What It Is

If you have studied the success of Youtube, Metacafe, and others enviously there is no reasons why you can’t create your own video sharing website. You should eventually be able to make some money in return from advertising depending on how well your promote your site. Here are key steps to take to get your video site off the ground

1. Choose a niche for your video site. This will help in gaining some leverage initially in the search engines, and differentiate it from the very popular and well established sites such as YouTube and Google Video. A niche might comic or funny video’s, internet marketing, howto’s and tutorials or a particularly type of cooking.

2.Once you’ve decided on your niche, the next step is a great domain name for your site. This domain should ideally be short and memorable (though many of the short domains have now been taken). There are two approaches, use some of the keywords for niche in your domain, or think of a unique zany one, the latter is what a lot of Web 2.0 sites do.

3. Obviously you will need a web host for your video site. The cheapest option would be to go for shared hosting. So you may need a more specialist video provider. Once your site gets established you will need more resources, perhaps a dedicated server. A virtual private server is a good compromise.

4. Normal web hosting might need the requirements for video sharing so check out web hosts, and Google for “ffmpeg hosting.” FFMpeg is a utility that powers a lot of video sharing sites as it will encode video in varying formats to flash video player format (.flv)

5. You visitors will want to upload their video’s. These will be in different formats. If you have used YouTube you will know that they encode your uploaded video’s into a flash format (.flv files). This requires specialist modules to be installed in your hosting account or dedicated server. These are ffmeg, ffmpeg-php, libogg