From Bland to Brilliant: Transform Your YouTube Channels’ Image

How to Brand Your YouTube Channel to Get More Subscribers

Shanoon Cox

Nov 01, 2022• Proven solutions

0

Epic Meal Time. Michelle Phan. Peter McKinnon. When you think of each of these YouTube creators, what comes to mind? The feelings and thoughts you have are vastly different because each one of these channels has its own unique branding.

Epic Meal Time’s YouTube brand is in-your-face and intense. It pumps you full of adrenaline and increases your heart rate.

Michelle Phan’s YouTube brand is calm, whimsical, and aspirational.

The color palette she chose is pleasing to the eyes and doesn’t evoke any of the stress we get from Epic Meal Time.

They have different branding because they want to reflect different feelings for different audiences.

Bad Branding Causes Mistrust

When a branding element does not align with the message or the tone does not match with the material, then the audience is not going to trust what you offer. Without trust, you won’t be able to get the advocacy that is essential for a YouTube channel to grow.

Imagine Michelle Phan using the aggressive colors of Epic Meal Time or vice versa. Pretty weird, huh?

What is YouTube Branding?

You might think that branding simply comes together while making videos, but that’s not true. Branding takes a bit of preparation and foresight.

YouTube branding is the idea your viewers have in mind and the emotion they get when they think about your channel.

Here are notable elements of your channel’s branding:

- Channel name

- Channel art

- Video thumbnail

- Video title

- Icon

- Watermark

- Catchphrase

- Style of video

How to Start Branding Your YouTube Channel?

Before you start designing thumbnails and coming up with a catchphrase, the first step in branding is understanding the purpose of your channel. Once you have a purpose, you will know how you want your viewers to feel.

Here is a quick exercise to find your channel’s purpose:

Draw a 3 circle Venn diagram.

In circle 1, write down everything you consider yourself an expert in.

- What do your friends know you for?

- What can you give advice on?

- What did you go to school to learn?

In circle 2, write down all the topics you are passionate about.

- What can you talk effortlessly about for hours?

- At a party, where do you lead conversations towards?

In circle 3, write down everything that people will pay for that you can supply. Here is where you find the demand of the audience.

- Can you give me travel advice?

- Can you make people forget about their stressful day?

- Do you have experience in a specialized field?

Understanding what people will pay money for will help guide you in creating content that has true value.

In the center, come up with all the ideas that can be associated with all three circles. This will be the ideal purpose for your YouTube channel as it harnesses your expertise, your passion, and the demand of a viewership.

Examples:

Epic Meal Time

Expertise = Eating

Passion = Fast Food Culture

Demand = Unique Meals

PURPOSE: Showcase a unique combination of fast food people won’t make at home.

Michelle Phan

Expertise = Beauty Products

Passion = Makeup and Fashion

Demand = Beauty School

PURPOSE: Give people more confidence in beauty products.

How Is Your Channel Different From the Others?

Now that you have your purpose, it’s time to separate you from others with similar purposes. YouTube is a crowded space for content creators. If your channel is mimicking another more successful channel, you will be in the shadows.

Good branding allows you to differentiate from others .

Pick a Unique and Memorable Name

If your name is Michelle Phan, and you are not the Michelle Phan, I’m sorry, but you will need to pick another name for your YouTube channel:

If you do have to pick another name or if your channel is an ensemble with multiple members, make sure the name you choose is original, memorable, and short (4 words max).

Picking an Icon

Not every YouTuber needs to design an original logo for their brand. In fact, if the channel is about you — the YouTuber — you are the brand, so using a high-quality picture of yourself as the icon is okay.

However, if your channel has a specific theme or topic and you want your branding to convey it so it sticks in the viewers’ heads, especially if it’s their first time viewing your channel. A clear logo will help in amplifying your message:

Create Video Thumbnails That Stand Out

The power of good branding is that your viewers will be able to spot your brand in a crowded space. On YouTube, the crowded space is the suggested video section.

Epic Meal Time thumbnails standing out amongst other loud thumbnails.

Once you have the feeling you want to evoke, test out different thumbnails. Go incognito, search up your videos, and see how the visuals appear beside your competitions. Do they all have the same style or is your far more impressive?

Good branding doesn’t happen in the first try so keep experimenting.

Designing Your Icon, Thumbnail, and Channel Art

There is a lot to consider when designing all the visual elements for your channel. I won’t get into all of it, but here are some tips that you should always keep in mind.

- Less is more: Don’t clutter your icons, thumbnails, or banner.

- Have a single focus: A channel and a video can have a lot of different topics, but the image can’t show everything a video can. Pick one important area and highlight that in the image.

