One of the reasons I invest a lot of time into YouTube marketing is that is where the millions of people visit to get information. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google and it’s 53 times easier to achieve top rankings on YouTube and/or Google than plain-text articles. If you want to sell your product or service you need to find out where your potential customers are hanging out. Most traffic will come from YouTube however other targeted traffic may come from the top 4 alternatives.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of using YouTube for business
Pros of YouTube
- Massive exposure to more than 1 billion unique users every month. Every minute more than 100 hours of video is added to YouTube’s inventory.
- Engage viewers through sight, sound and text
- Second largest search engine on the Net
- Create interactive images using annotations
- Build a targeted list by redirecting viewers to a landing page within your video
- Track the performance of your videos using YouTube analytics
- Ability to share and/or embed your videos on social media sites
- Integration of Google+ with YouTube subscribers
- Automate building a list of subscribers
- Interact with a community of like-minded individuals
- Ability to make your videos private
- Free unlimited space and bandwidth for all your videos
- Ability for your video to go viral
- Viewers usually watch videos from beginning to end unlike articles
- Build your brand
- Ability to advertise using display ads, in video ads and promoted videos
- Create a targeted advertising campaign through YouTube’s TrueView. Simply select a target (by topic, keywords or demographics). You pay only when your target actually watches your video.
Cons of YouTube
- Total reliance on YouTube for traffic – if YouTube terminates its service or changes it’s rules you could suddenly lose all your traffic.
- Channel can be terminated if you violate copyright or terms of service rules
- Shows unrelated videos at the end of your video
- Displays ads at the beginning of your video
- No customer service – it’s very difficult to contact someone who works at YouTube if you have a question
- Your video may lose it’s rankings after a few weeks
- Ads are displayed on YouTube which distracts viewers from your content
Top 4 Alternatives For Hosting Your Videos On YouTube
1. VIMEO
https://vimeo.com/
Vimeo has over 18 million members, receives over 100 million visitors per month, and has approximately 250,000 websites that use this video sharing platform.
Benefits/Features
- Less competition compared to YouTube
- Professional videographers and filmmakers choose Vimeo over YouTube
- HD quality video
- Ability to customize and brand your own video player
Pricing
http://vimeo.com/upgrade1v2 (compare plans)
Free account
- Limited to uploading 1 HD video per week
- Basic controls
- Embedding options are limited to SD (standard definition)
Plus account
http://vimeo.com/plus
- 5GB/week file size limit
- Priority uploading and processing
- HD embedding
- Unlimited storage
- Advanced player customization
- Zero ads
- Advanced statistics
- $59.99/year
Vimeo Pro
https://vimeo.com/pro
- Receive up to 1,000GB of storage a year (20GB each week)
- Unlimited HD uploading
- VIP support – 1-hour email responses 24/7
- No bandwidth caps or time limits
- High Definition video (up to 1080p)
- Mobile, tablet, and connected TV compatibility
- Advanced Statistics
- Super-customizable and brandable video player
- HTML5 support with the Vimeo Universal Player
- Password protected Video Review pages
- $199/year
2. WISTIA
http://wistia.com/
Wistia provides professional video hosting to engage your prospects, customers, and employees.
Benefits/Features
- Automatically encode Flash and HTML5 versions at multiple resolutions.
- Works on every device
- Customize your video player (set dimensions, player color, behavior)
- Easily add social sharing buttons
- Integrate with email marketing platforms
- Add clickable call-to-action links at the end of your video.
- Video heatmaps
- Video Sitemap
- SEO tools to improve video seo
- Private sharing
- Create playlists
- Add captions to boost SEO and improve accessibility.
- 2-week trial with unlimited videos and full support.
Pricing
3. SLIDESHARE
http://www.slideshare.net
Slideshare is primarily a document-hosting social media channel however the silver level enables you to upload and share your videos.
Benefits/Features
- World’s largest community for uploading and sharing presentations
- Easily upload infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars
- Generate tons of referral traffic (from the link on your business channel, links embedded in your document or description box below it)
- Publish/promote content you’ve already shared via articles, white papers, blog posts, etc
- Analyze how much traffic your website receives from Slideshare by reviewing your site analytics
- Capture leads
Basic
Free – only upload documents not videos
Silver
10 videos (Max size 500 MB)
Private uploads
Capture up to 30 leads
Analytics
$19/month
Gold
20 videos
75 leads
$49/month
4. AMAZON S3 Simple Storage Service
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Amazon S3 provides a simple web-services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It’s highly scalable, reliable and inexpensive.
Benefits/Features
- Free Usage Tier (new customers receive 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, and 15GB of data transfer out each month for one year.
- Only pay for the space and bandwidth you use
Pricing
Use Amazon S3 Flowshield WordPress Plugin
for secure video streaming
This plugin prevents people from stealing your files hosted on Amazon S3
or sharing them illegally with their friends.
My Recommendation
Utilize YouTube to generate traffic to your product or service however consider the top 4 alternatives. You won’t have to worry about losing all your traffic and subscribers if YouTube shuts down your channel, your viewers won’t be distracted (by ads or related videos) and you’ll have more control over your customers.
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