People often say blogging is Dead start Vlogging.
While others say youtube traffic doesn’t convert, Try blogging.
Or ever being in a situation where you are wondering which platform between Blogging vs Youtube should you try First?
Or
Which is Highly profitable?
In today’s posts,
I am going to show to what you need to know all about blogging vs youtube.
- The requirements to get started.
- Which platforms are worth spending time on & also best for your business?
- With my real-life case study leveraging both blogging and youtube.
That said.
Blogging Vs Youtube: My First-Hand Experience On Both
A while back ago, I teamed up with a personal brand who are finding it hard to grow its youtube channel.
Most especially, their channels aren’t getting any attraction.
They had a YouTube channel in a very competitive space with 50 helpful videos and only less than 5k subscribers in 3 years.
The worst part: They did Facebook ads to promote their video for more growth but still it only resulted in 5500 subscribers in 2 years. The ROI wasn’t great so it was a bit waste of budget.
So I came on board and we had a turnaround.
We grew from 5.5k to over 30k subscribers in the first 3 months of my service.
I wrote a step-by-step Youtube case study on how I achieved these desired results.
That said!
In January 2022, I also launched a blog in a very competitive space (the finance space), not damshustle.
The blog was less than 6 months old. but my early SEO tactics gave that blog its early attraction.
I would say the results aren’t bad for a blog in less than 6 months.
Most SEO experts know that it actually takes time for traffic to start rolling in.
So I am going to be sharing my experiences on these two platforms right away.
The fact is, am glad I encountered both.
And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be making these posts for You today.
So if you want to the key difference between a blog and a YouTube channel, you will love this post.
Here is the reality behind it when it comes to (Blogging vs YouTube) and it all boils down to their differences.
Tug Of War Between Blogging vs YouTube
YouTube in terms of simplicity Is a platform where videos are streamed & watched online.
You also create videos that can be uploaded on the platform.
While blogging on the other hand is simply sharing information about (any event, situation, topic, etc.) in written formats only.
The Good Part: They are both reliable ways to make passive income online.
But over the years?
Ever since the existence of YouTube in 2005, the emergence of vlogging is now become the talk of the internet.
Which makes everyone in the digital world feel blogging is Dead.
How true is that?
According to Google Trends, its popularity took off over blogging with a huge GAP in its early days (Aug 2010).
Ever since blogging became less talk of the town, vlogging has won the hearts of many content creators’ minds.
Could that be the reason why blogging is Dead?
Spoiler Alert: NO.
WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content management system) platform on the internet that manages 80% of all blogs on the internet.
About 5 million blogs were published on wordpress in the year 2021.
That is just to say, people still blog. But compared to YouTube, it can be so tough to scale out.
What do I mean?
It is easier to grow a YouTube channel compared to growing a blog and that leads us to their big key differences.
The Difference Between Blogging & YouTube
Introducing the big differences between having a blog and owning a YouTube channel.
YouTube Growth is Faster than blogging:
When it comes to their growth, it boils down to getting traffic that equals more views.
Check it out, I have been blogging for 3 years now, and all I can tell you is this.
When it comes to ranking on Google, Blogging takes longer before it starts getting Traffic than YouTube.
How true is this?
A study by ahrefs shows that It takes a blog 2+ years on average to start getting ranked on google for its keywords.
Because it takes several months for Google to know if your blog exists & that is because It is usually in the “Google Sandbox phase”.
At this stage, Google looks out for certain EEAT criteria on the blog before they rank your article page.
Most of all is the “E-A-T” which stands for…
- E= Experience
- E= Expertise
- A= Authoritativeness
- T= Trustworthiness.
And that can be achieved by link-building, building Topical authority, etc.
With “E-E-A-T” your articles pages get a high chance of getting that sweet spot on Google’s first page.
Knowing fully well you should have at the back of your mind that, you are ready to put in the work and patience before you start seeing any positive impact of blogging.
But with YouTube, Such doesn’t exist.
Just Upload your video & hit the published live Button & your video goes public.
Without further due, Your videos can now be found on YouTube search results regardless of other SEO measures.
That can start bringing in a decent amount of traffic depending on the keyword’s monthly search volume.
But blogging on the other hand doesn’t work that way.
You can build “E-E-A-T” and still not rank, Why? because all keywords aren’t created equal.
Google has a way of finding articles that are yet to show up on the search.
And the first way is by crawling site pages.
Crawling means it has found the page, indexing means it is ready to show up on search results.
