Why Video Blogging (Vlogging) Is Hot

Video blogging (or vlogging) can make the work of maintaining a business blog less daunting for those who aren’t natural writers. Instead of waxing poetic in writing about your niche, you create an editorial calendar for video tips, and then shoot as many videos as possible in one or two sessions. Transcribe the text (Castingwords.com can do this for around a dollar a minute), and make sure your short videos (about one to two minutes each) are posted in keyword categories on your blog after you upload them to your business’ YouTube channel. Each post that includes the transcribed SEO-friendly text helps with SEO by adding content and new page URLs that contain keywords. This gives your site an opportunity to grow on a regular basis, providing instant information to customers and a heads-up to the search engines.

Here’s something else to keep in mind: one of the highest forms of ROI can come from having hundreds or thousands of posts ranking for long tail keywords that have high conversion rates. Voila! Sales!

Think you have nothing to talk about on video? Think again! With some creativity, any of the content ideas for blog posts can apply to video.

By creating a video blog, you add more engaging pages to your site and will consequently see your search engine rankings go up. When you add the transcribed text of your videos to your site’s blog, Google will see your new pages as credible content. By adding video, you can participate on YouTube and will be taking part in two of the main social platforms, blogging and YouTube (both of which allow users to comment).

But the connectivity doesn’t stop there. By setting up your blog to feed into Facebook—for example, announcing on Facebook when you make a really cool video post and then linking back to it—you will inspire quality discussions around topics relevant to your business, not just marketing hype. Social media is most useful when based on themes and quality content, not “me, me, me” brochureware. Add Twitter to the mix (if you can find a valid reason to do so, like announcing mortgage rates, product launches, or mentioning recent posts) and you start to have an even deeper strategy. People will be more likely to link to your blog and amazing content when they see how social and authoritative you are.

Get people to share your blog posts on Reddit.com and bookmark you on Delicious, and you will not only have lots of pages that help your SEO, but Google will also see your “citations” all over the web and social sphere. Now write an optimized, mobile-friendly, multimedia news release about your video blog to complete the loop. Video is the wave of the future, as people seek to read less and less.

Photo credit: stevegarfield / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA