Bandwidth costs money. It’s a fact of life. If you need bandwidth, you’re going to have to shell out for it.
Servers also cost money. If you have a video that you’d like to show to a lot of people, you need a good hosting service for it. If you expect a lot of people to be viewing your video at the same time, you may need a dedicated server.
I came across this problem when I revisited my Keyword Transformer sales page. I had edited a 10-minute demonstration video, and the file was about five megabytes in size. With my hosting plan, I have 10,500Mb of bandwidth per month, which would mean that a maximum of 2,100 people would be able to view it. This would tend to eat up bandwidth like nobody’s business!
The other problem was that the bit rate was such that people with dial-up modems would not really be able to view the video.
Getting the video hosted with Google Video solved these problems for me! My Keyword Transformer Demonstration Video is hosted by Google Video for free. I also get a back-link to my site. This basically means that I have a free ad for my product, hosted by Google. It’s compressed more, and hence has a lower quality, than the video I produced, but that should mean that people with dial-up modems will be able to see it!
The best part is that the video can be incorporated into your own web page, as you can see here!
I know there’s a link to Google on that video, and that constitutes a minor leak which is a bad thing for a sales page, but I believe that people will only be clicking through that link if they are bored, and just browsing the net. These people would not have purchased the product anyway.
I’ve put links to pages that contain the full-quality demonstration video on my pages, so anybody who wishes to view the 10-minute video in full size and quality can do so. Typically, these will only be people that are really interested in what they see on the Google-hosted video but wish to see it at a higher-quality level, and these are the prospects that are likely to spend money!
I used Windows Media Encoder to produce the video, and that was quite a decent tool for the job, especially being a free download from Microsoft.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
