If you you write a blog for your business, or even just a blog for personal interests or adventures, or to build your social media profile, you should be using video to get more readers, and more people visiting your site. A video can be a perfect accompaniment to many types of posts, whether it be a tutorial, a photo montage, a time-lapse or even some more complex product videos.
Every blog has its day
If you are blogging for business purposes, you’ll be aware of how important good SEO is. SEO is Search Engine Optimisation, and it’s an important marketing tool to ensure your business stays near the top of search engine rankings for terms related to your business. By embedding a video into your blog post, you can get the viewer to spend longer on your page and become more engaged than they would with just written content.
Ideally, if your videos are engaging enough, your readers can fall down the “YouTube rabbit-hole” and watch many of your videos one after the other, boosting your popularity in the eyes of Google. Another way to assist your SEO is by embedding videos with captions. A captions file gives search engines the full text of your video in a searchable format, so that anybody looking for topics covered in your video will be sent in the right direction.
Get Creative
A video shouldn’t just be crammed in as an afterthought to boost your SEO, it should be complementary, or better yet, integral to your blog post. It’s easy just to translate your written blog post into a scripted video and simply read out your points. But it is much more effective to come up with a strategy that identifies your blog topic and to create a video that accompanies it well. Video for the sake of video will not capture anyone’s attention and a boring video may prove to be detrimental.
Go Blog Yourself
If you run a small business, or are in charge of promoting a business, why not put yourself in a video? By having a familiar face over a series of videos, you build a personal connection to the audience. If you’re a bit camera shy, you can recruit a confident member of staff or someone with a bit of experience in public speaking or acting. You don’t need to be Daniel Day Lewis, just confident and clear. Anonymous, faceless product videos work well for an established company like Apple, but if you’re looking to build up a readership then a friendly face will break up the monotony.
Strategise Your Blog Videos
If you are more of an occasional blogger, chances are you don’t really have a plan for what your next blog is going to be, and that’s fine, sometimes the best ideas come organically. But if you are blogging for business you should plan a few steps ahead to save you time and money when it comes to shooting videos.
For instance, if you know that you have an upcoming product launch, you could plan a series of 2-3 blog posts with accompanying videos. One could be about the best features of the new product paired with a product video showing each new feature. Another could be a tutorial video with a staff member showing the various uses of the products. You can also get customer reaction videos, teasers and various other videos depending on your product. You can shoot all of these videos at once, giving you content for several posts to drip feed out to your readers, saving you time and money.
If you are looking to boost your marketing reach, or just get more readers for your blog, get in contact with Dream Engine today.
Ryan Spanger is one of Melbourne’s most respected and sought-after video production professionals. Ryan founded Dream Engine in 2002, and specialises in helping medium to large corporates, government departments, and the non-profit sector to connect with their audience more effectively by using video.
