Don't Skip These Steps BEFORE Uploading on YouTube | Ep. 38

Are you missing crucial YouTube settings before hitting publish? In this episode, I walk you through the most important YouTube upload settings you can't afford to skip. From crafting compelling titles and thumbnails to optimizing end screens and descriptions, I'll show you exactly what matters for algorithm success in 2025.

Listen as I break down:

• Why tags aren't as important as you think
• How to craft titles that drive clicks
• The truth about timestamps and chapters
• Critical settings that affect visibility
• End screen optimization tricks
• The new thumbnail test & compare feature

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Chapters

• 0:00 Here's a fun fact that might surprise you.
• 1:34 Tags
• 3:40 Hashtags
• 4:48 Title
• 8:37 Thumbnails
• 12:58 Timestamps
• 16:52 YouTube Description
• 17:25 Age Restrictions
• 18:39 Altered Content Selection
• 19:45 End Screen Elements
• 26:34 Thumbnail Test & Compare

Transcript

AI Edits from 38 Don't Skip These Steps BEFORE Uploading on YouTube | Ep. 38

[00:00:00] Here's a fun fact that might surprise you. Before you publish a YouTube video, there are 30 different settings that you might have been breezing through before you hit publish on that video. Some of them are more important than others when it comes to helping your video actually perform in the algorithm.

But I recently recorded an entire 30 step,video uploading checklist for members inside video brand academy. But here on episode 38, I want to talk about which of those 30 settings are the most important so that the videos that you spend, you know, your blood, sweat, and tears on actually reach your audience and keep working in the algorithm for weeks, months, and years to come.

This is episode 38 of Video Brand Infusion. My name is Meredith, and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can build a thriving video brand.

And I want to ask you a question. are you aware of the 30 different steps or settings that you have to have [00:01:00] in place before you hit publish?

Well, I'll be honest with you. Some of them are less important than others. Like, does anyone even know what the YouTube category even does for anybody? Honestly, if you do, let me know in the comments because I've never really known what that was for.

But there are a handful of critical settings when you go to upload your video that if you skip them, if you don't fully optimize them.

Then you're missing out on some good, like, algorithm juice with YouTube so that you can get your video out to even more people.

Tags

And I want to start out by addressing one of the most confusing settings on YouTube. It continues to be a confusing setting when you go to upload your video, and that is tags. Do you need to use tags? Do tags help at all? And what's the difference between tags and hashtags?

Now, according to YouTube support documents, tags are descriptive keywords that you can add to your video to help [00:02:00] viewers find your content.

Your video's title, thumbnail, and description are more important pieces of metadata for your video's discovery.

It goes on to say that tags can be useful if the content of your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in your video's discovery. Those are the words directly from YouTube's support documents. When you go to upload your video, you have, you know, you have your title, you have your description, you have your thumbnail, we're going to talk about that stuff.

below that is a big old box for Tags. And tags used to matter a lot on YouTube and then over time the algorithm changed and YouTube now knows what the content is in your video because it can see your transcript.

So the title helps to be the title of your video so that YouTube knows what it's about. So the humans that are watching them know what it's about. The description [00:03:00] describes the video, of course, and tags used to be some additional keywords that helped YouTube know what all was in that content. YouTube doesn't need that anymore.

When I first started on YouTube 10 years ago, it was a pretty common thing to spend lots of time researching what you should put in your tags. And still 10 years later, I get questions from people. I have clients who are agonizing over what to put in the tag box.

And The truth is you could leave it empty. YouTube does make a good point about commonly misspelled words, But your description and your thumbnail play a much bigger role than tags.

Hashtags

hashtags are something completely different. Hashtags are words that you put in your description with that hash symbol. And I believe you can put up to like 10 hashtags in your description. The first three will show up. Next to your video's title and they are clickable.

