If you’ve been around YouTube at all in the past few months, you’ve probably come across a video or two that had little grey text bubbles pop up out of nowhere. These little additions to the video are called annotations, and they are added after a video is uploaded.
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.
November 3rd, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Very nicely written! I love the tip on using annotations like that! I am going to add a link to this post from my blog right now! thanks for the information!