How to Make a YouTube Header Image for the New Channel Design; Tips for an Engaging Trailer [Creator's Tip #82]

On this week’s Creator’s Tip, we’re gonna give you guys some advice on how you can create engaging trailers for your new YouTube design channel layout and also how to make a header image that works well on all platforms, mobile, desktop, tablets and television. That’s coming up.

Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another Creator’s Tip where every week, we here at Reel SEO do our best to help you guys make content that will perform the best on the web and reach your audiences and all that kind of good stuff. Today we really have to talk about the new channel design that recently rolled out to everyone now on YouTube. If you don’t yet have it, you can go to YouTube.com/OneChannel, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page that you can opt in there and play around with the new design. And also, if you later decide oh, I don’t really like this new design, I think I’m gonna go back to my old one for now, maybe switch later. You can go back to that same page, scroll all the way back down to that blue box again and you can opt out and you can go back to your old channel design for now. I don’t know how long it’s gonna last but you can do it for now.

Right away on this new channel design, you’ll notice that there are two main new features and one is that they have a spot dedicated specifically to a trailer for your channel that only shows up to the people who are not yet subscribed. So you want to make a video that is targeting exactly people who are like oh, who are these guys about, should I click subscribe or not? Last week on ReelSEO.com, we published an article that outlines a couple things we’ve noticed that are similar between trailers that seem to be performing the best and we’ve outlined all of those for you so go check that out for all the details.

Let me summarize it for you guys, giving their three main points and then I’m gonna add my fourth. The first one is welcome your audience in your trailer or video. As soon as they come, say hello, just say hi, just welcome them somehow. Personally, I recommend addressing your target audience in that same welcome so let them know that hey, this person’s talking to me and this is a place for me. Then number two, tell them what you’re all about. Don’t just tell them what you do, what kind of shows you make, also tell them why you make it. Answering that why question, I think, is very important because it makes it a lot easier for people to connect with you, not just the content you make but with you personally and it helps create more of a human connection, I think.

Number three, make it quick. Try to keep it to around 30 seconds if you can, a little bit longer is fine but don’t make a three, four, five, six minute trailer, make it as brief and succinct as possible. Then the fourth one that I’ll add to this article is show plenty of B-Roll. Don’t just tell people what you do but show love examples and clips from your previous videos while you’re explaining what you’re all about. In the article at ReelSEO.com, we share a couple of trailers that we think are exceptionally good if you want to check out some examples, go check that link in the description below this video and you can see some of those.

Now let’s talk about the header image here for a second. This was actually way more challenging for me to design than I anticipated because I have a very small window of space to work with for mobile devices but it grows huge when you start taking other things into consideration: desktops and especially television screens. And to further complicate it, on the desktop version, you have your channel’s image avatar there that covers some of the upper left corner of your image as well as the bottom right corner. Some of your social links and website links will cover that sliver at the bottom right of it as well. So even in that little small area that they give you to work with, they have a couple of spaces that are off limits on the desktop but you don’t want it to look awkward like there’s blank spaces there on the other devices either.

So here’s what I did and what I actually see a lot of other people are doing now as well and that is, start with an image that just covers the whole thing. It could be a pattern or it could be an image that just repeats itself or whatever, just use something big. Come down to that center mobile box and put your image, text, graphics, whatever in that smaller box but place it right in the center but don’t go too far to the outsides or else you’ll start bumping into your channel icon on one side and your social links on the other. Here’s a couple examples to show you what I mean. This seems to be what works the best across all devices.

It looks best, obviously, on desktop or mobile but it also can kind of work on television and I would love to hear from you guys what design tips, ideas you have. Comment below and let us know what those are, we’d love to hear from you guys. And if this is your first time here, welcome, we’d love to have you subscribe. Every week we do videos just like this to help you with your online content. Make sure you go check us out at ReelSEO.com for even more awesome stuff that we post all throughout the week and also check out my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/VideoCreators where we talk about online video news, what it means for us and how we make our content as video creators. We do Q&As and hangouts and stuff like that there as well.

So go check that out and I will see you guys next week for another ReelSEO Creator’s Tip video. See you then, bye.