 Hell yeah, what's up guys, it's KurtzPyke, my friend's called me Banksy. I'm back again guys, today we're talking about best practices. That's right guys, YouTube as you're probably aware has been cracking down on spammy channels and in the last few videos I've made, we've talked about some of the things that spammy channels do bad, but more importantly, what good channels do right. How you can make sure not only are you not detected for spam, even though you're not a spammer, but you're basically following all the rules and doing everything right. Get an A plus kind of thing. So let's get into a few more best practices. Now one of the best practices, and this is one I wasn't even aware of, I didn't even understand this until just recently, is basically having your channel banner, your channel banner at the top, if you have the ability or the desire to put your channel name inside the banner somewhere, YouTube or Google who owns YouTube can generally tell that and that doesn't even matter what font it is, because they use something called OCR which is short for Optical Character Recognition. Now when you look at Freedom's banner, let's take an example, on Freedom's banner, you'll see a whole bunch of stuff, a whole bunch of faces, et cetera, but you will see freedom in big capital letters. Now normally you would just say, hey, they don't know what's in that banner, it's just art. Well no, Google can do an OCR scan and tell and say, hey, this says freedom, the channel name's freedom, this channel is probably legit. Now obviously the channel's legit, it's got lots of views, lots of subscribers, but for those of you that are starting out and you wanna get a jump, guys, one of the recommendations that come from this is basically create your channel banner or your channel art, but put your channel name in there somewhere, it doesn't have to be big, it doesn't have to be in your face, put it in there, it's a tick mark, done. All right guys, this second thing we're gonna talk about is, all right guys, the second thing we're gonna talk about is channel icons, used to be called channel avatar and one of the things I see in a lot of channels, especially newer channels, is they use the default banner and they use the default icon. This, well, not a bad thing, is associated with lower quality accounts, particularly spammers. Spammers generally don't care what their channel art says, so they just leave it blank and then they just steal videos and upload them in bulk. Obviously you guys don't do that, like I've said in the past, but changing or creating your own channel icon is very, very required and is very, very easy. At the end of this video, if you're not a graphical guy or you don't know a graphical guy or gal and you don't know how to use Photoshop, you don't know how to use Gimp or any of the online tools, I'm gonna walk you through in a quick tutorial how to quickly create a channel icon, upload it, change it, done guys. But like I say, please if you've got the time, change your channel icon, create it yourself, only you know what you want it to say or what you want it to look like and if you don't know how to do it, follow the tutorial piece of cake. All right guys, that's gonna wrap it up for this video. Remember, optical character recognition, change your channel banner, change your channel icon, simple to do, if you don't know how to do it, watch the tutorial, I got this, or hit up one of your graphical designer friends because maybe that's a better way to do it. But anyways guys, that's it for today. I'll be back later with some more thoughts. Cheers. Hello everyone, welcome to the tutorial component of the video. Guys, this is for those of you that are new to YouTube or for those of you that don't have Photoshop or GIMP or aren't too familiar with some of the graphical editors that you can use to create icon and banner art and even thumbnails and things like that. I get it, we all start there at some point, you have two options. One of them is to contact one of the designers that have left a comment in one of my videos, for example, there's lots of people that do custom icon work, custom background, channel art, all that stuff. Those guys and gals are awesome, contact them for those of you that want to create it yourself and you don't want to get all cuckoo in the too deep into Photoshop, there are some free options which I'm going to show you. The best free option I think at this time is a website called canva.com. You go to Canva and bang, you get this, you get create a free, create a design. Again guys, this is free stuff, that's why I chose it. It's not the most powerful program, but it's free and that helps. So anyways, the next step from here is you're gonna have something at the top that says use custom dimensions, click on it. Bang, it's gonna ask you for width and height. You wanna go with 800 by 800. That is Google, well YouTube's prescribed suggestion right now so let's go ahead and follow their best practices. Click on design, bang. Opens up a new browser thingy-dingy