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YouTube Thumbnail Tutorial 2024
2K views
May 21, 2024
In this comprehensive YouTube thumbnail tutorial for 2024, you'll discover everything you need to create attention-grabbing thumbnails that drive views and engagement. From design principles and color psychology to effective text placement and best practices, this tutorial will equip you with the tools to make your thumbnails stand out in a crowded platform. Whether you're a seasoned creator or just starting out, mastering the art of YouTube thumbnails is crucial for maximizing your channel's growth and success.
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How to create a YouTube thumbnail that gets clicks, helping you grow your channel
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So the thumbnail is probably the most important things to help you get your videos clicked
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on and viewed. In this YouTube thumbnail tutorial video, I'm going to walk you through four steps to
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help you create amazing thumbnails to get clicked on, helping you grow your channel
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So the thumbnail is arguably the most important thing, even more important than the actual
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content of your video, because so YouTube is going to put your thumbnail and title on
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someone's screen. And does that convince them to actually click on it and start watching your video
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So there's a ton of competition on YouTube. YouTube knows a lot about you and what you like
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So there's going to be a lot of interesting things on your screen at any given time
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If there's 10 videos or 20 videos on your screen, what is the one video that stands
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out that says, I need to click on this and watch this video? So that's how important your thumbnail is
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It's not the only thing, because the click through rate, the people actually clicking
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on your video has to do with the topic of your video. Is it interesting to that person or not
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The thumbnail and the title. But then when someone actually clicks on it, what is your video about
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Does it deliver on the promise of the thumbnail? So after you get the click, you need to have a long average view duration
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If people click on your video and watch a ton of it, your channel is just going to take
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off, but your channel won't do well if one or either of those are not doing well
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So if you're not getting a lot of clicks or once people click on it, they're not watching
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it for very long. YouTube isn't going to promote your content because they want someone to click on videos
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because that's when they get to show ads and they want them to spend a ton of time on the platform
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If someone clicks on your video, watches five seconds and decides, Hey, I don't want to spend time on YouTube anymore
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Then YouTube isn't going to promote that content. So how do you create great thumbnails? The first step of creating great thumbnails is coming up with ideas
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So this could be your overarching style of your thumbnail. So ours have blue background, white text
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It could be that, Hey, I don't want to use a solid background like that. I'm always going to take a cool picture
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I need, if I need to blur something out so I can add a few letters of text or a few words of text, I'll do that
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Or you can see someone like Mr. Beast that hardly use text. So I recommend checking out your favorite YouTubers, your favorite content creators
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What are their thumbnails look like? And then think how you can maybe adapt some of those ideas to your niche
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You want to create something that people understand it has to do with whatever your topic is
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So if you want to create a video on a MacBook Pro review videos, it should look somewhat
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similar to other review videos, but you want to have your own style, something that stands
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out a little bit. But if it looks something completely out in left field, someone's not going to understand
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this is about MacBook Pros. The same thing with yoga video. So Sarah Beth Yogo is a good example
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So she puts a solid color background, a little bit of text. These kind of pop out among a lot of the other yoga videos
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And so I think that's one of the reasons why her channel is done really well, because the
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thumbnails really stand out. And the couple of words of text allow you to have a better idea what the video is going
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to be about before having to go down and read the title. So it's just really important to do some research on content creators in general, content creators
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in your niche, how can you fit into your niche, but then also really stand out
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So if you're on a screen with 10 similar videos about whatever your niche is, someone, their
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eyes are drawn to your thumbnail. They want to click in and start watching your video
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So step number two, take the picture for your thumbnail, or in our case, we end up recording
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a video and then taking a screenshot of the video and using that image for our thumbnail
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But it's important to think about this beforehand. Don't record the video, be three weeks later, you have a beard, you haven't gotten a haircut
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You don't have the same clothing with you and you're like, shoot, what am I going to use for a thumbnail
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Maybe I'll try to steal something from the actual footage of the video, but I'm not actually
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smiling at any of it. I don't have the same clothes. I can't take the picture right now
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So it's important while you're recording the video to take the picture or record the video
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where you're going to actually use that for the thumbnail. So what I ended up doing is I'm sitting here recording the video
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I finished all the content. And then from there, I'll make a couple of poses thinking about, Hey, you know, whatever
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I want to have as a potential thumbnail. And then I'm going to look at that footage later, take a screenshot, and then use that
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for the thumbnail. But if you're going to be going around in multiple locations for your YouTube video
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you're going to think about, Hey, when I'm at the park, that's when I take the thumbnail
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So for me, it's important to be wearing the same clothes, to have the same look. So I don't want to take the thumbnail four weeks later when my hair has grown out and
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you know, I'm not wearing the same clothing. So that's why I do it at the end of all of our videos
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And that's what I recommend that you do as well. So what we're going to do right now, I'm going to pause this video
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Then I'm going to record a really quick video, kind of making different faces for the potential thumbnail
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And then we're going to hop on the computer and turn that video into a screenshot into
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the thumbnail. Let's go. All right, now let's find our thumbnail
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So here is our video clip. Let's stretch this out so we get the best resolution for the screenshot
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You can either let it play or just kind of... Maybe one of those
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Sure, let's try this one. So maybe something like that. So then let's take this screenshot
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There we go. Okay. Then step number three, time to open Canva, use the picture you took and create an amazing thumbnail
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Here we are at canva.com. I'm currently using Canva Pro, the paid version of Canva, because it allows me to remove the
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background from images in a matter of seconds. There are other free tools you can use for this
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I'll link to a tutorial video up above right here. You can use websites such as remove.bg
