How to Name and Brand Your New YouTube Channel (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Welcome back to my creator boot camp. I don't know why I saluted this is not a real military in the last episode We talked about starting your creator journey and asking yourself Why do I want to make videos as well as coming up with a list of the types of videos you might want to make And today we're taking our very first step in our creator journey of actually making and setting up our channel now This may seem like way too minute of a topic to make a video about but the truth is there's a lot that goes into The look and aesthetic of a channel page, so it's important that we start off on the right foot, which is a left one Sorry I'll move on. First let's start off with your channel name. What are you gonna call that thing? Now obviously that all depends on the kinds of videos you want to make but here's a few guidelines you can follow to make sure you're picking the best name you can. First, keep your name simple. After all the main purpose of your channel name is so that people can easily find and remember you. So if you pick a name that's super long or super complicated it's not necessarily gonna bode well for people searching you later on. Two, avoid a name that boxes you in. Even if you know the specific exact types of videos you want to make right out of the box, you don't want your channel name to be explicitly tied to that thing, because it makes it a lot harder for your channel to evolve. For example, if you name your channel Fishing with Larry, but a year later you want to shift into a different genre, well now you have to change your channel name too, which can really hurt your searchability. Overall, when you're coming up with your channel name, don't overthink it. You don't need the perfect name, because that's not what makes your channel successful. Your videos are. So do some brainstorming and pick something that's simple and memorable. Okay, so hear me out. This is the idea I have for my channel for this also ignore my background This is what you don't see when I'm filming very very messy But anyways, my idea is I feel like it would be cool and funny to have a channel where I have like this topic or skill like building something or philosophy and I give myself Maybe ten minutes or something to like study up on it And then I just make a video as if I'm an expert in the topic and I'm either doing like a tutorial on how to do something or I'm doing like a lecture on philosophy or something like that, you know? I feel like that could be funny. I feel like it could lead to funny moments. My idea was I would name my channel The Expert Amateur, but then I found out that there was already a channel called The Expert Amateur, which is why it's important before you name your channel, you make sure it's not already taken. So I brainstormed a little bit And then I came up with the idea of naming my channel, Trust Me, I Think. I feel like that could be a cool, fun little channel name. My interest can be like, hey, welcome to Trust Me, I Think. Today we're talking about blah, blah, blah, or whatever. So I did a quick little search just to make sure that that name isn't taken and it looks like it's not. So yeah, we're just gonna go with that one. Trust Me, I Think. I don't know if I wanna do a question mark. Trust Me, I Think. I think I like the no question mark because it feels less like I'm asking a question, like maybe trust me. And it's more like a statement, like, oh, you can trust me, I think. And create channel. Boom, just like that. It looks a little ugly right now, but that's all right. We'll start working on that right now. Now let's move on to our channel look. Now there's three main aspects to every channel page. One, your visuals, two, your layout, and three, your information. And in your YouTube studio, you can customize all these things in the customization tab. Your visuals include your profile picture and your banner. And your profile picture is actually pretty important because it's essentially the logo of your channel. Whatever you put there is the image that your viewers will always associate with your videos. And there's really only two rules here. One, it needs to be easily legible. So your profile picture looks nice and big on your channel page, but that's not how it's gonna be viewed 95% of the time. In reality, it's gonna be viewed like this, just under your video, which as you can see is a lot smaller. So you don't want something super detailed or cluttered because it needs to be easily identifiable even at this small a size. And two, your profile picture should feel like you. It should be an extension of you and your channel's personality. For some people that means a clear image of their face, for other people that means something more abstract. For my personal YouTube channel, my profile picture is just an outline of my face that I traced over in Photoshop. 