Maximizing Your Video’s Presence: The YouTube Channel Checklist

You’ve been uploading videos to YouTube for a while now. The videos themselves are fine, maybe even good, but the channel they live on looks like nobody’s home. Default icon, no channel art, no trailer for a first-time visitor, thumbnails that are just a random frame of your face mid-sentence. You made the video. You never built the room it lives in.

As someone who already has real videos published and still isn’t seeing the subscribers or the search traffic to match, this session is aimed squarely at you. Regina is upfront that she’s not duplicating the technical YouTube training already taught elsewhere in this material. Her own words: her purpose “is not to train on stuff that he’s trained on, but just to be a compliment to what he’s presented.” This session is the branding and presence layer sitting on top of the technical one.

Why does YouTube care about anything besides your video itself?

YouTube is a search engine, the second largest one after Google, since Google owns it. But Regina’s real point is that it behaves like a social platform first. The more comments, likes, and subscribes a channel earns, the more YouTube favors it in search and recommendations. And there’s one metric she comes back to more than any other.

they would rather have a video that you have 10 people watching that video all the way through from start to finish, or at least most of it, rather than having, you know, hundreds or thousands of people watching it.

Ten people finishing a video beats a thousand people bouncing off it in the first few seconds, because YouTube reads completion as a signal that the content is worth showing to more people. As she puts it plainly, “They’re really huge on watch time.” That single fact should change how you think about your own thumbnails and openings: a clickbait title that gets the click but not the watch is actively working against your channel, not for it.

What’s actually on the channel-building checklist?

Regina runs through a specific list she wants you working through gradually, not all at once, with a PDF of reference links attached to the session for each item: channel icon, channel art, watermarking your videos, monetizing videos, adding a channel trailer, creating thumbnails, organizing your channel into sections, and using intros, outros, and annotations.

A few of these carry real numbers worth remembering. Your channel icon renders at a tiny 98 by 98 pixels, so Regina recommends uploading an 800 by 800 image so it still looks sharp. Thumbnails should be built at 1280 by 720, and she builds hers in Canva or PicMonkey, often just a screenshot from the video itself with text laid over it, because she got tired of every thumbnail on her channel being another shot of her own face.

The channel trailer deserves special attention because it does something no other single piece does: it shows a different video to someone who has never subscribed to you than to someone who already has. Your existing bridge video, the one built to connect your brand to your offer, is very likely the right trailer, since a stranger landing on your channel for the first time needs exactly the same introduction a stranger clicking your bridge video needs.

• Pick at least three items from the channel checklist to implement this week.
• Subscribe to, like, and comment on five other channels in your network.
• Use your existing bridge video as your channel trailer for new visitors.
• Build thumbnails at 1280 by 720 instead of relying on a random video frame.

Why bother collaborating with other YouTubers at all?

Regina’s example here is a UK creator who built an entire audience habit around trading intros with other YouTubers. It’s the same instinct behind her own team’s setup, where she plainly credits her collaborator John as the YouTube king of their team. Nobody builds a channel presence solo. Collaboration doesn’t require the other person to be in your business, or even your niche. It requires two channels willing to send each other a short clip, credit each other, and let both audiences discover somebody new.

None of this replaces making good videos. It’s what happens after you’ve made them, so the channel they live on actually earns the subscribes, the watch time, and the search ranking the videos deserve. Create your free account at empowernetwork.com/watch to watch the full session and download the audio, including the complete reference list Regina built for every item above.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Hey guys, it's Regina here, and in this video, I just wanted to talk about being able to maximize your videos by developing a stronger YouTube presence. And we're always uploading our own videos. Might as well make it look inviting or look nice. And I'm just going to go through some stuff here, but first of all, John is our YouTube king.

He's got some excellent YouTube training for you on technical ways to optimize your channel and your video. And he's got some good tips and tricks, so if you haven't seen his training, then go see it. It's excellent. My purpose here is not to train on stuff that he's trained on, but just to be a compliment to what he's presented.

And Rhonda is our branding queen. She grooms us. Well, she's huge on brands, your branding, what is your brand, and being able to sell without selling through attraction marketing. So, you know, basically having your own presence and just being able to build your brand so that your audience can know, like, and trust you.

