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During Day 18, I did a small amount of editing of my video before publishing it for the web. Today, I need to get it online and onto my squeeze page.

So my tasks are:

• Upload to a video site
• Put the Embed code on my blog
• Hide the text I’m replacing with the video

I’ll start with getting the video online…

Upload Video To Brightcove

You have a lot of choices to upload your video to the web. You can use YouTube, Viddler, etc., which are all free. Or you can go premium and avoid advertisements and branding.

I’ve been wanting to try out BrightCove for a while because it has player design features, autoplay on load, and a few other features that don’t come with the free services. So I’m going to start up a free trial of their service today and see what I think about it. But you can feel free to go through the basic steps I’m outlining here with whatever video service you want.

And by the way, for this particular video, I’m not using submission services like TubeMogul or Traffic Geyser because I’m not trying to get traffic for this video on those services. I may change my mind about that later. But since I’m specifically not putting my website address in the video, and I’m telling viewers to fill out a form on the webpage, I’ll post it on BrightCove only.

In BrightCove, there’s a Media folder, and a button to upload videos. Pretty simple process to start with. Because you have a lot of options, though, it seems more complicated than it is. The main settings I want to change are to autoplay the video on load, and have no advertising showing on the player. I also take off the Brightcove logo.

Put The Video On The Web

You have quite a number of player options as well, but for now I’m going to stick with the default player. One of the things I find confusing is how to get the code for the video. But there’s a not so obvious link under the video thumbnail to the right of the brightcove dashboard when you’re in the media folder. It reads “Get video player code.” If you have your window smaller than normal, you may not see it at first.

You have the option of getting 3 different types of codes: website,
blog, and URL. The website one gives you a javascript code. For some
reason, my WYSIWYG editor on Blogi360 doesn’t like that code. Could be
a blog/Wordpress issue as well. So I’m using the blog option (which is
probably why the have it), which gives me an object embed code instead.
This is the same thing that YouTube gives you, too. By the way, the URL
is just a text link to where the video is played by itself. I wouldn’t
use that.

Here’s what my code looks like:

<object id=”flashObj” width=”486″ height=”412″ classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0″><param name=”movie” value=”http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/37231372001?isVid=1&publisherID=36496421001″ /><param name=”bgcolor” value=”#FFFFFF” /><param name=”flashVars” value=”@videoPlayer=38333373001&playerID=37231372001&domain=embed&” /><param name=”base” value=”http://admin.brightcove.com” /><param name=”seamlesstabbing” value=”false” /><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /><param name=”swLiveConnect” value=”true” /><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /><embed src=”http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/37231372001?isVid=1&publisherID=36496421001″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” flashVars=”@videoPlayer=38333373001&playerID=37231372001&domain=embed&” base=”http://admin.brightcove.com” name=”flashObj” width=”486″ height=”412″ seamlesstabbing=”false” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowFullScreen=”true” swLiveConnect=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash”></embed></object>

I put in red the area of the code that you can change if you want your player to be smaller. You have to change it in both places. And you should keep the ratio to be the same. At some point, I’ll need to go back and republish my video to these sizes, or figure out how to change the player size in Brightcove (remember, I published my video at 400×225, at the 16:9 ratio). But for now, it’s fine.

All I need to do now is go the HTML of my squeeze page and paste this code where I want it to show up.

Hide Existing Text

Before I paste the video code on the site, and delete the text I already have there, I’m going to do something that will save me a lot of time later.

Since this is really still a test on which will convert better, I don’t want to lose my work I did last week. So instead, I’m going to hide the bullets and features of my squeeze page. I simply want my Headline, subheadline, then the video to the left, and the opt-in box to the right.

Here’s what my squeeze page looks like before I do this:

So to hide the text from the viewer, I’m going to use an HTML tactic called “commenting”. People who code websites use comments to tell themselves and future webmasters what they’ve done on the page. The comments can be seen in the HTML source code, but don’t show up on the page. I use it to hide stuff I may want to bring back later in case I have made a mistake.

To comment, you use <!– to start the commenting. Anything that shows up after that will not be shown. Then when you want the commenting to end, you put –>.

For example, <!– Here’s my original text –> would display in my source code, but not show up on the webpage itself.

When I created my second version of my squeeze page, I had made a 2 column table. The left cell had the bulleted text, and the right column had the opt-in box. So I put <!– right after the <td> code of my left column, and –> right before the </td> code at the end of that cell. All the text is between that comment, so it disappears from view.

After the –> but before the </td> I paste in the embed code from Brightcove. And voila, I have my new video squeeze page.

Since I now have the video, I am going to take off my photo from below the opt-in box, as well as the “Let Me Help Your Business Grow!” subheading.

Here’s what the new version of my squeeze page looks like after today’s steps:

So now it’s just a matter of testing this version of my squeeze page against the original. By the way, for the record, my second version had opt-in rates between 15.4 – 19.8% from organic search traffic and my Twitter, Facebook profiles. I definitely want to see an increase over those numbers, and I’m hopeful this video will do the trick.

With the video process finished for now, I can get ready for tomorrow, when I’ll be creating new messages for the autoresponder series.

Bob Jenkins
DiscoverAutoresponders.com

p.s. Once you have your video up on your squeeze page, link to it with a comment below. And if you’ve been keeping track of your opt-in rates from your webform, let me know what kinds of rate you’re getting!

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