What Is Vodcasting and Vlogging?

While the term podcasting can refer to both audio blogging and video blogging, the term vodcasting specifically refers to video blogging, also called vlogging. I generally prefer to be specific, to distinguish the type of rich media content that I’m discussing.

Vodcasting successfully requires a visually creative and critical eye. But if you’re just having fun, all you need is an inexpensive webcam and suitable video editing software with voice recording capabilities. Such software is often included with webcams.

If you want to produce vodcasts with some degree of visual quality, you’ll probably want to move up to a good digital video camera and higher-end video editing software such as Adobe Premiere, or something similar. If high-quality video content is business critical for you, consider hiring a production house to tape your episodes, instead of trying to shoot it yourself with your friends. Make sure that when you budget out the cost of episodes, that you include the cost of both promotion and monthly server bandwidth costs. It’s possible to have a successful podcast in terms of subscribers, but if you aren’t earning any revenues, it’s possible to choke on the bandwidth costs.

One way to supplement revenues is to consider packaging episodes onto DVDs for sale, providing this is appropriate for the content. Another possibility is to ask for donations “to help cover bandwidth costs”. Paypal has a button that you can use to collect micropayment donations. In fact, you can use Paypal to sell any DVDs/ CDs that you might want to sell. (I’ll have more about offering products online in the near future at the ItsMyBizniz weblog.)

For topic consistency, plan a list of topics in advance. Storyboard each episode, after you have scripted it. Storyboards are particularly important if you want to go beyond having video content that uses a single camera viewpoint. On the other hand, if you’re just running a camera and capturing live, unscripted events, this scripting and storyboarding advice probably doesn’t apply.

More information about planning podcasts and vodcasts.

(c) Copyright 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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