Everyone loves video, but for small businesses, the costs seem out of reach. Luckily for you, the video capabilities of WordPress are more than adequate to make a professional website with video and not increase your costs.
Finding Videos Online
If you are starting a video channel (vlog for short), you need to be able to curate the content on your own website. And luckily for you, you can easily embed content within the body of a WordPress post. Just copy and paste the link from YouTube directly into WordPress. This works with a list of trusted content producers that you can see at WordPress’s Embed Post.
If you want to embed a playlist, go to the Playlist page for the list you want to share and copy the link. Paste it in the body of your post or page, and voila!
For this post, I grabbed the Pentatonix Christmas playlist. If you see the top buttons, there is watch later share, and a list icon with a fraction. Clicking on that list will open up the list of videos without leaving the website.
What About More Functionality?
What if you want to display a gallery of videos on your website or have an embedded selection tool that opens the video player on your website?
This is when the small business owner either contacts me or uses one of the many Plugins available to customize WordPress to her desires. I am going to review 2 of the most popular embed plugins for WordPress below.
YotoWP Plugin
The Yoto WP plugin is for video creators, you will need API access to the YouTube channel you want to embed. YotoWP has a full article on how to get API access. Read that if you decide to use YotoWP.
Plan at least 30 Minutes of uninterrupted time to setup any plugin, longer if you are not comfortable navigating Google Developers products and the WordPress dashboard.
After you have got API access, go to the General Settings for the YotuWP Plugin (1). Then Enter Your API Key (2), Save Changes (3) and then go to Shortcode Generator in order to generate the shortcode that you can use in any post or page on your WordPress site.
YotuWP creates a streamlined gallery of the videos in your playlist as you can see from my test page using an old playlist I had sitting around.
YouTube Embed Plus
The full title of this plugin in the app store is Embed Plus for YouTube – Gallery, Channel, Playlist, Live Stream and as the name describes the free version is fairly robust.
After you activate this plugin and click on “YouTube Free” in your sidebar, you will be guided through a setup process. As you go through the process, you will need to enter your YouTube API Key. If you didn’t read the tutorial on that I linked to above, here is a video on how to get your API key.
After you have gone through the wizard and installed your YouTube API key, you will be able to use the YouTube Embed on your pages and posts.
Watch the short video below to see how to use the YouTube Embed Plus on a post/page.
As you can see looking at the video above, the YouTubeEmbed app works really well.
For now, I am recommending this app and will update this post as time goes on if it works well for Small-Time Marketing as well as for our customers.
Remember, What You Do Matters,
~Nathan Paul Davis