to be more confident on camera. Because I think that's something that almost everyone struggles with when getting started. Finally, I've designed this class so that you can follow along step-by-step. And at the end we will go through the class project, which is uploading your first YouTube video for me to take a look at and give you some feedback on. So having said that, thanks for watching and I'll hopefully see you on the other side. 2. Class Project: Hello, and thank you so much for enrolling in my class. It's really good to see here before we get started, I just wanted to introduce you to the class project and resources section. So yeah, this start off with the project and basically what I would like you to do is either step-by-step or at the end of the class is to upload an introduction video of yourself to your brand shiny new channel. This will mean creating the channel, planning, filming, and uploading your first video. And if you would like me to say it by choice, you can upload it to the resources section, which is actually where you will find anything that I mentioned or reference during this class. For example, there might be a time where I say link in the resources section down below. From there, you'll be able to head over and take a look. So I hope that you can take part in the class project. I'll be trying to take a look at as many channels as I possibly can. But if you want to keep it to yourself, then that's absolutely fine too. Yeah, thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video where I talked about choosing your niche and coming up with a good name via channel. 3. Niche & Channel Name: Alright, so in this module we're going to be talking about choosing your niche and naming your channel, which are the two most important things that you need to have in place before you can go ahead and start creating. Because the end of the day, if we want people to watch our videos, we need to be clear about what we talked about and when they discover us on YouTube, they need to know exactly what they have come fall. And it start off, we've been niche first because we need to know this to help us with naming the channel anyway, if you've already four of your niche than that's great. However, if you haven't and maybe you're struggling a little bit on what to make videos on. The first thing that I want you to do is sit down and write a list of maybe five or six things that really interests you and maybe something that you enjoy talking to your friends and family about. Because when it comes to YouTube, whilst down the line, it can be an extremely profitable business when starting out, you really do need to make sure that the finger talking about is something you enjoy because this will definitely show within your content. Now we have that we need to come up with a name for our channel. And this is something that I don't want you to spend too much time on because we can actually change this a little later down the line anyway. However, a couple of obvious points. If you're creating a channel about cooking and don't call it investing with Fred and you don't want anything that's too much of a mouthful. I would suggest aiming for around two to three words is your channel name at most. And this is something people are more likely to remember. A top tip that I have for anyone who has gone for quite a broad niche, you can always just go and name your channel after yourself. This is actually what I went for with my channel because my channel covers the topic of money, because money is quite a broad niche. I decided that I wanted my name to be the brand and it just gives me that little bit more extra flexibility. Alright, I think that's everything for this module. Remember, think about something that you're passionate about doing and don't spend too much time on a name. It can always be changed in the future. But once you've done that, we are now ready to go ahead and create our channel, which is what I'll be covering in the next module. 4. Creating Your Channel: Welcome back. In this module, we're going to be going ahead and creating our YouTube channel. I'm gonna be going through this step-by-step. So maybe now is a good time to go ahead and grab your laptop if you did want to go ahead and follow along and let's get straight into it. Okay, So the channel that I'm going to be creating in this example and throughout the rest of this class is going to be one that's all based around FPS gaming. So keep that in mind as we go ahead and create this channel and create our first videos. But yeah, this gets straight into it as you can see down here, we've got my laptop screen loaded up. And the first thing, of course, what we're going to want to do is go to YouTube.com. If we go ahead and click that. Of course I'm just on incognito mode or the first time. A doubt this is going to be the first time you've ever had it to YouTube. So we just go ahead and click Agree if it is, the first thing we want to go and do is go and click the Sign In button in the top right-hand corner of your screen from there, what you can obviously see is that you need to sign in if you already have a YouTube account. However, in this case we do not have an account. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and click this create account button. Now, what that then gives us is a couple of options. So we're saying is this account for myself, is it going to be from my child or is it going to be a business account in this case, in promotion, YouTube is it's always going to be for myself. So I'm gonna go ahead and click that from there. What I'm going to do is go and put my name and address in. I'm going to just use a dummy name because I don't want this popping up on YouTube at all. And then what we are presented with and what we need is a Gmail account. Now, do not worry if you do not have a Gmail account, we can go ahead and create one. But because YouTube is owned by Google, you're going to need to use a Gmail address instead of anything else. So what we can actually do right here is instead of having to go all the way over to Gmail and do it all on that side, can actually go ahead and create our Gmail address within the YouTube website. It's go ahead and go for what my channel name is gonna be called. By the way is FPS gamers corner. So I'm gonna go ahead and create that right now. So we're gonna go FPS gamers corner at gmail.com. That should all be fine. From there we can go ahead and create a password for this email address. So I'm going to go ahead and put that in right now. And then of course, regarding to confirm it. Once you get through that screen, you're going to have some personal details that you need to enter. I'm going to skip through this because you don't need to know mine. And we'll move on to the next screen. And then from there we need to quickly set our personalization setting. So this isn't really something you need to pay too much attention to. If you wanted to go through the manual personalization, you can, but I'm just going to click on the express personalization. And then I'm gonna click Next from there, we've got the usual stuff about privacy in terms which I'll leave it up to you if you want to go ahead and read that. And then finally we want to click, I agree. What that should then do is take you to the YouTube home screen we've used signed in with your new account, as you can see at the top here, we've got a J, which is obviously standing for Johnny Smith, the name that we that we put down. We've got our new email address, and then we've got some options down here. Now, this is YouTube from a viewers perspective, we want to actually create a new channel to upload videos to YouTube. And the way you can do this is very simple. All you need to do is go back up to the top where your account is located. We go ahead and click on that. And as you can see right here, we've got the option to create a channel. So let's go ahead and click on that. And then from there we get to enter our first piece of important information, which is our channel name. So I said that I was going to call mine the FPS gamers corner. We're going to go ahead and do that. And then all we're going to do from here is click Create Channel 01. Thing that I did just skip over there is that you do have the chance to upload a logo, but I'm going to be showing you how to design one in a future module. So I've just skip that for now. But here you go. You should be presented with this screen right now. And as you can see, we've got no subscribers. We've got our channel name of the top left-hand corner, which is called FPS game has corners. We can then go ahead and manage our videos. We can then go and upload a video. But what we're gonna be doing in the next module is going ahead and customizing our channel to give it a little bit of a branding and a little bit of a better feel about it right now, because right now looking at this channel, it's looking a little bit bare. So I'll see you in the next module. 5. Adding Channel Artwork: Welcome back. In this module, we're going to be going through creating and uploading your logo and your artwork for your YouTube channels. So we're back on our YouTube channel right here. As you can see, what we're going to go ahead and do. We're going to go ahead and click Customize Channel. And then from there, once that has loaded, we're going to want to go ahead and click on the branding section. And what you can see, we've got two major things that we need to upload. We've got our picture, which is our logo, and then we've got our banner image. So there's a couple of ways that you can do this. Now, if you're not really too confident on your design skills or you want to just get this done nice and quick and you don't have to worry about it. You can go ahead and head over to a website called fiverr.com, which is basically a marketplace that has loads of different people offering services like logo design and channel artwork design and all of that good stuff. However, what I'm going to do is show you how to do it yourself and nice and simple, free, easy way. So this doesn't need to be special at the start. We've just need something to get us started, get something to show people what our channel is all about when they see it from the Outlook. And that's all we're going to do today. We're not gonna do anything too fancy. And the website that you're going to want to head over to do this is a website called Canva.com. Now, this is a completely free website that allows you to do design work. So as you can see, you can do YouTube channel logos. You can do A4 document designs. You can do thumbnails for YouTube, which we'll talk about later on in the class. And you've got things like Instagram, anything that is logo design you can do through Canva. It's completely free. There is a paid version, but the free one is more than enough for what we actually need today. And what's really good about Canva is that once you've signed in and done all of that good stuff, where you can actually do is go over to the search bar over here and you can actually type in YouTube logo. And what that will do is give you some preset dimensions because of course the YouTube logo is really, really small, so we don't