Tips to Help Your Business Monetize YouTube Advertising

Create a call-to-action overlay on your video and link back to your website, advised Jarboe. Online retailer Artbeads.com saw a 150 percent increase in referral traffic to its website by simply placing an overlay on its own video — which is free to do, by the way — promoting its weekly specials at Artbeads.com. Just a couple lines of text with a link. To maximize effectiveness, place your overlay ad within the first 10 seconds of the video, Jarboe said. At that point you still have the audience's attention.

YouTube allows its advertisers to go back and edit overlays, title tags and descriptions, but you can’t edit a video itself once it’s posted. In addition to putting a link to your website in your overlay, place the same link within the first sentence. YouTube specifies that you must use http:// when creating your link.