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YouTube Upload Guide: Two-Phase Strategy — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

How To *CORRECTLY* Upload Videos on YouTube In Oct 2025

0h 09m video Published Sep 25, 2025 Transcribed Aug 18, 2026 Romayroh Romayroh
Beginner 5 min read For: Aspiring YouTubers and content creators who are new to uploading videos and want a structured, competitor-based approach to optimization.
AI Trust Score 45/100
🚫 Clickbait / Waste of Time

"Title promises a 'correct' method but delivers a basic, padded walkthrough with a heavy promo pitch at the end."

AI Summary

This video provides a step-by-step guide to uploading videos on YouTube, emphasizing a two-phase approach: repetitive settings for every upload and creative optimization based on successful competitors. The creator shares his personal workflow, including specific settings like unlisted visibility and using competitor data for titles, thumbnails, descriptions, and tags.

[00:01]
Two-Phase Upload Process

The upload process is divided into phase one (repetitive step-by-step settings) and phase two (creative aspects like molding the video to a successful competitor's video).

[00:26]
Uploading and Visibility Settings

Click 'Create' and 'Upload videos' to be redirected to YouTube Studio. Select or drag-and-drop the video file. Set visibility to 'Unlisted' to avoid going public without thumbnails and to allow YouTube to analyze the video for ad limitations.

[01:21]
Details and Content Settings

Scroll down in details and select 'No, it's not made for kids' (unless applicable). Also, click 'No' for altered content unless AI was used for scripting, audio, or thumbnails.

[02:10]
Phase Two: Modeling Competitors

After upload, click 'Details' to start phase two. Search for a successful competitor's video on the same topic, copy its title, and use ChatGPT to reword it for your video.

[03:03]
Thumbnail and Description Strategy

Hire a freelancer to create a similar thumbnail to the competitor's. For descriptions, copy the first two paragraphs of your script for SEO targeting, as they should contain high-ranking keywords.

[04:20]
Playlists, End Screens, and Cards

Playlists may not significantly boost views. End screens can be set to recommend a video and subscribe button in the last 7 seconds. Cards can be added at a specific time to promote another video.

[06:03]
Tags from Competitors

Use tools like Vid IQ or Vid Ninjas to see competitor tags. Copy and paste them into your tags section, filling up to the 500-character limit. Use Google Trends for keyword research.

[07:22]
Category and Publishing

The category doesn't significantly affect performance anymore. If unsure, ask ChatGPT. Finally, change visibility from 'Unlisted' to 'Public' and click 'Publish'.

[08:04]
Importance of Competitor Blueprint

Every video should be structured based on a successful competitor's video as a proven blueprint. This is especially important when starting a new channel.

The video concludes by emphasizing the importance of using a successful competitor's video as a blueprint for every upload, especially for new channels. It also promotes the creator's school community for more in-depth tutorials and resources.

Mentioned in this Video

Tutorial Checklist

1 00:14 Click 'Create' and then 'Upload videos' on the YouTube homepage to be redirected to YouTube Studio.
2 00:26 Select or drag-and-drop your video file.
3 00:41 Set visibility to 'Unlisted' (not public or private).
4 01:21 In details, select 'No, it's not made for kids' and 'No' for altered content.
5 02:10 After upload, click 'Details' and search for a successful competitor's video on the same topic.
6 02:35 Copy the competitor's title and use ChatGPT to reword it for your video.
7 03:03 Hire a freelancer to create a similar thumbnail to the competitor's.
8 03:17 For the description, copy the first two paragraphs of your script for SEO.
9 04:46 Add an end screen element, dragging it to the last 7 seconds, and choose to recommend a video and subscribe button.
10 05:38 Add a card at a specific time (e.g., minute 4) to promote another video.
11 06:03 Use Vid IQ or Vid Ninjas to copy competitor tags and paste them into your tags section, filling up to 500 characters.
12 07:50 Change visibility from 'Unlisted' to 'Public' and click 'Publish'.

Study Flashcards (8)

What is the recommended visibility setting when uploading a video to YouTube?

easy Click to reveal answer

Unlisted

00:41

Why should you set the video to 'Unlisted' instead of 'Private'?

medium Click to reveal answer

If set to private, YouTube won't be able to analyze your video, so you won't know if you're limited on ads or if there are any issues.

00:55

What is the two-phase approach to uploading videos on YouTube?

medium Click to reveal answer

Phase one is repetitive step-by-step settings, and phase two is creative aspects like molding the video to a successful competitor's video.

00:01

How do you create a title for your video according to the creator?

medium Click to reveal answer

Copy the title of a successful competitor's video and use ChatGPT to reword it.

02:35

What is the suggested strategy for writing a video description for SEO?

medium Click to reveal answer

Copy the first two paragraphs of your script, as they should contain high-ranking keywords.

