How to Get Started with Vimeo Pro

If you're a small business getting started with online video, you absolutely need to know about Vimeo Pro. It's just that big.

You know Vimeo, right? It's a video-sharing site, like YouTube but for artsy people. Vimeo offers terrific quality and ease-of-use, but it's strictly for non-commercial videos. So you can't use it for your business.

But the just-launched Vimeo Pro is all about business.

Besides offering the same ease and quality as Vimeo, Vimeo Pro adds in portfolio pages you can use to show off your videos and review pages you can use to circulate work-in-progress.

The real selling point to Vimeo Pro, however, is the price. It's a flat $199 per year for 50GB of hosting (enough for 500 HD videos) and 250,000 streams. That's far more capacity than most small businesses will need. It's also a lot more than those $100 starter OVP services cost.

So if you're ready to stop relying on YouTube for all your video hosting and start posting more professional-looking videos to your site, get your company a Vimeo Pro account. Here's how to get started.

1. Sign Up for an Account
You can find the Get Pro Now button on this page. One $199 payment and you'll be set up.

2. Upload Your Work
After sign-up, you'll get a Pro directory of your own. Upload the videos your company already has.

3. Get a Pass
Videos in Vimeo Pro aren't accessible to the main group of Vimeo users, since Vimeo is for non-commercial work. If you have something that fits that description - say a highlights reel of your work - you can get a community pass to share it with the main Vimeo audience.

4. Make a Portfolio
Vimeo Pro allows subscribers to create portfolio pages to show off their work. Choose from one of the twelve templates that Vimeo Pro is offering at launch and show off your work.

5. Customize Your Page
You can do more to a portfolio page than just add videos. You can also customize the fonts, colors, and branding so that it looks just like a page from your site.

6. Add Videos to Your Site
If you just want to add and stream videos from your regular site, Vimeo Pro can do that, too. Once you've loaded a video, get the iframe code so you can add it to your page. An automatic detect built into the iframe means it will play the correctly formatted content for every browser or device.

That's all there is to it. Vimeo Pro should have a major impact in how small- and medium-sized businesses use video on the Web. Get an account and start using it today.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net