YouTube Marketing Videos - How To Choose Your Own Thumbnail
YouTube is by far and away the 800lb Gorilla of online video and should certainly play a part in your online video marketing strategy.
But if you're using YouTube to host your marketing videos, it can be less than ideal when it comes to embedding the video on your own website.
Take for example the following video which we produced for a client and uploaded to YouTube:
The video quality is great and you can't argue too much with free video hosting, but there is a major niggle for the discerning marketer...
...the thumbnail!
Notice the image that's displayed before the video is played? That's known as the thumbnail. Looks a bit blurry right?
The crux of the thumbnail problem is that YouTube only let's you choose a thumbnail from 1 of 3 images grabbed directly from the video by YouTube itself.
Worse still, the thumbnails offered by YouTube often look naff and unprofessional - which isn't good when you're trying to encourage your visitors to click on the all important play button.
So here's a solution.
Continue hosting your videos at YouTube and choose your own thumbnail.
How? Glad you asked.
With the JW Player from LongTail. Here's an example...
In the above video we've used the JW Player to play the video from YouTube (so we still get free video hosting and all the other benefits of uploading our videos to YouTube.
And by using the JW Player we're able select our own thumbnail.
Problem solved!
You can download the JW Player for free and even give it a test run in a handy online wizard.
Have fun!
