Fire Up Your Marketing
With The YouTube Catalyst!
By: Moral Blogger
Disclaimer
You agree that by following this guide the author is not
responsible for the success or failure of your project and any
figures where stated are to serve as an estimation guide
only.
You also agree that the author is not responsible for any
consequences resulting from using the information herein.
This guide DOES NOT come with RESELLER RIGHTS.
In other words, this guide can be given away, but not sold. If
you do give this guide away, be sure not to change any part
of it, including links, strategies and text. It is forbidden.
With that being said, we can now move on to the very simple
issue of optimizing and uploading a video to YouTube that
includes a clickable link inside the video to your website or
product.
There are no affiliate links in this guide.
Authors note:
Welcome to my little guide about how ‘I’ optimize videos for
YouTube that include a clickable link inside the video to my
websites, products and affiliate offers.
This is the Catalyst that fires easier conversions!
There are many, many ways to make, upload and optimize videos to
get the best position in YouTube and other Search Engines,
particularly, the Big G.
This guide will hopefully go some way to showing you how to, at
least, stand a better chance of ranking your videos and getting
more conversions by getting that all important start.
I’ve been marketing online since 2009 and still pick up bits of
excellent advice from other marketers as well as finding out for
myself what works and what doesn’t in today’s, often cut-throat,
Internet Marketing world.
So if you’re new and a bit confused about all this optimization stuff,
video marketing, affiliate marketing or whatever, don’t worry!
Every marketer, including the experts, are still learning new stuff
every day…we have to because it’s an ever changing game where
the goalposts move almost every week. What works today may not
work tomorrow.
I have changed strategies more times than you can shake a stick at
and sometimes it can get pretty frustrating, but it’s part of the
business. At the end of the day, you have to tow-the-line, or else
you may as well give up and do something else.
My advice? Do what works…often. Stop flitting around shiny objects,
roll your sleeves up and get on with it.
It will come.
The YouTube Catalyst guide is about getting, at least, a good chance
of ranking your video in the search engines with imbedded clickable
links to your promotions.
Clickable links inside your videos make conversions easier, simply
because the viewer doesn't have to scroll down to the description
and then find your link, they can just click the video instead!
As for ranking videos, just be aware that a little common sense is
needed with keywords; you won’t rank a video called ‘ Dog Training’
for instance, but you may have a chance of ranking ‘ Jack Russell
Terrier Puppy Problems’.
I have taken the liberty of presuming you already have a website,
or are willing to get one just for this guide (all will become clear
why we need a website later on).
You can use an old one that’s been stuck on your hard drive
gathering dust, or a shiny new one for a couple of bucks.
So, to reiterate, you will need a domain name and hosting for the
purposes used here. Again, I presume you have those two items.
If not, go get them. If you don’t know how to set up hosting or
buying a domain name, shoot me an email from the contact page
on the Moral Blogger website, I will tell you what to do.
Or, if your prefer, go to our best friend, YouTube, and search for
‘setting up hosting’ or ‘ buying a domain name’ it’s really easy and won’t take you more than 10 minutes to do both.
This guide will use lots of images of every step, starting with your
website set up, then moving onto choosing a product to promote,
then on to the video, and finally optimizing that video, with clickable
links inside, and uploading it to YouTube.
I would advise a new website, and a new Google email account so we can set up our YouTube channel, Google analytics, Webmasters
Tools, AdWords account, G+ and Gmail.
I would also register with Clickbank (if you haven’t already) as I will
be using it as an example in the guide. You don’t have to, but they
are a pretty big fish to have in your aquarium!
I will be starting from scratch with the beginner in mind, but if you
already have a website, Google accounts and a YouTube channel
you can go ahead and use those for The YouTube Catalyst guide.
I’ve deliberately done things a little over the top in this guide. Some
more advanced marketers may say I’ve complicated matters by
doing it so methodically, but I really wanted to be thorough.
Advanced marketers may do things a little differently, cut corners
and not use some strategies I use, but they might also leave out a
cog that makes all this work.
