By nature, I'm a huge fan of internet video but there's something special that happens when you integrate it with blogging and email. In this new inbound marketing age, you need every advantage you can get.

People don’t watch commercials anymore and they resist traditional marketing.

DVRs and web browsers have put the lotus of control in the consumer’s hands. They decide when and what they’re interested in. They gravitate towards useful information on the internet and steer clear of marketing ploys. The consumer’s insatiable appetite for useful information is what has fueled the exponential growth of the blogosphere. And the blogosphere is now where you can vie for fans and customers.

It’s no longer about casting a wide net. It starts with building individual relationships.

You do this by providing information that people care about, information that is relevant to their circumstance, information that is so good they are willing to share it. Sound hard? Hold on…there’s one more caveat. It has to be information few people have covered. If it’s already been covered your blog isn’t going to be anywhere near the first page of search results. If you can get over these hurdles, a person just might be willing to give you their email address. And that, my friend, is what they call relationship marketing or permission marketing depending on what marketing guru you follow.

One of the main ways that marketing relationships are maintained is through email.

Think about how drastic a shift this is from the old model. You have to demonstrate value to a potential customer by providing novel information that they value highly before you can ever send them an email. Having their email is only half the battle. Spam has conditioned us all to ignore or delete a good portion of the emails we receive. It’s not surprising that out of the 100 people who have agreed to receive your emails, only 20 will open them, only 5 will click on a link and .3 will tell you not to email them again. These numbers are sobering to say the least.

So how do you improve these results? In a word…VIDEO!

Adding video to your blog and emails will dramatically increase your results. Web pages with video are 50x more likely to show up in search results than ones without. Google knows everyone loves video and because of this (and their ownership of YouTube), they have been pushing video further and further up the search results. So when your blog has video, it is no longer competing against all the other blogs. It’s only competing with blogs that have video. That competition pool is still relatively small. Smaller pool means better odds.

There is a similar phenomenon that happens with video email but it’s a bit more psychological.

Most inboxes are assaulted with walls of text. It’s hard work slogging through all that stuff. By contrast, video requires very little effort and is entertaining. It represents a mini vacation from your inbox. Because email video is so new, research on open and click-through rates are harder to come by. But there are examples you can point to. My good friends at Wistia did a pretty compelling study that reveals how dramatically video can improve your email campaign.

If you want to turbo-charge your blog posts and email campaigns, look no further than video.