Adding video to your blog

Dave Barnhart

Today’s guest post is by Dave Barnhart of Business Blogging Pros.  A social media strategy consultant, Dave has been neck-deep in the Internet since the days when the post powerful search tools were gopher and veronica — long before the World Wide Web existed.  Dave’s passion is helping his fellow Boomer-generation business owners master social media and successfully use it to grow their companies. 

Adding Video to your Blog

Video – not text – is the most compelling online component. Nothing humanizes you like video.  People get to see that you are a real live human being.  Your passion comes through far more easily in video than in text.  Plus, Google loves video.

Yet few people are incorporating video into their blogs. The reasons vary, but one that always comes up is the technological barrier – Most people simply don’t know how to get video onto their blog.

First a disclaimer: I am not an expert in the field of shooting or editing video.  The focus of this post is to describe how to put the finished video on your blog, but it would be incomplete if I did not say at least a few words about shooting and editing.

Shooting video

Have you noticed that many YouTube videos are professionally produced to look amateurish? One of the things YouTube did for us was to lower our expectations of video production values. A professional videographer with a $10,000 camera can produce really nice video. For what most of us are trying to accomplish, however, that is overkill. I shoot video using my decrepit old Sony PC-105 handicam. The Flip camera is inexpensive and so small you can carry it everywhere.  My advice: If you are going to shoot video of yourself get a camera with a remote control.

Keep video short.  I recommend no more than 2-3 minutes and today even that may be too long.  I recently completed shooting a series of videos intended to aid my personal branding efforts and each video clip is about twenty seconds long.

Editing

Programs like Microsoft Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie have made it incredibly easy to edit video.  I’m a Mac guy and though I own higher-end tools like Final Cut, I use iMovie to create most of my short video clips.  One of the benefits of iMovie is that it comes with royalty-free sound and music clips.  It can even upload your video to YouTube when you’re done editing.

 Hosting Your Video

The simplest thing is to use YouTube (http://www.YouTube.com).  Create an account there and upload your video.  While viewing your video, look for the field labeled ‘Embed’.  Copy the HTML of it.  Create a new blog post, click on the ‘HTML’ tab and paste. 

Why host your video on YouTube and not on your blog? Because that way YouTube (or whatever your video hosting service is) takes the storage and bandwidth hit instead of your blog.

Another popular video hosting service is Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com).  The attractions of Vimeo are that the video quality is generally higher, Vimeo supports longer videos than YouTube (YouTube limits clips to 10 minutes in length), and it doesn’t look like just another YouTube video.   The downside is that Vimeo cannot be used for commercial purposes.  Vimeo defines ‘commercial purpose’ pretty broadly.  For detail see http://vimeo.com/guidelines.

Move up the scale a bit and you find Screencast.com (http://www.screencast.com) from Techsmith, the same folks who produce Camtasia. Screencast is pretty easy to use with a very flexible permission structure.  For small amounts of video you can get a free account limited to 2GB of storage and 2GB of monthly bandwidth. A high-capacity account is only $9.95 per month.

Did you know that Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/) is great for hosting video?  It requires a little more technical know-how to set up and use but it is very inexpensive (15 cents per GB per month up to 50 TB).

Displaying Video on Your Blog

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, right? Services like YouTube, Vimeo, and Screencast make it simple to display the video right in your blog.  Just copy the ‘embed’ code they provide (It’s called ‘embed’ code because it usually begins with the html <embed> tag) and paste it into your blog. 

 Hint: Unless you want your readers to see the html of the embed code instead of your video, be sure to click on the ‘HTML’ tab your blog’s ‘Create Post’ page.

 But what if you are using Amazon S3 or hosting the video on your own site?  Flowplayer (http://www.flowplayer.org) and JW Player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/) are two Flash players that are available free and are accompanied by instructions simple enough for almost anyone.  Even easier, Wordpress plugins are available for both Flowplayer (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/word-press-flow-player/) and JW Player (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordtube/).

 Flash, You Say?

Both Flowplayer and JW Player are Flash Players.  Flash (file extension FLV) is a video file format originally created by Adobe and has quickly established itself as the format of choice for embedded video on the web. These players are designed to play FLV or MP4 files.   If you are planning to use FlowPlayer or JW Player in your blog see if your video editing software can output in one of these two formats.  If not, then you’ll have to convert it.  Probably the most common conversion tool is ffmpeg (http://www.ffmpeg.org).  It is a command-line application and so it’s a little geeky.  There are Windows and Mac versions available, and more information is available here (http://flowplayer.org/tutorials/conversion.html).

With helpful tips like these from Dave, I plan to incorporate more video into future blog posts!   LBV