Want to attract new visitors to your membership site? Then you’ll want to take advantage of YouTube, the second largest search engine after Google. This makes it an important platform.
Though building a community on YouTube and then converting it into traffic for your membership site can be difficult and time-consuming, don’t let that put you off!
In this article, you’ll learn some actionable tasks for creating a following on YouTube. We’ll also look at ways you can encourage your YouTube audience to visit your site with things like calls to action (CTAs) and advertising. Last, we’ll discuss the importance of monitoring your analytics to help improve your conversions.
Create a Community on YouTube
Your aim in using YouTube is to drive traffic to your website. However, before that can happen, you first need to create a large community of followers.
This community should consist of your target audience, so that once you start driving viewers to your site, you’ll know you’re inviting those genuinely interested in your content—real potential customers. How do you go about creating this targeted community?
Produce Exciting Relevant Content
First, you’ll need to upload interesting and valuable videos. Your content should be relevant to your membership site, so you attract the right viewers.
Consider posting how-to videos, interviews, and educational courses that can be split into a series of episodes. These are all popular ways to encourage visitors to engage with your YouTube channel. And be sure to add videos regularly and consistently so your viewers always have new content to consume.
Add CTAs
Displaying a CTA at the end of your videos is another great way to build a community on YouTube. Show an end screen encouraging people to like each video, to add their thoughts in the comments below, to share the video on other social media channels, or to subscribe to your channel.
CTAs create interaction between your viewers, expose your videos to a wider audience, and encourage people to come back for more.
Optimize Your Video Metadata
Adding metadata will help rank your videos on YouTube and on Google. Be sure to write a title and description for each video using keywords and phrases relevant to your video and that people are likely to use when searching. It’ll contribute to your video’s SEO, thus helping it reach more viewers.
Create Playlists
Once you’ve uploaded a fair number of videos, you’ll want to group similar videos into playlists. This encourages visitors to stay on your YouTube channel, watching more videos based around the same theme.
And be sure to use keywords to title your playlists. Playlists rank in search results too, so well-organized and labeled playlists help your content attract more viewers.
The Next Step
Once you’ve built a community on YouTube, the real work begins! You’ve got to entice your viewers away from your YouTube channel and over to your membership site. How? Let’s find out!
Use CTAs
Now that you have a thriving YouTube community, you need to change the angle of your CTAs. Instead of prompting viewers to like or share your videos, encourage people to check out your site.
Use End Cards
Another effective way to direct traffic to your membership site is to always promote it at the end of your videos. You can create graphic end cards that display a lead magnet, offer a freebie, or share news of a competition. The aim is to tempt viewers over to your site, so offer something relevant and interesting, something your target audience can’t resist.
Create Annotations
YouTube’s Annotation Tool enables you to add different annotations to your video. Most helpful is the Note option, which allows you to add pop-up boxes containing text. Here, you can add CTAs as well as your website’s URL.
Write an Enticing Description
When adding a description for your video, include your membership site’s URL and your CTA. Tell people why they should go to your website and how they’ll benefit from it. Viewers interested in your video may read the description and follow the link to your site.
Advertising
Advertising on YouTube can be an effective way to raise awareness of your membership site and encourage people to visit. There are numerous ways to advertise on YouTube, like remarketing, to target those who’ve already expressed an interest in your niche or industry.
When creating an advert, you can choose from an overlay ad, which appears across the bottom of a video; a display ad, which appears next to a video; or a video ad, which can be displayed in different ways and positions.
Think carefully about the message in your ads. Your primary aim is to get people to visit your membership site, so use YouTube ads to sell it to your viewers, explaining what it’s about, promoting the benefits of becoming a member, and telling people to visit your site immediately.
YouTube has a variety of targeting options to ensure your ads are seen by the right audience. You can select your audience based on gender, age, location, interests, and more.
You can also set a budget for your ads, split test them, and measure results, which helps you to understand how your target audience is responding and if your ads are performing effectively.
A successful advertising campaign on YouTube can dramatically increase traffic to your site, so it’s worth investing the time and effort to get it right.
Analytics
Obviously, it’s important you have an accurate idea of whether your efforts on YouTube are paying off with traffic to your membership site.
YouTube monitors your videos' analytics, enabling you to see where your audience is coming from, who exactly they are, and which videos they’re most interested in. As mentioned above, YouTube also provides analytics on ads so you can see what’s resonating with your target audience.
Google Analytics is also an excellent means of analyzing the effectiveness of your video campaign. You can monitor whether your YouTube videos are driving traffic to your site and whether they’re helping to grow your subscriptions, and you can then adapt your YouTube marketing strategy accordingly.
Final Thoughts
With a little know-how, you can successfully use YouTube to drive traffic to your site and increase membership subscriptions. If you’re just starting out, your first course of action is to create that all-important community of potential customers on YouTube.
And once your following has grown, you can turn those YouTube viewers into visitors to your site, and from there into long-term subscribers.
Have you used YouTube as part of your marketing strategy? Please share any advice or top tips you may have in the comments below.
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