Examples of YouTube cards and how to apply them to your YouTube channel
Today I want to talk about using YouTube cards and run through some examples, so you can start to think about how to use them on your YouTube channel.
YouTube cards were released in 2015 and were created as a replacement for annotations.
The reason behind this is annotations don’t work on mobile devices, so the YouTube engineers decided to create a new tool to allow you to engage further via mobile devices.
Providing access to those on mobile devices is critical, as the popularity of smartphones and tablets is out of control.
You will see in the graph below from ComScore, mobile and tablet usage continue to surge in households. So it is vital to make sure mobile is part of your YouTube strategy.
Click play on the button below to see the actual tutorial on how to apply cards.
So let’s jump into the YouTube cards tutorial and show an example of how you can add them to all your videos.
Step by step on using YouTube cards
The first thing you need to to is log into your YouTube channel. I’m going to log into the Profile Booster YouTube channel for this example, and I am going to add a YouTube card to the most recent video I put out, titled SEO Content Writing.
As per the image below, we hit the drop down menu which will give us access to a range of options to choose from, and we just want to focus on YouTube’s Cards for today. You will notice the option for annotations as well in the image below.
So we left click on cards.
Adding cards is easy. Now the Card icon is a little exclamation mark that appears on the top right of every video.
So the first thing we want to do is ideally position it, so it isn’t overlaying anything important on our video.
You may want to scroll along to the 15-second mark or to a spot where you have nothing up the top right. I’m just going to pop the card juts on the right-hand side the 15-second mark for the first card.
How do you determine the best location for your YouTube cards?
The best place to start is by looking at your video analytics. Some of your videos may be incredibly boring. The concept with cards is to provide an option for users to check out more of your other videos.
The best strategy is to look at your YouTube analytics and see where your users are dropping off. For many, it might be around the 60% market.
So I like to put one in nice and early and then the 2nd option around the 45 second to the 1-minute mark. This way users get the option to click forward and view another video if this one isn’t doing anything for them.
How many cards should you have on your videos?
Now with cards, you typically don’t want to end doing it with five, six or seven cards. You want to focus on maybe just one or two, the most important one or two.
Maybe three if your stretching and you’ve got some interesting information to share.
So once we have scrolled ahead to 15 seconds or the area we think there is space to add this. Left click on the add card and you will get a range of options, including:
- promote a video with the playlist;
- promote another channel; or
- we can link to an approved website.
So in this case, an approved website is one you setup within your channel to hyperlink back to your site.
In this case, I’m going to link to an approved website. I will left-click on create as you can see highlighted in the image above.
Your website is the approved website. So from here what I can do is to put the URL of your so you can direct people back there. In this case, I am going to promote the blog on Profile Booster.
Next, you enter the URL forward/blog in this case because that’s the URL of the site you need to promote. You can also link to an associated website via the drop down option in the image below on the left-hand side.
Merchandise sites or crowd funding sites are supported as well. If you wanted to drive awareness and support for one of your creative campaigns on the supported crowdfunding site. So you have some useful options to choose from.
Enter the relevant details
So now you need to click on next, and you need to put in all the relevant details. Now it will likely populate some of the information for the Card title, call to action and the teaser text. It may have an image in there as well.
So we’re going to put some new details in here including the card title, and in the card title, I usually like to say Visit our blog. But you can put anything you believe will attract attention to your card.
In the call to action I’d like to say ‘More Ideas & Strategies’, and in the teaser text, you should put something to attract their attention, but also keep it simple.
Updating the image on your YouTube cards
It is highly recommended to include a new image for this image. You want to make it attractive and eye-catching, but nothing over the top. Keep it simple to get the job done.
The image I have created has a simple background and a straightforward call to action.
Now I am going to change the image cause I have already created the one that’s more specific.
Image size for YouTube cards
The image you need to create for YouTube cards is 200 by 200 pixels in size. As mentioned, just keep it simple and effective to get the job done. You can see my example YouTube card image below.
So that’s going to sit at the 15-second mark. Now when the 15-second mark pops up, if the user clicks on the i, the image with the teaser text will appear.
Now what I want to do is add the second card because I want to promote the video on the channel, another video on the channel. Let’s go ahead and do that.
Click on the play button, and I’m going to scroll along to the 37 or 38 second because there wasn’t much information there. You will notice it is blank at the top right.
How to promote another video using YouTube Cards
So let us go ahead and add another card and in this case were going to promote a video, as you can see in the image below.
The first thing you do is click on Video or Playlist…Create. All the videos on your channel will then appear, allowing you to select from any of them.
The one that I like to promote is ‘How to Create Great Content‘. Once you have found the video you wish to promote, just left click on it. You can also promote another link by inserting the URL in the text box. Now just click on create a card and you are done.
The good news it that YouTube auto saves everything you do, which is very handy.
So now I’ve created a card at the 15-second mark, which is promotion back to the blog. I’ve also created another promotion to an existing video on my channel at the 38-39 second mark.
You will need to play around with what promotions you use, and the times you want them to pop up.
Creating YouTube cards is as simple as that. Pretty easy huh?
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