want to design a massive logo that's not going to fit within that section. What camera does is it gives you some preset design. So we've got the channel art, which we'll touch on in just a second. But what we've got just below it is the YouTube channel logo. So you can see the size is a difference between the two. So we're going to want to go ahead and click on YouTube channel logo to start us off from there, we've got a load of different templates that we can use to maybe help us find some inspiration. Of course, we do not want to use these because this isn't what our channel is going to be about. Like I said in the previous class, if we've got a gaming channel, we do not want anything that doesn't really represent gaming. And then other thing is we want to keep this really, really simple. We don't want to pile loads of words invocation, not going to be able to read it. It's going to be so small on the actual YouTube page. So we want to keep it really nice and basic and that's what we're going to do. So what I'm going to do just for demo purposes is actually create one from scratch. And like I said, it's going to be nice and simple. What we need to do is go ahead and click on this, create a blank YouTube channel logo button over here. So let's go ahead and click that. What I was thinking just to get us started with this gaming channels, just to go with something really simple that actually identifies that we are about gaming. The first thing that always thinking escape for a really bright background and then have an image of maybe like a game's controller with a really nice contrast in color, so it really stands out. So that's what I think will build right now. There's only two things that we need for this. It's really nice and simple and just really easy to do. So keep it simple. So let's get started by changing the background color because we don't want to have it on this boring white background. So what we can do is actually go ahead over here and click on this background color button. What I was thinking is maybe going for something like really bright yellow just to make something stand out on top of it. Let's go and see what we can find in here. So let's go over to yellow on the Color Picker. That's a little too dark. I mean, that's not too bad. Like I said, we don't want to spend too much time to effectiveness at the start if you've already got your branding colors and just use those. But I'm just using this just to get us started. So we've got our background. What we now need is an icon or some sort of logo of a controller that can contrast on this yellow to really stand out to people coming to our channel. And there's a website that I use, all of my icons. It's called flat icon.com. Once again, another free website. And what we can do, as you can see, there's over 6.4 million icons on this website. I'm just going to go ahead and type in gaming and see what comes up. Cool. So we've got some black images here, which isn't going to look too great on a yellow background. I mean, it might look good, but what I really want to do is find a contrasting color like a purple or blue. I mean, like this yellow controller is really cool, but because we're on a yellow background, it's not going to look as good. Maybe we could switch the background and put that one in there. But let's go for this one right here. This is a blue controller that see how this looks. So what we need to do, we need to go ahead and hover over it. Click download PNG. We're going to click Free Download. And then that's going to load up our game controller down on the bottom of our download screen right here. We're then going to want to go ahead and head back over to Canva. And all I'm going to do is drag this game controller onto this picture right here. And as you can see, we've got our controller in the middle of our logo. Now, one thing that I do want to do is I want to make this a little bit bigger. I don't want to make it too big because you'll see why in just a second. And I want to make it nice in the center. There we go. A camera tells us when it's in the center by using those lines. There you go. That's our logo. I mean, it's really basic. Like I said, it's nothing to professional but just getting started. That's all we need. Something that really just tells people that this is our YouTube channel. And what it's all about. So let's go ahead and click on this ellipses right here, and we're going to click Download. Then going to want to change this to a picture because this isn't a video. So let's pick JPEG. We're going to want to click Download. Okay, cool, So we've got our untitled design to hear that we can go ahead and select. What we're going to want to do is head back to our YouTube channel. So back to the channel customization tab. And as you can see where we've got this picture, which is our logo section. We're going to want to click up load. So let's go in here. And then what we can see, we've got our downloads folder, then we've got our untitled design here, which is the one that we just downloaded. And then we're going to want to go ahead and click Open. Then boom, it froze in our logo. Now the reason why I said we don't want to make it too big on the square. As you can see, I've already made this logo a little bit too big. This blue circle right here outlines what is actually going to be shown on your YouTube channel. And the controller would have overlapped those lines. So make sure you leave yourself a little bit of a buffer in-between, but you can go ahead and crop this and do all kinds of stuff with it. But realistically, I want to just make sure it's nice and centered. We want it full size and we've got the whole controller in our screen. So let's go ahead and click Done. There we go. We've got our preview of our controller. The final thing that we need to do to upload this to our YouTube channel is go ahead and click this Publish button. And what you can see is where we have our f, where our old logo is on the right-hand side. When I click this, this should now update to our new logo for our YouTube channels. So there we are. We've got our channel name and then we've got a logo that represents what our channels about that next up we need to design our banner image so you can guess where we're going straight back to. We're gonna go back to Canva. And in the top hand corner here we're going to type in YouTube channel art. And as you can see, we've got our channel art right here, so we can go ahead and click on that. Once again, it's going to have some different templates that we can use and feel free to go ahead and use these and just edit the text if you're not feeling to designing or anything like that. But once again, we're going to, in fact, I'll tell you what pitch. Go ahead and use something like this. Let's go ahead and edit this. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to change the background color because we want to match it with our logo and our branding to keep it nice and consistent. So let's go ahead back to the background color section again. Now, I took the color code from my logo, so we've got our yellow so we keep it nice and consistent with our, with our branding, of course now, the next thing we obviously want to do is go ahead and change our text on the screen. So the first thing we want to do is go ahead and change this to FPS gamers corner. Now, looking at that text right there, that doesn't really stand out too much. So I guess what we could probably do is go ahead and pick a color that's similar to our controller style. So if we went and picked blue and it stands out a little bit more, I guess what we could go ahead and do is change the font because I'm not really too keen on this one. I want to keep it nice and bold. So let's go ahead and go for FPS game has corner like that. Still not feeling it too much. Maybe we could go ahead and click on the Effects and get a bit of a shadow behind it to make it pop a little bit more. So let's go ahead and click that. And then we'll change our shadow color to black up the transparency a bit all now that's making it pop a little bit better. I like that. Cool. So that's now coming up like that. I really do like that now. What if I just try this? If I go back, see that when you're doing these things, you just want to be playing with it, just whatever works we view, like I said, don't spend too much time on this and you can always change this or maybe you just go ahead and get someone else to do it for you if you if you don't want to do it, but just make sure you have a little play around, see what works best for you. It's actually go ahead and try purple on there. I mean, that's pretty good. From there we can go and change this text right here because we want to have it matching. So let's go for Anton again. And I don't really like this gray on the yellow background. So let's go ahead and see what jet-black looks like. So let's go ahead and pick that. I mean, there's a nice little contrast between the two. So we've got FPS game has corner new episodes every Wednesday. This is a good start. I guess the final thing we can do is go and customize these logos here. I know this represents a gamepad. You've got the joystick there and the buttons there. But Let's have a look on flat icon just to see if we can find some contrasting colors that make this gray look a little bit better. So let's head over here once again as typing gaming icons. Let's go for something a little bit different than a control at this time. So maybe we could go for a headset and that's blue and that could work well on the background. So this download that and see how that works. And let's drag that over this one over here. Cool. So what we probably need to do is make that a little bit smaller. And then let's put that out there. As you can see, we've Canada uses these lines to make sure everything is nicely measured up while, and it's not really out of place. So even if we made it smaller. It would still adjust it so it's right in the center, so it looks nice and good. There we go. We've got the headset there. I like that. That's much better than this boring old pad. Let's go and replace this next one. So this goes back to flat icon. So we've got a headset. What else could we get? I guess we could get a PC maybe, or maybe even. We've got a life thing here. We've got a mouse pad or I liked that actually we've got the blue mouse pad or this one here, this blue mouse pad. And then we've got the headset as well because there are two key components to gaming. Let's go for that just as an example. And then we're going to want to make sure that it's the same size roughly as the headset. So let's go ahead and measure that up against the headset. There we go. Let's drag it over here. Let's get rid of this and then this, get this nicely inline. In fact, what I'm actually going to do is I'm gonna switch these because the mouse is on the left at the moment. But normally most people associate holding the mouse with the right-hand. These are just really small details, but it's just something that I think about when it comes to branding. So let's move this nice and close again to make sure that distance is the same. This now, go ahead and download this and add this to