The end product will have the basic things you will need to start
Video Marketing properly, so feel free to add items on such as WP
Plug-ins, a different WP theme, more backlinking or whatever you
think can improve the end product.
I hope beginners will learn something valuable and intermediate
and advanced marketers find something new to add to their
arsenal.
Enough blabbering…let’s get to it.
What's inside The YouTube Catalyst Guide?
Part 1…Website Creation
How to get the right look for a website that will not only be a back-
up to our videos, but will also be our ‘human’ touch.
Part 2… Setting up Google Accounts
Setting up a bunch of essential Google accounts for tracking,
keyword research, using YouTube and other matters.
Part 3… Choosing a Product to for our Video
Finding a product we can sell that pays well and is likely to convert.
Part 4… Finding the right Key-phrase
We look for a keyphrase that will give us a chance to rank in
YouTube, Google and other Search engines.
Part 5 … Part 5 – YouTube Video Optimization
Giving your video the best chance of ranking and also inserting a
clickable ‘Call to Action’ Inside a video.
Part 6… Simple Backlinking
Nothing too demanding here, just a very simple backlinking guide
using social sites and the odd Fiverr gig.
Part 7… Resources
A list of free resources to get you started in promotion of any
product you feel can fill your bank account with moolah!
Doing this will give you the Catalyst to start getting the
conversions you deserve.
Let's get onto Part 1 - Your Website:
You can use any domain name you wish, just don’t make it sound
spammy or dodgy such as www.buy-from-me-now.com or
www.you-really-need-this.com they look like a sellers website.
Yes, I know you are a seller, but these types of domains look shady
and will put people off visiting. People don’t like being taken for a
ride.
You can use a generic name like ‘ mypersonalreviews’ or
‘ samswebsite’ but I like to go for real names such as
jamesappleby.com or, as in the case of this guide, the name I’ll be using is callumreeves.com (my Brother-in-Law) This gives the web address a personal touch and instils a little
confidence in the visitor. Searchers these days would rather hear
from real people rather than a website they know they will be sold
to.
I use almost exclusively use Wordpress websites and I use mostly
Hostgator for my hosting because of the cpanel facility which
includes a program call Fantastico Deluxe. This allows setting up
Wordpress in a matter of a few clicks.
If you don’t know how to do this, either contact me or do a YouTube
search to see how it’s done…again, it’s really easy.
Presuming you have your website up and ready, just sitting there,
we now go over to choose a theme and set up the basic plug-ins.
You can add more plug-ins if you like, but try to keep them in single
figures!
I will start with the really basic theme below and change it to one I
like.
As you can see below, this is a brand new website with the latest
2014 default Wordpress theme.
We need to change a few things.
So, log in (http://YOURWEBSITE.com/wp-admin) and to get to the
dashboard. Let’s get rid of the sample post, sample page and
comment.
These will be named ‘Hello World’ in the posts, ‘Sample Page’ in the Pages section and a comment in the ‘Comments’ section (the
comment might have already gone by the time you’ve deleted the
post page)
Just click on each entry and ‘Trash’ them. They serve no purpose
for us, so away they go.
Next, we need a new theme. The Wordpress default 2014 theme
does nothing for me and we need just a basic theme that’s clean
and clear.
You can choose any theme you like just as long as it’s not too busy.
I recently found the Expound theme pretty good. It’s responsive
and easy to use. It also has some decent features, but we only need
the very basic stuff…we won’t be SEO’ing this website too much, it
will be just used for, mainly, YouTube purposes, so the cleaner the
better.
Go to your dashboard and click ‘Appearance’ then click ‘Themes’.
Here you will see the default themes loaded into Wordpress.
Click ‘Add New’ at the top and search for Expound (or if you’ve found one you like, go for that instead)
Then click the ‘Install Now’ button and then ‘Activate’
There…how basic is that!
We now need to tidy it up a bit by altering the title, tag line and
widgets.
Go over to your Dashboard and click ‘Appearances’ then
‘Customise’
I’ve just capitalized the CallumReeves.com and added a tag line
quote shamelessly pilfered from Napoleon Hill!
