If you’re the kind of person who does these sorts of things online: buy ebooks, subscribes to newsletters, register for a free mini course, join a membership website, etc. then you no doubt have noticed a new trend.

Bloggers and Internet Marketers alike these days seem to be using videos to help promote and sell their products more than ever before.

A few years back, embedding and streaming your own videos into your website was a bit of a pain unless you used a video site like YouTube or Vimeo. Even to this day using social sites like these to stream your videos is a great way to get your videos online and easily embedded into your website.

But there’s a few issues with broadcasting your videos by using such services.

Side-by-Side Comparison of Using Easy Video Player vs. YouTube

For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll just take the example of using YouTube since it’s the most popular video hosting social website. I realize, though, that other sites like Vimeo and Blip.tv have similar tools.

1. Price

YouTube is, Easy Video Player (a.k.a. EVP) is not.

Edge: YouTube

2. Setting Up Your Software and/or Account

With YouTube there’s no software you need to download and install, you simply create yourself an account on their website, write up a little profile for yourself, and then in a few short minutes you can start uploading your videos to YouTube.

With EVP, you have two options:

A) Install the video player script (i.e. program) onto your own web hosting account

B) Don’t install the script to your own account and just use it straight from EVP’s own website

For the most part (and to maintain complete control over your videos), it’s probably best to install the software to your own server. EVP gives you a very nice and easy to follow tutorial on how to install the script to your web hosting account; however, if you’re not use to installing programs like this or WordPress, then it could get a little confusing.

To further complicate the installation process, EVP also makes use of a database, so a user would have to set that up as well.

Edge: YouTube

3. Split Testing Your Videos

If you’re a video marketer and you’re serious about increasing your sales and conversions, split testing which video people see when they come to your site is extremely important.

Easy Video Player makes split testing very easy to set up. Simply log into the program (which is installed on your web hosting server) and pick two videos you’d like to split test. Then with a few clicks of the mouse you can generate a copy and paste code which you can paste right into your web page.

With YouTube on the other hand, if you wish to run a split test of two of your YouTube videos which are embedded on your page, you’ll have to use a third party program to do that, such as Google Website Optimizer.

Edge: Easy Video Player

4. Analytics

If you’re a video marketer, tracking your results and doing things like monitoring how long people watch your videos and what they do when the video ends is extremely important to you.

While YouTube offers a few analytical tools you can use in regards to your video, the tools which they provide are somewhat limited. On the other hand, Easy Video Player has an entire set of analytical tools you can attach to your video so you can monitor exactly what people are doing when they watch your video.

Here’s a short list of a few of the analytics which come with EVP:

- View how many plays

- View Completed Plays

- Track if a video lead to a sale

- See how much revenue a video has made you

- See how many Facebook Likes you’ve got

- View the number of Tweets your video got

- Geographical Stats

- Referrer Stats

Edge: Easy Video Player

5. Embed Email Optin Forms

The money is in the list.

We’ve all heard that one before. One of the best ways to build wealth and generate income online is by starting an email list (newsletter).

EVP has a really nice feature which allows you to embed HTML and JavaScript right into your video. So when your video finishes, you could display a “Buy Now” button or even an email optin form.

Edge: Easy Video Player

6. Ability To Create Squeeze Pages

If a video is meant to be a sales video, many times such videos are best embedded on a web page which has very little, if any, distractions. If you were to use YouTube for such a page, you’d have to create the page on your own, insert your links and buy images, and build the rest of the page.

With EVP, however, with just a few clicks of the mouse you can create a video web page which displays your video at the top of the page and a nice “Buy Now” buttons centered just below it.

You can also easily integrate a Facebook commenting system below the video.

Edge: Easy Video Player

Conclusion

If you’re looking to just simply upload some videos and show them on your blog or website, using services like YouTube, Vimeo, and Blip.tv is fine.

But if you’re serious about making money through the use of your videos, EVP is clearly the better choice.