Could you make a living out of creating how-to videos? According to New York Times, people are:

Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

It makes sense, in-demand content is the fuel of the web. More and more people are turning to the web for answers. Advertisers want to be where the eyeballs are.

Read the rest of this entry

If you take a good look around on the web, you will see media of all types from a wide range of people. Today, text is the most prominent—in recent years, blogs have prompted the average person to write content that can be seen by millions of people in a matter of hours or even minutes. However, the recent desire for video content must prompt many to question how commercialized blogging will fair in the future.

Commercialized Blogging Right Now

Blogs are an outlet for advertisers to spread the word about their products and services. This means that the content producers have a way to generate money. The more people that view the content, the more people that will view accompanying advertisements. Companies like Google have been able to take advantage of this.

Also, blogs are prime targets to be advertised on because the content on them can instantly be analyzed, and relevant advertisements can then be served to the readers. Each page on a blog is a new advertising opportunity. It works.

However, if we take a step back from everything to view the bigger picture, we all realize that video content on the web has caught on. Great sites (like YouTube and Vimeo) and better connections are giving this media format room to explode in growth and popularity. Some people even spend their entire days on sites like YouTube, and advertisers are determined to keep up with the people's interests.

Read the rest of this entry

In the latest PerfCast, Chris and I discuss how you can use video to differentiate your site. Specifically, we discuss the fact that the Internet is rapidly driving towards a mixed media format where text no longer suffices, and where video is the most sought after and most consumed media. Chris introduces the fact that new tools are being developed that make video production easier than ever (you can now stream and record video easily with your cellphone), and that the cost of entry to video production is getting to the point where it's accessible to bootstrappers with little or no funding.

In the process, we also discuss my own experience with The PopCrunch Show, as our team transitions into daily production (with the hope of even greater exposure).

Listen to PerfCast #2 here.

I've seen some blogs giving their readers 'something for the night'.
It is one of the easiest article formats. Let me show you how-to do it...

Why not post some late night articles to entertain readers?

Watching funny videos or listening to good music is something I believe some bloggers do from time to time. Do you? Why not share with your readers? It is so easy to create a series of entertaining videos which then will be published automatically at certain times.

Btw. the article title (and the whole article) was inspired by this hectic up-tempo version of Let's spend the night together performed by David Bowie live in London 7/1973.

Let's check sources and publishing possibilities...

Read the rest of this entry

I'm telling you that the only way to find success long term is to focus on building a brand.

I was browsing through Performancing's archives and I came upon the above quote mixed into and lost among a bunch of comments. Not only do I stand by this comment, but I think it applies even more now than when I wrote it.

Though this has been my working principle now for about nine months, I was surprised to find that I hadn't really written an article on what I see as the number one strategy for blogging success: building out a brand.

That's going to change. Because I believe that developing a brand is critical to success, I'm going to write several articles on the idea, with the hope of giving some concrete tips for doing so.

Text content just doesn't cut it anymore

Yes, your base of content needs to be text. And yes, if you are bootstrapping, you should probably start out with a text-only approach. But if you're serious about building out your brand, and capturing an audience, then text should not be your final goal.

The fact of the matter is that you face your fiercest competition in textual content. Text is the easiest form of content to produce and in most niches, the supply far exceeds the demand. This fact is even more pronounced with Google's recent emphasis on authority sites in the SERPS. Exact key-phrase matching is no longer the holy grail of the long tail. Goog has given the long-tail back to the rich and trustworthy.

Read the rest of this entry

If you're interested in adding some visual content to your blog, such as a music video channel, Mark, aka Thetafferboy83, a member at Digital Point Forums, has posted a very detailed, informative thread about making money with a video blog. It's most definitely one of the best how-to posts I've come across, period. Maki at Dosh Dosh offers a bit of summary of Mark's post, along with a bit of commentary. Both are must-read articles, if you're planning to get into video blogs.

Sourcing Videos

Video is hot, and it can be a great way to induce editorial backlinks, if you put in some thought as to the presentation, or how you organize the videos. Apparently, you don't even have to come up with original videos. You can just source great ones:

1. YouTube.
2. Google Videos.
3. DailyMotion.
4. Dovetail.
5. VideoJug.
6. HowTo.tv.

and many, many more sites. That's hardly a complete list, what with all the new video sites popping up, but it's a starting point for you. Warning: there are NSFW (Not Safe for Work) videos on some of these sites, so source content with some discrimination, or post a notice on your site.

Promoting Your Video Blog

As current editor at Tubetorial (started by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark), I've seen how such sites can draw traffic. However, I'm not sure if I agree that everyone can reach the 25% ad CTR (clickthrough rate) that Mark says you can easily get. To do that, I think that you'll need to promote your site on social sites, to get enough traffic:

1. StumbleUpon.
2. Reddit.
3. Digg.
4. Del.icio.us.
5. Netscape.
6. etc., as appropriate.

Do it yourself or get a friend. [Although note that Digg is banning users that vote on stories without apparently spending enough time. And Reddit keeps dropping my account after a couple of weeks, if I haven't used it.]

Read the rest of this entry