Blogs began as places where anyone could post his or her thoughts about anything, in the hope of finding an audience. But mostly, blogs were piles of words piled on top of more piles of words.

But that has changed in a big way, and the photographs which used to add visual interest to blogs have been supplanted by blogging video.

If you want to perk up your blog so that your visitors will spend more time with you and make a point of coming back, habits you should be cultivating if you want to turn your blog into a money maker, you need to start dressing it up with blogging video.

But that doesn’t mean you have to go out and drop a thousand bucks on a video camera.

Tip One: YouTube as Your Blogging Video Source

The Internet is awash in video sites like YouTube, where the world has congregated to share its discoveries, talents, knowledge, and daily experiences on video.

Blogging video can be used to illustrate whatever point you are trying to make with your blog. If you are trying to tell people how to become bloggers, there’s no better way to do it than to set up a series of blogging videos that walk them through the process.

If you’re a WordPress blogger, and you really should be, you’re in luck because Wordpress has a plugin designed to enable you to embed your favorite YouTube videos directly in your blogs.

The WordPress Viper’s Video Quicktags will let you embed not only YouTube videos by those from Metacafe, MySpace, IFILM, and Vimeo. What’s involved?

Clicking a button and pasting the url of the video into your prompt box. And just to make things even easier, the plugin lets you configure the downloaded videos so you get the most effective presentation on your blog page.

You don’t need to worry about embedding blogging videos against their owner’s wishes, because anyone uploading videos to YouTube can disable the embedding feature if they want.

Tip Two: How to Find The Best Blogging Videos for Your Blog

All you need to do is look over the YouTube categories, and find the one which seems most likely to have blogging videos related to the focus of your blog.

Then do a specific search in that category, or just flip through pages of that category until you find video which sounds like it might be a good fit. You can even tell how many people have watched each video, so you’ll recognize which ones have wide-based appeal.

There’s really no mystery to enriching your blogs with video content, and in the Xtreme competition of blogging for bucks, you need to do whatever you can to get an edge on other bloggers who are trying to capture the same audience as you.

Blogging video is a great way to keep your audience coming back for more, and besides, it will save you the time you normally spend in having to paint word pictures!