2011-10-13dated from the first comment; a lower bound

How To Convert Youtube Views to Fans, Subscribers &

Published no later than October 13, 2011, dated from the first comment on the original post. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

YouTube is the number one place that people go to find music online, so it’s no surprise that many musicians are realizing the importance of establishing a proper presence on the site. But a big question still remains - you’ve put in all the effort to grow an audience and get a load of hits on your videos - now what? What you want to do next is acquire the fan and connect with them somehow. For a related workplace reference on remote employee monitoring software, see the full guide.

They may be the kind of person that “subscribes” on YouTube, but most people aren’t, so what you want to do is try get them back to your website to either get their email address or get them to purchase. Traditionally, the best way to do this was with a link in the description box, but here’s a little tip from us on how to get a much more prominent, clickable link on the video: Change The Advertisement You’ve probably noticed that YouTube shows little ads at the bottom of some of your videos.

These are mostly useless, and a little bit annoying because they take people away from watching your video. What we’ve discovered is a little work around that will actually let you control what gets placed in these ads - including a free link to your own site! It’s a slightly lengthy process, but pretty straight forward and well worth it. For a current video-platform reference, see Vimeo.

Google Adwords You’ll need to make an ad to promote your video using Google adwords. This doesn’t have to be a big ad or a long campaign, we usually do a $1 ad for 1 day . If you haven’t used Google Adwords before, it’s pretty straight forward - just click “start now” and follow the steps. Once you’re inside adwords you want to create a new “display ad” and select the “ YouTube Promoted Videos Template ” as you can see in the screenshot below Click the “select a YouTube video” option and find your video that you want to promote.

You can set the budget to as little as you want, we usually do $1 - or you can put some proper money into the promotion if you’d like to try boost the hits it gets Customise Your Ad One this ad gets approved by the Adwords team (it usually takes about 24 hours) you can login to your YouTube channel, find the promoted video and click edit.

Over on the right hand side, below your video, you’ll now see a new menu that wasn’t there before - “ Call to Action Overlay .” As the name implies, this is where you can insert a message that encourages the fans to click through to your website . In this example below - we were giving away a free download of the song being performed in the video, in exchange for the fans email address.

Now when fans view your video they’ll see your ad shown on your video, which will attract WAAAAAAAY more clicks than a link in the description box. Keep The Clicks So there you go. Now, instead of fans clicking on random ads for other business’ products, they’ll be clicking through to see more about your music, to join your mailing list or buy your album!

You can also do more to encourage people to click the CTA overlay by mentioning it in the video or do a colored annotation pointing to it - which will help overcome the natural ad blindness that some users have.