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How to Create a YouTube Channel in 2021 (Beginner’s Guide)
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Jun 8, 2024
In the video "How to Create a YouTube Channel in 2021 (Beginner’s Guide)," the creator provides a detailed walkthrough for beginners looking to start their own YouTube channel. The video covers essential steps such as setting up a Google account, creating a YouTube channel, customizing channel settings, and uploading the first video. With clear instructions and tips on optimizing the channel for visibility and growth, this guide is designed to help new creators navigate the process of establishing a successful YouTube presence in 2021.
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0:00
So you want to learn how to create a YouTube channel
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That's great. There's a ton of opportunity on YouTube right now. You probably already know, but YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google
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And just in general, people are spending more and more time on the platform. Also, for many content creators, they're able to generate a full-time income from their YouTube content
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Also, it's a great place to promote an existing business, to grow your personal brand
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or just share things that you're passionate about. But what we notice in a lot of cases is people don't get everything set up right from the beginning
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that hurts their initial growth. So what I wanna do today is walk you
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through the basic settings, customizations, and enabling the right features so that your channel is ready to grow in 2021
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Okay, so here we are at YouTube.com. If you're not already signed in
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go to the top right hand corner and click sign in. You can sign in with your email or phone number here
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and click next, or if you need to create an account, click create an account and you can create an account
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for yourself or to manage your business. Once you're signing to your
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click on the icon in the top right hand corner and click on create a channel and then click
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get started and then from here you have two options you can use your name or you can use a custom
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name so if you use your name it's basically the the name that you created with your email
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also you're not going to be able to add any other people to collaborate with you and to access
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your channel you're actually going to need to log in with a password for that account so
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So this is your main Gmail account with all of your personal emails
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It's not something you're going to want to share with other people. And really, in general, I would recommend even for your personal brand creating a channel
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with a custom name, which is creating a brand account, which is this option here
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Really, there's no downside of creating a brand channel. And what you want to do as the very first step is choose a channel name
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If you want to help choosing a channel name, we're not going to get into it in a ton of detail here
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do have a video on choosing between a personal brand or a business brand
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I'll link to that video up above in the cards. Also, everything else we talk about is going to be down below in the description
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But let's say I want to create a channel about creating better videos, better
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to make sure to do here is use a closer picture of yourself, ideally with a little bit of color in
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it, something's going to stand out on YouTube. If this is for your business and you have a really wide logo, you may want to think of how do I
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orient my logo correctly so that fits well on a circular icon like this
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But let's go and upload a picture. Okay. And then the next thing is basically this is your channel description, which is on the about section
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of your channel. So if we're going to talk about creating better videos, you want to use the keyword
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or different phrases that someone may search for and would want to come across your channel
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So if we're gonna create a channel about creating better videos, okay, so for my made up channel
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I might say something like, welcome to my channel, better video with Jeff. On the channel, I'll create videos about camera gear
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lighting, audio, video editing, color grading, and how to grow on YouTube
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If you wanna learn how to create amazing videos, consider subscribing. So the next thing you wanna do is add links to your sites
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So this is actually gonna show up. This is the FIGCo. you see here where the links show up on desktop and then on a mobile phone they show up in the about section of your channel But what you can see from our channel so we have the text for the first link right here
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which is always just a reminder, so we have a free YouTube masterclass
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And so anyone that visits our channel page on desktop can easily see this free training
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which helps us grow our email list. Growing an email list can also really help you grow your YouTube channel
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If you wanna learn more about that, check out this video that I'll link to up above
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on how we grew email list from next to nothing to over 25,000 subscribers and less than a year
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But going back to filling this out, so here you can have it say, you know, my website
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or we could say free YouTube training and then add the link here and then this won't
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this is only going to let me add these specifically right now. So maybe we say the fig co
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the fig co and Facebook I think it's the fig and co
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and then save and continue. Okay, so here's our channel. We'll go through the design in a little bit
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One of the things we did upload a profile picture, it will show up here, but sometimes it takes a couple minutes
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I wouldn't worry about that, but I wanna go through some of the more important things first
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which is verifying your channel. So to do that, you can go into YouTube Studio
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So once you're here in YouTube Studio, click on settings and then go to channel
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and then go to feature eligibility. So one of the important things here
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is if you want to upload videos over 15 minutes, custom thumbnails, live streaming, and things like that
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you need to verify your channel with a phone number. So if you click here, you need to select the country you're in
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and you can either have them call you or text a verification code
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and then add your phone number. Then we'll put in the six-digit code, submit
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and congratulations, your YouTube account is now verified. Okay, so after the accounts verified
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So we want to go back into YouTube Studio. And there's a couple more things to go through within the settings
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So if we click on settings again and then go down to channel
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So what you want to choose is country of residence. And then so down below this, you want to add keywords for your channel
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So think about things that people might be searching for and you'd want them to find your channel
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So it could be video gear, grow on YouTube. I mean, so you can come up with a whole list of different keywords
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and then you can move on to the advanced settings. So in the advanced settings here
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basically it wants to know, do you want to set your channel as made for kids
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So this is basically saying, is your content primarily focused on content for kids under the age of 13
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I'm not a legal expert here. You may want to read into this in more detail, but for us, the content we create isn't made for kids
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You can either set as, yes, it's made for kids, no it's not, or you want to review it with
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each video upload. So I'm gonna select no here. So if you have a Google Ads account
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you wanna link to your YouTube channel, you can set that up right here. Scrolling down further is don't show inappropriate words
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and auto-generated captions. Do you wanna display your subscriber account? And that's about it, so click save
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Another thing also within the settings, there's a couple of different things here
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So within upload defaults, one of the things that we'd like to do is change visibility to private
