The Right Way to Upload Videos on YouTube in 2025 (Best Settings)

00:00:00 today I'm going to go over my exact uploading process and settings I use that have helped me go on to get videos like this almost 4 million views this one 2 million views this one 3 million views this one 1.9 million views you get the idea now I've got the social proof out of the way let me just show you exactly what we do step by step in depth and make the best YouTube video uploading tutorial on the internet so first thing you're going to do to upload your video is come to YouTube obviously you need to be signed in hit this button

00:00:27 hit upload a video pretty straightforward I have already done that and you can see I have a video being uploaded or has uploaded right here the first thing we're going to look at is the title now we're going to get on to some of the more advanced settings and cool fun stuff later but we need to spend some time on the title here because the title is incredibly important for a number of reasons first myth I want to bust there have been people around here saying that the file name of your video which is often

00:00:50 reflected in the title impacts your SEO and how well your video rank that is a complete lie ignore anyone who says that but what does matter to SEO is your video title itself so if you want to rank your video in search getting this right is the most impactful thing you can do the thing is though not every video is designed to get the majority of its views from YouTube search so let me give you an example let's go this video that I showed you earlier this is a video where I say I bought 5 million

00:01:16 YouTube views here's what happened now when you think about this this video has got 2 million people to watch it but not many of those people are probably going to YouTube search and typing in I bought 5 million views blah blah blah so instead most people probably would have found this on their YouTube homepage dra their next up and as you can see here if I go into traffic sources you can see that this is correct right only 5% of my viewers actually came from YouTube search so why does this matter well it

00:01:40 means that if your video is the kind of thing that's not going to be found through YouTube search and something like I bought 5 million views or I discovered this crazy challenge or whatever it is something that people probably aren't going to be searching for you don't need to worry about including any keywords or SEO stuff here just focus on making this title as clickable as possible possible the more clickable it is the more likely it is the algorithm is going to promote that video to viewers on the homepage un

00:02:06 reccommended and your video is going to get a lot of views however if your video is the kind of video that is likely for people to search for it so tutorial videos are a good example of this like how to change a light bulb for instance in those sort of instances it's very important that you get keywords right because otherwise your VI is not going to show up and the reason I'm telling you all this here is creating the right title that's going to get you the most amount of views really depends on the

00:02:28 type of video you're posting and you need to evaluate your video figure out which of the two buckets I've just mentioned it best fits in and then write your title accordingly I might turn gain into get because I'm a dumb Australian who doesn't like long fancy words then I might come over here and type get analytics access to a YouTube channel like a pro because what I think viewers who want to find a video like this are going to most likely be typing into YouTube is something like how to get analytics access to a YouTube channel

00:02:55 and so I want to make sure those keywords are in my title now you can use a keyword research tool like IQ for instance to dive a lot deeper into the best keywords and search phrases to include in your title but for now I'm just going to leave this and move on to the next part of our video which is the description now the description is something that people get wrong all the time and it's actually one of the most important elements to upload in your video so here is the description template I like to use for all of my

00:03:19 videos I'll explain exactly how to use it and why I use it right now but I'm going to give you this template for free later in the video just as a bribe to keep you watching and get my watch time up but anyway so the first bit of the description is you want a little text hook that sort of elaborates and teases what your video is this hook we don't want it to be any longer than 95 characters and I'll get to why that is in a moment also if you're creating a searchable video like we talked about earlier you want to make sure that

00:03:43 you're including your keywords in this section if your video isn't very searchable it doesn't really matter what keywords you include in here just make sure this section entices and excites people to stick around for the video all right so I might write something like here's a step-by-step tutorial and the easiest way to get analytics access to a YouTube Channel I'm just going to check the uh character count on this bam perfect 94 characters I'm just using an extension called character counts completely free and again if you're

00:04:10 seeing extensions and stuff around my uploading process I like using tools to make my life easier but you can do most of this stuff manually if you don't mind putting in a bit more time so now we're going to move down our description a bit to this section this is what I call your first call to action and a call to action is where you promote something and if you have a product or service obviously this is the perfect place to put it and you might be thinking but Marcus I don't promote anything I don't

