I was looking for additional auto-content solutions for one of my niche blogs, and I stumbled upon this auto-posting video plugin for Wordpress — in a few words — I think it’s pretty cool. For most people, I think it’d be perfect, but here’s a little overview of this video blogging, or vlogging, wordpress plugin.
First off, the site is WP Video Tube — it doesn’t look like your average Wordpress plugin download site, but hey — that’s the site. In any case, what I most like about this software is that it does what it says it’ll do — automatically post Youtube videos to your Wordpress blog. It installs just like any other Wordpress plugin does, so the the installation was super easy.
Basically, once the software is uploaded, and activated, it’ll grab Youtube videos for the keywords that you specify. As the niche website I bought this for is very tightly-focused, I went for the 20-keyword option, which was $30. Your needs may differ, and if you have a large keyword market, the Elite version, at twice the price I paid, allows you to grab videos for unlimited keywords.
Here are a few more things that I like about it:
- You can auto-post videos without needing to setup cron jobs. I’m assuming that the video grabbing script is triggered by a visit to your blog after the scheduled post time. I really don’t know, but I just know I didn’t have to mess with a cron job setup, which was nice.
- Also, it has a feature called ‘humanize’, which, if selected, it posts your videos at random times within the hour that the videos is supposed to be posted. As an example, if you want to post a video every 12 hours, and you ‘humanize’ the posting, your video might be posted at 12:50 (12 hours, 50 minutes), 12:03, 12:14, etc. This significantly minimizes the ‘auto post footprint’ that search engines can see. If you want to eliminate that footprint even more, just change the posting times (1 day, 10 hours, 6 hours, etc) every once and a while.
- The plugin will grab the comments from the Youtube video and post them to your blog as comments… quite handy as it gives your auto-post video pages actual content, which will probably be pretty unique considering I don’t know of any other Wordpress plugins that grab and auto-post Youtube videos with comments.
- You can edit the video posting template. This means that you can resize the videos that are posted to your blog, and you can auto-post Adsense ads around the video at the same time… I tried it, and I just added my Google Adsense code in a div float to the video template, and it worked. You could easily add banners, or other monetization options to the video template if you wanted to as well.
While I think that this is a great plugin, otherwise I wouldn’t have purchased it, I found something that I didn’t like — the auto-tag creation. Now, I use tags to structure my blogs, and I usually hack my Wordpress template to remove links to the category pages altogether, or at the very least, from the sidebar, so I’m probably in the minority here. However, it appears that the WP Video Tube plugin uses the tags from the video post for the tags on your blog. I guess the majority would probably find this useful, but for me — not so much.
Plus, I’m a SEO nut — I create posts in Wordpress that draw search engine traffic easily, so I like to tweak the post slug, the title element, and add a meta description. While this plugin can be a set-and-forget video blogging plugin, I like to maximize the potential of every post, so instead of auto-publishing every video, I set the new posts to ‘Pending Review’ — it still gives me all the benefits of grabbing the video, saving it to the post, grabbing comments, etc.
I guess this almost ended up being a review of this Wordpress plugin… but, I really liked it, and if you want to auto-post videos to your blog, I think that you’ll like it, and benefit from it, as well. If you have a small niche, the $30 option should suit you just fine, otherwise, the the unlimited version has a lot of potential if you have a wide-reaching blog.
You can download this plugin from the WP Video Tube website.