Video Blogging

July 28, 2010

This post comes to us from Guest Author D’vorah Lansky. She is a great student of both Screencast Profits and Learn Camtasia and becoming quite the resource for all things blogging.

Using video in blogs is, of course, and great strategy! Here is her article.

Video Blogging

I’d like to thank Lon for having me as a guest blogger on his site. My name is D’vorah Lansky and I am known as the “Relationship Marketing Wizard”. I’m a huge fan of and very involved in blogging and in designing WordPress blogs. I’ve been a student of Lon’s for some time now and we had the opportunity of meeting one another in person at Bob Jenkins’ Internet Marketing event in North Carolina this past spring. Lon will also be blogging on my site the same week that I am here. (www.RelationshipMarketingCafe.com).

Video Blogging

Adding video to your WordPress blog will add another dimension to your content, keep people on your site longer and have them coming back often to see what new videos you’ve created. Video blogging is quite simple and there are many things that you can video blog about. You can take your written blog posts, create a PowerPoint presentation with key points listed as bullet points, and read your article aloud. Alternatively, you can have just a topic title or sentence or two at the beginning of your blog post and add a video on that topic. Being that Lon is the world renowned expert in screen capture video, you can view his work to get an unlimited number of ideas.

Video captivates people and keeps them on your site longer. Setting up a video on your blog is very easy in WordPress. There are several different options for where to host your video. One of the most popular is to create your video, then upload it to YouTube. Once your video processes you will be able to copy the embed code to your blog in order to make the video play on the selected spot on your site. When you are in the post-editing mode on your WordPress blog, you’ll see that there is a place to put the code. Note that there is an HTML tab. Click on that tab and paste the video code into the HTML section and publish your post. When you do that you will have a video on your site.

Once you’ve uploaded your video to YouTube, you can select the “embed” tab and decide what settings you’d like for your video. It is recommended that you uncheck the box that asks where you want to “show related videos” after your video is done playing. You cannot control which videos will show up and often times these related videos are inappropriate for all viewing audiences (if you catch my drift). The other setting you’ll want to make note of is the video size. Choose the proportions that will best fit in your blog post.

The downside to hosting a YouTube video is, when someone clicks on the video player on your site, they will be taken to YouTube.com

An alternative method involves setting up an account at Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com). They do charge you for the bandwidth but it is ridiculously affordable. This way you keep your viewers on your site and prevent them from clicking off to YouTube. You will need to have a way to incorporate a video player with the AmazonS3 code. The premier Amazon S3 video player is called Easy Video Player. I found out about this player from Lon and absolutely love it.

I can complete an Internet Radio Interview and within three minutes can have the video up on my site. One of the beauties of using Amazon S3 and Easy Video Player for your video hosting is that you decide where the viewer will go at the end of the video you are also able to decide if you want your video (or audio) to be downloadable.

Another of the benefits of video blogging is that you can put a link to your video posts in your e-mail newsletter and say something like: “Click here for this week’s video.” This is a great way to get a lot of traffic coming to your blog and Google is going to pay attention. This will increase your search engine rankings, which will get you more traffic.

To ensure that you have an ongoing source of new video content, consider scheduling a time each week to produce a few videos. This way you will have reserve content in case you want to take a vacation or you get busy with other projects. Create videos and you will be creating a powerful way to share your knowledge and your presence, while building relationships with your audience.

I welcome your thoughts regarding video blogging and encourage you to scroll down and leave a comment.

As part of the Blog Tour that Lon and I are participating in, you will earn points for each comment as well as for each of the blog tour articles that you tweet using the hashtag #blogworldtour.

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If you enjoyed this article, I invite you to receive a free chapter of my book at www.ConnectCommunicateProfit.com

I’d love to hear your comments and questions and look forward to getting to know you.

All the best,
Dvorah

D’vorah Lansky
Relationship Marketing Wizard | Author | Speaker | Educator
www.BlogWorldTour.com/blog

Posted in Video Blogging