While we live in a video world, blogs aren’t going anywhere. As Cindy points out in her post about the future of blogging in a video-obsessed world, there’s still space for blogs and written content in a world dominated by short-form videos. As TV hasn’t precipitated the demise of books or newspapers, there is room for written and video content in web marketing. Let’s find out how to integrate your video and blog strategies.
A different experience
The core distinction between video and online writing is consumer experience. Written content requires active participation from the reader. They must determine which sections to focus on and at what pace to take the information.
Video is a more passive form of consumption, where the creator determines the running time and controls the experience. You can’t skim-read a video. It also plays across conceptual, visual, and aural faculties, whereas text only connects with us on a conceptual level.
In today’s mixed-media world, the best use of blogs and videos is an integrated strategy. In such a strategy, each form influences the other and works together.
There are a few ways you can think about getting started.
Turn your blog posts into videos
Certain posts are ideal to convert into videos, giving them extra life beyond your blog. You can post these on YouTube and social media. In addition, you can use these to augment and improve the quality of your blog posts.
The blog posts that tend to work best as videos are those with a strong individual editorial perspective. We know these as “op-ed” type content in traditional journalistic language.
When the post is written with the voice and expertise of an individual, hearing from that individual on camera helps to add authenticity and credibility to the post itself. It ensures the core message can be distributed across social media more effectively.
The simplest way to do this is to plan for a talking head video after writing the post – either as a monologue or an interview.
Firstly, reverse engineer your article to determine the theme (core message). Find the points that help explore and explain the theme.
Write these down, and then sit in front of a camera. Talk your way through them, or structure a more formal interview where an interviewer asks questions about each point to get you (or the writer) going.
These videos can then be edited to include branded visual elements, text overlays, and cropped for the optimized formatting of different platforms.
Generally, it’s better to shoot 16×9 horizontally, with the talent’s face in the center of the frame. From there, crop these to create vertical videos for TikTok and Instagram.
Turn your videos into blog posts
Do you have a YouTube channel that’s driving a lot of views? Do you seem to get a lot of engagement with your video posts on LinkedIn? Think about how those videos might be able to be adapted to a written form.
Sometimes, you might be creating a quick video based on an idea, and lo and behold, it seems to resonate with your audience or pick up a lot of views from a YouTube search.
Perhaps it’s then worth thinking about whether there’s a blog-style execution of this idea that would work. Examples of this might be a list of step-by-step instructions for a tutorial idea or several slides and images with supporting text explaining what they show.
A simple way to get going here is to pull out the transcription of the video. Once you have that, reformat it into plain text, and then use this as a basis to edit. Tools like Descript are great for pulling the transcription from any video, and you can then export it to Word or Google Docs.
If your video is rambling or unstructured, you can use ChatGPT or another LLM AI to summarise the core points in more of an article form.
Remember that the nature of media types on the web is much more fluid than ever. Blog posts can encompass video embeds, images, audio, interactive elements, and more.
Consider instances where a mixed-media approach may be preferable to just pure text. Find out where the different media types can support one another. Recipes, for example, are often great when they include lists of ingredients, a summary of the method, some supporting copy, an image of how the final product is supposed to look, and a video demo.
So, as you plan out a content calendar, consider before drafting the possibility of video as part of any posts you’re writing, and bake that into the creative process. Even if you don’t have production resources to do more than a simple talking head video, it can help with EEAT factors. You can demonstrate authenticity and use the personal connection offered by video to build trust.
Don’t forget to implement Video SEO
One of the great benefits of adding video to your blog posts is that these pages can rank in video search and Google organic search.
By implementing Video SEO — which Yoast Video SEO for WordPress automates — your blog posts can appear in the “videos” tab in Google and sometimes as video results with a rich snippet in universal web search.
This means you can use video to improve user experience and drive more traffic to your blog!
