I think it’s fair to say that everyone knows about youtube. Here are just a few facts to boggle your mind. 100 million videos are viewed every day. 65,000 new videos are added every day. Google bought youtube in 2006 for $1.65 billion and youtube is in the top 10 most popular websites in the world.
So, as a webmaster and marketer could you benefit from making and uploading videos to youtube. Absolutely! It’s a powerful traffic source, which for some bloggers and marketers, is the main source of traffic for their blog or website. But you might say ‘I haven’t got the time or the skills to create youtube videos’. Well, it’s quicker and easier than you might think and today I’m going to give you some tips.
You want to create videos and feature them on youtube to get you noticed and give you as much traffic you can get coming back to your main website or blog. There are a number of techniques to achieve that, but I will let Gideon Shalwick tell you how to do it right. Gideon runs the ‘become a blogger’ program and uses videos on youtube to great effect for himself and for his students too. Watch his 18 minute video on ‘7 killer tips for optimising your youtube videos‘. Or watch our featured video.
Okay, so what do you need to do to create a video for youtube? What are the steps? See this simple article from ehow. The easiest way to record a video is using a webcam. I have an inexpensive webcam from Logitech. It sits on your desk or perches on your screen and records you talking at your computer. This ‘talking head’ style of video is popular with video blogging. It’s quick and simple to do.
If you want to record a tutorial with screenshots captured from your computer, you can use camtasia. It’s a clever program and can be used for showing people how to use software, reviewing a website or using a web-based application, for example. You can record both your onscreen activity and your voiceover commentary. But it comes at price. If you want almost the same functionality for free, try camstudio. It’s open source software and it’s good.
For more help and expertise on screencasting visit Leigh Blackall’s blog on screencasting and watch the video on ‘how I do a screencast’. Then visit wikieducator and read the step-by-step instructions from Leigh on creating a screen recording using camstudio.
Now that you’ve created your masterpeice how do you upload it? Here is a short instructional video from youtube to show you how it’s done. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much easier and inexpensive creating your own youtube video is than you may have thought.
Happy recording.
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