Today Im taking a look at Video Profit Surge by Albert Mathews.

The idea of this software is to take advantage of the fact that video content is probably the most preferred content type on the internet. We have all seen the stats about YouTube, 1 billion visitors, 6 billion hours of video watched, each and every month. There is no doubt that video is hot and software products like this one aim to take advantage of this fact by letting you put you call to action, optin forms, social locks etc over the videos.
When I first spoke to Albert about reviewing this product one of the things I said was that I have seen other products like this before. Adding actionable content over videos is not a new concept at all. I let him know that his plugin would have to be something that is better than the other ones to earn my approval. I also let him know that if it wasn’t better I would point out every single flaw I found in it. Well he assured me that I would be impressed, and sent me over my review copy.

Well I have been testing this for a while now and I’m going to say it. Im impressed. From the second I started using this plugin I could see that this was something that a lot of work was put into. For example a lot of software products like this let you put actionable overlays on YouTube videos. But this one goes above and beyond. It lets you put them on YouTube, Vimeo, or your own self hosted videos.

Another example is that this actually has built in email functionality, so if your using the optin overlay functionality you can integrate with your autoresponder or you can also email directly from the plugin itself. No autoresponder needed. This in itself is a very cool feature that I was surprised to see integrated. But even here they did not skimp and do it cheaply. Evidence of this is in the fact that it has built in throttling for the email functionality so you dont go against your hosting company’s email restrictions. Again its things like this that really show that Albert wanted  (and succeed) to create a high quality software.

One thing that has new importance is the social lock feature. While Im not a big fan of fan pages anymore a lot of people still use them and a lot of people still have clients that want fan pages and fans. Unfortunately Facebook has decided that fan gating a tab on your fan page is no longer allowed. So now its harder than ever to get fans for you or your customers. Facebook removed one of the most popular methods to get them after all. However with the social lock feature you can basically fan gate your videos on yours site. Facebook TOS only apply to their site so there is no problem here. In this way you can actually build up your Facebook fan base from your website viewers. This is going to be an invaluable feature for anyone who still wants to get likes or who has clients that expect them.

Perhaps one of the coolest features is one that I almost missed. Its the embed functionality. Let me explain. Normally you would create your video, set the overlays and then use a short code the plugin gives you to put your video on your page. However with the embed function you can also put the video on a different website. Why is this important? Well besides the fact that it means you can put the video with the actionable overlays anywhere, not just on a WordPress site, it also means if your using this for clients you can put it on their website and they dont ever need to know that your using a WordPress plugin to do the overlay functionality. Basically its a kind of ‘white label branding’. Very cool for anyone with clients who does not want their customers to know how they do things.

I had no problems using this plugin at all. However if I needed help it was readily available inside of the plugin. It always bugs me that WordPress vendors put the help on the download page and not in the plugin itself. I always said that it was silly to make a user go to a different site and log in to view the tutorials. Its just a pain. Well Albert must read my blog (or at least think like me) because his has help and training videos built right into the plugin. Once again its a nice touch that shows a desire to create a high class product.

There is just one small negative with this plugin and that is that it requires PHP 5.3 or above to run. However to be totally fair PHP 5.2 is very old and outdated.  Unless your a stubborn programmer like me (and even I know I should upgrade) you really shouldn’t be running PHP 5.2 anymore. Also if by some chance you are running it (and if you have a managed server you probably are not since your host probably upgraded you without you even knowing), changing over to 5.3 takes about 30 seconds from cPanel. (Though most people wont have a problem with this requirement if by chance anyone needs to do this just let me know and Ill show you how)

While there have been other products that let you add actionable content, overlays, and social locking to videos this one is by far the most professionally done I have seen yet. Its a quality plugin and when you consider how popular video is it becomes clear that it has real value. Im going to call this one a big win and suggest that everyone at least take a minute to click below and check out the demo.

A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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