This process will help you create YouTube thumbnails that get MORE VIEWS

If you aren't getting views on your YouTube videos, it's probably one of two things, your title or your thumbnail. And while both your title and your thumbnail play a very important part in your YouTube video, in this particular video I'm going to share with you the process to create thumbnails that more people are going to want to click on to help you get more views on your videos. Because usually most of us are drawn to visuals first. So I figured let's cover thumbnails now and maybe we'll cover titles later. So I'm going to break this video down into three different parts. So in the first part, we're going to talk about the three main do's and don'ts when it comes to creating a thumbnail for your YouTube videos. And the second part we are going to look at examples. We've had some of our viewers submit thumbnails and I'm going to pull some examples as well to show you what I think was done well and what could be improved on. And in the third part, I'm going to walk through how you can create a thumbnail using Canva. If this is something that you've needed right now, let me know that by hitting that thumbs up button right now. Let's move into to the first part and cover the do's and don'ts when it comes to creating YouTube thumbnails. So how do you know if your YouTube thumbnail is good or not? Well, YouTube provides us a metric called the click through rate, the ctr. Now this does include the title because the title and the thumbnail is what gets people to click. So you can't necessarily say it's the thumbnail that's getting you the click or the title. They do work together, but like I said earlier, images tend to draw people in first. So you want to look at your click through rate. YouTube average says anywhere between 2 to 10% is a good click through rate. What we do for my channel and what we do for all of our agency clients is we start to track what their click through rate is for each video. So we start to get a baseline. We know for me a baseline is about a 3.2% click through rate. Every time we publish one of my videos, we try to make sure we hit at least a 3.2% and if it doesn't hit that when we release it, we immediately tweak something, whether it's the title or the thumbnail. This is how you're going to start to track how to make your click through rate better and your thumbnail contributes to that click through rate. So the first do when it comes to YouTube thumbnails is having a photo of yourself. Studies just show people are more likely to click on a thumbnail with an actual human being on it. We feel like that's more trustworthy, especially if you can see the whites of your eyes. That's why you see so many thumbnails on YouTube with close ups of people's faces, because people are more likely to click on those thumbnails because when they can see the whites of your eyes, you seem psychological, magically more trustworthy. Another do is to have layers on your thumbnails to make it look more two dimensional. And I'm going to cover how to make layers on your thumbnails inside of Canva. But basically what I'm talking about is it looks like, you know, you, you are separated from the background. Maybe you have like text coming out from behind your head. You just want to make it look a little bit more two or three dimensional because that's what's going to grabs people's attention and stop the scroll. The next do is, is to minimize the amount of text on your thumbnail. And you do not want to be repeating the title of your video on your thumbnail. Your thumbnail is precious real estate and you don't just want to take up that precious real estate by repeating the title that they are going to see. So the text that you want to be including on your thumbnail should be three to five words max. And it should be trying to get the point across and as little amount of words as possible. Bonus points if you can get the point across or the value across of your video by just imagery. And the last do before we jump into the don'ts is do zoom out of your thumbnail when you're creating it. Like make it look really small. Because remember, a lot of us are watching YouTube now on our phones and the thumbnails are really small on our phones. So you want to make sure everything that you put on that thumbnail is viewable, even when it's shrunken down to a smaller size. Let's talk about the don'ts. And you don't want to clutter your thumbnail. You don't want to throw all these different things on your thumbnails like text and emojis. And you want it to be really clear, really easy to read. Because if it's too hard to read, people are just going to go right on by it. So do not clutter your Thumbnail. I wouldn't. Another don't is I wouldn't use a white or black background. So YouTube background in general is white and if you're in the dark mode it is in black. So white or black background. Thumbnails just tend to blend in a little bit more on YouTube. They don't stand out. So we tend to see lower click through rates when we have like a black or a white thumbnail. Don't use script font. So like those cursive fonts, I, yes, I use them, but they're usually for just like one word, just like an accent word. When you have all the text on your thumbnail like that cursive font, it is incredibly hard to read. And you really need that text to be super clear and stand out so that it draws people's eyes to your thumbnail and then to your title. And the last don't before we look at a few examples is don't think about your thumbnail as an afterthought. So last week I did a video on how I write my video game plan. I will link that up here for you to watch next. But I talk about how I plan the title of my video before I even write the content or my video script. And this is important because when I'm coming up with that title, I'm also thinking about the imagery I want to get from my thumbnail and the text that I want to use on my thumbnail. So my very first step in deciding which video I'm going to shoot next is the title of the video and the text that I want on that thumbnail. And then I write the hook of my video and I finish the rest of my video script. So let's look at a few examples that you've all submitted and then I want to show you a few examples of good thumbnails on my part and bad thumbnails on my part. So this is from Brianna. And you can see the name or the title of this video is huge. Costco haul 322. $362. We need a lot of groceries. And then you can see this is the thumbnail right here. So we can even pull it up into a larger view. Costco Grocery Haul. And what I initially see here is this is kind of hard to read, that this is Costco. I had to kind of squint