If you’re growing a business on YouTube, it can be very important for you to find a way to get your YouTube audience to check out your website. Or sometimes the opposite is true: You already have a website with traffic, but you need to drive some of that traffic to YouTube to grow your channel. Many creators have tried this before in the past and ended up completely killing their traffic as a result.
On our podcast, we talked with Nate Black about his experience in growing YouTube channels and websites simultaneously. During this chat, he shared his strategy for how to drive traffic from one platform to another without killing your channel.
Creator Spotlight
But first, let me introduce you to Dalia. Before Dalia came to work with us, she had 1,000 subs on her YouTube channel and a business that wasn’t making a profit. Dalia was struggling to get organized and shape her brand. She started with 30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel and found it had incredibly helpful foundational material for her. After that, she also enrolled into Video Labs and found that Video Labs helped her really develop her videos and her storytelling techniques. Now she has over 61,000 subs, her business is profitable and she feels like she has more meaning in what she does. She claims that taking these courses was, “The best investment I could ever make for my business.” And we are glad to hear it.
Nate Black
Nate Black began by help people with their websites and then moved over to YouTube. Now he has created a hybrid strategy for YouTube channels and websites and found that using both in conjecture with one another is 10x more powerful than having just one.
How Can YouTube Grow Your Website
On YouTube, you naturally can build an audience that trusts you. You share about who you are and they hear the passion in your voice, etc. So how do you get them to your website? The key is to present your website as an additional resource for them. You can do that by occasionally mentioning an additional resource that’s on your website.
How do you do this? Let’s say that you run a landscaping channel and you have a video talking about how to have the greenest lawn on the block. In that video, you can give your top 5 tips and then you can mention that if they want techniques specific to their region, they can find that on your website. The idea is to add specific additional value that you wouldn’t necessary go through in your video but would appeal to your viewers.
The problem is that YouTube wants to keep people on the platform. Because of this, you can not do this in every video. If YouTube sees that people are leaving the platform when they watch your videos, they will not surface them to the masses. So Nate would advise doing it every 5 videos max.
How to get your Website Traffic to YouTube
Embedding your videos on your blog is not going to give your channel a lot of growth. For the algorithm, it doesn’t help you very much to have people watch your video embedded on another platform. YouTube does not count that watch time because it’s a different viewing environment that they don’t control. (No ads, suggested videos, etc.) Instead, you can say “if you have additional questions on this, go check out my YouTube channel” and then drop the link.
However, the pro of having a video embedded on your website is that it does increase your “time on page” for your website. So the question becomes, “What is more important to you?” Having people on your website or having people on your YouTube Channel?
Biggest Mistakes
We’ve talked about this before, but the biggest mistakes people make are treating their website and YouTube channels as the same thing. YouTube channels and websites are very different kinds of content. On a website, you are trying to be top on search. But for YouTube, search is actually bringing in the smallest amount of traffic. Suggested and Home Page bring far more viewers than search. So the way that you deliver material has to be different. Your YouTube can be any style – vlogging, teaching, entertainment, etc. But your website needs to be directly helpful content.
But maybe your website is just a Sales page (like mine). I asked Nate what he would suggest doing to draw more people to our website and he said to look for reasons why people would want to spend time on your website. Resources, guides or even blog style things would be a helpful addition.
Power Tip
Greenscreens are now available for YouTube Shorts. I know, I know. This has been available on TikTok and other platforms for quite some time, but YouTube has finally caught up. The feature cuts out your background and you can upload something else in the background and you can react to it.
If you allow other’s to “remix” your content (which is the default), other people can react to your content and your video will get attributed to it. – So that’s cool. Learn more about green screens here.
Have comments, reactions, questions, a YouTube tip to share, or just want to say hi? Leave a voice message for us and we may use it in an upcoming podcast episode. Until then…
Keep changing lives!
Tim Schmoyer
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