The idea of disparity between blogging and vlogging leaves people quite perplexed. That’s why discussing the difference between blog and vlog is the point of today’s discussion.
With so many terms developing with time, anyone can be perplexed. Something similar happens when it comes to the difference between blog and vlog.
If you’ve come across the terms- blog and vlog recently, you can understand the former as a written form of online communication with readers and the latter as a verbal form of communication with viewers. These two things have been a trending buzz of this era and have their own ins and outs.
Blogging and Vlogging are both as different as day and night. Also, these two are the most optimum and practical ways to earn online money. So if you’re considering generating revenue from a website and/or platforms like YouTube, reading further will surely benefit you.
Before we dive into the difference between blog and vlog, it is important to understand these two thoroughly. You must be aware of the disparities in detail. So let’s start with blogs first…..
What Is Blog?
A typical definition of a blog summarizes in two words- ‘online journal.’ But that was the case in the past as earlier people used blogs to describe their personal beliefs and experiences.
Nowadays, blogs are also used as a medium to generate revenue through online published content on a website or a web page. As a matter of fact, blogs are one of the top-most used forms of content marketing.
For one thing, what you’re reading right now is nothing but a blog.
To get indulged in blogging means you’re repeatedly publishing text-based content (regarded as blog posts) on a website. And, so, you become a blogger. By the way, how many blogs have you read by now? Exactly, it can’t be recalled, but as of now, over 650 million blogs have been published online. Astounding, isn’t it?
Blogging emerged simultaneously with the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW). Otherwise, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) would be nothing but a blank board. With time, the evolution of blog writing made it a way to earn money.
Blogging is primarily done to attract web traffic to the website. Here, web traffic refers to the readers who can turn into potential leads in the case of business and subscribers for a personal blogger. Before we discuss the difference between blog and vlog, let’s look at how blogging can be advantageous.
Importance Of Blogging
Today over 95% of marketers use blogs to reach their audience. This percentage itself suffices for how blogs can potentially generate profits for businesses. Moreover, here are the key benefits of blogging:
Benefits Of Blogging
1. Sell Without Actually Advertising
Blogs are a great way of promoting your brand name among your target audience. It is an effective way to generate leads without officially bothering your target audience with unwanted ads every single time. They come to your website for information, and if they like it, they get hooked to it.
2. Drives In Traffic
Today people look for various kinds of information online. Be it for home remedies, celebrity life, lifestyle, beauty, search engine optimization, or anything that comes to mind. That’s why the internet is filled with blogs on various topics.
3. Increases ROI
Blogging is an earning source for most businesses and individuals these days. You must have seen most websites with a separate blog section. That way, businesses upturn their ROI.
Also, when you need to make your website more discoverable among your audience, there is no other better way than blogging. A number of different queries can be covered in blogs. That’s why blogging is an indispensable part of SEO Strategy. Despite the difference between blog and vlog, both generate optimum revenue.
4. Builds Brand Authority
Blogging is an imperative medium to boost online presence. It helps in spreading the word about your business and builds thought leadership. Thus, builds a credible reputation among the audience.
5. Improves SEO Strategy
To understand it, think about how often you’ve come across the ‘Blog’ section on a website. Ever thought why businesses do so? Firstly, a business website can’t put on everything on its Homepage. Blogs help them in targeting vivid audiences via informational posts.
Secondly, blogging increases a site’s Click-Through Rate (CTR). Thus, it plays a crucial role in improving seo strategy. In fact, there is a big difference between blog and vlog here. Blogs can prove beneficial in seo for vlogs.
Downsides Of Blogging
(i) Takes A Lot Of Time
A blog post needs to be curated carefully. It demands R&D and detailed knowledge about the topic being discussed. This does not happen just in a blink of an eye. Moreover, building a loyal audience that is interested in your content and looks forward to it is not as easy as ABC.
(ii) Consistency Is The Key
When it comes to blogging, sitting back is just out of sorts. You have to be up and above with topics relevant to your niche and serve your audience timely. This requires a whole strategy to manage your blogs from the very beginning till the end. If you publish blogs like once-in-a-blue-moon, then expecting revenues is just not in line. Though there are a plethora of differences between blog and vlog, one has to be consistent in running both.
(iii) Tough Competition
The competition in blogging is cut-throat. After all, there are over 650 million blogs already out there. Thus, getting the desired rank is not that easy. For that, skillfully optimized content has to be designed.
This requires adequate knowledge of SEO and content. Even then, you can’t be certain that your blog will get ranked on the first page of Google or other search engines. Why? Because others are doing that too. So you need to be consistent and keep trying to stand out from the competition, which requires an abundance of patience. Irrespective of the other differences between blogs and vlogs, competition is tough for both.
What Is Vlog?
