How to Edit Your NEW YouTube Channel

Written by Matt Ballek on 02/06/2012. Posted in Community, Content, Meta Data, News, Tutorial 20 Comments

Make sure your YouTube videos have a nice place to hang out with a few simple tweaks. Read more [...]

Getting Started

Appearance Tab

You’ll start off on the appearance tab which...lets you change the appearance of you channel. You can start by uploading an avatar or profile picture. The picture can be a JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG file (sorry, no animated GIFs). As for the dimensions, the image can be up to 1600 by 1600 pixels, so feel free to go big but make sure it still looks good at a smaller size since that's what YouTube tends to use.

Next you can upload a background image. Just remember that the channel foreground is 970 pixels wide, so your background will need to be wider than that unless you plan on repeating it. Also do mind the 20 pixel gap at the top of the channel where your background will show through If you don’t want to remember any of that, you can download our free YouTube channel template at the top of this post (right under the video).

So once you upload your background you can choose whether or not you want it to repeat. Any changes you make will be reflected below, so have fun with it. Lastly, you can set your channel's background color which will appear if you don’t have a background image set or if your background image doesn’t cover the full screen. Just pick a color from the dropdown or enter your favorite color’s hex number. If you’re a YouTube Partner this is also where you can add a channel banner or watch page icon.

WATCH: How to Add a Banner to your YouTube Channel

Learn how to take advantage of this awesome branding space above your featured video!

Watch the Tutorial

Info & Settings

The Info & Settings tab lets you add some important information to help your channel get found in YouTube’s search results starting with your channel’s title. If you leave this blank the title will default to your username, which might not be good if you have a weird username.

Next you can enter in a description for your channel. The description you enter appears on the right hand side of your channel and in YouTube search results, so it should describe what your channel is about and ideally get people’s attention.

Then you can enter some tags for your channel. YouTube will use these tags to show your channel in search results, so it ‘s important to do a little keyword research to find out what the best tags to use are.

Lastly you can choose which tab you'd like your channel to default to. Here are the 3 options you can choose from:

Featured Tab

The featured tab shows a combination of featured videos, playlists, and channels based on which template you choose. For more information on each template keep reading!

Feed Tab

A reverse chronological feed of your activities on YouTube. Activities can include comments, likes, uploads, favorites, and more. This could be a great default tab if you don't have any videos or want visitors to see what you've been up to.

Videos Tab

A simple grid of every video you've uploaded and every playlist you've created. Probably not the best tab to default to, but do what you like. I'm not the boss of you.

Featured Tab Templates

YouTube gives you four different featured tab layouts: Creator, Blogger, Network, and Everything. Each template displays content differently and makes certain types of content more prominent than others. You should take into consideration the amount and type of content you have when making a template decision, or, preview all the options in the Edit Channel editor and decide from there.

To learn more about setting up each different layout just click the one you’re interested below and we’ll show you some cool stuff you can do with each one.