03:17

What tools are recommended for finding competitor tags?

easy Click to reveal answer

Vid IQ or Vid Ninjas

06:03

What is the maximum character limit for tags on YouTube?

easy Click to reveal answer

500 characters

07:09

Does the video category significantly affect performance?

easy Click to reveal answer

No, it hasn't for about 3 years.

07:50

💡 Key Takeaways

🔧

Unlisted Visibility Best Practice

Explains the strategic reason for using 'Unlisted' over 'Public' or 'Private' to allow YouTube analysis without premature public exposure.

00:41
🔧

Competitor Title Rewriting

Demonstrates a practical method for leveraging successful competitors' titles and using AI to create unique variations.

02:35
💡

SEO Description Strategy

Highlights the importance of using the first two paragraphs of a script for SEO, ensuring keyword-rich descriptions.

03:17
🔧

Tag Copying from Competitors

Shows a concrete workflow for extracting and reusing tags from successful videos to improve discoverability.

06:03
⚖️

Competitor Blueprint Principle

Emphasizes the core principle of using a proven competitor video as a blueprint for every new video, especially for new channels.

08:04

[00:01] videos, there are two phases. Phase one is the repetitive step by step. This never changes. This is just repeating the same settings on your uploads every into the creative aspect of it, which I'll break down later in this video. But

[00:14] for now, let's start with phase one. So, I'm in the YouTube homepage here. Now, to upload a video, if you don't know, what you want to do is click create on obviously going to click on upload

[00:26] to be automatically redirected to YouTube Studio. But anyways, from here, video. You can just click on select files and then just selecting the video is drag and drop the video. Now, once you do that, you're going to see this.

[00:41] visibility. And you want to make sure that it's set to unlisted. You want to make sure that the black dot is on unlisted. Okay? Not public, not private. multiple reasons. Number one, if you have it set to public, then it's

[00:55] obviously going to automatically go public without you having thumbnails, have it on private instead of unlisted, YouTube won't be able to analyze your video, which means you won't know if you're limited on ads or if there's any

[01:08] unlisted is just the best practice, do that, you want to go back to details. I never do anything to the title or the description of the video. But what I do is I scroll all the way down and make

[01:21] sure that no, it's not made for kids is selected. Of course, if you're making Roblox videos, Minecraft videos, toy reviews, and yes, of course, you can going to set it to no, obviously. Scrolling down a little bit more, you're

[01:33] going to see altered content. I always click on no because I don't use AI for scripting and audio, but when it comes to like thumbnails or the actual generate any of that. But if you did,

[01:46] go to video elements. This is more of like a phase two thing. I always skip it. For checks, I always want to take a look at that visibility. Again, make can click on save. And now, we're just going to leave it. We're going to ignore

[01:58] all of this. We're just going to click on close. And there we go. Now, the video is being analyzed by YouTube. It's not public. It's not private. It's just there. Okay. And it was very simple. So, now that we're here, we can start with

[02:10] things to your video. So, from here, we're going to click on details. this little pencil under your video. And now we can start with phase two. Phase two is essentially just molding your video to a successful competitor's video. For

[02:23] example, if the title of my video is editing tutorial, I'm going to open another YouTube tab and I'm going to search up editing tutorial. From here, I can see what the best performing video was. This one was posted a year ago and

[02:35] it has 4.2 million views. So, his title is how to edit so good your viewers get addicted to your videos. So, what we're going to do is copy this title. Then I'm going to open up chat GPT. I'm going to give it the command to reward the title.

[02:49] I like the fourth title that it gave me. So I'm going to copy that and I'm going to put it in the title of my video. Now for the thumbnail, we want to do the hire a freelancer to create a thumbnail that is very similar to his or you

[03:03] thumbnail tutorial, so we're going to skip that step. But but let's go ahead uh thumbnail. So anyways, after the title is there, we can scroll down and description. Now, if you're making automation videos or something with a

[03:17] script, it's not necessarily you talking like I am right now. What you can do is just grab the script of your video and put the first two paragraphs on here. Now, let me tell you why I do this. The way descriptions work is very SEO

[03:29] description of this video, you can see that it's very literal. It's pretty much just a recap of everything that I said. And sometimes in some videos what I do is I just copy paste the first two paragraphs of my script. That's because

[03:42] if the goal is SEO targeting, which means using high ranking keywords, the first two paragraphs of your script should already explain exactly what your every single keyword. If it doesn't,

[03:54] with your scripting. But anyways, that's what you want to do for the description. the upload file box here for your uploading a video. Nothing really changes for this. I'm just going to drag

[04:06] and drop a random thumbnail from my desktop and it's this one here. So, scroll down, we can see the option of playlist. A lot of people like to mess creating playlists gives you a ton of views. I didn't really see much

