Dude, Blog Your Business!

Tom and I made this viral video ad for Jones Soda as part of a zooppa.com competition this weekend – despite the rain!
Check it out, and if you like it sign up for free at zooppa.com and vote for us – there’s a $7k prize up for grabs!
We thought we stood a good chance of winning when we first came up with the idea but  we probably left it a bit late to enter  - the closing date is this coming Sunday, and it was a bit more of a rush to get it done than we would have liked.  Also, there are some very good entries & some very talented people out there competing. We had fun doing it though – check out the blooper video on Tom’s blog.

I saw this on Social Median and was compelled to do my part in helping Samsung create a world wide rave. Or, failing that, at least a Wales Wide Rave! Having spent three very happy years at Cardiff University this video certainly attracted my attention. I don’t think it is too Wales-centric to appeal to a wider audience and I commend it to you as a great bit of viral marketing.

As we have discussed in previous posts, video can be the most compelling content for your blog, and getting that video into your blog post couldn’t be more simple. Firstly, you should upload your original video to your YouTube account – that way you are using their bandwidth rather than your own – and like all good things on the internet, it is free. Once your video is uploaded to YouTube you will see two sets of code for sharing that video – a “URL link code” and an “Embed Code”. The URL is a link that you can copy and paste into an email or website that, when clicked, will take that person to the video where it is in YouTube. For your blog, you don’t want take people away from your blog, you want them to be able to play the video directly from the blog. For that you use the ‘Embed Code’ – it “embeds” that video into where ever you want it to go. Simple copy the embed code – then, in your blog’s dashboard (this one is WordPress), make sure you are on the HTML view of the ‘Write-Post’ box and then simply paste the embed code at the top of the page. It should now look like the picture above. Thats it – you are done! Write a few lines of text to explain what the video is about and publish. Your video will appear and be playable in your blog. You can also change the arrangement on the page by left, right or center justifying, or you can alter the size that the video appears in your blog by altering the height and width parameters in the embed code. Its as simple as that.

Last week Tom Hinchey and I spent some time putting together a short video for a presentation, showing people that video blogging can be relatively easy, inexpensive, and fun! With just a few simple tips and tricks most people can video blog for themselves. And that is what blogging is about – being empowered to do your own marketing in an inexpensive, professional and effective way. What we want to do is provide businesses and non-profits with a high quality vehicle that will get them noticed, draw people in, and put them on the cutting edge of online marketing. Then it is up to them how much input they need from us in order to maintain the blog. This five minute video provides a foretaste of what we are planning in the near future. Part of the video blogging package that we will be providing is a more extensive ‘How to Shoot Quality Video for Video Blogs’ DVD, to give our clients all the help they need to maintain their own blogs. For anyone interested in improving their own home videos the DVD will also be available for ordering online through both our blogs in the new year.