It’s already pretty easy to embed video into your WordPress blog. You can also use video plugins for YouTube which have some advanced features.

So why not I show you yet another way to do it, using Windows Live Writer. Unlike other methods, this one makes it just a little bit easier as it gives you direct YouTube-to-WordPress publishing. You don’t even need to copy and paste your video ID or URL.

There’s a built-in preview window in WLW. All you need to do is enter your YouTube user name and password to get a list of all the videos in your account. Each video is displayed with a short summary; just click on the ones you want to include in your blog, and you’re done!

WLW currently supports YouTube and SoapBox, as well as embedding videos directly from your PC or web URL.

If you’re big into using videos, you also want to check out the Traffic Geyser video automation tool, the FLV WordPress plugin and the best blog writing /editing tools.

A whole LOT more extra, if you don’t mind, and Viper’s Video Quicktags is the plugins that fits the bill. Basically, it allows you to embed and configure videos from YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, Vimeo and even FLV videos.

In the setting page for each site, you can also configure how the videos are displayed on your blog. For YouTube, you can also force high-quality playback and edit the border colors, choose to display related videos, and other settings.

You can easily add videos using “quicktags” in the WP post editor. The small buttons are very helpful indeed, just click on the YouTube icon for example, enter the video URL, and publish your post. All videos are also embedded into your RSS feed.

Download Viper’s Video Quicktags here

You should also consider signing up for Traffic Geyser and automating your video submissions to YouTube, Google Video, and about 15 other sites.

The logic is simple.

If you create a video to market your website, then you’ll need to upload to more than just YouTube to get maximum exposure. But the problem is creating all those accounts, managing them, and uploading to each individually. All video sites have different procedures, formats and whatnots.

But with Traffic Geyser, you create your profiles once and your video submission to all those sites are automated. Not too keen about setting up all those profiles?

Well here’s the interesting part.

Once you’re a Traffic Geyser customer, you get this “one-time-offer” where they create the profiles for you with a single GMail account, then send you all the login info. The Gmail account is for you to keep and you can change all your passwords if you want so effectively, this is as good as outsourcing the task to someone else.

I usually reject most one-time offers but this one made sense. So my new profile was emailed to me about 3 days after I signed up.

Different Levels Of Membership

Personally I prefer not having too many options, but if that was the case I would choose the option that made sense and that I am reasonably sure I can maximize. I signed-up for the Gold Membership ($97/month) which allows you up to 3,500 submissions which I think is more than the average market or blogger can handle.

You get all you need minus the high-end home study course about making videos and video marketing. Those aren’t really necessary unless you know absolutely nothing about videos. The exact package may not be what they are offering right now, but heads up – if you try to close the page you’ll be given a second offer, which is the Gold Membership.

(Shhhh… don’t tell them I’m giving you this direct link!). Try Traffic Geyser Gold at $97 here.

Overall Traffic Geyser is very well designed, runs smoothly, and is pretty user friendly, Plus they have a very good help / training section that guides you step-by-step on what to do. There’s a forum too if you want to bounce off your ideas or get opinion from other members.

Here are some other features I should mention..

Built In Slideshow Creator

The built-in slideshow generator is really cool. The easy way to do online video is to play a powerpoint slide with some vocal narration and background music. You can do all that and more with the slideshow tool.

Although you can do it faster if you have a mike, some royalty-free music, and MS Powerpoint. Still, it’s there if you need to use it, and it works.

Built-In Lead Page Generator

With the builtin lead page generator you can easily create your own video squeeze pages. Simple template with the main video, so headlines and text, and an optin box. There are several templates you can choose from and they all look pretty good to me.

The templates are easy to customize, just select the individual elements and enter the necessary text, like the screenshot below.

Customize YouTube Video Quality and Branding

Another cool thing you can do with Traffic Geyser is to customize the appearance of your YouTube videos. You can force high quality playback and also make your video play automatically, as opposed to paused at start. Plus, you can also remove the YouTube branding if you want.

Is Traffic Geyser worth your money? Only if you understand the impact of online video, and plan to use it seriously in your business. Don’t forget after your video is in YouTube you can also use Article Marketing Automation to spread it across thousands of blogs.

