How to use YouTube videos on your law blog
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Video has piqued my interest as the video quality expected by users has dropped.
Law firms historically believed they needed to hire a professional video crew and run only the highest quality video. However, you can now turn on CNN and find that they’ve picked up amateur video from a viewer highlighting a breaking news story. Some of the Fox News shows even have their anchors filming stories using amateur video equipment. The reason being to be more like citizen journalists. As a result, your law blog's readers are receptive to reasonable quality video, though it may not be as good as if you used a professional video person.
This opens up some great video opportunities for your law blog. You can record short vignettes about a particular item that relates to the topic of your blog. Store it at YouTube and then take the YouTube HTML and put that in your blog. That will display a “YouTube TV set” in your blog so that your readers can push the play button and view it on your blog.
Using YouTube allows you to syndicate your video so others may play your video on their blog or news web site. Let’s say you put up a video on timely immigration legal issue and it’s 2 ½ minutes long. Someone who also publishes a blog watches it and knows they can click on the little YouTube logo, take the HTML code from the YouTube website, and embed that video to be played at their blog.
Now they’ve got you addressing a niche news issue on their blog. It’s like YouTube is serving as an Associated Press clearing house of news video. You're the reporter.
To get this viral marketing bounce, you’ve got to be producing video that is valuable and/or timely. You can’t sit there and talk about all the wonderful things that you do and that you provide service just above average when compared to other firms.
YouTube also has other advantages. Videos at YouTube are getting indexed in Google’s regular search. Title and tag your videos properly and they may get picked up on relevant searches at Google.
And again if you're titling and tagging properly, you're picking up an additional link to your blog. That may help with the search engine optimization of your blog.
You may need to invest $500 to $1,000 in equipment and learn a few things relating to editing and uploading video, but it may prove worth your while to start using YouTube.
Hey, this is supposed to be a "How To Do X" and not "You Ought Try X"
Kevin, Thanks for the useful tip. I will try this on my blog about Texas Divorce law. I recently bought an iFlip video recorder that has USB to download into computer and in a format that can be posted to YouTube immediately. The video recorder doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but it seems easy enough to use.
I always enjoy reading your tips and find them very useful for this newbie blogger.
Michelle May O'Neil
Dallas, Texas
www.themayfirm.com/blog
Kevin:
This excellent post would have been more powerful if you had recorded a short video and embedded it. No?
Just remembered this clip from Gnomedex.
http://www.smays.com/default/2007/08/kevin-okeefe-of.html