00:04:32 have a product or sponsor or whatever that's fine promote another one of your videos here if someone clicks on your video and then they click on your call to action you've now turned one view into two views so don't miss out on that opportunity and you want to copy the exact spacing and character counts I mentioned here because what we want this to look like is let's go to a video on YouTube Good Old grammarly ad what we want our description to look like is this so you're going to have your first

00:04:55 text talk that's the first thing people are going to read and then you're going to have your call to action here here with the link showing up whether that's to your product service or another YouTube video and this is all going to show up without people having to click on the more button you don't want to push this link down to another row because if you do then people aren't actually going to be able to click on it without clicking on the more button now speaking of links this is something else

00:05:17 that people stuff up if you're linking to a product or a service or a website and try to have a unique tracking link for every single video that way you know exactly what videos are sending traffic to your website because some videos send more more traffic than this for example I had a video that got 700,000 views I think and it was sending double the amount of leads to my website as another video I had that I think had like 1.4 million views and without my tracking link I would have had no idea that my

00:05:43 700,000 view video was more successful and I would have kept making more videos like the one that got 1.4 million views now if you're not sending traffic to a website let's say you're promoting another YouTube video you don't just want to link the video here what you want to do is create a playlist and if you haven't got any playlists already you just want to come to your YouTube Studio come up to create click on create new playlist just add in the title of your playlist description doesn't really

00:06:06 matter and then click add videos and add a bunch of your videos to this playlist and the reason you are going to do this is because if I go to one of my playlists let's say I go to this one and now that I'm inside of this playlist I copy this link and use this link for my call to action when someone goes to this video and clicks on this link not only is it going to actually open up the video but it's going to open up the video inside of a playlist like you can see here which is good because one it

00:06:35 pushes down all of the recommended competitor videos and make it harder for viewers to see them and they have to scroll all the way down here to see these videos but two it means that if people get to the end of your video now they're going to just automatically be loaded up another one of your videos and then another one and then another one which is going to hopefully help you get multiple views off the same viewer so I'm going to put that there next what I like to do is I like to have this videos

00:06:56 to watch next section and I have a couple of different videos that are related to the topic of the video I'm posting with links to them again to try and get people to watch multiple of my videos and what you'll notice here if you look at these links carefully you'll see that these look like the links I just showed you and that's because these are also playlist links so if I copy this and I Chuck this into YouTube you'll see that it loads up this video but it loads it up again inside of a playlist now down below what I like to

00:07:23 do now is have another section for calls to action again I use emojis here because I want to draw people's attention to these calls to action this is exactly the same as the call to action that's up here I just changed the wording of it so if people don't click up here I have another shot of getting them to click down here so what I would do is I could just like copy something like this instead of doing want to watch me buy 5 million views I could just do something like I spent $80,000 buying views watch what happened here which is

00:07:52 actually true by the way and again I'm just going to promote the exact same thing so now I've got the opportunity to try and get people to do this thing and then below that I'm just going to have any other calls to action that I want to promote so this could be maybe your social media for me it's an email list highly recommend people promote an email list especially if you're an education type Channel because it means if anything ever happens to your channel you have all the email addresses of your

00:08:12 subscribers so you can just email them your new videos or new offers or products or whatever it is now below that I like to have a little quote I don't know if this actually makes a difference I just like it I'll then have my contact information for Brands and then below that I will have a bunch of hashtags now I get a bunch of questions about these hashtags firstly people ask is it not Allowed by YouTube and the answer to that is no if you read YouTube's terms and conditions they say you can have up to 60 relevant hashtags

00:08:36 and I usually have about 50 here and when you link a hashtag in your video it's going to one show the hashtags at the top of the description but if you click on those hashtags it's also going to make your video show up when people type in that hashtag now do many people type in hashtags no this isn't a great strategy to get huge amounts of views as you can see there's only like me and two other creators actually tagging their videos with these hashtags but I think about it this way it can't hurt it's not

00:09:01 going to make me get less views and if your videos are all around a similar topic I normally just copy and paste the same list of hashtags but just be careful doing that if your videos are very different because YouTube terms and conditions so you need to make sure your hashtags are actually relevant to the video that you're posting now if we keep coming down we end up in the custom thumbnail section now quick note here if you don't see this section it's probably because you haven't verified your

