When you’re building your YouTube channel, you definitely want to be telling people about it everywhere. And how would it be if you had one easy to remember URL that you could share that would not only send people to you YouTube channel, but ask them to subscribe in just one click. I’m going to share with you a simple way to get this set up for you, your business right now.
If you’re working to build your YouTube channel, then you can’t keep quiet about it. You need to be active, definitely directing people to go and check out your YouTube channel. But chances are, you’re probably just asking people to go to Youtube.com and search for your channel name to try and find your channel. And then you just ask them once they get there to hit that subscribe button, but there is a more effective way. I’m going to show you exactly how to do this, to make this process not only easy, but also absolutely on brand and trackable.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you’re working with a website based on the WordPress platform. The powerful thing about WordPress is you can download and installed plugins, many of them are free, and the plugin that I want you to install on your WordPress site in this particular case is a plugin called Pretty Links.
Once you’ve installed Pretty Links, and yes, you can pay for the pro version, but for the purpose of what we’re doing here, the free version is absolutely fine. So what Pretty Links allows you to do is to set up a branded redirect link on your domain. So if it’s www.yourdomain.com/link, whatever you want to call it, or in my case for my YouTube channel, engagevideomarketing.com/youtube will take you to my YouTube channel. And this is how I want you to use Pretty Links.
The next step, once you’ve got Pretty Links set up is actually to head on over to your YouTube channel. Once you’re on your YouTube channel, all you want to do is to take the URL of your channel name. You can do that by making sure that you’re on your channel page, the front page of your channel, and then looking in the URL section of the browser that you currently in, you should see something like youtube.com/c/whatever your channel name is, that might be a string of numbers, or it might be an actual channel name. You want to take everything from that channel URL that is before the query or the question mark, anything after the question mark is a URL parameter. So you don’t want to be copying that right now.
So what I want you to do is to actually copy that and paste it into some kind of a notes platform, just somewhere, anywhere where you can edit the text. Once you’ve pasted it there, I want you to append or add the following onto the end of your channel URL: ?sub_confirmation=1
Now this is a YouTube URL parameter that when someone goes to your YouTube channel with that parameter in place, YouTube is going to prompt them to subscribe to your channel as soon as they land on that channel page. Now they don’t have to, it’s not forcing them to subscribe to your channel page, but when prompted people are likely to click yes and subscribed to your channel page. So what I want you to do then is to copy that appended URL into your clipboard, and then head on over to the backend of your WordPress website, click on the pretty links plugin, and then click on “Add New”
It’s in this section that you can title your pretty link and then leave the redirection at 307 (Temporary). And in the target URL section, you’re going to paste in that appended YouTube URL with the sub confirmation parameter added on. Then in the next section, you’re going to choose what the actual shortened URL is going to be. So in this case, you can see my domain there, engagevideomarketing.com, and I’m going to change that to /youtube.
And that then becomes the pretty link that I’m able to use when encouraging people to go and visit my YouTube channel and to subscribe.
So there you go. That’s it super simple and something if you haven’t got set up yet, I strongly encourage you to do. Remember every time that you’re shouting out for people to go and check out your YouTube channel, make sure to use that Pretty Link.
