For small businesses having a video produced can be a expensive and nerve racking experience. It’s important that you work with a company that you are comfortable with. Do your homework and research the companies you might want to work with. Here are a few tips when researching companies.

Call up your potential video production company and ask them questions.
Here are a list of starter questions to ask:

• How many years have you been in the video production business?
• What types of video productions do you produce?
• Are you insured?

From my personal experience I love it when potential clients contact me about working together. I want to make them comfortable and reassure them. So come up with your own questions and ask away!

The next step is to setup a meeting with the video production companies. This is a great way to get to know who you’ll be dealing with.

By the way if your interested to know how I would answer the questions above here are my answers.

• How many years have you been in the video production business?
Visual Post has been in the video production business for three years.

• What types of video productions do you produce?
At Visual Post we produce videos for all different types of mediums – web, television, presentations and other formats. Specific types of productions we have produced in the past are TV commercials, sales video, corporate video productions for conferences, introductory web video, and many more.

• Are you insured?
Visual Post is fully insured by EMC Insurance.

Do you have more questions for me? Feel free to give me a call 401-312-3409. I would be happy to answer all your questions.

Patrick Hughes
Co-Founder & Production Director at Visual Post, LLC

P.S. Are you interested in learning more about the TV commercial production process? Check out my TV Commercial Guide, it’s filled with great tips on how to produce your first TV commercial.

Co-host this week: Lou Perseghin

Connect with Lou on Twitter @louperseghin

Check out Lou’s Yelp Profile http://loup.yelp.com

Lou’s Picks

Victoria K.
@missionfood
Great homemade recipes with photos to document the process. Conversational style. She graduated from Johnson and Wales recently and is interning at the Food Network.

Mc Slim Jb
@mcslimjb
Mysterious Boston area Yelper and food critic. Great reviews and links, for a lot of high brow places, but he also writes the On The Cheap column for the Boston Phoenix.

Yelp Boston
@yelpboston
Lots of Boston area news and events. Run by the Boston Community Manager Leighann, who’s always out at new places.

Drew Lazor
@drewlazor
Food editor for the Philadelphia Citypaper. Great style, lots of pop culture and sports references, and photos. Also runs the @mealticket blog for the CP.

Patrick’s Picks

Andy Ihnatko

@ihnatko – Andy Ihnatko is a “Chicago Sun-Times’ tech columnist, a host of the MacBreak Weekly podcast, Macworld back-page columnist, occasional TV guy” visit his web site http://ihnatko.com and be sure to read his epic iPhone 4 review here

Landing Strip Web Show

What is it? A web show dedicated to reviewing awesome and awful landing pages on the internet!

Who host’s the Landing Strip Web Show? The beautiful and talented Amanda MacArthur (@amaaanda) and Patrick Hughes(@eastofprov)!

Where can I watch the show? I’m glad you asked, visit http://landingstripshow.com.

Can I submit a landing page to be reviewed? Oh course! Submit a page to the Landing Strip here!

Now that you’ve got your businesses web site up, its time to get creative and start posting some web site video content for your visitors.

Like your web pages, your videos need to be hosted. You could host your video files like you do your other web pages—on your own server—however videos use a lot of bandwidth and could put a strain on your server.

A better alternative would be to use one of the popular video-sharing services like YouTube to host the video and then embed the files on your web page. Some video-sharing providers charge for the service but there are quite a few free ones to choose from. Below are four of the ones that companies are using to host web site videos successfully.

1. YouTube

Since they are the site that has become a household name, it’s only fitting that YouTube should at the top of our list. In order to use YouTube, you have to register for an account, and once registered you can upload as many videos as you want. The nice thing about the service is that the interface is very easy to use and upload videos.

YouTube’s video file size is limited to 2 GB and 10 minutes length of time. Youtube also offers great SEO for your video. Google has started placing videos in prime positions on search results so be sure to get your keywords into the title and description.

Here is an example of YouTube’s video player.

2.Yahoo

If you already have a Yahoo account for email or RSS feeds you can automatically start using Yahoo Video, their video hosting service. Yahoo video hosting capacity is minimal with an upload limit of 100 MB.
Here is an example of Yahoo’s video player.

3.Vimeo

If you are a filmmaker or in the video production world, Vimeo is a very popular and professional choice for hosting your web site video. They have an active community that loves to share videos and talk about the equipment they used to get the shot.

Vimeo also supports full 1080p video and has a slicking video player. They offer a Vimeo Plus plan that gets you even higher video quality video, 5GB of uploads per week, faster uploading and advanced video statistics.

Here is an example of Vimeo’s video player.

4.Wistia

Do you want video hosted on your website professionally? Do you want a no-ad, non-branded video player? Do you want advanced analytics and video heatmaps? If you answered yes then you need Wistia. Wistia offers a professional video hosting platform that is perfect for collaborating, marketing and sharing your videos. Full Disclosure – we use Wistia to host all our videos in our portfolio and use Wistia for client approvals. No, we’re not getting paid to recommend them.

Here is an example of Wistia’s video player.

There are other free & paid video hosts for you to choose from but this list will at least get you started. If you find that your business is using more video promotions, you may want to experiment with some of the other video-sharing sites—maybe even the premium ones—to find the one that works best for your business.