How To Make Custom Thumbnails For Your YouTube Videos - PicMonkey Tutorial

It doesn't matter how great your content is, if your thumbnail and your title doesn't get somebody to click on it, nobody is ever going to watch your videos.

So what can you do to make.

Your titles and thumbnails more click worthy? Stick around because I'm going to share with you some of the best practices on making better thumbnails and give you a tutorial in PicMonkey on how you can do this. Hi, my name is Trina, I am a YouTube strategist and I'm committed to helping you do YouTube better. One of the ways to do YouTube better is to create better thumbnails, but I understand that you may be creating thumbnails that you think are amazing and that's great. But I want you to look at the data. You can go into your YouTube analytics under the new Studio beta and you can check at your thumbnail click through rate. Now this isn't just your thumbnail, this is your thumbnail and your title combined. But you're going to see how these two pieces are working together to get people to click on your content. Now if this thumbnail click through rate is anything below, let's say 3 or 4%, there's definitely room for improvement. Now there's no specific right percentage to target, but what I want you to target is constantly making that click through rate better for you. So if you're at a 2%, you're at a 3%. I want you to shoot to making it a 4%. Once you hit a 4%, I want you to shoot to hitting a 5%. So I so what constitutes as a good thumbnail you may be asking. Here are some of the best practices to use when creating thumbnails. First, I always suggest you putting yourself on that thumbnail. People are more likely to click through and trust you if they see you on the thumbnails and they can see.

The whites of your eyes.

Now there's a way to do this in Photoshop and I think also in PicMonkey where you can take out the background behind you and just transpose yourself on another photo, which I'm going to walk through here in a little bit. But it's going to be important for you to get your face on that thumbnail somewhere. What I like to do for my thumbnails is once I'm done shooting this video, I'm going to turn this camera on self timer and I'm just going.

To take shots of myself posing.

It's so much easier to have these photos than trying to take a screen Capture of me talking in a video.

First of all, it's going to take.

Me a lot longer to try to find the best shot of me without like weird movements or blurry hands. And it's just going to be a lot quicker process. If you take actual photos of yourself for your thumbnails, you also want to have some kind of consistency in your thumbnails. If somebody watches one of your videos, you want it to be easily recognized.

In the suggested videos.

Or if they pop onto YouTube again, they can easily recognize your thumbnails. So, so what I do to brand.

Mine is I always have kind of.

The same color thumbnail, like it's kind of airy whiteish. And then I have that pink corner tab with my logo so that people.

Know that's a Trina video.

So how can you brand your thumbnails using the same colors in every single thumbnail, the same font? So there's some kind of uniformity across.

All of your thumbnails to make it super easy for your people to, to.

Find more content from you here on YouTube. All right, I want to take you over to PicMonkey, which is a free tool that you can use to show you how to create some really click worthy thumbnails.

All right, so here you'll see all of my options for thumbnail pictures for this video. So we're just going to go ahead, grab this and download it. Then we're going to go up here to PicMonkey and I do have an account. You can use some of the features here on PicMonkey for free. So I would get started on PicMonkey for free first to see what you like. What I do like is they already have templates over here. So you can go over to the YouTube template and already use some of these thumbnails as a great way to get started. I also have my own templates that I created in Canva. So you'll see these are edible templates. So every time I create a new video, I can pop my picture in here. So if I want to grab this picture and pop it right in there, I can edit this and then I just change the title here. Or maybe I want to use this template right here. We need a longer photo, but we need a different style photo. So maybe we grab this photo, but it needs to be on the other side because I want my text here so we can flip it horizontally and there it's on that side and I can make this text. You know, my, my colors that I. My brand colors that I have. All right, that's why I really like having pre made templates. Again, I have four of these inside of Canva and that's something that I offer my members of YouTube for Creatives. They get these, these templates for free. But let's go back to PicMonkey and show you how to create your own thumbnails. Let's just say you want to start from scratch. So let's create a new and we want to, let's do a blank canvas because we're starting from brand new. This is the dimensions that you will want for a YouTube thumbnail. The 1920 by 1080. Now you have this fresh graphic. The next thing you want to do is add in a photo because a photo of you always performs better on YouTube. So you can up here to add an image.

All right, then what I really like.