and here we go, we got a nice bright white canvas with nothing on it. Perfect, now we have some options guys. We can go ahead and start adding in text, background. We can upload our own images. Let's just start for simplicity's sake to start with a background and you can select any of these colors or add your own color or you know what, take one of these free color designs. I don't know, this gray one looks all right. Let's try it, left click on it. All right, we got a gray background. We're rocking and rolling. The next step I like to follow is text. I click on the text button and then you're gonna see that I can add in some of these types of text. Text, pardon me, and it's got a lot of pre-built designs all of which are free that maybe will solve the issue. You don't wanna go too crazy into the Photoshop world so let's go ahead and just select a free design and show you how it looks. All right, strictly no parking private property. Let's click on that and see what that looks like. All right, it loads up. Looks good, we got gray with some nice grayish, light whitish background off white here. Okay, click off of it, click on to it and you're gonna notice that you can go ahead and now start typing over top of these texts. So let's say welcome to, now I'm gonna type in Curtis Pike. Curtis Pike. And then on this one I'm gonna write YouTube channel. Boom, okay, that is probably not what I would do for final copy but we're just doing a demonstration here so you guys can go nuts, select anything you want. Now you wanna make some adjustments to it, you can change the text type. We're using Roboto Condensed or Roboto Condensed but if you like Railway, go with Railway. Control Z to back, oh shoot. Here's my YouTube channel. But go nuts, if you wanna increase the size of the font, do it, easy. Now you might wanna resize this element, you're gonna notice that this does have some simple grids in it. So you're gonna notice that this is centered both vertically and horizontally but if I change the size like this, well now it's not centered so I gotta go ahead and re-center it. And now it's re-centered if that's the look you were going for. So now it's this big. All right, I could go ahead and just download this if this was a final copy that I wanted. Click on the download button. Image for WebJPG. Presto, it's coming down. And it says hold tight, preparing your design and that's all there is to creating a design. Now obviously you can create a, you know, you can do some searches where if you wanna add in some holiday stuff, you can click on this and you know what? I want a friggin' partridge in a parature or whatever the hell that is. So I'm gonna put that partridge right up in there. Yeah, let's do that. You want a partridge there? Yeah, I do. You like pie? I like pie. Get rid of the background text. Let's delete that trash can. And my channel icon is a big friggin' piece of pie. How's that? Center that bad boy. All right, cool. You wanna wear a hat on that pie? Put a hat on the pie, guys. There's no stopping you. We're on a roll here. See the center button done. All right, let's reduce the size of that hat or that hat. This pie is way too high. You see what I'm doing here, guys? It's super simple stuff, but maybe you wanna turkey in that bad boy. All right, turkey and pie, turkey and pie. Reducing the size. I'm doing this just to show you what is possible with this simple online editor. With all that nonsense out of the way, I did show you how to go ahead and adjust that. So let's just go ahead now and upload the design. Final part of the tutorial. Go back to your website or to your YouTube channel, pardon me. And here's how you get there. Go to Creator Studio. Click on Creator Studio. Now go to View Channel. Now you get this screen, which we were just at, but here's how you get there. Now you wanna click on that pencil or pen-looking thing. It looks like a pencil. Click on that bad boy. Click on Edit. And now we're gonna select a photo from our computer or just drag and drop a photo on here. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that photo we just made. Welcome to Curtis Pikes, blah, blah, blah. And drag and drop it. And here it gives you a center thingy option. So that looks kinda good, but you know what, if you wanna create it a little bigger and still, I don't know, center it. Okay, that looks pretty good. So we're in good shape here. Sent as profile picture. And done. Now let's just hit cancel. Do I need to share it? Sure, let's share it. Why not? It gives a shit. Sugar. And there you go. I've added in a new look here. Now you're gonna notice that it is a circle. So while the original icon is 800 by 800, Google does circle it out. Also, this image transfers over to your YouTube channel. It just takes a while for the YouTube to get the update. So if you don't see the update right away, do not panic. The update will happen shortly. Guys, that's all there is to using this free tool, Canva.com. I hope this tutorial helped and I'll be back later with some more thoughts. Cheers.