7 Free Tools EVERY YouTuber Should Be Using

– Over the years that I’ve been making videos for this channel, I’ve built up a collection of tools that I use to help me script, film, edit, publish, and promote my videos here on YouTube. In this video, I’m going to be sharing my seven favorite free tools

So that you too can make the most out of your content creation, and the best part is, all of these tools are completely free. Before we dive into the first tool, let me pay the bills real quick and give a quick thank you to the sponsor of this video, Epidemic Sound. I’ve teamed up with Epidemic Sound to give you an exclusive offer on their service where you’ll save a massive 50%

When signing up to that annual personal plan. All you need to do is to click on the first link at the top of the description and then use the discount code GAMING50 at checkout. You’ll still get the full 30-day free trial to start where you can test out Epidemic Sound completely risk free

And then if you love it, which I know you will, you’ll be saving that massive 50% on the annual price. So if you want to upgrade the music that you use for all of your content, check out Epidemic Sound by using the link and the code to save 50% off below. So our first category is design and thumbnails and our first tool within that category is Pixlr. This is a simple online tool that will automatically remove the background from your photos and leave you with just the subject. This is super useful for any thumbnails where you want your face or a product included,

But with the ability to create a more interesting background. The automatic removal seems to work really well, especially if your image is really sharp, but if it doesn’t get it quite right, adjusting the image to remove bits around the subject is really simple. Once you’re done, you can then download the finished image,

Without the background, so that you can use it in whatever software you wish to or upload it to something like Canva, which is our tool number two. Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool that you can use to create your thumbnails, logos, end cards, social media posts, really anything that you want.

It’s really intuitive to use, even people completely new to graphic design can quite quickly create something by starting with one of thousands of different templates and then changing the colors, text, fonts, and images as they please. I personally use Canva every week to create Instagram Stories

That promote when my podcast is going live on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and I’ve even used it a few times when needing some inspiration for some of the thumbnails that you might have seen on this channel. Some of the templates and stock footage are locked behind Canva’s premium tier,

But there’s absolutely loads that you can do with just the free tier and I’d highly recommend you creating an account and having a play around. Thumbsup.tv is an absolute must visit website if you’re serious about YouTube. It allows you to test various different title and thumbnails combinations

To see exactly how they will be shown in various different places on YouTube. From Desktop to mobile, home page to suggested, you’ll be able to check that your thumbnail is visible even at the smallest of resolutions. I use this for every single upload to test things like the length of my titles,

Making sure that they don’t get cut off, and also to make sure that none of YouTube’s UI elements block any important parts of my thumbnail. You can even toggle between seeing it in YouTube’s light or dark mode to make sure that your thumbnail still stands out. A couple of last little websites

That I’ve had bookmarked through the years are Design Gradients and Coolors. Design Gradients is a simple website full of beautiful different gradients and their color hexcodes that you can use if you ever need a background gradient. I also even use it to generate new gradients for the lights that I use

In the backgrounds of my videos. Coolors is a website that generates full color palettes for you, where all the colors will work aesthetically together. You can even here lock certain colors and generate the unlocked colors again until you find a color scheme that works for you. When it comes to what software I recommend for people looking to actually edit their videos, it no longer matters if you’re looking for a free or a paid solution, the answer is DaVinci Resolve. Long gone are the days where I recommend Adobe’s Premiere Pro, as the software just feels so archaic now,

It’s ridden with bugs that cause crashes, and it’s just not built to take advantage of these fancy encoders that we have in our NVIDIA GPUs. DaVinci Resolve however feels fast and modern, it comes in both free and paid studio versions, but the free version really doesn’t feel limited at all.

It gives you loads of the editing, color grading, visual effects, and exporting options you’d expect for a modern editor, but it’s all for free. Seriously, there’s no reason to learn anything else nowadays, if I was starting from scratch, I’d 100% be learning DaVinci Resolve. There are some great YouTube channels out there

Teaching you how to do all sorts of things in DaVinci Resolve, from the basics right up to some really complicated things. MrAlexTech and Patrick Stirling are both awesome dudes with great channels that you should really check out. Photopea or Photopea, however you want to pronounce it, is a browser-based image editor

That basically replicates 80 to 90% of Photoshop’s capabilities, but for free, and in your browser. You can even open Photoshop PSD files, so if you’ve ever downloaded a stream design or a thumbnail PSD file, you can open it, edit any of the layers as you please,

And export it just as you would with Photoshop. If you’ve ever used Photoshop before, all the tools here should feel instantly familiar, but if not, the layout is so similar that you can basically follow any Photoshop tutorial on YouTube and still achieve the same results with Photopea. Seriously, the number of times

I’ve needed to edit a PSD file whilst being away from home has made Photopea a permanent bookmark in my browser, it’s just such a handy tool to have at your disposal. One of the biggest mistakes that I see new YouTubers making in their videos is not using enough B-Roll to keep their audience as engaged. While ideally, I’d always recommend going out and capturing this B-Roll footage yourself, sometimes it just isn’t feasible. Maybe you don’t have access to the right equipment,

Or don’t live near a location that you need to include, whatever the reason is, that is where stock footage comes in. Pexels is a website dedicated to offering free stock footage for use in your videos. There’s a massive library which is easily searchable and videos can be downloaded

In a variety of different resolutions to suit your project. You don’t even need to create an account, just simply browse or search for the type of video you’re looking for and then download any videos you wish to use. When it comes to actually managing the Gaming Careers YouTube channel and the life cycle that videos go through from scripting all the way through to publishing, I use a tool called Notion. It is single-handedly the best workspace that I found for managing and collaborating with other people,

And I’ve been using it for about 3 years now. You can build templates and databases to function completely as you wish to and things can be as simple or as complicated as you need them to be. You can view these databases as Kanban boards, calendars, or tables

And it just makes managing multiple projects, especially with multiple team members, so much easier. Most of my Notion setup was originally based on Thomas Frank’s video from a few years ago and then I’ve slowly adapted over time to better suit my needs. Honestly, I could probably dedicate an entire video

To how I use Notion for my YouTube channel, so let me know if you’d like to see that, but I’d highly recommend you start managing your videos or any other projects with Notion, it’s a game changer. The final tool that I’ve heard many members of the community have great success with is Mercury by StreamElements. It’s essentially a handful of tools that can help automate some unique functionality for your YouTube channel. You can do things like dynamically update your YouTube banner with a subscriber goal,

Or thanking your latest members in the YouTube descriptions that will automatically update whenever you get a new member. For anyone who’s using Patreon, you can even automatically generate graphics that you can put at the end of your videos which thank your latest supporters. StreamElements are constantly adding new features to Mercury

So I’m hopeful that in time, this could become a really useful tool to have on your YouTube Swiss army knife. Hopefully, some of these tools that I use have now made into your bookmarks for your next video, but please do share below any tools that you use that I haven’t heard of yet.

The great thing about making videos like this is that I can learn from you guys too. If you’ve enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up, and why not check out my video on “7 FREE Tools For Streamers” whilst you’re here. Thanks as always for watching.

I’ll catch you in the next one. Peace!