As a blogger, you pore over your choices of words and images to make sure you’re communicating exactly what you intend to your readers. Why not add another tool to your arsenal? Using video can be an awesome way to illuminate, instruct, or just create a different kind of connection with your audience.

You might think that video is just for news sites or college kids with too much time on their hands.  Think again — video can be used to enhance your content in lots of ways:

• Were you going to include a photo gallery? Try video instead.
• Do you write a DIY or cooking blog? Host your own show.
• Mommyblogger? We’d love to see your rugrats’ antics.
• Write a travel site? Give us the flavor of the medina you just visited in Casablanca with a video tour.
• Use your blog as a journal? Try talking right to the camera to add a raw dimension to your musings.

Now that you can shoot high-quality video with a DSLR camera or mobile phone, the sky’s the limit. Heck, you can upload videos directly from your iPhone to your blog!

Once you have that perfect clip to push your post over the top, upload it right to your site with VideoPress, available both as a plugin for self-hosted WordPress.org sites and as an upgrade for WordPress.com sites. VideoPress is made to work with WordPress, so uploading couldn’t be simpler. And since you’re uploading the video right to your own site, there are none of the downsides of using a third-party video service: no ads, no maximum length for what you can upload, and best of all, no redirecting, so your readers start and end on your video and stay on your site the whole time.

Since VideoPress is an Automattic joint, you know the technical side (that is, the side you never have to worry about) is going to be clean and efficient. VideoPress automatically selects the best video player for your viewers. Readers see a preview, including a title and preview image, as the full video loads. The preview is lightweight and HTML-based, so the rest of your page loads with no lag time.

WordPress and VideoPress work together to make publishing online video easy as can be, so the only limit is what you can capture.