Wrong.

There are certain uses for YouTube, but it also comes with substantial risk. In fact, there are some kinds of videos that absolutely don’t belong on YouTube, under any circumstances and if you run an online business, you need to know about this.

Read on to learn about the risks of using YouTube and discover exactly what kinds of videos do and don’t belong on YouTube.

The YouTube Risk Factor

During our recent web clinic webinar we spoke briefly about some of the benefits and drawbacks of using YouTube as your video hosting platform. This caused quite a flurry of questions and so we thought that it was worthy of a post by itself.

The first point that needs to be addressed is the risk associated with hosting your videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, I know about this first hand, since my largest YT account was banned some time ago.

Without going into too much detail, here’s what happened:

• The account was over a year old.
• It contained 115 original videos, no copyright violations and completely TOS compliant.
• It had more than 1,000 subscribers, who actively participated with comments, likes etc.
• It was banned without warning, without explanation and without chance for recourse, from one moment to the next.

There are a lot of spammers on YouTube. Some of them using bots to download and re-upload other people’s videos, some participating in comment spamming and much more. Because of this, I estimate that hundreds, or even thousands of accounts are banned on YouTube, every day.

However, even a completely legitimate account can be wiped out, for no discernible reason.

This brings us to rule number 1:

Never put any video on YouTube, that you can’t afford to lose.

I’ve received far too many messages from people who’ve experienced the same thing as me: they had a real, legitimate and non-spammy account and had it banned for no reason. Rule number one is not trivial.

And it gets worse: your videos and your account always need to be compliant with YouTube’s terms and rules. However, those rules can change at any time. Even if all your videos are TOS compliant right now, the TOS can change over night and your account can get whacked because it’s no longer compliant with the new rules that were just created. Google (the owner of YouTube) is notorious for doing exactly this, with many of their services.

Essentially, you don’t really have any rights to any videos you upload to YouTube.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

There are some advantages to uploading videos to YouTube. The most obvious one being that it’s free to use.

In addition, the platform brings a certain traffic potential with it, especially since it’s often used much like a search engine. Your YouTube-internal rankings are based on the number of views, number of likes, ratio of likes to dislikes, keywords in the video title, description and tags and good old backlinks to the video. Get these factors optimized and you can have a video appear in the search results on YouTube, as well as in “related video” sections for other videos.

Another advantage is that it’s sometimes easier to get a YouTube video ranked in Google search results, than getting a page from your own site ranked. This is because A) YouTube belongs to Google (and Google likes to promote Google) and B) domain authority is a very strong ranking factor in Google.

Unfortunately, there are also some serious drawbacks to YouTube, even apart from the sudden-account-death risk.  One of them is the video quality, which isn’t terrible, but also isn’t thrilling, on YouTube. This is especially true for screencast-type videos.

Apart from that, there’s also a branding problem: YouTube is interested in promoting YouTube. They are never interested in promoting you, your content or your website/business. Every YouTube video contains YT branding, links back to YT, links to YT social options and links to related videos, even if you embed them on your own site. This can partially be fixed (more on that later).

Take the above, combined with the risk of losing your account and the conclusion is that you don’t have much control over your YouTube videos. A video on YouTube is like an asset that you don’t own or control and that’s never a good thing.

What Does and Doesn’t Belong on YouTube

Here are the types of videos that belong on YouTube:

• Anything private and completely non-commercial. E.g. a vacation video you want to share with your friends, which has absolutely nothing to do with your business.
• If you’re on a budget: things like “casual” videos you add to your blog and videos that don’t directly have a conversion goal.
• Viralbait: videos that have the express purpose of going viral, through the YouTube social media elements. This would be part of brand marketing.

And here are the kinds of videos that do not belong on YouTube:

• Any business related video that has a direct conversion goal (e.g. a sales video).
• Any video you place on a page with a direct conversion goal, like a video testimonial on a sales-page (because you will “bleed visitors” through YT embedded videos).
• Any video, the sudden loss of which would hurt your business.

