As the second most popular search engine on the Internet, YouTube is a must for any business to promote itself. YouTube offers some great tools, from being able to create your own “channel” to which viewers can subscribe, to embedding uploaded videos on your own web site. The problem is, that if you use the default settings, you may end up promoting your competitors without even know it! Here are a few simple (though technical ways) to make sure you are maximizing your YouTube embedded videos:
The Search Bar
By default on all YouTube videos, that really annoying search bar always pops up at the end, allowing people to search for videos by your competitors! Of course, you don’t want that at all! To fix, just add “&showsearch=0” as a parameter at the end of the YouTube URL, and that search bar goes away.
Related Videos
At the end of your video, by default, YouTube will pick a bunch of related videos (usually by other people) to show to the viewer. The same as for the search bar, you want to get rid of the related videos to keep people viewing your content, and not your competitors. (Related videos usually equals competitors’ videos because, well, they are kind of related… you just don’t want your viewers to know about them!) To remove the related videos, just add the following code to the the YouTube URL:
&rel=0
That’s all you do. Attach that code to the player, and that cluster of “related videos” that shoots across the screen at the conclusion of your movie will no longer show up!
Captions
You can also remove the YouTube annotations on a video. You might not want to do this for your videos, but if you’re embedding someone else’s and you want to turn their annotations off by default, add this to the end of your URL in the same place as before:
&iv_load_policy=3
And no more captions!
So there you have it… a few simple tricks to make your videos work better for you.
Use these on your sites and you’ll no longer find yourself sending visitors to your competitors’ videos! If you want to take your video marketing to the next level on the Internet, WebStores Ltd will be holding a special YouTube class on July 12th for people interested in creating their own video channel.
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