Reason #1
Posting videos to the Internet is hot.The statistics are mind-blowing. Over and over I hear YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world and I should get in on the action. OK I finally gave in and started recording and uploading videos to YouTube. Of course there’s other video networks out there but I focus on YouTube because it has (by far) the most viewers.
For years I said, “You can’t search videos. Reading is much faster!” From my ivory tower I shouted to the masses, “Don’t waste my time!” Video was off my radar. Video startups approached me at parties and I said, “Sorry guys, I’m not interested.”
The good news for bloggers late to the party: YouTube is still growing.
Reason #2
Turns out you CAN search videos.Google used its enormous financial resources and has the smartest engineers in the world working on this problem. The problem of pulling words from videos using speech recognition. My father is an accessibility engineer, so I understand the complexity of speech recognition. It’s not a “teleport me to Mars” impossible problem, but pulling words from almost-random sequences of frequencies is not easy!
However, we must also acknowledge “speech recognition” is just the tip of the “search videos” iceberg. YouTube has user-generated “meta data” in the form of tags, descriptions and comments. These “relevancy clues” are further reinforced by YouTube’s various voting mechanisms: subscribe buttons, thumbs-up buttons, view counts, etc.
Pull all that data together and searching videos is not that hard. Video SEO is absolutely real, useful and vital. Video SEO is good for bloggers and good for business. When we embed a video in our blog, whether or not we recorded it, we benefit from all this rich relevancy. More relevancy means more traffic, more people reading our blog.
Reason #3
Blogs complement videos and vice-versa.YouTube lets you link and brand your blog in multiple ways: in the video itself, in the description of your video and all over your channel page. On my YouTube channel page you can see my logo and links to all of my blogs. Also, look in my video description, I have a direct link there to a relevant page on my blog, passing sweet link juice. And in the actual video I’m showing my URL in the subtitles. All those links add up!
On your blog there’s new opportunities too. Listen to this tip I picked up from watching YouTube videos about Adsense. In our blog’s theme, if we show an ad beside an embedded video, our blog’s reader will probably see it. Why?
Reading requires our eyes’ full attention. And as we read, we scroll! If we’re “speed reading” or “scanning” we’re scrolling even faster! This is why 90% of readers skip the ads on our blogs. But watching a video on a blog is a totally different experience. As we watch videos our eyes are free to wander. If the video is interesting, we’re not scrolling the page at all. So ads beside videos get several minutes of exposure, clickthrough-ratios (CTR) increase and CPM (cost per thousand) rates rise.
Ideally, blogging for cash isn’t our primary goal, but you must admit it gets our economy pumping. Helping businesses find new customers gets people working together, helps people solve problems and helps businesses grow. This provides jobs and everyone benefits. Win-win for everybody.
That’s just three reasons off the top of my head. Let me ask you, are you publishing videos on your blog? Why or why not? What are YOUR reasons?
