How to Add Cards (Annotations) to a YouTube Video

Adding a card (annotation) to your YouTube videos is a powerful way of increasing your content’s uniqueness, and overall potential reach — people like content that feels like it has had effort put into it.

So, here’s how you add cards to your next YouTube video!

Step 1. Upload a Video.

This is the easiest part, and there are many guides on the web that can walk you through the process of making your first video if you are new to the process.

Step 2. Go to the YouTube Studio

Clicking on your name will bring up a drop down menu with many different options to choose from.

The one we want,  is the YouTube Studio. Go ahead and click that.

Step 3. Click the “Content Button”

This will take you to where all your current content (videos) are.

Step 4. Click the “Details” Button.

Mousing over the video of your choice will reveal some more options. For this, click the “pencil” icon called, “details.” This will take you to the editing side of that video.

Step 5. Click the “Cards” Button.

You will be presented with a menu. And here is where the annotation magic happens.

You will see three options:

1. Video.
2. Custom Message.
3. Teaser Text.

Here is what each option does.

Video.

This option lets you link the card text to a particular video. The video can be your own, or any video on YouTube (like for instance, if you had another channel, this would be a good option to grow both channels simultaneously).

Custom Message.

After you’ve linked a video, you can add a custom message to the card. So when someone clicks the “Suggested: >video name here<,” they will see your custom text above the video link.

Teaser Text.

Teaser text allows you to actually customize the message instead of it just saying, “Suggested.”
This is a good way of further increasing the uniqueness of your channel.