Relevant to: Bloggers, Content Providers, Mastermind Groups and Digital Product Creators

Read Time: 4 minutes.

As an online seller, there’s a chance you’ve launched a resource or created content that you only want certain eye balls seeing. You can usually do this by simply sending only those people an e-mail or putting content on a protected website, but what do you do when it comes to video?

Video is hard to manage because it’s big in size, so it’s expensive to host and cumbersome to pass around. There are tools to password protect specific files, but then you need to know how to host them, send them to people, upload and download, encode and re-code. You need a tech guy on call. I often get asked, can’t I just use YouTube somehow?

Cath Duncan of the amazing website Mine Your Resources recently asked me this and the answer is, yes, but with caveats. YouTube allows you to upload videos to your account as “unlisted” which keeps the URLs private. What does that mean though?

When you upload any video to YouTube, it automatically lists your video in search engines, in YouTube’s video directory, and in your account video listings. It’s most certainly not private, and anyone checking out your content is going to see it.

YouTube does have a private setting for videos, but this setting is limited by specific access controls that require you to enter the e-mail address of the person you’d like to see it, this doesn’t work if you want to share it with a private community that could number in the hundreds or thousands.
The “unlisted” feature acts exactly like a normal video, but YouTube does not list the “link” to see the video anywhere on the web. You are then left with the link to keep private on your own terms.

Benefits

• Easy to do
• Easy to share
• Creates “exclusive” feel

Drawbacks

• Not truly private
• Holds you and your audience to keep private

How To

The process is built into the normal upload steps but lets review it here.

Once you’ve finished editing your video, make sure it’s less than 10 minutes, smaller than 2GB in size, and in an acceptable format, you’re ready to upload it.

• Click the Upload link at the top of any YouTube page.
• Click the “Browse” button to browse for the video file you’d like to upload to our site. Select the file you want to upload.
• Click the ‘Upload Video’ button to start the uploading process.
• As the video file is uploading, enter as much information about your video as possible in the relevant fields (including Title, Description, Tags, and Category). You’re not required to provide specific information, but the more information you include, the easier it is for users to find your video!
• Select “Unlisted” under Privacy
• Click the ‘Save changes’ button to save the updates you’ve made to the video file.

Here’s the process in picture format.

Happy YouTubing! Use these tips to offer “your eyes only” video’s for your audience.