How To Create A YouTube Channel (2026 Guide For Beginners)

Here's how to create a YouTube channel step by step in 2024 with all of the latest optimization techniques to make sure that your channel is optimized to get as many views as you possibly can, including a lot of the key optimization features that most people miss. And by the way, congratulations if you're starting a channel on YouTube because it is the best place on the internet to start and grow an online business. And this is coming from someone who's made millions of dollars from starting dozens of different YouTube channels. So So you're making a fantastic choice. And let's start with step number 1, which is to actually create your account. And if you already have a Google account, you can skip this part right here. But if you don't, simply go down and click Create Account, and then select For Work or My Business if you're gonna be treating YouTube as a business. Then from here, you can put your first and last name in, click Next, and from here, enter some basic information like your birthday, a couple other things. They may also ask you to verify your phone number, and then they'll ask you to put in the name of the Gmail you'd like to secure and then from there you will have a Gmail account in which you can create your YouTube channel with. And now once you already have a Google account, what you can do is click on your profile picture in the top right and then go down here to settings. From here then, we're going to click create a new channel. And you can have many different channels under one Google account if you'd like. Then you can simply click create channel. From here you can give your channel a name. This is going to be a channel I'm creating for my younger sister who is recently starting YouTube. So we can simply type in Kayla's Cash, what we're gonna call the channel, check this box right here, and then click Create. Now one quick bonus tip for creating your YouTube channel, make sure to use a password manager for saving the password of your Google account. It'll help you so much. And the one that I recommend is called Bitwarden, and it is completely free. And if you need some help coming up with a YouTube channel name, you can simply go on over to a website called ChatGPT, which is completely free. And type in, give me 30 YouTube channel name ideas for a channel about making money, and then click enter right there. And then you can see that ChatGPT will go ahead and give you 30 different great channel name ideas. Now with all of these ideas that you get right here, make sure that you run these through a website like the WIPO Global Brand Name Database to make sure that it's not already an established company and also double-check on YouTube that there's no huge channels using one of these names. But you can get hundreds of name ideas from here, and I almost guarantee you'll find a good one doing this. And now it's time for step number 3, which is customizing your channel. Once you have your YouTube channel created, you can get to it at any time just by simply clicking your profile picture and then clicking View Your Channel. It'll bring you right to it right here. And in order to add a profile picture, it's very easy. Simply simply just hover over your profile picture, click it, and then it'll let you upload a new profile picture right here. And in order to create a profile picture that looks very professional, I recommend using a website called snappa.com, and I'll leave a link down below where you can check it out. But it's basically a fantastic image maker where you can create images directly online. And we're just gonna use a photo for my sister right here for her channel. But if you're creating, for example, a faceless channel, What I recommend doing here, just go to custom graphic or size and put in 1080 by 1080 for the size and click create. Then you'll want to add a banner image, which is the image that shows in the background of your YouTube channel. In order to do that, all you simply have to do is go to, back to Snappa, and they have a built-in YouTube banner template right here, which is 2560 by 1440 for the dimensions. And you can just click that right there if you're using Snappa. And it'll give you tons of templates that you can use to create that channel banner. And here's a good one right here that we can use for my sister's channel right there. We can just click it and it'll open it up, and then you can simply edit any text that's on here. Since we're gonna be calling her channel Kayla's Cash, just like that right there. I wanna get rid of this Twitter and Instagram logo right there, and instead I just basically want this right here. And then I can upload a photo of her right here if we want to. We can resize it a little bit. And what's cool about Snappluzz, we can even remove the image background if we wanted to right there. I'm gonna keep this simple because I wanna keep this fast for you guys for this tutorial. So we're just gonna click Save and then click Download and then click Web Optimized JPEG. Go back to YouTube Studio, click Upload for Banner Image, select your banner image, click Done, and boom, now we have a background image for our channel. For video watermark, this doesn't matter that much. You can literally just put some text that says subscribe. I see some people do that, but you can just leave it blank as well. And then if you click View Your Channel, you can take a look at the changes that you made and see what it looks like. Step number 4 now is unlocking all of the features for your channel. Some features, for example, adding custom thumbnails on your videos to entice people to click them, do require some additional verification. I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that right now. From