Many online marketers use video to promote their product or service, as well they should…. it’s free, and it works.  It’s also still WIDE OPEN - case in point, at a conference in January, I sat in a room full of about 300 entrepreneurs involved in the home based business industry, representing many different companies.  One of the speakers asked the room, how many were using video to market their business?  I was SHOCKED when only about 10 (including myself) stood up.  This powerful medium is still in it’s infancy, and those who utilize it are at a huge advantage over others.  The whys and hows of that I’ll talk about in another post.

YouTube being free means that you are putting a fair amount of trust into YouTube (and ultimately Google, who owns YouTube) with your content.

Most of the time, this is fine.  However, I have a few colleagues who have had large numbers videos disappear, or even their entire channel shut down, and weren’t able to find out why from YouTube.  This can be super scary if you’ve invested any kind of time and effort into your videos, and frustrating as the exposure you get from those videos just disappears.

The lesson here is to ALWAYS keep a backup of your videos.  On your computer, on a backup drive or CD, whatever… just keep a backup so you don’t have to search around to find them… or worse, re-create them, in the event that something happens to your vids on YouTube.

If this is a concern for you, check out this quick blog post from my business partner and sponsor Scott Phares.  Find out what he did when his YouTube channel disappeared into thin air:

http://www.whoisscottphares.com/successful-online-marketing-tips-control-your-own-content/

Now, here’s another way to protect your content, WITH a cool hidden lesson.    Let me give you a sneak peek:  If you use Traffic Geyser, you now have a built-in way to copy your videos over from YouTube, as well as an easy way to put them on your website(s) with your own custom video player (which has some great features built in).  Since Traffic Geyser is a paid service, you can bet that storing and streaming your videos here won’t leave you subject to something like the whims of YouTube.  Get the details here in this 5-minute video:

http://trafficgeyser.com/blog/?p=290

I mentioned this was a way to protect your content with a cool hidden lesson thrown in.  The hidden lesson is: if you don’t know what Traffic Geyser is, find out by watching the quick video at TrafficGeyser.com.  If you don’t use it, you should - it will bring you big traffic and help your Google rankings in a big way.  But, only sign up for it if you can commit to making videos and actually using it - otherwise you’re wasting your money.