Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
I am doing spectacular and thanks for taking in this next installment of my v-log, Growing
Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers.
Our topic today is I want to talk to you about calls to actions, using annotations within
the videos to create calls to action, the sort of things that we can reach out to our
audience and ask them to engage in within our videos.
But before I get to the main topic, I just want to give you a bit of an update on what’s
been going on here.
Technically speaking, you can see we’ve got the green screen behind me and I’m going
to give you a long shot showing the green screen, kind of all of its mess.
It’s still not really quite set up and it’s not very well lit yet but I’m getting there.
I’m starting to figure out the whole process of the green screen.
I’m not sure I’m going to love the end result.
Having a disembodied head floating in the video screen doesn’t really work for me.
There are some effects that I have liked.
You’ve probably seen in some of the videos, I stuck my head on top of this big block of
ads that I created, thinking that was a brilliant concept.
It looked like crap as far as I’m concerned.
We’re not going to go with that.
Maybe it’s the graphics.
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s the graphics and the block and the graphic artist could maybe make it look
better.
I might explore that option but overall, my own efforts at making it work were somewhat
less than okay.
But the big news for the week for us wasn’t technical and green screen at all but it was
the launch last week of our campaign on Patreon.
For those of you who are just tuning in to this week’s show and haven’t noticed all
we’ve done, we are embarking upon the crowdfunding model for the DottoTech channel.
Rather than going out and getting corporate sponsors to help pay for the channel as it
grows, I’ve decided to reach out and ask the audience to contribute a small amount
to help us grow and to help support the channel and Patreon is a really cool option for doing
that.
I’ve got to say I was really thrilled with the response of the audience.
Our first couple of days out, we got 82 patrons signing up, mainly from the newsletter, from
our email list to the tune of about $178 per month.
Now that was at first blush because I actually sent out an email asking people to come and
support us.
That reached pretty much my whole audience and I had a really good open rate.
When I looked at my newsletter list, my email list, they were opening at probably almost
50% clip so about half of the 9,000 people or so on my email list got the request from
me for funding.
I predicted a fairly large unsubscribe and there was probably the biggest single day
unsubscribe that I’ve ever had but not huge.
It wasn’t huge.
Some people went, “I don’t want you asking me for money, Dotto.
I’m going to unsubscribe.”
Ironically, about 82 to 85 people unsubscribed from my mail lists and 82 people said yeah,
I’ll do it so it was a 50/50 split.
You know which group I like better, personally.
I like the 82 that said yes.
The 82 that left, that’s fine, too.
But I certainly appreciate those 82 people.
As a content provider, it’s kind of profound that audience members are willing to take
out their credit card and go through that whole process to say yeah, I believe in your
product, I’m going to support you and I want you to continue being able to produce
this type of content that I’m learning from.
It gave me a pretty good feel good day for a couple of says there as I saw the first
rush of patrons come in and sign up.
Where is this going to go?
Is it going to ultimately become a real major part of the income supporting DottoTech and
allow us to do some of the things that we want to do?
We will see but so far we are looking pretty good on that front.
Let’s get back in and let’s talk about engagement and calls to action within our
YouTube videos.
I have shown you in the past where we used annotations to create engagement with the
audience and to do things like to ask them to subscribe to our channel but there are
a lot of things that you can use calls to action for within your videos, depending on
what your business model is.
We’re each going to have different needs.
Some of us might have needs to raise money, like I would.
Others might want to be growing your newsletter list.
Others might be looking for leads.
There is a wide variety of things that you could be looking to create audience engagement
in but for the most part it’s going to start with your annotations.
But your annotations are limited.
Let me just go into a video here.
Let’s just got into the one we just posted.
We’ll put this one in because this one’s got the ugly block of ads.
Kitchern, I just saw a typo.
Isn’t that funny?
Way to go, Steve!
I’m going to correct my typo.
I’m going to save those changes.
Me and typos.
I actually have a semi legitimate reason for them.
Spell check doesn’t always catch them obviously but I actually have an eye issue.
I have the beginning of macular degeneration.
I’ll come out and I’ll tell you.
I’ll come out of the closet.
I’m very young to have it and it’s not very serious but there are certain times that
letters overlap, especially when I’m a little bit tired, and your brain fools you.
I actually see what I think I’m seeing as opposed to what’s really there.
Consequently, I do more typos than the average.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a lousy speller, really.
It doesn’t have very much to do with that fact.
There it is.
We fixed it as a team.
Thanks for helping.
Let’s go in and let’s take a look at the annotations that I have which create the calls
to action in this particular video.
I’ve gone in and this was my grand attempt at a new structure for dealing with the green
screen.
So there’s the screen that I thought might work well which is this big of block o’ads
right here with my head perched like a canary on the top.
