Firstly decide whether to offer a mainstream video sharing site like YouTube. Starting off small, I would suggest going after a small niche, in order that you can rank well for that niche in the search engines. A niche might be sports, funny videos or how-tos, such as cooking or computer maintenance.
Once you have decided on your niche, the next step is a great domain name for your site. This domain should ideally be short and memorable (though many of the short domains have now been taken). There are two approaches, use some of the keywords for niche in your domain, or think of a unique or whacky one, the latter is what a lot of Web 2.0 sites do.
Choose a web host. You should consider a dedicated server as the load with video sharing websites is greater. However shared hosting or even a VPS or virtual private server should be ok to test your site, until you are getting decent traffic.
Normal web hosting might need the requirements for video sharing so check out web hosts, and Google for "ffmpeg hosting." FFMpeg is a utility that powers a lot of video sharing sites as it will encode video in varying formats to flash video player format (.flv) This is important as your shares will upload their films in a variety of formats. You server or host will also require php (safe mode off) ffmpeg-php, libogg & Libvorbis, mencoder, mplayer, and GD library and a decent file upload limit. Ideally your site should be hosted on the Linux platform.
It goes without saying you'll need a host with a generous disc and bandwidth (data transfer) limit. One of the reasons to go with a dedicated server, then other people's video sites can't slow yours down.
Your You Tube clone site will require a "front end" - an interface you and your users can log into. The good news is that there is a growing choice in video sharing content management systems to run your operation on. The most established appearing to be PHPMotion, Vidiscript, Mediashare, and Clip Share.
With all your software installed and the server working you can now start testing and uploading video's. If you decide to download existing video's from existing video sites,be mindful of any copyright issue's
Finally you can start putting the word out about your site. Try and rank well in the search engines. Choosing the right niche without too much competition will help here. However you can also spread the work on all the social networking sites, such as Facebook, Digg, and Mixx and well including you video web site URL in your YouTube bio or profile One the word is out you can then start creating some advertiser interest and affiliate deals to monetize your website.
Paul Lee has over eight years experience in the hosting industry running the popular Web Hosting Review site as well as a consultant at a well know London Web Hosting Provider |
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