Starting a Video Blog - Part I
Posted on March 1, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Wordpress |
This is the first part of a Video Blog Tutorial series. I hope this guide will help you enter the world of video blogging.
Video Blogging Part One Covers:
- Blogging Software - Worpress
- Domain Name Branding
- Wordpres Plugins for Video Blogging
- Tag Clouds
- Video Management
- Convert to flv
- Rip flv
- Compress videos on Windows and Mac
- Wordpress Themes
There is a lot of traffic in video sites. You see the great success of sites like Youtube and, and old sites like ebaum. Yes, there is a lot of competition, but video media is here today, gone tomorrow. New viral videos spring up all the time. A video comes out, hits it big, is spread via IM, forums, websites, and social media sites. A few months latter, a whole new video comes out and repeats the process. You can capitalize on this disposable traffic.
You Need A Blog
This is pretty simple. I’m not going to cover every step of the process, because my focus here is how to set up a blog for videos. I will give you a few resources though.
First off, use Wordpress. There are other blogs out there, but I consider Wordpress the best, and this tutorial will be done using Wordpress.
You have two options:
Get Site Hosted with Wordpress
Go to wordpress.com and sign up for a wordpress blog
Host Your Own Blog
You’ll need hosting. I use dreamhost, but many hosts will work for this. Since this is a media site, bandwidth is a consideration.
Go to wordpress.org and download Wordpress
Then, you can follow their guide to install the software. It’s pretty simple.
Also, check out Courtney’s great article on starting a blog. Hell, read his entire blog. You can apply everything he teaches you to a video blog.
So, you should have your blog up and running now.
Domain Name /Branding
Although similar to keyword snipping, its actually good to brand this type of site. Video sites can keep traffic, and really benefit from branding. I wouldn’t consider it a “Flagship” blog, nor a keyword focused site, but its somewhere in the middle imo. At least mine will be.
So, when picking your domain name don’t get a keyword flooded name, or one that has hyphens. Get something catchy. Put some thought into. We’ll be building the entire site around this name. So get something solid. If you can include a keyword, that’s great, but don’t sacrifice a good name in exchange.
Video Blog Plugins
This is how were going to transfer an ordinary blog into a video blog machine. Plugins are great, and can drastically transform a blog.
Viper’s Video Quicktags - This is a wonderful must have plugin and the core of your new video blog. This plugin adds buttons to quickly add a video to your post. It can easily handle 3rd party videos simply by taking the video’s URL as the input, or even play videos hosted from your server.
WP-PostRatings - Another wonderful plugin that will allow your visitors to rate videos 1 to 5. It has a nice ajax voting system that is clean and easy. Can also output the top videos. Works well with a widget WP theme. This is useful because it gets your users interacting with the site. It is a MUST.
Sociable (Anti-Social) - Another great plugin that adds quick and easy buttons to a post that allow your users to add the link to various social networking sites. The anti-social version adds no-follow to the links. if you’re concerned about SEO, go with anti-social.
Feedburner - This will handle and track all your subscriptions (RSS and Email). It provides visitors an easy way to keep up with updates to your site. Helps create visitor loyalty.
All in One SEO - A MUST. Install this. If you have the slightest concern for SEO, you need to install this. It has many SEO options for your site, and optimizes your page titles.
No-WWW - Often overlooked. You need to select a preferred domain. The point is that Google treats: www.domain.com, differently than domain.com. You need to pick one, and redirect the other to your preferred domain. Read my post on: Preferred Domains.
Google Sitemap - Create an xml sitemap for your blog quickly. Another MUST. Don’t skip this. Here is a great article on how to use the sitmap plugin.
HTML Sitemap - This has a two purposes. One is usability and navigation. This greats a list of all the pages on your site. Its readable to humans. But, it also provides a quick way for a bot to crawl your site.
Related Posts - Another plugin with two great reasons.One, it keeps your users on your site by linking them related content at the end of each post. Hopefully they’ll see something that interest them enough to click and stick around a little longer. Secondly, it helps deep link to old posts, it interlinks related posts, and keeps content from getting buried.
Show Top Commentors - An easy way to build activity on your site by encouraging people to comment more often.
Threaded Comments - Just a user friendly addon that allows users to reply directly to a comment.
Recent Posts - Help catch users right away, show them a list of your fresh new content right in your side bar.
Configurable Tag Cloud - I’ll mention tags and a tag cloud later, but this is a great plugin to make a tag cloud with a widgetized theme. [Uses built in Wordpress tagging]
Akismet - Comes installed with Wordpress. You just need to get a key. This is a must to stop spam.
Tag Cloud
You really should take advantage of tags. Tags are basically keywords you can “tag” a post with. They link to a tag page that shows other posts with the same tag. These tags can also show a tag cloud. Which is a list of text links that represent the tags used on the site.
My explanation doesn’t do them justice, so read this article: Tags, Tag Clouds and SEO.
I’d really suggest the use of a tag cloud for Usability and SEO.
Dealing With Videos
A lot of the videos I deal with are already in flv format, but if you need to convert them, there are a could of different ways I can suggest:
Convert Videos to FLV:
If you need help encoding various video video formats (avi,mpeg,etc) to FLV, here are some suggestions:
If you use DreamHost, they’ll convert videos to flv for you. Check your control panel. Under goodies I think. It’s just one more reason DH is awesome.
Take advantage of YouTube. When you upload a video to Youtube, they convert it to flv. You can then redownload it with the Firefox Add-on Download Helper.
Or use a program: Try out Riva FLV Encoder. I’ve personally have never used it, but you could give it a shot.
Rip FLV Videos:
If you want to rip videos from popular video sites, like Youtube, use the Firefox Add-on Download Helper. I use it personally, and it has been great.
I’m not an expert on videos, but the first two options usually take care of what I need.
Compressing a Video:
If you need help compressing videos you make:
Wordpress Theme
Honestly, any theme will work, but not all theme are created equal. A trusted source is Court’s SEO themes. If you are targeting a keyword, check out his keyword snipping theme. I suggest getting a theme that can tag advantage of widgets. It makes your life very easy.
A few articles I’ve written you may want to check out:
Wordpress SEO
Mask Your Keyword Snipping Theme
Conclusion (for now):
That should be enough for now to help get you set up. In my next article, I will go further indepth, and help you get your video blog going.
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