Vloggers vs Bloggers

Now, I hope I don’t come across as being a bit big headed here, but at the Bloggers’ Lounge we think of ourselves as experts on blogging. When we aren’t writing tips and ideas for you lovely lot on how to make your blog better, we are reading blogs. And we read a LOT. Anything from lifestyle to fashion to cooking to tech, we read all of them and there is a good chance that we have read yours too! There is another form of blogging that we don’t talk about that shows no signs of slowing down. I’m obviously talking about vlogging. But what does this rise of vlogging mean for good old fashioned blogging? I decided to take a step away from my comfortable home of blogging and step into this unguarded territory of vlogging to find out what can bloggers learn from volggers?

I first went onto the reigning queen of YouTube, Zoella. She is crazy huge, with over 6 million Twitter followers and over 2 million YouTube subscribers. She is known as a beauty vlogger, and even now has her own range of beauty products so she must know her stuff! I watched her makeup storage video to see just what is was that got her millions of fans hooked.

The thing I really liked from Zoella’s makeup storage video (apart from her amazing dressing table) is that at the end, you could click on a drawer and choose which sort of makeup you wanted to view- this would be a really cool thing to incorporate onto a photo on your blog- I loved how interactive it was, and let the audience choose what they wanted to watch. It also showed technical skill, which is always an added bonus!

Also she kept saying things like ‘You would have seen this before’ and ‘I know I’ve already said this’. She treats her viewers like her friends and is really aware of her connection with them- this is definitely something to take on board, treat your blog posts like you’re emailing an old friend, casual and fun, and reference to previous things you’ve said or done. You need to make your audience feel like they are a big part of your life!

I veered away from Queen Zoella and her magical makeup drawers to her boyfriend and just-as-popular Alfie Deyes of PointlessBlog (who I once walked passed outside Oxford Circus tube fact fans).

PointlessBlog isn’t as focused as Zoella’s, which is something we wouldn’t usually recommend- you should really have a niche, especially when you’re just getting started to draw your audience in. But vlogging is different from blogging so I’ll let this pass! Even though his videos aren’t very consistently themed in terms of their content, each one is really fun and shows him having a laugh with his friends which I think is really important to blogging. It’s supposed to be a fun thing to do, not a chore or something that feels too much like work (although you should apply some disciplines).

So, the steady rise of vlogging doesn’t seem like it has any signs of slowing down, and is definitely starting to get much more mainstream if the amount of ‘think pieces’ from newspapers this week is anything to go by. There are definitely little tips and tricks that vloggers use that bloggers could adopt (and vice versa!) but just as long as you are producing great content, beautiful photos and are utilising your social media, there’s no reason why your blog can’t be just as successful!