Adding video to your WordPress website or blog is a fantastic way to boost readership, keep your readers engaged with your content and offers a different platform you can use to connect with your fans.
In dark days past it was a real pain in the butt to embed a video on a website however, thankfully, it's pretty darn easy now.
There are two ways that this can be accomplished easily and both make use of some free 3rd party services you've no doubt heard of.
Using sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video and others not only makes the embedding of a video into a WordPress Post or Page super easy but also goes a long way towards getting your video seen by more folks.
So, as a practice head over to YouTube and pick out any video that has an "Embed" button at the bottom right.
The very easiest way to post a video to your WordPress blog is the following and works in WordPress version 2.
9 and higher.
1)Copy the URL of the video.
2)Go to your Post Editor on WordPress and paste that URL into the content area while under the Visual view (rather than the HTML view).
The Visual/HTML toggle is at the top right of the Add New Post content area.
Make sure that the URL is on its own line and that it is not linked.
If it shows as a clickable link in the content area after you paste it in simply highlight the URL and click on the "Break Link" button (looks like a broken piece a chain).
3)Really, that's it.
When you either look at the post as a Preview or publish the post the video will appear in the content fully functional and ready to go.
Doesn't get much easier than that, right? The second method to post a video into a WordPress page or post involves getting what is known as the Embed code.
Most of the major free 3rd party sites have a little snippet of code that you can copy and paste into your WordPress Post.
When using the embed code make sure you are in the HTML view of the content area.
Copy the entire snippet of code and paste it into the HTML of the post.
That's pretty much it.
There is also the option of using the Video or Media buttons at the top of the content section of the Add New Post section.
I'm not sure why but I've had some tough luck using that feature.
When using the full embed code you'll have more flexibility as far as shape, size and display of the resulting video.
Once you get more comfortable with using video in WordPress you'll probably want to play around a little with these in-code settings.