However, for those that haven’t taken the plunge yet the idea of vlogging can be intimidating. Just like pitching up for your first day at a new school, there’s a fear that you might not fit in, you might not look quite right or say the right things. Just like the schoolyard the internet is a place full of people who aren’t afraid to comment, and putting yourself out there on camera can be disconcerting.

So what are the challenges you need to overcome and what should you do to ensure you become popular and part of the cool crowd? Let’s find out.

Be yourself
Imagine turning up for your first day at school, you might spend hours thinking about what to wear to make a good impression and look cool. The same thing might apply when thinking about making your first vlog, this is going to be the first time your community is going to see you in the flesh.

Is my hair perfect? What clothes should I put on? What kind of lighting should I have? These are the questions you might be considering, and it’s perfectly natural, but should you really worry about what everyone else thinks? The most important thing is just being comfortable. That means dressing as you normally would and acting like you normally would, it means being yourself.

Are the people, both on the internet and in the schoolyard, who judge you on how you look worth caring about? The people who become your friends like you for who you are and what you talk about. That goes for your blog community too. They visit your blog because they love your content, the stuff you talk about and the way you talk about it. What you wear or how you look doesn’t come into it.

And don’t hold back
Sat in a classroom for the first time it’s pretty tempting to keep your head down and only talk when absolutely necessary. The temptation is the same with vlogging. You might do it, but only because you feel you have to.

Don’t succumb to the temptation though, you’re not afraid to voice your opinions and ideas, you’re a blogger after all! The best way to get started is to just get stuck in, hold your head up high and be confident.

It gets easier
Being the new kid at school isn’t easy, but it gets better with time as you find your feet and settle into it. The same is true of vlogging and before you know it you’ll feel completely at home.

All it takes is a bit of confidence and the courage of your convictions. The idea isn’t to fit in and be part of the crowd, but to be yourself and to talk about the things you want to talk about. Isn’t that why you set up that blog in the first place? So why not get started today?

The way people access content is changing

US: “Time spent consuming media online and in mobile among 18-49 year olds has ballooned in the past four years while consumption of TV, radio and print have shrunk.”
(SpotXchange, Survival Guide to the Digital Video Landscape, November 2012)

US: “One of the reasons for this is, of course, the growing smartphone and tablet penetration. Forrester found that about half of U.S. online adults now own a smartphone and two-thirds even own multiple connected devices. Tablet adoption doubled since 2011 and is now at 19 percent.”
(Forrester, The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2012, US)

UK “Nearly 1/3 of page views in the UK now occur on a smartphone or tablet. The rapid adoption of internet enabled devices is contributing to a more fragmented digital media landscape.”
(ComScore, UK Digital Future in Focus, 2013 p.3)

These devices are increasingly used to view online video

“Mobile and tablet shoppers are 3x times as likely to view a video as laptop or desktop users.”
(Forbes. Video+Tablets: The Mobile Catalyst for E-Commerce (Watch out Amazon!). 2012)

UK “The online video audience in the UK grew 8 percent in the past year, whilst the audience for video viewing on a mobile grew 262 percent. YouTube still top video property followed by Amazon and Facebook.”
(ComScore, UK Digital Future in Focus, 2013 p.3)

And to purchase products

US: “Last year, eMarketer estimates, US retail mcommerce sales shot up 81% to nearly $25 billion. This year, a further increase of 55.7% in sales is expected, and mobile sales will account for 15% of all retail ecommerce.”
(eMarketer, Jan 10 2013)

UK: “Almost 70% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month.”
(InMobi and Mobext, The Role of Tablets in the Consumer Sales Journey, 2012)

The question many bloggers ask is whether you can do it without getting that nagging feeling you’ve sold out. Let’s take a look at some ideas for how you can create great content, make money from it and sleep soundly at night.

Promote a product
Blogs are credible because of their independence. If you’re a film reviewer, you can be as brutally honest as you want about the latest blockbuster because, well, who’s going to stop you? People can relate to this honesty and trust it, just think about how important user reviews have become on ecommerce websites. We want to know what real people think.

If your blog talks about products, whether just mentioned in a video tutorial or fully road-tested in an in-depth review, the best way to make money is to give your community a way of purchasing that product, assuming you’re being positive about it of course! Your credibility on whatever subject you talk about is bound to influence the buying decisions of your community, so if you recommend a product, give them a way to take the natural next step and get hold of it.

