Your Channel Homepage is Costing You Views on YouTube!

Improving your channel's homepage is one of the best things you can invest time in as a beginner Youtuber. That's the page many viewers will visit if they're interested in seeing more of your content and/or considering subscribing to your channel.

Unfortunately, setting up the homepage is usually one of the first things we do when launching a new channel. And at that stage, we may not have a great sense of what the channel will be about or be very good at creating homepages. As a result, our mistakes may cause viewers to leave without watching more videos or subscribing, negatively affecting our channel's growth potential. 

The good news is that we can fix things by revisiting the key areas that significantly impact the viewer experience and channel optimization. In this episode, we'll cover three such areas: the channel banner, the About page, and the section headers.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:22 Mistake 1: Channel Banner
• 2:20 Mistake 2: About Page
• 2:52 Mistake 3: Section Headers
• 5:10 Conclusion: Call to Action

Transcript

[00:00:00] Tim: Have you ever gone to a website homepage and then not been able to find the content that you're looking for? How long did it take before you exited the page? 10 seconds? 20 seconds? The reality is, most people don't even wait that long. But there are three main ways you can fix this, and that's what I want to talk about in this episode.

[00:00:17] So let's get into it.

[00:00:17] Let's start with your channel banner because that's one of the first things people are going to see when they come to your homepage. A good channel banner is visually appealing and provides a clear message on what the channel is about and who it's for. A poor banner is amateurish-looking and unclear.

[00:00:35] And I can say that because I used to have one of these banners. You can see my first attempt right here, where I had a bunch of text and icons and like, eight different topics described. My second effort got a little better here, with a nicer-looking graphic and a clearer message. But with that version, I'd probably taken it as far as I could go myself.

[00:00:52] I mean, if you're like me and you're not a professional graphic designer, it's gonna be hard to come up with a compelling banner on your own. And that's where you can look at three different levels of outsourcing for this. And the first level would be templates. For example, if you have a Canva Pro membership, you can search for and find a bunch of pre-designed channel templates. And you can see that a lot of the ones that come up right away are better than my initial efforts. And they're also going to take less time to adapt and use than starting from scratch. 

[00:01:21] The second level of outsourcing would be getting a dedicated tool like Thumbnail Maker. It also has a bunch of thumbnail templates that you can use. Or you can create your own from scratch by selecting a specific background for the banner. And then add in any text, icons, or other elements that you want to it. You can also use the tools to customize any template from the library as well. 

[00:01:42] So this here is an example of a banner that I made with Thumbnail Maker and InShot. And it's for the YouTube Growth Club that I established as an XApp community. And you can check it out over there on the XApp if you like. It's got about 70 members so far, and we share ideas, goals, and the daily struggles of trying to build a YouTube channel. 

[00:02:02] Now the third layer of outsourcing is to hire a graphic designer to do it for you. And you can do that by going to a site like Fiverr, which is what I ultimately did when I hired Autovector. I thought the style was kind of cool, you can see he's got a lot of positive reviews, and the prices are pretty reasonable. 

[00:02:18] Once you've got the banner nailed down, the next thing to work on would be your About page. Ideally, you want to use your About page to let your audience know something about who you are, how your content helps people, and the specific subtopics covered within your channel. And in this case, I have listed a fair number of subtopics, but I think this is the one place that's okay to do, because visitors to your about page generally want a more detailed understanding of your channel. And if you match your about page keywords with your channel keywords and your content keywords, that's going to be helpful for search engine optimization. 

[00:02:51] That brings us to the third thing that you can do to optimize your channel homepage, which is to set up the sections on your channel homepage. You see, once your channel gets to a certain number of videos, it's going to become harder and harder for viewers to find exactly what they're looking for when they arrive on your homepage.

[00:03:08] And that's because the default sectioning on the homepage is Shorts and Videos, that's it. Whatever comes up there is just going to be your most recent stuff. That may or may not be ideal for any specific viewer, depending on how many subtopics that you post about and how good your latest stuff was.

[00:03:23] But fortunately there's a way we can fix this by going into Channel Customization and then scrolling down to Add Our Own Sections. The options you're going to find there include popular videos, lives, playlists, or even favorite channels. 

[00:03:39] My recommendation is to put popular videos first so that your best stuff is at the top, and then follow that up with your content pillars as the main section headers. These represent the main topic areas that you talk about within your content. 

[00:03:53] Now, just like when it comes to your channel links, I think you want to limit the number of sections within your YouTube homepage. If you've got too many section headers and too many potential topics to choose from, viewers are more likely to get overwhelmed and then simply leave the channel.

[00:04:09] Ideally, what you want is to have your channel section headers to be another element of your channel that sends a very clear message about what your channel is about. And that's going to make it that much easier for viewers that come to your homepage to find something else on your channel that they'd like to watch or perhaps even to help them make the decision to subscribe.

[00:04:28] The other good thing is that when you create playlists, you can also add descriptions to your playlist. And I think this is a great thing to take advantage of because it's going to allow you to add more keywords to your channel. That's going to help give the YouTube algorithm and other search engines a better understanding of what your channel is about.

[00:04:46] Then this, in turn, is going to help the algorithm surface your content to viewers that are more likely to be interested in that content. And in the end, your channel will go from having just those two sections of shorts and videos... To something that will give viewers a much better sense of what the channel is about and where to find the type of content that they're interested in. And then all that should help to boost your views and hopefully your subscribers as well. 

[00:05:10] You know, as creators, we often spend a lot of energy to bring people to our channel through our videos or social media posts or what have you. So it only makes sense to make the most of that opportunity by optimizing the homepage that we're bringing them to.

[00:05:25] So if you haven't done so already, I strongly encourage you to make some of these changes on your channel and then once you've done that, drop me a note in the comments so I can come and check it out. I hope you found this helpful. If you did, a like or a positive review is always appreciated. Thanks for tuning in.