What to Use Instead?

The short answer is that for business related videos, you should either host them yourself or (my recommendation) use a video-service such as Wistia. Wistia provides a fantastic service, amazingly detailed video stats, a great video player and much more. It comes with a whole range of tools that support your marketing efforts and all the videos you see on this site are hosted by Wistia. As usual, I tested a ton of different options and services, before deciding that this one was the best.

The longer answer will be delivered shortly, in a separate blog post, covering everything you need to know about online video.

How to Make YouTube Videos Suck Less

If you take all of the above into consideration and you’re 100% aware of the benefits as well as the risks associated with YouTube and you still want to use the service, we’ve got something for you.

For embedded YouTube videos, you can add parameters to remove some of the YouTube branding, prevent related videos from showing up at the end, set the video to auto-play and more. And we’ve built a nifty little free tool, to help you set all that up: Better YouTube Embeds

This online tool, which takes only seconds to use, automatically sets some options to improve your YT embedded videos and it gives you a simple choice of tick-boxes for further customization. Just grab any YouTube video URL and have a play with it.

Did you enjoy this post? Do you have any un-answered questions about the topic? Please let us know by leaving a comment below!

Here are today’s links:

• Seth Godin on Getting Stuff Done
  In this video, legendary marketer Seth Godin talks about the importance of concentrating on “shipping” a product after a certain point in development and no longer trying to tweak and improve it. Really great presentation (as usual, with Godin) and a very important message.
  
  
• Optimization: Call-to-Action Buttons on shockmarketer
  This is an older post that I only just discovered today. It’s a very short report on a test run with two different buttons that yielded some very interesting results.
  
  
• affbuzz
  Many of you probably already know about and avidly use affbuzz. While I’ve known about it for a long time, I’ve only just started really making use of it. It’s simply a collection of tons of different Internet marketing blogs and it works out a bit like an IM RSS-reader. You can browse through all the posts and check out the ones that interest you. If you’ve never seen it, go check it out right away! (Disclaimer: You probably won’t do anything productive for the rest of the day, once you discover affbuzz. That is not my fault.)

And that’s it. Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Be that as it may, I will still gather useful posts and resources and post them up on a Friday once I’ve found several.

Without further ado, here’s today’s collection:

• Split Testing Calculator
  This is a very simple online tool that has one purpose: To tell you whether your split-testing results are significant yet, or not. When you are split-testing and you don’t want to spend a huge amount of money to get tons of clicks, this tool can help you find the probable winner even with a relatively low number of clicks.
• CommentLuv Blogs Sorted by Niche
  If you want to promote your blog by doing some blog commenting, then you’ll always welcome the CommentLuv plugin, which shows your latest blog post below your comment. Here’s a list of over 100 CommentLuv blogs, sorted by niche. Just remember to leave relevant, non-spammy comments.
• Backlinks Explained on BloggerIllustrated
  Allyn Hayne of BloggerIllustrated has changed gears recently and seems to be going in a more newbie-friendly direction. The post linked above contains several, well-made videos covering pretty much all the basics you need to know about backlinks for SEO purposes. Definitely worth checking out!
• Who Are You Trying to Impress? on Shoemoney
  Best post I’ve ever seen on Shoemoney. Shoe talks about why it doesn’t matter that he tends to get a lot of flak from other IM bloggers and the community in general. Do yourself a favour and give this a read.