Promote a merchant
However, if you’re a blogger whose content isn’t focused on individual products, this isn’t an option that’s available to you. Never fear though, rather than giving your community a way to get hold of specific items, why not connect them with a reputable merchant in a similar sector to that of your blog?

For instance, you might be a mum or dad who runs a blog giving advice and tips on the trials and tribulations of parenthood, along with all those funny anecdotes about your little terrors! Why not direct your audience to a merchant that sells childcare products, clothing and accessories? The connection is still relevant, and you can choose to only promote a company whose values you believe in.

Promote a brand with shared values
So what happens when you can’t find a way to promote a relevant product, and you can’t think of a merchant or company you want to promote more generally? It’s a difficult one, because the more general you get with your connections to places outside of your blog, the higher the risk there is that your community thinks you’re just trying to make money out of them.

There is another solution though, you can promote a brand that has shared values with you. Let’s use the example of a music blogger who devotes hours to buying new music and reviewing it for her audience. She can’t find an affiliate link for a particular album, but also doesn’t want to be seen to be promoting one record label over another on the back of liking one artist on their roster. However, she’s a keen surfer and most of the music she reviews has come out of the surf scene, so it might make sense to connect her community to a brand with similar cultural values to the music she reviews, like a surf brand.

Before you go to bed
Connecting your blog posts with a particular product, merchant or brand and earning commission on each sale you contribute to is the basis of what’s known as affiliate marketing. ProBlogger has a great article on 10 popular affiliate programs for small and medium-sized blogs for you to check out. If you’re a video blogger, maybe Coull Vidlinkr is for you?

Whatever service you use to make money from your blog, promoting something that’s relevant to your content and your community is key to picking up a cheque and sleeping soundly at night. It might be a bit more work than installing banners or Google AdWords, but it’ll be worth it.

The PMA categories cover channels such as mobile and search, as well as verticals from travel to retail and technology. The Best Brand Engagement Campaign award, for which our campaign for Tesco Direct is shortlisted, focuses on campaigns that have been successful in engaging consumers and meeting client objectives across channels such as video, social, print, and email.

We worked with Tesco Direct over the Christmas shopping period to deliver an online video campaign with a difference, promoting product videos across mobile and desktop platforms, connecting consumers with Tesco Direct’s ecommerce site and driving sales. Coull’s comprehensive tracking of viewers’ consumer journeys enabled Tesco Direct to link video distribution costs to sales revenue and see a clear return on investment. For more information, see the full case study here.

The awards ceremony will be take place on May 7 at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, London. Last year’s was certainly a memorable event, so we’re looking forward to catching up with the movers and shakers in the performance marketing industry and celebrating everyone’s achievements over the last twelve months.

See you then.

In this blog we’ll give you everything you need to know to start using video on your blog, it’s such a simple process that within hours you’ll be dropping videos into your content like a pro!

Step 1 – Getting video content

If you’re going to use video on your blog, you’re going to need some video. There’s two ways of getting hold of video content.

• Option 1: Record your own

  Get your smartphone out or purchase a cheap camera, record video snippets like how-to guides, product reviews or daily updates, create a YouTube account and upload your videos there for free.

  There’s a reason YouTube is by far and away the most popular video hub on the internet, it’s free for you to upload videos and have them hosted, with simple options for managing your content and sharing it. For a blogger it’s our recommended option.

• Option 2: Choose one from YouTube

  There’s a wealth of content on YouTube, and the creators of that content make it available for anyone to share via social networks or embed on their blogs.

Step 2 – Grabbing the ‘embed code’

Once you’ve selected the YouTube video you want to place on your blog (whether your own or someone elses), the next step is to grab what’s called an ‘embed code’. This is a string of html code than you can copy and paste into your blog’s content and it will pull in the YouTube video you want to feature.

With Easter a couple of days away, perhaps a cheeky how-to guide to making Easter Eggs would make a nice bit of content?

