Instead of having to go into your account and to the page specifically for annotations editing, the new editor is built right into the videos main page. While your viewers will see your video as normal, you’ll see yours with two little arrows in the bottom left corner, and when you hover your mouse over the video content, you’ll see that it changes into a little targeting icon. Pretty nifty!

There is also an option to turn the new annotations editor off, if it bugs you.

Just thought this was worth mentioning, especially since it seems like I’ve only been posting negative stuff around here lately. This is good news!

Oh, I almost forgot. Another YouTube change! For those of you who like to troll comment boards and then later regret your ridiculous comments, you’ll be glad to know that YouTube has made it now possible to delete your own comments. Previously, only the owner of the video was allowed to delete any comments.

There are several purposes for these annotations. Some people use them simply to highlight something in the video, or perhaps clarify something that happens during the video. Others use them to link to other videos. That’s right, annotations are clickable. Unfortunately, you can not link to an external site with YouTube annotations. You can only link to pages on YouTube.com. This is still handy if you’re trying to build a subscriber base and get more exposure for your videos, but for your typical YouTube marketer, the linking feature isn’t worth all that much. So what is it good for?

Although I don’t think it was ever the intended use of annotations, they are a great way to draw attention to your link in the description box. You should already make a habit out of putting the URL you’re promoting in the description box. These links of course are no-follow, but for the purpose of driving additional traffic to your site/affiliate offer, they are an excellent resource.

The best thing about annotations is that you can add or edit them at any time (unlike your actual video content). That means you can go update all of your current videos with these handy annotations. Trust me, it really improves click through rate. Just adding a simple bubble towards the end of your video with an arrow pointing at your URL in the description box will make a significant impact in your CTR. Many people simply need to be told what to do!

To add annotations to your videos, simply log in to YouTube, go to the “account” tab in the top right and select “my videos”, and then click the “annotations” button next to the video you’d like to add them to. The annotations interface is pretty easy to use once you get used to it.