- Quality matters: Your audience is savvier than ever. If they see a pixelated image, they will judge your channel poorly. That’s bad branding. Always use high-quality pictures.

- Make sure the color pops and the text is visible: Use eye-catching colors and visible text. This is a billboard, you have milliseconds to get people’s attention as they scroll past.

Want more resources for creating your channel’s visual elements? Yes? Well, we made this for you:

- How to Make YouTube Video Thumbnail

- How to Make YouTube Icons

- Free Youtube Banners

How to Make Your Visuals Consistent?

When a viewer finds your video and considers it pretty interesting, they will then go into your channel page to learn more. Here is where they make their decision: subscribe or not subscribe?

Consistent branding affirms the viewer that they are in the right place. Peter McKinnon’s brand is built upon his amazing photography, it only makes sense that his visual elements are awesome.

Peter McKinnon is best known for his photography and cinematography, and his branding amplifies that.

But Branding Is Not Designing, It’s A Feeling

Don’t get too caught up with a design.

Look at PewDiePie’s branding. You can argue that it is inconsistent and the design is not professional, but actually, his branding is spot on, because he is making you feel a certain way.

PewDiePie’s brand highlights its upbeat and unpredictable personality.

PewDiePie wants you to laugh. He is not branding his expertise like Peter McKinnon is, he’s branding his personality.

Consistent branding is about making the elements of your channel: channel art, logo, thumbnails, titles, etc. all harmonize together to evoke a sensation.

The humor in PewDiePie’s brand is consistent, even though his thumbnails don’t look like Philip DeFranco’s. It is up to you how you define consistency, and that will happen over time.

Philip DeFranco supplies commentary on current events with a satirical flair. Like a news broadcast, his branding and video format are consistent, while the daily news is different.

Inserting A Watermark

The main point of a watermark is to let the viewers know when they are watching your video that it is in fact your video.

Let’s be honest, YouTube content can all look the same, especially if you are making content that is quite general (like beauty or tech), so a watermark helps differentiate, so when viewers are ready to subscribe, they have an extra branding element connecting them to your channel.

Improvement Pill is a YouTube channel focused on inspiring and motivating its viewer to live a better life.

Above we see an example of a watermark from the YouTube channel Improvement Pill. You can see the watermark in the lower right-hand corner.

Improvement Pill is not the only channel that uses whiteboard animation to illustrate their story, and because of that, they need to set themselves apart. A watermark helps do that.

When a viewer lands on their video, the watermark gives the viewer another way to get more familiar with the channel, and if they are to scroll over the watermark a subscription button pops up.

Want to set up your subscription watermark? Here is a quick tutorial:

Coming Up With A Catchphrase

A catchphrase can be your greeting or sign off, but it doesn’t have to be an original line, it can simply be the way you say “hello.”

Check out some of the popular YouTuber’s catchphrases:

When coming up with a catchphrase that is connected to your channel’s branding remember how you want the viewer to feel. Do you want to leave them with a smile? Or do you want them to take action?

Final Thoughts On YouTube Branding

As you build and grow your YouTube channel, you can expand your purpose while still sticking within the overall theme. You might have started a channel that focused on the topic of nutrition, but as you grow, you will discover that your audience may also be interested in fitness tips or workout accessories as well. Take it slowly and grow with purpose.

Your branding doesn’t dictate the content you create, but it does affect how you go about making it.

Got more questions about branding your YouTube channel? Let us know in the comments below.

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox

YT Treasure Hunt: Accessing Previously Deleted Content

How to Watch Deleted YouTube Videos Online in 2 Ways | Ultimate Guide

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

YouTube features a wide variety of corporate and user-generated content ranging from music to DIY videos. Along with all this massive inflow, there are scenarios where the video content that you like or wanted to watch gets deleted for any reason. Either the uploading channel deleted the video, or YouTube sometimes deletes videos for violating any of the platform’s rules – showing the dismal message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available”. You’ll be thinking it is probably impossible to access deleted YouTube videos that you wanted to watch so badly. Though it may be true to some extent, in reality, nothing gets deleted from the internet. To help you watch deleted YouTube videos, we’ll dive into the two most handy methods down below. So, let get started.

You might be interested in How to Make a Playlist of Uploaded Videos and Others’ Video on YouTube>>>

• Part 1: Watch Deleted YouTube Videos with a URL
• Part 2: Watch Deleted YouTube Videos without a URL
• Part 3: Bonus Tip—Make Your Own YouTube Video with Wondershare FilmoraX

[

Part 1: Watch Deleted YouTube Videos with a URL

Internet Archive(known as the Wayback Machine) is a website archival system that has been collecting and cataloging websites since 1996. This means the system has effectively saved the site’s current layout and data. This enormous world archive of the Web’s past has amassed over 100 terabytes of storage with around 10 billion web pages.

