Another popular style of vlogging is to mimic professional news broadcasts but with your own quirky or niche content, such as the very popular vlog WebbAlert. Here, Morgan Webb, who has experience hosting television, reports daily on tech news and digital culture in straightforward, three-minute video clips. Another popular vlogging technique WebbAlert uses is to list Web links to the articles talked about in the video, so that viewers can click on them for more information.

Your imagination is the limit when it comes to what you do in your video entry. However, the key to maintaining a successful vlog is to do it regularly (either daily or weekly), keep the length within two to five minutes, and produce on what you know.

How Do You Make a Video Blog?

For simple video blogging, you’ll need a computer, Internet access, a webcam, basic editing software such as Vlog It!, and something to say. Macs come with a free video editing software called iMovie, which is a simple drag-and-drop program that allows you to take what you record, put it in a video timeline, and add music and effects. You do not have to host your videos on your own Web site, which can be costly, especially if you have 20-30 MB files produced daily. There are many great video hosting platforms that make it really easy for you to publish and post your videos.

For higher production value on your video, you would need a three-chip or better video camera, a standard lighting kit, a teleprompter (especially for news reporting and scripted segments), a good microphone, and more advanced editing software such as Final Cut Pro.

How Do You Publish and Post Your Video Blog?

If you have your own blog and you want to post a vlog on it, you make the video, save it as a Quicktime file, and upload it to one of the video platform sites such as YouTube. Once you upload it to a video platform, they will convert it from Quicktime to a Flash format for you. Flash video conversion is important because it is the technology that most people can watch on their computers. Although Quicktime tends to be of higher quality, it doesn’t always stream as well as Flash, and many computers and people don’t have the Quicktime application. Therefore, CNN, YouTube, and most videos you watch online are in Flash. Once your video has been converted, the site generates a code that you can copy and paste onto your own blog as an html file. Many popular blogging platforms such as WordPress and TypePad have video plug-ins and widgets to make the cutting and pasting of the code even easier.

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