Did you know that you can now put clickable links into your YouTube videos?
Nope, these aren’t the old link annotations that could only point to other YouTube videos.
These are real, clickable, powerful links that you can embed into your video to point at your site!
Exciting times.
In fact, I’d go even farther than that – revolutionary times. This is clearly changing video marketing!
Setting Up Clickable Links
Your first step is to make sure your YouTube channel is set up properly. Here’s what you do:
- Activate monetzation on your channel.
- Add your website.
- Make sure the external annotation feature has been activated.
- Go to the “Annotations Editor” add your annotation and let YouTube know where to send your traffic.
It’s a little bit complex, so I’ve created a 13-minute video that walks you through this process step-by-step (I recommend you click the box in the bottom right corner of the YouTube screen to blow it up to full screen):
Watch this video on YouTube to see how the clickable links work: How to Create Clickable Links to Your Website in YouTube Videos
How This Changes The Game
There are several ways that this literally changes the process of online marketing, including:
- Any video that doesn’t now contain a call to action with an external link is losing you money
- It makes a top ranking for your video in Google (still fairly easy to obtain) even more valuable than it was before
- You aren’t limited to only one link. so you can put in an optin link, a blog post link and potentially a buy link, all in the same video!
Take action today!
This is going to be huge for generating traffic to your website.
After you have completed the steps above, make sure you go through all your old videos and add the External Annotation for every video.
Be sure your traffic is going to the correct place–like an opt-in page.
Use call to action and External Annotation in all your future videos.
What do you think of this new technology? How do you plan to use it for your business? Let me know by adding a comment below. Plus, don’t forget to Share, Like, Pin and Tweet this post!
Other Related Posts You Should Check Out:
How and Why to Add Text (Closed Captioning) Subtitles to YouTube Videos (Includes a video and downloadable transcript)
   
5 (More) Reasons You Must Your Video In Your Social Media and Marketing
How To Use Google Hangout Broadcasts To Build Your Business (Includes Google hangout broadcast recording)
Hi Don,
I was searching this trick, from past few days, and can’t find any informative post. But, your post clears my all doubt, about how to insert link in Video. Thank you so much for sharing!
-Sagar
Hello Don, this was a really useful video and it was a good use of a Sunday Morning. If you don’t mind I will link some of your content from a specific page on my site back to your page. and hopefully more subscribers for you. One comment for Lisa regarding “invalid URL” and you touch on it later in the presentation. I tried to link to an external affiliate landing page and it came up with “invalid URL’, that’s because it was not an “associate website” ( Dohh!! am I dumb or wot?). Meaning part of my named associate website.
The way around it of course is to link back to one of your own sub pages where you can have the link to the affiliate squeeze page.
Don excellent site you have.
Thanks – and thanks for passing this information on to your audience too!
Don
Don, I am still having the bug you talked about – Not being able to see the associated website as one of the options in the list of annotation links. I have this problem from a few months. The status shows green for external annotations in the settings. Everything needed is green. I don’t know what to do.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Shanthi
All I can do at this point is to send you to YouTube to ask that question, sorry.
Don
My coder iss trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP.
I have always disliksd thhe idea because of the expenses.
But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on various websites for about a year
and am anxious about switching to another platform.
I have heard fantastic things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can transfer all my
wordpress coontent into it? Any kind of help would be really appreciated!
Sorry, I can’t help you with blogengine. It’s not our area of expertise.
The important thing – you need to have a blog going and it needs to have the key blogging features. WordPress does that well, so make sure whatever you choose has similar features.
Don
Don,
I started to add external annotation links, and I’m getting a message pop up saying that I’m not allowed to other domains. Is this really safe to do? I don’t want to jeopardize my account.
You can only add links to the domain that you’ve gotten approved, not to other sites. So, your base domain is the only site you can link to, not to amazon.com, for example.
Don
Hi Don,
The process for links works great !!! Yes, the screens seem to have changed a little with the new channel layout.
FYI….on an iPad links do not seem to appear for me. Still checking it out though…
Best,
Beth
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on YouTube. Regards
Hi Don,
I tried setting up the click able links and the bug you spoke of, where the associated website item in the add annotation/link/video/drop down menu is not showing up is not working and continues not to work regardless of what I do to reset the page.
Any suggestions or feedback from others?
Thanks so much,
Chris
Don thank you so much for this
May I ask a question?
