Sick of plain text?

Here are a few fun and unique ways to spice up your blog with video! Every so often I’ll upload a video to my blog to mix things up and I have a few resources to make them that much better. Video’s are something I’m looking to do more of as they have a tendency to go viral more often than text posts, and Google seems to be fond of them too (videos can rank well and in very short amount time). To make your videos that much entertaining, actually generate some revenue, and even interactive for the viewer you may consider using these tools and tips!

Video services

Let’s talk about the different video services you can use first. While YouTube.com is the leader of the pack there are other services that offer more than just sharing and embedding your vids.

Revver.com

www.Revver.com is revenue sharing video servce.  When your video is viewed revver produces income from either ad impressions or ad clicks and shares that revenue with you.  While they aren’t very clear on exactly how much you’ll make or what your percentage of the revenue is, it’s still better than nothing.  From my experience I’ve been generating roughly $0.01 per 30 video impressions.  If you hit a home run and your video goes viral and receives 1,000,000+ views you could really rake in the dough…

Revver also has a nice little Wordpress plugin that make sharing your Revver vids a snap.  While I’m not using it at the moment I’ve tested it and will likely use it more in the future.

Because of Revver’s proffit sharing model I’ll be switching over from YouTube for sure.  The only drawback is Revver manually approves every video and that can take a few hours, and they’re VERY strict on not allowing copyrighted material (this can be a drag if say, you use a copywriten song for a background on a vid).

BlogTV.com

BlogTV.com is a pretty cool service for the serious video blogger. The thing that set BTV appart is their live show feature.  Yup, you can host your very own LIVE show, complete with interactivity from the viewers via a live chat feature.  If you so choose you can record your live shows and offer them for later viewing and embeding.  I think the live whow feature will make BlogTV.com an excelent choice for doing webinars and whatnot for your blog readers.  Just one more way to provide something new and different that can provide real value.

viddler.com

What sets viddler.com apart is their built in link functionality.  What this features does is allows you to insert comments with functioning links at any given point in a video.  This can be VERY useful if you’re doing a tutorial video and want to offer links to useful resouces throughout the video.  In addition to the comments you can add tags and video comments at any given point in the video.  Using the Many Cams program (free to download) you can record live video comments too.  There are a million ways this could be useful  - limited only by your imagination.

muveemix.com

muveemix.com is geared torward mixing your vids with music.  They offer a full range of free music you can use and an online editor to mix your vids.  This is a fun services and very easy to use.

Eyespot.com

Add effects and transitions to the videos you upload, or use some of the large amount of free video clips and music from Eyespot’s media partners.  Good service for free effects and transistions.

YouTube.com

While sharing the fact YoutTube is out there and offers video services may seem redundant because I’m sure you know about this service, I want to mention that if you’re looking for a video to go viral and/or rank well on Google’s search engine result pages, YouTube.com is the way to go.  The services mentioned above may rank on a given search term but from my experience and research for this post you’re most likely to have your YouTube vids rank well above the others.  While the exact reasons for this will never be made public I suspect it because Google owns YouTube… You do the math

Other tools

Now that you have your options covered for places to host and share your vids let add some effects, sound, and maybe make an animated video…

Soundboard.com

If you’re looking for a way to spice up your vids with sounds (effects, movie bites, whatever) soundboard.com will likely have what you’re looking for.  As of this writing they offer over 124,000 sound clips.

Blender

Now if you’re interested in doing animated videos without breaking the bank - Blender’s your choice.  It’s a free program offered under the GNU gereral public license.  While it will take some serious learning to create animations with this tool the end results are well worh the work.

Wax

Want a nice, free, basic video editor? You may want to try Wax. In addition to offering basic editing capabilities as a stand alone editor, Wax can be used as a plugin for several popular editing programs (currently supports Sony Vegas®, Pure Motion EditStudio and Adobe Premiere®, with more in the works) as an advanced 2D and 3D special effect modual.

There are plenty of other options for editing, effects, audio and so on and if you have a favorite I didn’t mention here please comment below with your suggestions for all to read!!!

Stumble