If you have studied the success of Youtube, Metacafe, and others enviously there is no reasons why you can’t create your own video sharing website. You should eventually be able to make some money in return from advertising depending on how well your promote your site. Here are key steps to take to get your video site off the ground
1. Choose a niche for your video site. This will help in gaining some leverage initially in the search engines, and differentiate it from the very popular and well established sites such as YouTube and Google Video. A niche might comic or funny video’s, internet marketing, howto’s and tutorials or a particularly type of cooking.
2. Choose a good domain name, the shorter and snappier the better. This goes hand in hand with choosing your niche. If you are creating a niche video sharing website, such as racing cars or say football, consider incorporating your keywords into the domain.
3. Deciding on your site hosting. To start out and test your video sharing site you can try cheap shared hosting. However if your site proves popular you may need to budget to upgrade to a VPS Private Server) or even a full dedicated server.
4. Standard shared hosting might not meet the software requirements of running video hosting. Almost certainly you will need to ensure your shared web host has installed ffmpeg. FFmpeg is a software that converts video to .flv format or any video format.
5. Users will upload their video’s in .avi or mp3 format, and your server will convert them on the fly using ffmpeg. Other software that might be required to encode and play your video’s will be ffmpeg-php, libogg & Libvorbis, mencoder, mplayer, and GD library.
6. Choose a host with generous bandwidth and disc space allowances if you opt for shared hosting. You don’t want your account turning off for exceeding resources. There is no such thing as “unlimited hosting” and most hosts will have some clause in there acceptable use policy (aup) to protect their other customers against a particularly heavy user.
7. You will need to choose a CMS or video sharing content management system for your video sharing web site. This is the web interface you and your users will use to manage the site and upload content. There is a growing choice and the good news is that many are free. Amongst the most popular are PHPMotion, Vidiscript, Mediashare, and Clip Share.
8. You can now test that it all works and for this you will need some video’s! You could kickstart this by getting videos for free form existing video site and cutting and pasting the code into your own video site. However you will have to be mindful of copyright infringement. You can always shoot your own of course with a cheap webcam, or handheld camera or even your mobile phone!
You now start getting the word about. To promote a video sharing clip site I’d suggest creating some buzz on all new social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc by creating a good profile on all this sites and taking part in their communities With increasing users on board look at getting a sponser, advertising or lining up affiliate opportunities. Fairly soon you can start watching the money roll in!
