Using YouTube to Promote Your Business
Whether you run a small business from your home or work for a large corporation, you can use YouTube to promote your company. As you probably know, YouTube is a video-sharing site where anyone—including you and your business—can upload videos for others to view. The trick is determining the right kind of video to upload, and then finding a way to profit from YouTube viewership.
Using YouTube as a Video Host
Do you already have videos in your business? If so, you can easily upload those videos to YouTube, for anyone to view. (Whether anyone wants to view your videos is another story, however, which we’ll cover shortly.) Aside from making your videos public, there’s another good reason to upload your videos to YouTube. When YouTube hosts your video, you don’t have to.
That’s right; YouTube is, at its most basic, a giant video hosting site. Instead of taking up valuable storage space on your own web server, you can let YouTube host your video instead. You'll display the video on your own website, of course, but you do it by embedding code for the video in your site’s underlying HTML. The code points to the video on the YouTube site; YouTube then serves the video from its site to appear on your web page.
Not only do you save on storage costs, you also don’t have to pay for all the bandwidth used when visitors watch your videos. Yes, you still have a slight bandwidth usage when someone views the text of your web page, but the bandwidth used to deliver the video comes directly from YouTube.
If you run a small business with limitations on storage and bandwidth, having YouTube host your videos can be a real cost saver. And if your video happens to become popular or even viral, you don’t risk having your servers overload and shut down; YouTube’s servers will handle the load.