Most times google crawls a page and still has not indexed it.
And that can cause a Huge Pain.
YouTube instantaneously crawls your videos instantly and decides where they ought to be on their search results.
Start-up Costs:
The average cost of starting a blog is around $100/year and it costs you $0 to set up a YouTube channel.
You don’t need a Host because YouTube is a self-hosted platform.
When creating a blog, you need to know which platforms you are to manage your content on.
WordPress is the most popular content management for blog owners.
Before setting up a blog, you need a domain name & a Hosting package, and that will cost you a yearly recurring fee.
Content Creation:
Making a YouTube video or writing a blog post, which is faster?
In common sense, a blog post is faster compared to making a video.
A while back ago, I was trying to make a faceless video about a course I was trying to promote on a brand-new channel with no subs.
it took me 3 days to be able to create this video which is not an easy thing for me.
To be honest, am not a video editor.
I just leverage some common basic video editing tools like canva and invideo that are beginner-friendly for startups.
And that video doesn’t look 100% satisfactory and professional.
It would cost me over 100 dollars to be able to make a better version of that single video.
So if am to make about 10 more videos, then I should have a budget of $1000 in my pocket.
Not all startups can afford such an amount at the start even though it will pay off in the long run.
For these reasons, people never find it pleasant when they feel they are to make YouTube videos.
Same for my client’s channel, we had a video editor we paid a fee for every video he edited.
This doesn’t work for everyone because not everyone can afford to pay for editing especially when starting.
My client was financially buoyant, so paying video editors wasn’t a big deal.
But with blogging, Things are quite different.
This article on my blog ranking page 1 on Google took me less than 7 hours to create.
And now it ranks on Google and gets a small amount of traffic.
If you are good at video editing, then you won’t find it uneasy when making videos like mine.
But better still, you can still make videos regardless of doing video editing.
SEO Standpoint & Organic Search:
SEO as it may sound means search engine optimization.
It is usually all about optimizing your content for search engines like Google or YouTube.
From an SEO standpoint: Google is known for ranking blog posts & youtube videos just as shown.
And also shows videos in the top search Whenever users are searching for information that videos describe best.
With Youtube: Videos only.
Pro tip: Google has invested so much in its algorithm that they are smart enough to know if a video should rank for a keyword on Google or not.
Google makes 92.26% of all the search traffic on the internet making it the most popular on the planet.
So you get an advantage when your videos are ranked on Google search results.
For example,
One of my client’s videos is hitting that No. 1 spot on Google for a keyword with a good amount of searches.
So that brought in 4.6% (22,994) views of his traffic from Google and 6.2% (2401) views from a YouTube search.
But because that video is a Video keyword, Google ranks it.
This gives YouTube videos potential headshots to steal that Google first page & youtube first-page search.
Unlike YouTube, you can’t rank blog posts at all.
But the truth is both platforms (blogging vs YouTube) have different criteria for SEO.
For example.
Optimizing your videos to rank on YouTube can be so easy to do.
- Conduct video keyword research using the VidiQ tool
- Make videos, and upload them.
- Sprinkle the keywords in video descriptions,
- Add relevant keywords to tags and add an attractive thumbnail & Captivating headlines.
- And finally, HIT published and called it a DAY.
Crickets… Traffic is now rolling in
While blogging SEO tactics can be a severe nightmare.
You hear SEO experts say the following
- publish long-form content.
- Add keywords to the headline and meta description of your posts.
- Sprinkle some keyword variations into your post.
- Make awesome unique blog posts
- Use short URLs
- Build backlinks, understand the search intent
- Add infographics and videos to increase dwell time.
In summary
Only for you to hit publish Button and your blog posts aren’t even Indexed.
In most cases, the article is mostly buried down Google’s 2nd-page results.
This can be a Huge pain, which makes YouTube SEO pay off.
Either way, if the blog post gets a first-page spot, GREAT!
But the process of optimizing those posts worth the stress.
Technicality:
Blogging is more technical than YouTube.
During my early days of blogging, I experienced a lot of difficulties on my blog which I almost have up the run.
It is worth the stress but these difficulties can be a Huge pain if not tackled correctly.
It can also hurt your blog’s success.
A while back ago, I was battling with this issue on my blog. it took me several months before I got it fixed.
It was preventing my blog from getting indexed by the search engines, so I had to make sure I fixed that up
It wasn’t easy for me, especially the fact that I was in the beginning stage of running my blog.
So I watched lots of YouTube videos and did a lot of consulting with other bloggers and some advice didn’t work.