our YouTube channel. Once again, let's go ahead and download PNG file. There we have it in our download section. Let's go back to YouTube now, the channel customization tab, and let's go ahead and click Upload. Once again, we're going to click gray gaming channel access, what it was called before. We can of course change it to whatever we want to. I also recommend saving a copy of this somewhere as well just in case you need it elsewhere and maybe it disappears from Canada, but likelihood it won't, but just wanted to get the backup. So there's openness up. And what we can see right here is our first mistake. So what you can see is we've made our images a little bit too big so that it's not quite viewable on all devices. Because what this guide is here is, is big box is saying it's viewable on TV. So if you hover over it, That's what we see on the TV. When we hover over the desktop, that's what we see on the desktop. And then if we hover on viewable, all devices is just missing out that headset on the left-hand side. So let's head back to Canva and it's just make both of these a little bit smaller. Like so, cool. So let's go ahead and download that once more and quickly. Fly through this. We're going to click on our newly downloaded one right here. And then we're gonna click Open. And as you can see, it fits on all devices now, desktop TV and of course your mobile phone as well. So we're gonna go ahead and click Done, and then we're gonna click Publish. Now from here, what we can actually do is go ahead and click on View channel. What we can see is our new updated channel art and next to our logo. So I think that's pretty good. We're matching the color scheme. We've obviously we haven't thought too much about the title color. There was just put something that works, but I think that looks pretty good. That just about does it for this module. In the next module, we're gonna be talking all about how to add an About Us section to really sell our channel and make sure that the viewer coming to our channel knows exactly what they're getting. So see you in the next one. 6. Create About Us Section + Links: All right, Welcome back. In the last module, we designed our channel art and then we also designed our logo as well. In this module, we're going to be talking about the About Us section. So this is really the final part of setting up by YouTube channel from a basic standpoint. And this is what we're gonna be doing today. So as you can see, we've got the YouTube channel backup on the screen right now we were on the branding page. But to fill out the About Us section, what we're going to want to do is head over to this basic info tab. If we go ahead and click that, what we can actually see here, we've got a little box that we can actually fill in and actually says tell viewers about your channel. Your description will appear in the about section of your channel and search results. So one key thing is number one, we need to get a couple of keywords in necessarily people do search the terms may be FPS, gaming or, or anything like that. We have that chance of coming up in the search results now, don't get too tied up on this because I don't think it plays that much of a bigger fact that you're going to want to focus more on keywords in your actual videos. But this one is of course not going to do as any damage in throwing a few good keywords in there as well. So what we're gonna do is just simply fill this out. What I'm actually going to go ahead and do is grab a template of one that I made a little bit earlier and we're just gonna talk straight through that. So let me just grab this and throw this in here. Cool. So basically what I've done with this one is I put a welcome message, a quick sentence about what we're actually about. And then we've got some expectations from the channel about the different types of videos we're going to be making. And then some sort of little call to action at the end there basically asking them to subscribe this, just break this down. So the first thing that I've written is welcome to FPS games corner. Nothing really to look into that. But obviously the first thing that I do is I make sure that I get this keyword here of first-person shooter games. So if someone wants to go ahead and search for that term, there is a really small chance that they could discover us throughout the YouTube search. But obviously from there we've gone for, if you're looking for, again, reviews, reactions, play throughs, Challenge videos, top 10s, then you're in the right place. So why not check out some of the videos, leave us a comment and subscribe to the channel. It's free. So a little bit of comedy in there as well. But basically what I'm doing with these types of videos is I'm setting an expectation. So once we've got a few videos on the channel, we can obviously make these videos. So if a viewer does come to our channel and they see this, they say, Oh, I like top ten videos or I liked reactions to new games. This go and check out their videos in the first video they see as a reaction, you've got much more of a higher chance of that user actually clicking on that video and potentially staying around for longer time than that they usually work. And that is the About Us section. Now, if we just go back, there is a couple of other things that we can actually add here. We also have linked. So if you've got any social media pages you want to build up with your YouTube channel. So if you wanted to create an Instagram account or a Tik Tok account, you can add all of those links there. And you can also add your e-mail address because in the future you could set yourself up for some sponsorship opportunities and leaving an email address in your About Us section is the first place where those brands are actually going to go. But once you've done all of that, once again, all you have to do is go ahead and click Publish. And that's going to publish itself to your channel. And it'll be fully updated for you to go and check out. So that's the end of this module. I'll see you in the next one. 7. My Professional YouTube Studio Tour: Alright, so in this module, what I wanted to quickly do is actually just give you a quick tour of my professional YouTube setup now, please do not worry whilst you're watching this that you haven't got any of this stuff. This literally took me three years of reinvesting money I'd made for my channel to get to this stage. And in the module after, I'll actually be showing you how you can get started without spending any money at all. But let me just quickly grabbed my phone and keep you a quick tool. I guess we'll start things off with my actual working desk. So as you can see what I have over here, two screens where I can go ahead and plug my laptop. Stand at the back. Basically, this is the area where I'll do all of my scripting or do all of my video clowning. And of course I'll do my editing. Having the two screens makes things so much easier than just having one screen. Also got an iPad Pro there where I do a little bit of animations when I edit my videos and I, I also designed my thumbnails on my iPad and all of that good stuff. But not really too much goes on air apart from planning and actual work. And obviously, as you can see over in the corner there, maybe a bit of PlayStation as well. But the main thing that we want to take a look at is this bit over here. Now, this is my actual filming set, and as you can see, it looks a lot neater when I'm actually on camera because it has a lot of all of this stuff behind the camera. It's not exactly The best laid out by a works for me. And like I say, it doesn't really matter what it looks like behind the camera as long as it looks good on the cameras. So this start things off over here with my actual camera. And I guess the first thing that you can probably notice is this funny little device on here. And what this is called is a teleprompter. Basically what I can do is I can put my phone on this tree right here and I can put some text on there, and that allows me to read that text. If I just come over here, you can probably see the lens on there. And basically the texts will mirror onto the, onto the glass over there. But you won't actually see that on the cameras. So I can essentially just write out my entire script and read that off from that screen without even taking my eyes off the lens to maybe look down at my script or anything like that. So that's a super important and really useful piece of kit for me to use. Now moving on to the camera, basically what I have is what is called an canon M6 marked too. I think there are about 800 pounds. And then I have a 32 millimeter cannon EM lens there, which is about 500 pound lens. Like I said, I didn't start with that. This is only recently I've upgraded to this camera and for the most part I've actually used my phone and a really cheap Canon camera. If it was an M5, it was called. And I use that for the first two years. So just moving on here. That's basically the camera, by the way, guys, one thing that you'll notice is that it is connected with this wire, which we'll get to in just a second. Let's move on to the light. So what I have right here is what is called a three-point lighting setup. So what we have is my key light here. This is the main light, beams down onto my face. We then have a fill light which I actually bounce off my white wall to give me a softer feel on the other side of my face. And then at the back we have my background light, which is just simply a blue LED light, the I-beam against the wall to give me the effect that you've been seeing in my videos that you've been watching in this class. I do have another one down here. I believe in the first module, the introduction, you saw a bit of purple and blue. So if I wanted to mix things up a little bit, I'll just pop that on there as well because I'm sitting in front of it. You never see that light. So that's basically a three-point lighting setup. From there we have my microphone, which is actually boomed above my head. Now, some people use a clip on microphone. Some people put their microphone on top of the camera. But one thing that's really useful to do is get your microphone as close to you as possible. So as you can see, when I'm sat down there, the microphone is probably only a couple of inches away from my actual mouse. So what I'm doing now is getting the full quantity out of my microphone. Let's move on to the main thing about the powers, this entire setup, and that's this switchboard right here. And essentially what you can do is plug-in up to eight HDMI devices into the switchboard. And whilst this is normally used for streaming, actually use this for actually recording my video. So what you can actually see right now is that our cameras plugged into this HDMI. It comes all the way into here. And this screen over here, as you can see, is projecting what is actually going to be recorded. But I can do, I can plug this hard drive into this switcher and I can go ahead and click record up here, this button over here. And anything that is going on this screen is going to be recorded today's hard drives. So one thing that I could do is if I wanted to switch to my laptop, I can press number two, and