20 year old me said, sure, this looks good enough, and it's been my profile picture ever since. So as long as you follow those two guidelines, again, your profile picture does not have to be this masterful piece of art. Just something that's strongly and unapologetically you. Now your channel banner is where we can get a little bit more creative. This is where we have the most freedom to visually showcase you and your channel's personality. Think of it as the movie poster of your channel. Since we have a bit more real estate here and it's only seen in your channel view, you can get as abstract and as intricate as you want. But a list of things that are good to have in your banner are any logos, a short tagline or phrase, a content schedule if you have one, and any social media handles for other platforms. Aside from that, the world's your oyster. Go have fun with it. Okay, here's what I cooked up. Also, I realized that I changed my sweater, so that is not good for continuity. Ignore that. Here's my banner. You ready? 3... 2... 1... Boom. Ta-da. Trust me, I think banner. Now this little red thing there that's actually not there that's a safe zone because the way that the YouTube banners work is that it really needs to be this big like huge aspect ratio so it can fit on phones and on TVs. But really this little sliver here is what you would normally see in like a regular YouTube banner setting. So you want to make sure that everything is in that little slit. But when I turn the transparency off of that this is basically what my banner looks like. The idea here is I have my head just kind of like cut out and with four different professions. Like one's an astronaut, one's a surgeon, then one's like a cowboy, and one's a chef. And the idea is that I'm doing all these different things at an expert level. And then we have the trust me I think in the middle. Then we have a little tagline here, get ready to learn from the expert amateur. So even though the channel name is not going to be named the expert amateur, I was still able to squeeze it in there even if it's just a little tagline So basically the way I made this is I just went on to like Canva which I think is good for making like graphics like This especially if you're not good at graphic design, which I'm not then I just kind of looked at their YouTube banner templates I found one that I liked and I just changed it up to fit what I needed Then I just went into Photoshop got images of like the helmet and the hat and all that stuff and I just like photoshop it onto my face for this one I like morphed and distorted it onto my face and then I exported those and I brought it into Canva and then I just assembled it real quick so this is our banner I'm pretty happy with it I'm sure it could be better but I think looks pretty good so at least starting out I'm fine with this and then our profile picture is the same idea just kind of reformatted I was thinking about doing like the trust me on the top and then I think on the bottom but I think that would be a little bit too busy so I think this is better just simple and now if we go to our channel let's do a quick reload this is what it looks like so it looks a lot cleaner a lot more official a lot nicer you don't have to be an expert in graphic design i would say the template and canva did like 80 percent of the work and yeah now we have a pretty nice looking channel now starting out your channel layout is not that important mainly because you don't have any content yet so this is something you don't to have to stress much right now, but as you start to get more uploads under your belt, you want to make sure that your channel is easy to navigate, especially for newcomers. I recommend having a for you section at the top row, followed by a section for your videos, and then any playlists, followed lastly by your community tab. You want to make sure that as you make more and more videos, you create some playlists to better organize your channel and make it easier for new viewers to keep watching similar videos. Lastly, we got our channel info, and this refers to our channel description, links, and contact info. For your description, you want to A, introduce yourself, B, explain the type of content your viewers can expect, and C, give them a reason to subscribe. And you don't need to write any sort of essay here, just a couple lighthearted sentences is enough to do the trick. Channel description, what do we want to say here? I don't think we want to say a lot, I want to think of something like quippy. Alright, how about this? I just want to, like, explain what the premise is, I guess. I give myself ten minutes to learn a topic, then I teach that topic to you. Don't worry, you can trust me, I think. I like that. It incorporates the channel name, it basically tells you what I'm doing, it's jokey, I guess. I think just this as a description is good enough for me. I think it gets the point across. So I'm going to stick with this. Here you want to add any social media links or websites for your channel and in your contact info you want to add an email address that people can use to reach you for opportunities like brand deals or interviews. Now if you're going to add contact info it's imperative that you do not use your personal email address. That's something that you probably want to remain private. Instead make a new separate email address that's solely meant for business opportunities and connections. So okay your homework for this week is to officially create your channel if you haven't already and curate your channel look draft up your videos set up your layout and add in your channel info and in the next video we're going to talk about generating video ideas to start working on your very first upload see you then soldiers again with the salute we are not a real real military guys.