YouTube is Not the Only Answer

By Megan McDonald, Search Coordinator

The numbers are in. A couple weeks ago, YouTube announced on their blog that they supporting over 1,000,000,000 video views a day. ONE BILLION. That’s more YouTube views than Google searches a day! This is great news for any of you that have video content that is begging to be bestowed upon the world.

YouTube is thus an easy way to get a large amount of people to watch your content. However, YouTube’s greatest strength, its massive amount of viewers and videos, is also ones of its weaknesses. With so many people and so much to sift through, how on earth will people stumble upon your videos? Don’t fret though! While you should take full advantage of YouTube’s offerings, YouTube isn’t the only opportunity to share your video content.

Because of the multitude of video sharing engines out there, you can find niche sites that can really play to your videos’ strengths. If you have traveling videos, try Travelistic. If you love cars, check out StreetFire. If you created instructional content, test a site like Howcast. Don’t be afraid though to try more general video engines such as Yahoo! Video or Metacafe to help broaden your videos’ reach. By expanding your video program past YouTube, you can find more focused audiences and give your videos a greater chance overall of showing up on search engine results pages.

In addition to the arguably more relevant viewers on these niche sites, some video engines allow you to even more thoroughly enrich your videos. Howcast, for example, allows you to create printable step-by-step instructions on the page, as well as placing pop-up tips in correlating parts of the video. Giving this sort of supporting information can only help legitimize your video and give your audience a better viewing experience.

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So, if you have video content, go out there and see where you can expand. Take advantage of a growing online video community and share your entertaining, instructional or informative videos!