that switches to my laptop. My laptop is now being recorded. I can then go and press this button here. And what that essentially does is puts me in the corner there. Basically this makes my editing process so much easier because I haven't got to go and record my screen. I haven't got to do anything like that. I can all be monitored. It is switchboard and this is just two inputs. I think that's just about it. One thing to mention that you can't see in this room right here, just over there, I have another USB microphone that I plug into that desk over there. This is for when I basically want to do professional voice recordings. But the one thing that you can't see in this office, which I've had to take out, is that I actually have some temporary soundproofing boards. I'll throw a picture of them up on the screen right now, which I placed behind my lights near my camera and over by the window as well just to help me improve the acoustics of this room because I'm guessing you listening to this video right now, my voice probably sounds a little bit different to the one in my actual modules that you've been watching. This is because the room hasn't been sound treated. They're currently sat on the outside just so I can move around and film this tour. But lots of money invested into the channel. But once again, when I started out, I started off with just this iPhone that I'm filming on right now. Alright, cool. So I hope you enjoyed that. Like I said, this setup is completely overkill for what most people need to get started. But I fought. You would find it interesting to see how I fill my videos every day. I having said that, this now move on to the next module where I'll show you my cheap and easy setup that anyone can use to get started. 8. Free YouTube Studio Setup: If you watched the last module, you would have seen a quick tour of my professional YouTube setup which been investing into over the past three years. It's taken me a long time to get there. However, you don't need all of that fancy stuff to get started. And I certainly didn't use that either. In fact, I actually just took a look at my channel. It wasn't until after about seven or eight months of filming videos to a free times a week, every single week, or actually went an invested my first piece of money into my YouTube channel, which is when I went and bought a really cheap camera to start filming with. So that is 100% a myth that you need a really good and professional YouTube studio to get started. If you have to just go and have a look at all your favorite creators. Once again, go ahead and look at their first videos. I can guarantee you that they weren't in no studio or anything like that. What I'm gonna do in this module is showing you how you can actually get started for free. And there's actually only two things that you need to get started. Number one is going to be your phone now, I'm pretty sure everyone that's watching this has got a smartphone of some kind. Normally most of the latest smartphones have actually really good cameras on them. This is an iPhone 12 is not the latest one, but the camera on this phone is really, really good. And this is all you really need to start filming videos. So this has got a really good mic in it as well. And because we're gonna be nice and close to the camera. If you watched the last module, I said you need to keep your mic as close to your mouth as possible. If we're like this in the shot is obviously going to be nice and close and we're going to pick up a really nice quality from the bill in mike on the camera. And then the second thing we're going to need is some sort of natural light source. So what you're looking at right now is actual artificial light. I have my blinds closed. I have actual physical light beaming down on me. However, if you just go ahead and film with natural light, you're gonna get a nice balance on your face. You're not gonna be too bright, you're not gonna be too dark, especially if you're using just the pre-built settings on your iPhone or whatever phone you decide to use. The key thing is, is that you want the light from the natural light to be behind the cameras. So basically you don't want to be filming with the natural light in the background. That's going to cause glare into your lens and that's going to make the quality look really fuzzy and there may be a little bit blurry as well. You want the light coming down onto you. So whatever you do, use your phone for starters, and then you want to be filming right in the center of a natural light source. And that's how you can really get started filming YouTube videos for free. Now if you did want to invest a little bit of money and you didn't want to go full-blown with the studio, I would highly suggest focusing on audio first because the end of the day, anyone can tolerate a little bit of blur or fuzziness in a video. However, if the audio is bad, then the likelihood is people are going to click off that video, especially if you're giving information or base videos like myself, people are gonna want to hear what you're saying rather than see what you're actually doing. So focus on the audio first before you do anything else from there, I would then probably focus on light so you don't have to worry about using the natural light source. And then maybe from there, go ahead and grab yourself a camera. But you really do not need an expensive set to get started with, because I'm going to prove that when I go ahead and film this video right now. So thanks for watching this one and I'll see you in the next module. 9. Planning Your Video: Welcome back. In this module, I'm going to be talking for exactly how you should be planning your YouTube videos. Now, planning is so important when it comes to filming content, because what we want to be able to do is get the most value and entertainment to the viewer in the shortest time possible. And one thing that we definitely don't want to do, stray away from our video topic because that's what's going to put people off and get them to click away from your videos. Now when I plan my videos, what I actually like to do is script the entire video out word for word. And I'll show you exactly how to do that in a moment. But before we do that in, before we do any kind of planning, we need to come up with what I like to call a video structure. Now, having a structure for your video will really help your viewers stay engaged and it will give you more chance of them actually returning and subscribing to your channel. Because if you stay consistent with your content that you are constantly delivering on your promise, the audience knows exactly what they are going to get every time and that's going to cause them to keep returning. If you just go and take a look at any of your favorite YouTubers right now, you will notice that whilst they're not all the same, they all have a certain structure and style to their videos. So what we need to do is come up with one for our own. Of course, coming up with your own style is definitely going to develop overtime as you start to film more videos. But what I want to do is introduce you to basic and most effective one that you can use to get started as a beginner. And this is a structure that I still use today for 90% of my own videos. And it goes a little bit something like this. First up, you're going to need a hook. This is one of the most important parts of filming a video because first impressions are absolutely everything. When it comes to YouTube, you want to keep this at no longer than 20 seconds and you want to be hooking that viewer in straight away because essentially you need to make that view and know exactly what they are going to be getting at the end of the video at the star. Otherwise, the likelihood is they're just going to click off. For example, let's say you're making a video on how to invest in the stock market with little money, maybe the hook could go a little bit, something like sup everybody. In today's video, I'm gonna be showing exactly how you can get started investing in the stock market, but wait with as little money as possible. Get what I mean, you just need to have them hooked from the first second. Now, a bad example of the hook with the same kind of video is, hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. I hope you're having a good day. It's been a little bit of a busy day here for me, but a found some time to film this video anyways. But what I'm basically going to be doing is talking about how to invest in the stock market with little money. So hope you enjoy it and I'll see you in the video now. Unfortunately, as much as you want to tell the viewer how your day is going and all of that good stuff. The average viewer wanting information simply just won't care about how your day is going. As nice as I can put it. They are there for the information and they don't care about you in the sense, if you just spend the first 30 or 40 seconds talking about something that is completely unrelated to the title, there is an extremely high chance that they're either going to click off the video or they're just going to skip until you actually start talking, which is going to hurt your watch time anyway, which means YouTube probably won't promote your video as much in the future. That's the hook and that is by far the most important part of the video. Next up is the actual meat of the video. This is where you need to deliver on the promise that you gave them in your title and hook. Now with this part, you can actually be a little bit more loose with your presenting style here, but you still want to make sure that you stick to the point and you definitely don't go off topic. And the way I like to break this section down is by splitting it up into free value points. So every single video, I want to make sure that I'm hitting free value points every single time. So value 0.123, I feel this way it keeps the information nice and bite-size and easy to consume as well. Now, if I feel that I have a topic that I feel needs more than three value points. That's probably a case to split that video into two separate videos, which then of course equals more content. Once you've done that part, the final part of the video construction is going to be your call to action. This is essentially the way that you will end the video and you should always end it with, like I say, some kind of call to action. This could be getting the viewer to watch another video of yours subscribing to your channel, going to a website that you may be suggested throughout the video. Anything along these lines are great shouts to finish the video with a good example of a call to action. And let's just use the investing example again would be, so now you know how to invest with little money. Why not go ahead and check out this other video that actually shows you my own portfolio where I shared the investments that I invest into. Basically as you saw, as I was pointing out there with editing, you could put a picture of the video on the screen, like an N screen and a link during this. So it will actually automatically direct more people to that other video of yours. We're just going to increase views, engagement and of course, more watch time. And