Blogging vs vlogging? Both blogging and v’logging (video blogging) are great ways to generate organic traffic for an affiliate business; or any business for that matter. By creating content either through writing or video, anyone can attract website visitors to gain greater exposure. This can drive affiliate sales and/or customers to a business.
Blogging has been around much longer than v’logging of course and blogging became a thing in the early 90’s – see the history of blogging. V’logging became popular after YouTube was founded in February 2005. From 2012 to 2017 the number of YouTube viewers increased at a massive rate, rising from 380 million to over 800 in only a few years.
There are over 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world. Their authors account for over 6 million blog posts daily, or over 2.5 billion annually.
Blogging Vs Vlogging: Which To Choose?
So are you going to become a blogger or a v’logger? Or perhaps both? Blogging is certainly more competitive than v’logging. So you may need to work harder and for longer to attract free traffic from a blog than from a YouTube channel. Videos can be spun out much more quickly than blog posts too. So this is definitely a consideration.
According to Alexa’s traffic ranking Google is the most used search engine followed closely by YouTube in second place. But it’s also much more competitive. More on this here.
YouTube plays a key role in Google search too. Since YouTube is owned by Google many of YouTube’s videos are shown in Google’s search results. The platform you choose might also depend on the kind of visitors who are interested in your business/products too. A recent Austrian survey among teenagers stated that YouTube is their No.1 search engine.
So, if your business sells to a particular age group, it’s well worth doing some research to see which platform is the most relevant for your target audience.
Blogging Vs Blogging: Traffic
If you’re looking to become a blogger or vlogger in order to build an online business, you should expect a lot of work. Other methods of building traffic are far quicker and if you don’t have a lot of patience paid marketing is a much faster and more scalable route. (See PPC vs Organic marketing) But blogging and vlogging can ultimately give you free traffic and therefore a passive income. Just expect to put in the work upfront before you start looking for results.
As a blogger, I can attest to the patience you’ll need to build a lot of free traffic. It’s years not months before you can see a good amount of free visitors. While YouTube and TikTok are less competitive than Google (and therefore blogging), the two platforms are still very highly saturated; particularly YouTube.
Not that long ago you could monetise YouTube quite easily even as a beginner. But now there’s so much competition you’ll need over a thousand subscribers just to be considered for their payment program:
Of course that doesn’t matter if you’re using a video blog for website traffic, and you’re monetising in another way; either for a business or affiliate product.
Leverage Your Interest
Whether you decide to become a blogger or a vlogger or perhaps both, you need to realise that free traffic takes time; so you’ll need to be in it for the long run. If you can’t imaging creating content on a blog, or video blog over months and perhaps years, it might not be the answer.
Ideally if you’re going to create content yourself you should pick a topic you know about and/or have a passion for. If you like to write, choose blogging and if you like creating video use a v’log. But either way, you won’t get much exposure if you give it a few weeks and then quit. Long term bloggers and vloggers are the ones who eventually succeed and get free traffic. There’s just too much competition in both to expect much traffic for a small amount of work.
So the best thing you can do if you’re an affiliate using organic marketing is to pick a topic you care about and love! Stick with it for a long time and create lots of content. Eventually you should see traffic growing and people finding your business. If you start with your passion and focus on creating value and the traffic will come. See also best niche to blog about.