One of the areas of blogging I have not jumped into yet is video, but it is getting hard to ignore the benefits of video for blogging and SEO. When people Google my name, aka personal brand, I want my results to look something like Matt Cutts, my current “personal branding hero” in Google, with no one else in the top 10.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for my own personal brand, therefore I plan on expanding myself into the realm of creating different types of media for myself, blog, and other projects.
Video Ideas for Bloggers
Here are some of the ideas I came up with for videos that I plan to do for my new YouTube Channel, and I thought I’d share them for other bloggers looking to also build up their video repertoire.
About Me Video
Instead of just an about me page or introduction post to your blog, why not add a video to it? You can transcribe what you say in the video below it so you have something for both your readers and your watchers. Look for this coming soon on my own about page.
Search Story
This is actually the first video I have decided to do – my own search story. YouTube Search Stories let’s you create a video using different search queries and their results. I chose to focus mine on my blogging and major guest posting contributions (of course, I had many more, but not enough fields in the search to cover them all). I used my name and main keywords – blogging and social media – in the title of the video for search purposes.
It takes about 5 minutes to create, a few more to process, and a few more to upload, so you can have one in less than 15 minutes. And of course, you can do it on any topics you choose. If you have trouble with the search showing a few too many things that don’t belong to you, try using the back button a few times and re-processing the video – it changes the view of the results from slide to slide. If you want a guide to creating a great search story, check out this post with 7 steps to creating a compelling search story.
Video Tutorials
Do you like writing tutorials? Why not take some of your tutorial posts and actually walk people through the steps of the tutorial in a video screencast. I’m going to be testing out some free screencast programs over the next week and working on one for a recent favorite tutorial post of mine. If you have used any free programs, suggestions are welcome, especially with example videos.
Answer Commenter’s Questions
If you get a lot of questions in your posts’ comments, why not answer some in a video? Talk about a reason to get people to watch your videos, and being able to fully answer questions without writing a book in your comments!
Explain Why You Chose Something
Have you recently written a top list of favorite bloggers, websites, tools, etc.? You can do a video accompanying the post, explaining why you made the choices you did. It can be a video of just yourself, or a screencast of you going through the websites of the people / tools you are talking about with why you like them or how you use them.
Your Video Blogging Experience
Have you embarked upon the road of incorporating video into your blog, or are at least contemplating it? What other ideas do you have for videos for bloggers, and what tools / software do you use to produce your videos?
Also, be sure to click here and subscribe to my new YouTube channel so you can stay up to date on my video blogging progress.
