As we continue our segment about marketing online video, one of the most effective ways of doing so is encouraging video viewers to take action by including clickable links. In YouTube, annotations can be used for such purposes – however, annotations can only contain clickable links within the YouTube/Google umbrella, drastically reducing your ability to market outside this.
To overcome this challenge, some services have begun to pop up that give us the ability to include clickable, external links within our videos. One of these services is BubblePly, which can be found at http://www.bubbleply.com/. The process is quite simple, and follows these simplified steps:
1. Go to bubbleply.com.
2. Enter the URL of your video you’d like to add clickable links to and press “next”.
3. A new page should open and your video will begin playing on the BubblePly platform. When you’re at the right moment in the video to insert your link, pause the video player.
4. Click on “add bubble” and drag the bubble to the desired part of the video screen.
5. In that bubble, type the text you want to include in the bubble, and at the top, select the ‘link’ icon to link the selected text.
6. Enter the URL of where you want the viewer to be taken once the link is clicked.
7. Click “done”.
8. Test out the video and the link, and if you’re satisfied, copy the code to embed that video into your site.
Note – there is a great tutorial of how to do this located here.
A tool like this will help you shed the rigidness of YouTube’s linking policy and help provide your viewers with the ease and convenience of clickable external links within videos.