Thank you to all the people that wrote in and said Steve, it looks stupid because obviously
I didn’t recognize that fact although looking at it right now, I’m somewhat embarrassed
by the fact that I did that.
Anyway, each of these now is a link that allows a call to action of some sort.
I do it by putting a graphic in and saying “Please support us” or “Please subscribe
to our channel.”
In the past, I would pop these in at different times within the video but I thought I would
leave them up and create persistence within this ad.
I actually haven’t noticed it engaging the audience that much more.
Maybe it’s because they’re laughing at me so hard for spelling “kitchen” wrong.
I don’t know.
Now I have here three different types of calls to action within this one video.
I have a link back to my website so just visit me back for more information on whatever it
is I’m talking about, my call to action as far as supporting us on Patreon so this
a request for support and funding, and a request for you to subscribe to our YouTube channel
which is the call to action that I’ve used the longest and the most.
Now there are two different places that you can send calls to action.
You can send it within YouTube so you can put a link to another video or like this one
here which is an invitation for people to subscribe.
Because I have my YouTube partnership, I’ve reached a level of trust within YouTube that
I can create what’s called an associated website.
You see right there it says Associated Website.
I’ll actually take you in and show you where that is.
This is a big step as you’re moving along in your YouTube career.
I’ve got to go back to my video manager and there in your Channel Settings, this gives
you a status update of where you stand with YouTube in a variety of different areas.
You always have to be in good standing in all of these areas in order to get extra privileges.
One of the privileges that you will at one point be able to ask for is this one here
which is called External Annotations.
It says it lets you link annotations to external sites or merchant partners.
Now I haven’t figured out what merchant partners I can link to but if you go through
this description here, it will allow you to create the opportunity to type in your URL
or any page that’s pointing to your domain and then send your visitors to that page.
That is a huge step forward in audience engagement because you can do calls to action to your
website.
You can invite people to some to sign up for a newsletter or to view the rest of your blog,
a variety of things you can send people to your site to do.
Now let me show you and prove to you at least my belief that annotations work.
Let me go back into my channel.
Let’s just go back here.
Let’s go into my Video Manager and let’s take a look at our Analytics.
As you start growing your channel you have to constantly pay attention to what’s happening
in your Analytics because it tells you everything that your audience is doing.
It tells you where you’re performing well, where you’re performing poorly and more
importantly, it allows you to compare what happened last week or last month to what’s
happened this month as you start to change and as you modify and morph it.
There is no game plan for being a YouTube content publisher.
We’re making this stuff up as we go along so having even a week of historical data is
very useful.
But let me show you just how important calls to action and annotations are as far as overall
growth of your channel.
Here’s my most popular video as it’s currently running right now.
It’s my 5 Favorite Evernote Features and it’s closing in on about 100,000 views total
overall.
But in the last 30 days, these numbers here are just from the last 30 days, from the last
month, the performance it’s had 21,000 views.
No big deal there.
These are all nice things.
This is the thing that makes me sit up and take notice – 370 subscribers.
If I click on this, I’ll get more details but this is how many people have subscribed
to my channel while they’re watching this video or from this video.
Their action was to subscribe.
Now they might have chosen to subscribe anyways because it is such an awesome video but also
30 seconds into that video, as for all of my videos, I ask people to subscribe.
Before I did that ridiculous block which I did through the whole show, now we’re going
to go back to asking them 30 seconds in.
But I do that religiously. 30 seconds in, “Please subscribe to my channel” or “Think
about subscribing to Steve” or something like that with that little graphic that I
embedded in the video and then I put the annotation above.
So this is over the last 30 days what this video has meant to my total number of subscribers
every single day.
Do you see the numbers, 13, 15, 10?
A total over the last 30 days of 370 new subscribers have subscribed to my channel because of this
one video.
So if we take a look at my numbers here, if we go back to my dashboard and we take a look
at where we are sitting, that’s 370 people.
If didn’t have a call to action in that video, I would be 300 less.
I would be at 22,300.
I’ve got to tell you.
It feels a lot better being at 22,700 than it does with those poor losers back at 22,300.
So I think this is proof that the calls to action work.
If you don’t believe it, put a video up with call to action, put a video up that’s
similar in content and don’t put a call to action.
Then take a look at your Analytics and decide for yourself.
Now before I leave this topic, I want to take a look again at one of my videos.
Let’s just bring up the same ones we were looking at and I want to talk to you a little
bit about the privilege, I guess we can call it the privilege, that YouTube is giving us
by allowing us to link back to our website because I don’t believe YouTube takes that
permission lightly.
They very clearly spell out what we can do and what we can’t do with the link back
to our associated website.
I think there’s always a temptation to try and skirt around it.
For example, the things that we can do very easily, we’ve already said.
Get people to subscribe.
Get people to visit our site.
Bring them to a page that will allow them to subscribe to a newsletter.
All those are good.