So if you think about Facebook and [00:04:00] Instagram, the hashtags become this like clickable thing that you click on. And now you can see any of the content that has that hashtag.

in my opinion, Just like tags, hashtags are not something to agonize over when you upload your video. You can throw some in there that makes sense for your content, that makes sense for your niche or your industry. But your title, description, thumbnail, and the video itself is so much more important than tags and hashtags.

so let's move on to the title. And if you're thinking that I'm only going to address like the most common things like title description and hashtag, there's a couple of things right before you're done uploading that you want to make sure that you do before you actually publish your video or schedule your video.

Title

So stick with me here. The title of your video is probably the very. first key thing to think about before [00:05:00] you even upload your video. And in my very last episode, I talked about how having your title and your thumbnail actually done before you hit record is going to help you create a better video and it's going to help your video perform better for you on YouTube.

So if you're curious why that would be, you can go back and listen to episode number 37. But when it comes to deciding what actual words to put in that title spot,

Obviously it has to be very tightly related to whatever is in the video

because clickbait is not going to work for you longterm.

But what I like to teach my clients and students is to craft a title that is clear and specific with a little bit of a dramatic punch.

What I mean by that is how to edit a YouTube video is clear and specific, but kind of boring.

Whereas EASY, in all caps, [00:06:00] the EASY way to edit a YouTube video. or quick in all caps or fast in all caps.

I like to capitalize single words so that they stand out and give a little punch. Exclamation marks are great. Question marks are great.

And if you're doing your keyword research and SEO and you're optimizing your video for search, then you definitely want to make sure that the keywords that you're trying to rank for are closer to the beginning of your title. They don't have to be the very first words because you do want to have a little emotional punch in there as well.

But you have to spend some time to really craft. This group of words in a way that is optimized for search is clear and specific, but also enough of an emotional punch, enough of a drama punch to get your viewers attention and generate some intrigue.

There's a [00:07:00] lot riding on this one simple sentence. So while it might seem like a simple sentence, take the time to really craft something that is intriguing for your potential viewers.

I will caution you here, there are quite a few tools out there, some that are browser extensions that integrate with YouTube that will put some title ideas right there in front of you. Or if you go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask for some YouTube title ideas,

I wouldn't just take those tools. At their word that what they're giving you is actually a decent title idea because most of the time what the AI outputs looks like it's written by AI. And if. It's 2025 in this current climate that we're in as content creators, it's never been more important to be as human as possible.

A [00:08:00] couple of days ago, I got a comment on one of my videos from a couple of months ago, like back in November, where I misspelled a word in the title.

And the good news is that's what makes me human.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, please don't let the AI tools write your titles for you without having some human input and without understanding your own strategy behind crafting a really good title. Clear. specific emotional punch

and SEO optimized if you are going after keywords. 

Thumbnails

So I mentioned thumbnails. Let's talk about thumbnails next.

Now I just got off a call today with a one on one client who asked me about her thumbnails, which is a common question with my clients and students. Like, how are my thumbnails? Should I change them? Are they okay? And you know, what's really interesting? Thumbnails are such a visual. Piece [00:09:00] of the puzzle, right?

Obviously,

but we as the creator of the video or the creator of the thumbnail are so biased when it comes to analyzing whether something is a good thumbnail or not, whether it looks good or not.

And the reality is your analytics. actually tell you whether your thumbnails are good or not.

So my client asked me to look at her thumbnails, which I did. And the reason why she asked me if her thumbnails were okay is because she's using a template. So she didn't know if that was okay or acceptable or good enough. 

And visually they looked fine to me, but I went into our analytics to determine whether they're fine to the algorithm.

And they were. There was nothing I saw that said that she needed to change anything that she was doing. Template or no template. But almost every time that I get a question from a client or student about [00:10:00] thumbnails, they're ignoring a huge missing piece of the thumbnail puzzle. And that is the title. So we just talked about titles, clear, specific, SEO optimized, punch of drama.

but what most people do is they think about their title and their thumbnail as separate things, separate from each other. And they're not, they're together. They're always together. If you think about scrolling on YouTube on a desktop or on your phone, you never see a thumbnail without a title or a title without a thumbnail.

