YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Your Own Website

Utilizing all these methods for promoting your videos outside of YouTube is important, but as Michael likes to remind me on a weekly basis, any of those sites could be closed, purchased, or remodeled at any time. Websites come and go, and when they go, they usually take all their content with them.

Having your own website, your own domain, can help you safeguard against losing your entire online presence should the websites you rely on fail you. Hosting is cheap, and you can buy a domain name for about $6 a year. You have to also pay for hosting, but that can be as little as $5 a month for a lot of space and throughput. (You can learn more about this, including specific recommendations, in the O'Reilly Digital Media site article about RSS referenced below in the "Blogging" section of this chapter.) Then the space is yours to do with as you wish—blog, upload photos, stream your videos, and embed your videos. Your own website means you are in control of the design, the features, and the content. You can even place AdSense ads on the site and monetize the traffic you drive there (www.google.com/adsense/) (URL 10.10). O'Reilly has a good book on using AdSense called Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense (http://tinyurl.com/6kjljy) (URL 10.11).

Note

To create your own website, you need only two things: a hosting plan and a domain name. Usually you can get both from the same service.

When you start your website, your first focus should be content. Many new website ...