00:09:22 channel so if you have a new channel what you need to do is come into settings then you want to go to channel then you want to go to feature eligibility and in here you can see this is new channel right I'm not eligible for these other two features because I haven't verified my phone number so you would just need to verify your phone number and then you'd also need to verify a valid ID to get access to the last one and that's going to allow you to do things like custom thumbnails upload videos longer than 15 minutes etc

00:09:45 etc but anyway back to thumbnails we have upload a file which you can upload a singular file you can autogenerate a thumbnail which is usually horrendous and you can test and compare which is going to let you upload multiple thumbnails and test them against one another now I do think the test and compare option is the one you should go with I've heard people saying test and compare actually hurts your videos I haven't found that and a lot of my other YouTuber mates who are much smarter than me haven't found that either so what I

00:10:08 would do is you just come and click on this and then you upload multiple different thumbnails so I might just upload this one this one this one now what I will say is that I have been getting some interesting results from thumbnail test and compare let me show you what I mean so if I come to my content you can view how your thumbnails went later by coming down to the video that you added on clicking on options and clicking on view test and compare I did test and compare but with three of the exact same thumbnails I did this

00:10:36 across multiple videos one you can see is that YouTube actually gave me very different results it said that this thumbnail was the most successful with a 40% watchtime share and this thumbnail was the least successful with 27% watch time share which is interesting because these two thumbnails are literally exactly the same so right now should you fully trust YouTube's Tes and compare feature a friend of a friend of mine has actually talked to YouTube's developer team who created this feature and even

00:10:57 the developers who created this feature say that they think it's about 50% accurate which probably means it's like 30% accurate so long story short don't take the results that you get from thumbnail test as gospel also it's not a bad idea to run the thumbnail test multiple times to make sure that your winning thumbnail actually is a winning thumbnail but overall I still do use it right now assuming all three of your thumbnail variations are actually good quality all right if we continue down we

00:11:20 now are at the playlist section here you can just click in here and just select all playlists that are relevant to your video and just hit done coming down further we are at the Copper section this is where you have to designate whether your video is made for kids or made not for kids the way you want to think about this here is think about is your video made specifically for kids so think about something like Peppa Pig right the TV show that TV show is made specifically for kids so if you're uploading videos like that then yes the

00:11:45 video is made for kids on the other hand if you're uploading videos that are akin to say Marvel movies right Marvel movies aren't made for kids even though kids enjoy watching them and if your video content allows for you to do this genuinely selecting no is usually the option you want because it's it's going to give you a whole bunch of extra features that would be unavailable if you said your video is made for kids all right continuing on age restriction if your video is very explicit then yes you

00:12:08 can restrict it to viewers over the age of 18 most of the time you don't have to worry about this also video game violence and stuff doesn't really count so I had gaming channels for example for 5 years lots of killing and death and stuff like that and I never had to restrict my video to over 18s and I never had any problems so continuing on paid promotion if you have sponsors or brand deals you're supposed to check this box legally now I'm not saying you shouldn't check this box but I will say

00:12:31 that a lot of big creators and you guys have probably noticed this don't check this box even when they are promoting things so like if you get this one wrong it's probably not going to matter but I guess you should try and be genuine about this now if you do check this box it's going to show a little Banner at the beginning of your video that says this video includes paid promotion or something like that now next we have YouTube's AI section so basically if you've created AI characters or footage

00:12:54 that could be mistaken for real characters or footage supposed to check yes here so I'm just going to no because I don't include that now next one we have automatic chapters chapters are those things where you can see the video play bars being broken up into multiple different segments sounds like a really great idea turning on allowing automatic chapters and key moments I hate it because YouTube's AI often gets it wrong so I would turn it off if you want to add those sections or segments to your

00:13:18 video which as you've probably seen from my uploading process here I don't think it's necessary there are times where I think chapters can sort of hurt retention because people see the upcoming chapters and they just skip to them but of course that's not every video so if if you do want to add chapters I would do it manually the way you would do that is You' come up to your description and you would type 0 colon 0 0 and then type the name of your first chapter then you come down and type the Tim stamp where that chapter

