How To Get Started With Vlogging to Increase Your Income

[Lou Serrano]

A blog can help grow your business and increase your income, but the use of video in your blog greatly increases the effectiveness of your blog by having a bigger impact on your audience as compared to an all text site.

A video blog or vlog is an excellent marketing tool for your business. It can help create traffic to your site, and establish brand loyalty.

This short video gives you all the basics to get started with vlogging, and help you increase your income in the process.

Click Here to watch the video and read the accompanying article.

Since I'm on a never ending quest for knowledge, I'd love to hear about your experience in the world of vlogging.

Lou Serrano

[Brad Henderson]

I've seen it used by people who post links to them on established sites to lure traffic onto their own, for their own commercial interests.

As a general observation, if someone wont (or cant) organize their thoughts into a cogent written form suitable for a blog, I hold little hope that their v-log will be 'more' thoughtful or impactful. Plus, it usually takes longer to sit through their videoed rambles than it would to read a transcript there of, even without the text being edited for redunancies and rambles.

But that's just a general observation.

[SteveP]

Good article Lou. Your recommendation for a Kodak Zi8 is perfect. I bought one of these a few months ago and it's a bargain for a consumer level, hi-def camera. Very easy to use and no bigger than a smart phone. What I would add to that is make sure you buy an large SDHC memory card. I picked up a 16GB card for mine. The camera, out of the box, will only let you shoot a couple of minutes of video.

Google definitely takes advantage of video. So many searches now return video from YouTube in the top 10 serp and your eyes are immediately drawn to it.

Since what we do is visual, it only makes sense to add video to our social media efforts, even if it isn't a demo of the show. I've been putting it off for too long and I'll be doing much more with video over the next 2 months.

What Lou does is perfect because he has a short video that isn't going to take up an hour of your time to watch, but if you don't want to watch, or isn't convenient to, then you can still read the same information in the blog post.

[Lou Serrano]

Steve,

Thanks for the recommendation on the memory card. Nothing worse than to buy a camera and not be able to shoot video, because you're out of memory.

On a side note, if anyone is on the fence about creating a video blog, because they believe they're not ready, there is no better time than now. If you wait until everything is perfect, where you have the best camera, the best lighting, the best location, the absolute correct thing to say, that time may never come.

I've been shooting video for my blog for over a year, and I'm still trying to find my voice. Talking to a camera is a very foreign feeling. As performers, we might find it easy to talk in front of an audience where we can get immediate feedback, but speaking to a camera gives you no instant feedback.

As time goes on, I have found that I'm much more comfortable in front of the camera than I used to be, although I'm still not completely comfortable. At least I now have a year head start on finding my voice than I would have if I waited.

Every week I get new people signing up to my blog, and those people are my core audience. In a way, they are members of my tribe, and those are the people for whom I create content.

The sooner you get started, the sooner you will grow your audience. Start with what you have, and move forward from there.

To your success!

Lou Serrano