Create a Video Blog with WordPress

This basically boils down to posting video clips on your website instead of (or in addition to) writing blog articles. These can be your own videos shot on your digital camera or relevant clips filmed by others and sourced from YouTube or similar sites.

See a Video Blog in action at www.schoolschoralfestival.co.nz;

Why Video Blog?

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then video speaks millions. Think of the time you could save…

• Instead of a detailed product manual, upload a video showing how to assemble or use your product
• Instead of writing about an event/gig, video it and post to your website
• Instead of descriptions and photos of a finished project, video it and post
• Instead of writing about how beautiful your local area is, video it and post

Use a Video-Friendly WordPress Theme

If you’re planning on posting many videos to your blog, this is the way to go. The best video-friendly theme I have found is Tubular Theme by Studio Press.

See Tubular theme in action at www.schoolschoralfestival.co.nz

Briefly what makes this theme so easy to use is that there is a theme options section under Presentation where you choose which of your categories corresponds to the large video at the top of the homepage and which category corresponds to the smaller videos underneath and how many you want displayed at a time. When you Add a new video, just tick the relevant category and your clip appears on the homepage ready to play. Have a look at the New Zealand Schools Choral Festival website to see how it all works.

Purchase Tubular Theme…

Chrome theme by Studio Press also displays videos on the homepage.

Using Your Own Videos

To display your own videos on your website, first setup a free YouTube account. If you already have a Google account, you can login with your google email and password.

Once you are logged in, click on profile and put in your website address, description of your business, your name and any other details you think are relevant. Click the Upload button to upload your clip, making sure you give it a keyword-rich title, tags and a description including your website address.

Loading your videos to YouTube and then using the YouTube code to display them on your website has a couple of big advantages:

1. Video files are large and even a 20 second clip could be 10MB so uploading a few of these clips direct to your own website will probably triple the size of your site and your monthly hosting costs.
2. If you include your web address, interesting descriptions and titles on your video, you will get website traffic from YouTube. Others may even decide to link to your videos on their websites.

Adding Videos to a Blog Post

Find the video you want to display on YouTube and click on it. Copy the embed code on the right (see screenshot) and paste into a new blog post (making sure that the HTML view tab is selected). Hit publish. If you are using one of the Studio Press themes mentioned above, you will want to tick the correct category to ensure your videos to show on your website’s homepage.

You could alternatively create a playlist of any number of video clips and display them on your sidebar. Read my blog post on how to do this…

Promote Your Videos

Make sure you draw attention to your videos. Here are a few ideas:

• Include a YouTube logo on your website linking to your YouTube page
• Customise your YouTube page to show business info, favourites, blog posts etc
• Post a twitter update when you upload a new video with a short description and link
• Create a new page to list all your videos on (you could use List Posts on Pages plugin)
• Use the Other Category Posts plugin to list other videos below each post

Watch a Video Instead (not mine)

Stay tuned for my up and coming post on how to customise your YouTube page, link it to Facebook and Twitter plus other tips and tricks.

Creative Web Ideas