YouTube is an amazing platform that you can use to expose your content or products to a huge audience and drive traffic back to your website. Google continues to make upgrades to the YouTube interface, both for end-users and administrators. Lots of these changes focus around making it easier for you to customize your videos and the look of your YouTube channel.
The question is, how can you take full advantage of these extra features from YouTube?
While the content of your videos is the most important aspect to increasing traffic, it also helps to have a visually stimulating YouTube channel page. One of the best ways you can do this is by creating a “Featured Tab” for your channel.
[shadowbox]Update: YouTube changed the layout to One Channel in 2013[/shadowbox]
YouTube Channel Settings and Tabs
There are several options in your YouTube Channel settings to customize your featured tabs. The one that we'll focus on in the video below is the “Overview” option.
When you select Overview, your YouTube Channel page will have one featured video with a shelf underneath of 3 videos of your choosing.
You can also add featured playlists in those shelves if you'd like. Ideally, this would be the best spot for an introduction video to tell your audience what your channel is about. Underneath, you can put some of your most popular videos, or your most recent videos. The following video is a tutorial guide on how to incorporate the “Featured Tab” into your YouTube channel.
Check out more of my upcoming videos about customizing your YouTube channel here.
Another option for your “Featured Tab” page is the blogger format. To see what it would look like, you can check out my YouTube channel. As you can see, it has your featured tab on the top, with your videos underneath starting with the most recent. For those of you that do not have an introduction video for your channel, this is a good format to use.
There are lots of opportunities opening up on YouTube that all content creators should explore. Google + is now integrated with YouTube and you can connect your blog to your YouTube Channel as well. Take it a step further and add links to all of your social profiles on your channel home page so you can grow your audience and your social footprint.
Regardless of how you use YouTube, it makes sense to utilize this feature in order to give your YouTube Channel a cleaner look. Because after-all, first impressions are pretty important.