Where Should Your Video(s) Live?

I’ve been reading more about video marketing and promotion as of late, and there seem to be a few schools of thought.

Your video should live in one place

Similar to how you don’t want duplicative content on your blog and elsewhere, your video should have one home and you should promote that single location. You may have a teaser video on YouTube, but you’d drive to your site to see the entire content.

Your video should be everywhere

This is the reason services like OneLoad exist. Your content should be available everywhere people may seek it out.

Different objectives?

I suspect there is no “right” or “wrong”, but these different approaches are related to your intent. Is the video a promotional tool to drive traffic to your content, or is it the actual content itself? If you are creating video as a means to drive traffic to your site, you’d want it in as many places as possible.

But if your video IS the content, you’d want to be a bit more selective so that you can focus your marketing on a single location and try to really drive up traffic to that one location. Possibly this may help you from competing against yourself in SERPs.

What about optimization?

Something else to consider – when you post your videos in multiple places, you could use different keywords, titles, descriptions on different platforms to test their effectiveness- Basically some A/B testing between platforms on the same content. This follows along the model of the video being the driver to content – similar to the idea of using different keywords in an ad buy.

Thoughts?

{ 2 comments }

1 Wardell Apr 16, 2012 at 3:09 pm

The teaser video seems like a good idea, but it may also annoy people since you can’t scan through online videos as fast as written content, I think a good idea would be to upload your video to multiple places with your url inserted at some point or super imposed, and have a transcript of the video on your site which would help you get indexed for more key words.

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2 Andrea Hill Apr 16, 2012 at 3:15 pm: Thanks! I think the idea of “teaser” content is that you could add enhanced info or better quality content on another site you have more control over. Or if you’re monetizing, you want people to come back to your site more frequently, not Youtube..

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