[04:20] success with that. With my celebrity news YouTube channel that has over 200 think less than 100k viewers really clicked on on the uh playlist. So, I So, I'm just going to ignore it. Now, scrolling down, we do have end screens

[04:34] and cards. I kind of like to ignore end screens as well. You know, I'm not very traditional like these other guys. I think it's pretty useless, especially people actually make it to the end, and

[04:46] clicks on the end screen. But hey, it. You know, I'll show you how to do little pencil icon. You're going to see You're going to see this black line with a little black circle. You're going to

[04:59] mouse icon changes. You're going to click and drag it all the way to the video. And we can see the timelines here. So, we're going to leave it to the last 7 seconds. And we're going to click on one of these. How do we want it? Do

[05:13] we want to promote a video and a subscribe button at the top like so? Do we want to do just two videos? They look like this. You can also just hover over them around, you know, whatever you want. But I think the best way to go

[05:26] about it is to just do the first one where it recommends one of your videos subscribing. So from that you can click moving on to cards. Kind of the same thing. We're going to click on that

[05:38] little pin. We're going to go grab that little line with the black dots and then drag it to like minute minute 4. And we're just going to click on video playlist or channel whatever it is that you want to promote. So for me I'm just

[05:50] going to do video. I'm going to click on that and then choose a random one, which I'm going to do this one here. And that's it. Now, when a viewer makes it going to see this appear on the right side of their screen. From here, you can

[06:03] down, we're going to leave everything as is, and we're going to go to tags. This competitor's videos. So, we're going to go back to the other tab. We're going to you want to have Vid IQ or Vid Ninjas installed. But for this example, I'm

[06:18] going to show you guys Vid Ninjas. So from here we can see what tags they used on Google Trends and search up what the best keywords are for a tutorial on editing. You can just take the tags from a video that already performed. So we

[06:31] can see he used YouTube creator video editing, retention editing, all kinds of tags, right? So using Vid Ninjas, I can just go down here to the bottom and click on the little copy to clipboard. We would go back to our YouTube studio

[06:44] and right where it says add tag, we're going to click on that and we're just going to paste. And look at that. Then from here, we just click on save. So the tags. And from here, you can go to other competitors videos, right? It

[06:56] doesn't have to be just this one. We can click on this guy, see what tags he used, and copy paste them into our tags tab. And the trick is that you want to fill out as much as possible. As you can see here at the bottom, I only have 395

[07:09] of 500. So I can definitely add more tags to this. But scrolling down, we are certification. That's because YouTube automatically identifies what language useless. But anyways, yeah, we're going to keep scrolling down to category,

[07:22] Now, this is a very common question. What category is my YouTube channel in? problem that people have with this is that they don't see the option that kind There's education, comedy, cars, and vehicles, but every now and then someone

[07:36] know, none of those really apply. Well, it's an easy fix. You can just go on Chad GBT and ask it what it would be considered. And if that doesn't work, it doesn't matter what it is. It's kind of like subscribers, you know, the category

[07:50] your video's performance anymore. And it hasn't for some time now. I would say about 3 years. But yeah, besides that, that's pretty much it. You know, from down arrow next to unlisted, click on public, and then click publish on the

[08:04] a YouTube video. But something very important that I want to mention and I like YouTube. The video that I made needed to be structured by a every video that you make, you need to have a successful competitor's video.

[08:19] Like there has to be a source, you know, a reason for it, a proven blueprint that that video title works. You know, before you put a video in production or or if competitor's video. That's what you need to do for every single YouTube channel

[08:32] that you're going to do, especially when starting off. That's how you want to future, once you get a little bit more experienced, then you can start, you the beginning, you want to mold everything like your competitors. Now,

[08:46] YouTube a little bit more serious, you can click the link in my description or that's going to take you to my school community. For those of you that don't forget to like and subscribe, and I'll see you guys next time. But for those of

[08:59] inside of my school community. The first thing you get is the blueprint step by whatever. It just kind of shows you how to put everything in order, especially for automation channels. But in the tutorial vault, this is where the entire

[09:11] course is. And this is over 60 videos where I give you step-by-step tutorials channels and how I scaled them to over a million dollars. You also get a list of competitors YouTube channels. You also get a link to pre-made thumbnail PGs for

[09:26] and drop and your thumbnail structure is pretty much complete. You also get free background music. I paid a couple of music producers to make copyright music use it. You can also hire editors, but the best part is that I go live two

[09:39] speak with you guys directly, answer any questions, review your channels, all where I go into the wins tab and show you guys like testimonials and don't really feel like promoting right now. So, have a good day. I want to go get

[09:53] So, have a good day. I want to go get coffee.

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