A video log (or vlog) is a way to connect with people through video format. Vlogs are quite famous these days. A vlogger utilizes online platforms and social media sites to publish video content on a regular basis. In fact, a major part of vloggers today have their own channels where they share their vlogs.
It won’t be wrong to say that even after substantial differences between blogs and vlogs, they do go hand in hand. Just like blogs, a vlog also talks about a specific topic, be it for business promotions, reviews, gaming, or events. These days many vloggers also record their day-to-day activities to engage the audience.
It won’t be fair to start discussing the difference between blog and vlog without properly analyzing the bright side of vlogging.
Importance Of Vlogging
Vlogging is as imperative as blogging. It engages over 92% of the internet audience. This is so because not every other person is interested in reading, so they tend towards video-based content. Moreover, vlogging has under-stated potential benefits:
Benefits Of Vlogging
1. Show Your Talent
Vlogs are a splendid way to leverage your talent. A lot of comedians, musicians, gamers, painters, etc., are already exploiting video-based platforms for this purpose. Reaching out to a large audience has thus become incredibly easy with vlogging. Even writers also do blogging for passion, so this is similar despite all the differences between blogs and vlogs.
2. Earning Source
Vlogs are no less than blogs when it comes to revenue generation. Businesses utilize vlogging to promote their brand name while building a new client base from viewers.
On the other hand, many famous vloggers even generate an exquisite earnings from vlogs that they don’t need any other job. YouTube itself does provide revenue to the creators. Additionally, a vlogger or creator can also ask their audience to join the premium community for premium content.
3. Grab Quick Attention
The utmost leverage of vlogging is that it grabs the audience’s attention more quickly than any other form of content sharing. In fact, they capture attention more easily than blogs, the reason being the majority of netizens are more driven toward videos.
Also, even social media users open a video link, more than any blog link. The difference between blog and vlog attention-grabbing time is that the latter is relatively faster at it.
4. Drives In Interested Customers
Vlogs are an exquisite way to get more business leads. That is the only reason why influencer marketing is so profitable in present times. People get to know more about the usage and features of a product or service. This makes it easier for them to decide why they should spend on a particular product or service. A well-crafted blog also draws in traffic, so there is no difference between blog and vlog here.
5. Connects Easily
Vlogs connect audiences more interactively and engage them more In comparison to any other medium of communication. They build a direct link between the audience and the vlogger. Thus, they stay hooked on them. This is more evident in gaming and comic vlogs.
Downsides Of Vlogging
(i) Lack Of Ideas
While vlogging is an exquisite career option, there is a hub of vloggers out there. And it is a biting a bullet kind of task to keep the audience engaged. Because people happen to like videos that deliver quality content in a creative and enticing way. Not to make you afraid but just to give you a reality check, this becomes painstaking at times for the vlogger. So try to plan well in advance and stay updated with the trends.
(ii) Huge Investment
Sure, with consistent efforts, one can make a fortune from vlogging. But it is also a fact that vlogging costs a fortune in terms of time and money. HD-quality cameras, editing tools, and exciting ways to narrate are required to get to the top of the trending list. These are all major investments. And if you have a recording and/or editing team by your side, be ready to expunge out more money.
(iii) Demands Time
Shooting yourself on camera all day and editing the video takes countless hours. Even some YouTube creators record themselves whilst they travel. You can imagine the hard work and efficiency they have to maintain. This is one thing that remains constant for bloggers and vloggers despite the differences between blog and vlog.
Blogging and vlogging are both impeccable alternatives to earn a nice chunk of change. But you might be wondering which one to invest in. Well, for that, you need to assess the difference between blog and vlog. It is no coincidence that it’s exactly what we’ll discuss next.
Difference Between Blog And Vlog
Here are the differences between blogs and vlogs at a glance:
Let’s discuss the key differences between blog and vlog in detail:
1. Form Of Content
The most basic difference between blog and vlog is the form of content. Blogs are text-based, while vlogs are video-based. Thus, it is crystal clear that the blogs will be positioned on search engines, whereas vlogs will get uploaded on different video-sharing platforms.
Besides GIFs, images and video content can be aligned with a blog altogether to make it enticing. Vlogs just get going with the flow shared by the vlogger.
2. Audience
One of the major distinctions that sets blogs and vlogs apart is the interested audience. While blogs are an effective way to attract readers looking for information online, vlogs are an enticing way to target viewers over video-sharing platforms.
The difference between blog and vlog audiences is quite a consideration. Moreover, it is also important to determine what your audience wants to know about. This demands in-depth research about your audience and creating a strategy based upon their interest. Several tools are used for reckoning analytics that provide insights about audience interest and queries. Continue reading, as we’ll talk about that in detail in a while.
3. Investment: Tools & Equipment
Tools & equipment are the only investment apart from time whether you go for blogging or vlogging. And, of course, as with other differences between blog and vlog, tools and equipment too differ for both of them.