And that’s all, folks. Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

But I haven’t given up yet, so here’s another installment of Link Love Friday:

• PPC vs. Yahoo Answers on SEOmoz
  Once again, the people over at SEOmoz manage to produce content that I just need to link to (even though they hardly need my promotion). This is a case study in which classic PPC is pitched against using Yahoo Answers for generating leads and the results are quite surprising.
• Affiliate Marketing Not Dead After All by Ben Moskel
  After Google dropped a huge ban-hammer on thousands of Adwords accounts, there was something of a panic-reaction to be seen on some blogs and in forums. In the above post, Ben Moskel provides a very level-headed analysis of what probably went on behind the scenes and pretty much nips the “death of affiliate marketing” idea in the bud.
• Gary Vaynerchuk Adressing Internet Marketers on Traffic Cafe
  In this video, Gary Vaynerchuck is interviewed by Dean Hunt and Ciaran Doyle. It’s a very interesting video and Gary specifically addresses Internet marketers with an important message. He also completely misrepresents Internet marketing and gets quite a lot completely wrong. You’ll be seeing more about this from me, very soon. In the meantime, make sure to watch that video.

And that’s this weeks (late) Link Love Friday. Enjoy! And if you ever have recommendations for these posts, let me know! I love to read up on interesting and fresh material concerning anything SEO, marketing, website building or general “make money” related.

Cheers,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• Affiliate Hijacking and Other Cheats – Affiliate Beginners Guide
  This is quite an extensive roundup of things that can go wrong with affiliate links and payments. From Hijacking to bait-and-switch commissions, this article informs you how you can get cheated out of your well-earned commission and offers some pointers as to how you can protect yourself.
• How Search Engines Evaluate Links – SEOmoz
  Seems like I find at least one article really worth linking to on SEOmoz every week. This one is a very well explained run-down of how link-value is determined by search engines. Read it and learn the difference between good links and bad links (and everything in between).
• John Reese, Frank Kern and Tony Robbins
  These three uber-Gurus get together and have an “interview”. At least, that’s what the description says. In effect, it’s mainly Tony Robbins doing his thing. Still, it’s interesting to watch. Maybe not quite as much for information as for entertainment value, but that’s not to say there isn’t some good info in it.

And that’s it for this weeks little roundup. I hope you enjoy the links and have a wonderful weekend.

Cheers,

Here are today’s recommendations:

• Google Personalized Search on SEO 2.0
  There were two insightful posts into the recent Google upgrade, making personalized search based on the search history, a standard for all Google users. This is the case, even if you aren’t logged into a Google account. The first post is a list of ways in which personalized search affects SEO and the second one contains some ideas on how to use personalized search to your advantage.
  -
• Great Content Does Not Make for Great Rankings (by itself) – SEOmoz
  Very interesting post on SEOmoz about the sometimes unfortunate fact that “build it and they will come” rarely applies in the online world. Just having great content will not automatically lead to good rankings and this post explains why.
  -
• Mark Lyford’s Millionaire Challenge
  Mark is a guy who’s seen some ups and downs in his time. He used to make tons of money, then got in dept and even spent time in prison. On the day of his release, he embarked on a personal challenge to make a million dollars. On his blog, you can follow his progress daily. Very interesting to see someone who’s been around the block build an online business from scratch. Definitely worth checking out.

And that’s it for this week’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!

I found a free trial of an automatic spinner and entered two example sentences:

Article spinning robots can really screw up your texts.
I suggest you always do article spinning manually or at least supervise the automatic spinning process.

See the video below to find out what the (word-replacing) tool made of these sentences:

So, the spun text ended up being:

Article moving bots can truly propeller up your texts.
My persuasion is to e’er do article spinning manually or at littlest observe the semiautomatic moving touch.

I particularly like the “e’er”. Very contemporary. Remember that this was a completely random variation, by the way. I didn’t try several times to find the silliest version, or anything like that.

I don’t mean to bash article spinners in general. I haven’t tested any of the paid ones extensively and I can’t judge whether they are all useless. As I said: This video is partially for amusement purposes.

If you want real, valuable information, check out my videos on article spinning. There’s also an overview of all my videos here.

