Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo & Francisco Collazo
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After reading the articles in this series, you’ve become intrigued by the possibilities of boosting your blog with video. You’ve applied the tips we’ve shared–and those that readers far more experienced with video have offered (thanks, Craig!). You’ve produced some decent video you’d like to share with visitors to your blog…. now what?

The final steps in boosting your blog with video are publishing your video and promoting it once it has gone live. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Establish a YouTube account. If you don’t already have a YouTube account, now’s the perfect time for you to get one! YouTube, of course, is a massive online archive of videos, ranging from the terribly amateur to the compelling yet obscure. Signing up really is quick and easy.

YouTube isn’t the only online video library that’s free and yours for the using. Vimeo and GoogleVideo are two similar services. Each of the services offers its own advantages; the only major drawback of all three systems is that your uploaded video gets compressed considerably, affecting the quality of your final product.

Matador Travel’s video editor, Joshua Johnson, just tipped us off to a service that we haven’t checked yet but which seems to offer some serious promise: TubeMogul. TubeMogul is distinct from the other three services mentioned above because, as its website says:

TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.

In other words, if you have a TubeMogul account, you upload your video there and it gets distributed across YouTube, Vimeo, and more than a dozen other online video platforms. Sounds good to us.

Finally, if you are creating videos in a particular area of interest–travel, for instance–you may wish to do a Google search to see if there’s a specialized video platform that archives and broadcasts video for that subject. TripFilms is an excellent example, though there are many more. TripFilms happens to be especially interesting because regular video contributors may be able to get paid for their footage.

Regardless of the online video platform you select, be sure to name your account appropriately. If you have a blog you’re using to promote yourself as a writer, and if your blog (as it should) has a name, then your online video account should use the same name or something really similar. You’re creating a brand for yourself; be consistent.

2. Upload your video. Once you’ve decided which one(s) of these online video platforms you want to use, upload your video. This is a fairly straightforward process, and the instructions for doing so will be on the website you’ve selected. Typically, uploading video simply involves clicking “Upload,” noting the title, category, and keywords that describe your video, and selecting the video file from your hard drive that you want to upload. Upload time depends entirely upon the size of your file and the speed of your internet connection. Expect upload times of 5 minutes or less for smaller files; several hours for longer videos.

3. Don’t skimp on the details. Before you actually hit the upload button, stop for a second and review your entire submission. Does the name you’ve selected for the video match the title that’s actually on your video (if it has a title)? Do the key words or tags you’ve included reflect the content in the video? In your key words and tags, be sure to include common variations or anticipiated misspellings for words that might be typed in incorrectly during a search.

4. Promote your video. Once your video has been published, your online video platform will give you a string of HTML code that you cut and paste into a blog post in order to embed the video. Once you’ve pasted the code into your post, be sure to preview to make sure that your video appears and runs correctly. You may want to consider creating a new category for videos on your blog; that way, visitors can conduct a search for your video content quickly and easily.

5. Manage your promotional efforts. Your video is up on your blog. Now what?! You can use all the usual techniques you use to let people know about new blog posts: Twitter, Facebook, your e-mail status bar. You can send an e-mail to your contacts announcing that your blog is now video enhanced. You’ll also want to check into your online video account regularly to see if any viewers have left comments or ratings of your videos. Viewers who are doing a casual or targeted search on YouTube may access your video through that site, not through your blog, and their comments may go overlooked if you’re not checking in on your account on a periodic basis.

So go get publishing and promoting! And let us know where we can see your video.

Photo: Frederic-Michel Chevalier (Flickr creative commons)