YouTube is the largest hub for videos worldwide. More than 1.5 billion users, each month, sign in and watch videos on YouTube. Uploading videos can be a rewarding experience as you can share videos on YouTube to entertain or educate people as well to get famous or to build a community online.
In this article, we’ll go through the steps that are required to effectively upload a video on YouTube.
Contents
Signing In to YouTube
Go to www.YouTube.com. When you reach the Home page, click on the Sign In button on the top right corner of the page.
In the dialogue box, enter your Gmail address and password. Then, click Next. You’ve signed in to YouTube.
Uploading the Video
Now you’ll see a video camera shaped icon among other icons on the top right side of the page. Clicking it will give you a drop-down menu.
Choose the option Upload video from that menu.
The upload page will appear.
Privacy Settings
On the upload page, first select the privacy setting for the video that you want to upload. You will find the following privacy options there:
Public: With this privacy setting, the video will be available to everyone out there. It will come in the videos section of your YouTube channel and may appear as suggested video.
Unlisted: This video will only be accessible to the people who have a link to this video. It will not show up in the videos section of your YouTube channel and it will not appear as a suggested video or in the YouTube search results.
Private: This video will only be available to you and the users you choose to see it. Others will not be able to discover such video and it will not appear on your channel or as a suggested video.
Scheduled: With this setting, the video is uploaded on the YouTube but is not available to the users until a specific date and time that is set during the upload. This setting is useful when one has to plan a video campaign or upload a series of videos without individually uploading each video.
Choosing the Video for Upload
On the upload page, click on the Select files to upload option to choose a file.
From the window that opens there, choose a file to upload by double-clicking the folder, clicking it once and then clicking the Open button or else by dragging and dropping it on the screen.
When the video is uploaded, it will have to process and one can see the progress on the status bar.
Title, Description and Tags
The three bars beneath the status bar are for the title, description and tags respectively.
Title: Name the video here. the title should e relevant the video and should not be vague or difficult for the users to understand. YouTube values the title most while ranking the search results.
Description and tags: One also has to add description and tags in the lower bars. In description, add some keywords that will give your video a higher ranking in the search results. The information in the description should be more relevant to the video to give it a higher ranking.
Thumbnail
Selecting a thumbnail image for the video is also important. This is the image that will appear on your channel, playlists, suggested video previews and everywhere the video appears. YouTube will give you three choices for thumbnail images.
Custom Thumbnail
If you don’t like anyone of them, you can yourself create a thumbnail for your video. The size of such image is recommended to be 1280 x 720 pixels. The thumbnail should be relevant to video telling what your video is about and should be professional.
Click the “Custom Thumbnail” button in order to upload a custom thumbnail.
The Video page
The uploaded video will have its own URL through which you can go to the respective YouTube page. From there, the users can like, comment and share the video.
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