Anyway, here we go with today’s collection:

• Find Good WordPress Themes on ThemeGrade
  If you’ve ever been looking for WordPress themes, I’m sure you quickly noticed that there are more of them available than you could look at in a lifetime. Many of them look very fancy, but how can you know which themes are also good “under the hood”? Ideally, a theme should have good SEO presets (proper tagging and such), be compatible with all browsers (with the possible exception of IE6) and load quickly. ThemeGrade is a great little resource since they rate (free and paid) themes in many different aspects. Makes picking a good one that much easier.
• Link Acceleration Explained – SEOmoz
  Very nice, short-and-to-the-point video explaining the concept of link acceleration (sometimes also called link velocity). A must see for everyone who does link-building for their sites.
• Link Building Basics – Terry Godier
  In this article, titled “7 Habits of Highly Effective Link Builders”, Terry Godier explains the basics of proper link-building. Together with the link above, this should give your link-building and ranking a kick-start.
• Huge Collection of Video Marketing Resources – reelSEO
  As the title suggests, this post on reelSEO contains perhaps everything you will ever need to know about video marketing. It’s a collection of links to lots and lots of resources. If you’re into video-marketing, you can’t miss this.

Right, that’s it for this week’s Link Love Friday.
I hope you enjoy the linked content and benefit from these online marketing gems.

Cheers,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• More on the Duplicate Content Myth – Jonathan Leger
  I recently posted my own thoughts about duplicate content. The linked article by Jonathan Leger actually has two parts (part 1, part 2), of which I especially enjoyed the second one. The posts are already a bit over one year old, but they are still relevant as ever and definitely worth a read.
  –
• Description of a CPA Scam – Harlan Kilstein
  A while back, I posted an article about the difference between a scam and a crappy product and stated how I often see the term “scam” being misused. The video linked above is an example of a real scam. It’s really disgusting that people do such a thing and the video is well worth watching.
  –
• Dennis Yu – Shoemoney
  Speaking of scammers, this is an in-depth post by Jeremy Shoemaker about the, by now notorious, Dennis Yu, a guy who managed to piss off a lot of high-profile Internet marketers in a very short time. It’s interesting and sometimes baffling to read his story. There’s more in this follow-up post.
  –
• 3 Symptoms of a Marketer Who’s Destined to Fail – Chris Rempel
  Finally, here is an incredibly good post about where most IM’ers that fail to make money go wrong. I’ve seen many a post with this type of “Top Mistakes to Avoid” theme, but this one just left me speechless. It’s really well written and contains priceless information. Go read it now!

And that concludes today’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

See this weeks selection after the break.

• Pat’s First Annual Income Report – Smart Passive Income Blog
  Pat has been documenting his online marketing career on the Smart Passive Income Blog for just over a year now. He has been incredibly proficient in finding and leveraging sources of income and his blog is a real goldmine of good information. He posts monthly income reports and just recently, he posted his first ever annual report. Some very good summaries and insights await so go ahead and give it a look, if you haven’t already!
• Grizzly Brears’ Take on SEO – How To Make Money Online For Beginners
  Griz has an interesting, relatively simple and probably accurate stance on SEO. This article is a good summary of said stance. He also takes on some of the misassumptions being spread about social media marketing. And in case you caught the “controversy” caused by Powazek’s recent rant about SEO being all lies and scams (to which SEObook and many other SEO blogs posted rebuttals very quickly), Griz also adds his two cents to this little discussion.
  All in all, I really liked this post for offering quite a wide overview over what’s currently going on in the SEO “scene”.
• How I Ranked For 66’000 Visitors Worth of Keywords – ViperChill
  While it has a very spectacular title, this post is actually a “keyword research basics” kind of post. Glen from ViperChill explains how he drove a ton of organic traffic to his personal development blog, PluginID. Great resource if you’re new to keyword research, as he explains everything you need to know to do it and it’s all with free methods.
  Reminds me that I should do an RQR Basics post on keyword research.

And that’s it for today’s roundup.

Have a great weekend!