00:13:40 ends so let's say 020 then type the name of the next chapter that's going to be so it might be intro you might say 0.1 and go 0 50. 2 1 50.3 etc etc you don't have to have these spaces I just added them in for some reason and that will make those chapters appear inside of your video now an important thing to know if you are doing chapters try not to spoil your video so I see a lot of people do this in their chapters they basically spoil the content and make it so the viewers don't actually need to watch so for

00:14:09 example if I had a chapter in this video that was like why chapters don't matter you're going to be watching the video and you're going to see that little chapter with its title and be like okay he said chapters don't matter so I don't need to watch this I'm just going to go to the next step and people are going to skip if you are doing chapters when you're titling them try to title them in a way that doesn't make people think oh I already know this or I already know what's going to happen and just skip to

00:14:28 the next interesting part of your video all right going back down continuing along allow automatic places we don't want YouTube to docs us so let's take that off next automatic Concepts turn it off you don't want that next we have tags now tags in 2024 and Beyond basically don't matter I do use tags my rationale reasoning for that is the fact that YouTube has still included them means that they are somewhat relevant to some degree but in my experience the difference tags make is so minute that I

00:14:53 put very little effort into this I will basically just use a tool like vid IQ I'll type in like one keyword just copy all of the related keywords that show up and paste them in here in bulk so it literally take you like 20 or 30 seconds to do this and I don't think you should even bother spending more than that amount of time on tags all right continuing Down video language you can select that here cap certification leave that at none recording date I don't know why they have this almost no one uses

00:15:17 this feature but I guess you can add the recording date of your video If you really want to now license and distribution if you select standard YouTube license it means that people aren't supposed to take your video and re-upload it themselves if you just like Creative Commons attribution it means that people can reupload your video or reupload parts of your video as long as they give you credit now I like to leave it at Creative Commons attribution because I think well if someone wants to re-upload my video and credit me it's

00:15:39 like free promotion it's free marketing for me why would I not want that so most people have it a standard YouTube license cuz they don't want people to steal their content I'm like you want to steal my content and promote me in it fine like go for it please be my guest cool next one is allow embedding if you have this checked it's going to allow people if they want to embed your video into their website same thing here if people want to embed my video into their website free marketing free views for me

00:16:01 of course you can do that and the next one down here this is a really interesting one so publish to subscriptions feed and notify subscribers now when you check this it means when you post your video it's going to end up in your viewers subscriptions feed and notify any people who have the Bell notification turned on and you would think that you would want to leave this on here's why not so if you post a variety of different types of videos let's say you've been posting a bunch of Minecraft videos and then you

00:16:22 go and post a guitar tutorial video if you have your published to subscriptions fee to notifi subscribers checked in the beginning YouTube's going to be more likely to promote your guitar tutorial video to the viewers who watch your previous videos who are interested in Minecraft not guitar tutorials and so those viewers don't click they don't watch and sometimes that can get the algorithm confused and it thinks well this is just a bad video maybe it's the best guitar tutorial in the world it's

00:16:46 just being promoted to the wrong audience sometimes YouTube doesn't seem to be smart enough to figure that out so in my opinion think about it like this would the viewers of your previous videos also really want to click on this video that you're about to publish if the answer is yes great leave this on publish it to subscriptions feed and notify your subscribers if the answer is no leave this off because you don't want YouTube to send your video to the wrong type of person who's not going to watch

00:17:08 and it's going to make it less likely the algorithm will promote your video more in the future next allow shorts remixing this will just allow people to create shorts using your content in your video again I like to allow this cuz free marketing and if we come down to category this is where you can select the category of your video now if you select certain categories like gaming for instance it'll actually allow you to type in exactly what the game is that you're playing in other categories to

00:17:31 say like comedy doesn't require any sort of additional specification so I would just go through here select the category that makes most sense to you and if there are any additional prompts that show up when you select your category just fill them out to be as accurate as they can be in describing whatever type of content is that you've made so for this video I might just go like education this is going to be like a how-to video it isn't part of any academic system so I'm just going to go none and here I would just type in