They're always together and they work together.

I like to say that the thumbnail is there to get your potential viewers attention visually, like get their attention. And then the title is there to generate some interest. Together they generate intrigue.you have to Create some intrigue, create [00:11:00] some curiosity in order for your potential viewers to be motivated to click through and watch the video.

If you give away all of the information in the title and or the thumbnail, they have no motivation to click through and watch. If you create some curiosity with the thumbnail and the title.

It creates an, uh, what sometimes is referred to as an open loop to where for the ideal viewer, they have to watch it and figure out what are you talking about here?

So a couple of problem areas that I notice with thumbnails is that you want to watch out for making sure that if you put words in your thumbnail, they are chunky. I like a chunky text for thumbnails, not just because that's my style, but because they have to be readable when they're small. you have to be able to.

Like, in a second, understand what the words [00:12:00] are on the screen when they're tiny.

So the font that you select is important. The size of the words are important. And the color is also important.

Now, as far as what to include in your thumbnail and not to include in your thumbnail.

Don't just repeat your title in your thumbnail text and don't include several elements in your thumbnail. I like, uh, about three different sort of elements, text, face, maybe some other object or logo or something like that. At the most.

And again, anytime you are creating your thumbnail or evaluating your thumbnails, look at the thumbnail and the title next to each other. Thumbnail on top, title on bottom, just like they would be displayed on YouTube so that you're really looking at the whole picture, at the whole package.

Timestamps 

Now, I recently got a question [00:13:00] inside of Video Brand Academy from Laura who said, Hey Meredith, question for you. Should I add timestamps to my videos in the description or not? She mentioned the goal obviously is to increase watch time because that's what the algorithm wants, but 

 could they help with SEO in some way? And so what is it chapters and timestamps or no chapters and timestamps? And honestly, this is, uh, this is a topic that I myself struggle with, uh, because the answer is. It kind of depends and it depends on the ultimate objective of the video, I guess.

So, what Laura is referring to is in your YouTube video description. you might see there are timestamps for the video that have the actual, like zero one, you know, Oh two or whatever. And when you put timestamps in your description, they're clickable. They will link [00:14:00] to that timestamp of the video so that you can sort of fast forward right to that moment.

I'll try to remember to put timestamps in this video so that you can see what I'm talking about. And if you take a look, you'll also notice that if I give you a timestamp with a clickable link, you could skip over what I'm saying right now and skip somewhere to the future of the video, and that might hinder the watch time.

And do I really want to do that? The flip side is for the user, for the viewer, for you, it's actually quite handy to be able to see the different parts of the video and skip ahead to the part that you really want to watch.

And if your topic is Um, and it's a great keyword and your video has great keywords in it. I like to think of this like a blog post, a blog post has a title and then there's headlines all the way down the blog post. And if you're really smart with your SEO and your, Blog posts, [00:15:00] you would SEO optimize each of those headlines as well for the specific keywords of those headlines.

And you could do the same thing with your timestamps and chapters. If you have those keywords, like if it makes sense, if you are optimizing for those keywords, You should totally do that. you have to understand that it might cause people to skip ahead or bounce around in your video And that's why I say it sort of depends on What you're trying to achieve with the video.

There are times Where you know in this video? episode that I'm recording right now, I'm kind of walking through these different things, tags, hashtags, title, thumbnail. Now we're talking about timestamps and I'm going to talk about your end screen and things like that in just a little bit. So I'm walking through each of these kind of like steps or subtopics and it makes a lot of sense to [00:16:00] list each of those topics out as timestamps.

Whereas Sometimes an episode is just me talking and it's not really a listicle type of content. I think longer, you know, screen recording tutorials type videos where the purpose of the video is to educate and provide information. It's really helpful to the user to have those timestamps so that, you know, it's kind of like having a table of contents in a textbook so that you can find what you're looking for,

but not every video is structured in that way.