So why not combine their skills and include our social media knowledge? So you want to keep in mind that YouTube is a social media platform. Which means that the more interaction and the more likes and the more subscribes that you have to your channel, the more YouTube likes it. And it's not only that, is they're huge on watch time, which basically means they would rather have a video that you have 10 people watching that video all the way through from start to finish, or at least most of it, rather than having, you know, hundreds or thousands of people watching it.

Looking at that video and clicking off right away. They're really huge on watch time. So you want to keep that in mind and keep that in mind for something that I'm going to talk about later. And this is the second search engine, the second largest search engine.

Well, it makes sense because YouTube is owned by Google, right? So we already do video marketing and we upload our videos to YouTube. So you might as well tighten up our presence and make our channel inviting for people to come back. So these are some of the things that you can implement.

Okay. And I have this long list of things here, and these are the things that I'm going to go over and keep in mind that my intention here is just to kind of get you up and running and just give you these resources so that you can take it and implement it in your own time as well. I am including the PDF with all the links of references for each of these items here on this list. So, you know, if you're like, shoot, I don't remember how to add a channel trailer.

Well, how do I go and do that? Well, I have that link here for you so that you can go back and implement it because there's quite a bit of information. And I'm also planting seeds in your head so you can have some things to think about when you're tightening up your channel and, you know, just creating a culture and a little community on your channel. So channel icon, channel art, watermark videos, monetizing videos, adding the channel trailer, creating a thumbnail for your videos, channel organization.

Create an annotation on a video, and collaboration. And so, I want you implement this week is to pick at least three from the list above and then subscribe at least 5 other channels of.

Five other channels of other people, and liking, comment on to their videos. And so I want you to subscribe to at least five other channel of people in this group, and like and comment on to their video, well, because YouTube is a social media platform, and it oczywiście a search engine, so the more activity is on your videos and channel, the more exposure you get, the higher you rank, etc, etc. And you want to pay it forward. Like I said, YouTube is huge on watch time. So if you have a group of people that you mastermind with, and you guys kind of just leverage each other, and comment and like and watch each other’s videos, then you know they’ll do that for you if you do that for them. So it’s just a good way to kind of get some activity going on your channel while you’re building it.

So, just to get into it, the channel icon is just a little square on the banner, and you want to get, or you want to save out an image, or that is, these are square images, and they render out at 98 by 98 pixels. And so we recommend uploading an 800 by 800 pixel image. These are the, these are different file types that you can use: JPEG, gif, BMP, or PNG, no animated gifts. They have to be in static images. Yeah, don’t upload pictures containing celebrities, nudity, artwork, blah blah blah, copyrighted images. And so I’ve set the YouTube community guidelines link right here for you guys, take a look at.

Now, Channel art. What you see, what you see here, is exactly what you’re going to see here in the middle, the logo and text area. And this is just kind of a general, this is just kind of a template that you can use. I generally, I just put my logo in the middle, right snap tab in the middle, and then the rest of the, the rest of the page is just like, all, you know, white. And I just do that just for simplicity sake, I don’t like it too busy for me, but that’s just my preference. But I’m including this art template, channel art template, for you to use so that in your own time you can use it. And I think I have a Photoshop file, and I just have like a regular PNG.

So, in video programming, watermarking your videos. And what does it mean to watermark your videos? Well, my watermarking your videos, let me show you. And in my videos here, just as, as, as, just as an example, so it’s just this cute little thing up here on the top right, that’s what I mean by watermarking videos. In some cases, watermarking might actually mean putting text physically on the video here, but in YouTube terms, it just means this little thing, just your little branding icon. And to be able to access that, you can go to your in video programming, and you, and these are just the instructions on how to enable your in video programming, which is, which allows you to add a watermark. I have these directions here for you. I have a link for you as well at the end of this presentation that you can use. And you can see here on this image on the right, you know, you can add a watermark, and you can add a feature, and you can also feature a video, and keep that in mind too, when I talk about intros and outros, this in video program area and being able to feature a video, I’ll talk about that briefly when doing intros and outros.

Now, monetizing your videos. So, my Google, or YouTube, works on ads as well, and you want to be able to monetize your videos. And that’s pretty cool too, because it’ll give you an incentive to make more videos, and make them, make them interesting enough for people to watch, so that you can get more traffic. So what you’ll want to do is, you’ll want to enable your Google adsense account by just signing up with your Google account, because you can just use the same login information. So, I don’t, I don’t know the exact URL, the book that might be absence of google.com, we should just google it, google.com forward slash adsense. And yeah, this shows you how to monetize your videos.