your YouTube channel page, click your profile picture in the top right and then select YouTube Studio. Your YouTube Studio will be your hub for checking analytics, changing settings, and basically getting into the behind the scenes of your YouTube channel. And from your YouTube Analytics, you can go to the left-hand side right here and go all the way down to the bottom to Settings. And then from Settings, go to the side right here and click Channel, and then click Feature Eligibility. From here, in order to unlock, for example, custom thumbnails, which is an absolute must— I highly recommend doing this before you upload a single video on your YouTube channel— all you have to do is just verify your phone number. So click Verify Phone Number, put your number in right there, it'll send you a text message, verify it, click that, and then you'll be able to put in your phone number and then click Get Code. From here then, they're going to text me a 6-digit code real quick. Then I'm gonna enter this code right here and then click Submit. And boom, now my phone number is verified with YouTube. And now all of these features are enabled. Now there are some additional features which require even additional verification as well. For example, being able to upload more videos every day, being able to apply for monetization to put ads on our videos and make additional money that way, And this is a big one, putting external links in our video description. This is very important if we're selling something like affiliate products or our own product. This is very important to do, and it does require some additional verification. And you have two options for this. Number one, you can do something like upload a video of yourself, submit a valid form of identification to YouTube. They usually takes a couple days and they'll verify you. Or you can get some channel history, which simply means having your YouTube be active for around a month, meaning uploading regular videos, and then they will go ahead and enable these features on your channel. I usually just go the video history route, but if you do have some links that you need to put in your videos from the very beginning, make sure to go in here and do this. Now it's time for step number 5, which is optimizing your channel. These are some additional settings that are gonna help your channel get more views and rank in the algorithm faster. So let's dive straight into them, starting with going back into our YouTube Studio. From here, we're going to go to the left-hand side and go down to Settings, and then from here go to Channel and And first of all, select your country of residence. For me, I'm living in the United States, so I'm gonna go down and select United States. And directly under that, we can add keywords that relate to our channel. So my sister's channel right here is going to be about making money online. So I'm gonna put in keywords like make money online, earn money. And if you need any help with this, you can use something like ChatGPT. Give me 30 keywords about making money online. Click enter. Let's see what they give us right here. As you can see, it's given us a couple of good ones. For example, passive income. That's a good one right there. I wasn't thinking of. And then also a side hustle. Side hustles, make money. And then also put the name of your channel. So my sister's channel name is Kayla's Cash. And then we'll also just put Kayla in right there as well. So that way we're just putting a couple extra keywords that relate to our channel. And if you want to go even a step further with this and find the absolute best keywords to put here, you can check out a tool called vidIQ. I'll leave a link down below where you can get it basically for free for the first month, and that'll help you find the best keywords to use. From here then, we want to go to advanced settings and select if our channel is made for kids or not. This channel is not going to be made for children. All you simply have to do is ask yourself, is the intention of this channel to be shown to people under the age of 13? If that's no, then we click no, this channel is not for kids. Right there, and then simply click Save. The next step is to select our upload defaults, so we just go down here to Settings, and then go on up to Upload Defaults, and then from here, go to Advanced Settings, and then select your video language. This channel is going to be uploading videos in English, so we're gonna scroll down and just select Overall English right here. And if you know all of your videos will be in a single category as well, for example, my sister's are all gonna be how-to videos, I'm going to select How To and Style right there. And then I'm also going to select the title and description language, which is also obviously going to be English right there. And then we can simply click Save. This will save us a ton of time in the uploading process when we upload every new video. Now what we want to do is customize our channel to get as many views as possible, and this is very easy to do. Go to the left-hand side down to Customization, going over to the featured sections of your channel, click Add Section, And I recommend adding a popular video section because your popular videos are that way for a reason, because they're typically performing good within the algorithm. So we want to push people to those videos that land on our channel. So that will help you get more views. And you can add some playlists here if you want, as well as featured channels if you'd like. For example, um, we could add a section that says check out these channels. And of course we'll leave a link back to Make Money Matt right here. From my sister's channel. Thank you, Kayla, shout out. And once you've made these changes, you can also