Using NING to enhance your videos!

NING is a social web site where you can create a community for your customers or friends. It is also a place you can upload video and get high quality playback. In this article I will show you how you can use NING as a place to upload videos, brand them with your own company logo and then embed those videos on your web site, blog or other business site.

Ning allows you to create a free community and gives you 10 gigs of free upload space to upload your videos. 10 gigs equals about 300 videos if they are under 3 to 5 minutes. So it is perfect for promos and commercials or product advertising. You can embed those videos from your Ning web site into your blog, or business site with better quality than UTube and without all the text and distractions from a Utube video.

UTube videos tend to have ads and other text or redirect links that can distract from your message. Plus UTube videos look like UTube, which is often thought of as an amateur site for blooper videos. You probably want a better more professional player on your company web site that will not link to funny animal or silly videos from someone else.

In this program I will show you how to create a Ning site for your company, brand the player with your own company logo then upload and get the embed code so you can paste that code into your blog or web site. Once you know how, it's faster and easier than trying to set up a player and upload complicated flash media into your own page. Plus you are not using the bandwidth on your company site, the video is streaming from your Ning site.

In future programs I will show you how you can craft the Ning site to become an extension of your own site too. You can use it as a place for customers to join and interact with you and each other. All under the umbrella of your own company site! A great marketing tool!

But first, lets learn how to use it as a place to put your videos and share them on your site in a professional player that is branded with your own company logo! After watching this video go to NING and create your own site!


See how I changed this link at In The Viewfinder!

Select the "Full Screen" option from the Media Player Controls under this video to see it larger!
Advantages to using Ning:

• Your own branded videos with your logo.
• Streaming video, no downloading then playing a video.
• Better quality!
• Fast & easy to upload - process - copy / paste to embed in your site.
• Use the 'community' as a place to interact with clients / customers.
• 10 gigs of free storage space.
• No 10 minute time limit on videos! (keep files under 100 megs)
• No links in the video to lure viewers away, no distracting text.
• Ability to resize video.
• Media Player Controls (volume, pop-out, full screen viewing, etc.)
• No coding or flash files to deal with. Just upload, embed & go!
• No converting video to FLV before you can upload.

J.
I encoded this video as a wmv, much better quality is usual for ning sites.