How to Prevent People from Downloading Your Videos from Your WordPress Website
WordPress is probably the most popular content management system used today, powering over 25% of the websites on the internet. It’s a great choice for bloggers who want to create a full blog with multiple pages, post content often, and take advantage of various free features WordPress offers. But what happens when you want to monetize your blog? You might discover that you have thousands of videos on your site that no one wants to watch because they all went down automatically after being downloaded.
You might consider using a video hosting platform like YouTube to monetize your videos. You can set up a YouTube account for free, and start getting paid per each video you make, whether you keep watching ads or not. You can also integrate YouTube videos into your WordPress site, allowing your viewers to navigate your entire blog using only the videos you’ve posted to YouTube.
While this is a convenient solution, embedding videos from another platform onto your site can backfire. For example, if you embed one of the most popular YouTube videos onto your WordPress site, your blog might actually lose traffic because the content is no longer accessible to users if they’ve already seen it on YouTube. This can hurt your monetization strategy if you’re relying on ads to fund your blog.
Why not put the videos on your site first before you start monetizing? You can use a service like Video Copy to easily grab the first few seconds of any YouTube video, and use them to enhance your blog posts. You’ll want to use a similar service to take care of any Instagram videos you might want to use too. You’ll find many tools that can help you take care of videos on a remote basis, and ensure that they display properly on your blogs and websites.
The Best Way to Monetize
Even if you do want to use a different hosting platform to keep your videos, you’ll still need a way to collect payments. You might try an affiliate marketing program like ClickBank, which allows you to promote products you’re passionate about (such as a gym membership) and earn a commission when someone clicks a link or buys a product you’ve recommended. You can use a tool like affiliate tracking software to easily keep track of your commissions and see what products and offers are generating the most interest.
You might also want to try selling and displaying ads on your site. You can use an ad platform like Google Adsense, which will automatically place relevant ads onto your blog, or take a more hands-on approach and use an automated tool like Wistia’s Ad Manager to create, edit, and manage your ads across different platforms and devices. You can even use Google Adsense to earn money passively by running profitable ads on other people’s sites while keeping your own content free from ads.
Choosing the right balance of content and monetization strategies for your own site can be challenging. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the popularity of your content, and use that information to guide your future decisions about whether or not to upload a new video, or expand your monetization strategy.
Managing Your Video Hosting Platform
Many bloggers discover that simply hosting their videos on YouTube results in a significant number of views, but that eventually the videos drop off and they have to actively promote them to keep getting the same results. You can use a tool like Sucuri to manage the performance of your videos on YouTube. This free tool gives you detailed information about the traffic to your videos, and offers suggestions about how you can improve the quality of your content to get more engagement.
If you discover that your videos are struggling to gain popularity on YouTube, you can use the platform’s built-in Analytics to track the performance of your videos. For example, you can use the Reach metric to determine how many people have seen each of your videos, and use that information to track the success of your content creation.
Growth Hacks
You might want to put these tips into practice and see how they help your videos gain traction. You can use a service like YouTube Analytics to get a complete view of your video’s performance, or track the progress of your videos using a tool like Google Analytics. You can even use a service like Segment to follow the path of a user who came from YouTube, to discover the steps they took before reaching your site, and how you can repeat those steps to gain more interest in your content.
If you’ve got a new blog post or website update you want to promote, consider using one of the many free video tools out there to create a short, entertaining video to go along with your content. You can use tools like Animoto or Jing to easily create a video to explain your blog post, or combine a few of the tools to create a fun, engaging little movie to convince people to click on your link or visit your website.
Whether you use WordPress or Blogger to build your blog, you can put in place a content management system for your site. You can then use services like YouTube to build a community around your content, or monetize your site using various methods.