5 Actionable Tips to Create a Clickable YouTube Thumbnail

Breadnbeyond
6 min readFeb 25, 2020

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Image by NotionPic on Canva

Are you a YouTube geek? Or a YouTuber? If you are, thumbnails inevitably seem familiar to you.

A YouTube thumbnail is a small picture that appears as your video representation on Youtube’s search results. It’s one of the essential buttons on a Youtube channel.

For Youtubers or content creators, this button is crucial to increase the popularity of their channel and content.

Today, we’re going to talk about why it is crucial to put some effort to create appealing thumbnails and how to do it.

Let’s geek out.

YouTube Thumbnails: Why Does It Matter?

Youtube’s thumbnail is an essential part of advertising your video because if your video’s thumbnail is not attractive, the viewers won’t bother to click on it — let alone visit your channel.

Some people might believe the wise saying, “Don’t judge the book by its cover.”

However, in this digital world, your videos are mostly judged by their thumbnails.

Along with your video title, thumbnail acts as mini-marketing posters for your content on YouTube. It’s the first thing that people see when they’re exploring your YouTube channel.

That’s why it’s a significant deciding factor in whether or not a person will click to watch a video.

According to Eepsa Mittal, thumbnails are also supposed to represent your content accurately.

With compelling thumbnails, it is much easier for you to entice and impress your potential customers in the first place.

So, it’s obvious now why it’s crucial to make it appealing and eye-catching.

Curious about How to Get a lot of “Like” on Your Video Thumbnails?

Now that you know the power associated with YouTube thumbnail, we will deeply talk about tips to increase thumbnail “quality” on your Youtube channel.

There are some quick and easy tips that you can practice:

Provide an Attractive Representation for Your Video

You can arrange an attractive representation of your thumbnail video by providing a suitable picture and brighter colors.

The picture that you are presenting on the thumbnail must be related to the content of your video because if not, your viewers will find that the content of your video is not relevant.

As an example for you, a YouTube channel named “Tasty,” always provides the delicious cut of their cooking results without being hyperbole on providing the colors.

However, you can also show your face, and then you might as well put it on your thumbnail.

Just like what Paigon Davis said, all the goofy and extreme facial expressions can attract your potential customers to click on your video as well.

Provide Clear Headline for the Thumbnail

Providing a strong, clear, and proper headline for your video is vital. You can offer a quick clue about your video by giving such a headline.

It will spark your audience’s curiosity so that they can’t help but click on your video.

According to Roberto Blake, it’s also essential to use clean, appealing, readable fonts for headlines, so your thumbnails look like a pro and less amateurish.

You must not put a lot of words for your headlines- make sure to be concise and straightforward for it.

Take a look at an example below for your reference:

On his Youtube channel, Gary Vaynerchuk provides appealing pictures with short, compelling headlines for his thumbnails.

With these attractive pictures and fonts, the audience will be attracted to visit and watch the entire content.

Show Your Main Act on Your Video

Trigger your audience’s curiosity by displaying the central act of your video in the thumbnail.

It helps your potential viewers get a glimpse of what your video is all about.

By providing your potential viewers an enticing image of your main act, they will try to find out what your video is about because they are curious to know what will happen.

These tips work for experiment videos. If you are creating experiment videos, then this type will help you out to get more audience.

Take a look at the example below:

In their channel, Superkot displays the picture of the process of the experiment.

The spoiled process of the experiment makes your audience want to find out more and more about its videos.

The Benefits of Using the Right Thumbnails

By providing and displaying the right picture, font size, headline, and other essential elements, you will increase your viewers from your hard work.

Creating and displaying the right thumbnail is not easy work because you need to adjust the thumbnail with your content.

Don’t confuse your potential viewers with a false thumbnail, but don’t give away your entire content. Provide a thumbnail enough to tease them to click on your video.

With the right thumbnail and meticulous planning, you’ll increase your viewers in no time. Here are some advantages to providing the right thumbnails:

It Maximizes Your Channel Exposure

Once your page is set up with a beautiful and exciting queue of colors and pictures, your audience will be happy even when they only see the brief page of your channel.

The excellent arrangement of thumbnails on your page will make your audiences remember much easier.

It also impacts the way the YouTube algorithm treats your video, which dramatically impacts if your video gets a massive amount of traffic or just epic failure.

If your thumbnail is set beautifully, it is evident that your audience will come again to your channel for more videos.

It Helps Spread Out Your Message

Once you have set up a decent thumbnail for your video page, the thumbnail will help you spread the central message of your content.

The thumbnail is the first preview and gives information about the main message of the video.

Furthermore, when the audience tries to search for videos, a thumbnail that stands out helps you drive the audience to your page.

If they like your video content, then with no hesitation, they’ll more likely to share your videos across platforms.

It Increases Interactivity

It is evident that thumbnail helps your page interaction with your audience to increase.

With a lot of attractive options and flexibility to edit your Youtube thumbnails, you can automatically increase your interactions with the audience.

You must realize that every thumbnail you make on your page, speaks the brief content of your videos.

It Represents Your Identity

Setting a thumbnail on your Youtube page represents your identity.

Every Youtuber’s page has its characteristics and uniqueness.

If you take a close analysis of cooking channels, they will provide beautiful and delicious images of dishes with attractive colors.

Further, they will also provide short but sweet headlines to engage their viewers.

On the other hand, experiment channels will display a scene from the experiment to engage more viewers.

Every creator has a unique way and preference on how to provide previews on their videos.

You can experiment with your videos until you come up with a thumbnail that represents your channel’s identity.

Learn More: 8 Ideas To Make Your Youtube Channel More Appealing

What Do You Think about These Youtube Thumbnail Tips?

We’ve created a video that sums up the whole points above:

Hopefully, all these thumbnail tips will work for you!

Have you ever done these tips for your Youtube page?

If so, do the tips work?

Please let us know your opinion below!

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Breadnbeyond
Breadnbeyond

Written by Breadnbeyond

Crafting animated explainer videos since 2009. Visit our website: https://breadnbeyond.com/

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