essentially that is the structure. You have your hook, you've got your free value points, and then you have your call to action. Now, there's talk about scripting the video. And I think everyone should script that video in some way or another. But it's very much up to you how deep you actually want to go with it. Now, I've made, I do all of my scripting on a simple Google Docs file. This is completely free to use and it doesn't matter really what you use, basically just anything that is nice and easy to read, nice and simple and it's not too complicated when it comes to scripting, you basically got two options. Number one, you could go ahead by writing a couple of bullet points on the areas you want to hit for your video. So for example, you could go ahead and script out introduction of the video. But then in the meat of the content, you could just put some bullet points that you could freestyle and just make sure that you hit those bullet points throughout the video. Or the second option you can go with is by literally writing the script down word for word. Now, I personally mix mine up a little bit. Sometimes I use option one and sometimes I use option two. I probably use option to more than option one, but it all very much depends on the style of video that I'm making. For example, if you're doing some kind of blog or maybe you're traveling somewhere, of course you're not going to want to script that one outward word because you want to make it feel as natural as possible to maybe in this case, what you would do is go for a few bullet points of a few things that you may be want the viewer to make sure they see during the video. However, if you wanted to create some kind of educational video, maybe scripting the entire thing out word for word would be better to make sure that you are delivering the maximum value. My entire class right here is actually scripted out word for word apart from the screen-share modules, as it allows me to check that I have everything covered and checked off. All right, so that's the structure of your video and some basic scripting techniques. What I want you to actually do now is go ahead and script out your first planned video. Because in the next module, we are going to be talking all about filming. So I'll see you in that one. 10. Filming Basics: In this module, we are going to be filming our first video on our shiny brand new channel. Now, before we do, if you are maybe feeling a little bit nervous or potentially lacking in confidence, number one, do not worry. Every single YouTuber will go through this, including myself. In fact, what I'm going to do right now is throw up a clip of how slow I took things in my first video. Hello everyone. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year. Today is the first of January. And I thought What's not a better video to kick off this YouTube channel. Then five ways to make money in your spare time in 2019. So as you can see there, it's a little bit different on the way that I talk right now on camera. All this comes with practice, but let me give you a couple of tips that you can take on straight away when it comes to confidence. And the first one is, I don't want you to take this the wrong way and you probably guessed this one already. And that is that the likelihood is your first video is likely going to sound. And you just need to embrace that because it's fine. It's our first ever video filming yourself on camera is a completely unnatural thing to do and it will certainly take time to improve. But if you just keep filming videos, things will get better. I promise I just played the first video that I ever made in comparing it to how I'm talking right now on camera. And I didn't do anything special, I just simply kept making videos. So that's tip number one. Embrace the fact that the likelihood is your video is going to be bad, but understand that it can only get better. Tip number two is to not worry if you mess up now, this is exactly why we edit our videos to get rid of the mistakes so that if we do mess up, we don't have to go all the way back to the start of the video and just start filming from the beginning when you're filming your first video and maybe you're going to fumble a line, the likelihood as you will I do it on every single video I make. Take a break, go back to the start of the sentence where you messed up and just start again from there, we'll be able to delete the bad bits in the edit. And tip number three is to remember to smile and be extra energetic on camera. Because one thing that they do say is that a camera zaps around 20% of your energy when it actually gets played back on video. So smile, be energetic, be passionate, and be as confident as you possibly can be. Alright, So now that we have all of that, what I'm actually going to go ahead and do now is film my first video for the gaming channel I created in Module four. And all I'm going to do is plan out my hook, put my free value points in. And what I will then finish with is my call to action. The video I'm going to film is going to be about my top three FPS video games of all time. And you're going to see the raw uncut version of that in our next module where I'm actually going to go through the quick process and editing out all those bloopers. So good luck we're filming yours. What I'm going to do now is grab my iPhone. I'm going to ditch this professional setup and I'm going to go with my cheap recording setup that I talked about in the previous module. And I'll see you guys on the other side. 11. How to Edit Your Video: Cool, So I hope the filming went well. As I mentioned before, if you did mess up, do not worry. I still mess up every single time I film a video even after three years. And so does everybody else, which is why it's YouTubers were actually quite lucky because we can afford to do that with the power of editing. And that's what today's module is all about. And what I'm going to simply do is perform a really basic edit on the video that I just filmed. I also messed up a couple of times as well. So you'll be able to see may actually doing that. But one thing I do have to say before we jump into the laptop screen right now is that when I do edit my current videos on my actual YouTube channel, I of course go a lot more in depth with the editing. But this class is all about just getting started, just like the filming. You can learn more about editing as you go. But today this just stick with Free Basics and that's going to be cutting out the mistakes. Throwing a title on your video as well. So you can give some texts to the users and throwing some images up on your screen as well. These are really basic concepts of editing that most YouTube is using all of their videos. But before we actually go ahead and do this, we're going to need an editing software. Now the one that I'll be using in this tutorial is one that's called Final Cut Pro. Now, this is a paid software that you can grab. However, no matter whether you are using a Windows or a Mac, there will be a free software for you and the concepts in this tutorial will be the same across whatever you decide to use. If you have a Windows computer, I believe the free software is called Windows Movie Maker. If you have a Mac, you can use iMovie. If you do have final cut, then that's great. But if not, do not worry, everything we're covering in this tutorial can be done on any editing software. It's all going to be very basic stuff. It just might be a different shortcut which you'll have to work out as you go along, but it's all really basic stuff. So having said that, there's getting to the tutorial, alright, so what we have here is Final Cut Pro for the Mac, you can only get this program on Mac. But like I said, if you're using any other kind of video editing software on a computer, whether it's Windows or Mac, it's going to look very similar to this. And all of the concepts are gonna be pretty much the same. But one thing that you'll probably notice this common is they'll have our preview window. We've got our files on the left-hand side, and then we've got our main thing, which is our timeline. Now, one thing that I must actually add how to get media into this timeline, it's very, very simple. You can go over to your Finder. Over here. You can grab your image or your media, your video. In our case, you can simply just, let's just try this one. There we go. We want it to drag something name. We can drag it into our timeline, knows our mouse from our previous module. We could try and do the movie. Now, there you go. We drag our movie in. As you can see, it drags it into the timeline, but we're obviously not going to need that because we've already imported it. So let's go ahead and delete that and make this full screen again. So as you can see, we've got our video that I just filmed literally just a second ago in front of the window there with my iPhone until the quality isn't going to be as good as the professional studio, of course, but like I said, you don't need to worry about that too much when you're first getting started. So what we're gonna do is go through three main concepts that you can do on all of the editing softwares follow along with me and it will all make sense. So the first one that I want to talk about is the cut. Now this is just the simple cup which you can use to go through your entire video and just get rid of all the bad pieces. So one thing I did was I messed up loads of times in this video, I've got lots of things to cut out. I'm going to show you how to do that right now. So let's play our intro clip, guys and welcome back to FPS game has corner. In today's video, I'm going to be giving you my top free FPS online games of all time now, I've been playing FPS games for a long time now think I've played some good ones and I'd definitely buried plates and backgrounds as well. So as you can see, I completely messed up there. So what I did was I just took a breath and I came back and I filmed the next line. So let's go ahead and find because you can see there, I've just made a mistake. So I'm just going to just letting you know as you can see, I've just made, all I'm going to do now is either use a shortcut or I'm going to use the actual tool, the shortcut to cut on Final Cut Pro. It might be a little bit different on the other softwares is control and B. And what you can see that does, is that puts a little cut line in the timeline. So if I was just to go ahead and undo that, the other way that you could do is come over to this toolbox over here and click the blade option from there. Or you can do is go ahead and click the line. And once again, it adds that cut inside there. So what you can then essentially do is go all the way to the point where you messed up. So what I did was I looked at this line, so I started this line not going to waste. I started with a so I'm not going to what I need to do is go back and look at the first credit, definitely buried plates and bad ones as well. So I don't want to have the SOA now because I've always I'll be saying so twice. So I want to stop it just before they played some backgrounds as well. Around about there. So we do control Beta cut it. Well, I'm going to do is I'm going to delete this little