TreyMarkel

Like many other people, I am a visual person.  I can learn much faster if you show me something in the form of on paper, or in a book or in a video.  When business owners first started catching wind of the Internet and how they could advertise themselves to potential customers, it was all about content.  Google wanted as much fresh content that you could possibly get on a website.  Even today, the major search engines want to see fresh content on a website.  However, today fresh content is no longer just words on a page.  Content is now video, audio, words, webinars, podcasts, twitter chats, etc.  Video has become the newest and most popular form of content for website owners.  YouTube.com is the second largest search engine in the world directly behind Google.  It’s a search engine 100% dedicated to video content.  Many website visitors like videos because its easy to comprehend.  A combination of words, pictures and audio allow for a potential customer to easily understand what you are trying to offer.  Studies have shown that when a website owner implements video on a website, their conversion rates go up, their bounce rate goes down, and their average time on site goes up.  These are all factors that major search engines take into consideration when judging your website.  Needless to say, it also drives revenue.

The bummer part about having video on your website is it’s a storage hog.  If you’re going to be hosting your videos on your own servers you are going to need quite a bit of storage space.  If you don’t have enough storage space on your servers and you implement a video on a certain page, that page could load much slower which in turn, causes your bounce rate to go up and sales to go down.  YouTube has a wonderful solution for all those companies that can’t afford their own servers and want to implement video on their website.

Let’s say you have recorded some video about your business.   A little side note; Google only accepts video that are no longer then ten minutes long.  So, you have your video and you want to post it on the web.  You need to go to www.YouTube.com and you need to create an account.  It’s very easy to sign up.  Once you have an account you can upload your video into YouTube.  Once you have uploaded your video into YouTube, you can now view your video.  For example, the link I have provided is a YouTube video.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dDpWPh6ylc On the right side of the video there are two fields that have code looking text inside of them.  One field is labeled “URL” and the other field is labeled “Embed”.  The Embed field has a bunch of text inside of it.  You can copy this text and then paste it into your website and the video will then show up on the pages of your site.  The text is what we call “HTML” text.  If you are using wordpress for your website, you need to click on the “HTML” button so the “HTML” code of your wordpress website shows on your screen.  Paste the YouTube text into the “HTML” code and the video will show up on your website.  Take a look at this URL for an example: http://www.ibank.com/blog/page.cfm/ask-an-iexec-video-podcasts 

When you implement a YouTube video on your website, the video is NOT stored on your servers but the YouTube servers.  You now have video on your website to show your customers.  This process requires a little bit of knowledge of HTML code but once you understand it, it’s very easy.