From Blurry to Bold: Crafting Powerful YouTube Previews

Best YouTube Thumbnail Size: How to Make a Thumbnail for YouTube in 2024

Benjamin Arango

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

You must have heard the phrase, Never judge a book by its cover. But actually, we do judge everything by its cover. The same is the case with Youtube videos. No matter how good the content of your video is if you are unable to convey that with the thumbnail of your video, it will not bring any good to your channel. If you are looking forward to growing your channel and attracting more viewers, then having an appealing and eye-catching thumbnail is one of the most important factors. There are several things to be considered while creating a custom thumbnail if you want to make your videos look stunning and engaging. By following all these points, you can increase the chances of your channel’s growth.

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In this article, we have 5 chapters for you：

• Best YouTube Thumbnail Size
• How Important is a Custom Thumbnail?
• Best Practices From Experiences
• How to Make a Fortnite Thumbnail
• How to Add a Custom Thumbnail to Your Video

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Best YouTube Thumbnail Size

Being a content creator, you never know which device is being used by the viewer to watch your videos. It can be a smartphone, laptop, pc, or smart TV. It is very important to keep all these devices in mind while choosing a Youtube thumbnail size. For the best possible results, consider the following points while making a thumbnail for your Youtube videos.

• To cover all the devices perfectly, set the thumbnail resolution to 1280x720
• Save the thumbnail in JPG, GIF, or PNG format
• Try not to cross the 2MB limit
• Make sure to use a 16:9 aspect ratio for perfect results throughout the devices

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How Important is a Custom Thumbnail?

Custom Thumbnail is a tool through which the viewers can understand everything about a video. It tells the viewers what to expect from a video, what not to expect, and what the video is all about. no matter if you create amazing content, if the thumbnail is not good enough to covey that to the viewers, all your hard work will be of no use and will not bring any good to your channel and its growth. According to Google ,90% of best-performing videos have custom thumbnails. It shows the importance of custom thumbnails.

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Best Practice From Experiences

Now, since we know the importance of having a custom thumbnail, it is important to know how to make a thumbnail for Youtube look perfect, appealing, and eye-catching at the same time. There are some points to be considered while creating a thumbnail for Youtube. We will provide you with the best practices that we have learned throughout our journey of using Youtube and growing it from zero.

7 best practices can help you make your Youtube thumbnail stand out from the crowd and make its way out.

1. Show your face

In a world full of machines and computers, people love to listen and interact with people instead of computer-generated voices and a voice without a face. Showing your face on a Youtube thumbnail makes it more appealing to users to click and listen to the person who is being shown in the thumbnail. Humans are more inclined towards faces. When there is a human element in a video, it increases its effectiveness. Check out the pics below, which one are you most likely to click through?

1. Use Simple Fonts

With your face, it is necessary to put some text on your Youtube thumbnail to let viewers know what this video is all about without clicking or watching it. Don’t use fancy fonts on Youtube thumbnail. It makes it hard for the viewers to read and understand what to expect in the video, especially for those watching YouTube on their 5 inches screen smartphone, ultimately decreasing the chances of your video being clicked and watched. I personally recommend you to use give these fonts a go while making YouTube thumbnail.

1. Use Phrases, not sentence

If you have ever noticed, Youtube thumbnails are very small in size, making it hard for viewers to notice any small elements. According to YouTube , more than 70% of Youtube watch time comes from mobile devices. While adding text in a thumbnail, instead of using sentences, make sure to use only words and make them large in size that can easily be noticed on small screens. Summurise your video in no more than 5 words.

1. Put every stuff on left side

When we navigate to a Youtube thumbnail and place the cursor on it, it shows us two icons, “Watch Later” and “Add to Queue,” located on its right size. Come on, you don’t want your beautiful thumbnail that cost you a few hours be covered. To avoid these icons from hiding your important stuff of thumbnail, make sure to put everything on the right side of your thumbnail.

1. Have a unique and Consistent style

Try to make all your thumbnails follow the same style. Following the same style for all your Youtube thumbnails will make your channel look unique and all your videos identical. It will be easy for viewers to identify your videos when they see them. It gives your channel a touch of its unique brand.