section here. I'm going to delete this section here. And as you can see, our two clips have now joined up. If we play it and we're not gonna have any errors, and it should just naturally flow through to my next sentence, give or take. Definitely buried plates and backgrounds as well. So I'm not going to waste any more time and I'm going to jump into, it's not the smoothest right now what we can actually do is go in deeper and refine that even more so we can get that straight in right there. We can play that runs as well. I'm not going to waste any more time. There you go. That is simply the cut. So what I will simply do from there is go through my entire video and I will just cut out all the mistakes. So I'm not gonna do that right now. I've always been here for a little while. What I'm going to move on to next is adding a title and tier video to give you that text representation. So we can go back to this clip here where we actually introduced the video and what we want to do is frozen text along the bottom part of the screen saying exactly what the video is about. So let's go ahead and type right now. I've been playing FPS games for low back, too good to be giving you my top three gamers corner in today's. So what we want to do is when I actually say, I'm going to be giving you my top three FPS games of all time. That's where I want to throw to text just to give the viewer that visual representation. So on Final Cut, what we actually have is a text icon in the top left-hand corner here. And then what I'm going to want to do is I'm going to want to go and click Custom Tech. So if I go and click that, and then all I'm going to simply do is drag it onto my timeline, onto that red marker, which is where I want it to start. So what we can actually see is on our screen. And if we make this a little bit bigger, actually, we can see we've got this thing that says title here. In fact, it's fitness like that. Perfect. So we've got this title here. Obviously we don't want it to say title, so we can then go ahead and double-click it and then we have options to customize all of our texts. So what I want to actually do is call this top free FPS, not GPS FPS, games of all time. That's the title we want to write, but obviously we don't want it to have it right in the middle of my eyeline. That doesn't look very good and I'm not too keen on the text fonts. So what I'm actually going to do is go and pick one that I like a little bit better. So we're gonna go for inter and then we're going to make this as bold as we possibly can, which I think is black. So there you go, It's nice and nice and bold. And then what I'm going to do as an extra is add a drop shadow to that, just to make it stand out a little bit more from the lighter background. Perfect. Now, of course, we don't want that in the middle of our eyeliner and we actually probably want to make that a little bit bigger. So what are first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click on this button right here, which is the transform button, which basically means I can move this around wherever I want. Once I've clicked that, you can see that it's selected our text. If we make sure we go ahead and select our text down there. And then all we can simply do is just drag this down to the bottom to get it out of our airline. Then if we want to make it a little bit bigger, we can just scroll up on the left-hand side here in Final Cut, Like I said, it's gonna be different for all of your software. The features are definitely going to be there and I'm just going to simply make it bigger. So it just takes up the whole screen. So if we go, That's a little bit too big. There we go. If we now go ahead and play that back. Yes, game has corner in today's video, I'm going to be giving you my top. Probably haven't timed that quite right there. As you can see, the texts come before I started saying my top, giving you my I start saying it there. So all I simply do is drag it up to this point. In today's video, I'm going to be giving you my top three FPS online games of all time now, I've been playing FPS guy, right? So the next thing we want to change is that that's probably lasted a little bit too long than we want. We want to have it finished after we've actually finished saying this, just play it back again. And it's guitar point where we stop our title games of all time. It's about there. So all we need to do from there is the same as what we did with our clip. We make sure we select the title and then we just go with the Cut option. So we go Control B, we use the blade and then we just trim off by deleting the last bit that we need. So let's go ahead and play that and that should run relatively smoothly, giving you my top three FPS online games of all time. Now, I've been playing this game. So that's how to do a basic cut and a basic title. So you can get really creative with these says, you can add loads of different effects. You can add transitions. I'll just show you a quick example right now, if I wanted this text to come in from the side or from below, I could add in a slide transition to this. So if I just add that in right there and then we just modify this to make sure it slides out of the screen, instead it back in, we can then play it again. In today's video, I'm going to be giving you my top three FPS online game. So it just gives it a little bit more movement into the screen in a little bit more of an animation rather than just the textures popping out of nowhere. So that really good. Like I've been saying constantly, these are just basic tips, but if you can just get these right, and if you only just use these. You can definitely put out a respectable YouTube video. So that's the title. That's how to cut this. Now, add some images just to make it a little bit more engaging. So what I'm gonna do it skip on my edit to the point where I mentioned a game. And what I'm gonna do is go to Google, download an image of the cover of the game. I'm going to slide that in with my transition, as I mentioned it. And let me go ahead and find a place where we can start this freaking game, guys, I would play. I'm not going to waste any more time and I'm going to jump into the list with number three, which is Call of Duty, Modern Warfare two now, alright, so we want to go ahead and find an image of Call of Duty, Modern Warfare two. So let's get our starting point again into the list with number three, which is we go there. We can always just put a marker point on our timeline as well. If you just go and press the keyword m using Final Cut. Remember that we'll actually put this little blue thing here, which is a marker points so we can actually remember where we need to put our image. But let's just go ahead over to Google quickly. And this grab an image of Call of Duty. Call of Duty, Modern Warfare two. There we go. Get an image. There we go. That seems like the one that we will use to seeing. We can save image as and save it to our desktop. So let's come up down there. And then all we need to do, each dragging onto our timeline. Once we've dragged it onto our timeline, will make final figure again. Now of course, we don't want this coming up in the middle of the screen because they're completely blocked out my face. What we want to have it coming up on the top right or top left-hand corner a little bit like how they present the news, right? First things first, we probably want to make this smaller. So once again, we can click on the image, we can then click on Transform. Then we can actually go ahead to these blue dots in the corner and we can drag them to make it a little bit smaller. From there, we can click on the middle of the image and drag it wherever we want on the screen. So let's in fact, it's nice and plane over here, so it's a nice contrast. So let's go ahead and add it over there. And why not go ahead and add that transitioning against it slides in from the left-hand side so we can go ahead and click the slide transition. We drag that onto our new image. Let's go ahead and play that into the list with number three, which is Call of Duty, Modern Warfare two. Now today go a really, really simple concept, but something that goes such a long way in terms of just making your content look a little bit more professional and a little bit more engaging. Now, you can take this even one step further with what we like to call B-roll, which is essentially just clips and footage playing over top of me actually speak until I tell you what in this lesson, it's go ahead and add that as a quick bonus as well. All right, cool. So what I've done here is I've ripped some footage of Call of Duty Modern Warfare two from a popular YouTuber. He gave his name is Ecoli espresso. And basically all I've done is once again, I've dragged it into my timeline. But one thing that you can see is that it's also dragged it in using his audio. Now, we don't want the audio of the game playing over me speaking because that's going to sound quite bad. What we can do is we can right-click on the cooler duty audio clip here. And what we can select is something called detach audio. You can just turn it down if you want, but I like just to get rid of it completely so we click the Attach audio, we then select the bit of audio that's been detached, and then we click Delete. Then all I'm going to do here is I'm just going to line it up a little bit closer to my image. What we're going to see, you've already just seen a sneak peek of it. There is this video clip of Call of Duty playing whilst I'm actually talking over this game-playing. So let's go ahead and jump back to the list with number three, which is Call of Duty, Modern Warfare two. Now, this is again that of course I played a long time ago as it was the first major release after the breakout color duty, which I would say it was called a duty for. Right. So there you go. I've added some B-roll on top of me talking now, look at the difference in engagement that's actually going to create, rather than just me just sitting on camera actually just talking about the game. People want to see the game, don't ne. And another good thing about this is if you don't have a professional setup, you can use more B-roll. You don't really have to worry about being in the camera as much. So if you're not confident and being on camera, you could just do some voice-overs. So you could do the whole video of being B-roll and you could just do a voiceover on camera. So you don't even have to be in camera in a scenario like this. So yeah, that's some really basic editing concepts. We've got the standard cut. We have got adding titles. We've got a couple of transitions in there as well. And then we've got adding images and B-roll. What I'm actually going to do now is go ahead and complete the rest of this edit. So I'm ready to upload it to YouTube. And I will see you in the next module where we talk all about just that. 12. Uploading to YouTube + Thumbnail: In this module, I'll be taking you through the step-by-step process on how to upload your first video to YouTube suggests to recap on the previous session, we've now filmed our video. We've edited it to remove all the bloopers and we've added some engaging images and texts and little bit of B-roll on