Welcome to this guide to using video. This will guide you through everything you need to know to start using video on your OptimizePress websites, including the various options available to you and the common pitfalls to avoid.
Using Video on the Web
Using video on your websites can be a very powerful way to increase engagement with your audience, and improve conversions for your landing pages, sales pages and any marketing sites you create.
However, using video on the web can be complex and there are many factors that can contribute to issues with video.
The OptimizePress Platform includes our own “video player” element which can be used with external videos in MP4 format hosted on Amazon or a suitable video hosting service. However, just having a video in MP4 format is not enough to guarantee it will payback reliably on all devices and platforms
There are many other factors that can contribute to issues such as the original source encoding format, frame rate, optimization for web, file size, video dimensions and other factors.
It\’s important to note that our video player has been extensively tested and will work perfectly with properly prepared video – so if you encounter issues it is because of the source file you are using or another factor. This guide will help you get past these issues so you can successfully use video on your OptimizePress pages
Note: To convert your video to MP4 format – you can follow our guide here:
The Easiest Way to Get Video on Your Sites
By far the easiest way to get video on your sites is to use a professional video encoding and hosting service. This means that when you upload your video to your chosen service, they will encode your video (prepare it for web), and will provide you with an embed code to use on your OptimizePress (or any other) website.
Remember that it\’s very important if you\’re using video that it plays back fast and reliably – otherwise it can actually hurt conversions. So the services we use for video hosting are paid services, but we find the cost is easily covered by the extra profits that using video brings.
In our business we use a number of different services:
Vimeo Pro [$199/year]
http://www.vimeo.com/pro – Vimeo Pro is the professional service from video hosting service Vimeo. This provides 1000GB of video hosting per year (20/GB per week), and unlimited HD embeds bandwidth (so you will not pay more than $199 per year unless you have more than 20GB of videos to upload each week which is highly unlikely (our total video uploads are less than 20GB!)
Upload your videos to Vimeo and they will provide you with an embed code and also give you options to customize the video player to fit with your site branding. There are no adverts or Vimeo branding so the viewer can focus on your video message
Wistia [from $25-$300+/month]
http://wistia.com/pricing – Wistia is a very popular video hosting service used by many startups and companies across the web. They have a very fast video player with some cool additional features.
The additional cost gives you extra features like Turnstile Email Collector (collect email before/after video has played), Advanced video stats, Playlists, Calls to action and many other features.
Wistia will encode your video and provide you with various embed code options (we recommend using the iframe embed option with OptimizePress and place this into the HTML/Shortcode element on your pages).
YouTube [free]
http://www.youtube.com – YouTube is the best known video sharing platform. This is not specifically designed for commercial use and as with all free platforms your videos could be removed without notice (if someone reports your video or complains about it). We don\’t recommend using Youtube for your sales video or any videos in your funnels, but it can work great for content videos that provide valuable content on your blog and other marketing pages
If you upload a video to YouTube, you can grab the URL of the page and use this with our Video Player Youtube URL option – just drop in the URL of your video and our video player will automatically play this – you can also use additional options to customize the player settings for each video you embed