Why You Need Your Own Video Website Outside of YouTube [Creator's Tip #49]

On this week’s Creator’s Tip video we’re going to talk about the value of having your own video website outside of YouTube, that’s coming up.

Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of Creator’s Tip where every week we just help you guys who are creators know how to make that stuff stand out the best on the web. And this week I’m talking with a guy named Kieran from VidCaster and we’re going to talk a little bit about having your own video website presence outside of YouTube and why that’s important, why would we want to consider something like that in the first place?

Yeah, well it depends on your objectives as a video producer, but oftentimes we work with companies and their primary goal is to sell a product and their service. So in order to do that they want them to be on their own website to engage in their product, to buy or whatever. And so the key part of this is actually getting organic traffic to your site from that video content and that’s where it becomes really critical that you own your own infrastructure. You have that white label component around driving traffic direct to your video library and that kind of gets on that video SEO sort of component from there.

So what about people who are like YouTubers. Maybe they’re working on their product and they’re trying to advance their content? I actually have used VidCaster for that use. For just my own personal YouTube channels and actually really love it. It’s free. What is some of the value of someone who is a YouTube creator just kind of using the free site and other stuff that you guys use.

For YouTube creators especially it’s a way they can start building a brand off of that YouTube environment. So, what we often recommend is that you don’t have to give up the YouTube player, in fact it’s good and of course if your generating revenue through that player you should still use that. But then you can start to train your users to go to your own site. So like your name.tv or your channel name.tv, this starts to give you that business flexibility so that in the future, if you have, for example a direct ad deal that you negotiate with an ad agency or a local business, that you have that flexibility to be able to put that in your own player instantly and you don’t have to go through all these crazy deals with YouTube to pay them like $200,000 to get a link and an annotation. So it gives you that sense of actual control and experience with their users and at the end of the day that’s how you make money.

I found, personally, one of the things I found that is really cool about it is that there’s a lot of people who like watching video but they don’t know YouTube, you know they wouldn’t know how to subscribe on a YouTube channel and they wouldn’t naturally navigate a YouTube channel cause they see a video and all the related videos so they just kind of leave, so if I could send them to a website where it’s just my content, I get more views that way. People stay on my content and engage, cause they know how to navigate a website. And the other thing I thought was really cool is you can actually add other pages, more content, so you can make it like a full-fledged video website. For the people out there who are video marketers, who they have a product that they really want to promote, they really want to push but they want to use YouTube at the same time, how can they as creators and marketers really tie together a website and video content seamlessly in a way that really enhances their product and their brand?

That’s a really good question and in fact what we recommend is that you actually have what we call a hybrid strategy where you put content that is very easy to understand for people who have never heard of your product, you put that on YouTube and you put that everywhere. You put that on Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Facebook, like everywhere you can. But you leave certain content that you know only like the power users or people who are really interested in buying, on your website in a self hosted player so you get that search engine traffic going directly. So that way you still get the organic discovery from YouTube of that more friendly like short bite-size content, but then you can still direct people through to your own site for the more detailed stuff. And that way you still get that boost of a higher chance of conversion for that guy who is actually likely to buy, but you still get that organic search traffic through YouTube and the rest of them. Best of both worlds.

Awesome, well, if you guys aren’t familiar with VidCaster go check them out, we say that because, we’re not getting paid for this or anything we just really – I like it and we love these guys so go check them out, we put a link to them below. And thanks for hanging out with us guys, if any of you have any experience in using both your website and combining that with your online video, just comment below and let us know what experience you had and what advice and tips you have for people who are trying to marry those two platforms together in some way with online video. We’d love to hear from you guys and learn from you and if this is your first time hanging out, please subscribe, click that button above this video here on YouTube. We’d love to have you join us and hang out with us every week for these videos and more so thanks for hanging out guys and we’ll see you again later. Bye.