How to do Video for Video Blogs

Here’s something new. Business owners have known for a while now that a good Blog can help you get remembered, draw web traffic and heighten your profile in the business community.

Then someone plugged a camera in. Video blogs were born, and many pioneers have tested the idea.

The best written blog article will be referenced, draw traffic and be shared over Social Media.  Good writing coupled with good content that offers the reader insight and food for thought will stand the test of time.

The same can be true of video blogs, but viewers are very fickle and if it doesn’t look and sound as gorgeous as possible, they don’t watch for long. The content could be pure gold, but for most video watchers the first few seconds make or break a video. These are decisions based on what they will find acceptable to watch, in audio visual terms. Bad sound, wobbley filming, little or no editing and poor lighting doesn’t make people want to stay for long enough to hear what you have to say.

And that’s what blogging is really about.  People hearing what you say, how you say it, what things mean to you, what you have figured out that others can benefit from learning…That’s what video should be about too. And it can be. But what is needed is retention of a viewer for the whole video production. Not them clicking in then out again after a few seconds. Not losing them half way through. But viewers engaging with the video blog content, feeling comfortable to sit and watch for the length of what you have to say. For that, it has to feel as much like television as possible.

Viewers are used to watching something better edited, lit and recorded from a warzone than they usually get from a video blog. Yes they are spoilt and shouldn’t expect their local Accountant / Gardener / Make-Up Artist to have broadcast quality video production, but their eyes and ears prefer that. Thanks to evolving video technology, everyone can in theory produce video. Making watchable, engaging video however is much, much harder.

I am talking to people now about producing video for their blogs, and here’s what I’m telling them. Video Professionals are expensive. So, draw up a list of tips that you are happy to share on generic topics relevant to what you do.  These won’t age, so could be filmed all in one day and released on your website monthly or whatever. Unless the world is taken over by aliens and you neglect to mention it, it won’t be apparent when it was filmed. Leave “current events” to your written blog. You have lovely looking video blog content for months ahead, all for the cost of a one day filming being edited.

A plus is that since YouTube was fully integrated into Google recently, video blogs will be easily found. Now you just have to make them easily watched...

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For lots more video tips and other goodies, please take a look at my blog here...