On the archive.org website, you can find many of your favorite web site’s “snapshot” at a time in the past. For our case, we need to find and watch deleted YouTube videos, so for that, all we need is the link of the video, and we can most probably find it on archive.org. The steps for finding and restoring deleted YouTube videos are simple and as follows.

1. First of all, find the URL in your YouTube email, channel account if you’re searching for your uploaded video. You can find the link in browser history, in YouTube history, or you may have shared the link on social media.

If you want to watch a deleted YouTube video using the Wayback Machine, you must find the link to the video you want to access; without the URL, you won’t be able to access the deleted YouTube video.

2. Head over to the archive.org website and paste the YouTube video URL in the search bar and press return.

3. Once you find your video on the internet archive, you can see the details of the video.

4. You won’t be able to play the video directly, but you should be able to download it. Right, click the video to find the option to download the video.

This method works mostly as the Wayback machine is pretty active and regularly crawls the web to archive the sites. But sometimes, this method may not work and would require a more sophisticated way to watch deleted YouTube videos.

[

## Part 2: Watch Deleted YouTube Videos without a URL

But what if you don’t have a URL for the deleted YouTube video? The internet is a global village network. Everything on the internet is connected, and that connection makes it more useful for example, even though a YouTube video might be deleted, you can somehow access and watch the deleted YouTube videos without a URL because people always replicate videos and share them on other YouTube channels or social media platforms. To make sure you get to watch your favorite YouTube video again, we will dive into the vast internet and find the deleted YouTube videos.

This method can be a bit complicated and would require you to give full attention to find the video you want to watch that badly that you’ve landed on this article.

1. Open a new tab in your browser and go to the Google search bar. We’re going to employ a technique from the SEO expert’s toolbox – Google Search Operators.

2. In the search bar, type “site:www.youtube.com + name Of TheVideo”

3. This way Google will crawl all the name relevant videos only from the YouTube databases and move us closer to finding our deleted YouTube video.

4. If you know the video was shared by someone on Facebook or any other social media platform, you can change the site URL in the search bar, replacing YouTube with Facebook, for example.

5. Once you find the video URL, you can simply go back to the first method that we discussed and paste the URL into the internet archive. The archive will give you the video and you can enjoy watching a deleted YouTube video.

Note: If you still cannot find the video using this method, I’m sorry to tell you the video may be completely deleted from the server, and you cannot access it anymore.

Part 3: Bonus Tip—Make Your Own YouTube Video with Wondershare Filmora

Want to make a YouTube video again? Wondershare Filmora is a relatively lightweight and powerful platform you get an intuitive interface and the power to create wonderful, unique content. To help you make your own YouTube video with Filmora, we’ll go through a short introduction of the flow and features first:

• Organize media with folders and projects
• Cutting and trimming raw footage
• Unlimited Layering
• Visual effects and filters
• Attach/detach audio and music
• Add creative text and icons with a wide range of templates to choose from
• Advanced color correction tools
• Export videos to YouTube directly and support various output formats

Make a YouTube video with several clicks using Wondershare Filmora:

1. Download and install Wondershare Filmora on your computer by tapping the download wizard below. Remember to join the Wondershare Video Community to connect with other video creators.

2. Launch Wondershare Filmora, add your videos to the Media Library. And you’ll also be greeted with a sleek and simple interface with controls for everything such as transitions, titles, layering clips, soundtrack, and more.

Click here


3. Add your video to the timeline, then go to the Titles tab, and you will see hundreds of titles and text templates. Select the template you love and add it to the video.

4. Then you can also go to the Effects tab and apply astonishing filters to the video

5. Once you’re done, you can click Export and upload your video to YouTube directly.

The free version will have a watermark on the exported video.

There’s nothing more delightful than to put your skills to work and save time by using Filmora. The time you save can be put into making more content and editing videos to boast of your creativity to friends.

Conclusion

YouTube has immersed so much in our day-to-day life that on average a mobile viewing session lasts more than 40 mins. To satiate our thirst for video content, YouTube has become the sole free platform. But even if your favorite song or movie gets deleted, you don’t have to worry as I’ve compiled the best solution to watch deleted YouTube videos and even be able to restore deleted YouTube videos to relish watching them with your friends and family. Leave your comments below if you love this article.

Richard Bennett

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

Follow @Richard Bennett