» January 7, 2008 in
Watch this video at Youtube.
In today's video I give my opinion on whether or not you might consider building a video niche site.
My takeaway point is that if you want to get into video marketing you should be creating your own videos and not trying to make mini sites using other people's videos.
An analogy is trying to make money with a blog writing your own blog content or aggregating someone else's blog content. For most, being the author of the content is the most valuable.
If you do make a mini video niche site I recommend trying to build your traffic from natural links and not from seo. Video is bad for seo unless you create it, then you can sometimes rank nicely because of google's universal search.
Creating something original that can't be found on youtube to your video pages might also help. One example might be bringing in flickr pictures related to the video.
I would also keep the advertising subdued. People aren't dumb and they know the video came from youtube or myspace video. If you annoy them too much they will take their searches somewhere else.
In Summary
You probably can make some money with other people's videos and a little creativity, however I suggest making your own videos for starting any sort of site. Shoot, if you REALLY want to use other people's videos, use them to compliment or supplement your own videos.
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Kris says on January 7, 2008
I don't ever intend on making my own videos but I will soon be giving a video site a try. In my eyes there are key benefits because you don't need to host the videos so hosting is relatively small but you can have TONS of content absolutely free. Automation is my biggest problem but I think it's something worth exploring.
45n5 () says on January 7, 2008:
"I don't ever intend on making my own videos"why not? they are real easy.
"you can have TONS of content absolutely free"
so can everybody else.
jen says on January 7, 2008
Great advice, I actually have 2-3 sites using youtube rss feeds going to wp for autoupdates and the sites were actually removed from the serps.
I have a question though, when you say "making your own videos is where the seo is" what do you mean?
Will the search engines give me more traffic by me shooting a video? how do the search engines know the difference, or do you mean that by making a unique video it will become more viral?? where does the seo part in video come??
Thanks great blog.
45n5 () says on January 7, 2008:
@jen - thanks for the commentgoogle universal search ranks youtube videos quite highly and the creator of the video gets the traffic if they
1. brand their videos
2. provide an easily clickable url
For instance youtube is usually one of my top 5 referrers at 45n5.com
It's also real hard to have a video go viral for you that belongs to someone else ;)
Ruck says on January 7, 2008
Ripping videos from Youtube to your own niche site and getting them ranked is easier than you think. Depending on the time and effort you want to put forth, you just use the All In One SEO Wordpack on your Wordpress niche video site and have it rewrite the title, keywords and description. But we'll leave it at that and not travel the dark path. Got a lot of blackhat buddies that do this and do quite well.
But I will agree 100% with doing your own and personal branding. Which reminds me, I should dust off my camcorder sometime soon.
Great post Mark,
Ruck
45n5 () says on January 7, 2008:
@ruck - LOL, I agree 100%, if you want to get into black hat, or typos, or redirects, or keyword stuffing, etc you might get a video site ranking for sure.yeah, get the cam out, seems like only a very few are making videos anymore.
Kris says on January 8, 2008
But sites can go viral with your videos or not. Videos may be easy but they are more time consuming. In the time I could make a single video I could post 10-20 videos on a niche site that's hand-tailored to what my readers want.
Bjarke says on January 10, 2008
In my opinion www.easybartricks.com is a very good example of a great video niche site - and it seems that the site is very successful too (Not surprisingly because the videoes have been uploaded to every possible video site on the net.)
Also I think the implementation of AdSense is pretty good. I bet he's making a great deal of money of his site.
thegeekboys.com says on March 9, 2008
this is a great idea I have been working on something like this for a while know I'm not done because it takes sometime to learn alittle editing I hate learning something new even if it's preety simple
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