Want to get more traffic and keep visitors around longer? Once you know how to add Youtube videos to your blog, you can kill both these birds with one stone.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to put a link in your blog to a YouTube video. You’ll also learn how to add a Vimeo video, GIF, and SlideShare. And I’m going to make this very untechnical (even I can do it and so can you).

Once you have your video inserted and playing, I’ll also show you some neat tricks to get them to behave how you want.

But, first let’s take a step back and talk about WHY you should add Youtube videos to your blog.

Why add Youtube videos to your blog?

More time equals more business.

Your blog is like a series of breakout rooms off the main conference hall.

Your website is like a conference hall – people come from different directions to visit, explore, learn, and even buy.

Visitors arrive directly via your emails (announcing your new blog post) or from social media or organic searches (people find you by searching for a topic). Some leave soon after arriving—as many as 75-85% won’t make it past the first room. The average time in that conference hall your website is about one to two minutes.

And then there’s your blog…

Your blog is like a series of breakout rooms off the main conference hall. Each room has a different topic – a new set of solutions tackling a problem your clients struggle with.

What’s different about those breakout rooms/blog posts is people stay a whole lot longer—like 5-13 minutes.

That’s a HUGE opportunity!

Imagine if conversations with your prospects were 5-10 times longer – that’s good, right?

That’s what your blog can do: make people stop, explore, look at your products and services and ask for more.

When you add richer, more detailed content – like video – this works even better.

Now prospects will stay longer and get to know you better. Soon you’ll start to develop that know/like/trust relationship we all want.

That’s why it’s such a good idea to add media, like Youtube videos, to your blog.

Adding video is a great start, but here are 7 other ways to help your blog stand out from the crowd.

Now, let’s look at how to actually get the video into your blog.

How to put a link in your blog to a YouTube video

If you’ve already mastered the steps to insert images in your blog, adding video will be easy.

Not a pro yet? Don’t worry—we’ve got a guide for adding images to your blog posts right here.

WordPress comes installed with a neat feature called auto-embed. This allows you to insert videos in your WordPress blog post by simply pasting the URL of your video directly in the post.

Auto-embed will work with YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia hosted videos. It will even work with your favourite Slideshare videos.

If you’re working with a simple MP3 or GIF video, you can upload the file into Media, but note this will slow down loading time.

Your best practice is to always embed your videos from YouTube or a hosting site like Vimeo or Wistia. You can also embed your video directly from your Google Drive (see instructions below).

Here’s how to put a link in your blog to a YouTube video:

1. The first step is to capture the URL of the video you want. You can copy the URL from your browser’s address bar or directly from the YouTube share link button.

Tip: For longer videos, you can easily change the start time (for example, 30 seconds in) by first checking the “Start at” box and choosing the time you want. Then copy the link.

2. The easiest and quickest way to embed YouTube videos in WordPress is to simply copy/paste the URL into your new post. Make sure you are looking at the “Visual” editor, not the “Text” editor.

3. Once you have the video inserted, go to Preview and you can see it in action.

Want to change the settings? Use the WordPress blog edit menu.

If you want to change the size of the video (this only works if you pasted the embed code), go to the “Text” editor and change the actual “width=” and “height=” settings.

Be sure to keep the ratio between the numbers the same (warning: this involves math!)

For example “<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=” (315/560 = .56) could be changed to “<iframe width=”800″ height=”450″ src=” (450/800 = .56)

 

 

 

How to insert video from your Google Drive

If you’re like the team at BlogWorks, we like to have all the elements of our blog post neatly organized in one folder on our Google Drive. This includes the images and the videos for that post.

The goal is to embed that video, not upload it, so it will load faster and not take up room on our WordPress site.

It’s a bit of a workaround, but once you’ve done it once (like making bread, Origami, or sex) it’s not so scary. Ready?

It’s a bit of a workaround, but once you’ve done it once (like making bread, Origami, or sex) it’s not so scary. Click To Tweet

• Click on the video in your Google Drive.
• Once opened look for the 3 dots and click on “open in new window”
• Again, click on the 3 dots, and this time click on “embed item…”
• Copy the embed code (it will start with “<iframe src=”https://drive.google.com/file…”)
• Head back to your new blog post and select the “Text” view (instead of “Visual”) and paste the embed code where you want it.
• Finally, go back to the “Visual” view to see your video and edit the settings.

Note: your video share settings must be set to be viewed by anyone who has the link. You can quickly change your share settings by opening the video, go to 3 dots, click on “Share”, click on the sharing option drop down (you might have to then click on “more…”) and change settings. When you change settings here, it changes how your embedded video works on your site.

New to Google Drive? Here’s how to master it.

How to insert a Slideshare deck into your blog

If you are still a fan of Slideshare it’s easy to add your latest slide deck to your blog post. Slideshare (owned by LinkedIn) can be a great way to not only dress up your LinkedIn profile (upload decks directly to your profile) but also to keep readers happily clicking through slides and staying on your site longer.

Here is a good example:

Here’s how to insert a Slideshare deck into your blog:

• First, open Slideshare, and find the deck you want to add.

• Click on the “Share” button. That should open up a menu with your embed code. It should look like this.

• Open your “Text” view in WordPress and insert the embed code in your post.
• Finally, go back to the “Visual” view to see your video and edit the settings.

About privacy settings

Recent versions of YouTube have removed some of the earlier options to modify how your video played on your WordPress site (if you are using the embed code option.) You can still remove the player controls (start/stop etc.)

One option that has been added (and that you should use) is the “Enable privacy-enhanced mode.” Essentially when you select this, YouTube won’t collect information about your visitors unless they play the video.

Okay, now that you know how to add Youtube videos to your blog, it’s time to get started on creating awesome content.

We can help with this.

Did you like learning how to add Youtube videos to your blog? Here are more articles all about videos, images and more.

How to Leverage Video Content on Your Blog for SEO
4 Ways to Make Your Blog Images Pop
Free Images for your Blog: 7 Awesome Sources

This article was originally written in May 2019, and updated in 2020 to help you!