How to Quickly Add Videos to Your Blog Posts

Let's continue with the writing better blog posts series. The past three posts talked about proper formatting of a blog post, writing a good title, and using images in your blog post. This post will talk about using this strategy to further increase people's engagement with a your blog post.

This strategy can be implemented quickly and easily. But if you want to go the DIY route, it will take a bit more time.

What we will talk about is adding videos to your blog posts. We will discuss why it is a good idea to include them, how you can record your own videos, and how you can add other people's videos in your posts. 

Why Embed Videos in Your Posts?

The first reason is engagement with your blog readers. Not all readers like reading text. So, if your blog is only be composed of written text, some of your blog visitors will immediately click away. 

It is better if we could take advantage of technology. Now that options are available, it's easy to embed audio and videos into our blog posts. 

The second reason is to make things more interesting for your readers. If you add relevant videos into your posts, readers would want to stay longer on your blog. 

People probably won't stay to read a long blog post, but if you put the same content in a video, it would be more interesting and they would watch it. When your visitors stay longer on your site, that can boost your Search Engine rankings. 

So, for example, you're in the gardening niche. You're writing a blog post about growing tomatoes from seeds and you want to show the process of replanting the tomato seedling in your garden bed. You can do this by including a video where you show them how to do the replanting. Adding the video would really enhance the rest of your blog post. 

How Can You Add Videos to Your Blog?

Because you're reading up to this point, it means that you are interested in knowing more about adding videos to your posts. 

Well, first you need to decide whether you will create your own videos or not. 

If you're not creating your own videos, you can still add videos to your blog posts. Just go to YouTube or any video-sharing sites that allow people to embed videos. 

This is the easiest way to add videos to your blog posts and I do this many times. See the two videos embedded below? They are from YouTube created by other people. 

The important thing you should keep in mind is that the video should enhance your content or your written content should enhance the video if the video is the main reason you put the post together. 

Creating your own videos is not as difficult as you might think especially with the technologies available nowadays. Here are a few ideas:

1. Use your mobile phone to record a video of anything you like as long as it is something relevant to your blog niche. 

2. Use PowerPoint, Keynote or Google slides to create a slideshow presentation about your topic of choice and convert it to a video.  Watch the video below to learn how to create a video using PowerPoint.

3. Use online programs like Canva, Lumen5 or Adobe Spark to easily create videos from your blog post text. The three programs can be used for free. 

I have used both Lumen5 and Adobe Spark to create videos, which I share on our YouTube channel. In the post 5 Essentials of How to Write a Good CTA for Your Blog Post, I created and posted a video I made using Lumen5.

I mentioned using Canva (my affiliate link) for creating images before. Well, you can also use Canva to create videos. It's free to use and there's no watermark unlike with the above two programs. Watch how to make videos using Canva below.

Watch the video below to learn how to use Lumen5. 

4. Use a video conferencing platform like Zoom or Streamyard to record a video. 

You can also use this technique for free with limitations to record yourself talking while sharing a slideshow. I see a lot of online marketers use this technique to create videos including tutorials. 

But I think the advantage of this technique is you can use it to create a video in collaboration with other people. You can host an online meeting or a webinar, interview people, or have a panel discussion and record it at the same time. 

Second, you need to upload your video then share it on your post.

After creating your videos, you can upload them to sites like YouTube or Vimeo for free and then embed the video to your blog. Watch the video below to learn how to Add YouTube Videos to Your Blog.

If you're using Blogger, there are three ways to easily Add YouTube Videos to Your Blog post. 

1. Copy the URL of the YouTube video, then click the Insert Video icon and click YouTube. 

Then click Search and paste the URL on the search box to find the video. Click the video that appears and Select to add the video to your post. 

2. If you have a YouTube channel connected to your Blogger account, you can just search and select the videos already uploaded to your YouTube channel.

3. You can also upload videos to your blog itself, but doing so will eat up your hosting storage space. 

In Blogger, when writing your post, you can click the Insert Video icon and click Upload from computer, then follow the instructions. 

If you're using other blogging platforms, there are options to do this also. In WordPress, you can add your video to your Media Library.

As you can see, it is good to add videos to your blog post and it can be done easily using the different options mentioned above. Go ahead and try to do this tip for creating better blog posts.

This is the fifth post in our Better Blogging Challenge. If you missed the other blog posts in this series, just click the link above to find the other posts at the bottom of the page.

Thank you for reading.