With LinkedTube you can use videos created by someone else to make money yourself by promoting related affiliate products or your own products for that matter. Just find a YouTube video you want to use on your site, the use the system to overlay an ad on top of the video, then embed it into your site.

Technically what this means is that someone else does the hard work of creating the video and uploading it to YourTube. You just use their hard work to make money for yourself.

Ethical? A great idea?

As I said I’m just the messenger, I’m just telling you what’s possible. Look at this video for example about Keyword Elite. All I have to do now is find the most suitable video, embed my affiliate links, and use it on my website or blog.

Sorry to the video creator, I’m using your video to show how it works. If you think it’s a great idea, then by all means use it. Videos attract attention and are a good sales tool for affiliate products, building an otpin list, and for selling your own products as well.

Get info: Linked Tube

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FLV Plugin for WordPress makes it a whole lot easier, plus it gives you 17 great-looking FLV video layers to display your video professionally. Once installed, you should see a link to “FLV Plugin” when writing a new post or page.

Just enter the exact URL of the FLV video and everything else is done automatically.  You can also upload the video directly but I recommend you use a proper FTP program, especially if your video is large.

Below are the 17 video players included, which you can simply select from the Settings page in your WordPress dashboard.

This FLV plugin can be used for all FLV-format videos, but in case you’re having trouble converting your videos into FLV you may want to consider getting FLV Producer.

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Although you can easily use Camtasia Studio for screen capture videos, FLV Producer works much better for full-length or motion videos. In other words, if your video involves a human face, a lot of movement, and other non-screen objects, FLV Producer will convert videos faster, smoother with better compression and production levels.

All you do is select the video on your PC, define the output location and file name. Then edit your video conversion settings ( you can use the predefined ones), as well as the quality of the audio / video. Click on “Start Encoding” and FLV Producer will easily convert your videos to FLV.

Here’s the difference between videos played using the players provided with FLV Producer:

• The first frame makes the preview image – You don’t have to display a blank player like you do with a lot of other video players. Neither do you have to create a separate “preview image”. The video just takes the first frame and enhances it to make the preview, therefore when you play the video it transitions smoothly to the rest of the video.
• You can choose to preload the movie – great for shorter movies but sucks up bandwidth pretty quickly if the video is long – after all not everyone will click the play button so why load the whole movie unless you have a specific objective?
• URL redirect after movie – Yes, you can bring users to a specified website once the movie ends. A great way to make money from affiliate marketing – just do a video of the product you’re promoting and once the movie is over bring the user to the product page with your affiliate link!

FLV Producer costs $97, so I understand if you need to think twice before getting it. However let me assure you, I’ve searched everywhere for VLF converters and players that are specialized for Internet marketers and affiliate marketers, and most can’t compare to FLV Producer. An investment here is more than worthwhile, especially if you plan to do more video blogging in the future.

You should also take a look at FLV Plugin, which makes it even easier for you to display FLV videos on your WordPress blog. It was developed to be used with FLV Producer but you can use it to display any FLV video on your blog.

If it’s not for you – and you don’t mind the technical difficulties and lack of features – there are of course other choices. We’ll cover more in the “Blogging With Video” series.

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Watch the video as I show you step-by-step how to install PodPress, tweak the basic settings, and add audio to your blog. If you’re interested in creating audio products to sell, or just to create “podcasts” like this one to provide more value to your blog readers, this tutorial will be very useful.

If you want to create interview products and sell them online, take a look also at Easy Audio Products.

As far as I know, there are hardly any video bloggers out there and yet video sites like video.google and youtube are growing like mad with people submitting their videos as if they were paid to do so.

So what happened? Why hasn’t video blogging taken off? Don’t we love recording our life for the world to see – judging by the success of formerly mentioned sites and reality programs we do. So how come bloggers don’t bother with having a purely video content blog were they record a span of their life for others to see?

I don’t know these answers and can only speculate. Personally I don’t like to have every person in the world taking a seat on my couch to see what’s happening in the Mundell household. Privacy levels differ between blogging and video blogging. When we record a video we also show every emotion we feel at the time.

But by blogging we can be madly upset, stark naked, happy as chum or silly and nobody would ever know.

So, why have you not considered video blogging?