Video Creation, Hosting & Distribution for Traffic Rush
I’ve developed a home study course on the usage of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your website. This project is the account of my progress in developing and marketing that course. The course is now LIVE, is called Traffic Rush and you can enroll right now at http://www.traffic-rush.net/.
Video Creation
I started experimenting with video a few months back after getting myself a headset. So far the only video I have done has been in the form of screen casts which is where you record what is happening on your screen and then talk over that to provide the audio. The software I use is Camtasia Studio. So far I have just scratched the surface of the software – all I have done is use the zoom feature and add some audio and a title.
If you have been following along with the Thirty Day Challenge you’ll notice that the videos produced by Ed this year are on a whole new level compared to last year. Of course Ed is a Mac User and he uses some Mac-only software called Screenflow. Interestingly, when I twittered to ask if there was a PC equivalent Ed himself said that Camtasia was the closest thing.
I’d love to be able to do what he does – basically he mixes screen cast video with ‘talking head’ type video into the same video and what that allows him to do is to narrate with video while he teaches. It really feels like having a teacher in the room with you.
I have ordered myself a webcam so if I find myself having a rare good hair day at some point in the future then I might start doing talking-head type videos too!
Video Hosting
I use BlueHost to host my blog and any associated files such as my ebook. So far I haven’t even made a dent in my bandwidth allowance so I could have just hosted my videos on my own server but I really didn’t know what implications that might have and I didn’t want to put my blog at risk if I ran into trouble so I decided to look at a dedicated third party host.
I decided to go with Amazon S3 on the strength of reputation, plus its what the guys behind the Thirty Day Challenge use and I know they had huge bandwidth usage last year and it held up. Prices are very reasonable, so far I have only racked up less than $5 in charges and Traffic Rush has been live for almost two weeks now.
However, Amazon S3 is not simple to set up. Well it is, but only when you know how. There is no getting started guide or in fact any kind of tutorial that I could find on the Amazon website. All I found there was documentation for software developers which scared me for a while! Thankfully, help was at hand. I googled around and found a nice Amazon S3 tutorial video which explained how to set it all up.
To use the service I needed to install an Amazon S3 plugin to my browser but this simply didn’t work in Firefox 2! That also scared me for a while but I upgraded to version 3 and all was fine.
This allowed me to host the actual video files – the .mov files on the Amazon server. Now all I had to do was make them accessible.
Video Distribution
I had previously debated just how I was going to distribute Traffic Rush as a whole. My first idea was simply a set of emails but when I decided that I wanted to include images and video I realised I needed something that allowed rich content. So I decided to simply host it online using WordPress.
To make the lessons flow a little better I wanted to be able to embed the video right into the page with the rest of the content. WordPress 2.5 does have better support for video but doesn’t support Quicktime directly so I needed to use another plugin to help me this time. I used the Embed Quicktime plugin which allowed me to use a very simple bracket notation to embed the videos.
I also provided a direct link to the .mov file so that people could download the videos to their computer and watch them offline rather than wait for them to stream. I know that is something that I personally prefer to do when watching video.
Video Sharing Coming Soon
I want to experiment in general with video. Many of the big video sharing sites such as YouTube tend to rank very highly in the search engines and can bring in a lot of traffic so using video can be an extra source of traffic. Nowadays there are a great many video sharing sites so if you upload your video to all of them they can also be a good source of backlinks to your site.
Seeing as the first half of Traffic Rush is free, I am going to experiment with distributing the videos across all these sites. Doing it manually is a slow process but there are a few tools out there that will help so I’ll be looking into those. This will probably be some weeks away though as my attention will be taken up mainly with the Thirty Day Challenge during August.
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Mitchell Allen
July 21, 2008
Hey there, Caroline! Thanks for sharing the “Making of StumbleRush”. It’s fun to see just how pedestrian the whole process can be, if one takes the time to go from step A to step B.
Too many of us see Step A (Idea) and Step Z (Implementation) and have no clue how to proceed. Sure, we read your blog, other people’s blogs, but it all seems like so much fairy dust.
I returned to software development, because I just couldn’t get a handle on all of the “systems” required to build useful websites.
Of course, when it’s time to SELL that software, I’ve got to get right back into it, or be prepared to pay someone to do it for me :)
Cheers,
Mitch