New YouTube Channels allow off-site links!

Happy New Year.

I owe this one to @ThornyBleeder who posted about it over the holidays.

The post is on Social Times and sets out how to redesign your channel after the new makeover that YouTube has had.

The big notable improvement is that you can now have links to your site and social media profiles from your Channel page - every artist should go and add these now. The article tells you how:

...covers the ins and outs of the new site design, starting with the new YouTube channel design and layout.

If you haven’t visited your YouTube channel since the redesign then you’re in for a surprise.  Not only can you now post links in the sidebar of your channel, but YouTube is also now offering a series of layout templates, a new Feed and more.  Not sure where to get started?  Not to worry.  We’ll take you through all the steps of getting your new YouTube channel set up.

Read the article here.

And you can check out the quick spruce up and off-site links we have made to our YouTube channel here - http://www.youtube.com/MakeItInMusic.

Custom Backgrounds for YouTube and Twitter

I've been asked about this a LOT in the last few weeks.

And, I'm remiss, as I haven't done our YouTube channel background properly (it's just the logo) and our Twitter one is a simple repeated logo! It's on the very long list of things to do.

However, we do try and make sure that our clients have a custom background for Twitter and YouTube that fit with their site design. Some are prepared to invest the small-ish cost of getting a designer to do this and some aren't. YouTube is tricky to do well if you don't have Photoshop skills!

Nonetheless, it's what we recommend. A consistent look across your own website and your social media profiles is obviously a good idea - just look at what major label artists do to see the consistency of their look! In fact, look into what they do all the time in social media and steal their best ideas!

This oldish post on Mashable has some good pointers and is worth checking out - although the dimensions listed for Twitter are now wrong for the new layout - check our post here (point 2) instead for that.

If you Google 'YouTube Background', you'll get loads of detailed info and endless videos that show you how to do it if you have the skills.

Obviously, if one of you in the band is a designer or if the people that designed your site can do the backgrounds, you're sorted.

However, if you are after an all-in-one solution, check out these people - Custom Page. We've used them several times for various backgrounds and they will be doing ours for Make It In Music when we get five minutes!

The quality is good and they're reasonably priced and they deal with the photoshop stuff that gives me a headache!

That said, they have lots of free backgrounds that you can use as well, and a really good tutorial on how to make your own here.