1. Go to YouTube and find/search for your chosen video, then click the ‘Share’ button beneath the video. If you want to use a YouTube video someone has already embedded on their blog, like the one above, click the YouTube button in the bottom right corner of the video player and you’ll get to the video’s page on YouTube itself
2. Click the ‘Embed’ button in the menu that appears below it
3. Tailor the options that appear to suit you, before highlighting the embed code in the box and copying it to your clipboard (right-click, select ‘copy’). The ‘Video Size’ option is important, as this will decide the proportions of the video frame when you embed it on your blog. 560×315 is the default, and will look great, but if you have space, try going for a larger size. Make your video the centrepiece of your content.

See these steps in screenshots by clicking here

Step 3 – Putting the video on your blog

Ok, so you’ve found the video you want to embed on your blog and you’ve copied the embed code, nice job. The next thing to do is to place that embed code within your blog article.

Login to your blog’s content management system to add a new post or edit an existing one. Whether you’re using WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger or any other blog provider, the interface is generally similar. Locate the point in your post where you want to put the video, and simply paste the embed code there.



When you’re happy with the rest of your blog post that, pretty much, is that! You’ve successfully embedded a video within your blog and added rich new content for your community to enjoy. Now crack on and do some more!

]]> http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/28/how-to-embed-a-video-on-your-blog/feed/ 0 http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/21/online-video-for-brands-the-stats-you-need-to-know/ http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/21/online-video-for-brands-the-stats-you-need-to-know/#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:35:50 +0000 dan.madden http://blog.coull.com/?p=1725 Reasoned arguments, personal insights and gut instinct are all well and good, but there comes a time when you just want some stats to back it all up with. When it comes to the online video ecosystem there’s a huge amount of data on smartphones and tablets, video success metrics and the rise and fall of CPMs, so we thought we’d do the hard work for you and curate it all for you.

Once every three months we’ll post a blog with the key stats we’ve scraped from various recent industry sources and categorize them in a way that makes it easy for you to find the info that’s relevant to you. We’ll also try and link out to the original source where possible. First up are some juicy stats on trends in online video consumption and adspend.

Online video consumption continues to grow, helped by mobile

In the US
“More than 188 million U.S. Internet users watched 37.7 billion online content videos in August 2012, while video ad views totaled 9.5 billion, according to comScore.”
(ComScore Video Metrix Trend, August 2012)

“57% of Gen Y viewers say they watched a TV network channel from 8-9pm in 2012, down from 82% in 2008. They are instead streaming video, watching a recorded program or playing video games.”
(GfK Research, PrimeTime TV 2004-2012)

In the UK
“The online video audience in the UK grew 8 percent in the past year, whilst the audience for video viewing on a mobile grew 262 percent. YouTube still top video property followed by Amazon and Facebook.”
(ComScore, UK Digital Future in Focus, 2013 p.3)

“There were 37.5 million online video viewers in December 2012 on PCs, an increase of 8% year on year.”
(comScore Video Metrix, December 2012, UK 6+)

Globally
“A YouTube executive recently said mobile accounts for 25% of video views, up from 6% just 18 months earlier.”
(Robert Kyncl, Global Head of Content Partnerships, Abu Dhabi Media Summit)
(Latest official YouTube statistics here)

Brand marketers are spending more on online video campaigns

In the US
“Forrester Research projects online video revenue (online video adspend) to grow from almost $2.5 billion this year to $5.4 billion by 2016.”
(Forrester Research Online Display Advertising Forecast, 2012 To 2016 (US))

“Increased online video budgets will also result from reallocated media spend from banner, search, classified and other online advertising the IAB says accounted for $17bn in the first half of 2012.”
(SpotXchange, Survival Guide to the Digital Video Landscape, November 2012)

Interesting chart here (data from eMarketer), which features in the SpotXChange article referenced above, showing the disparity between the time people spend in a particular media channel and the percentage of advertising spend that channel receives.



(Data: eMarketer, time spent and ad spend share, 2011)

In Europe
“86% of the agencies responding to AdMonsters and Adap.tv’s European Digital Video Outlook purchased digital video in 2012, with 93% reporting an increae in video budget.”
(AdMonsters & Adap.tv’s European Digital Video Outlook, 2013, p.2)

In the UK
“Brands in Britain spent £109 million on online video ads in 2011, a 200% increase on 2010 and 800% increase since 2008.”
(Internet Advertising Bureau, May 2012)

Have you got any stats you want us to add to this list? Leave a comment and let us know.

