How To Create Custom YouTube Thumbnails (Easy) 2019

Key Takeaways

hey so in this video I'm gonna show you three different ways that you can create YouTube thumbnails and thumbnails are one of the most important aspects to actually creating YouTube video see sometimes people overlook these and different things about thumbnails and they can end up really hurting themselves when trying to get views on YouTube and the reason for this is because a thumbnail is directly correlated with click-through rate so click-through rate is essentially how often people are going to be clicking on your video versus other videos that might be available to them so to give you an example here think about when you're on YouTube browsing maybe you ended up on this video and there might have been eight other videos that you could have clicked on but you clicked on this one so you want to create videos with a thumbnail that's going to be enticing that's going to get people to click on it to get that higher click-through rate when YouTube sees that they're then going to promote your video even more and more and more and so I want to show you a couple different YouTube channels and how they're creating thumbnails and then how I personally do it for my videos and just some different tips and tricks you can use throughout when you're actually creating these thumbnails so if you're new here to the channel you want to learn more about some of these different topics then definitely consider hitting that subscribe button and let's just get started with this so the first thing that we'll show you here is when trying to create thumbnails sometimes it's important to not try to reinvent the wheel so let's just take a look at some of the biggest youtubers right now on the scene and one of them is PewDiePie he is almost a hundred million subscribers I believe the largest YouTube channel besides t-series and if you look at his thumbnails here they're very plain they're very basic he doesn't have a lot of words he doesn't have multiple sentences crammed into the thumbnail and I think that's one of the biggest keys to take away from this is that you don't want to put too much in the thumbnail in general it's better to have less than too much so for my thumbnails you'll see that my thumbnails are a little bit more informational and because they're informational I like to put a few words in the thumbnail so if you look at my main channel here you can see that I'll generally put maybe three or four or five words max in the actual thumbnail when creating these if you look at somebody else like say mr. beast he grew from I believe you about three million subscribers at this time last year and now he is over 20 million subscribers if you look at his thumbnails they're very simple yet they're very eye-catching at the same time so there's some surprising about it if he does put any type of numbers or words in there they're going to be something that really catches your eye it's gonna be a big number or some word that is really interesting but that's just something you want to think about so let me show you the first strategy for actually creating these thumbnails and the one that I've been using for the past couple of years which is a website called canva calm now this website it's free to use they do have some upsells but I'll tell you this I've never paid a dime to this company and they're not sponsoring this video kind of wish they were but they're not and so I've never paid any money to them there's a lot of free services that you can use with canva let me just kind of walk you through how you can actually go about using them and some different things that you can implement to make better thumbnails all right so what we're gonna do here is we're just going to type in YouTube into the search bar here and it's gonna give us an option of YouTube channel art which is also a great option to create with canva and then YouTube thumbnails we're gonna click on YouTube thumbnail and this is actually going to give us a bunch of different designs that they've already essentially pre-made for us that we can alter Kate to make something a little bit different but still get something that already has some good design to it so depending on one type of YouTube channel you have what type of videos you're making maybe who go through different ones to find ones that would be more suitable to you but for example my videos are generally going to be tutorials or informational so I'm gonna go through here and find something that is like I said not having too many words nothing where there's too much going on so this is a perfect example right here making the perfect cup of coffee okay so the amount of words that they have here on a thumbnail I believe is a perfect amount anything more than this would just get too much and overloaded and people wouldn't click on it because they wouldn't take the time to actually read everything that's going on within here so what's great about this is that you can just change up these words you can change up whatever you want to type in here your blah blah blah blah blah right and then you can change the picture you can change everything within here you can change the color and it's very easy to use and they have a lot of these outlines now some of these are free some of these you have to pay for this one for example they're gonna try and charge you like a dollar or something for which honestly I've never had the use to actually you have to pay for some of these but if you're willing to pay a couple dollars then go for it but for example this one here is free and you'll see which ones are free which ones are not free but this is a great way to create thumbnails without having to be a graphic designer you can even not changeup very much at all if you're scared of designing something and you don't know how to actually lay something out then you can literally just change you have the words in here and maybe put a different picture in here and you'll get a nice thumbnail for that but that's essentially canva you can upload your own photos to this as well so if you just click on photos and then you click upload you can put your own photos on here and really make it exactly how you want it to be alright so maybe you don't want to use canva there are some other options as well and one of them is so simple but this is really what I use even today I use this one over canva you see use canva very often I'll use it less often now and I actually use PowerPoint people ask me how are you making your thumbnails are you using Photoshop I'm not a graphic designer how am I going to do this look I'm not a graphic designer either but I can tell you that using PowerPoint actually offers a lot of different things within it that are simple to use easy to use and I just think it's something that people should take advantage of and what's great about this is you can create these thumbnails without using the internet so with canva you might have to have the Internet you might have to have some type of Wi-Fi or data but with PowerPoint you can literally do this on a plane somewhere or on a bus and you don't have any internet that's what I've been doing and it works quite well so just get a little bit creative with this there's so many different things you can do to correct the color of some of these different backgrounds you can do things to go into format different types of pictures and there's really a lot you can do within it almost as much that you need to do as what you would do in something like a Photoshop now I've used Photoshop a couple times in the past for creating thumbnails but I just find that it's it's just too time consuming to actually use Photoshop I have a pre created file on PowerPoint with probably about 50 slides now of just new thumbnails that I'll create and then I'll just copy one and put it into the next one and it just works out very well for myself you can use Google slides as well I've use Google slides and then to save this photo or to create this thumbnail once you make it in PowerPoint I use just the snipping tool on Windows desktop and you can use something on Mac as well I forget the exact keys that you press but to essentially just take a screenshot of it and then crop it to exactly the size of the thumbnail and then just upload it to YouTube it's very simple and it's very easy to do and the final one then I'll show you is actually just by using a plug-in and use this a couple times what I really needed to when I had nothing else and had to make it a thumbnail in a matter of 30 seconds and I had no other options and that's to use the plugin called tubebuddy they actually have something where you can actually create thumbnails on to buddy threw them right there on youtube so when you upload a video as long as you have this plug-in which is totally free to use then you're able to actually create thumbnails for this video and like I said I've done this a couple of times in the past it doesn't create the best looking thumbnails but if you need to just put like a couple words over top of maybe some type of frozen frame from one of your videos then it's something that you can definitely do so I'll show you how to do that really quick but it's very very simple so what we can do is we can just create the thumbnail right here with this plug-in and then we can just get a steel frame from the video so let's say that we'd like this one right here good enough and then continue and then we can add layers to it we can add text to it so say we want to just make it really simple and say it's a video nails I didn't even spell it right but then you can add this text and you can add different colors to it and it's easy to move around and like I said this is just something that you can do for if it's last minute you need to create a thumbnail you need to put some words on on the front here then this is something that you could do and it could work very well then you preview it and then save and publish it which I'm not going to do because I don't want it to actually look like that but that's an option as well that's available to you so like I said you don't have to be a graphic designer to make thumbnails that are somewhat decent and you know what the best way to do this is just look at what everybody else is doing and then do something somewhat similar don't copy people you know I sometimes I look and I see people who have the exact same thumbnails as my videos and it's pretty obvious that they're not very creative about what they're doing I just put a little bit of effort into it find a way to maybe improve what maybe other people are doing with their thumbnails and find a way to make yours better or just do some trial and error to do some split testing some maybe testing and it could really go a long way for you so thanks for watching the video thanks for supporting the channel really appreciate it and I'll see everybody in the next video