Reasons To Use Video to Enhance Your Blog Posts

Every Monday on my blog I have a segment I call, 'MUSIC MANTRA'. Sometimes I review newly released CD's by different musicians or I have interviews with different people in the music industry. But one of my follower favorites has to be when the day's post focuses on a video I share. I even had new followers join my blog based on the addition of my MUSIC MANTRA posts. How cool is that?

After awhile, I started adding video and video links to some of my other regular posting days and I noticed that the view hits were much higher on the days I added a video than on those I used just pictures or nothing at all. That told me alot.

Now I know many of you already add the video features to your blog posts or online articles but for those who haven't tried it, or wonder how using them can help, I thought today we could talk about some good reasons for using video.

Here are some I realized from my own experience:

• They breathe life into your words. Just think of how much brighter a story shines when you use strong verbal imagery.


• Video can often bring a new emotional level to your piece. Visual cues, especially music videos, are deeply connected to our memory bank. Think of what happens when you watch a video of one of your favorite songs or bands. It pulls you deeper into the precious memory you hold for that song--at least it does for me.


• Many of us are visual learners so when you add the video, your words make more sense to this group. (My daughter, Jaimie, is a visual learner and often absorbs things better with some sort of visual cue.)


• Video can help stimulate discussion on specific issues or subjects your covering.


• It can give the writer inspiration for an article.


• For those writers wanting to do more journalistic-type pieces, you could do your entire article as a video. This is also a great promotional tool!


• Authors who use video trailers for their books can often trigger a higher interest and achieve higher sales because they are making the book 'real'.


• Video helps target those groups who actually prefer watching a story rather than reading it.


• You're likely to have more readers sharing your story when it's been enhanced with video.

The one word of caution I should bring up is that if you aren't using your own video clips in your blog post or article, just be sure it's okay with the creator to use the video in your piece. Most times, people are cool with it as long as you give credit and/or links. But it's very important to get that permission, especially with personal YouTube videos. For example, my videos are unlisted and private because many of them are of my children. I use them for family purposes as well as for highlighting articles I write about certain therapy strategies we use. I don't want people sharing them without my permission (if they actually found them) so I always make sure I give that courtesy to others before sharing theirs.

Okay. That's it on the subject of reasons to enhance your posts with video. What are your experiences with using video clips or links in your posts?