Blog­ging Or Vlog­ging Which Is Right For You

Start­ing a blog can be a great way to 

  • share your views with the world,
  • con­nect with other peo­ple who share the same in­ter­ests as you, or even to
  • pro­mote your­self as an artist, writer, mu­si­cian or business.

There are so many op­tions now when it comes to blog for­mat, from mi­cro blogs of im­ages like Tum­blr through to clas­sic text and im­age blogs and of course, video based blogs.

If you are un­sure what style of blog is go­ing to be right for you, then here are some things to con­sider which will help you decide:

Where Do Your Strengths Lie?

Do you come across well on cam­era, and en­joy pre­sent­ing your ideas and en­thu­si­asm vo­cally, or do you like to take your time and write things down?

The se­cret to any blog’s suc­cess is how good the con­tent is, so if you know deep down you aren’t a great writer or you are cam­era shy and don’t think you can con­vey the right sort of grav­i­tas or charisma on video, then you have your answer.

Play to your own strengths.

Of course, just be­cause you aren’t JK Rowl­ing does­n’t mean you can’t write some­thing worth­while, and you don’t need to be a me­dia trained pre­sen­ter to make a good video, ei­ther. If your ideas, thoughts or other con­tri­bu­tions are good, peo­ple don’t ex­pect every­thing a mem­ber of the pub­lic has made for the web to have the pro­duc­tion val­ues or slick­ness of pro­fes­sion­ally made media.

The thing is to avoid do­ing any­thing you know you are worse than av­er­age at, and make sure you choose a for­mat you’ll en­joy mak­ing rather than find stress­ful and arduous.

What Does Your Tar­get Au­di­ence Like?

Peo­ple us­ing the in­ter­net all have dif­fer­ent habits and preferences.

  • Some peo­ple don’t like to do a lot of read­ing and pre­fer their in­for­ma­tion pre­sented in video form,
  • whereas oth­ers en­joy blogs they can take their time read­ing wher­ever they are.

You should have a fair idea of the kind of peo­ple you would like to be read­ing, watch­ing and shar­ing your blog, so think about what you think those peo­ple might find it eas­ier to en­gage with.

While the ma­jor­ity of peo­ple, if the con­tent is good and rel­e­vant to their in­ter­ests, will ac­cept both text and video blogs into their reg­u­lar vis­it­ing list, if you know that the kind of peo­ple you want to ap­peal to en­joy read­ing care­fully thought out ar­ti­cles or pre­fer fun, fast paced videos, then this should help your decision.

How Much Time Can You Commit?

Do you want to spend a lot of time on your blog, or just an hour a week?

While you can spend as much or as lit­tle time as you like on ei­ther writ­ten or video con­tent, video tends to be a faster way to cap­ture thoughts and ideas than writ­ing them out, proof­read­ing and post­ing them.

If you want to make lots of posts every week so you have an abun­dance of con­tent quickly, video can also be the way to go as you can make a video clip in a few min­utes, and even a short writ­ten ar­ti­cle (which won’t do much for you in SEO terms) will take most peo­ple at least half an hour to put together.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: It’s amaz­ing how fast and cheap you can cre­ate video con­tent for your site or blog.

I don’t do it yet on In­ter­net­Busi­ness­Mas­ter­mind be­cause Eng­lish is not my na­tive lan­guage; but cre­at­ing videos for my Ger­man sites and clients is a mat­ter of 15 to 60 min­utes. If you feel you need spe­cial light and make up, maybe an ex­tra hour for that.

When I started my agency 12 years ago we were in­volved in a client project spend­ing a bit more than $ 1,000,000 on 20 min­utes of cor­po­rate video. To­day we could cre­ate the same pro­fes­sional videos for 5% of that.

And a ‘talk­ing head’ video for your blog is lit­er­ally ‘free’ if you own a smart phone with in­te­grated video cam.