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How To Schedule YouTube Video Uploads and Add A YouTube Custom Thumbnail

Ileane
Schedule Your YouTube Videos in Advance

When someone subscribes to your YouTube channel you can feel pretty confident that they like what you have to say, or they like the content you share in your videos. Your subscribers can get hooked on you – and they will keep coming back to your channel each and every week (or every day depending upon your publishing schedule) just to see what you're up to.

It's a great relationship that you are nurturing by adding value to their lives and both you and your YouTube subscriber, are pretty happy about the way things are going.

Please don't ruin it by publishing video, after video, after video …. all at the same time. You're hogging the subscription feed!

I'm pretty sure they don't like you THAT much!

The easy (and free) solution is for you to simply schedule your videos ahead of time using the YouTube interface, so that none of your dearly devoted subscribers ends up clicking the dreaded unsubscribe button leaving you and your videos out in the cold!

Uploading YouTube videos and scheduling them to go live on your channel at a later date, is just like the concept of scheduling Facebook posts or Tweets ahead of time!  Let's take a look at how it works and later we can discuss the pros and cons of scheduling your YouTube videos in advance.

Here are just a few examples of the pros:

YouTube Video Marketing Course

In this video tutorial, I share step-by-step instructions and you'll learn how to:

Let's take a look at this tutorial on how to schedule a YouTube video (keep in mind the tricky part is at the beginning) 🙂

Schedule YouTube Video Uploads with a Custom Thumbnail


Note: You can scroll down to read the full transcript of the video.

The Cons of Scheduling a YouTube Video Upload

During this demonstration, I uploaded a video at the end of a 3-day holiday weekend and I thought it was the 4th of the month but it was actually the third of the month and – to make a long story short – what I'm trying to say is: I found out the hard way that you can't schedule an upload for a later time during the same day. You have to schedule it for the next day or later.

In the grand scheme of things I guess that's not really too big of a deal, as long as you're aware of that before-hand.

That brings me to the next “con” on my list: YouTube can't tell time. I scheduled the video to publish at 9:30 am but it published somewhere closer to 9:09 am – I guess being early is better than being late, but I still can't figure out how that happened.

One final “con” I found against scheduling a YouTube video ahead of time, is that it didn't post to my Facebook page right away like it would if I published instantly.

I recently started using this Facebook app from vidIQ and you can see how nicely it displays videos in a tab on my Facebook page here and the scheduled video didn't appear until hours later. That made me a little uneasy because I didn't want to post the video to Facebook manually then have it show up as a double posting later on. I also noticed that the pre-scheduled video didn't show up as one of my choices in CommentLuv when I used that little trick I showed you guys for sending traffic to your YouTube videos from  CommentLuv Enabled blogs.

Keep these points in mind if you should decide to use the scheduling option and let me know if you encounter similar hiccups. Overall I think scheduling is worth a shot if you want to buffer your content or if you promised your subscribers that you will release a new video on a specific day of the week, as I mentioned earlier.

It's important to check your YouTube Analytics to see if the scheduled time selected is the optimal time for your audience. You might find that you get more views on Monday mornings or perhaps your view counts are going up on the weekends.

The Long Awaited YouTube Video Custom Thumbnail Image

When YouTube opened the partner program and allowed just about everyone with and AdSense account to monetize their videos they promised that pretty soon we would all have the ability to assign custom thumbnail images.

I was delighted to see the “upload custom thumbnail” option available for all of my YouTube video uploads (past, present and future) and if you don't have it yet, I feel confident that you will very soon. If you are wondering about the YouTube custom thumbnail size, I have something for you.

The YouTube Custom Thumbnail Dimensions are 1280 x 720 px. Download your free template below

Click to download full size

It's also important to monetize your YouTube channel before you see the availability of these options. First, login to your YouTube account and then go to Account Monetization.

Final thoughts on YouTube Videos

Video marketing should be an integral part of your online presence and your content marketing strategy.
Recommended reading:

If you need some encouragement or ideas on how to get started, take a look at a post I wrote called How to Promote Your content on YouTube or any of the other articles in the YouTube category.

Get started with your own YouTube Video channel, one day you'll look back and be glad you did.

Video transcript:

Hello everyone. My Name is Ileane Smith and I'm with BasicBlogTips.com. My goal is to help you build a better blog.
We now have the ability to schedule our uploads to YouTube. So let me show you how that works. Now this basic step is really important because if you don't do this before you start to upload your video it will be too late.

When you're on the YouTube upload interface come down click this next to “privacy settings” and you will see “Scheduled”.

From here you can drag and drop videos anywhere on this page or click that. And this is the video that I'm going to upload today.
And it starts to process the video. Now I'll fill in all the information about my video please don't forget to change the title of your video
if it's an MP4 file or whatever. Just make sure your keywords are included the title. I already had my video description saved on a Google doc so I just copy and paste.

Be sure to fill in your tags.

And now we can come over and schedule our video. So let's make sure that we have the correct time set. I'm in Philadelphia so i will make sure it has New York time there. And the increments that you can schedule are half-hour increments. Right now it's about quarter after nine so I'll just scheduled it for nine thirty.

I also have the ability to upload a custom thumbnail for this video. Which I've already got prepared. Choose your category. In my case it's going to be Science and Technology. Choose your license. And I will always use creative commons. But the standard YouTube license is good as well.

If you're monetizing your video go ahead and click the monetization settings and under the advanced settings tab I always fill in my location and I filled in Philadelphia. And I'll include today's date. And, of course, you always want to make sure that your settings are saved. Sometimes YouTube will autosave for you as you're going along but just double-check this area of right here make sure that it's saved.

And so now our video is scheduled.

We come over to our Video Manager and we'll see that the videos there. Right now it's marked as private you'll see here it says that it's scheduled. Also if you scroll over here it tells you the date and the time that it's scheduled for.

I hope you've enjoyed watching this video and here's what I'd like you to do: While you're over on YouTube, subscribe to my channel. That way you can keep up to date with all of the blogging tutorials, social media, and anything that's going on with YouTube, or Google, and Google Chrome.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it and i'll talk to you soon. Once again, its Ileane from Basic Blog Tips.

More YouTube Video Tutorials and Resources:

 

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