Adding Your Video to Your Blog or Website
You have created your video. You have saved it on your website. You have created a description for YouTube to get it found by search engines. Now it’s time to put your video on your website or blog. You have three options to connect your marketing video with your blog or website.
I will not go into details here about uploading your video to YouTube. Go to your account on YouTube and follow the simple instructions for uploading your video.
Option One
The first option is easiest but least attractive from a marketing perspective. You can simply copy the URL of your video on YouTube and paste it into you blog or website text. Like any hyperlinked URL, when the person clicks on it, they go to your video on YouTube where they can click and play it.
This is a simply option. It works well for those who don’t feel comfortable dealing with html code. It will work with most email programs. The downside is that when a person clicks on your video URL, they are taken away from your site and may have a difficult time returning to it. They will also see other YouTube videos in your same category. Maybe even your competition!
Option Two—Embedded Code
Embedded code is the most popular option. YouTube has made it easy. When you uploaded your video, it supplies the code you need to embed the video player along with your video on your website or blog. Here are the steps involved from the YouTube instructions:
1. You’ll need to edit the HTML of your blog entry or page—this should be relatively straightforward. In Wordpress click on the HTML option. In Blogger, just click the “Edit HTML” tab.
2. Next, go to the video that you want on YouTube and look for the ‘Embed’ box in the “About This Video” section. Copying the HTML code that’s there into your website will create an embedded player; the video will play within your site when the user clicks on the ‘Play’ button.
3. You can resize the player by editing the object width=”425″ and height=”350″ fields at both the beginning and end of the embedded player code. Make sure that the sizes you choose have the same ratio as the default numbers, so that the video doesn’t get stretched—just multiply the width by 0.8235 to get the height.
You use the same process for embedded the code on to your website. You do need access to the html code on your web page. Once you have access, you can place the embedded code between the <body> codes so that you have the video player and your video.
Third Option
A third option is to connect the video you made to a video player other than a Youtube video player. You have seen these on various websites. In these situations, your video has been uploaded to your server of your website using a FTP program.
Once it is on your website/server level, you can place video playing code onto your webpage or blog that finds the address of your video on your server. In short, your video is stored on your website server and you are not going outside of your “system” to get the video played. (Videos take large amounts of band width. If you have a lot of videos, your server may have a limited amount of bandwidth available to you).
Here is a source for free code to get an alternative video player. It takes only a minute to determine how you want your video player to look and play. You can get the free code here; follow the instruction on this site: http://www.freevideocoding.com/
Go here to see the sample of this video player, how it looks and operates from a client of mine. http://site.mawebcenters.com/stpaulflatbreadco/Flatbreadtraditions.html. Below is the actual code I copied and embedded on the webpage to use this alternative video player.
<!– START FreeVideoCoding.com –>
<embed src=”StPaul_Flatbread_Holidays.wmv” width=”320″ height=”283″ autostart=”0″ showcontrols=”1″ type=”application/x-mplayer2″ pluginspage=”http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/”> </embed>
<!– END FreeVideoCoding.com –>
Conclusion
Now you have your video on your blog or webpage.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Al Hanzal
Tags: Embedded Video Code