So, when you’re monetizing your video, you want to make sure that the content that you’re using is royalty free, or otherwise, you know, you can, they can track you down and say, hey, they can take your video down, or whatever. Sometimes, if I’m using music that I know is copyrighted, I will put the link in the description box. A lot of times, I’ll go to soundcloud.com, or I’ll contact musicians or producers, and ask them if I can use your music, and tell them that I credit them in, in my video, and they’ll usually say yes or no. But usually, being able to clearly credit them is probably, you know, is good enough, depending on, you know, what artist you’re, you’re featuring, or what music you’re featuring. So, to be able to monetize your videos, you can go to your channel settings. So if you go to your, go to your channel, and go to monetize, you can monetize your videos there. And yeah, and then here’s another link for more information on that.

Adding a channel trailer, and I’m just going to show you where you can add that. So on your channel, when you’re in youtube and you go to, when you go to my channel, this is basically what, what people will see, what, what people will not see, see, when I mouse over this, it says unsubscribe trailer. Well, that just means that if a person that goes onto your channel and they’re not subscribe to you, this is what they see. And basically, you want this channel trailer to be, is an overview of who you are. I’m going to come back tomorrow for one more video, and we’ll see you guys then.

Back to this in a second too, because I’m going to show you another view. So basically, you know, for those who browse onto your channel, they are able to get to know you a bit better, you know, right away. So you want to tell them who you are, you know, and what your channel is all about.

And I mean, this is perfect, you probably already have a video like this. It’s just perfect for you to use, to, you know, and talk about, you know, what is your big why, why are you doing what you’re doing, and who are you, and what did, who got, or what got you into this business, or what got you into whatever you’re trying to promote. And we’ve talked a lot about, you know, your bridge, your bridge video, and I think that would be just the perfect trailer to put, if, if you’re promoting your business.

So going back to this bit for your unsubscribe trailer, you can also see what you are doing and what your channel is all about. So I’m going to, you can change it out, and you can remove the trailer or whatever. But if you click on unsubscribe trailer, you’ll see that there’s another option that says subscriber view, and this is what people see if they’re already subscribed to you. So there’s just going to be a list of your uploads, and you know, what to watch next, and stuff. So that’s pretty cool. So these are just some images to show you how to change your trailer, it’s fairly straightforward.

Creating thumbnails for your videos. Now, if you’re doing strictly marketing videos, it’s like strictly a sales video, sometimes you want to kind of consider what kind of video you have, because sometimes creating thumbnails may make it look too marketing, I guess. But for me personally, and this is just what I, you know, decide, because I do, you know, my husband and I travel the world, so we do reviews and we do different things, and so we do, we create thumbnails to make our videos stand out. So when people are looking at your videos, you want to give them a reason to click and watch your video, and they don’t have to be super fancy.

And the reason why I started doing this is, well, first of all, I started watching a lot of the, the kids these days, these YouTube stars, and they do it as well, and I’ve been actually kind of watching them and seeing what they’ve been doing. But when I was looking at my channel a couple months ago, I got sick of looking at my face all the time. So, you know, if I go to my videos, a lot of my older videos are just, let me see if I can find any, but see, like a lot of my old videos are just there. I got bored of just looking at my face, and it’s like, okay, well, you know what I started up doing is, you know, just creating thumbnails that are, are useful.

So it’s like, if I see something and I say, oh, look, how to get around get responses API web form double opt-in, okay, well, that’s cool, because I know I have it written here as the title. But if I just look at the video, you know, most of us are visual, it’s like you can see that, oh, get response, okay, well, that’s easy. Or even just, you know, when we went to Texas, and I went to the Cadillac Ranch, it’s like, yeah, this is Cadillac Ranch, but okay, there’s, you know, you can put up a really cool image and then just put that up there. But it also depends on the type of video you’re doing, because I mean, in the end, you want to come across as being genuine, well, you want to be genuine, but you want to come across as genuine as well. And so you make the ultimate decision on what, what you think will, will be the best, and you can always test it as well.

You know, here’s another example, is picking blog topics, like you can see that from a mile away because it’s bright yellow. And so your thumbnail size, 1280 by 720, is how, is, you know, the size that I make it. Sometimes I take screenshots of the actual video itself and just put text over it, and make it really, really simple. So yeah, 1280 by 720 is the size that you’ll want to create your thumbnail at.

