How To Make Video Tutorials For Your Website

Filed under Blogging

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth millions of words. Sometimes it easier to get your idea to your readers on video than with words.

Making a video does not only benefit your visitors, it benefits your website as well: publishing your video through a high-traffic site like YouTube.com can bring loads of traffic to yours.

This tutorial will show you how to create a video for your website / blog.

Get A Screen Capture Software

Techsmith makes their available screen capture software, Camtasia, available for free at http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe. Now before you go through the installation, get your free registration key here: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp.

Record Your Video Tutorial

Launch Camtasia Recorder (Start => Programs => Camtasia Studio 3 => Applications => Camtasia Recorder) and click on Capture => Window. Select the window you wish to record and hit the F9 key.

Camtasia is now recording the active window. When you’re done, hit F9 again. From the Camtasia Recorder menu, click on Capture => Stop.

At this point, there are some nice features you can use such as adding voice narration, transition effects and captions. From the Camtasia Studio window, click on Produce video as… from the left menu.

From the Production Wizard window, select to export your video as an .AVI file. Click “Next” until you get to specify the video size. If you want to publish your video on YouTube, select 640×480:

You can also include a watermark with let’s say, the name of your website. This watermark has to be a .GIF file with a transparent background. Alright, finish on with Production Wizard by hitting next and saving the movie to your hard drive.

A 15 seconds movie at 640×480 will take about 1 Mb of disk space.

Getting Your Video On YouTube

Now it’s time to get your video online. Visit YouTube.com and sign up for a new account if you haven’t already done so. You can also use your Google account. Once logged in, click on My Account and then the Upload videos button.