Add A Video To Your Website: How To Add A Video To Your Website To Stand Out From Your Competitors
If you have a plain drab website and would like to spiff it up a bit; add a video to your website to stand out from your competitors.
Currently, by far the hottest form of media on the web are videos. 
Anyone can easily learn how to add a video to your website, and if you already know how to obtain and add graphics, the task becomes much easier.
First of all, there can be no doubt that videos are the most important form of content on the Internet.
They literally put your website into motion and can be used in your business many ways.
Videos can easily be incorporated into your online business as blog content, as teaching tutorials, as an intro video, as a video sales letter, to explain your checkout procedure, to personalize your guarantee, to explain the email opt-in process, for testimonials, as a squeeze page video, as an exit pop video, or for whatever other idea you can come up with.
Streaming video keeps getting better and most Internet users can now stream video.
Here are some ways to add a video to your website.
- Add a video to your website from a third party source as an embedded video.
This is the easiest way to place videos on your website. There are hundreds of sources that have videos for syncication, including many good niche websites.
Or, you can use free video hosts like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Tangle, Revver, etc. to select a video for embedding.
All you do is copy the embed code and paste it in your website or blog page.
A word of caution; when you’re editing a YouTube video post in WordPress, make sure that you uncheck the “use the visual rich editor when writing” box in your user profile before pasting the video embed code in your wysiwyg editor. If you don’t, your video will look and act crazy when you publish it online.
You can Google “embedding a Youtube video on a WordPress blog” to get help learning how to edit or customize the embedded movie player, or to teach you how to get the code from the various video hosts and copy it to your website.
- Add a video to your website using your personally produced live video
This method is complicated and can be very expensive to shoot, transfer, edit, and encode depending on which way you decide to go.
You can use a relatively inexpensive Flip Video camera, or webcam that costs anywhere from $30 to $290. 
Or, you can go the professional route and buy a $4,000 High Definition camera, $1,200 Final Cut Studio, a $600 Adobe Flash to produce your own HD videos.
You can embed your videos by whichever method you use to produce them, by simply uploading it to YouTube or some other video hosting site, and then copying the code to your website.
The downside to this method is that you have links to the video host, which make your videos look less professional.
- You can add a video to your website by converting it to flash yourself, and then embedding it.
There are several free tools such as FLV Producer Lite, or JW FLV Player, that you can use to accomplish this.
If you plan on producing a lot of heavy video streaming, you might consider a dedicated server to host your files.
- You can add a video to your website with your own screen capture video.
This method is great for producing video tutorials and is an extremely effective marketing tool.
To make your own screen capture videos, you can get the free version of Camtasia from http://www.camstudio.org.
A better version for a relatively low cost is CamStudio Pro.
The full version of Camtasia Studio will cost you about $300.
Techsmith, the maker of Camtasia Studio, makes a neat tool that creates screen capture videos on the fly. You can get it at jingproject.com if you’re interested.
All of the versions have video tutorials that explain how to use the software along with recommended settings to use.
