Alternatives to Youtube for promoting your Business through Video
Promoting your business through video sites is a good thing. It’s the ultimate in Web 2.0, and if you’re good at it, use tags properly, and keep filesize/time limits firmly in mind, it can really help your website to take off. And we all know that YouTube videos can sometimes go viral, and really give your website a boost in traffic, providing you put a link to your website from your youtube profile and include your url on the end of your video, keep your SEO keyphrases in mind when creating tags, enable sharing, and do all the other things that will help in spreading your message using video.
The problem is that YouTube seems to be doing more purging of lower traffic videos these days. So you upload your video to YouTube, embed it in your blog, then find out a few weeks later that no one can see it. Should you not put things on YouTube? No, that’s not the answer, since if it DOES take off it can bring you a huge amount of traffic. But you should keep a watch on your videos and if a YouTube video of yours goes south, you should have an alternative video host to switch to.
Here is a list of alternatives to YouTube that all have embedding and can easily be added to your website in a way similar to youtube embeds.
You can also self host your own video. There are Wordpress plugins and also add ons for other popular web aps such as Movable Type, Drupal, Modx, Joomla and others, that allow you to upload and embed videos on your own site, which does give you more control. The one gotcha with doing it this way is that sometimes the bandwidth involved can max out your hosting account. That’s one of the reasons the video hosting sites have become popular, the other being the potential for traffic from the video hosting site to your website. These are upsides that don’t exist when you self host, but you also retain more control over the video, the quality, the length, and other things.
Technorati Tags: Video Hosting, Youtube Alternatives, Using Video to promote your website
May 20th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I had no idea about youtube taking off low traffic videos. I was going to upload some music videos but perhaps I’ll look at some of the alternatives you mentioned. The only thing I find wrong with revver is that sometimes the video just stops playing and then the ads come up. I then have to start playing it from the beginning.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Maybe it hasn’t impacted you because you’ve maintained your traffic above the threshold they’ve set. If so, congrats!
Interesting about Revver, it’s the one that the folks at WPW have recommended the highest. I haven’t used it but watched a couple videos there and tried one of their embeds for this article, and it seemed to work fine. I wasn’t using it during a high traffic time though.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Thanks for such great video youtube alternative marketing.
Duncan,
I also experienced as you did on revver, but I do not think revver that have a problem.
Because when I saw video on revver at others pc got no problem. So I assume your PC got some application glitch. My be you could check your browser or any antivirus setting regarding video streaming.