But there are more direct ways that we can create annotations and links back that could
create more revenue.
I’m doing one by asking you to subscribe to my Patreon page but that’s not going
to straight to my Patreon page.
That’s going into an intermediary page where I ask you to click on it to go to the Patreon
page because this whole thing I set up to send people back to your website or to send
you to merchant sites that YouTube approves of.
So there might be a temptation for those of you who know a little bit more about HTML
coding and know a little bit more about websites to do a redirect of some sort.
I have a tool in my WordPress account called Pretty Link and it’s an awesome tool.
It’s like Bitly.
It’s like a URL shortener except it’s a URL customizer.
So I might take a long link within my own website—I’ll just go to DottoTech and
I’ll show you—I might take a link to this video here.
As a matter of fact, I’ve done it for this video here.
This is my latest podcast and you see the URL here?
It’s dottotech.com/dt-149-maffin-mason-head-camp.
That’s the URL.
That would be a hard one to communicate to people.
Because it’s for my podcast, for my radio show, I do a shortening thing using the Pretty
Link so I just call it dottotech.com/149.
It’s a lot easier to remember and watch.
What will happen is it will load—well, you won’t see it change—do you see how it
changes in the omnibar there?
It changed it to that URL.
So I can actually create links to outside websites doing the same thing.
So theoretically, you could try and fool YouTube and put your URL pointing to an external website
but using the redirect that you’ve got, by using one of these tools like Pretty Link.
But I think they’re going to catch you doing that.
I’m not positive because I haven’t tried it but I know that you run the risk of being
penalized and what might that penalty look like?
I’m not willing to find out.
See YouTube is too important to my business moving forward.
I’ve committed to publishing full time on YouTube, being a YouTube publisher.
I’m not going to try anything that puts that at risk, including something that might
make me a little money.
Now how might that make you money?
Well, let’s say it was an Amazon link that you would go into, an affiliate link.
You’re reviewing a camera in your video and you create a link through to the Amazon
merchant account that allows you to get a commission or an affiliate fee based on that
camera sale.
Don’t do that.
Don’t embed that in your video.
Having said that, you can include those but there’s a place and a time for everything
and the place that you would include those links, affiliate links to products like that
is you could put them right here in the Description field.
You can add links to outside websites, whatever you want, right within here.
So you say, “Please visit my affiliate link” or “Here’s a place to look at the camera
that’s talked about in this.”
You can say in the video, “Look in the description field below for a link to this.”
You could do things that way.
That’s a completely legitimate way to create some traffic for affiliate revenue or for
anything else, driving people to websites, either your website or outside websites.
And before you even get the permission to do the associate websites, that’s a way
to get people to go visit your site.
I hope that all made sense.
The bottom line is if you’re building a business on YouTube, if you’re building
an audience, creating audience engagement is often going to be important and there is
a variety of different ways that you can create that engagement using the different tools
that are available that’s primarily through annotations but just if you create a thought
about we can create some sort of traction with our audience.
YouTube, as far as I’m concerned, is just a spectacular way to create that traction.
I hope you found today’s video to be interesting and useful and a little bit oversharing on
my part.
I shared an awful lot that I wasn’t actually planning on doing at the beginning of the
video.
Well, that’s why I kind of like doing these things as a v-log like this.
It allows me to kind of cover a whole variety of content and I hope that you learn a lot
from these.
We’re well on our way to 100,000 subscribers.
To give you an update, I’m not positive that we’re going to make our 100,000.
I’ve got to figure out some ways to start increasing that number of subscribers.
We’re not doing bad.
We’re getting lots of views.
We’re getting about 150,000 to 160,000 videos per month which I think is a pretty rich,
reasonable number of views.
We’re growing by 3,500, 3,600 sometimes it says 4,000 but we’re growing by about
over 3,500 new subscribers a month.
But do the math.
That’s not going to get us to 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year.
I’m hoping that staying the course these numbers are going to continue to increase.
They’ve been flat for about a month so I’m a little bit concerned for my numbers as far
as that’s concerned.
But remember, I’ve just titled this series Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers.
It’s really about building a business on YouTube and every time that that subscriber
number increases by one, that’s a new person that I now have in my community that I get
to form a relationship with.
So I feel that I’m getting success every single day that goes by in this journey of
becoming a YouTube content publisher.
With that, I’m going to leave it off now.
It’s been a long video.
I’m going to finish up with a pitch for you to consider sponsoring us and becoming
one of our Patreon supporters.
There are lots of perks if you are a supporter so please click on the link.
I’m not too sure where I’m going to put it because I haven’t figured out what I’m
doing graphically with this thing until after I’ve shot it.
But click on the link that you’re going to find somewhere here, go to Patreon, have
a look at it and then decide whether or not you feel that you can become our next support.
If you do, good on you.
If you don’t, that’s okay.
Maybe next time.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!