]]> http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/21/online-video-for-brands-the-stats-you-need-to-know/feed/ 0 http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/14/vine-for-brands-the-six-second-smile/ http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/14/vine-for-brands-the-six-second-smile/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:43:29 +0000 Zac Froud http://blog.coull.com/?p=1717 Last week we looked at Vine and the opportunities this six-second video platform presents for bloggers. This week we’re going consider the value in Vine for brands, or whether for the big players it’s a distracting bandwagon that you shouldn’t be jumping on.

Less is sometimes more
On March 2 French electro-duo Daft Punk released a 15-second teaser trailer for their new album during American TV’s Saturday Night Live. One comment on the YouTube version simply says: “15 seconds are enough to hype the sh** out of me”. Before long it had been cut into a six-second Vine and the Twittersphere was buzzing with rumours and conjecture on what the new album would be like and when Daft Punk would be touring again. A tiny piece of content stimulated massive noise — is this is a microcontent revolution?

An emotional connection
As Daft Punk showed, microcontent can have considerable impact. And, of course the speed of distribution through social media is phenomenal, but Vine’s six-second format presents some creative challenges for brands looking to get involved. 78% of TrueView pre-roll ads on YouTube are skipped as soon as the ‘skip’ button appears (after five seconds), highlighting the difficulty in engaging a viewer in this window.

In our previous blog we saw how bloggers can use Vines to give people a window into their world. Perhaps the same is true for brands? Rather than try and use them to deliver traditional advertising messages, Vines should probably be seen as a way brands can share a bit of personality and create an emotional connection.

The six-second smile
You might be forgiven for expecting General Electric, one of the largest companies in the world, to have a dull, corporate presence on social media, but the conglomerate is one of the trailblazers using Vine to interest people rather than sell to them. They’re using the hashtag #6secondscience to share Vines showing what happens when you do crazy things like mix milk, food colouring and dish soap, or to wish a humourous happy birthday message to a hero of science. It’s light-hearted, interesting and easily digestible stuff.

If brands can use Vine to add a smile to someone’s day, there’s a good chance that person will be willing to then explore other, longer content and start building a relationship. Maybe they’ll check out your YouTube channel, visit your site, or perhaps it might just mean that when a your video advertising appears they won’t ignore it, open a new tab to pass the time or impatiently wait for the skip button. They might pay attention because they’ve already bought into who you are, not just what you’re selling.

It’s a great stepping stone format that can use intrigue and imagination to draw people in to engagement with your brand. So, what’s stopping you?

]]> http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/14/vine-for-brands-the-six-second-smile/feed/ 0 http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/08/vine-for-bloggers-give-people-a-window-into-your-world/ http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/08/vine-for-bloggers-give-people-a-window-into-your-world/#comments Fri, 08 Mar 2013 13:55:18 +0000 dan.madden http://blog.coull.com/?p=1709 If you’re using Twitter you might have seen the hashtag #vine popping up all over the place, usually accompanied by a six-second looping video. Vine is the iOS app that enables people to create these bitesize videos, or ‘Vines’, and share them with their followers through Twitter.

It seems as if there’s a new social media phenomenon every day. Knowing which ones represent an opportunity for a blogger and which will just be a waste of time is tough, so let’s take a look at Vine, where it has come from and how you can use it to engage your audience.

The move to microcontent
The Vine blog sums up what it’s all about:

Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They’re quirky, and we think that’s part of what makes them so special.

As internet users we have serious time constraints. We might be spending a lot of lives online, but the sheer volume of content available, all competing for our attention, means we want to learn, to experience and share things in as short an amount of time possible. That’s the need Twitter satisfied with text messaging and Instagram with pictures. It was never going to be long before video became part of the microcontent revolution.

Where microcontent works best
How many times have you scanned through your Twitter feed until something interesting grabbed your attention? We use social media as a way of curating things that might be interesting to us, before filtering through to get the good stuff. A six second Vine might not seem like very long, but if you’re a blogger six seconds might be the maximum someone who doesn’t know you will give you.

