How to Make & Embed a YouTube Playlist
By AngelaWills |
Have you ever used a YouTube playlist? It’s a great feature that will add a series of videos to your website or blog to keep your visitors’ attention. In today’s post I’m going to show you how to both create a playlist and then embed it onto your WordPress website or blog.
Let me back up a second, though…
You might have noticed that the name on this post is Angela Wills, not Michelle Schoen. That’s because I talked Michelle into letting me make a guest blog post and share some (hopefully) useful content with you. So here I am. Michelle and I have known each other for many years now, back when she first commented on MY blog. I am the owner of a company that teaches business owners like you how to use WordPress to grow their business at Website Design Mojo.
Now, back to today’s lesson:
How to Make a YouTube Playlist
Let’s start by making a playlist. I’m going to assume that you already know how to make a video and upload it to YouTube. If you don’t, then you’ll definitely want to spend some time checking out Michelle’s content because she’s the lady to teach you about that.
1. Create a Playlist.
So once you’ve got the videos ready for your playlist, you need to go into YouTube and click on ‘My Videos’ in the top right drop-down. Then along the side of the screen you’ll see a list of options, the last being Playlists. You need to click ‘Add New’. Give it a title, and a description, create it and you’ve got yourself a playlist.
2. Add Videos to Playlist.
The next thing you do is click the checkbox next to any and all videos you’d like to add to the playlist. Then you click the button up top that says ‘Add to’. When you hit that a drop-down of your playlists will show up and you need to pick the one you want to add it to.
How to Embed a YouTube Playlist into WordPress
So you’ve got your playlist created and you want to add it to your website or blog. Here’s how:
1. Get Playlist Embed Code
To get your playlist embed code you’ll want to look at that right-hand menu that you see when you click on ‘My Videos’. You should be still on the same screen from when you added your videos. Click on the right menu item that says ‘Playlists’. When you get there you will see any playlists you’ve created. Now you want to click on the playlist you’re looking to add to your site.
To get the embed code you need to click the button that says ‘Share’ (next to the black ‘Play All’), then click on the ‘Embed’ option. It will look like this:
2. Embed Playlist Into Your WordPress Website or Blog
WordPress makes it easy for you to add HTML BUT there’s a catch. If you take that code you see up above and you add it to your blog in the ‘HTML’ section you won’t be able to go back to the visual editor.
If you use WordPress and are not necessarily a HTML Geek than this is an issue!
My solution for you would be to use a WordPress plugin called Easy Embed. Just as the name suggests it makes it easy for you to embed YouTube code into WordPress. It doesn’t just work for YouTube code, though, it works for anything. I’m talking about email list forms, surveys or any code that you would like to put into your pages or posts. It’s a handy plugin that you work all from the Visual (non-geeky) Editor of WordPress.
Once you install Easy Embed here’s what you do:
Create a New Custom Field by using the tool below your post editing area. Like this:
Then make sure click the button that says ‘Add Custom Field’ to save the embed code to your post. Now all you do is put your shortcode into the visual editor for the post, like this:
And that’s it! You now have a great way to embed code while still working within the visual editor in WordPress. Your finished playlist should look something like this (and yes, we’re using the Easy Embed plugin to show you this!):
That’s me talking about WordPress, by the way 
I hope you have fun creating YouTube Playlists to promote your business and add value to your marketing, and I hope this post has been helpful to that goal.
Got any questions for me? I’d be happy to answer, just post them below. Or share your comments on how you’ll use playlists for YOUR business…
Take Care,
Angela Wills
p.s. If you want to know more about using WordPress to provide services for clients or to just grow your own business then I hope you’ll come by and join in a free webinar coming up on Wednesday. It’s called ’3 Ways to Earn a Living With WordPress’ and your link is here:
Earn a Living With WordPress
Thank you for the interesting article. I like learning about playlist ideas. Can you email a link to an example so I can see the resulting playlist of what you explained.
-Steve Lewis