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Market Your Small Business With Video: How to Understand Website Hosting Jargon
Video marketing is hot, and it’s worth big bucks, too—advertisers will spend $4.14 billion on digital video ads this year, eMarketer projects, and this number will almost double to $8.04 billion by 2016.
Small businesses are finding video cost-effective for reaching bigger and more targeted audiences.
If you’re thinking about doing video to market your small business, you’ll encounter some daunting technical terminology when preparing to host your productions.
Get familiar with this jargon to make video hosting easier.
Aspect Ratios
When hosting videos, you can choose among several aspect ratios relating screen width to height.
Video professionals advise using a widescreen 16:9 ratio to accommodate the widest possible range of viewing devices.
Widescreen’s 16:9 aspect ratio is sized for HDTV and widescreen monitors.
Standard TV screens and monitors and iPads use 4:3, with letterboxing for widescreen display.
Early iPhones used 3:2, but iPhone 5 recently switched to 4:3 to accommodate HDTV.
Screen sizes come with different resolutions, measured in pixels.
HD, also called 720p or 1280×720, is recommended as a general guideline.
Codecs and Containers
Videos you create will be saved in the format of their originating program.
Your viewers will be watching in different programs, requiring a format conversion called exporting.
Digital videos include two types of file formats: codecs and containers.
Codecs encode and compress video data for faster transmission, then decode it for viewing.
Standard codecs are H.264 for video and AAC for audio.
A video container format contains all codec files in a video.
Today’s standard container is MPEG-4, frequently called MP4, which has superseded Flash.
Combining H.246 with MPEG-4 produces a standard format called H.264/MPEG-4, or simply MP4.
MP4 is used by most popular hosting providers, including YouTube, Vimeo and Apple iTunes Store, and is generally recommended.
Hosting Options
Your format also depends on your host, since video hosting services such as YouTube have their own requirements.
When it comes time to choosing a host, you have a few options.
One is to use your own website’s server. Another is to use an external service such as YouTube or Vimeo.
You can also your video on another site and install a code to display it on yours, called embedding.
Whether using your own server makes sense depends on how much bandwidth your viewers consume in proportion to your hosting limits.
You can get an estimate of your usage by talking to your provider, or going into your site’s administrative area.
Some packages enable you to scale up to meet your bandwidth.
Dedicated servers provide more flexibility in this than shared networks, but can be expensive.
A less expensive alternative with similar benefits is a virtual private server (VPS). Most VPS services provide a backdoor administrative area displaying your bandwidth usage, the cPanel VPS options at MyHosting.com show.
If your viewing volume exceeds your server’s capacity, you can host your videos on another site, and use embedding. YouTube is popular for free embedding, but places some restrictions on commercial content.
A popular commercial embedding solution is Amazon Web Services, which lets you scale up to your actual viewer volume, instead of buying more bandwidth than you truly use.
Wes’ Take on Video
Video is hot.
But like all things in business, the key is to get started.
When the Flip phone was popular I bought one of those —a Kodak Zi8—and got HD videos for about $100.
A great many of my video testimonials that are on YouTube with proper SEO and embedded into my site were recorded with that Kodak Zi8.
When the iPhone started offering HD video I switched to that for recording great looking content fast and affordably.
Again, though, I use the Share feature on the iPhone and send it straight to YouTube then login from my computer, tweak the SEO on the video and Share the video with the Embed code into my WordPress website (now my HubSpot website.)
Around 2012 I bought a simple Logitech HD webcam from Sam’s Club for under $100 and it records great video on my iMac.
I use it when making tutorials using screen capture technology—Screenflow for $99—and I put my happy mug in a small box in the bottom right of the video.
In 2013 I bought a nice DSLR—a Nikon D5200—to record really nice video.
The key to making good video is lighting and sound.
Get a good microphone and make sure you have good lighting and you’ll be fine.
But get started.
Make your video today and upload it to YouTube now. YouTube even gives you the ability to edit, annotate, crop, etc. so the only thing holding you back is yourself.
Now go make some videos.
If you need more help growing your sales, consider the following resources:
Apply MagneticMarketing to your business and watch your business grow
Learn to put PersonalityInCopy and watch your influence grow
Go where the money is: Marketing To The Affluent
Or just contact me and we’ll set a time to speak.
Good Selling,