How to create a video for your website

One of the most effective viral marketing techniques for websites involves creating a video or a podcast. You have heard of YouTube right? You can also leverage video to help market your website. You can create videos to add to your current website content, you can tag videos in YouTube, and you can create your own videos to launch onto other sites. All of these ideas help to generate traffic to your site using your video content! I am writing a few articles about how to market your website using viral techniques, and in this article, I focus primarily on how to make a video for your website. Even if you do not want to market your website, you can still use these steps to create video for your web content.

If you are looking to simply create your own short video on your current website, the first thing to do would be to practice making a few videos with a webcam, phone cam, or a camcorder. Just get in front of the video camera and work on your delivery, eye contact with the camera lens, and being able to present your subject matter smoothly and slowly.

After you get comfortable in front of the lens, write a script about what you want to present in the video. Take a look at other people's videos and try to see if they are reading from a source behind the camera, if they are presenting from memory, or if they are just winging it. If you can just wing it - great - but remember to act like you are talking to another person, and to avoid delays and repeating yourself. Practice your script and try to do it from memory. DO NOT read directly from your script as you present to the camera.

After you have practiced your script of your content enough times, sit down in front of your camera and record yourself. Practice it numerous times and watch it each time to catch behavior that you want to improve. Once you get comfortable with your script and you feel like you are ready to record a final shot, move on to the next step.

Set up your environment next! Nobody wants to watch a video of you with a bunch of stuff going on in the background - like people walking around, a tv, toys everywhere - your background has to be clean. Try sitting in front of a blank wall so that there are no distractions going on behind you or put your company or site logo up behind you. Make sure that you have plenty of good lighting as well so that you can be seen clearly in the video.

Now go ahead and make a final video using your webcam or video camcorder and save the file to your computer desktop. If you are happy with the simple video you have created, go ahead and publish it to your website and to YouTube with a link back to your site. If you want to edit your video and get more advanced - move on to the next step!

If you want to edit your video and add special effects to it, there are numerous programs and sites out there that you can look into and use for your video presentation purposes. I will include these links in the resources section at the end of this article for you to look into. If you have a windows machine, try the Windows Movie Maker Program - which is free to download.