My friend Renee Shupe (http://RedHeadVA.com) posted today about a simple way to add video to your WordPress blog. If you’ve tried to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr, you know that they provide you with a chunk of code to add to your blog post. You have to make sure you add it to the HTML tab, and also have to be careful about “loosing” the code if you switch back to the Visual editor.

Since WordPress 2.9+, however, that’s no longer needed! There’s a list of the third-party services that WordPress supports on Renee’s blog, but embedding video in your blog post is now a simple as doing a quick copy/paste of the URL for the video. WordPress will automatically embed the video!

Renee also answers why you’d want to use a third-party service to host your marketing videos:

“Videos take a lot of server resources (where your site is hosted) and for most people you are on a shared hosting account. If your videos get lots of traffic your site is more likely to crash. In addition to this you are missing out on additional traffic from having your video hosted with a service provider. Using a third party site such as Youtube or Blip.tv can save your server resources and also help to drive additional traffic to your site.”

The one caveat here, is to be careful about hosting all your purely business related videos on a third-party site. Frequently, those videos are open to the public (so don’t share members-only information!) and using YouTube and Vimeo (and maybe others too) solely for business purposes is against their Terms of Service. Personally, for my business videos and those of my clients, I use Amazon Web Services. While it’s not free, the costs are minimal and I know my videos won’t disappear!

Ok. Now to try Renee’s trick!

I’m posting a URL to a video I found today. I’m just listing the URL, not linking it at all. No coding needed!

Can you see the video above? Cool!