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What’s the Best Way to Incorporate Video Into Your Blog?

What’s the Best Way to Incorporate Video Into Your Blog?

Blogging has long been established as a path to revenue online, whether you’re trying to monetize your blog with advertising, or using a blog to improve your company’s reputation and conversion rate. In any case, if you’ve been relying purely on written content, you’re falling behind the times.

Visual content, and specifically video content, is now king. Not only is visual content easier to consume and retain, it’s also attracting significantly higher demand; it’s estimated that in 2017, video content represented 74 percent of all internet traffic.

So if you already have a blog, and you’re new to the world of video content, what’s the best way to incorporate video into your existing strategy?

Potential Approaches

Let’s start with a handful of high-level approaches you could try:

  • The gallery. If you want your video to stand apart from your blog work, you could try offering a video gallery like this one from Semper Solaris. The idea here is to give your readers more video content, but without distracting from your blog—the main draw of your website. This option is ideal for webmasters whose blogs have already attracted and retained a fair number of readers.
  • Integrated examples. If you want to complement your blogging strategy with more video content, you can integrate short video snippets to illustrate what you’re talking about, like this article from How Stuff Works on car engines. Animated gifs and illustrations excel here, as they’ll help you explain your points in a way that’s more understandable to your target audience. You may even be able to use these video elements in other areas of your marketing and advertising.
  • Content as video. You could also offer video content in place of a blog post, or as a repackaging of content you’ve written about before, like this guided demo video of Zendesk Chat, which recaps written descriptions in a more engaging format. Here, your video will serve as an extension of your core blog content, bringing it to a wider, more visually-focused portion of your audience.
  • A standalone strategy. Finally, you could treat your video campaign as a separate entity from your main content marketing strategy. Here, your video content will exist as a separate channel from your main blog, but you can cross-reference these independent strategies so you can build a mutual audience. This is best reserved for bloggers who want to start a new or tangential topic in their video content strategy.

How to Make Your Videos More Engaging

Those strategies may help you with video placement and incorporation, but what about the actual video content you’re creating? How can you make your videos more engaging?

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Study the competition. You aren’t the only blogger in your space creating video content. Take a look at the competition and study what they’re doing. What do their viewers like to see? What are they missing that you could provide?

  • Keep things short. In general, short videos outperform long videos. Try to keep things to 5 minutes or less, especially if you’re using videos as supplements to your written material.
  • Skip the fluff. You might be tempted to use time in the video to pitch your products or services or share some personal anecdotes, but unless you’re catering to a very specific, casual audience, it’s better to cut the fluff and get right to the meat of your content.
  • Show off your personality. That said, you don’t want to come across as a robot either. Make sure to inject your personality into your video content, whether it’s in the tone of your voice, the style of your visuals, or an occasional joke thrown in to lighten the mood.
  • Invest in decent equipment (if you can). You can technically create and upload videos with a decent smartphone, but if you want to make a good impression, it’s better to invest in higher-quality video equipment. You’d be amazed what a difference a professional camera and decent sound equipment can make for your finished products.
  • Promote your channel. Don’t keep your new video content campaign a secret. No matter how you’re uploading or integrating your videos, go out of your way to promote them—send an email blast to your customers announcing your new video series, and distribute them across social media. You can even optimize your YouTube channel for search to get even more views.
  • With these tips, you should be able to upgrade your blog for the modern era, giving your customers more high-quality video content and supercharging your blog with more engaging material. Be sure to carefully measure your audience’s responses and feedback, just as you would with your written content, and make adjustments as you gain more experience and insight into the video marketing world.

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