top. We've checked the video for any further mistakes, and now we're finally ready to put it to the world. And where we want to start this off is back on our YouTube channel on the home screen. And there's gonna be a couple of ways that you can actually start the upload process. Now, if you've never uploaded to YouTube video before, as you can see, we've got this image here with this upload a video to get started with the upload the video button down below it. Now, once you've added one video to your channel and you're gonna go to add another one. You can actually go up in the top right-hand corner here and click Create. And then you then have the same option to upload the video both at the same buttons, take you to the same place. But in this case, because it's our first video, I'm gonna go ahead and click the Upload Video button here. Now, the first thing that's going to happen is that it's going to bring us up this upload video screens. Now we've got two choices. We can either drag or drop our video into this arrow right here, or we can just go ahead and select the file. So what I'm gonna do is click Select Files. I'm gonna go to My Documents tab because that's where I saved my new upload. And as you can see, we've got top three ifs games, which I created just a while ago. So I'm gonna go ahead and click that. And then I'm gonna click Open. And once you do that, that automatically starts off the upload process. So if we have a look down the bottom here, it says uploading 3%. And it tells us roughly how long we've got left. It's only got four minutes on this one because we did a relatively short video. Now, the first thing that we have to do in this upload process, because it's gonna be quite a few things is we need to come up with a title. Now, we need to come up with a title that is going to appear in the search. We don't want to have it too long. It needs to be easy to read, easy to understand, and clear on what we're actually going to be saying. In this case, I'm just going to go for the top free FPS games of all time. And I'm gonna put that in capital so that stands out a little bit better. So hopefully we can hit the search results. We can pick up a few keywords there and all of that good stuff. So that's the title, like I say, keep it nice and simple. Do not go ahead with saying, Hey everyone, this is my top three FPS videos of all time video or anything like that. It's just going to not do very well at all. So just keep it nice, short and sweet and you will be fine. Now, next up is the description. Now we can be a little bit more free with the description, but I like to write about two or three sentences, just giving a little bit more detail about what's to come in the video in some keywords in there as well, because they can definitely get picked up from description for when people search for the content. And then what I like to leave as a couple of links of some call to actions may be another video that I've made in this case, we haven't got one. Maybe a link to subscribe to the channel may be a link to a product that we may be want to promote on a channel to maybe a little bit of money. But in this case it's gonna be our first ever video. So we're just going to write a small description and we're going to leave it as that. So this guy was something like In this video. I share the top three FPS games of all time. In my opinion. I believe, again, should not be just based on it gameplay, but also based on the emotional experience. It brings you, but you get the point. You want to keep it nice and short in terms of its description. And then if you do have any links, then you can throw them in there as well. For example, if we just take a look at this guys you're about and you can see that he's gone very heavy on his link. So what you can see, he's got his little blurb about what the video is about, and he's got some free stuff that you can go ahead and grab that will likely be affiliate links. And then you've got links to his social medias is discord there. And then you've got a disclaimer from this guy as well because he talked about financial products and financial advice and all of that stuff. So you can see it's nice and basic is not like a massive essay. He's written just a couple of lines about the video and then some call to action links that you may refer to throughout the video as well. So that's the description. Next up is the thumbnail. Now this is actually really important and some may argue that the thumbnail is actually more important than the actual video itself. Let me just switch back to the main screen for this because at the end of the day, if your thumbnail is not enticing enough to get that viewer to click on your video. It doesn't matter how good your video is actually going to be. If no one's ever clicking on it, or no one's ever tempted to go ahead and click on it. You're never going to get anyone viewing that content in the first place. So one thing that I'm going to be doing is making a full course on thumbnails and how I get people to click on my thumbnails without being too what we call clickbait, where basically we're promising something in the thumbnail that we're not going to deliver in the video, you still need to deliver the promise at the start of the video on the title and the thumbnail. Thumbnails are super important and I will create a class on this dedicated to this in the future. But for this video, we're just going to keep it nice and basic. What we're gonna do is head back over to Canva. If we just switch over right here, which we used in our previous module, and we're going to just design a thumbnail from there. So just once again, by the way, if you type into Canvas search YouTube, thumbnail, we've got our preset dimensions that we can go ahead and click on. So let's go ahead and click on that. We can then go ahead and select gaming from our theme. So let's go and find gaming. We're going to select gaming, and then we're gonna click free as well. And a good exercise that I'd like to do is if you wanted to go ahead and use a canva template, go ahead and pick the one that stands out to you the most when you've just taken a look at it right now. And for me, it's got to be this one right here. So this yard band, it's one. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And what we're gonna do is we're going to design and just customize this thumbnail based on this little design here. So we haven't got to start completely from scratch for this demo. But one thing that I do highly recommend is when you are looking at your thumbnails, really spend a good amount of time on this. Because like I said, this is the first thing the viewer will say and decide whether they want to click on your video or not. So having said that, we want to go ahead and make this stand out, and we want to make sure that we're telling the viewer exactly what we're gonna be talking about in this story. So the first thing that I'm obviously going to do is change the text and what I was thinking, oh, by the way, with text, you really want to keep it at a minimal. Do not put your whole entire title in there because it has to get that really small. And on things like mobile phones, which is where most people watch YouTube. Never gonna be able to see that text. That is, keep it nice and bold, nice and big, and maybe just three or four words at max. So luckily in our video we can definitely do that because what I'm going to do is I'm going to go with top free FPS games just like that. With the S. What I can actually do is make this text a little bit bigger to make up as much screen as we possibly can. And we've got a small little line behind there which we can go ahead and delete because we don't need that. Now, I'm not really feeling the blue. So the first thing that I'm going to go and do here is change the color of all of this text. And I'm going to go for something like a red for danger. Now that stands out much better than that kind of Ti Li, aqua blue that we had previously. Now, yeah, I really liked that. I think that really stands out. It's nice and basic is nothing too special, which is good, simple as better I think, especially with thumbnails. The next thing that we need to changes, of course, this image. Now this image doesn't represent FPS gaming at all. I don't really know what that represents. So let's go ahead and click Delete there. And what you can see here is that this is a Canada place holder. So no matter what image we put in there, it's going to be in the shape of this. So this is really good. So let's head over to Google and let's go ahead and find our image, which is one that I picked out earlier. Which is this one right here, which I think is really good because he's got freely FPS games on it. And you can't really tell exactly what they are unless you're a kind of a massive fan of each one of them. We're gonna go ahead and click Save that. I think I already saved earlier, yes, I did. And once that's downloaded, we're gonna head back to Canva. And all we're going to do is drag this into our camera project. And then we want to click it, and then we want to hover it over that placeholder. So as you can see, it then puts the preview up there and then when we release, it, pops it in there. Now, when we take a look at this, this is not framed the way we want to frame this picture. So what we're gonna do is I'm going to double-click on it. And then what we can then do from there is we can move this about a little bit so we can make sure that it fits a little bit better in the frame. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. Now that's much better now I think I need to go just a little bit further to the left TO his head just fits on there. Yeah. I really like that now it's up to us if we want to keep these play buttons down here. Fast-forward wherever they are. But there you go. That is a really basic thumbnail that really stands out, is going to catch someone's eye. And when you look at that with the title, they know exactly what they're getting from this video. So let's go ahead and download that. That's now downloaded over there. So we're gonna head back to our YouTube channel. We're going to click Upload thumbnail. And then once again, It's going to bring us up our file system. We're going to want to go to downloads, and then we're going to go ahead and click our fun now that we downloaded and we're going to click Open. And then what you can see here, it's popped up thumbnail into the YouTube Upload screen. And in just a second it'll come up here as well as a preview. Cool. Next up, we have playlist now on YouTube, you can organize all your videos into different playlist. So if you were a gaming channel, you could go with an FPS playlist and you could have an animate playlist and you can have a sports game playlist. So in our case, we're actually going to create a playlist for our top freeze because this is going to be a regular feature on our channel. We're going to pop that playlist there. We're gonna go ahead and create that. And then we're going to click on that. So it goes into that playlist. When we upload it. Playlists are really good for keeping people on your channel if they want to go ahead and click your playlist. Because