Anyway, I got it all sorted out in the end.
But that is just one piece of the puzzle.
Setting up your blog to a standard level requires some level of expertise.
In most cases, You can watch free YouTube videos to walk you through that process.
but you can’t sort that all by yourself at the beginning stage of setting up the blog.
E.g. connecting your blog to Google Analytics and console, Setting up all required SEO plugins like toast, rank maths, etc.
On the other end, with Youtube. it is pretty much easier.
You don’t need to worry about all this mess I mentioned earlier.
All that matters is to set up your channel, make videos, and check your studio analytics to see how well the videos performed.
Monetization:
So there is no one perfect answer to how much a content creator earns on either a blog vs YouTube.
Both platforms have their criteria and metrics for monetization which vary by niche.
On my client’s channel, we made $645.35 from 146.0K views from YouTube ads revenue.
From experience I would say, blogging makes more than that with such an amount of traffic.
Though my clients don’t rely on YouTube ads revenue, solely on course sales and affiliate marketing.
And then, YouTube did convert and the revenue is 10X that of YouTube ads equally on the same traffic value.
So our revenue streams were just from Course sales, affiliate marketing & ads.
But in blogging, you get a lot more than you ever think of.
For instance..
Adam effory made a video on how he made $5,000/month from a single-click article with affiliate marketing.
Excluding ad networks, just a piece of the article brings in $5,000/month.
Sweet.
With that, he still made 812,718 dollars in the year 2020 alone with his blog with 292.9K visits.
All revenue came from,
Ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored ads, and course sales.
YouTube does a good job when it comes to monetization with different-level streams.
But with the next level of monetization, blogging can do that.
Blogging gives you the option to place ad placement on any sections of your blog that best suit and work well for your audiences.
But with YouTube, the algorithm does that for you, and it usually appears 30 seconds after the video has been clicked.
With that here is a quick summary of all the differences between blogging vs YouTube in a table as shown below
[table id=1 /]
Should I Start A Blog Or A YouTube Channel In 2024?
The most common questions that have been asked all over the internet are.
But the answer lies in your goal and objectives of your business or better still your brand or personal purposes.
For example.
A popular SEO SAAS software company called Ahrefs.
They provide tools and resources for SEO experts who want to rank higher on Google and charge a monthly fee.
Knowing fully well their customers are people who do SEO.
They ranked for some top competitive keywords in their niche that their audiences are searching for.
And each article links to their products page which is where they make money whenever people subscribe to their tool.
NICE!!
Knowing fully well Google covers 93% of all search engine traffic, Ahrefs knows its customers are searching for key terms related to what their products can offer on Google.
So they rank for keywords that bring in traffic to their products which can lead to sales.
E.g People searching for the query “Keyword research guide” is going to need a keyword research tool.
But for Gillian Perkins was the opposite.
In case you have never heard of her, Gillian Perkins is a female marketing strategist basically for online entrepreneurs.
Gillian has been recognized for her business framework and concepts for uniquely naming her content which makes them stand out.
The concluding part is that her success came from YouTube.
She quotes as shown in the image.
The point is every successful brand leverages both platforms.
But at the beginning stage of their career, they focus on one.
And when that took off to some point, They diversified and moved to other platforms.
Adam enfroy is a successful blogger who started his journey as a blogger on his blog way back in early 2019.
Today, he makes over a million Bucks♥ in revenue from the blog.
After finding success with his blog, he launched his YouTube channel.
And that is not all, other personal brands do the same too.
80% of successful brands that have a YouTube channel also blog too, and Vice versa.
The point is, start from one platform, and once you grow to some certain point where it requires less you do less work and achieve great results, diversifying to the other.
But if you feel sucked at standing in front of the camera, then leverage blogging. But if you do not, then start YouTube.
But engaging both is a great win as it expands your brand’s online visibility.
But the following expectations are what you should be experiencing.
How Fast Are You Wanting To Get Traffic:
As I mentioned earlier, in terms of traffic growth, blogging is slower compared to YouTube.
And that gives YouTube an edge over blogging.
If you are haste to quickly get traffic then you should know investing in Youtube is the best option.
In other words, Blogs also can easily get that quick traffic spike.
But the required measures for it are not easy, not at all.
When growing your site domain authority, you may need to do link building which is every blogger’s nightmare.
Are You Ready To Deal With The Technical Aspect of Managing A site?
Blogging is actually a good thing to do due to his vast options in terms of monetization.