So there's no real answer to that question other than it depends. And I'll be honest with you I'm sure there's a lot of videos here on my channel that could use some timestamps that I just like wasn't in the mood to Create them when I went to upload the video

Which is bad behavior on my part.

YouTube Description

So one last thing to mention about the description itself is the very top of your [00:17:00] video description is meant to describe the video, but it's also a good place for some Google juice, some YouTube juice, throw some keywords in there. If you are optimizing your video for keywords,

but it should be readable and understandable by a human. Because humans are watching your videos. The robots are watching too, but we're creating content for the humans, right?

Age Restrictions

Moving on to a couple of settings that are really really easy to skip over, but you want to pay attention, is the audience and age restriction setting. This trips people up a lot, because what YouTube is asking is Is your video made for kids? And the way that it is often interpreted by creators is YouTube is asking, is this video appropriate for kids?

Like, is this okay for kids to watch? And that's actually not the question that it's asking. It's asking if [00:18:00] you. are deliberately making this content as you know, entertainment for children to consume. And for the most part, if you're watching this, if you're listening to this, if you're one of my clients or students, usually the answer to that question is no, this is not made for kids.

That doesn't mean kids won't watch your video or can't watch your video. It doesn't mean that you're saying that, you know, you're swearing or there's like are rated material or anything. 

YouTube just needs to know is this made for kids or not because there's a whole law out there that YouTube has to abide by for what to do with content that's made for kids.

Altered Content Selection

And YouTube recently added an altered content selection to the uploading process as well, which is Like, is this video that I'm uploading me, the human, or is it meant to depict a human when it's not? Is it meant to sort of [00:19:00] trick the viewer into thinking that this is, uh, real when it's actually been created by AI?

As of right now, that selection is optional. I don't think you have to say one way or another.

But moving on, of course, you're going to have some monetization settings if you are, in fact, monetized. You're going to have some, like, music licensing disclosures, which if you're using royalty free music that you have permission to use, like, say, from Epidemic Sound, which is what I use, then you don't have to worry about that.

You should be good to go there. There's two more things I want you to be very mindful of towards the end of Uploading your video and going through all of these steps. 

End Screen Elements

One of them is your end screen

It's one of the very last settings and it makes sense because it's actually like the very last thing that your viewer sees on your video when they're watching your [00:20:00] video.

but the end screen is where you get to select the next video or playlist that you want your viewer to watch next. You get to sort of direct your traffic here at the very end. So if you record your video and you know the next obvious video on your channel for somebody to watch is whatever it is, you can mention that in your video.

You know, Hey, if you liked this video, if you thought this was helpful, you might be interested in watching my video on X, Y, and Z. You can say that in your video. You can record that into your video. for the very end so that you can put a clickable end screen element to the video that you're mentioning and It is clickable.

It's clickable on desktop. It's clickable on mobile and it's a really great way to essentially increase the chances that the next video your viewer watches is [00:21:00] yours. Because that's what you want to have happen. That is a huge green flag to YouTube when you have a viewer watching a video and then they go on to watch another one of your videos.

That's a green flag that tells YouTube, this person makes great content. Let's get more people to it.

And even if you're not 100 percent sure what video on your channel would be best to watch next, you can always use a playlist as a clickable element. Or YouTube gives you the option to not select a specific video at all, but sort of leave it as a where you can select either put my most recent video there.

So a month from now, a year from now, when you upload a new video, it's automatically going to put that new video as the clickable end screen element. Does that make sense? If you're uploading a video right now today, the video you're uploading is the most recent video, right?

But a year from now, the video you're uploading today is going to be a year old. So [00:22:00] you can put that placeholder in every new video you publish after that is going to go in that spot to be a clickable and screen element to your latest video for every new video that you publish. Or you can let YouTube decide what the next video from your channel should be.

