Photo by Athena’s Pix. I read an interesting piece by Steve Rubel, a voice in social media that I admire and respect very much, called ‘Why Text Remains King of the Web‘. He argues that, as much as video is booming, text is the stronger medium. Text brings search traffic, videos don’t do this so well. Text is scannable, video is not. You can get away with browsing text at work, but it’s much harder to get away with watching video. Text plays nice with mobile devices, video does not… and so on. All very good points. Although I’m not a video blogger, I do see video as the next frontier of web content. I also think Steve’s depiction of video is a little one-dimensional. Text certainly has a few things over video, but video has a few things over text as well. These things are not inconsiderable. We’re at a point now where every niche imaginable has been saturated by written content. You can still forge a name for yourself and gather an audience for your stuff, but it’s harder than ever to set yourself apart. You have more competition than ever before, and because we’ve been doing this for a while now, people are smarter in how they approach creating blogs and websites. For that reason, it’s harder to give people a reason to take an interest in you over the dozen, hundred, thousand people writing about what you’re writing about. Video blogging immediately sets you apart. You offer readers a different sensory experience and a different kind of engagement with the content. Often it’s an experience that simply can’t be translated into text. In fact, great video bloggers often make poor writers, and vice versa. This could be you… One video blogger who has become much more popular lately is Gary Vaynerchuk (even if you don’t like him the case study is relevant). His main assets are his energy and his clarity of expression when he speaks. He doesn’t always say ground-breaking things, but he gets people excited and pumped up to tackle things that matter. If his blog were a traditional written one, though, I’m not sure he would have ever made a name for himself. Energy is really hard to communicate in writing–about the only tool you have is an exclamation mark! Just like I’m far less articulate with words than I am in writing, Gary is the opposite. He’s a brilliant verbal communicator but his writing is average. Video blogging plays to all of his strengths. If you can see some of yourself in his strengths and weaknesses–maybe you feel like just an average writer, or that you’d much rather speak to someone directly than write to them–think about whether you might actually be better suited to video blogging than written blogging. If so, this is not a bad thing at all. In fact, it could be a very, very good thing. A good tech analysis video blog is going to generate much more interest than a good tech analysis written blog. The niche is saturated with ‘good’ text content, but very little good video content. The people who are passionate about tech are already reading all the blogs they’re supposed to read–they’re probably not hungry for more of the same. Video blogging offers something completely new to them. You can cover topics people are passionate about in a way that is utterly different to the written stuff. You’re going to achieve something that is incredibly challenging for a written blog to do in a niche like tech analysis: set yourself apart from the pack immediately. In the ‘Why Text is King‘ article, Steve argues that it is big strength of the text medium that it can be scanned. True, but remember that whenever something becomes widely propagated online there is always an inverse market for its very opposite. Some respite from what ‘everyone else’ is into. If you’ve found yourself drawn to blog posts with complicated thought-lines and not a single numeral in the headline, you may personally be experiencing this. I would much rather watch every second of a ten minute video blog than scan the bolded sub-headings in a blog post. The very appeal of video as a medium is that it enables and encourages full engagement. There for the taking The thing that excites me most about video blogging is that there are so many unused good ideas ready to be turned into incredible realities. Unlike written blogging, where it can take days of hard thinking to come up with even a small idea that is vaguely ‘new’, video blogging has only reached 1/10th of its potential and, I believe, its saturation. You can start a video blog about indie music or half-hour video game reviews and be the only player in a niche that, in its written existence, is choked to the brim. If I had the qualities to make a good video blogger, I would be losing sleep over this. I would be pulling my hair out over which niche to colonize first. While I don’t have those qualities, I know that some of you do, and I hope I can make you as excited about this new frontier as I would be. Even as a spectator, I’m so excited to see where people take it. A different kind of search traffic The video blog that is spreading virally through word of mouth and social media because it’s something completely new and entertaining will far and away eclipse the written blog that receives a few dozen visitors a day from long-tail search traffic. SEO, mobile compatibility, watching at work, scannability are all pretty small things in comparison with something that captures the imagination of the audience. The latter will spread far and wide, despite its handicaps. As humans, we love to see faces and listen to other voices. We like facial expressions, we enjoy entertaining our eyes. We like to watch stuff. Most of us probably spend a lot more time watching stuff than we do reading it. In fact, watching stuff is so ubiquitous that most of us probably don’t even think of it as a hobby. ‘Watching TV/YouTube’ is unlikely to be something you’d put under ‘interests’ on Facebook! YouTube is now the second biggest search engine in the world. Bigger than Yahoo. I don’t buy the argument that video blogs will die because of lack of search traffic. Host your videos on YouTube and the problem is solved. In fact, I’d suggest many video bloggers will get more traffic from YouTube than I will ever get from Google! So here’s the tip My goal with writing at Skelliewag is to help people build popular blogs. Not just blogs that people read, but blogs that a lot of people read. I’ve talked at length about how to do this with written content, but I feel like video blogging–if you have the right qualities–might be a significantly easier route to notoriety than the hard slog path of writing. It also presents an opportunity that has waned in the world of written web content: the opportunity to be a pioneer in a huge niche. I don’t want any of this to sound like I am jumping ship from written content and backing video all the way. Writing is where I devote my energy and I do love it. I also believe the full potential of written web content has not even come close to running dry. But I want to help you think about other ways that you can set yourself apart as a blogger, and I think video is one of the best. So if you are, or could learn to be: Not self-conscious Verbally articulate A bit thick skinned A bit brave A bit less private Then I urge you to think about it. I do envy the opportunity you have!

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Skelliewag/~3/ggYVRfNxKdI/video-is-your-chance-to-be-a-pioneer-598.htm