Then I ‘Saved’ at the bottom. Now we get rid of some widgets that
appear on the right hand side of our site.
Go to ‘Appearance’ then ‘Widgets’
All the widgets in the sidebar have to be dragged and dropped into
the space on the left, so there should be nothing left. All those
shown below can be removed.
Now the site will look even more basic, but things will fill out over
time. Don’t worry; it will be looking better after this guide has been
completed.
Ok, with that done, we need to install some plug-ins to help with
getting the site a little optimized in case we do get any visitors.
Once we’ve made a video for our product, we will write an article or
review about it and place that review on our website with a link
back to our video and, of course, our product offer.
The product may be your own creation or maybe an Affiliate offer
that you found on Clickbank. But remember, this website won’t be
the main link to our products…the video will be, but it does no
harm to promote the product on your website too.
All will become clear soon…promise!
Now, let’s get some plug-ins.
Plug-ins
The Plug-ins we will be using are the very basic ones that every IM
Wordpress website will need, these are all free too:
- All In One SEO Pack
- Form 7
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Pretty Link Lite
- Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
- WSA Favicon
Now, if I’m being picky, you don’t even really need all these six
plug-ins, but I’ve added them because they only take 5 minutes to
set up.
Explanation of the Plug-ins.
All In One SEO Pack
This plug-in will make sure you have the title, meta tag and
keywords filled out on your review page. It also helps with the
home page etc, but I’ve included it here just to make sure the on
-age optimization is done correctly. There are others, Yoast for
instance, but there is a learning curve involved in how to use it
properly.
Contact Form 7
Having a contact form on your website helps with its authenticity.
This is so simple to set up, that it would be silly not to include it.
Google XML Sitemaps
Helps Google find your website and useful for when setting up
Google analytics which we’ll do later.
Pretty Link Lite
A must have! This is the little plug-in that will enable us to directly
link out from our YouTube videos. Again, easy to use.
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
Not really needed, but a clever little tool that lets you use html in
your widgets without any coding. You’ll see what I mean later.
WSA Favicon
This Plug-in lets you place a tiny picture on your website tab at the
top. It makes the site look more professional. I’ll go through all of
these in turn.
So, we need to go over to our Dashboard again and this time click
‘Plug-Ins’ on the left hand side.
Click the box next to the ‘Hello Dolly’ plug-in and delete it, it
serves no purpose. Keep the Akismet plug-in, but don’t do anything
with it. We might need it later if our site takes off. The Akismet
plug-in stops spam hitting your comments box, but as we won’t be
allowing comments, it’s not worth enabling.
Now go to the ‘Add New’ box at the top and search for ‘All in One SEO Pack’ and click install. It will ask you if you’re sure, you just click yes.
The next page will ask you if you want to activate it. Go ahead and
do that.
Ok, do the same for the other plug-ins…it’s the same process. When
that’s done, we’ll configure them one at a time.
Using the Plug-ins
First thing we’ll do is make a little Favicon. This tiny pic sits next to
your tab on your pages when someone visits your website.
Make a small pic, or upload one, that is 128x128 in size, it must be
saved and uploaded as a .png file.
Then go to the settings in your Dashboard and click the ‘Favicon’
word. Find the .png file on your computer and upload it. Then Save
changes.
If your little pic doesn’t show up immediately, do the same process
again.
The Favicon might not show up at the top of your pages just yet,
but it will do soon. If you see the little pic as above, you’re good to
go.
Now, you don’t have to do this, but I think it does make the website
look as if someone has actually taken a little time with it.
We’ll configure the other plug-ins as we go along.
Now we need to set some things with the SEO pack plug-in, starting
with the Home Page setting. Just go to the ‘All in One SEO’ tab on
the left and just fill in the Home Page stuff for now and save
changes.
There’s really no need to do much here, it's just a case of filling out
the boxes. Remember, SEO is not needed at this point.
Next we go back to the Dashboard and click ‘Settings’ then
‘Permalinks’.