a little bit. That color is super bright and harder to read. I also noticed that this is hard to read as well. If that is something really important. Like this is how much you send spend at Costco, that should be really clear. Maybe a solid text with, like, a black backdrop behind it. So I'm going to show you some examples here. I also noticed that these images are kind of dark. They're kind of hard to see. They're very small. This is just in my desktop. So if I'm looking at this on my phone, it's going to be even harder to notice that these are lentils. I can't even tell what this is. Maybe barbecue sauce. I can kind of tell that that's milk. And so you need to really get across on your thumbnail what the purpose or what the value of this video is going to be. So if we go back here and we look at this particular video, it's about a Costco haul. What I would do to figure out ways to make this thumbnail better is I would go to YouTube and search this particular term and see what other people are doing, see what is the trend. And you can see real quick how clear this is. We can see it's Costco by the Costco logo right there. Whereas with this particular thumb. Thumbnail, we're looking right here. I don't know. That's Costco initially, and it's hard to tell. So if you're trying to get people to click on your video because it's a Costco haul, we need that to be very clear. You can also see the food is a little bit more noticeable there. You see in the shopping cart. We can see how this is, like, a really big haul. This is showing us this is a haul without even really needing to tell us there's a hall. Like, I don't even think this text would be needed because we can tell visually that this is a hall. So what I would do when I am creating a thumbnail is I go and look and see what are the styles and what are the types of thumbnails people are currently creating, because I can get trends to help my thumbnails better. So that's what I would recommend here for Brianna is make Costco really clear. Make your text that you're using super clear. Let's go to the next one. And here we have Sheridan. And this particular video is eyebrow makeup for alopecia. And we can see right here is her thumbnail. So initially, what I see is this text is kind of hard to read, and it's not necessarily telling me why I should stop and learn about this or stop and read the title. I think we could lead with something more value proposed. Like, again, let's look at Eyebrow makeup for alopecia. This looks like this is the term she's going after. Let's go ahead and search this on YouTube and see what are the trends that we see here. So when we get YouTube to pull up here eyebrows for no hair alopecia makeup, it's super clear. Right. You can see how different when we pull this together. How different? That font is a lot clearer. Even this particular text blends in with that washcloth that you have. And so again, it just needs to be super clear. And we can see pointing to the eyes, eyebrows. Right. I'm going to show an example of a thumbnail that I have that does really well and it has arrows. So these are just some examples. Well, this is great you are showing up for this particular search term. I think it can be a little bit more clear that this is temporary eyebrow tattoos. Even if this was just the temporary eyebrow tattoos was the only text on there, but it was much bigger. Maybe similar to this or even similar to this. I think that can make the thumbnail even better. And then the third one that we're going to look at here is from counseling with Mr. B. You can see his thumbnail is new counselor tips. I like that the font is clear. I like that the font is big, but it's not necessarily pulling us in for a particular value. If we go to tips for new school counselors. Right. We're going to go ahead and highlight this and we're going to look again in YouTube search. And why would my thumbnail stand out compared to everybody else? Well, Mike is doing great here. He's showing up for number one in this term with over 13,000 views. I would see. Okay, how can I pitch value tips for new school counselors? Maybe it could be be a better counselor. Crush it as a school counselor. Right. Not just new school counselor tips, but what would make your tips different than anybody else? Like you're going to crush it. You're going to teach them to do better. Just give it a little bit more pizzazz, more of that buzzfeed type headline on that thumbnail to get them to then read the text. Let me show you example. One that's bad and one that's good. So this particular thumbnail, minimal successful business model, we're at a 1.9% click through rate. Now, we did tend to see more impressions on this particular video. But I think what happened here, again, if we go to the details, we can make this thumbnail a little bit bigger. I think it wasn't clear in minimal successful business model. I just think that was confusing. I don't think that caused people to stop. I think if I said something like simplest business model that could have caused people to stop. And then read the title, the Minimalist approach to Business I'm taking this year. So again, it all comes down into the text that you're using, the words that you're using. And when I'm talking about 3D, you can see I have this white outline right here. So it looks like I'm popping out of the background. And I'm going to show you how to do that here in just a minute. But let me show you a thumbnail that did really well on my channel and it's this particular one. Let's go ahead and blow this up just a bit. So you can see arrows anytime. You can have an arrow pointing to something to spark curiosity or always does. Well. So you can see this video is create a content calendar from scratch. But what people initially see is my content plan routine. They see an arrow and they're instantly being drawn to that asana board that is color coded. I know my audience loves to be organized and color coded. They just don't know how to get there. So that initially draws their attention. They say, oh, a content plan color coded like a calendar. It looks really great. Then they read the title. Create a content calendar from scratch. And I mentioned there's a social media calendar template and that's what they saw in the thumbnail. That's what made this particular video. I think if we saw we put it up back here, it has 11% click through rate right here, pulled up 10.8% click through rate as of today. So that's an example of how to do it. Well, now let's move into this third part and I'm going to show you how I create a thumbnail. So the very first thing when I'm creating my thumbnail is since I take my photos myself, I like the filter to be the