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So it's basically when you upload a video it set to private not public to everyone on YouTube so that you can make sure that everything set up correctly and then basically publish the video from there If you want to include things in the title description or tags from the beginning we don usually have anything set up
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Each one of these is going to be completely different depending on the video
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And then here's the standard license. You can choose the language of your videos if you want
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So, no, that's not right. So English. And then one of the last things within the community tab, so some of the things that you could turn on
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When people leave comments on your videos, do you want, like if people are spamming it with links
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to other YouTube videos or their website or things, you can block links if you want to
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And then with the faults here, comments on your new videos. So what it'll do is hold potentially inappropriate comments for review
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You can disable comments, hold all comments for review. This is usually how we have it set
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then again remember to save here. Okay, so that gets through kind of the boring stuff to get that
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out of the way. Now what we want to do is customize the channel. So there's a couple of ways
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that we can do this. So you can actually click and open up your channel. If you're on your channel
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page, you can click customize right here. Or back in YouTube Studio, you can click on customization
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right here. There's a couple of different things here on the layout. If you don't have any videos
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yet on your channel. You're not going to be able to select things here, but this is going to be
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the homepage of your channel. And so you want to set this up so that people can easily find your
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content. You want to promote certain content on your channel and also organize your channel by
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playlist. So we can look at this for the FIG code to give you a bit of an idea. So we have the
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4,000 hours of watch time to help you monetize your channel. Is what will show up for somebody new
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or for a subscriber. Here's all of our recent uploads. This isn't always
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what we start our channel with a lot of times. A popular uploads playlist is something to add so people can easily find your most popular content
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Also you want to think about creating playlist for the different types of content you create
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So we have one for YouTube, one for personal branding, for email marketing, website and graphic design
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So think through how can you improve the experience for someone viewing your channel
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Also, if it's easy to find your content and it's sorted through playlists like this, there's
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a good chance someone finds other videos to watch in your channel and there's a better chance that they'll subscribe. Okay, so that's the layout piece and then you have the branding section
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So if you ever want to go in and change the profile picture, you can do that right here
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Another important thing is your banner image. So I'll link to a video up above that walks you through step by step how to create your YouTube banner. This is something really important
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Here again, I'll show you the FIGCOs, which is this banner right here. So you want to have
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obviously the name of your channel, a picture of you, and a little bit about your channel
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so how frequently you publish content and what the main focus of your channel is. So
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definitely check out the video on uploading your banner image, but basically what you'll do
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is here's our channel art. And then it's going to show you this will show up on all devices
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this will show up on desktop, and this is what is viewable on TV, then click done. One of the
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other kind of bonus tips is create a video watermark. I'll actually put a link down below to what we
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use So this shows up as you can see on the bottom of your videos And what you can do here is here I choose the one that we have So we just have something that looks like the subscribe button and the reason that we do that is just to make it really clear to someone if this is your logo or something like that people may not pay
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attention to it or realize that's how they could subscribe to your channel so you
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can choose when you want it to pop up the end of the video the entire video usually
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what we do is something like this like after 10 seconds so you watch a couple
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seconds of the video and then this little subscribe button shows up in the bottom, the bottom corner. And whenever you're making changes to this, we've done this
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a couple of times is don't forget to hit the publish button. With that, it makes sure your changes are saved. So this is the branding tab, and then moving on to the basic info. So here's
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where you're going to find the channel description that we created right when the, we created our
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account. You can also add other languages for translating the channel description if you'd like
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And then here's your channel URL. So here's the URL for this channel. What's going to happen is after you
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actually have a hundred subscribers and your channel's been around for at least 30 days, you can
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create a custom URL. So for the FIGCO, it's just YouTube.com slash the FIGCO
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And I can just show you really quickly. Here's basically the requirements for a custom URL. So to
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be eligible 100 subs, have 30 days of your channel, a profile picture, and a banner. And then
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you can choose a custom URL for your YouTube channel. And then again, here you can go through and edit
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the different links for your social media. Here it gives you a lot more options than when we created it initially so I can go here
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and delete Facebook if I wanted. I could add Pinterest if I chose
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And then you can also move these around. So I could move Pinterest here, I could move Instagram up, and Twitter can be last
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And then you can choose exactly how many links you want to show up
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And then you can add your contact information. So this is good to add as your channel grows because some businesses may want to reach out
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to you to have different collaborations, to sponsor videos, things like that
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So we'll put our main work email. And then again, after all these changes, don't forget to hit publish
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Let's see now with View Channel. So you can see the FIGCO YouTube banner is now showing up
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My profile picture is now showing up and it's starting to come together
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Also I want to show you really quickly how to add managers to your brand channel
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So remember as I mentioned before, if you create just a personal channel, you want to be a personal channel
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be able to do this. But being that we created a brand channel, you can go down here and click on settings
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And then if you go down and click on add or remove managers
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you can then manage the permissions. After you confirm your password, you can go to manage permissions
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Then you can add an owner, manager, or communications manager to help you manage your YouTube channel
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Okay, so we create a channel, set up all the basic settings
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customize the channel, and verify the channel so that you can have custom things
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thumbnails, longer videos, and things like that. So the next step is uploading a video
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We have a whole video walking you through step by step how to do that. I'll link to that up above
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But basically, you can do that from a couple of different places on YouTube. So if you're in YouTube studio like this, you can click upload videos
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You can click create here and upload a video. Or if you're just at the YouTube homepage, you can also click the same icon and upload
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a video from here. So if you want to know about other potential mistakes you could be making on YouTube
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check out this video up above right here. If you want to learn some of the best practices as you get starting on YouTube, check out the video below
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We hope to see you in those and future videos. Bye-bye
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