Video promotion for your author blog content is all about getting eyes what you produce. It’s an excellent method of building a group of consistent readers. Readers — regular readers — help you in three ways. They can:
- Subscribe to your email newsletter
- Provide word-of-mouth promotion for your books
- Buy your books
Your author blog is but one of many (Thousands? Tens of thousands? More?). Attracting readers to your blog is difficult. You need a way to stand out. One method is the use of video promotions for your blog posts. These are short videos posted on social media accounts such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc promoting content on your author blog.
Why video promotion? It’s more engaging. Simple as that.
Blog content promotion by video is a natural extension of the book trailer idea. Done right, I believe blog content promotion by video can consistently drive traffic to your blog.
General Concepts
Length: A content promotion video should short. Book Trailers are one to two minutes long; a content promotion video should be 10 to 20 seconds long.
Topic: You probably do not want to do a promotion video for every blog post. Much too time consuming. Here are two suggestions for when a promotion video would be appropriate:
- After finishing a series of related posts
- After a month’s (or quarter’s) worth of posts, depending upon your blogging frequency
You can probably think of others.
Images and Audio: Images should be simpler to source than for a book trailer, and you may be able to re-purpose some of the images you used in your blog post. Alternatively you can use a tool like Canva or PicMonkey to create some that relate to the video’s promotion content.
If you want to use audio (music and/or narration), keep in mind these will add to the complexity of the video (and production time). Music is probably the easiest of the two as several web-based video sites (e.g. PowToon or VidoeMakerFX) come with royalty free music you can just drop into the video.
Simplicity: Simplicity is key. You don’t want spend hours on a promotion video. The video’s purpose is to promote your blog content. It is not an end in itself.
Tools
There’s a growing number of free or low cost tools available for crafting videos. I have personal experience with the following, but there are lots more:
Examples
Here are two examples I created to promote my ongoing series of posts “Let’s Make a Book Trailer”. The first uses Proshow Producer. The second uses PowToon.
Proshow Producer
PowToon
Start the PowToon promotion video by clicking the > symbol on the grey footer bar.
Final Thought
Content promotion videos can attract readers to your author post. Keeping them coming back involves providing quality content!
Thanks for reading and I will see you again soon.
