If there’s one thing Google knows how to do, it’s make money offering advertising options. And with their acquisition of YouTube, they’ve now “spread the love” to everyone’s favorite video site as well. Obviously, the easiest way to advertise on YouTube is to upload a video that advertises your book or company. The only bad thing about that is that videos that play on YouTube are not “clickable” which makes creating a “call to action” all that more difficult. Sure, your video can feature a call to action — i.e., “visit such and such website today for a 10% savings — but this requires the viewer of your video to remember the webpage URL and then asks that viewer to actually type the webpage address into his or her browser.
We’ve become a society of clickers. We don’t write freehand anymore and we barely type anymore. Unless we can “click” from one place to another on the internet or tap our iPhone/iPad screen, the chances of us reacting to your “offer” is decreased exponentially.
Fortunately, adding an “overlay” to your videos on YouTube solves that problem. Unfortunately, in order for your video to be eligible for an overlay, it needs to be submitted to YouTube’s PPC Promoted Video’s program. This is where you bid on search terms (in much the same manner online marketers do within Google). So while the overlay itself doesn’t cost any money, you are committing yourself to some level of advertising cost by submitting your video to their Promoted Video program in order to activate overlays on your video.
At Outskirts Press, we are just starting to experiment with actively using video for the promotion of our company (we’ve been doing it passively for a number of years). As we watch the results, and the costs, we will better be able to determine whether this is a marketing option we want to offer for our authors and their book videos as well…
President of Outskirts Press 