We need to change the ‘Custom Structure’ to /%postname%/
to make our posts (if ever we use them) to look tidy.
We may never use posts because we will be using Pages instead…
but that’s just a personal preference, you may prefer to use posts,
but I think we have more control over pages.
Hope that made sense? Pages are easier to link to in the menus that
we’ll be setting up later.
Don’t forget to save changes after changing the Permalink setting.
That will do for the plug-ins for the moment, but we’ll be back!
Now, we need to add some pages to our site.
These are what we will add:
- About Me
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Privacy Policy
- Contact Me
So, back in the Dashboard, Click ‘Pages’ and ‘add new’
We are going to add an About Me page!
Why? Well, people like to see reality, so be honest about yourself
here.
Write a 400-500 piece about yourself. Tell them what you do, what
you like and why you made this website. Be creative.
It shouldn’t be hard to write an article about yourself surely? :)
It adds the human touch that searchers prefer these days. I believe
more and more people are clicking on ‘About Me’ pages…and
Google likes them too.
Scroll down and fill in the SEO bit at the bottom, it’s not actually
needed but I like to keep everything all tidy!
We don’t really want search engines to find these few pages here so
well check the little boxes next to the ‘indexing’.
We won’t do this with our review pages through…We WANT our
pages indexed then!
When that’s done, go ahead and publish it by clicking the publish
button to the right. You can see your handy work by hitting the
preview button.
It might look a bit boring at the moment, but we’ll be adding
widgets soon to brighten it all up a bit!
Next we Move onto the Privacy Policy Page.
This has to be on your site by law because you may be taking email
addresses in the future. It also explains what cookies are to the
visitor and what they do, so it’s got to go in I’m afraid!
Just add a ‘new page’ and get a Privacy Policy to suit your website.
These are pretty generic and you can copy mine if you like from the
Callumreeves.com website.
Just make sure you change the URL's throughout and the personal
stuff at the bottom to your details.
So, once you’ve added a new page and titled it ‘Privacy Policy’ and
added the policy itself, AND clicked the no follow boxes as we did in
the About Me page, go ahead and publish it.
Next we go to our Contact Page:
Go to the dashboard and click ‘Contact’ on the left.
This will open up a new page and all you need to do is copy the little
piece of shortcode as below.
Now go to ' Pages' in the dashboard and ‘add new’
Now, title the page ‘Contact Me’ and put a little note about how
people can contact you, then just paste the code you copied whilst
in the Contact area a short while ago.
Scroll down and check the ‘no index – no follow’ boxes and publish.
You can now preview the page.
Nice!
Next, we have to have an ‘Affiliate Disclosure’ that lets people
know we may earn a commission on products if they click through
and buy a product affiliated with our website.
A simple transparency page is all that’s needed in most cases, but if
you’re promoting Amazon products, be sure to put the proper
Amazon Affiliate Disclosure on ALL your pages.
It’s against the Amazon TOS if you don’t do this and they may well
ban your account…and we don’t want that!
Amazon also does not allow cloaked links, apart from their own,
that is!
It would be wise indeed if you went over ALL the Amazon
conditions before building a website or promoting Amazon Products.
This site won’t be promoting Amazon products, it will promote
Clickbank, JVZoo and other digital products, but we still need an
Affiliate Disclaimer on our site.
I like to be open and a little tongue-in-cheek with my affiliate
disclosures…as long as the message comes across, to whoever is
reading it, that you may make a commission after someone has
clicked your link and bought something, then that’s all that matters.
So, ‘Add a new page’ and title it ‘Affiliate Disclosure’.
Write a little about earning commissions from possible clicks, check
the ‘no follow- no index’ boxes, publish and that’s that done.
OK, that’s all the pages done for now, we’ll start linking them to our
site now in the menu and widget area.
Go back to the dashboard and click ‘Appearances’ then ‘Menus’
Name your Menu in the little box, something like ‘side menu’ or
‘inside pages’ then click ‘Create Menu’.
Check the boxes below in the pic. This is going in the sidebar and