1. Use elements to grab the attention

To make your Youtube thumbnail more appealing to the viewers, add circles and arrows to grab viewers’ attention to something very important in the video. It will increase the curiosity in the viewers and make them click your videos to learn more.

1. Choose the right tool

This whole process seems to be very hectic and time taking, but do you know, you can do everything on just one software? There is no need to edit a video in a different software then make a thumbnail in another software. With Filmora X, you can perform all these tasks on a single platform with so many amazing features. Whether you want to remove the background of your image or add attractive titles to it, Filmora X has got you covered.

1. Avoid clickbait and irrelevant pics and title

It is one of the old tricks that so many people on Youtube use. It undoubtedly brings you clicks and more views, but once the viewer realizes that you have used irrelevant pictures or texts to attract them**. I**n reality, your video doesn’t contain any information related to it, you are going to lose their trust. They are never going to click on your videos again. Even if you don’t use such a trick anymore. Try to avoid such activities. Avoiding such activities can make your channel grow in the long term. Only use the text and images that are relevant to your content and stick to that.

1. Choose your preview window wisely

Do you know that Youtube can show a 3-second preview of your video when someone hovers the cursor over it? It is one of the best ways to show the viewers the content of your video even when they don’t click on your video. These three seconds will help them decide whether to click on your video or not. This preview is selected by the system from the first half of your video according to its relevance and similarity with the topic. That’s why it is very important to add related information in the first half of the video, otherwise, Youtube will choose it randomly. If the preview is not selected for two days, it means your video is not eligible for it.

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How to Make a Fortnite Thumbnail Super Fast and Free?

Many of you might be interested in how to make a fortnite thumbnail, so here it is. To make a Fortnite thumbnail for free, we are going to use Filmora X. Filmora X contains all kinds of features and elements that are required for a perfect and eye-catching thumbnail. To get started, make sure to download and install the latest version of Filmora X.

1. Before we start making Fortnite Thumbnails, we have to take a screenshot of the gameplay. Open Fortnite and go to the Career tab. Here you will find Replays.

1. It contains all your recent gameplays. We can use it to take a screenshot. If you are using a console, you will find 10 recent gameplays here. But if you are a PC user, you can find the last 100 gameplays. Select the gameplay you want to take a screenshot from.

1. For our preferred angle, choose “Drone Free Camera” mode from the bottom right corner of the screen. It will allow us to use our preferred angle without any restriction. Choose an angle and take a screenshot.

1. Open Filmora X, make sure to select the 16:9 screen ratio. Import the screenshot that you have taken from Fortnite.

1. Place it into the timeline to start working on it.

1. Now to separate the character from the background, go to the Effects. Under effects, you can find a tab named AI Portraits. Click on AI Portrait. Now drag the Human Segmentation and drop it on the screenshot in the timeline.

1. It will ask you to purchase it. But there is no need to do that. Just hit Try It.

1. This effect will remove the background of your screenshot.

1. Now you can add a background of your choice. You can upload an image or choose a simple color from Filmora’s Media tab and drag it below the screenshot in the timeline.

1. To add text to the screenshot, go to Titles. Here you can find a wide range of different and unique titles to choose from for your Fortnite Thumbnail. Choose any of the titles and place them accordingly.

1. To make it more attractive, we can add icons and other elements from Filmora’s Element tab. You can also download the stickers from the internet and use them.

1. After completing the thumbnail, click on the Snapshot icon located below the preview tab of Filmora. Or press “CTRL+ALT+S”. It will save a screenshot into the media panel of Filmora.

1. Right-click on the screenshot and navigate to “Reveal in Explorer”. It will open the folder that contains all the screenshots taken from Filmora. Now you can use it as a Fortnite Thumbnail.

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How to Add a Custom YouTube Thumbnail to Your Video in YouTube

Once you have successfully created a custom thumbnail, you can use it in your videos on Youtube.

1. Open Youtube Studio and upload your video. While uploading the video, you can see a section named “Thumbnail”. Under this section, click on “Upload Thumbnail”.

