Most savvy Internet marketers are using YouTube annotations to drive traffic to their landing pages, affiliates, websites or blogs.
Annotations are informational, interactive, narrative notes that can be displayed in your video as it is being played by viewers. They can also be used to link to other videos and YouTube URLs.
Marketers use YouTube Annotations for a variety of reasons.
For instance, if you create several training videos that are in a series; they can be linked together
using YouTube annotations right inside each video.
Using YouTube Annotations to network your videos instead of the video organizer and YouTube Channel, makes for a neater presentation and gives greater assurance that the user will actually view the next video in the series.
The following video describes how to
use YouTube annotations and how to link to other videos in a series.
You could also be
using YouTube annotations to highlight specific parts of your videos.
Let's say that you are an ancient coin collector and you have some recent finds you want to visually display to other collectors.
You could provide them with a virtual gallery that describes the coins, where they were found, where they are from, the approximate dates, mint marks, what they were used for and other pertinent information.
You could also be
using YouTube Annotations to link to other videos of coins in other collections to better describe each coin or series of coins.
By
using YouTube annotations, you can provide step by step instructions on how to clean ancient uncleaned coins, without the necessity of using cue cards or worrying about unnecessary dialog.
Annotations can also be coupled with subtitles to complement them and to add additional information.
By using both annotations and subtitles, you can forget about using sound or dialog in your videos if you feel like it and because YouTube translates subtitles into multiple languages, you can market internationally.
By
using YouTube annotations along with subtitles in your videos, your viewers have more time to digest the information that you are providing them.
Viewers can pause the video at any time or run the video back to catch information they missed on the first go around.
Annotations are a way to offer far more information to your viewers and still present it in a video format.
When
using YouTube annotations, don't overwhelm the video content.
Balancing the correct use of annotations in your videos is considered by many to be almost an art form. Use them judiciously.
When
using YouTube annotations, a good rule of thumb is to try not to use more than three lines of text per scene.
Other than the fact that you cannot presently link to a URL that is outside of YouTube without becoming an AdWords advertiser;
using YouTube annotations is a great marketing tool and an excellent way to direct traffic.
