Between the various popular social media platforms as well as YouTube there is an absolutely massive audience for videos that is growing on a daily basis. While it is possible to use these platforms to publish videos for various purposes, one way to capitalize on their potential is to use them to generate traffic for your blog or website.
How It Works
The theory behind using social media and YouTube to generate traffic is really extremely straightforward. Essentially you will have to publish videos on these platforms in order to obtain views, and then attempt to channel traffic to your blog or website via a link that is conventionally placed in the description of the video.
Don’t be deceived however. Although that may not sound complicated, it is actually a lot more nuanced than you imagine. However if done right you stand to benefit by taking a slice of the audience on some of the most popular platforms on the internet and directing them to your website or blog.
Create Videos that Attract Interest
As you can imagine the success or failure of your efforts to channel traffic will largely depend on whether or not your videos can attract the interest of viewers. That is something that you need to plan out from the onset – as not just any old video will be able to fit the role.
Generally speaking, the videos that tend to be able to attract the most amount of interest are either those that are informative and useful, or those that provoke an emotional response by being funny, inspiring, or touching. That should be a nice place to start figuring out what sort of topics you will want to use for your videos.
Once you have managed to come up with a few topics, try to outline the structure of the videos. Every good video should have a beginning, middle, and end – and in this case the beginning should convince the viewer to keep watching, the middle should deliver the content, and the end should be the call to action that encourages them to visit your blog or website.
Bear in mind that there are many different types of videos that can be interesting, ranging from brief funny clips to short informative guides and tutorials. Sometimes even highlights from a webinar or presentation can act as compelling content – if the information it provides is interesting enough.
BBecause the attention span of viewers tends to be short, you may want to keep any videos you publish on social media to 30 seconds or thereabouts. That will mean you have about 10 seconds or less to convince viewers to keep watching and should be as direct and to the point as possible. Sometimes videos on YouTube can afford to be a little bit longer, but anything over a minute is pushing it.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to directly promote a product or service in the videos that you’re using for traffic generation. Always remember that these videos exist for a single goal: To convince viewers to visit your website. If you do want to eventually promote a product or service, you can do so on your website or blog itself through the content that you publish there.
Ensure Videos are Visible and Discoverable
Having amazing videos that are extremely interesting isn’t going to matter that much if they aren’t visible and discoverable. When you publish your videos on various platforms it is important to keep that in mind.
For YouTube you will want to pay close attention to SEO when creating a title and description, as well as choosing tags for the video. With the right keywords present your videos could perform extremely well as many users search for videos using the platform’s search engine and Google’s own search also ranks YouTube videos high on their results.
On social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or even Twitter you’ll be relying more on people sharing your content. It is a bit harder to make videos visible in that sense, but your video title and preview image will have a part to play. Also using the right hashtags could help give your video additional visibility.
If you’re unsure about how tags or hashtags work, think of them as categories of sorts. Normally you’ll want to use a mix of very specific tags that often have less competition but also a smaller audience, alongside more general tags that have more competition but a larger audience. Keep in mind that almost all platforms limit the amount of tags that you can use – so choose them wisely.
At the end of the day the aim should be to make sure your videos get as many views as possible, and there are a lot of other factors that will play their part. The right topic and style, an entertaining approach, and a catchy title can often be all it takes for a video to start to go viral and really reel in views. That being said every little advantage you can get for your videos will help – so it makes sense to do as much as you can to make your videos visible and discoverable.
Give Viewers a Reason to Click
To convert the viewers that you’re able to obtain on YouTube and social media into traffic for your blog or website you will have to convince them that they should click on the link in the description (or elsewhere). It may seem obvious but to accomplish that you need to give them a compelling reason to want to click on that link.
The ‘bland’ way of getting this done is to inform them of the benefit of visiting your blog or website. Promising them more interesting content that is similar or more information about the same topic might be a good place to start.
Alternatively you could incentivize clicking on the link to encourage more conversions. Often that involves giving out a ‘freebie’ in the form of some digital product such as a report, eBook, podcast, webinar, and so on. In reality the promise that you’re providing is actually the same, i.e. content that your viewers may be interested in – but phrasing it as a ‘freebie’ gives it a more tangible value.
On some platforms you may be able to integrate the link to your website or blog within the video itself. With YouTube you can do so by using annotations or cards. Some social media platforms such as Instagram do not allow links in the video posts, but do allow you to put a link on your profile.
In any case, you should now be fully aware of what you need to do to start reeling in traffic off YouTube along with Facebook and other social media platforms. Of course the first step you need to take to do so is to start creating your videos – which can be a stumbling block if you don’t have enough experience.
If you are thinking about creating video guides by recording footage from your screen then Movavi Screen Capture might be the perfect place to start. It is an easy to use screen recorder that will let you capture footage directly from your screen to be used as a video.
Needless to say recording footage from your screen is an excellent way to create video guides or tutorials about certain topics. However with Movavi Screen Capture you can do much more than that, including learning how to record Google Hangout or Skype conversations – which can be a nice way to create content such as webinars or interviews.
When you do record videos using Movavi Screen Capture you’ll find all the features that you need to create high quality videos for any platform. It will let you easily configure the recording parameters and define the area of your screen that you want to capture, select whether you want to record audio from your speakers or a microphone (or both), and set the frame rate.
More importantly Movavi Screen Capture also has several other useful tools that will be placed at your disposal. If you want you can set it up to display keyboard actions on-screen so that they can be recorded, as well as highlight the mouse cursor and set up a custom ‘click’ sound to make it more audible.
Once the recording itself is done, Movavi Screen Capture will then let you trim out any excess or unwanted footage. After you’re sure the video is perfect, all you need to do is save it by choosing a format or using one of the presets to optimize your video for a device or platform – including YouTube.
It is understandable if you have doubts about whether Movavi Screen Capture is truly as easy to use as it is reputed to be – but rest assured it is. Even if you have absolutely no experience creating videos, it won’t take you long to learn how to do so using this user-friendly software.
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