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Hello. Terri-Ann Cormier here with Executed Solutions, and today we're going to talk about
how to create a custom thumbnail for your YouTube videos.
Typically speaking, when you're loading a video on YouTube, you're given the option
of the thumbnail that YouTube creates based on the video that you've uploaded, but a lot
of times, that's not going to get you the views that you're looking for and it just
doesn't look as nice, especially if you're doing a "how to" video like we're doing right
here. The overall screenshots don't typically have that look and feel that maybe you're
wanting to represent your brand. A custom thumbnail is just like this one right here
where on this video we have the "How to install a Twitter tab on Facebook."
Two things before we go ahead. You need to make sure that your monetization is clicked
"on" before you can actually click the "Have a custom YouTube thumbnail. I'm not going
to show you how to install it right now. What I'm going to show you is how to create one.
In our next video, I'll show you how to actually install the custom thumbnail.
Basically, what I want you to do is go to Pixlr.com, and that's P-I-X-L-R.com. You're
going to go to "Open Pixlr edition advanced," and you're going to click "Create a new image."
I'm going to make this really easy for you. Obviously, YouTube has a specific size within
heights in pixels that they require for those thumbnails, but if you go to the presets right
here on Pixlr.com and you go down to the bottom, you click on "Movie 720p," and it actually
brings up the specific width and height that you're required to use for your YouTube thumbnail.
You're going to click, "Ok."
Then from here, it actually is really easy, quite simple. Obviously, if you have a logo,
you have a picture, you can take a screenshot of one of the best parts of your video that
you would like to use for a thumbnail and you saved it, obviously, in your computer
on your desktop. I'm going to go to, "File," "Open image," and what I'm going to use is,
"Social Terri," as you can see she's right here. What we do is we're going to pull the
background in a layer onto our already sized ... and I'm just going to bring this down
just so you can see it a little bit more, and I'm going to bring this in. Give me a
second. There we go. Perfect.
From here, what I want you to do is click on your ... Let's add some font or some letters,
and we're going to make one for, "How to create a custom YouTube thumbnail." From here, what
you can do is you can actually change the color and so I would like this to be bright
red and make it a little bit bigger. You can change the font, all of your typical Google
fonts are on here. Obviously, it's getting larger and we're missing some of it on our
screen, so you just, "Enter," and take this around. Perfect. Make that a little bit bigger
and then you can move it a little bit more, but I'm going to say fine.
This looks great. I'm going to save the image and call it, "How to create a custom YouTube
thumbnail." From there, we're going to bring the quality up to 100% and we're going to
save it as a PNG and you can save it right where you're supposed to save it, which is
in your desktop in one of your file folders, and that's it guys. That's how you create
a custom YouTube thumbnail. In the next video, I'll show you actually how to install it.