what's going to happen is your videos are gonna constantly keep playing after each other, even when one finishes. So it keeps them on your channel, which is really good. Now, the next part is very much something that you'll have to decide for yourself wherever it's made for kids or not. I'm going to put no, it's not made for kids on here because all of these games are probably going to be 18 plus or something like that, or maybe 15 plus. So I'm gonna put no, it's not made for kids. And then the final bit on this page, you want to go ahead and click Show more because then that's going to lead us to our tags section. Now, tags used to be quite an important part of YouTube in terms of getting discovered. But as you can see by this message here, it says, tax can be useful if content in your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tax play a minimal role in helping the viewer finds your video. So I don't like to spend too much time on putting some tags in here anymore, but I'm just going to for the purpose of this video. So we're gonna go with FPS games as go with call of duty, Halo Reach. We're gonna go with Apex Legends. These are all FPS games I mentioned in the video. We're going to go with Xbox. Playstation. You get the point. Wherever your videos about, just put a couple of tags. That, and another good thing I like to always do is always put the channel name in the tags as well, because maybe that will start putting it out to YouTube. Probably not, but it isn't always worth the shell, so we'll put that in there. And then from there we've got a lot of stuff that I like to leave blank. I don't really pay too much attention to it. You can go ahead and fill these in, but it's not really going to make too much difference to your channel. You can actually change the category right here. So we're gonna change the category to gaming to once you've actually set it once. I believe it will stay as the default for your future video. So it might be worth going ahead and doing that. And then at the bottom here, you can actually decide if you actually want to have comments on the videos or anything like that. But once you've done that, you can go ahead and click Next. And then from there you get a couple of options. You can either add an end screen. How I spoke about this in the earlier model, you know how I was saying we wanted to have a call to action at the end of the video. This is where you could go ahead and put another video of yours on the screen for the user to click on. You have to do over here is go ahead and click Add. And then you can select the video that you want to promote at the end of your video. Now in this case, this is our first ever video. We're not going to actually have a video of asked to add on the end. Maybe we can do it in the next video. But for this case, I'm just going to skip that. Then we have cards which is basically the same as n screens, which are videos that you can pop up throughout the video whilst you're talking. So for example, if I was talking about gaming and honest dimension, Xbox, I could say, well, why don't you check out my video on Xbox, which are leaving the card at the top here. And then you can go ahead and add that card and pick where you want that to pop up in your video as well. So that's n screens and cards. We're not going to add any of those in there. We're just going to go ahead and click Next. From there we have this new feature that you choose recently introduced, which is check. So basically YouTube is just using their algorithms to actually just check your content just to make sure there's no copyright music in there, or anything offensive or damaging or anything illegal in your video. They've got an algorithm that checks that, but in our case it says no issues found and we're good to go to the visibility section. We've got a couple of options here. We can either save or published this video or we can schedule it so we can choose a date in the future for this video to come out. And then when you save or publish it, you have a couple of options. You can either just publish a private video, you can publish an unlisted video, or you could publish a public video which is obviously going to send it out to YouTube. Or if you did want to schedule it, you could go ahead and click Schedule and then he's simply just pick a date in the future when you want to schedule this video. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to publish this video. I'm going to publish it as private, so no one's going to see it as of yet in case I do want to go ahead and make some more changes. But let's go ahead and click Save. But that is how you upload your video. As you can see, we're currently private at the moment. Or you need to do, like I said, is switching over from private to public. And then it will be available for your friends, your family, and people all over the world to go ahead and watch your video, which is actually what we're gonna be talking about in the next module, which is different ways to promote your video at the start to get that initial traffic flowing through into your YouTube channel. So I'll see you there. 13. How to Promote Videos: Welcome to this module, which is all going to be about video promotion. Now, we've done the hard work, we've gone ahead and we've plan, we've filmed, we've edited, and then finally, we've uploaded our first-ever video. And if you've been following this step-by-step and you've done that then massive well done to you, that's absolutely amazing. However, as we are just starting out on YouTube and we have no fans yet, the best thing that we need to do to get our video moving is using our friends and family through social media to get those initial views to give our video a little bit of momentum. Okay, so what I'm going to demo to you right now is everything I do in the first hour of releasing a video. So as you can see here, if you're familiar with this kind of screenshot, this is from Instagram and this is the first place where I go to promote my video because that's where the majority of my audience is right now. So what I basically do is I go over to an Instagram story. I take my thumbnail from my computer, I'll pop it in right there. I won't include the title because this one is actually quite an intriguing thumbnail. Actually want people to go ahead and click. Whereas if I were to say what this video is about, they may not actually go ahead and click. So what I've decided to do with this one is a new YouTube video out right now. And then as you can see down below, I've left there, Click Here button where they can click it and it'll take me straight to the YouTube video. This strategy does really work, even if I can just get five or six clicks from this, it's five or six clicks. I not going to get our views that I'm not going to get if I wasn't to promote it anyway. So that's the first thing that I do. And then what I then go and do his head over to my Facebook profile. So I've got to Facebook profiles, one for my personal, one for my business with both has a following on there. And I've done something very similar here. But the main difference between this and the Instagram post is that as you can see at the bottom, I've put link is in the first comment. Now the reason why I've done that is because Facebook picks up any links that you put in your posts and they significantly reduce fuel reach when you're actually posting them. So one thing I like to do is hide the link in the comments wherever it works or not, who knows. But one thing I definitely know is that every time you post the link in your actual post, Facebook doesn't really send it out to as many people from there. I then head over to my Twitter account. As you can see, I've got a lot of social media accounts, so you don't have to worry if you haven't got all of these, but obviously the ones that you do have, go ahead and post them onto them. And once again, you can see this is very, very similar to the Facebook posts. Once again, even if it just gets a couple of views that a couple of views that would have never have got. And then finally, what I do is send that over to my e-mail list, which I built up over the past few years. Once again, if you're first getting started, you probably won't have one of these, but this is definitely one thing that you can go ahead and build up using your call to action at the end of your video. So this is what I'll do in this normally gets me around 20 to 30 clicks every time I send it out. I'm sending out to a lot of people. But once again, that's 30 views from the start that I'm having boosted on my video. And it's just going to give it that little bit more chance of getting recommended by YouTube or maybe even getting into the search. Now, if you're just starting out and you do not have a following one option that you could go ahead and do, which is what I used to do it A-star is actually just going ahead and sending a group text to a load of your family and friends. Because if you're starting out on YouTube at the end of the day, you would hope that your family and friends would actually support you and definitely be interested in your first ever video. I know when I posted my first ever view, I've got a massive boost because people saw me on camera and they want to see what I had to say and then did drop off a little bit from there, but make sure you're not afraid to let people know that you're on YouTube. You can get those initial views at the start, and it's definitely going to help you get the ball rolling. But this is very much simple things that I do. I do it all within the first hour. It's not massively effective. But like I said, if you're first starting out, every single view is going to count and make sure that you are promoting as much as you can, but also bear in mind you do not want to get to span they with it, so just keep that in mind. Okay, So that's my exact strategy, what I use for social media promotion of my YouTube videos. Keep it simple. Don't be too spammy, and I'll see you in the next one. 14. Final Words: All right, We've made it, we have created our Channel, filmed and edited our first ever video, and then we have finally uploaded it. I really do hope you enjoyed the process for me. Youtube has been by far the best thing that I have ever done. And I can assure you that if you just stick with it, things like being more natural on camera editing and knowing what to talk about, what just get easier as time goes on. Now, as we mentioned way back at the start of the class, the project for you was to upload a screenshot of your channel or maybe even a link to your first ever video. So please feel free to go ahead and do that as you please. And I will look forward to checking them out as they come in. But having said that, I would like to thank you for joining and completing the course with me. I would highly appreciate it if you did find this useful to leave me a review and follow my Skillshare page as this is my first of many classes I plan to upload on the platform. Finally, if you did have any requests for another class, also don't be afraid in suggesting me one and I will see what I can do. But thank you once more and I hope to see you sometime in the near future.