But the monetization aspects may sound enticing to you.
Can you handle the technical aspects of running a successful blog to meet these requirements?
The answer lies in how well you are willing to put in the work.
In other words, blogging is technical.
If you are good @ writing and have to start a blog, don’t get discouraged by this.
It is just a tough issue every blogger faces and the more you face it, the better experiences you get.
If none is part of your choice of preferences then YouTube should be your goal.
SEO (search engine optimization criteria):
SEO on YouTube and blogging are two different things but they all achieve the same results.
Which is ranking “higher of search results”.
You can deal with SEO on YouTube, even beginners can get it figured out.
Add keywords to the title and video description design an attractive thumbnail, upload, and call it a day♠
But SEO in blogging has the same principles but is highly technical and tactical.
You need to know in,
- Keyword research
- Technical SEO
- Content writing
- Building E-A-T
- How to set up Yoast
- Schema markups
- Internal linking etc.
You don’t have to be an expert at all of the above-mentioned before you get started, you only get better along the way.
So don’t let this discourage you but they are what you will experience when blogging.
It’s just what you need to do when you have it in mind blogging.
Costs Of Equipment & Resources
Blogging vs YouTube are two different things, so they require different resources.
With YouTube, you can start based on what you have but having some professional equipment can help your video stand out and have better clarity and experience.
You need to have all this equipment in place if you are serious about doing vlogging.
You should get one. But if you don’t have the costs to get it, Fine.
You can start from somewhere, after all not all channels require the cost of video equipment.
Some channels do 100% screen records due to their niche and they still found success.
But on the other hand, is Blogging.
As blogging may sound, there are going to be some materials you ought to get when running a blog.
I don’t mean paying for a domain and hosting♦
Common blogging tools that help you scale your blogging business.
The good part is they are 100% required for the start. They are most blogging tools required for research and analysis.
As time goes on, the need for certain tools will generally increase over time as your blog grows.
You see a successful blog and want your blog to be successful too.
But all successful blogs are blogs that can convert traffic into paying customers.
And what makes them successful is the resources they leverage at the right time.
E.g
- Email marketing tools for a successful email marketing campaign.
- Blogging designs (paid themes) and more.
Vlogging vs Writing (Which Sounds Natural To You):
There used to be a quote that says, you get better at something when you do it over and over again.
But the reality behind it is that getting good over time requires your determination towards it.
You can’t become a better writer when the passion for writing is not part of you.
You can’t become a better YouTuber when you are always shy about getting in front of a camera or talking to your screen.
Between both, there should be one you should be more passionate about than the other.
Whichever it is should come naturally to you.
How to Start A Blog Requirements (Quick Summary)
Step #1: Get good hosting and a Domain
Step #2: Set your sites on wordpress
Step #3: Choose a blog theme
Step #4: Submit your sitemap to Google using Yoast SEO plugin
Step #5: Connect your site to analytics and search console
Step #6: Start publishing articles
Learn More: Check out the Cheapest way to start a WordPress Blog
How To Start & Set Up Your YouTube Channel
Step 1: Pick a niche
Step 2: Create your YouTube channel
Step 3: Vse vidiQ to do keyword research
Step 4: Generate a list of videos for your channel
Step 5: Add keywords in video Tags, title, and description and publish the video
Learn More: Check out the backlinko Youtube Hub
FAQ
Is Blogging Still Relevant in 2024?
Yes, blogging is still relevant in 2022 and the demand for bloggers is still very high.
There is a potential opportunity for every aspiring blogger should dive into.
83% of searches on the internet come from Google, so there is enough opportunity to get your blog in front of these audiences.
Is Blogging More Profitable Than YouTube?
As I mentioned earlier, there is no one-size-fits-all on how much you can earn using both platforms.
But blogging gives room for diverse monetization strategies, unlike YouTube.
Which is easier blogging or YouTube?
The answers depend on your objectives. for example, if your content requires more practical and actionable stuff then you should do YouTube as it explains better compared to writing it in the form of written posts.
Are videos better than blogs?
Videos are not better than blogs, each has its unique way of attracting audiences.
However, research has proven that videos tend to bring in more customers and conversions than written posts.
Now it’s your turn.
In today’s posts?
I believe I did justice in diving deeper into blogging vs Youtube
And which of them are you going to try first or leverage? Are you good at making videos?
Do you choose to be a YouTuber but are worried about making videos?
Or
You feel uncomfortable being on camera and then you choose to blog
Which way, Lemme know by dropping your comments below.
