Increase Your Audience by Adding Video

Updated: Oct 6th, 2009

With all of the travel writing websites out there, it can be difficult to stand out in the Internet Universe. Great writing can certainly help, but how can a person attract more viewers to their blog? Better yet, what can a person do to keep people on their site longer, view more pages and have them come back regularly for more?

YouTube is one of the most popular online communities and people are watching hundreds of millions of videos on the Internet each day. By adding video to your blog, you can take advantage of a huge market and attract an entirely new audience.

It can be a daunting task adding another element into the mix. Bloggers are busy enough coming up with content, photos and writing interesting text each day. But adding a short video can really bring your piece up to a new level and appeal to a wider market.

With all of the editing software out there, it has never been easier to put together a mini movie or a short snip-it. A simple and easy to use program is iMovie. It allows you to cut your clips, add titles and transitions and play with music and audio with the click of a button. For a blog, you don’t need to use anything more complicated like Final Cut Pro. A basic program will have all of the elements that you need to make an interesting and dynamic video.

After you have edited your video, save it as a QuickTime movie compressed for web streaming. Now you are ready to upload your video to anywhere you would like on the Internet.

A great place to start is on YouTube. Open up an account, follow the prompts and Voilà, you have a video online. Plus by having your own YouTube channel, you can lure more readers to your website. People that regularly surf video channels probably don’t surf writing websites quite as much as we would like. You can provide a link to your blog from your bio on your YouTube channel, and if a person likes what they see, they will want to click on it to check out more.

With plug-ins like TubePress for WordPress you can have an entire page of your featured YouTube videos on your blog. Another great plug-in for WordPress is All-In-One-Video-Pack. It allows you have your content hosted elsewhere and gives you the ability to edit online. It has 10 gigs of storage and you can put small clips directly into your post by loading them onto your website. We have just discovered this one and we look forward to using it regularly on our future posts.

Between photos, text and video, you are offering your viewers a wide variety of options to look at. You will not only attract more people to your site, you will also keep them there for a longer time.

Make sure to be careful of copyright though. We started showing our videos on YouTube three years ago simply wanting to share our travels with friends and family. We made the mistake of using music that we loved thinking it wouldn’t matter. We thought who would be looking at them anyway? Well, some of our videos ended up receiving over 30,000 views without any kind of advertising or marketing. This caught people’s attention and now many have been deleted.

They were our most popular videos, so we have now missed out on thousands of potential new visitors to our blog that we have since started running. However, it proves just how many people YouTube reaches.

~Deb Corbeil

Do you incorporate video into your blog? Share your tips & tricks!

Dave and Deb are a couple from Canada that love a great adventure.
You can follow their travels around the world at http://www.theplanetd.com
Their YouTube channel is http://www.youtube.com/wegobyebye
You can follow them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/theplanetd
About DaveAndDeb 3 Articles

Canada’s Adventure Couple, Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil have been in high gear since meeting in 1991. Married for 11 of their 18 years together, they have climbed, paddled, hiked and biked their way through 5 continents and over 30 countries.  Their adventures have taken them to the far corners of the earth where they have embraced new cultures and ways of life, while learning about the traditions of the indigenous people that they meet along the way.

They explore the world with a broad view by seeing it from two different perspectives, allowing them to experience different activities that they would otherwise avoid if traveling alone, and have come to respect the value of compromise.  They believe that they've only scratched the surface of what this world has to offer and look forward to more great journeys. Their goal is to teach the world about other ways of life and raise awareness of social issues that different communities face each day.

In November 2009 they will be leaving on yet another epic travel starting in India and working their way through Central Asia and the Middle East.

You can follow their travels around the world at http://www.theplanetd.com

Their YouTube channel is http://www.youtube.com/wegobyebye

You can follow them on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/theplanetd

10 Comments

  1. I do incorporate video but I get concerned if TOO many videos will slow my site down. Sometimes when I visit websites they take FOREVER to load because they have a ton of graphics, ads, and videos. I just click off and go to another website. But that’s just me.

  2. Great post. I like putting videos on my sit. Almost everyone I know has a YouTube account. It’s easy once you do a video or two. That sucks about the music and that you had to take down your videos. Ya gotta be careful these days because the recording industry is cracking down on people.

    Question, Are the plugins for WordPress compatible with WordPress 2.8? I’m one of those people that likes to update to the latest version even though there could be some “bugs” in the system :)

  3. Hi Jamey.
    Yes, I agree. A sight that is too cluttered with video and graphics is not good. It is important to check the site that is hosting your videos. youtube and kaltura (all-in-one-video-pack) have a large bandwidth that allow your videos to run smoothly. That is what we find anyway.Thanks!

  4. Hey Stan
    We haven’t checked compatibility with 2.8 because we haven’t upgraded yet. We are opposite and like to wait for the bugs to be ironed out:-) But as soon as we upgrade and find out, we will let you know. Yes, it sucks about the music, but it is our fault. When we originally uploaded them 3 years ago, we weren’t really concerned with copywrite or anything. They were just shorter versions of the videos we made for our home movies to share with friends online. I am going to get around to re-editing them and re-posting though, because they were our favorite videos. Thanks for the comments.

  5. Hello Deb,

    Great article. Very easy to understand.

    One question though. What software (free, please!) for video editing can be used by us Windows Freaks?

    The Apple software sounds nice, but I cannot use it. Right?

    Really wanted to get started with taping videos in the next 1-2 months. Haven’t figured out how to do editing though. I want to switch between live video recording and showing stuff on the computer. Needless to say, I will not tape the computer screen but will use software to capture my screens :)

    Thanks again and looking forward to your responses!

    Best Regards,
    M Brand

  6. Great article Deb! I took your advice and posted a video on YouTube of a media trip that I took in April – I’ll be posting a short blog post about it tomorrow…..

    When you get around to re-editing your videos that were removed because of the music copyrights, you should check out iStockPhoto.com – I know there are a lot of sites that offer royalty-free music, but iStockPhoto added a section for music and they already have a lot to choose from – all free of copyright issues for non-commercial use.

    Thanks again for contributing!

  7. Hi Deb great informative post.
    I used YouTube a lot at the start of my blogging 2 years ago., and loved what you can do with iMovie but sometimes when you compress the files the quality of the video becomes a little blurred but now YouTube has increased the MB and the time up to 10min. I had the same problem recently with the usage of music but now YouTube kind of came up with a solution they provide a verity of free music to choose from to add to you video on site I had to add new music to some of my previous videos its not the same effect I had before but then at least there isn’t any copyright breeching with it.

  8. Yes, I tried adding the youtube music, unfortunately we had some speaking in our videos as well, and the music just worked as a blanket over the entire video. Have they changed it so that you can put it into only certain sections of your video?

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