We all know that blog posts are a great way to drive traffic to your website. They are also perfect bite size content for sharing on social media. You can integrate keywords to help with SEO and you can build your website and brand authority by demonstrating your knowledge of your specific niche. But in todays competitive marketplace, this is not enough to stay ahead of the competition. Everything is turning to video. Youtube is still the biggest social media network when it comes to video, but all of the major platforms now support native video content. Search engines are now optimised for displaying video results ahead of standard url listings. The fact is that if you don’t have video content, you will never rank at the top go Google search results.

If you have spent hours writing creative blog content and are frustrated at the poor conversion to traffic, fear not. The is a simple solution. Convert blog posts to video.

81% of businesses now use video marketing as a major strategy on the internet. This figure is rising every year. 

Original video content can at first glance to appear complicated or costly, but there are so many free or cheap options out there today, there really is no excuse not to dive in to video.

If you already have blog posts on your website in a relevant niche, the process is simple.

 1. Create a youtube channel for your business or brand

This is pretty straight forward. Just sign up, upload your brand logo and a little bio, add your website url and you're good to go. 

 2. Choose a blog post

As a general rule of thumb, spoken words are roughly 130 per minute. You want to keep your videos from around 1 minute ( 130 words ) to 5 minutes ( 650 words ) to keep the audience engaged.

 3. Read the blog post out loud. Edit any parts which do not translate well to spoken word.

even if your blog post is very well written, when it is spoken out loud, you may find that certain word combinations or sentences are hard to say naturally. Minor edits might be required. If you decide to have someone else do the voiceover youcould always give them the permission to make minor edits to suit their delivery style.

 4. Record a voiceover narration or hire a spokesperson or narrator 

If you are recording this yourself, use a microphone and record in a room with soft furnishings as this will soak up most of the reflections ( echo / reverb ) in the room and result in the clearest recording. If you want to employ a professional voiceover artist you can find specialists sites online or try one of the freelance sites.

 5. Use free stock video footage or images to overlay

There are some great sites for free stock footage like Pexels and pixabay - you can search for related videos to use as overlays and cut aways in your video.

 6. Add a free background music track.

Free music resourses like incompetech.com are a great place to find royalty free background music.

 7. Add subtitles

Lots of people watch videos without sound. This is particularly common on social media feeds. always add hard coded subtitles and make them large enough to see on small screens.

If you really want to turn your blog posts into videos super fast, there is another option. You could make a text based powerpoint presentation and export it as a video. It may not be as engaging as a spokesperson video , but it will help with SEO and general exposure.

If you have experience with video editing or you are interested in that skill, there are plenty of free video editing tools around that you can use to create your own video from your blog posts. From high end cinema grade editors like Davinci Resolve or Windows movie maker, all are capable of creating engaging video content. You can add video footage, images, text, voiceovers and music. 

What’s the quickest way to learn how to use video editing software? You guessed it. Video. Just take a look on Youtube. There are so many tutorials. You’ll be up and running in no time.

 

If you don’t have the time or inclination to produce the video content yourself, there are lots of other affordable options. A spokesperson video is the ideal solution. You can use a specialist company like Screen Promos or take a look on freelance sites like Fiverr and Upwork. Prices are usually based on the number of words in your script. For an example, you can get a spokesperson video created based on your blog script including choice of spokesperson, the type of clothing they wear, the video background, text overlays, stock footage clips and background music from Screen Promos for $75 ( 300 words ) The advantage of using a professional service like this is that with this type of quality, you could re-purpose it at a later date as a paid course or give away package. 

 

Video is the future and now is an realtime to start utilising it. You can convert you blog posts to videos in minutes and start building your youtube channel.