So these are just a couple of easy recommendations. I know there’s a ton of applications out there, but I mostly use canva.com and PicMonkey.com. I know that for the Android there’s Fonto, and there’s Photoshop Express, there’s GIMP, which is an open source platform like Photoshop. So I like canva.com and PicMonkey.com, for, like, for like stuff that I want to do quick and easy, they’re free. You can buy a premium version of, you can buy the premium, or upgrade to the premium account with PicMonkey and canva.com. I think some of their elements cost a dollar or something, but you can manage to do it for free, you can get around with it. So it’s super, super easy.

Okay, organizing your channel. I’m, I’ve included the inspired travelers here, because they did a really good job of organizing their channel, how, like for example, this row here is a, is that one of their playlists, how we change our lives, 120 days Muay Thai in Thailand, and live life on your own terms. So they’ve got these playlists all laid out for you, and they’re just, if they’re just nicely organized. Sometimes, you know, when you start your YouTube channel, there will just be kind of a list, like just a list that goes straight down on the left, but being able to organize them, and, and show people where you want them to go to, is probably helps the most.

Now, my, our channels, we have a couple channels, but they’re mostly on our travels. But I also got, have an area here where I have like interviews of people, you know, business owners. I have one just, you know, for inspiration, motivation. I have success tips. I have free training. And you can organize it in any way you want. To be able to do it is that you want to create a section here. So, add a section, you can select the type of content you want, whether the specific videos, whether their playlist, created playlist, single playlists, you can create a vertical list or horizontal row, whatever you want to do.

And it's just easy to move them up and down, so you can just move them up and down however you want to organize it. But then at least if someone comes to your channel and they're like, hey this is really cool, they've got everything, you know, if there's something specific, like they need some inspiration, they can just go directly to the inspiration and motivation area. So yeah, playlists are a great way to group your videos. I mean, they're not the only way, but they're the great way to organize your videos, group your videos, and organize your channel and just make it look kind of nice and neat and interesting, I guess.

Intros and outros. So earlier I was talking about in-video programming where, you know, setting up your watermark, but also in here there's an option to feature a video. And this video is a three-second video that can be used across all of your videos. And that's what I wanted to get into with intros and outros.

So an intro basically is a three-second video where, you know, you can have your logo across, you know, moving across the screen or just like a picture or you can have, you know, a saying or something that you say and it'll be featured on every single one of your videos. And it's just a good way for people to kind of know who you are, you know, it's just a great way to brand your videos. So simple three-second intros can be placed as a feature before all videos. You know, as a branding intro.

And here's a link here that you guys can go to. Again, it's in the document that's included with this presentation. You can use outros and annotations to get the viewer to interact. So for example, you can get them to subscribe to a channel.

You can get them to lead into a new video for like a video series. I just found the ability to enable external links and annotations. I don't think you were able to do that before. So there used to be a sneaky workaround that I used, but you can use external links.

I think you can use it as long as it's the same root URL of the website that you're associating your YouTube channel with. So I haven't really looked into it too much, but it's definitely something that you'll want to look into. So I just wanted to mention that. So you're probably wondering, you know, what the heck is all this, you know, annotation stuff?

I'm going to go over this really briefly, and I'll do a video to talk a bit more about annotations and how to use them because I think they're very useful because you can actually do your call to actions directly onto your video. So just as an example, I'm just going to go through, okay, so I have a series, a Vagabond Lifestyle series, and it's just basically about, you know, how you can live as, you know, as a vagabond, you know, pretty much as a digital nomad. Some of the things that we think about when we're traveling and, you know, how we pack and all of that stuff.

So I think I have an intro here that I put myself, and it's just a good, and this is just a good example of what you can use for your feature video. I manually included them in my videos because I was just doing a blogging challenge, so it's only used for some of my videos. So that's just my intro that I'm using for all of them. Now I'm just going to turn this off.

Okay. So I'm going to turn this off. So that's a good example, a good example for an intro. An outro, this is just an example of an outro, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to do this, but I would definitely recommend going to other people's channels, especially the kids nowadays, and I'm always going to say that because the kids, the content that they're coming out with these days are, you know, absolutely brilliant, and they do all these crazy things.

And it just, they're brilliant, kids are brilliant. So my video here, it was just a two-minute video, and I, you know, started talking about, you know, introducing the series that I was doing here. And then I get into, it stops here, after a couple seconds, yeah, I have my bug bites, that's why I'm rubbing my arm. So here's an example of an outro.

