Add A Clickable Link To Your Video Using Camtasia - How To

Do you want to increase your traffic or convertions by adding a clickable link or button to your video?

In this tutorial you will learn how you can easaly do that using Camtasia Studio.



Transcript of the video:

In this video, I to show you something that can make your video marketing really go over the top. And this is going to show you how to add a clickable link directly onto your videos. Anywhere on your videos, for any duration of time you want on your videos. And it can be at the very beginning, in the middle, at the end, for the entire duration, however you want to do it – and it can be not only a text link that's clickable, but an image as well.

 

For example, you've got an image of a buy now button or a PayPal button – is the imagination juices flowing yet? And you've got that clickable link right there on your video and you got a verbal call to action, let's say, in the video saying in a second you're going to see a button appear on your video and just click on that and it will take you directly to the checkout page or the squeeze page. You just enter your name and e-mail address. And between the actual visual call to action that being the button appearing, and the verbal call to action, that being you on the video saying what to do when that button shows up.

 

The two combined is a very powerful tool in your video marketing. So let me show you what I'm talking about here. Click on play and this is just a snippet of a video that I've got. You can see it's playing right along here and then all of a sudden, bam, there you go. And that just appears anywhere. And you can have whatever your button's going to be – whether it's this, you got a specific button for this particular product. Or it says subscribe now, click me, or whatever, however, I'll show you how to put your button on your video.

 

But let me show you what I'm talking about here. This is clickable. And just as an example, I've got it going to the PayPal website. You can have it going to a PayPal checkout page. To a shopping cart. Like I said, just about anywhere you so desire that's got a URL, you can have it go there.

 

Let me show you what I'm talking about.

 

Head on over to your Camtasia studio. Now, I'm using Camtasia studio version five. And in version five, you only have the ability to use two formats of flash. Now, I might want to explain myself here. By the way – let me back up – by the way, this particular tool will only work in flash. In other words, a clickable link on your video, if it's an AVI, won't work. MOV, won't work. WMV, won't work. Anything other than flash – that being SWF, FLV, or MP4, it will not work, so version five you only have the SWF and the FLV to choose from. The latest version, the version 6.0.3, has all three – MP4, FLV, SWF. Why am I not using version six? Well, because version six really sucks up the resources while I'm making videos. So – in order to make a better, smoother looking video, I'm using version five. That's enough of that.

 

So let's go ahead. We've got our video in here that we're going to add the button to. I've already pulled it into the timeline down here and the button, we've already got it created or set aside, or however you want to do it, but you got the video and you got your button. Now let's bring the button into the picture. Let's head on over to the callout function. Left-click on that. Click on the plus sign here. And what we're looking for here is the custom callouts. And you want to come on up here to new custom call out. Left click on that button. Navigate to the location within your computer where your button's going to be there and there you go.

 

And what I do is I use a transparent background – I'm just going to make it a PNG button or a PNG image, and I try to make my buttons generic. One like buy me, rather buy x, y, z product. That way this particular button can be used on multiple videos. Totally up to you – you want to make your own button directly related to that particular product. That'll look even better but like I said, I'm kind of lazy and I like to be one and done. So however you're going to do that but it has to be – well, it doesn't have to be, but if it were not transparent, if it were a JPG, for example, image format, then you're going to have a white box slapped right on your video.

 

Now if your background is a plain white background, then no big deal. Not very often would I want myself a plain white background. That's just me. But anyway – that being said, transparent, generic.

 

And now once you've brought it in. Let's give this guy a name. For lack of imagination, I'm going to go with something like buy now button. And you've got a few other options down here you can play with but we're not going to mess with that. Click on okay and we're good.

 

 

Now let's bring that button into play here. Custom call out. Choose the button we want. And – come on down here, you've got a few other options you can play with here. You can fade in – which I prefer, fade out, yeah, not – this is just a personal preference. The thing is though is down here, if you left click on your mouse, you can drag this wherever you want and you can, when you get the arrows here, on the end, left-click hold and drag and make it show or go away whenever you want. So right now it's going to start right about – looks about the ten-second mark of the video, and it's going to play all the way through to about the 45 second mark of the video. And this is only a minute-long video – so, again, just to let you know.

 

So you can have it go for as long as you want up here, wherever you want, just to let you know that's how you do that. Now, the key thing to all this, is this guy right here. That's the magic guy. Check that box. Click on this. And by default, because I've been tinkering with this. By default, this is going to be checked. So to un-tick that, you have to first tick this right radio button here – jump to URL. And then un-tick that box.

 

Now, let's go ahead and clear this out.

 

And you want to, in place of that, you want to put the URL that you want your people to go to – whether it's the URL to the squeeze page, the URL to your shopping cart, the URL to your PayPal button. Now, wait a minute – PayPal buttons are forms, aren't they? Not necessarily, they are, but there's other options. Let me show you.

 

I'll login to my PayPal page. Now let's assume you've already gone through the process of creating your button and you got to the final stage here – here is the default setup, your PayPal form code that you slap onto your webpage – but you got this option too, the e-mail. That's what we're looking for. Because this is the URL that will take your viewers of the video directly to the checkout page of this particular button that you made.

 

So first you got to create the button. And when you get to that final stage, you're here, you just click on the e-mail rather than the website. Highlight. Copy. Come on back here to our Camtasia studio and paste right on in there. Now I always tick this here – just personal preference, I'd rather them go to an additional browser window. That way the original browser window or tab is still in tact. Click on okay – come on up here. Click on finish. And we are done.

 

Let's go ahead and render this badboy. Remember, you gotta do it in flash and I'm in version five, so I only have the FLV and the SWF to choose from. I'm going to go with the SWF. I believe I've already got that set, yep, and come on up here. Click on next. Give it a name. And location on the desktop – keep it in its own little folder. Click on next. Here are the settings I've got for this particular SWF format. You're welcome to copy them. And then click on finish. And through the magic of video, this will only take a second.

 

And that's finished, so let's – we're pretty well done with these guys. Get this out of the way. And we're done with that guy, get that out of the way. And let's open up another tab so we can bring in this video. Open this up, here's the files from that video. Go ahead and drag this into our browser. Get this guy out of the way. Click on play. And it's playing. There we are. And any second now – any second now – there we go.

 

Now this is a video – or the button that we just made. Now if we click on this, it should take us to the checkout page, not just to the site. There we are. How cool is that? And that's how you do it. That's how you add a clickable link and in this case a buy now button directly to your video.

Thank you very much for watching and I hope this gets those imagination juices flowing. Have a great day.

Add a clickable link or button to your video using Camtasia Studio
Donna
By

Donna

on 20 Aug 2016

Thanks for this tutorial. I created a video with a call out hotspot and it worked perfectly. However it seems when I upload it to YouTube that it is gone and the hotspot no longer works. Is there a way to make this work with videos uploaded to YouTube?

Rebekka Deforce
By

Rebekka Deforce

on 09 Feb 2017

Nope, it doesn't work when you upload to YouTube unfortunatly, you can create an annotation in YouTube though with an external link.

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