WordPress Wednesday Tip: Embedding Videos into a Blog Post

You know that using video as part of your social media strategy has been the rage for a few years now. And guess what! Its popularity – and therefore its importance to marketing strategy – has only continued to grow. In fact, it’s beginning to dominate the social media space. Adding video to your blog posts is not only a great way to attract, engage, and draw visitors back to your site, it’s becoming increasingly essential for businesses to keep up in the market.

Today’s WordPress Wednesday shows you how to easily embed video in a blog post. Ready to get started?

 

WordPress Wednesday: How to Embed Video into a Blog Post

An older version of this tip provided detailed instructions on how to find and insert the HTML code required to embed videos directly in blog posts. Since then, WordPress has made it super easy to embed videos, as well as other assets such as images and audio. Here’s the simplified way to play videos directly from within your blog posts.

1. Open a new tab in your browser and go to the page that houses the video you want to embed (e.g., YouTube).

 

2. Find the video you want to embed and click ‘Share.’ This may be the actual word ‘Share’ or an icon that looks like one of these:  The share option might be within the video’s ‘Menu’ or ‘Settings.’ Again, this may be the actual word or one of these icons:

When you click Share, the video platform will likely display a window with several sharing options, including choices that will automatically push the video to one of your channels such as Facebook or Reddit. For example, when we select Share from an episode of Raney Day Talks on YouTube, this window pops up:

If you selected the first option, Embed, YouTube would take you to the complete html code you used to need to embed the video into your blog post. But now you simply need to….

3.     Click “COPY,” which will copy the link to the video, which you can see there in the window.

5.     Navigate back to the website. Go to the spot in the blog post where you want to embed the video.

6.    Ensure you are on a new line* and then simply paste (ctrl-v) the link to the video into the body of the blog post. 

WordPress will then automatically – magically, even – turn the link into an embedded video! As soon as you paste the link, you’ll see the text disappear and the live preview of the video will appear in its place.

*If you paste the link directly before or after other text in the post, the link will appear as text.

Which results in this: the https://youtu.be/pD5foonnGvw

versus this:

 

That’s all there is to it! 

Bonus Tip

Help your video stand out and increase the likelihood that visitors will view it by letting your audience know right away that there’s a video in the post.
Do this by:

• Noting it in the title of the post. Using brackets has been shown to boost click-through rates.
• Embedding the video as close to the beginning of your post as possible. Ensure it can be seen “above the fold” by, introducing the video with a few sentences and then display it.

 So now that you know how to embed a video into your blog post, will you start using them into your blogs? If so, be sure to share a link in the comments below. We’d love to check it out!