Bloggers require a domain, hosting, CMS, and a well-structured SEO Strategy for blogs. On the other hand, an HD camera, tripod, and mic are basic necessities for vlogging.
There is a difference between blog and vlog tools also. For a blogger, grammatical tools like Grammarly altogether, with a plethora of plugins, are compulsorily required. They also require keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Google Search Console.
But, a vlogger requires heavy investment in video editing tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, Canva, iMovie, etc.
4. Hosting Platforms
This is one of the most crucial differences between blog and vlog. While blogs require an effective Content Management System (CMS), vlogs need video-sharing platforms to get published on.
Hosting platforms are also accountable for the varied nature of the audience for the two most powerful digital marketing mediums. So let’s discuss the major hosting platforms for blogs and vlogs.
For Bloggers
(a) WordPress.com
WordPress.com is the top-most choice of businesses and bloggers these days. Why not? After all, its easy-to-use interface makes sailing through the publishing hefts smooth. The platform provides free-to-use software to publish and maintain blogs on the site. Nevertheless, it can be upgraded. The website also provides hosting services with over 50,000 plugins (free and paid).
The most exquisite feature of this platform is its customization level. It provides HTML coding as well and makes it quite easy to incorporate media elements. No doubt, it won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in 2009 and was rated five stars for privacy by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Themes can be altered and even created to match the requirement. Multiple business organizations utilize WordPress.org for hosting blogs.
Why Use WordPress?
- The platform is an overall Open Source CMS.
- It offers over 50,000 plugins.
- It has Gutenberg Editor support.
(b) Wix
Wix is another over-the-top hosting platform for bloggers, especially those who think coding is not their cup of tea. It proffers a number of designs for distinct niches. In fact, its in-built Artificial Design Intelligence, which goes by Wix ADI, automatically creates a suitable theme for websites. All you need to do is provide the asked information about your blog type, such as- its category, purpose, etc. Unless you need premium features, you can use it for free. Over 220 million registered users swear by Wix for hosting.
Why Use Wix?
- Wix ADI builds a suitable theme-based site with relevant design and structure.
- It can be used even if you aren’t well-versed in coding.
- It provides free hosting.
(c) Joomla
Joomla is the 5th most used CMS presently. This open source software comes with over 5500 extensions and supports multiple languages. Thus, it is an exquisite choice even for multilingual sites.
Like Wix, its backend and frontend dashboard features are designed to assist people with less technical knowledge. It builds splendid websites and manages content with flexible configuration.
Why Use Joomla?
- It has over 5500 extensions.
- It supports 60+ languages.
- Its interface can be operated with ease.
For Vloggers
(a) YouTube
For any aspirant vlogger, nothing can be at par with YouTube. After all, it is the top most used video-sharing platform.
Vlogs and YouTube have a deep connection. After all, YouTube is not just the second most visited social media site but is also a hub of vloggers. Yet, there are other platforms, too, where vloggers go jumping. Continue reading, and you’ll discover those platforms soon.
Over 2 billion people are using YouTube. And there is no need to tell how actively they engage with the video content on this platform, be it in the form of likes, subscribers, or comments. Provided that over 60% of people access the platform from cell phones, it has a huge potential to grow.
It all starts with creating a YouTube Channel and consistency. Gradually, when people start to engage with your video, you’ll be able to make a fortune out of it. Till date, there are a plethora of videos of gaming, reviews, comedy, food, learning, etc., on YouTube. You need to pick a niche and get started.
If you’re a vlogger but don’t have a YouTube Channel, then you’re seriously missing out on a crucial platform. Well, there is no need to elaborate on the imperativeness of YouTube for a vlogger. Yet, here are some key features of the platform:
Why Use YouTube?
- Once you get 1000 Subscribers and 4000 valid public watch hours, you can monetize your video content on YouTube.
- The maximum file size the platform allows to upload is 256 GB or 12 hours (whichever is less).
- You can also make use of YouTube Video Advertising and Influencer Marketing to earn from this platform.
(b) Vimeo
Vimeo is an avant-garde platform for vloggers with over 260 million users. It provides different plans and exquisite features. The platform is the right hand of video-content creators because it has a plethora of video editing tools and optimum storage capacity. Not just that, but Vimeo’s Premium Plan proffers over-the-top options like unlimited uploads.
Why Use Vimeo?
- Even with Vimeo’s Basic Plan, you can access the right to upload 500 megabytes a week.
- It provides a track of video-related metrics. That helps in drawing out plans for future videos.
- It provides access to one-of-a-kind video editing tools.
(c) Twitch
Gamers out there! You must make use of Twitch as it is one of the most popularly used hosting platforms for live game streams. Apart from gaming, the platform also supports real-life and music videos.
