YouTube External Links In Annotations | How To Link Your Video To An External Website

  • Do you want to redirect visitors from your
    YouTube video to an external website?
  • Do you want images within your video
    to link to a landing page?
  • Do you want YouTube visitors to
    opt-in to your free report?

If you don’t want to lose viewers after they’ve watched your video you need to add what is called “associated website annotations” within your YouTube account. These are links (text or images) that you can add to any YouTube video you’ve uploaded.


Here are the steps to get started:

1. Make sure your account is verified.

You can verify your account at youtube.com/verify or login to your YouTube account and go to video manager-channel settings.

Watch >>>
How To Create A YouTube Account In Less Than 3 Minutes
It will show you how to verify your YouTube Account.

2. Add your website as an associate website in Webmaster Tools.

This confirms that you own the site before you link it to your YouTube account. YouTube only allows you to link to one website so make sure you use the correct one.

3. Add your website as the “Associated Website”
in your YouTube account.

Visit your Advanced Channel Settings and add the information in the “Associated website” section. Now, you can enable Associated Website annotations and add them in your videos.

Here is how:

  • From your Video Manager, click the down arrow next to the “Edit” button of the video you want to change, then click Annotations. If this is the first time you’re using external annotations, at the top of the menu you’ll see a banner that says “Enable your account for external annotation links.” Click the Enable button and accept the Terms and Conditions.
  • Once you’ve accepted the Terms and Conditions, click the Add annotation button to create a new annotation, or select an existing annotation. Select the “Link” checkbox to add a URL, then select the category Associated Website.
  • When you’ve placed your associated website link and have finished editing your annotation, select Save and/or Publish.
  • You’ll see the text “Success” displayed when you’ve account has successfully linked to your website.

4. Now you’re ready to add external website
annotations to your video

  • Go to your video manager and then select one of the videos you want to put annotations to and click the drop down box.
  • To select annotations click “add annotation” In this case we’ll do a note then add your text “click here for more info”
  • You can add a video or any selection from the drop down list but in this case we’re going to select “associated website” so we’re going to put in our website to link it then click “publish

To check that the external link is actually working go back to your video manager click on the video. It should redirect to your particular blog post.

Note:
Links to Associated Websites must not be used to redirect to unauthorized sites. You first need to associate one website to your account in Webmaster tools before adding another one. To do this just add your new website in Webmaster Tools then you’ll be able to link to it within your YouTube video and you should be good to go. Annotations will just look at Webmaster Tools to see if the domain is allowed.

Hot Tip
Go through ALL of your past YouTube videos and
add External Annotations to EVERY video.

And now I’d like to invite you to subscribe to my free ecourse “21 ways to generate free traffic from YouTube

Comments

  1. Thanks for this article. It helped me to add annotations to my youtube videos.

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