So basically, I'm actually… Okay. So I'm actually showing an older video that I have, either I'm showing an older video or a newer video, but it's kind of my outro, and what I'm doing for that, I think this is an older video. The reason why I'm doing that is just to kind of give a bit of entertainment, and then also I have these two boxes here.

One says, click here to see day three, and click here to see all the 21 day challenges. And these are clickable annotations that'll actually take me to, for example, click here to see all the 21 day challenges. It'll take me to my 21 day blogging challenge playlist, but also, while this loads, but also on this one, you can actually click directly to a video. So these are clickable annotations that you can add to a video, forward to a video, a playlist.

You can forward, you can subscribe, see I have my little subscribe button here, and they're just annotations. And I highly recommend that you use them because then you don't have to say, okay, click below to subscribe. You definitely have it here, and you're saying, just subscribe to my channel. It's easy, just subscribe to it.

And there's a billion different ways that you can do it too, but that's just a brief overview, and if you don't know much about annotations, I highly recommend you either look it up or I have a video, a more in-depth video on that. Collaboration. This is a huge, huge thing. With YouTube itself.

And basically what you're doing is you're finding another YouTuber, and you're doing videos together. And they don't have to be, you don't have to physically be together. Sometimes what happens is, and they don't even have to be in the same niche, but what will happen is, for example, there's a guy in the UK, and his YouTube name is Fun4Louis, and he gets other YouTubers to subscribe to his channel. That's a huge thing.

And he actually has a YouTube channel as well. And he gets other YouTubers to do an intro for him, and then he just kind of says, and then he puts the link to their channel, or a link to one of their videos before he goes into his main content. So you can send each other certain clips. Like if I have, you know, wanted somebody to do something for me, I can just say, hey, hey, I was wondering if you can send me a clip with you doing like a handstand on the lake near your house or something silly, you know.

I would do that, and I would credit that person, of course. And so this is a perfect way for you guys. I appreciate it. And then you can just go ahead and subscribe to the channel.

I'll see you guys in the next video, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. to promote each other.

Now I know it gets a bit tricky when you're dealing with marketing and business and there's always kind of this thing where they're on my team but what if they end up going to the other person and signing up under them. In the end really whoever you sign up with and whoever signs up with you is the person that's meant to sign up for you if they stay with you because really the people that you want to work with are people who want to work with you. But you don't even have to use people who you're working with. You can be doing a work at home business and then have the butcher down the street do some weird video to give to you.

It all kind of has a bit of entertainment value in it as well and it's nice to see different things and being able to collaborate just allows you to get your subscribers. You get more exposure because both of you can put videos on each of your channels so this is a good way to get exposure. So like I said earlier what you can do is implement three from the list below and be social. Subscribe to at least five other channels and comment and like on their videos.

And if you've already done these then look for them. Okay. Look for at least two people who aren't working in your business with you right now whose channels you really, really like and subscribe to them. And just to kind of see what, you know, and kind of study what kind of videos, why you like them, what kind of videos they put up, what kind of content they put up, why it intrigues you, you know, even I mean social media platforms so comment and like on their videos and get to know other people as well.

It's no different than Twitter. It's no different than Facebook. It's just another avenue to get your content out there and get more eyeballs on your content and be able to sell what you have to sell. Also, yeah if you've already done everything then try optimizing three of your videos.

Go through the John training. The John training. His YouTube training optimized your videos. Maybe make a few thumbnails.

I don't think he makes, he uses custom thumbnails. Because, yeah he just wanted to show you videos. Oh I love that. wants you to be able to have, I think he just wants people to, um, to see, you know, your face and look like, make, see that you're a normal person.

And that's fine too. It really is up to your preference. I'm just showing you something that you can do. Um, and then do number two, be social, subscribe to, um, other five other channels and then like and comment on their videos.

And I just wanted to thank you so much for, yeah, for watching this video. These are the references, the reference links that I have for you that you can use to go back. Once you go back through these slides, you can read up more on each of these information. If there is something specific that you would like me to go over, by all means contact me and I can probably hook you up.

Anyways, hope you have a good day and hope this was really helpful to you. Um, you know, we, the, the thing about, about putting, about blogging and vlogging is putting out online content for, to create more online real estate and, you know, strengthen your brand and for you to give more value to your audience. So hope you have a good day and I'll talk to you later. Thanks.

Bye.