Should you spend more time creating videos or articles?

Obviously this is an article but is it the most effective way to get visitors to your site or offer?

Which works best?

You’ve probably guessed the answer I’m going to give:

It depends

It’s a classic fence sitting answer but that’s because there’s no right answer for every eventuality.

Ideally, you should do both.

Which is what I’ve done with this article:

YouTube videos are definitely popular. It’s generally acknowledged that YouTube is the second biggest search engine, dwarfed only by its parent company Google.

And videos often show up in the search results.

That sentence should give you a massive clue as to why it’s worth doing both a written version and a video version of at least some of your content.

You potentially get two bites of the cherry.

One where your blog appears.

The other where your video appears.

And more opportunities if you turn your post into something you can upload to a document sharing site and re-work it on an article site.

That last option is something I tend to do after the initial post has been live for a day or two. That way I’m writing fresh content rather than unintentionally writing almost the exact same words in something I’m fooling myself into thinking it’s a new article.

Then you can go full circle and create a video based around the article you’ve just put on an article directory.

The neat part of this approach is that you can satisfy the needs of more potential visitors.

Some people like videos, others prefer to read.

And of course you can always “watch” a video like the ones I make in the background, listening to it in the background and only giving it your full attention if something stands out.

Multi-tasking in other words.

And something most of us do at least occasionally. Especially if you reach a sales page that stubbornly won’t give you a link to click until you’ve been on the page for a set amount of time.

Most sales pages like that don’t care whether you’re actively engaged with the video or not although some are very possessive and will stop counting if you switch tabs or even scroll down the page so the video is no longer on screen.

My solution for those is to close the tab – I don’t like being forced that way (much the same as I tend to click the back button on YouTube videos if there’s not a “skip advert” option after 5 seconds – but that’s digressing.

By creating a video as well as an article, you’re increasing the potential size of your audience.

All I tend to do is write the article, press the publish button and then copy & paste the article into my word processor.

I’ll amend the fonts as necessary and then insert page breaks after every few paragraphs – usually no more than half a page of writing.

Then I’ll use a screen capture program like Screencast-o-matic, double check my microphone is being recorded (because it’s annoying to record a silent video!) and then press record and start reading the article out loud.

At the end of each page, I’ll press the pause button, scroll down to the next page, un-pause and start reading again.

And so on until I reach the end of the article.

I get occasional emails from people telling me I should add intro/outro logos, maybe background music, maybe graphics.

That’s not something I do but you could experiment to see which gets the most clicks.

Then monitor your stats every now and then to see where you’re getting most traffic from. If it’s videos, put more emphasis on those. If it’s articles or blog posts, put more emphasis on those.

Because your niche and your approach will be slightly different.

Once you’ve tested for a while, you’ll know.

Then it’s just a matter of re-checking every now and then. In case something has changed.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comment box below.

And if you’d like to know how I write posts like this quickly (even though I’ve not followed the exact format I teach in this post), click here.