One more note on video blogging

April 16, 2008 | Posted by Sapphire

I’ve talked a lot recently about negative reactions to video blogging. This post is more neutral, and addresses a couple of distinctions my other posts didn’t make.

Reaching new visitors

Will video blogging introduce new visitors to your site? It sure can! If you post the videos in the right place for the audience you’re seeking, and the videos are good, and your site is of interest, absolutely. It can be a fabulous way to expand your readership (which is one of the points Mark is always making).

Can it alienate current visitors?

Yeah (see my above linked post). But generally, I think if you have text along with video, you won’t lose any visitors.

Should I add it to my existing site?

There’s no right answer. For affiliate marketers, I think video blogging with text can help without hurting. For other niches, I’m not so sure. I think it will always be best practice to include text with video. I recently posted on another site a video of someone cooking a recipe because seeing him do it was helpful; but I typed the recipe and directions because you can’t print the video and take it into the kitchen with you. You’ve got to consider how people might be using your posts in order to give them what they’ll need.

And are there niches where video blogging could hurt you even if you include text? I think so. Plenty of people are still complaining about load times and sites hanging up so they can’t read the text for the video’s epic struggle to load. People who are barely tech savvy enough to read blogs may think videos are ads or viruses. I think the niches where video blogging could hurt you are few and far between, but you’ve got to think about who your audience is and what they would want to see. Maybe they would appreciate links to video tutorials or videocasts, but not having the video itself embedded right in the middle of the post. And maybe they really want that video and nothing else. It all depends on your audience.

Do people read your blog at work? This is a really, really important consideration because people who read blogs on the sly at the office are not going to crank up your video so they can hear what you’re saying. Nor can they read your video on WorkFriendly. Before you abandon text altogether or get lazy and tell people “Just watch the video – it’s all in there, but I don’t have time to type it up”, consider that your core readers may not have the option to watch your video where they read your blog.

Do people read your blog on their iPhone? In this case, video might be ideal for you, providing you have tested what your videos look like on it. It’s almost definitely going to be easier to watch a video on a postage stamp screen than read text.

And when you make your video, consider whether your audience has time for fancy intros. Is your audience consuming 100 blogs, trying to climb to the top of the same heap you’re working in? Or is your audience someone who lazily reads blogs on Saturday afternoons. I suspect the most successful videos will always be the ones that have short intros and dive right into the content. You may not even need an intro if your title says what the video is all about.

There are plenty of niches that cry out for video blogging. Travel, for one. Reading a description of a tour someone took is great, and some people will always prefer it. But to have the option of footage from the vacation? How cool is that? Traveling is an extremely visual activity – that’s why they call it “sight seeing.” If your niche is similarly visual, go get a camera and get to work.

Bottom line: There are very few cases where offering video as an alternative to, not replacement for, text wouldn’t help you, and in all of those cases offering a link to a video instead of embedding it should work great. Keep videos as short and to the point as possible – don’t start thinking you’re Spielberg. And make sure the text you provide is complete enough that the comments won’t reveal they missed something by skipping the video, or you might lose a valuable reader and commenter.

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