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Also if you want to try Canva Pro for free for 45 days, I'll put a link down below in the description
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This is our affiliate link. So if you end up signing up with our link, we may earn a small commission, but at no
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extra cost to you. Now let's create our thumbnail. So to create a thumbnail, it may show up here in the, you may want to try because we've
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created a few of them before, or you can just type in the search bar, YouTube, YouTube thumbnail
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and you're going to see they're right here. So they're going to give you 2,500 different templates
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Honestly, I don't really like that many of these. Some of them have way too much text or just, just really small and hard to read, or there's
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just kind of too much going on. So I just create a blank one from scratch by clicking right here
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If you have your brand color saved, it's really easy to just click here, click on the
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colors, add your background color. Here is the blue background. The next step would be to add the image we have from our video right here
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It's going to take a second for this whole video to load and then allow us to add the
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image right here. I think it's saying, please wait. Yeah, it's got to finish uploading
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All right. So now we're good to go. If we click on edit image and then here's where we can remove the background
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Okay, so it looks like the back of my chair is coming in right here. So if there's something either you want to add back in or get rid of, you can just basically
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do that right here. So I think if I do that, that, that, there we go. Done
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All right, there we got rid of the chair now too. Let's make this more the size that makes sense
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May want to go down a little bit just so I want to make sure that I have enough room
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up here to add some text. So maybe like that. I want to let you know about our YouTube masterclass
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It's a free one hour training with tons of tips to help you grow your channel in 2022
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If you're interested in signing up, check out the link in the description below. All right
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So there's that. And then we can continue to edit the image. So what do we want to do now
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This to me is a little bit dark, so maybe add a little bit of brightness
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You can play around with the contrast and saturation as well. There's a bunch of filters
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One of the things that we do in at least some of our videos is kind of add an outline around
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around me. So I think when you go and add some of these things, you're going to notice that some stuff
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gets undone, like the size of the picture right here. And so what we can do here is you can see a dark shadow around me
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What if we wanted it to be white? We didn't want any blur
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So we just have a solid outline like so, and then make it a little bit bigger
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This is kind of gray because it's 50% transparent. If we went pure white, it would be here, maybe just a touchdown to be not quite so bright
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Something like that. There, I think that works. And then I think if you saw when it kind of went back to the original settings, I think
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I'm going to have to go in again and add a little bit of brightness, something like that. Okay
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Let's make this bigger. Something like that, I think works. What else do we need here
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So we need elements. So let's see. So we've used the YouTube button for, you can see right here
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So something like maybe right up in the corner. And then if you want to add text, you can just hit the T and it adds it like, so we
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usually use open Sans, but not open Sans light. Probably the extra bold actually. Thumbnail
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And then so you can either, you had this highlight, you can go and change the font size right here
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Or if you just grab one of the corners, you can change it like so. Thumbnail
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So YouTube thumbnail. Let's say thumbnail tutorial. And so we could have it like this where it's, um, the text is centered or I think maybe
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to have this left aligned and then what else might we want to do here
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So I think too, if we want this to kind of line up with the YouTube button, we could
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have it centered like so. But the thing is, I think we may want to change is to reduce the spacing between the two
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Maybe something like that. So I mean, really, really easy. It doesn't have to be really complicated
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It's just something that you want to make sure that someone can understand what this
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is about on their phone. So if you want to have an idea what it may look like on a phone, if you're using a fairly
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large monitor like I am right now is bring this down to yeah, 11%
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Can you, can you tell what this video is about right now? Also you can also tell kind of the tone
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Um, again, I still think that this might be a little bit too dark, so maybe we change
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this to 30. Yeah, I mean, something like that. Also the fact that this is new, maybe you want to add the fact that this is for 20
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oops, 2022. So what we could do is, let's see, let's add an element, a circle
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We want a white, let's see what gray looks like. So you may want to put something kind of down here in the corner
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And so what you can see here is we would want to line this up kind of for the circle
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I just want to show a quarter of the circle. So right now it's in the middle of this design vertically
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And then if we move it over, it should do the same thing
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So we have the vertical line and the horizontal line. This is exactly one quarter of the circle
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So we could maybe just hit T for text and then put 2022, make this smaller. Oops
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Sometimes it's tough to make sure you're clicking on the right thing. Something like that, or maybe make it a little bit smaller
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So something like that. Maybe I would want to make this white
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So it stands out a little bit. And then the text I could use our navy blue
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Maybe something like that. So you can see YouTube thumbnail tutorial, you know, over in the corner, not too distracting
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Also kind of filling up this space a little bit. You know, maybe even move this over all just a touch
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So there's not quite so much kind of blank blue space right there
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Also is this, make sure this is aligned horizontally in there we go in the middle
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So the YouTube logo is directly in the middle of this text right here and something like that
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If you're happy with the thumbnail, all you need to do now is click on download
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So after downloading the thumbnail comes step number four, which is upload it to YouTube
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So you can do that as you're uploading a new video to your channel. Also you can swap out thumbnails for videos that are already public on your channel
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So if you have a video that's not doing as well as maybe you think that topic deserves
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you can change out the thumbnail, which could boost the click through rate and give some
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additional life to that video. So the thumbnail is obviously one of the most important things to get clicks for your videos
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but there's a ton more to grow in a YouTube channel and we have tons of videos to help you that I'll link to a playlist right here so you can check some of them out
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I hope to see you in those and future videos. Bye bye
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