00:17:56 whatever it is I help my viewers with all right continuing on comments and ratings I like to allow comments to be on for comment moderation I like to have it at basic as well if you get a lot of hate comments and you can't handle them you could put it at strict or hold all and that will only allow comments to get approved to you published to your video basic's pretty good in my experience and last you can choose how you want to sort your comments by always leave this at top because that's how most videos on

00:18:20 YouTube are sorted and of course you want to allow people to see how many people like the video otherwise people will think you're weird and you're hiding something so now we've done all of that stuff we can just hit next if your channel is monetized you can come here and click on on which will mean that your video is going to show ads now if your video is over 8 minutes in length you can actually insert mid roll ads into your videos so there's going to be ads at play not just at the beginning of your video but during your video but

00:18:41 if you're at the point where you have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours which is how many you need to monetize you probably already know how to do that so I'm just going to keep going cool next is ADD suitability so basically you just want to go through this questionnaire and just answer all of these questions as accurately as you can so I might just have that adult content there's going to be none violence none har flx none recreational drugs none none none none cool none of this is that

00:19:04 so then I can just hit submit rating and then I'm going to hit next and you always want to try and be as honest as you can in this section because if you stay honest there YouTube is going to basically allow you to continue moderating your own content but if YouTube picks up that you're lying about what's actually in your video then they're going to stop trusting you and they might actually need to review your videos which could take some time meaning that if you want to post your videos right away you're going to miss

00:19:28 out on a chunk of of AD Revenue while YouTube are reviewing your ad suitability so next we're into video elements you can add subtitles here if you want to reach an broader audience YouTube automatically adds subtitles for most languages I just let YouTube do it because it's pretty good next you can click on add an end screen what an end screen is is that video box or playlist or Channel subscribe icon that pops up at the end of a YouTube video to do whatever it is you wanted to do so you can import an end screen from a previous

00:19:53 video and we're just going to create one custom for this tutorial so I'm going to click add so YouTube has a couple of different templates you can use here what I like to do personally is I like to promote a video so your video is going to pop up here what you can do is you can click on this and I like to drag this out like that to make it as big as possible and Chuck it right in the center of the screen the reason I do this is the more elements you add onto the screen the more what's called decision fatigue is induced so when I

00:20:16 was working in marketing for 4 years what I learned was the more choices people have the less likely it is that they're going to make any choice at all so I like to just give people one big Choice which is the thing I want them to do which is to watch another one of my videos so I can turn that one View into two views now the other thing I like to do is end screens by default are set to last about 20 seconds 20 seconds in my opinion is way too long it doesn't take people 20 seconds to decide on whether

00:20:39 or not they want to watch your next video so if you want to scroll to the end of your video to see how long it is you have to like kind of drag your plainhead off the screen like that and then click on this little button and it'll like move it to the end of your video so I can see that my video is 4 minutes and 47 seconds long so I'm just going to drag this over to here click on my plainhead and then I'm going to drag this down to say I was like 47 seconds I think giving people about 7 seconds is

00:21:03 enough time ideally so I'm just going to Chuck that there the reason I don't have a hard and fast number here is because I usually like to in my videos themselves actively promote the end screen that pops up so I'll say something like hey if you want to watch XY Z video click on that video on screen right now and depending on how long it takes me to say that call to action will depend on how long it is that I have this end screen show up for so I'll basically just have this end screen show up at the point

00:21:26 where I say there'll be a video on screen right now so I'll just drag to wherever that is but roughly my end screens usually end up being about 5 to 10 seconds now after you've selected your placement and how long you want the video to be for you can select what kind of video you want to feature here now if you have no idea I would just select best for viewer and let YouTube choose what video to promote to your viewer but if you do what I mentioned previously where I actually have a baked in call to

00:21:47 action in my video script where I'm like hey go check out the video on screen that's going to help you do XYZ I like to come to choose a specific video and then choose the specific video that I am promoting in my outro for obvious reasons so once you've done all of that you can just hit save and the last thing is cards basically cards will show this little like icon at the top right hand corner of the video but not many people click on or use cards nowadays so vast majority of people I don't think you

