Opening a blog with most of the content involving your voice and face can be intimidating, but the benefits of running a video blog (vlog) often outweighs any second thoughts you may be having at the time.

For startups and soloprenuers, video blogging provides a human element to your brand – giving customers a more personalized and enjoyable experience. With videos, your audience connects and relates with you, and feel they are buying something from the real person, rather than a website.

Also, people love to watch people, so your video-based blog will be kind of a reality show that engages your visitors and keeps them coming back if you provide enough value. There are many ways of capturing people’s attention, such as by being witty, playful and emotional. So not only you would make your blog something that your audience is more likely to remember, but you would also benefit yourself, by talking about what you love to do.

In terms of search engine rankings and other web properties, video blogging provides the following benefits:

1. Increased Search Engine Traffic

There are millions of blogs on the internet, and many of them don’t receive a lot of organic traffic. Also, blog owners don’t update their blogs frequently, making the signal to noise ratio extremely high in the blogging space. With video blogging, you can stand out in a space that is yet to be filled.

Adding video content to your blog can make it quickly outpace those blogs who just rely on text to attract search engine visitors. According to the iPage blog, videos help you get backlinks, as people are more likely to link to web pages that contain good quality videos rather than just plain simple text. Also, videos help visitors stay on the page longer.

2. Increased Social Media Engagement

If you have a Facebook or Twitter page, you already know how challenging it can be to reach a wide number of audiences with your social media posts. Good news is that video content can make it easy to expand the reach of your social media pages and posts.

Several studies point out that social media content featuring videos (posted via blogs or directly posted on social media pages) have the most organic reach of any type of social media content. It’s a great way to stand out and also gives your posts a chance to go viral.

3. Increased Conversions

Getting organic traffic is one thing, but if you are in an industry where increased sales is the ultimate goal, you want your site visitors to convert.

Videos have been found to increase conversions as they invoke a series of emotions resulting from visuals that connect with the hearts and minds of audiences. Also, videos offer the opportunity to sell to your audiences via storytelling.

Requirements for Running a Video-based Blog

Running a video blog requires the same things that a normal blog requires: a domain and web host. However, you would need more disk space and bandwidth because videos take up more of these spaces.

A dedicated hosting server is recommended for running a regular video based blog, as it often has unlimited bandwidth and a large amount of disk space.