It has over 3.3 million monthly broadcasters and is no less than any other video streaming platform. The Amazon subsidiary has been putting out new features and plans for vloggers, which makes it one of a kind.
Why To Use Twitch?
- It supports affiliate promotion videos and live streams.
- For every subscription, a Twitch partner streamer can earn $4.99 per month. The platform itself deducts $2.49 out of it as charges. However, there are exceptions to this rule as per the platform.
- It has over 27,000 partner channels.
So the difference between blog and vlog hosting platforms must be clear now. Now we’re about to start with the most awaited difference between blog and vlog– revenue generation.
5. Revenue Difference Between Blog And Vlog
When it comes to discussing the difference between blog and vlog, consideration of revenue generation is the typical question. Both blog and vlog provide good income depending upon:
- Niche
- Content Quality
- Monetization Policies
- Audience Base
- Tools
That’s why the earnings can vary, and it is hard to give an exact figure here. Nonetheless, both blogging and vlogging can generate a handsome amount of money. The discussion of the difference between blog and vlog can’t get over without discussing how to earn from blog and vlog.
Ways To Monetize Blogs & Vlogs
Whether you opt for blogging or vlogging, the primary purpose is generating revenue from it. Below are the ways to earn from blogs and vlogs. Of course, there is a huge difference between blog and vlog earning ways also.
For Blogs
(a) Google AdSense
AdSense is crucial to generate income via blogs. A blogger must have an AdSense Account in order to monetize blogs. Especially the newbies in the blogging industry can trust AdSense because Google operates it. It will boost the PPC and CPM ad campaigns. The rates vary as per the keyword selection, traffic, and niche.
(b) Provide Advertising Space
If your website is popular enough to attract a wide audience, generating revenue from blogs and vlogs will be much easier. Just consider how newspapers charge for advertising. It’s similar to that.
In the case of blogs these ads are typically called “banner ads.” If a business or brand wants to appear in search results, they’ll connect to you. The only difference between blog and vlog here is when you’ll advertise a brand via a blog, you’ll spread the word about them in written form like banner ads. On the other hand, in a vlog, you’ll speak of the positive experiences from that product.
If we look at the difference between blog and vlog advertising, people tend to engage with blog advertisements more, even while unconsciously scrolling also.
A tip for both business owners and those who run a personal blog or vlog, advertise products or services related to your niche or target audience. It’ll save you from falling short of relevancy.
(c) Affiliate Blogs
Though affiliate promotions can be done in vlogging also, there is a difference between blog and vlog affiliate promotions.
Bloggers lend ad space against some charges for banner ads. Or else, they promote a product/service in their blog or write a review blog and get paid.
Whenever someone buys using their provided link, they earn a pre-decided commission for each sale. This strategy is widely used by vloggers also, just the format changes.
(d) Email Marketing
Businesses can use email marketing to its full potential. And, they must. Reaching out to your audience via email is a bonzer way, be it for:
- Announcing A New Offer
- Promoting A Product/Service
- Asking For Renewals
Independent bloggers can also utilize this strategy to promote someone else’s products/services and earn revenue.
For Vlogs
(a) Video Monetization
Now there is a huge difference between blog and vlog monetization. Video monetization policies differ depending upon the platform. This is so because eligibility criteria for different platforms differ. Apart from that, distinct video-sharing sites allow creators to get financial support from their fans and provide incentives as well.
(b) Affiliate Marketing
You might have seen a lot of vloggers promoting products/services in their vlogs. You just have to do the same. You’ll earn a pre-decided commission for every sale through the link/code provided by you.
So this was all about the difference between blog and vlog. Now let’s see one more crucial aspect.
Vlogging V/S YouTube
There is no denying that YouTube is the go-to option for every vlogger. Yet, using vlogs and YouTube synonymously is wrong. Why? Simply because not everything up on YouTube is a vlog.
When an individual earns from YouTube by publishing his videos on a regular basis on YouTube, they become a vlogger.
Many people get confused figuring out the difference between vlogger and YouTuber. To cut it short for you, a vlogger turns into a YouTuber when he/she consistently uploads video content on YouTube. However, music videos, movie trailers, and news channels are not considered as vlogs.
Blogging V/S Vlogging: How Can Mind Mingles Help You?
So, you’ve seen the difference between blog and vlog. Have you made your decision about which one to go for?
The difference between blog and vlog is much more than what meets the eye. That is what you’ve just read about. Maintaining consistency in blogs can be a little hefty at times. But worry not, Mind Mingles’ Content Writing Services will get you through it.
Oh, wait… We have not left vloggers aside. We can help your vlog reach a broad audience through our Social Media Optimization Packages. Our focus remains on elevating your reach and increasing your profits. If you want a suggestion on which of our plans will work best for you, get in touch with us now.
