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This is a guest post by Andy Havard. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

Video blogging is one of the most popular uses of online video on the web right now. So how do you make your video blog stand out from the crowd? This article outlines the 7 essential tips for putting your video blog ahead of the competition:

1. Understand What A Video Blog Is
A video blog (or “Vlog”) is just a video representation of your everyday blog. Users read particular blogs because they either enjoy the personality behind the content, or they’re interested in the topic being discussed or because they can relate to article. Your video blog should do exactly the same.

2. Be Engaging & Accessible
Much like in the blogosphere, viewers don’t want to watch video content they can’t connect with. Here are a few pointers to establish real engagement with your audience; ask questions that users can respond to, discuss issues and subjects that tie in with your topic niche, and always try to address your audience in a way a friendly and familiar way.

3. Be Useful & Up To Date
When exciting news hits the web, Internet users will be undoubtedly searching for it. If your vlog is constantly up to date with topical news in your niche you’ll stand a better chance of getting users to check out your video blog.

4. Be Personal & Human
Blogs by nature convey personality through the uses of playful text and images, and your vlog should do the same. The benefit of video blogs is that they allow your audience to see you, hear you and relate to how your body language and on-screen actions. By letting your audience see you in this way will give your vlog an essential personal feel to it. Always be yourself, trying to be something you’re not will be surprisingly obvious to viewers and they won’t like you for it.

5. Check Out Other Vlogs
No one becomes a master of video blogging overnight. It takes time, practice and dedication to become comfortable and confident on camera. By watching other vlogs and seeing how other users have changed from their early episodes, you’ll pick up some handy tips and gain confidence in your early performances. Learning from other users will help you be able to make sure your vlog tick all of the right boxes.

6. Always Aim To Inform, Educate & Entertain
There are 3 essential golden rules when it comes to creating video content these are to inform, educate and entertain your audience. If you are able to hit these 3 areas on the head you’ll be well on your way to creating a great video production. It’s quite a task to tick all 3 boxes, but by hitting at least one or two each time you create a video will really help to benefit your video blog’s.

7. Give It All You’ve Got
The more time and effort you can put into each and every video blog the better you can make them. Spending time script writing, planning your shot, filming your vlog, editing it and producing it will really put your video blog ahead of the pack. You’d be surprised how many vlogs are slap-dash affairs and their creators wonder why they don’t get viewed or shared. Always give it everything you’ve got no matter if it’s your first vlog or your hundredth.

Summary
Just like in the blogging world there’s tough competition to battle out there, but by taking on board these pointers your video blog will stand a much greater chance of succeeding online.

Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

Gina,

Q: How to eliminate the dates from my posts…
It is the Twenty Ten Theme on wordpress. I need to remove it from my homepage as well as from the single posts.

To remove or not to remove the date and time from the blog posts is a different issue and we will cover that in the later part of this article.
First lets see how to remove the date being displayed on your theme.

Caution:
Make sure to take a backup of your theme before trying this.

General Themes:
In general, most themes would have < ?php the_time(); ?> in single.php or post.php file, present in your theme directory.
Usually the path is: /wp-content/themes/themeName

Log into your WordPress blog: Click on Edit under Appearance menu.
Click on single.php or post.php file to edit it.

remove that code or comment it out, save the file and refresh your webpage. Make sure to clear your blogs cache if you have installed any caching plugin.

For Twenty Ten Theme
Twenty Ten theme uses a function call < ?php twentyten_posted_on(); ?> to display post date as well as author name.
So removing it from your single.php file would even remove “posted by author” info also.

So, you need to remove the date part from the functions.php file directly.

Log into your WordPress blog: Click on Edit under Appearance menu.
Click on functions.php file to edit it.

Scroll down to find this line of code:

printf( __( '<span class="%1$s">Posted on</span> %2$s 
<span class="meta-sep">by</span> %3$s', 'twentyten' ),

Now remove the code which is responsible for generating “Posted on ” info. Now the code must look like:

printf( __( ' <span class="meta-sep">by</span> %3$s', 'twentyten' ),

Save the file and refresh your blog.

If you followed everything correctly, the Posted on (post_date) will now be removed.

To Remove or Not To Remove ?
People searching for the content often get frustrated to go through long enough only to know that its a old and out dated information 🙁
Sometimes they need to scroll down to the comment section to see the date of the first comment, to roughly know the post date.

If it’s a timeless content, then it’s always fine, but what if you are a news site and some kind of gossip site where knowing the post date might be important for the user.
In such cases, it’s not advisable to remove the date of publishing the article.

I have faced problems too.. I usually visit application development sites and read and try the coding so long only to know that the core software the post is talking about is years old and it doesn’t work any more 🙁
Such development site even fail to mention the software version etc details.

Advantages to the webmaster:
People coming to the site may think the content as still fresh and will continue reading.
These people are mainly the visitors coming from search engines, so he gets the advantage of getting more organic traffic. Google Adsense ads likes organic traffic! Once they know that this is not something they were looking for, they will start looking around and may click on a ad $

My Personal Take:
My advice would be to include the date, if you are writing a development blog or a news site where the articles are more or less time sensitive.
On the other hand, if you are writing timeless articles: you can well remove the date and time of posting the article.

These are my views. What you people think ?