same for every single video. So I use an app called Lightroom and I use a preset, the same preset every single time. So all of my photos look as close as possible. So when I take that photo, I will then share it to my phone. I will get on my phone and use this app. So it's called Lightroom. I will open up Lightroom so you can see that is one that I recently edited. But what I do is I come in here I go from my camera roll, I'm gonna pick one of these that isn't edited yet. So you can See, this one's not edited yet. So what I do is I come to my presets, I click on this one and it does make it super bright. So the next thing they do is I just adjust a lot of the exposure in the color so it looks decent. So I turn down the exposure just a little bit. I will then make it give some darker blacks. I am not a photographer. I just play around with these. I know visually what I want it to look like. So then I play around with these tools to make it look how I want. I do tend to go a little bit on the bluer tint. So I will add that blue, add a little bit of vibrance here and then you can see how different that looked. Then what I do is I will check it, I will then go ahead and export it to my camera roll and I will upload that into Canva. So let me show you how we do this on my computer. Now, I use Canva to create any kind of graphics you can see. We have a lot of graphics here and I would highly recommend using Canva. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a YouTube thumbnail. They already have templates and I just create a blank one. Now once you create a style that you like, you can come up here and you can save it as a template. So you can see right here, if you go to more template and you can save that and reuse it again and again. So the first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and upload my photo. This is the photo that I edited in Lightroom. So we're going to grab that, we're going to go ahead and open it. Now I'm going to need this photo and then I'm going to need the photo without the background to create that two dimensional look. So we're going to put this here and we're going to get it situated right where I want it. Then I want to get the same photo without the background. So what I'm going to do is go to Remove bg, upload that image. This is totally free. So we're going to pop this image in here and it's going to create this photo of me without the background. Voila. Now we're going to download it all downloaded and now we're going to add it here to Canva. Because I'm going to put this over top so what this looks like, I got to make it big enough to fit fit. And when you do use Remove bg, it can Impair the image a little bit to make it blurry. So just be aware. You may want to pay for the version that you can get it in hd. So just a heads up, but the reason I did this is because now I can go in here to edit image and I can start to play around with it. I can put a shadow behind it. So right here is the shadow. We can put, you know, this white color and let's make it. You know, if you want that line that I had on mine, we just change the blur, change the size, right? And it did resize it. So we're gonna have to size it up again. We're gonna make it just a little less blurry again to get that line. Now let's go ahead and put this in the right size again. And this takes a little bit of playing around with to get just right. So do be aware. But once you do it one time, it starts to get easier. So now we have this. So it's covering the initial photo of me, right? And we can see it just pops, right? It just. That white line makes it look three dimensional. The next thing we're going to do is grab some text. So this is, say this is my video game plan. We're going to grab this text. We want to make it a little bit thicker. Like I said, this is a bit thin. So we're going to grab my fonts here and add perfect over here. Perfect. And then copy paste. I just hit command, CV script. I have all my colors, my brand kit in Canva, so it makes it super easy. So we're going to do that. I think I'm going to make it a little bit bolder. I may need to actually pick a thicker font because remember, we need this to stand out. One thing that you can do is click on your photo back here and make it a little bit more transparent if you wanted. So again, that just makes it a little lighter so that this can stand out. You can come in here to effects and add shadows to your letters as well, which is something that we do. Let's go ahead and make the background shadow color this white. And we want it to not be blurry, but we want it to be thick right there. I think that's good. Offset it. How do I want to offset it? Like that. And again, to stand out, I think I'm going to need a backdrop for that text. So we're going to do an element. We're going to add this and that pink might actually work. So I'm going to add this pink Right here. And remember we talked about making this 3D. Going to move this pink box position backward so it goes behind my head. So again, you're starting to create that 3D look. So we're going to do the same thing here. What size is this? This was 73 Monte Serif. We're going to make it just a little bit larger. And I want this to be different, to stand out. I want this and this to repeat. So give me a minute. Okay. So after playing around with it a bit, you can see how clear this looks. Perfect script template. And then the title may be how to write a Video Script from Scratch. Something like that. We want to zoom it out so we can make sure it's super easy to read, even on a mobile device. And if everything looks good to go, then you can go up here, you can share it, you can download it. You'll want to make sure it's at 1280 by 720 or even this 1920 by 1080. Download it. And now you have a great thumbnail for your YouTube videos. Now that you're going to have more people clicking on your thumbnails, the next important part of your video is making sure they watch to the end. I mentioned earlier about a video that I just released about how to create your YouTube video script. I highly recommend watching that video next. It's on your screen because it's going to walk you through the key elements every YouTube video script should have to make sure you're getting people to watch to the end because you're going to grow your YouTube channel. You're going to see more, more views on your YouTube channel if you get people to click on your video and you get them to watch to the end of your video. Plus you're going to get a behind the scenes look at how I record my videos and you're going to actually see the script of my video inside of Google Docs. So seriously, time for you to go watch that video right now.