Over the past 6 or so so months I’ve been experimenting more and more with using Video on my blog. It started out with just an experiment or two but the response from readers was so encouraging that I set myself the goal of running weekly (or as it turned out every second week) video posts.
Like I say – the response has been wonderful – there have been numerous benefits:
- For starters I’ve noticed a lot of new readers commenting on the blog. It seems that video connects with a different kind of reader. While some prefer text others prefer audio/visual teaching.
- It’s added a more personal dynamic to the blog – when I was at the SXSW conference earlier in the year I had a lot of people come up to me because they recognized me from the video and had a lot of comments along the lines of ‘I feel like I know you from your videos’.
- It allows me to express myself in ways I’d not really been able to do before with just written words and still images. Being able to use body language and different tones of voice enables a different level of communication.
The problem with video on a blog is that it is a lot of work. It also means learning a new skills set and spending a lot of time on things like filming and editing – time that I would previously have put into other core blogging tasks.
I personally think that there is a lot I could learn to improve my video so recently when David Kaminski from WebVideo University contacted me to see if I’d be interested in promoting his video making course I told him that I wasn’t interested in promoting it – but instead I was interested in DOING IT.
If you’d like to join me in some learning the course starts on 1 May. It’s short notice (I’m sorry, I was meaning to promote this earlier but it’s been a crazy few weeks) but I’m sure some of you will have time to leap into it.
The course goes for 4 weeks in a ‘virtual classroom’ where you log in to get your classes (video based lessons – what else would you expect in a course like this).
The course isn’t just focused on producing talking head videos but has more of a sales angle to it (creating web videos that sell/web commercials).
I’m looking forward to starting the course tomorrow – hope to see some of you as classmates!
