You're running a week-long sale and your channel has 200 videos. Editing each description by hand is not a plan. Here's how to do it properly.
Black Friday. A course launch. A summer bundle. An anniversary discount. Whatever the sale, the math is the same: you have a limited-time offer and a back catalog of videos still sending traffic to full-price links or, worse, to nothing at all.
Most creators announce the sale in their newest video and maybe update a handful of recent descriptions. The other 95% of their catalog keeps showing old links or no promotion at all. Meanwhile, those older videos are still pulling views from YouTube search and recommendations. Every one of them is a missed chance to put the sale in front of someone who's already watching your content.
YouTube search traffic doesn't care about your upload schedule. A tutorial you posted 14 months ago might still get 200 views a day. If someone watches it during your sale week and the description says nothing about the sale, you lost a potential buyer who was already engaged with your content.
During a time-limited promotion, every video on your channel is a potential landing page. Treating only the latest upload as the promotional vehicle ignores the long tail that drives most of your total views.
You need two or three lines that do three things: state the offer, give a deadline, and link to the sale page. That's it.
30% off the complete course until Friday. 7-day refund if it's not for you: [link]
The deadline creates urgency without being aggressive. The refund mention lowers the risk. The link goes to one place. No "also check out my other products" in the same block.
Avoid percentage-only offers with no context. "30% off" means nothing if the viewer doesn't know the original price or what they're buying. If space allows, name the product:
The React course is 30% off this week ($69 instead of $99). Full refund within 7 days: [link]
Now the viewer knows exactly what the offer is, what it costs, and what happens if they don't like it. That line works in any country, any currency (adjust the numbers obviously), any niche.
A sale announcement that goes up 3 hours after the sale starts has already missed your early-bird traffic. A sale block that stays up 2 days after the sale ends makes you look sloppy and erodes trust.
Plan the rollout:
24-48 hours before the sale: Prepare the sale block copy and your tracking link. Have it ready to go.
Sale start: Push the sale block to the first lines of every relevant video description at once. Not over the course of a day. All at once.
During the sale: Monitor click-through rates. If the first 24 hours look flat, test a different opening line or a stronger deadline ("last 48 hours" instead of "ends Friday").
Sale end: Remove the sale block from every description. Replace it with your default link (course at full price, newsletter signup, whatever your evergreen promotion is). Leaving a dead sale block up is worse than having no promotion at all.
If your audience is spread across multiple time zones, "ends Friday" is vague. Friday where? Midnight in which time zone?
Options:
If you sell a digital product and your audience spans the US, Europe, and Asia, your "sale week" should account for the fact that Asia is already in tomorrow when the US is still in today. This sounds obvious but many creators set sale start and end times based on their own time zone and accidentally cut off a chunk of their audience.
Also: if you use regionally adjusted pricing (PPP discounts on Gumroad, for example), make sure the sale discount stacks correctly. A 30% off coupon on a product that's already PPP-adjusted at 50% off might either break the checkout or leave you selling at a loss.
Use UTM parameters on your sale link so you can see which videos drove traffic:
?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=summer-sale-2025
If you want to get more specific, add utm_content=video-slug to each video's link. That tells you exactly which video sent each click. This is tedious to do manually across 200 descriptions, but tools that manage descriptions in bulk (including Sendari) can handle the tagging for you.
During the sale, check two things daily:
This is where most creators fail. The sale ends and the sale block stays up for days or weeks because nobody wants to manually edit 200 descriptions again.
Stale promotions do real damage. A viewer clicks a "30% off this week" link two weeks after the sale ended and lands on a full-price page. They feel misled. That's not a customer you'll win back.
The cleanup should be as fast as the rollout. Remove the sale block from every description and replace it with your default promotion. If you planned ahead, you wrote the replacement copy before the sale started so the swap is instant.
Every sale follows the same pattern:
If you run 3-4 sales per year, this becomes muscle memory. The copy changes. The mechanics don't.
For channels with large catalogs, Sendari handles the bulk update, scheduling, and cleanup across your entire library, so the rollout and removal happen on time without manual editing.
