Did you know I never intended to blog?
Yes, I wanted to have a website, and yes, I wanted to share my ideas about personal finance. But in creating Thousandaire, I never thought I would be writing blogs.
My original intention was only to make videos. I wanted to make videos because I knew intuitively that people my age watch youtube, but they don’t read blogs. My friends in college watched youtube all the time; not a single one of them consistently read any blogs.
So I built this website and I started making videos, but then I realized something: videos are hard. I had to come up with an idea, shoot the video, watch the video and realize it sucks, shoot the video again, edit the video, and spend an hour uploading it. It’s harder than learning Spanish.
Blogs are easy. Give me 45 minutes, and I can pump out a blog that is at least as good as anything you wrote in elementary school.
So here I am, six months later with a pretty darn successful blog (considering I’ve only been at it for six months), and I come across this little infograph from Mashable that completely validates what I knew intuitively six months ago.
Compare “Watch video” to “Read blogs”, specifically in the Millennials and Gen X columns. (While I love old people and I appreciate anyone who visits my site, my main target is young people) Here’s an opportunity for me to test out tables in my new theme:
Walmart Amazon Apple Store $1,924 (Refurbished) $2,099 $2,499
Looks pretty good if I do say so myself. I freaking love my new theme.
Now back to the point; young people watch a lot more video than they read blogs. In fact, people of every age (even the old farts) are watching more video than they are reading blogs on the internet. I know I want to keep blogging (without videos), but I also know I need to incorporate more videos in my blog if I want to connect better with my target audience. I just have to make myself do it, even if it’s hard.
I’m gonna be doing some experimenting over the next few weeks. I have some ideas. The first one I’m gonna try is an opinion/news video, similar to a Phil DeFranco video, but mine would focus almost exclusively on financial topics. I also want to do more music videos (like Haven’t Made a Budget) and educational videos (like What is a Roth IRA), but these videos take lots of writing and planning. Since I don’t have time to do those every week, I’m gonna give this opinion/news thing a shot and see what happens.
So this was just a bunch of rambling, and probably not better than anything you wrote in elementary schools, but thank you for reading my babbling stream of consciousness. I will attempt to babble on video this weekend about news and we’ll see if you like it next week.
If you have any suggestions on videos you’d like to see me make, please leave a comment and let me know. Also, any generic supporting comments to help motivate me to follow through on my videos are very much appreciated. Thanks internet friends!
Kevin McKee is an entrepreneur, IT guru, and personal finance leader. In addition to his writing, Kevin is the head of IT at Buildingstars, Co-Founder of Padmission, and organizer of Laravel STL. He is also the creator of www.contributetoopensource.com. When he’s not working, Kevin enjoys podcasting about movies and spending time with his wife and four children.
That’s a very interesting infographic. While our generation does tend to watch more video, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they aren’t watching anything remotely related to personal finance.
All things considered, I like blog way more than video for information. Until a video can be “scanned” as easily as an article, I’m sure my preferences will stay firm. Also, I hate the speeds at which people speak in videos…I feel like they inch along sometimes while others speed right by. I always manage to read at a perfect speed for my liking, though. 😀
I definitely understand there are people who prefer reading, which is why I don’t want to stop blogging. I do, however, just want to add more videos to my arsenal.
You would have a unique concept for the personal finance market. I don’t know of many personal finance bloggers that regularly create videos.
Ugh, I’m right with you McGee! I can’t stand the slow pace of videos lol. I think the only video I would post is maybe an introduction for my homepage telling people a little bit more about who I am and what I’m about…
@Kevin- sweet infograhic! It’s interesting how popularity of blogs decreases with age, it would seem like a personal finance blog would increase the older you get but maybe not. I say you do an intro video, then I’ll give you some feedback!
I’m gonna do a video this weekend different from anything else I’ve done already, but here are a few links of things I’ve done in the past that I feel turned out really well:
http://174.37.190.189/~thousand/videos/havent-made-a-budget/
http://174.37.190.189/~thousand/videos/what-is-a-roth-ira/
Check back next week for the new video. I’ll make over the weekend and post it Tuesday
Kevin,
This is an interesting insight. My buddy Phil is largely a video blogger (avprofessional dot com) and he started out making music videos that took a TON of time to make. I think he figured out very quickly that wasn’t scalable and has since switched to episodic type content that he can bang 5-7 out at a time. The videos of yours that I’ve seen all seem like they take a ton of time to concept, shoot, and edit so maybe there’s an opportunity to simplify. Even if you do a news-ish/informational type video perhpas you could shorten the length and do five 2 minute clips that you release weekly… still bringing your voice to it but maybe saving some of the effort.
Hey Kevin, I got a video idea for ya’. I’m by no means a Beatles fan (no disrespect, just not my thing), but have you ever heard “8 Days a week?” How about a “6 Days a Week” video twist on the 6 days a week work out challenge? How about a contest where your readers give you ideas for videos they’d like to see your incredibly talented video blogging self create?
I don’t think the infographic really gives you the right indicatin as to what people are doing. If you search certain items My Journey to Millions comes up as number 1 on google – they will the come to my site and maybe have a convo with me, maybe not…but either way they will have marked “searching” rather than reading a blog, because really how long does searching actually take.
Sorry for the run on! lol