Microcontent is made for social media, it’s instant gratification at the click of a button, and video is the perfect format for it. Social media is the high street everyone’s ambling down, window-shopping as they go. Tweets are kind of appealing, people might stop for second, nice pictures in the window will get some attention too, but an engaging video is the type of thing that’s going to draw the crowds. If you can get people’s attention, you can get them through the door to your blog.

Use Vine to connect people with your world
Going back to the quote above, Vine’s are ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.’ If Vines are the window, your blog is the home of things that make up your life, the things you are passionate about.

As a blogger, you can use Vine to give people a tantalising glimpse of your world. If you’re a film blogger, can you review a film in six seconds? Got a new how-to vlog, can you do a six second version? Give people something interesting that they can digest in a small amount of time and there’s a good chance they’ll come to your blog to find out more.

Check out this Vine from Rolling Stone, who asked followers to guess who was on their next cover:

Or this lessons in layering Vine by fashion magazine Lucky.

Used the right way, Vines can be highly effective in creating appetite for your content, giving people a snapshot of who you are and what you’re about, and if you haven’t started vlogging yet and you’re interested, Vine could also be an easy way to get started. Start with Vine and maybe build up to recording longer content that you can then upload to YouTube and embed on your blog. So, what’s stopping you?

]]> http://blog.coull.com/2013/03/08/vine-for-bloggers-give-people-a-window-into-your-world/feed/ 1 http://blog.coull.com/2013/02/28/the-harlem-shake-not-just-another-viral-video/ http://blog.coull.com/2013/02/28/the-harlem-shake-not-just-another-viral-video/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:38:25 +0000 dan.madden http://blog.coull.com/?p=1699 Unless you’ve been living in a cave, deprived of any contact from the outside world for the last few weeks, there’s no way you haven’t come across or at least heard of The Harlem Shake, an online video meme that is the latest thing to take YouTube and Twitter, Facebook et al. by storm.

Whether you like this latest of YouTube fads or not, there’s a lot of value in taking a look at what it represents in terms of wider trends in how we interact with media. With inspiration from a great article by Mark Suster, a venture capitalist at GRP Partners, here’s our rundown of what this means…

Gangnam Style, a taste of things to come
2012 was the year of Psy and Gangnam Style. The official music video now has almost 1.4bn views on YouTube and the song has reached #1 in more than 30 countries worldwide. It’s the most-viewed video on YouTube and the numbers continue to grow.

As well as being phenomenally successful in its own right, that success, as it always does, spawned imitation. Videos popped up all over the place with people doing the Gangnam Style dance routine in their bedrooms, in parks, on celebrity chat shows. Viewers wanted to be part of the action, celebrities wanted to raise their profile, everyone was in on it. Success (particularly commercial success) however, was reserved for one video alone. In truth, there’s only one version of Psy’s Gangnam Style, and that’s the official one with the 1.4bn views.

Not just another viral video
The Harlem Shake is different. It’s not a single of piece of content that has gone viral, racked up the views and then generated imitations. The imitations, the crowdsourced content, are the viral aspect of the video.

Sure, Harlem Shake is a song created by Brooklyn producer Baauer, but it’s a song that was first released back in May 2012, two months before Gangnam Style. The official video didn’t get much traction, and it was only when a YouTuber called Filthy Frank featured the song in a skit (the original video above) in January 2013 that the lunatic dancing was introduced. A few guys in Australia copied it, which brought it to the attention of Maker Studies (online video / YouTube content specialists with a massive following), who created their own version in their office.

As Mark Suster says in his article:

Boom.

It made national news. Maker was contacted by every major news outlet. And suddenly every office in the country was doing their own version of the Harlem Shake.

Current estimates put the number of versions of the Harlem Shake on YouTube at around 50,000, with a total number of views of approximately 200 million. So, not quite at Gangnam-levels of views yet, but just looking at that stat misses the point. We shouldn’t be looking at the views; it’s the sheer number of spin-off videos that have been created that’s remarkable.

Participating and creating, not just consuming
In Mark’s article, he talks about media not just wanting to flow one way, about an alignment of technology that has enabled people to create. He references access to video recording (phone cameras), bandwidth for uploading it, free cloud storage (e.g. YouTube) and ease of sharing through social media. This is the technology that has allowed people to see something online, get their friends round and publish their version of it on YouTube or their blog within an hour.