About PicMonkey is you can do different layers. So you'll see how this comes into play here in a second. From here you can start editing this photo. And what I really think is important is adjusting the exposure so you want your photo to be bright so we can add brightness. I'm going to show you how to make that not look so pale here in a second. Pump up the highlights as well. Then you want to hit apply. The next thing I like to do is colors. And I really want to saturate this to make it stand out a bit. You don't want to get too orange and give it a little vibrance. All right. Then if it's looking yellow, my photos always tend to look a little yellow. I'll add the cooler temperature to it. You add a little bit of blue and it just takes out all of that yellow. So we're going to head and apply that. Next thing you can start to do is maybe make this a little bit bigger. And let's say we want to take out the background. So what you can do next is come over to the graphics here and hit erase and you can just start erasing all around you. You'll want to start with a larger size first because we can easily get rid of all this pretty quickly. So you just go through here. Get rid of as much as possible. Get as close to you as you can. As you start to erase all of your background, especially if you want just a solid color in the background. Once you have the majority of that out, then you want to go down and make the eraser size just a little bit smaller so you don't have to worry about erasing your head and don't worry about getting right close to you. Remember, thumbnails are super tiny as it is, so nobody's going to notice if it's not right up against your hair or you maybe cut off your shirt a little bit. You can go a little slower on this process if you want. But again, tiny details aren't necessarily going to matter on a thumbnail because they're not really going to see all those details. So I'm just going to go through here. Okay, so now we have that. You can start to move this around. You might want to erase the rest of this stuff, too. But if you're just using this particular photo, you won't have to worry about what you didn't erase again. You can enlarge it a bit if you want. Now, let's say you want to make this a solid color in the background. So you're going to want to grab a shape. So come over here to graphics and come to basic. Just grab a square and I'm going to change it to my brand color. So my brand color. I know the hex code, right? Pop in that hex code and let's just make this the whole length of this particular square. Now, since this is on top, what I'm going to do, like I said here with layers, is I'm going to take this photo layer, move it to the top above the square, and there I am. Now, the next thing you want to do is add some text. So you could add a shape behind your text if you want. So let's just say we're going to add some white here, because I'm going to add my text inside of here to make sure it stands out right. And then you can also right click this and copy and paste it so that you have two of the exact same things. If your text is going to be a little bit longer. Now I'm going to go into text. Now, remember, when you are doing your thumbnails, you really want to make sure you're consistent. So all the coloring that you have should be consistent across all of your thumbnails. And your text should be consistent, too. You also want to have minimal text on your thumbnails. You don't want to overdo it. So we're going to say this is the video about thumbnails. So I'm going to add some text. My fonts are generally lato. Probably not saying that right. And the other one is Monte Serif. So let's kind of go ahead and use Monticera here. Gonna move this up and say thumb nails, right? Center it right in there, and it'll tell you where it. When it's centered. And then I want to add another text that says four more views. Let's make sure that fits. It's a little bit bigger than the. The box that we created. So let's make this just a little bit smaller so it fits. I'm going to pop it right under this guy and I can move this to fit where I want it to. So I'm going to pull it out, pull this up. I want to make this a little bit bigger, too, just so it looks aesthetically pleasing. And you can just play with this until you think it looks good. Let's say you want to add an emoji here. What you're looking for here is you want to make sure the background is transparent so that you can use it on that thumbnail. Now I'll show you what a transparent one looks like here in a second. So see how that has that little checker box that is transparent. So you're going to right click save image as heart emoji. And now what I can do is I can come back to PicMonkey, pull this in, and you can also tap tilt it, Maybe add a 100% emoji in there as well. You could also get stock photos and put it behind here. So let me show you an example of that. I have a subscription to a stock photo membership called Hot Stock. And what happens here is I get access to all these different stock photos that are already created. I just download. So what I'm looking for is an image or imagery that I could use in the background of this video. I could also, as we saw back here, I could also use some of the icons like this right here, if that fits with. I was talking about a vlog, going to the beach or something. I could definitely use some of those icons from this particular membership site. So let's say we're going to use this as a background. So we're going to go ahead and download it and we're going to come back to PicMonkey and we're going to upload it here to this. And I'm going to use that palm tree as the background here, not necessarily this pink background. And I'll show you how one little cool trick also to make your text stand out is you don't want this particular box. We can delete that. What I would suggest doing is going ahead and copying this. So highlight this, right click and copy. Right click and paste. You can create like a shadow effect. So what you want to do is zoom in just a little bit to make this work. And we'll want to make. Let's make the one in the back. So again you can come over here and use this to really manage all your different layers. So I'm going to just pop that there. It won't make a difference, but we have the top layer clicked and we're going to make that white. All right, now when you zoom out, see how it looks like you can see a shadow. Simple as that. Now we have that stock photo that we want to add. So. So we're going to go ahead and drop it in here. And go ahead and drop it in here. Now you can drop it here to edit that photo before you actually put it on your thumbnail or just put it on the current image without any editing. So now we have this beautiful imagery of palm trees and I want it to go right here and I can go back to this solid square and delete it if I want. But. But then you're going to change this color. So maybe this is your pink now so that pops and you can get rid of that square and you can just start to mess around with it. The last thing I want you to do is I would prefer you always kind of watermark your corner here. Reason being is when you see suggested videos on the side, patterns show up and it's generally this pattern, anything in a pattern right here. So what I always do is I have a hot pink corner on my thumbnails. So you can do that by just going into graphics. Go to the basic here, grab a triangle, pop it here into the corner, just like that, change it to your coloring. And if you have a logo, all you need to do is upload your logo, add it into that little corner and then you have that consistent branding across the board on your thumbnails.

Alright, now that you have people clicking through your videos with your awesome new thumbnails, let's make sure people are watching your content. Create a playlist on the screen right now of my best videos to help you do YouTube better. Make sure you click on that playlist and watch it to get all the best strategies that are working on YouTube right now. And I'll see you over there on that next video.