even add a channel trailer if you want, but in the beginning, we don't have any videos on this channel yet. We're just gonna click Publish, and we can add things like that channel trailer as well as a featured video for your returning subscribers later. And I would just recommend choosing one of your better videos for both of those two right there. Next up, we want to click Basic Info right here. And this is where you can do things like change the name of your channel if you would like. You can do that every 14 days on your YouTube channel. Or also change your YouTube handle. So your handle is different than your username. Your handle is basically the URL of your channel. So in this case, we got the handle Kayla's Cash. Not every handle is going to be available, so you can always double-check that prior to choosing which handle that you would like to do just by typing in one you're thinking about, and it'll show you if it's available right there if it shows that little check mark next to it. But we just want to keep Kayla's Cash right there for the handle for for it. And you can add some additional settings right here if you like, as well as a description for your channel. This is something that I do recommend filling out, and you can use something like ChatGPT to help you with this if you'd like. Write a 250-word description about a YouTube channel called Kayla's Cash which teaches people how to make money online in different tactics for doing so. Click enter. And then from here, it's going to give us a description that it wrote straight for us. So as you can see, it wrote, welcome to Kayla's Cash, the go-to YouTube channel for anyone looking to dive into the dynamic world of making money online. Hosted by Kayla, a seasoned entrepreneur, myriad ways of earning income in the digital age. And as you can see, 250 words was quite a bit. We're just going to use the first paragraph from this right here. So we'll just copy that over, put that right there in the description. From here you can scroll down, you can add some links to, for example, other social media you have, or if you have links to affiliate products or your own products, you can put those right there. And then also I do recommend adding some contact info. So you can just simply put in your email right there so people can reach out to you if they need to. And this is very important if, for example, sponsors wanted to reach out to you or other business dealings that you may want to know about. And now I know everyone here wants to make money from their YouTube channel, and I don't blame you. I've made millions of dollars from YouTube. It's completely transformed my life. So make sure when you're setting up your channel, go over here to the Earn tab on your YouTube Studio and then scroll down here. And as you can see, it requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in order to join the YouTube Partner Program. And after you're a part of that, you can start getting those regular paychecks from YouTube. So I recommend selecting Email Me right here so you can get emailed once you reach the requirements for doing this so you don't forget about it. You don't wanna forget to join the Partner Program. And start making that YouTube money. And then also go down here and turn on two-step verification. This is going to help keep your channel more secure. Just click Turn On right here, and then you can simply put in your phone number and do that. And also it's going to allow you to join the Partner Program, which will in turn let you get monetized when you hit those requirements. Now another very cool feature that you may wanna utilize is permissions. And in order to do this, simply go to your YouTube Studio, go down to the left side to Settings, and then click Permissions, and from here you can invite other people who have a Google account in order to access your channel. And you can give them different roles. For example, you can give them the role of moderator to just answer questions and stuff, and then you can also give the role so people can help edit your channel as well, like I'm doing right here for my sister. I'm helping her get set up and everything. Now one thing you can do if you'd like is add an auto-subscribe link in order to get more subscribers for your channel. And in order to do that, simply go to the URL bar of your YouTube channel and then put this text after it:?sub_confirmation=1. And I'll show you what that does. So if we copy that over right here and click enter on this link, it'll direct people to a link where it will confirm if people want to subscribe to your channel. This in turn will help you get a couple extra subscribers. I think it's worth doing. Simply click Customize Your Channel in order to add this link onto it, and then go to Basic Info, go down to Links right here, and then just simply put subscribe right there and put that link, click publish. And now if you click view your channel, you will see that subscribe link showing up right here. It just gives people one more option to subscribe to your channel there, along with if you wanna put some links to your other social media. And now it's time for step number 6, which is to start uploading and potentially even making money from YouTube. And if you wanna discover exactly how to make money on YouTube without making videos, feel free to check out this video next to me right here. It goes over this exact process, step by step. In fact, I give you 4 specific secrets for doing this in this video right here, including the best niches to do this in, how to generate tons of content quickly, and how to get a ton of views and subscribers fast so you're not just leaving this to luck. Check this out right here. My name is Matt Parr. Hope you got value from this, and I'll see you there.