It's going to look at the viewer behavior, look at the content on your channel, and make like its best guess at what the next video should be for that viewer.

So, I know when you upload a video, you're like, I got my thumbnail, I got my title, I got everything ready to go, I want to get it out there, I want to publish it. It's like, the end screen is like, oh, it's one more thing that I have to do before I get this video out there, but long term, this is going to be really helpful for your channel When you select your end screen elements, you're helping YouTube figure out how this [00:23:00] video is related to the other videos on your channel.

And we all know that you're trying to build a library of binge worthy videos, right? Well, that's how you can connect them together and help YouTube connect them together to bring more people to your channel.

And lastly, before you hit publish or schedule your video. Please watch the video on YouTube. I might have mentioned this, in one of my previous episodes that you always want to, like, when you export your video, you want to watch the video on your computer and make sure that the whole thing exported.

correctly that the end of the video is the intended end of the video. And then when you upload it, you want to make sure that it uploaded correctly. So I don't usually watch the whole thing, but I do like to just go hit play, make sure the beginning of the video is where the beginning of the video should be.

And then just go all the way to [00:24:00] the end and make sure that the end of the video is. Where you intend it to be. And it might sound crazy. Like, obviously Meredith, like, what are you talking about? I have uploaded videos before where I exported the video. I was editing in premier pro and premier pros like, okay, video's done exporting and the files right there on my computer.

And I upload it to YouTube, but there was like. one little bit or bite of information that just like wasn't quite fully baked yet and the file wasn't complete and so I upload the video to YouTube and then I publish it and then it just cuts off at the end like the last five seconds or 15 seconds or even just like two seconds just like cuts me off and I didn't edit it that way.

But, it got exported and then uploaded before it was really finished exporting. So you [00:25:00] want to look for that. The other mistake that I have made is exporting a video where there was like some random thing in the timeline. That's like 15 minutes down the timeline. If you, uh, if you edit your own videos, you, you might know what I'm talking about.

So I have like the main chunk of the video and then like some random graphic or a sound effect or something is like 15 minutes down the timeline. And this used to happen a lot with premiere pro. And then I'd go to export the video and I don't realize that there is like 15 minutes of. Dead space, at the end of the video because it exported everything on the timeline and I just wasn't seeing this one little thing that was hidden down there.

And to be honest, like neither of those things are that big of a deal, but when you put your time and effort into creating the video, you want it to be displayed in the way that you're expecting it to be. and it only [00:26:00] takes a couple of extra minutes to check the video after you upload it to make sure that it plays correctly, it's uploaded correctly, the whole thing is there, nothing more, nothing less, and it's good to go.

one more thing I want to mention because I did just record this 30 step mini course inside a video brand academy for your YouTube publishing punch list. There is a punch list inside of the YouTube roadmap planner, which I will link to down in the description below.

Thumbnail Test & Compare

But YouTube just recently added your thumbnail, um, test and compare feature. So when you go to upload a video to YouTube, you can obviously. Upload one thumbnail, But it also gives you the opportunity to upload two or three thumbnails, and it will automatically test and compare those thumbnails to [00:27:00] see how they perform.

And it does this based on watch time. So you're like hands off. You don't have to use this. If you do want to use it, you just give it either two or three thumbnails and it will run these tests for you and then tell you which one of these thumbnails performed the best and then you can, you know, Move forward with that and you're good to go

now a lot of the 30 different steps and settings that I Recorded for the mini course are things that you can sort of set it and forget it but here in this episode I wanted to make sure I covered the ones that are the most important and the things that you have to pay attention to and Focus on with every single video that you upload

If you like getting step-by-step instructions and you like getting help and feedback from other creators or coaching from me, then I invite you to check out the YouTube Roadmap Planner, which again, I'll link to down in the description below because it includes [00:28:00] planning worksheets,

fill in the blank scripts, a content calendar, and a bunch of other cool stuff to help you grow your audience on YouTube.