How To Drive Massive Blog Traffic Using YouTube?

Are you struggling to drive traffic to your blog? How about driving blog traffic using YouTube. After all, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine.

Often new bloggers put in a lot of effort in creating the content only to find little or no traffic. Don’t worry, you are not making any blogging mistakes, every successful blogger has faced this.

In this post, I’ll show you how to drive massive blog traffic using YouTube.

When it comes to driving traffic to your blog beginner blogger often overlook YouTube. It should be the first to-do thing on every blogger’s list.  It’s the only social media platform that can give a quick boost to your blog traffic.

Deploying the right strategy, Youtube has a huge traffic generation potential for any blog. Be warned this article is not about creating a youtube channel. I have no intention of burning you out.  Nevertheless, if you stick around you can find a thing or two that are useful for you.

• Youtube is the second largest search engine with over 2 billion users after Google. It is the second most popular social media platform, next to Facebook.
• Youtube videos help drive organic traffic as they are indexed by Google. This helps videos appear in Google search engine result pages (SERP)
• In contrast to a blog, YouTube helps you grow your audience quickly thereby driving extra traffic to your website. Your videos can become the traffic-generating machines driving huge traffic regularly
• Youtube videos can be embedded by others on their websites boosting your traffic.
• It helps you in getting more social shares as the videos are easily sharable on social media sites.
• Youtube can add to your earnings via Adsense or affiliate marketing.
• You can build an email list by embedding your sign-up forms in the YouTube videos.

So, you have learned about the benefits of starting a youtube channel for your blog.

Next, we will cover how to use youtube to grow your blog traffic.

In order to drive traffic to your blog from your YouTube channel. We need to drive traffic to our YouTube channel in the first place.

Driving traffic to YouTube is a 3 step process.

• Create Engaging Content.
• Drive Traffic To YouTube Channel.
• Route Visitors To Your Blog.

Let’s discuss the 3 steps in detail:

• Creating engaging content is the single most important step for driving massive traffic to your YouTube channel. The content that you create should inform, educate or provide a solution to the visitor’s query.
• Add a trailer video or featured video about your blog and link it to your dashboard. It should entice and engage the visitors. This will force the visitor to find and view more of your videos. You can easily do so by going to the “Creator Studio” settings. On the left-hand menu under Channel. Select “Featured content”. You have the option to select the most recently uploaded video or playlist.
• Your channel should have a consistent theme and colours. Create a custom background image to complement your video content. It will help you in branding yourself. 
• Always create attractive thumbnails for your YouTube videos. An enticing thumbnail helps you get more clicks leading to more views.  

To drive traffic to the blog, you have to drive traffic to your YouTube channel first. The best way is to invest your time in learning YouTube SEO.

The good news is YouTube SEO is quite simple compared to regular SEO. Here are some of the most important YouTube ranking factors

There are many ranking factors but YouTube never discloses them. The SEO experts come up with the list by performing extensive tests

According to SEO experts, these are some of the most important SEO ranking factors for YouTube videos:

• Title tags
• Audience retention
• Video Description 
• Tags
• Video Length
• Number of subscribers 
• Likes/dislikes
• Comments

YouTube also generates the transcript of the video which can be used for understanding and ranking the content. 

Let’s discuss these YouTube SEO strategies in detail:

These simple Youtube SEO strategies will help you get more views, subscribers and YouTube traffic. Ultimately you can funnel this traffic to your blog, leading to more engagements and better conversions.

Before you start creating content, you should find out the low competition and high search volume keywords. For this, you can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.

If you are creating the video based on one of your blog posts. You can use the same keyword that you have targeted in your blog post.

You can start your YouTube keyword research using the YouTube recommendation function. This will give you frequently searched keyword phrases. Make use of other free keyword research tools to come up with as many keywords as possible.

Now enter these keywords one by one in google and look for the results on the first page. Are there any video results? If not you are good to go.

A targeted keyword phrase will boost your video traffic, views and impressions in the YouTube search engine.

Include the keyword phrase in the YouTube title. The video title should be clear, concise, enticing, and should arouse curiosity. 

Keep the title between 65 to 80 characters and should not exceed 100 characters

The video description box tells your viewers more about your video as well as your blog. Use it to get your viewers excited about your content. You can add keyword phrases, blog URLs and social media profiles here. 

If you have a really long description, try to add the most useful and attention-grabbing information in the first few lines.

Limit this information to the first 150 characters. As YouTube truncates extra characters and hides them under the “Show More” option.

Note: Never use a sales pitch or try to sell in the description box. It will have the opposite effect on your visitors.

Your YouTube about page gives you an opportunity to tell more about yourself and what you do. You can use it to refer traffic to your blog link here.

If you want more visitors to your site you need to ask your visitors to do so. You can do this by having a clear CTA or call to action.

Ask the visitors to take action, using the what, how and why formula. For e.g. “visit my blog by clicking on the link below to… [giveaway or benefit]”

The benefit that you are providing should be compelling and have a high perceived value.

You can include the CTA in your video and the description box below the video. 

Another way to include CTA is through YouTube’s CTA overlay function. It’s a simple banner ad that is displayed at the bottom of your video. You can add a thumbnail image and link to your blog or CTA link here.

It is best to add at least 6 tags related to your video content. You can use your primary, secondary and even LSI keywords as tags.

Always make a habit of responding to YouTube comments. It shows that you care about them and this interaction helps you build rapport with your viewers. 

It also gives you an opportunity to direct your viewers to visit your blog. You can even pin your comments with a clickable link to your blog.

You can delete unwanted or spam comments to clean up the feed.

Reach out to the other YouTubers in and around your blogging niche for collaboration. Collaborations help you increase the visibility of your channel and reach out to new audiences.

The final step is to route the YouTube visitors back to your blog.

The most important step is funnelling YouTube traffic to your blog. You need to intentionally direct the visitors to your blog wherever possible.

Never miss the opportunity to mention your blog, wherever possible without using any sales pitch. If you are still clueless, go back and read the article carefully. I have shown the various ways, you can use to refer YouTube visitors to your blog.

• Always create a video along with your blog post. I am not asking you to engage with YouTube full-time. It will be a lot of extra work for you. Instead, you can convert your blog post to a video and then upload the entire video to the YouTube platform. 
• It’s easy as there are many free and paid tools that can make your job quick and easy. And don’t forget to link back to your video as it will boost the video in Google organic search and drive additional traffic to your blog.
• Share Your Video To The Maximum on all the video platforms, social sharing and bookmarking sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mix, Medium etc. 
• Create playlists of your videos, this will help in improving visitor engagement.
• Ask for feedback, comments etc. If you fail to ask chances are you are not going to get it.
• Ensure that the creatives that you use in your YouTube Video are not copyrighted. The creatives may include images, sounds or video clips.
• Create a useful, entertaining and fun video that users would like to share.
• The duration of your video should be based on the content that you want to deliver. If you can deliver the idea in 2 minutes don’t add fluff to make it 10 minutes long and vice versa.
• Don’t wait for creating a perfect video. Just create and upload it.
• Always try to add clickable video annotations in the first few minutes of your video. This annotation can be a call to action.
• For more details, you can check the YouTube SEO guide by backlinko

When you are starting out, don’t spread yourself too thin on all the social media platforms. Instead, focus on one at a time, master it then moves on to the next in their order of importance.

YouTube should be the first on your list as it provides you with a quick initial traffic boost. All you have to do is to repurpose your blog post content and upload it to YouTube.

What are your thoughts? I love to listen to your views. Leave your reply in the comments below.