Creating video content is no longer the preserve of those with big budgets, post-production suites and deep pockets for a seeding campaign. It’s available to everyone and there’s clearly an appetite for people to do it, we don’t want to passively receive media, we want to participate and create.

Gangnam Style is a viral video. The Harlem Shake is more than that, it’s a viral movement. Whether you like the core content or not (I’m ambivalent to be honest), it’s representative of the shift towards widespread content creation that has been happening for a year or two now, but never in such a joined up way. Consumption and creation aren’t mutually exclusive, people want to do both, and that makes the internet a far more interesting place for everyone.

So, if there’s tens of thousands of people willing to dance like fools in front of the camera, what’s stopping you from adding a little interest to your blog with some video content? You don’t even need to look daft… you could provide something useful and relevant… or not, it’s up to you.

]]> http://blog.coull.com/2013/02/28/the-harlem-shake-not-just-another-viral-video/feed/ 0 http://blog.coull.com/2013/02/22/5-reasons-not-to-use-video-on-your-blog/ http://blog.coull.com/2013/02/22/5-reasons-not-to-use-video-on-your-blog/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:27:04 +0000 adam http://blog.coull.com/?p=1689 If you run a blog, you can’t have missed the current trend for video blogging. The YouTube generation is well and truly here, and the benefits of video to search rankings and user experience are being sung from the rooftops. And, product reviews and how-to videos also give you an excellent revenue opportunity. So, why aren’t you doing it?

1. You don’t have the kit
People often think video blogs should be professionally recorded with a high-spec camera, full lighting rig and struggle for final cut that James Cameron would be proud of. If you’re someone who runs a blog in your spare time, this can be a big barrier to getting started vlogging.

The truth however is that only companies with incredibly tight brand guidelines need to worry about this, and to be honest, even they could probably do with a little humanity and realism in their videos from time to time. Most blog readers actually appreciate a touch of the home-made feel. It looks ‘real’. So, all you really need is a camera, and every phone has one these days. A decent mic might be a sensible investment. But, don’t worry about the quality of your production too much; the quality that really matters is the quality of what you have to say.

2. You’ve got nothing to say
Hold on, aren’t you a blogger? Bloggers have always got something to say, that’s why you started blogging in the first place. Your writing allows you to express those opinions, but no matter how talented a scribe you are it’s difficult to see how your personality could ever come through as clearly as it would in a video. If you’ve made the effort to set up a blog and build a community of readers, putting yourself in front of the camera is a great way to build a closer relationship with that community.

3. You haven’t got time
If you’re a regular blogger you might have a set routine, like a particular evening of the week you set aside after work for a new post. You know how much time it’s going to take, not accounting for writers block of course, and you’re comfortable with that. Vlogging is an unknown, the whole process from recording a video to getting it on your blog probably seems pretty daunting, but once you get the hang of it, it’s quicker than getting words on a page.

Think about it, you record yourself on your phone and when you’re done you watch it back before hitting the ‘Upload to YouTube’ button. A few seconds later you’ve got a link which you just need to copy and paste to your blog. Perhaps turning to vlogging might even be a time-saver for a busy blogger, and enable you to get more content out there?

4. You’re scared of the camera
Some people love the camera and the camera loves them. If you’re not one of those people, and I count myself here, the idea of getting in front of the camera and creating something the whole world can see can be a horrifying idea.

The thing is, while you might care that you’re having a bad hair day, your voice sounds different to how you thought it did, or the lighting in your room isn’t quite right, your audience doesn’t. They’re after your thoughts and your ideas, not perfection. Now, we’re not saying running a comb through your hair and finding an attractive corner of your home to film in isn’t a good idea; it’s just not the be-all and end-all. Get some honest friends to give you some feedback on your first few shoots.

5. Someone else is doing it better than you
You’re new to vlogging, while loads of other people have been doing it for a while and are amazing at it. This is true, and no, you probably won’t be as comfortable in front of the camera as them for a good period of time. But, does this mean you shouldn’t be doing it? No. It might mean that you do a few test shoots, and spend a little longer editing the first few times. If your writing is worth reading, then your vlogs should be worth watching.

Vlogging gives you a new, more personal, more accessible way to connect with your audience. What you say is unique to you, and we all know that showing a bit of personality is key to building a community. So, go on, be brave… it’s worth it.

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