1. Select the thumbnail that you have made. Just like the one Fortnite thumbnail that we have created using Filmora X.

1. The thumbnail will be uploaded and attached to the video. Now you can process all the settings and publish the video.

Conclusion

Thumbnail is the first thing that helps the viewer decide whether to click on a video or ignore it. Which increases the importance of having a well-structured and attractive thumbnail. By following the above guide, you can make an astonishing and clickable thumbnail in no time. For better and quick results, we recommend you using Filmora X. It allows you to perform all the tasks from video editing to thumbnail creation on a single platform.

Benjamin Arango

Benjamin Arango is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Benjamin Arango

Keyword Mastery: The 10 Best Online Resources to Increase Views

10 Best YouTube Keyword Tools to Get More Views

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If we asked you to name the world’s biggest search engines, undoubtedly you’d come up with Google, but what would be number two? Bing? Yahoo? The truth might surprise you.

According to figures, the world’s second biggest search engine is actually YouTube. Millions of people are using it everyday to search for videos about fitness, hair, marketing and more. With such a large audience already searching directly on the platform, doesn’t it make sense that when we use YouTube keyword research and SEO should be as important as it is on our website?

Luckily, we can use YouTube keyword tools to analyze YouTube keywords. Here we’re going to take a look at 10 best YouTube keyword tools out there, which can help you identify and optimize for the highest traffic keywords for your videos. By optimizing your videos, you can rank higher, get more views and enjoy a larger audience on YouTube.

• Part 1: 10 Best YouTube Keyword Tools Recommendation
• Part 2: Bonues Tips - Google video result keywords

You May Also Like:
YouTube SEO Complete Guide >>
How to Edit and Optimize YouTube Title, Description, and Tags >>

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Do you want to edit YouTube video easily? Filmora is a YouTube editor that you should have a try. As a YouTube video editing tool, it is simple to use with dragging and dropping. You can add various video effects, filters and transition to make your video better. Besides, titles and texts are also available to use. After editing, you can directly upload video to YouTube plactform. Now, download it to have a try!

Download Mac Version ](https://tools.techidaily.com/wondershare/filmora/download/ )

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Part 1: 10 Best YouTube Keyword Tools Recommendation

Before you can get into using any YouTube SEO tool, you’ll need to identify what the best keywords for your videos are. Let’s start by taking a look at the best YouTube keyword tools available.

1. YouTube autocomplete

When you start to search for something on YouTube, you’ll probably notice that YouTube suggests some keywords to finish your search. This is called autocomplete, and it works by suggesting the most popular keywords that start with the letters you’ve typed so far. What it is essentially saying is that those are the most frequently searched for terms that use the words you’ve already typed.

This means it’s a great place to start building your keywords, and a fantastic YouTube keyword tool for your videos. Just start your search for your video (e.g. shoes for…) and see what comes up. In this case, we can see that the most popular keywords are ‘girls’, ‘men’, ‘kids’, ‘summer’ and ‘boys’.

2. Keywordtool.io

Without doubt, this is one of the most powerful YouTube keyword tools out there, ranking hundreds of keywords by popularity. It captures data from YouTube autocomplete and allows you to create lists of keywords from that data. As well as autocompete data, you can also search for questions people are asking, which makes it highly beneficial as a YouTube SEO tool.

The downside to this particular tool is that it’s fairly limited on the free version. Upgrading to Pro Basic will give you almost double the keyword results and will let you compare the volume of searches made for those terms too. However, this will set you back around $68 a year, so it’s going to be something of an investment if you go for it.

3. SEOChat

SEO Chat is an amazing free tool that can generate keyword ideas from Google, Amazon, Bing and YouTube. You can search for keywords from all of those sources or can just search YouTube alone to find your keyword lists. You’ll need a ‘seed’ keyword, such as ‘shoes’, ‘make up’ or ‘marketing’, and then organizes results alphabetically with other letters following your seed keyword.

Simply scrolling through the results is going to give you loads of ideas for keywords and possibly content too. The tool also allows you to further expand your results by selecting a keyword and running ‘part two’ of the process, which expands those phrases even further. Your chosen keywords can be exported from the software, ready for use in your YouTube SEO tool.