00:22:09 need to use them so we're just going to hit next here now it's going to show us a screen to see if we have any copyright issues in our video so for me I'm all good because this video has no copyright issues so we're going to hit next so what you're going to want to do is first save your video to unlisted and now when you upload it to unlisted it means no one will be able to see it unless you directly send them a link to the video let it sit for an hour or so while it publishes the HD version of your video

00:22:31 because if you just upload your video right away to public the video might have only processed to standard definition so when people watch it it's not going to look very good also YouTube might not have checked whether or not you have any copyright violations yet in your video CU also that can take some time sometimes so you might find that you upload a video you post it and YouTube's like hey this video has copyright issues and at that point you've posted it and it's too late so uploaded to unlisted until all of your

00:22:55 copyright checks and your highdefinition version of your video is processed mine you can see it already has down here from these icons but a lot of longer videos might take some more time now what I personally like to do is come down to schedule and I like to schedule the video to go live at my peak time so when most of my viewers are active so that video IQ extension I told you about that I've got installed tells me that my best times to post are between 12: and 2:00 a.m. so I could just select

00:23:19 whatever day I want my video to go live on and then I would select 12:00 a.m. so it goes live at the beginning of my peig time now if you don't have vid IQ installed something you can do is you go to your YouTube channel you go to YouTube Studio then you're going to go to your analytics then you're going to come to audience and the audience Tab and if you scroll down you should see this little thing here and it's going to tell you when your viewers are online so if I hover over these boxes the lighter

00:23:44 purple you see the more viewers are online so these dark purple sections it means not many of my viewers are online if I hover over this you can see that but if I hover over these sections for example like from 12: to like 2 3 4: a.m. that's when the majority of my viewers are which is what viq just told me right I should be posting around like 12:00 a.m. but quick thing bear in mind if you have a really small Channel and you don't have much data unfortunately this section of your analytics is not

00:24:08 going to show up in saying all of that though don't worry too much about publish time a lot of people make a big deal about what's the perfect time to publish out to get more views it really doesn't make that big of a difference but coming back to actually publishing our video you might see this option down here set as Premiere what this will do if you select this and you hit setup Premiere you can select like a countdown timer that might look something like this you can choose what you want the

00:24:30 length of the countdown timer to be so you can actually make a trailer for your video that people can watch before your video goes live at the scheduled date and you can also add redirects which would allow you to sort of like Stitch together multiple live streams or Live Events I never use this but anyway if you're creating a really big massive exciting video I like to set as a premere to try and sort of build a bit of extra hype within your audience if you don't really have an audience at the

00:24:52 moment then setting as a premere doesn't really matter but I would say try not to do too many premieres cuz if every single one of your videos is a Premiere and you're uploading frequently then eventually when you do Premier a video people are just going to be like well he always premieres like it it's not really that special so I try and be selective with this so when people see me publish a video as a premere they're like oh this one's special and so if you hit that your video is going to show up as

00:25:12 scheduled like this just sort of build hype for when the video is supposed to go live and when the video does go live there's going to be like a live stream chat where viewers can interact and you can interact with your viewers while everyone's watching it for the first time and cool stuff like that and now all of this has been done you just hit schedule close this out and you can see that the video has been scheduled like so and if I go to my channel really quick I need to do this really quick cuz

00:25:33 I need to delete this Premiere because it's going to make my channel look stupid um let's load it up for to my homepage here you can see it right here so you can see upcoming how to get analytics access to a YouTube channel blah blah blah if I click onto this you can see that I've got a Premiere and there's one person currently waiting and the the kind of the wait looks it looks like this anyway I'm going to delete this really quick so people don't see it this is stressful a lot of people go through

00:25:57 this and think that just by publishing the videos properly it's going to help them get more views it's actually more about what well actually I have a whole video on this so I'm not going to get into this now cuz this video has already been super long video on screen go watch that video make sure you do all that stuff first and then come back to this publishing guide then publish your video like I've just shown you here and you're going to give it the best possible chance of getting more views so go check

00:26:15 out that video and I'll see you on the next one see you