Youtube, as we all know, is mean and petty by not allowing us to include clickable links within a video. Sure, sure, it gives us the ability to add a clickable link in the description below the video, but you and I both know how much more effective a nice call to action is right inside the video itself, right? Of course, there’s more than one way to skin a cat video (excuse the bad joke). Here are a couple of free ways to get that all important clickable call-to-action right inside a Youtube video. (I admit that using the word “inside” is a bit misleading, but hey, it’s close enough to the truth, so let it slide, will ya?)

We’ve used our International SEO video in the examples below to show how easy it is to create clickable links in a Youtube video.

Method One: LinkedTube

LinkedTube makes it very easy to add a call-to-action button in the top right corner of your video. It also enables you to use different messaging to complete your call to action. The button text is your main message, but when a visitor hovers over the button, they’ll see two more short messages of your choice. This gives you a little more flexibility in grabbing the visitor’s attention.

First, let’s look at a screenshot of the LinkedTube interface. As you can see, you simply input the information requested in the short form, preview the results, and grab the embed code.

And here is the final result. Notice the button in the upper right corner? Be sure to hover over the button to see the two extra lines of text that show up, and of course, click it to see that it actually works.

Method Two: Mozilla Popcorn

Mozilla Popcorn has a lot more features and enables you to do some really amazing things. For the purposes of this post, we’ll simply add our clickable call to action, but feel free to delve into all the rest of Popcorn’s capabilities.

Popcorn uses the familiar movie editing timeline, enabling us to attach “events” to any portion of the timeline. We’ll use the Popup event near the end of our video, but we could add other events throughout the video. For now, let’s see what the interface looks like.

And here is the result of our little Popup Event test.

To see an example of all the cool things Popcorn can do, check out the sample video below.

I personally like LinkedTube’s method best, but Popcorn definitely has some interesting features as well. Which do you like best? Both of these methods are free, by the way, and I’d bet there are others I don’t know about, so please share if you know of alternate methods.

Originally posted by: Donna Fontenot