How to Organize Your YouTube Channel

You probably already know that YouTube can be a significant source of traffic to your blog.

As the number two search engine in the world, 3.25 billion hours of video are watched each month.

With average mobile viewing sessions lasting more than 40 minutes, YouTube videos play an important role in today’s digital landscape.

If you are just getting started with creating a YouTube channel, you’ll have a lot of competition no matter what niche you are in.

The good news?

If you take the time to organize your YouTube channel, you’ll have a better chance of getting noticed than the lazy people who don’t bother with this step.

Today I’m going to show you how to get your YouTube channel organized so your visitors have a welcoming experience.

Why Bloggers Should Grow a YouTube Channel

Before I get into setting up your YouTube channel navigation, I want to drive home a couple of important points for bloggers.

Here’s the deal …

68% of YouTube users watch videos to help make purchase decisions. What if YOU, could create helpful videos that were congruent with your blog posts, and embed them in your blog post?

Now you would have a second media format to attract a whole new audience that otherwise might have never read your blog post.

Yes, you can get lots of traffic from YouTube!

That’s not all …

YouTube users watch tons of videos but the predominant categories are:

• Comedy
• Music
• Entertainment
• How to

If you took your “how to” blog posts and repurposed them into YouTube videos, imagine how much more attention you can gain?

How to Optimize your YouTube Channel Layout

When a new viewer visits your channel on YouTube, what do you want them to see?

If you don’t bother to organize your YouTube channel, your visitors might see this:

• Uploaded videos
• Liked videos
• Subscriptions

Is that appealing to you?

There is no organization here and your visitors really aren’t on YOUR YouTube Channel to see your liked videos and subscriptions!

OR, it might look something like this (yep that’s my new channel – not setup as of this writing so I can show you stuff). There are actually videos uploaded but since the channel home page is not organized yet, you see that sad message “This channel doesn’t have any content.”

Let’s give your YouTube viewers a better experience.

We’ll be focusing on two important steps:

• Creating and Optimizing Playlists
• Creating YouTube Channel Sections

Let’s get started.

Creating and Optimizing YouTube Playlists

Before you can organize your channel into sections, the best thing to do is create playlists.

A playlist is an ordered list of videos that you create, usually with a specific theme, like “HealthyTreat Recipes” or “Blogging for Beginner” playlists.

The videos in a playlist can be videos from your channel or other channels.

If you are just starting a YouTube channel, add videos from other channels will fill out your channel homepage nicely!

Playlists can help you position yourself and introduce your audience to more of your videos in the similar category.

Here are the first page results in YouTube search for the query “paleo recipes.” Notice the playlist appears in the results along with individual videos.

So be sure to create some and add every new video you upload to a playlist!

How to create a YouTube playlist

1. Go to the video you want to add to a playlist.
2. Under the video on the right side, click Add to.
3. Select an existing playlist or click Create New Playlist. If you create a new list, be sure to fill in the name, privacy setting and then click Create. Set the privacy to Public to make the most out of your YouTube channel.

After you create the playlist, you’ll need to add a good keyword rich description.

1. Go to Creator Studio.
2. On the left-side menu, under Video Manager, select Playlists.
3. Click Edit next to the playlist you want to add or edit a description for. You can then enter a keyword rich description and add new videos to your playlist.

That’s it! Now that you created some playlists, let’s organize them into a nice YouTube channel homepage.

Video: Create Playlists in YouTube

Creating and Organizing YouTube Channel Sections

Your YouTube home page is important to give the right impression to new visitors. Often, people will subscribe or not subscribe to your channel based on what they see on the homepage.

Organizing your content into sections is going to give a viewer a much better impression of you. They will also be able to easily navigate through your videos to find the categories that interest them.

When you visit a new YouTube channel, what do you like to see there?

Let’s get to it.

Create YouTube channel sections (you can have up to 10 sections per channel):

1. From your YouTube channel homepage, click Customize Channel.
   
2. At the bottom of the page, click Add a section.
   
3. Under “Content,” use the drop-down menu to select the type of content you want to appear in your section.
   • Videos: Choose to highlight popular or recent uploads, liked videos, and more.
   • Playlists: Choose to add a dedicated section from your playlists.
   • Shows: Choose to add All shows or a Single show. If you choose single show, the click Choose a showfrom the drop-down menu and choose your show.
4. Under “Layout,” use the drop-down menu to select a horizontal row or a vertical list layout.
   
5. Click Done.

Now, doesn’t this look better than the “no content” look?

Channel sections can be edited at any time. You can change your sections around, add or remove videos from playlists and arrange your channel homepage however you like.

Video: How to Organize YouTube Homepage

But always do this with your viewer in mind to give them the best experience possible.

Final Thoughts

Keeping your YouTube channel homepage organize helps your audience make decisions about what to watch and if they want to subscribe.

Nothing is more frustrating than visiting a channel with either nothing or a giant list of videos without any sorting of categories.

It doesn’t take much time to group videos together to give your viewers a better experience.

To learn more about optimizing individual videos for search results, read my article about How to Optimize Videos for YouTube Search and download the checklist too.