As bloggers we are constantly looking for ways to make our blogs more interesting. It goes without saying that it’s important to write well and to know our audience and focus on topics relevant to it.
However, these days it may not be enough to simply write good blog posts and assume that our readers will be sufficiently entertained. So what more can we do? I have found that creating new multimedia experiences for our readers by mashing together various social media content is an effective way to increase audience engagement and drive more traffic.
A picture is worth a thousand words
We’ve all heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” it then would logically follow that a video has to be worth a lot more. Of course I’m not telling you anything new by suggesting that you should use video embeds in your blogs to pique your readers’ interest. We already know that embedding multimedia content such as web video, flash games and other widgets is an effective way to get your audience actively involved.
What I’m proposing is a different approach. Why not get more value out of your embeds by embedding more than one thing at a time? For instance you could enhance that YouTube video you were planning on embedding by combining it with a related Twitter feed. Thus, your YouTube video will come equipped with its own reader “comments”.
Your readers will not only get the opportunity to enjoy the video but they’ll be able to see what the Twitter community thinks about it as well. As a result your audience will likely be more engaged by consuming this YouTube & Twitter combination than by the “commentless” YouTube video alone.
Consider the multimedia mashup
You can also consider the multimedia mashup as a blog post contained within itself. It is sometimes a challenge to consistently come up with compelling content for our blogs. Why not use the creative energy of millions of YouTube and Twitter users to help us put together blog posts on current hot topics without investing a ton of time? You can write a short intro and supplement it with the YouTube/Twitter mashup. Your audience can enjoy the video and stay engaged by reading the endless flow of tweets.
The mashing together of multimedia content will not only increase engagement but can also help you monetize your blog. We can take that same YouTube video and combine it with the Amazon product widget. Your readers can enjoy watching the video and observe related Amazon products right next to it. It is the best of both worlds.
The viewing experience is not interrupted by having an advertisement intrude on the video in any way and yet the products remain highly visible. This particular YouTube & Amazon combination should result in a higher conversion rate than having the traditional Amazon sidebar which may or may not show content-related products and is not in the main view.
Making money outside of your blog
Another advantage of using the multimedia mashup over traditional affiliate marketing is the potential of making money outside of your blog. The Amazon widget contained within the mashup stores your Amazon affiliate code. As readers embed the mashup on other websites and blogs or link to it, your affiliate code travels along with it.
The mashup that started on your blog can now continue to work hard for you on other websites and help you get more value out of your affiliate marketing. In fact, this opens up a new way to take advantage of popular web videos. You now have a great incentive to leverage viral content by attaching your affiliate campaign to it. If your mashup goes viral that means your affiliate campaign just went viral as well.
My company uCubd.com (you cubed) was created to give bloggers and web publishers an opportunity to effectively leverage popular social media content. We have built a mashup platform that will allow you to add more value to your stand-alone embeds. The best thing about our technology is that it’s free and easy.
It literally takes seconds to create a mashup using our platform. All one needs to create a mashup is a YouTube embed code. Our system will automatically analyze the video and render related tweets from Twitter or products from Amazon next to it. Our mashups are not limited to YouTube, other embeddable video and widgets will work as well. We’re also currently working on building a variety of mashup templates that will offer users more options beyond Twitter and Amazon.
Give this a shot, have fun, make some money and let us know what you think.
A guest post by Marat Galperin, co-founder of www.ucubd.com. Want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog? See more info here.
Image by Q Thomas Bower
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{ 12 comments }
Hey Marat,
You discussed some pretty cool ideas. I like to mix it up sometimes like you mentioned. I don’t do it very frequent, but I will mix it up on a blog post. By reading this it is going to allow me to be creative with my post. Thanks for this awesome work!
Chat with you later…
Josh
Hey Marat,
Really Great Post. Some Awesome Points.
I really like the point “Making money outside of your blog” .. Grreat point..!!
Thanks for sharing this great Post. Great work marat.
~Dev
I like idea of Twitter and Youtube, recently i am trying on Facebook Ewhoring.
the idea of outside of blog is nice, i never think about this. maybe i will try one day.
Well done, Man
Hi Marat,
These are pretty good ideas. I will try to use them one day.
Howdy Marko
Long time reader and first time commenter..
Anyway..your method here will be something super for me to try and implement on my personal blog. Its always good to read good content from bloggers like you, because it makes life that much easier when I can set back and learn.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Hey Guys,
Thanks for all your comments. I look forward to getting your feedback. A tip for those who plan to embed on self-hosted WordPress blogs. You’ll have to publish our embed codes without previewing (previewing changes our embed code, we’re working on a solution and hope to have it soon). It works well on Blogger and should work on most blogging platforms and any website. Remember if you run into any trouble rendering our embedded mashups then try to publish without previewing.
-Marat
I always make sure to use either a video or some form of imagery in every single post that I craft as not only does it help readers to understand the topic of the post more, it also helps to break a text only post up a little bit.
I’d also just like to point up that if anyone does decide to go the YouTube ‘content mash-up’ route, make sure that you study popular YouTubers who know how to do it well first. Also, I’ve found, from watching said YouTubers, that humour and lots of energy helps to do content mash-ups!
Hi Marat,
Thanks for this wonderful article
Hi Marat It’s a very usefull thing for blogger’s like me to do a viral campaign without spending a dime.Thank You.
I like your tips about the you tube … bloggers like John Chow is also doing this some time.
Would love to give a try to it.
I do understand how social media effect the entire traffic of any site. You can expect traffic in hundreds of thousands only if you post get popular in Digg or other social platform. But how does one monetize better with social media. Please look at my site and let me know what else i should be doing to earn more traffic and money.
Thanks
Katie,
Thanks for checking out this blog post. I’ve looked at your site and I think there are several specific ways you can use our mashups to drive more traffic and increase monetization. Feel free to email me at marat@ucubd.com and we can setup a demo for you and continue our discussion.
Regards,
Marat