If I have already added an associated website can you add more or change the one you have added?
Many thanks
Sue
Frankly, I don’t know the answer to that. You will need to contact YouTube directly on that one.
Thanks!
Don
Don, Thanks for the video. I had actually already set up annotations but did not have them linked to my site. Every time I hit the link button near the final step, I can never get it to give me the “associated website” option. I went back like you said to my channel and began the process again as you suggested but I still can’t get anything but the option box naming a video, channel or subscription to link it to. Any other suggestions or…just keep trying?
Thanks
There’s a blue bar that comes up after you’ve got everything else done that allows you to confirm that you want to use associated website links. You have to click that!
That was MY problem when I first went through the process.
Don
Hi Don: I heard you on the list building summit for the first time. Really enjoyed this video! I will just go do it! Thanks so much!
Thanks Don for sharing the good news, brilliantly as always.
Thanks for the insightful video Don. Love your clear explanations.
One thing I thought would be worth mentioning which is important is to have the monetization part beneficial you would need to have an Adsense account setup…otherwise it’s just free money for Google, lol:)
Would be interested in knowing the link you refer to in a comment, that shows how to add an admin to my YouTube channel.
All the best
Mark
Here’s the link to the ability to add additional admins to your YouTube account that you and Joan requested.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/06/adding-associates-to-manage-your.html
Disclaimer – I haven’t actually tried this one yet, so it may not be what we’re looking for, but it does seem like it from their post.
Don
Hi Don, Thanks for the video – I’m working my way through it but realised as I have a wordpress site, I have no idea where to upload the verification file to?!
I’ve pulled up FileZilla and am at a loss.
Could you help?
I assume that you have a WordPress.com site, which makes lots of things more difficult.
Google does offer other ways of verifying your site. If I remember right, there’s a link on the verification screen to do that. One of those ways is to put the verification codes into your meta tags, which is what you’ll probably need to do.
But the real issue is having your site at wordpress.com. I don’t recommend that because of the control issues you’ve already mentioned and because the SEO link love you get for your site goes to them, not you. You might as well be building quality links for your own site!
I would strongly suggest that you buy a domain name and host (both can be done for a total of about $60/year) and move it to there. That sounds like a great blog post, doesn’t it!
Let me know how it goes with your verification and your move!
Don
Hi Dan,
I would like to comment on other people’s channel with a link. It is banned but recently I saw some comments that people put links. in the form of http://test.com.
Do you have any tip on that?
Thanks
Team etna
Not yet, but I will investigate!
Don
Hi Don: Thanks for this great tutorial. I followed your step by step instructions no problem, all the way to the point of entering my url pointing to the specific page I wanted to link to through the annotation. Unfortunately, no matter what page I put in (either my home page or a specific page) I keep getting this error message: Please enter a valid URL.
Can you please recommend what I should do next? Not sure why this is happening as I am entering my own website URL. Any suggestions are welcome.
Lisa
I’ve found that frustration too.
1. Make sure the URL is on the domain you’re approved for. Any other domain won’t work.
2. Either put in or remove the www. That is usually the problem for me.
3. Start over and try again. There’s a bug in this process that I hope YouTube will rapidly resolve. Frustrating, but hopefully it will go away soon!
This is a frustrating situation, I know, but I’m confident it will get better soon.
Don
Thanks Don for this information. Personally I do not have any videos on U-Tube but that is not to say that I won’t in the future. Still learning lots about how to get more traffic to our web site, so everything is helpful.
Well, that sounds like something you should solve this week! It’s not hard, it just takes some figuring out!
Everyone who is serious about trying to build their business needs YouTube videos. Period.
Don
I would have them verify their account (tying it to their website) and have them make you an administrator on Youtube (it’s there in YouTube’s help screens, can be done on either Youtube or Google Webmaster tools.) Once that’s done, when you upload videos to their accounts, you should be able to create links to their site with no problem.
That shouldn’t affect your ability to link from your YouTube account to your site.
Don
As always great information. I do my best not to miss anything you address.
Thanks
Don,
Thank you for posting this. I am going to share a summary of it with my LinkedIn community and post the link to your site.
–John
Don,
This is a cool tip that you shared – thanks and I am going to quote you and share a linkback from my site as well. I really like the information you share so keep it coming 🙂
Mark Edward Brown
The Web Traffic Reporter
My pleasure Mark. You can always feel free to quote and link to me :<) Don
Thanks for the info.