Blogs are great. They give a voice to the people and bring a wide variety of issues to the attention of the public. But they are still mainly just words. Lots and lots of words.
Of course, photographs can add a lot of interest to blogs and can break up large screens of gray text, but the hottest new trend in blogging is the use of video.
More and more people are getting high-speed Internet connections, so you might as well take advantage of something that will encourage your visitors to spend more time on your blog and to keep them coming back. These are habits you will definitely want to cultivate if you want your blog to be profitable. Yes, you need to start taking advantage of video!
Video can be used to illustrate whatever your blog happens to be about. If your blog is about blogging itself, then you could set up a series of instructional videos to walk visitors through the process.
Gone are the days when you had to spend thousands of dollars on video equipment. Your computer has a great video camera built in. For example, older model Macs came with the iSight, while the new iMac comes with the Facetime HD video camera capable of capturing full-screen HD video. Although this may be overkill for most blogging purposes, it’s nice to know it’s there!
Use A Plugin
There are plenty of video sites online, but the king of video sites, and the one that probably accounts for 60 or 70% of all video traffic, is YouTube.
If you blog using WordPress, you can take advantage of one of the handy plug-ins that make it easy for you to embed YouTube video directly into your blog. Some of them, such as WordPress Viper’s Video Quicktags, will allow you to embed videos from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Flickr videos and more.
Adding a video, however, can be as easy as clicking a button and pasting in the URL of the site on which it resides. Most plug-ins have various configuration options to allow for the most effective placement and presentation of the video on your page.
You needn’t even create the videos yourself. You can embed the videos of others as well is your own on your page if they provide great value. You don’t have to worry about rights issues involved with posting the video on your blog, since any YouTube video owner can disable embedding if so desired.
It’s not hard to find videos on YouTube. There is a search feature as well as categories, at least one of which may relate to the topic of your blog.
You can either search by subject to find a good fit or browse through the category that seems to be the best match. All videos on YouTube have viewing statistics, which can give you a good idea which ones have the broadest appeal. Of course, it’s a good idea to watch all videos first before embedding them on your blog.
Blogging for profit is a highly competitive arena, and so anything you can do to give yourself an edge over the competition is a good idea. Embedding videos is an easy way to do this. It’s a great way to keep your visitors coming back and it can provide an occasional and welcome relief to the chore of needing to put everything into words.
Traffic Geyser allows you to press one button, and blast your content around the globe, automatically. No more going to each site and manually uploading your videos, articles, podcasts, etc. Try it for a month for only $1 here.
