How To Download An Unlisted Video TESTIMONIAL From YouTube

Could you use more testimonials in your business? Sheryl Plouffe here, Video Strategist. I work with solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, and small business owners to help them leverage video and build their brand and business. And today I encountered a bit of a problem.

Let me explain.

I was speaking at an event yesterday. I asked the event organizer if she would create a video testimonial for me, and she graciously agreed. So she did the video. It was about a minute and 15 seconds long, sent me the link to the video, which she published on YouTube and set to unlisted. So I want to take the video and I want to save it in Google Drive. I may want to use it in a future video project, but I need to access and download the video from YouTube. Bit of a problem, though, because I didn't publish the video.

And so I found a solution and a workaround today that I'm going to share with you.

But the truth is that we all really could use more testimonials in our business. And I think this video will not only serve you from the standpoint of, of gathering and garnering testimonials and saving them for safekeeping, but maybe in other ways as well. So if you like the topic of this video, if you know someone in your network who could benefit, or maybe a colleague, be sure to share this with them. Like the video, subscribe to the channel, New videos come out every Thursday, so you'll want to hit the notification bell so that you are notified of new videos every week. So without further ado, let's head over to my computer and I'll show you the workaround that I found on how to download an unlisted YouTube video that you did not publish.

What we're looking at here is the backend of my own channel, my video library here, and if I scroll through the visibility tab, to a video that is unlisted, such as this one. I have published this video to and set it to unlisted. I could download this one. If I just click on these little dots here, I have a download button, but that's not what I want. I want to be able to access a video that was shared with me today that I did manage to save to a playlist, and that was easy enough to do. I accessed the video through the link that was shared to me, and I saved it to a playlist. So I saved it to this one here. So let me open it and I'll show you. It's from Jen here. So Jen sent me this great review. I want to be able to utilize it, but what I've encountered is that there is no button to download it here. I've tried everything. I've tried sharing, I've tried the 3 buttons. There's no other buttons in here, and that's the trouble that I encountered. So the solution that I came up with today was to actually screen capture this. This might not work for all situations, but it works well for this situation. So what I did was I opened up Camtasia and I created a new project. And then what I did was I went over here and I screen captured the actual video. So I clicked on the button, I hit start recording, and I recorded me playing out this video in real time. So once I was recording on Camtasia, I came over here and I hit the play button and recorded the screen. Once that was completed, I came over here and I stopped the recording. So once I stopped the recording, that video recording ends up in Camtasia over here, and then what I would do is bring this down onto the timeline and just go ahead and edit that as per usual. It's a little bit meta here because I'm actually recording the recording, but I think that if I just bring this back over, we'll just mute this line right now, this channel. But now we can see here that this is the file to be edited. If I actually scroll through that, you'll see that I have recorded. There it is. The recorded Jen in real time. So what I would do is I would come in here and I would edit this part out. Once I'm happy with that, I would just go through the regular process of creating a video where I save it, I would export it, and then that video export ends up being uploaded into, let's say, Google Drive, for example. So I have a whole folder that's dedicated to testimonials. And what I would do is come over here, choose File, Upload, locate the video in question, which is this one, and I'm going to hit Open. So now I'm uploading that to Google Drive. But where this begins is by using Camtasia, I can actually create a really, a workaround to the problem of not being able to find an easy solution to download the video from YouTube. There are ways to do it, but If you search other methods of downloading an unlisted video on YouTube, you'll find that it's quite complex. And that's what I encountered today. I thought, wow, these are really complex recommendations on how to do this that involve third-party softwares. And I tried a couple of them today and they weren't working. And I thought, what is an easy solution to this? And that's what I came up with here. So I guess in some sense, this is not really directly downloading from YouTube, but it's a workaround to achieve the same result.

So get out there and ask for testimonials of your work. Just remember, you have to have a place to store it. So whether you use Google Drive or you have Dropbox, or maybe you save it in a folder on your computer or an external hard drive, make sure that you have that particular place where you store all of those assets, because that's really what testimonials are. They are assets to your business. And now you know that as you get those testimonials, should they come into you as an unlisted YouTube video link, you'll know now how to actually download that, or at least a workaround to download that and to be able to upload it for your own purposes in the future. Be sure to subscribe to my other videos on this channel, and thank you so much for watching this week and always. New videos come out every Thursday, so be sure to subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you in the next video.