Adding Video to Your Blog...
Today’s post is for fellow bloggers that are, or are considering putting video on their blog. When I started about a year ago, I searched for other video blogs, and could find none (that doesn’t mean there weren’t any, but if there were, I couldn’t find them). Now they are becoming more common. The obvious questions are: ‘is it worth it?’ and ‘what are the advantages?’
When I started, I was attempting to put up a video every week or so. At that time I didn’t track the traffic to my blog, so I have no idea if videos had any impact. Now that I do, I wanted to put up another video installment, and see if it impacted my traffic. I hadn't posted a video in months, so I just came home the night before last and threw one together. I usually have 20-100 visitors a day. The two days previous to the video post, I had 33 and 30 hits, on the day that I posted I had 27. This is far, far from a scientific study, but it certainly didn’t give any obvious evidence that posting video will result in greater traffic to your blog.
So, what is the amount effort and resources required to include video? When I started I had was hosting a site with Dreamhost, so I just put my videos on their server, and imbedded streaming video in the posts. I can’t say it was painless, but it worked pretty well. I am in the middle of moving this site to another (and smaller) account, so it didn’t make sense to put the videos on the Dreamhost server. I looked around for other (ideally free, or at least cheap) places to host my videos. There are a couple new companies popping up to assist with video blogging. I checked out a couple of them, and they weren’t really up and running, and were so limiting as to not be worth it anyways. So I uploaded my video to the Internet Archives, but I couldn’t get it to work properly on their site. I had an account at Revver, the new video site, that shares the add revenue generated by your video with you. It seems like a cool site, and they are open to you using your video how and wherever you want, but you do end up with a still ad at the end of your video (you can control what kind of ad). So I uploaded my video to them. Pretty painless, drag and drop, with there up-loader. It took about a day for them to approve it and all, which is less than ideal. But once it was up, I just embedded the code (they provide) in my post and everything ran smooth.
A bit of a hassle, and maybe no more traffic, are there any advantages? Sometimes. For most posts, the ideal for your readers is to have clear, concise text, they can glance at, and pursue if they are so inclined. A video requires more of a commitment from your readers. Sometimes however, to get the full emotional impact of what you are conveying, or to clearly illustrate something, there is nothing like video.
In conclusion, video has its place, but don't expect too much from its impact.
If you want to see the latest video mentioned above, it is in the post below.
Main points;
*It is constantly getting easier to upload video to your blog
*You no longer have to host your own video
*I have no evidence of increased traffic due to video
*But it does have its place, and a power that text can’t transmit
*It is getting relatively common, so the ‘newness’ factor is fading
When I started, I was attempting to put up a video every week or so. At that time I didn’t track the traffic to my blog, so I have no idea if videos had any impact. Now that I do, I wanted to put up another video installment, and see if it impacted my traffic. I hadn't posted a video in months, so I just came home the night before last and threw one together. I usually have 20-100 visitors a day. The two days previous to the video post, I had 33 and 30 hits, on the day that I posted I had 27. This is far, far from a scientific study, but it certainly didn’t give any obvious evidence that posting video will result in greater traffic to your blog.
So, what is the amount effort and resources required to include video? When I started I had was hosting a site with Dreamhost, so I just put my videos on their server, and imbedded streaming video in the posts. I can’t say it was painless, but it worked pretty well. I am in the middle of moving this site to another (and smaller) account, so it didn’t make sense to put the videos on the Dreamhost server. I looked around for other (ideally free, or at least cheap) places to host my videos. There are a couple new companies popping up to assist with video blogging. I checked out a couple of them, and they weren’t really up and running, and were so limiting as to not be worth it anyways. So I uploaded my video to the Internet Archives, but I couldn’t get it to work properly on their site. I had an account at Revver, the new video site, that shares the add revenue generated by your video with you. It seems like a cool site, and they are open to you using your video how and wherever you want, but you do end up with a still ad at the end of your video (you can control what kind of ad). So I uploaded my video to them. Pretty painless, drag and drop, with there up-loader. It took about a day for them to approve it and all, which is less than ideal. But once it was up, I just embedded the code (they provide) in my post and everything ran smooth.
A bit of a hassle, and maybe no more traffic, are there any advantages? Sometimes. For most posts, the ideal for your readers is to have clear, concise text, they can glance at, and pursue if they are so inclined. A video requires more of a commitment from your readers. Sometimes however, to get the full emotional impact of what you are conveying, or to clearly illustrate something, there is nothing like video.
In conclusion, video has its place, but don't expect too much from its impact.
If you want to see the latest video mentioned above, it is in the post below.
Main points;
*It is constantly getting easier to upload video to your blog
*You no longer have to host your own video
*I have no evidence of increased traffic due to video
*But it does have its place, and a power that text can’t transmit
*It is getting relatively common, so the ‘newness’ factor is fading
posted by The Dean at 00:25
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