5 ways to turn your YouTube views into sales and traffic

What has your YouTube channel done for you lately?

You followed the advice of the experts and created a YouTube channel. You even produced and uploaded some videos. Now you watch the numbers grow as YouTubers view your videos and subscribe to your channel.

But what do numbers matter to your business if they don’t convert to sales or leads?

YouTube visitors tend to convert and click deeper into websites than visitors from other social sites. Are you taking full advantage of this motivated audience?

Here are some tactics to help your YouTube channel and videos drive more traffic and generate more sales.

Optimize your YouTube channel

Do you know about all the goodies you can add to your YouTube channel? A couple of these goodies include adding links to your website and other social media accounts and linking your YouTube channel to your Google Plus profile.

Optimizing your YouTube channel helps your presence look more professional and encourages links to landing pages, product pages, and other places you want to drive traffic.

Customize your YouTube channel

It’s not that difficult to customize your YouTube channel to make it stand out from the crowd. Customizing your channel with a branded background sends a distinct message to visitors: that you take pride in what you produce and your videos are worth their time.

At top is a video that walks you through how to customize your background using templates.

Optimize descriptive text for your video

Did you know that you can place linkable URLs in your video descriptions? Take advantage of this by encouraging viewers to click through to products or landing pages relevant to the topic of your video.

Take the time to optimize your descriptions, tags, and categories for each of your videos. Use relevant keywords as tags and within your video description.

Add interactivity to your videos

YouTube allows you to place notes, titles, and other types of annotations in your videos. You can even place links within your videos to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel or watch other videos.

Take advantage of this annotations feature to encourage subscriptions and to drive traffic to other videos on your channel.

Notes within your videos are a great way to draw attention to the links in your video descriptions. A simple note like: “Look in the Description Below for Links to Special Discounts” can make a huge different in click-through rates.

Just be careful not to clutter your video with too many notes.

Here is a video that shows you how to add interactivity to your YouTube videos:

Add your own call-to-action overlays

Did you know that promoting a video through Google Adwords at any budget level allows you to place your own call-to-action overlay?

A call-to-action overlay is the pop-up that appears as soon as a video begins to play. Adding this type of overlay to your videos can drive a lot of traffic, especially from within a viral video.

The call-to-action overlay option becomes available as a video editing option once the video has been added to an Adword’s campaign.

This post is based on Deltina’s class on Udemy, “Leveraging YouTube to Drive Sales and Traffic.” Take the class today at a special SocialMedia.biz discount of $19, and learn even more ways to turn your YouTube visitors into customers.Deltina Hay, a partner in Socialmedia.biz, is an author and educator who develops online curricula on social media and other Internet marketing topics. She also helps businesses prepare their content for semantic search and big data analysis. Contact her, follow her on Twitter and Google Plus, or leave a comment below.