4. Gather keywords from your competitor

Why not learn from the best and see what’s already working for your competitors? Finding their high traffic keywords is easy and can save a lot of time and energy. To do this, pick a channel that is around your size, as they’re your nearest competitors. Steer clear of the huge channels, as you’ll find it hard to rank next to them.

Click the videos tab to see their content, and sort them by ‘most popular’ to see the ones which got the most views. Take a look at the title and the description of those videos, and you’ll find a good fistful of proven keywords that you can start using yourself.

That’s not all though. To maximize your competitor research, let’s dig a little deeper into the tags they have used for their videos too. Unfortunately, these are hidden on YouTube, but are easily seen using the page’s HTML. Simply right click on the page and select ‘view source’. Don’t be alarmed at the great stream of HTML that pops up, it’s easy to search using your search function (press ctrl + f on Windows or ⌘ + f on iOS) by typing in ‘keywords’ to the search box. The following terms are the tags used in the video.

If ploughing through HTML sounds somewhat taxing, there is a handy YouTube SEO tool you can use to display the tags on page. It’s called TubeBuddy and is a Chrome extension which you’ll find in the Chrome store for free.

5. Keyword Tool Dominator

It’s got a grand name, but it’s actually really easy to use and a great place to start if you’re new to YouTube keyword research. Pop in your seed keywords and the Dominator will produce a list of relevant keywords related to those terms. You can then select the most useful and download them to your device.

The drawback with this is that you can only perform three searches a day on the free version. Perhaps that’s enough for you to begin with, but if you want to upgrade to the unlimited version, which will also give you search volumes, it’s a one-off fee of $39.99.

6. Ubersuggest

For getting more data on specific keywords, Ubersuggest from the SEO guru that is Neil Patel is one of the best tools out there. As well as showing search volume and competition, you can see other information such as cost per click and the seasonality of the keyword. It’s free to use with no limitations at all, so is well worth checking out.

7. Google trends

We would highly recommend investigating Google Trends as part of your YouTube keyword research, as it is powerful, accurate and, best of all, free! The options let you narrow down the trend results to just YouTube searches, which is great for gaining insights to your search terms. You can narrow down the results to a specific country too, helping you to gain insight into what your target demographic is currently interested in.

8. VidIQ

The keyword tool in VidIQ is one of very few research tools that has a function for just YouTube built in. You can paste in the keywords you want to research, choose the country you wish to target, and it will return all the search volumes and amount of competition, and will score your keywords based on these figures.

On the downside, there is a fairly complicated subscription process to go through if you want to upgrade from the free version. To be honest, the free version is OK for new users, but for in depth analytics you’re going to want to upgrade eventually.

9. Keyword Keg

Keyword Keg is definitely one of the most powerful YouTube keyword research tools out there. It offers lots of data, drawn from a variety of data sources including Wikipedia, Alibaba, Playstore and more. There are filters for country and language and you can drill down into issues like buyer intent and product info. However, as with most free YouTube keyword tools, there is a strict limit on what you can do before you pay. In this case, you only get to see the first five results unless you want to upgrade.

10. Kparser

Kparser is a YouTube keyword tool that you should notice. You can use it to find YouTube keywords free to use. More than finding the best core keywords, this tool can also give you suggestions on long tail keywords in every field. By use this, you don’t need to worry that you can’t the right keywords to use in title, description and tags. You also can selcet country and language when searching a YouTube keyword. For searching more than one keyword, remember to seperate them with coma.

Part 2: Bonus Tips - Google Video Result Keywords

Getting your video ranking highly on YouTube is excellent and will certainly bring you more traffic. But, do you know what would be even better than that? Getting your video ranking on Google as well.

To do this you’ll need to find ‘video result keywords’ in Google, so that yours can be one of the selected videos that sometimes show up in search. Google decides what should and shouldn’t trigger a video result, and usually shows them when a video would make sense, for example when someone asks ‘how to’ or searches for ‘cute’ or ‘funny’ things.

There’s a bit of trial and error involved as there is no YouTube keyword tool to find video result keywords… yet. But you can use Google to search your keywords and see if they are video result keywords. Just type them in, and if a video appears in the listings below, you’ve discovered a video result keyword that is well worth optimizing for.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett