How to use windows movie maker, part 2

This is part 2 of how to use windows movie maker. To read part 1, click here.

In part 1 I spoke about:

a: How to open movie maker.

b: How to upload videos in to it.

c: How to put pictures.

If you have no idea how to use movie maker you should really read part 1 before you read this. Anyway here I will tell you how to add music to your video.

In most windows computers there should be a sample video pre-installed. Go to the folder which says “Sample videos”

Click on this folder.

My sample video is a wildlife video, yours might be the same or might not but double click on it regardless and it will go on to your video.

Double click on the video with a left click.

Your video will then look like this, on the right hand side (see the orange yellow) you will be shown your video.

You now have the sample video clip in your movie maker.

If you like the music in this video, fine. However if you want to change it, first you can silence the existing music by going to the edit button and turning the sound off as shown in the picture below.

The orange arrow shows the “Edit Tab” which you click on first, and the blue arrow shows the sound control which you reduce to 0.

Now that there is no sounds on the video, to add music you click on the “Add Music” icon as shown below.

To get music click on the icon shown.

Once you do that you will get a menu with a range of options including chosing a music file from “AudoMicro”, “Free Music Archive” and also “Vimeo”, you can click on any of these and then look for a file which has the sound or music that you want. Or you can go and chose a music file already on your PC. Once you do that you have the video clip and music for your new video and hey presto, you have your video!

A pop up menu appears with different choices.

As Hollywood would say “THE END”.

Looking for audio files/music to put in to your videos.

However what if you cannot find the music file you are looking for?

Well there are different ways you can find them and download them on to your computer.

One of the easiest is this way is to go to Youtube and look for a file that you like.

For example you can type the words “Relaxing music”.

Type in the name of the song or type of music/sound you are looking for.

When you have chosen the video you like, copy and paste the URL i.e. the webpage addresss which would look like this for instance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvsW-BmFAE8

Then go to http://www.youtube-mp3.org/

Type in the URL (address of the webpage i.e. youtube video) you like anad click on “Convert Video” and then after a short time you will have a new audio file (sound only, no pictures) of that youtube on your computer which you can then put in to your videos.

After pasting the URL, click on “Convert Video”.

I hope you have found this useful and if you have any questions feel free to ask.

Have a great day!

- Jahan

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Using youtube videos for your blog

There are many webpages which give advice on how to get more people to read your blog, or what we call get “traffic” i.e. people coming to your site.

They all give great, fantastic and wonderful advice.

These include things such as:

1. Be patient!

Which I have to stress the first as it does take time, you also need to be persistent.

2. Post regularly.

You could have the world’s most famous Hollywood star going on TV telling people to read your blog, but if there is nothing there or if it’s not of good quality people won’t come back.

3. Make sure you have original, good quality content.

If your blog is just copy & paste articles, or heavily plagarized people will realize that. Also people want to read something interesting, fun, meaningful or useful not something boring or irrelevant.

4. Submit your blog to blog directories such as Technorati, Blogtopsites and others

and others as well as Yahoo and Google’s directories.

There are other pieces of advice that others give such as posting on others blogs and integrating your blog with social media such as facebook and twitter.

I will be totally honest and say that I did use facebook for my blog, that is I have a list of under 5,000 facebook contacts (though they are officially called “friends”) and my blog articles would automatically appear on my wall when I published them here on this website. However for a variety of different reasons I recently decided to stop that, though my blogs still automatically appear on twitter.

If anyone wants to know to build up a list of 5,000 facebook contacts then feel free to ask as it is quite simple and anyone can do it.

Very few people on my facebook list were interested in my articles and did not click on the links.

“Hang on!” you might be saying. “Isn’t this the internet, aren’t you supposed to project (even if a little exaggeratedly) about how successful, smooth and peach dandy is for you? Aren’t you supposed to potray yourself as a beacon of success?”

Huh?

Wouldn’t this perplex even some of the greatest minds?

Source.

Source.

Aren’t you supposed to keep setbacks, problems and the reality of not being as successful at everything you try a secret. Aren’t you supposed to keep shussh?

“Shussh!”

Source.

Well that’s not the way I am. In my own way I am successful and will be even more successful. However I also like to be honest. Plus in the long run people will appreciate the experiences of those who had disappointments on their path to success rather than people who pretend they had nothing but smooth sailing.

Anyway back to the main focus of this article, using youtube videos for your blog.

Youtube videos.

Audio-visual material tends to stimulate people more than having to sit down and read texts. This is why TV documentaries are so popular. You could easily learn about most of the contents of TV documentaries online these days. However it requires you to shift through different pages and for many the whole process of reading is just not as “fun” as watching images and sounds. This is why a Youtube video on a topic and an article on a topic may vary greatly in the number of people looking at them.

These days it is easy to produce your own videos and every Windows PC or laptop will have Windows live movie maker on the system which is an easy-to-use application that helps you make your own videos, which you can then download.

If you integrate you Youtube videos and your blog together e.g. have a video covering the same things in one of your blogs but with more pictures and music you are likely to get more interest.

Windows movie maker.

Image source.

In the next few articles I will give very basic advice on how to make videos.

Please click on the pictures below to enlarge them, if you need a clearer view.

The first step, setting up a Youtube account

1. Go to your browser (e.g. Explorer, Firefox, Chrome) and the white bar at the top of the screen called the “browser” and type “www.youtube.com”

or you could just type “youtube.com”

2. Then go to the top right hand side of the screen, which says “sign in”

3.  Then on the next screen, click on “Create Account”.

4. In the next screen fill in your details as you would with any other similar sort of account creation on the internet.

Upon doing that you will find the screen below.

5. When you see the screen just below, click on “Back to Youtube” in the middle of the screen.

6. On the next screen, you will see your username on the top right hand side with a little arrow to the right of it. Click on that arrow.

7. The first thing you must do is go to “My Channel” and set up a channel. You cannot go to “Video manager” and just instantly upload videos you have on your computer.

8. On the next screen, fill in the details and then click on continue.

In my picture (or “screenshot”) below, I used the name “Mr Example”, this would not work and you would have to put in an actual name like “Joe Smith”

9. Finally you would get to the screen, where you can start to upload videos.

Now you have created your Youtube channel.

The next step is to learn how to make videos!

I will be covering this in future articles.

- Jahan

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Youtube videos.

Youtube videos are a great way of promoting yourself or your company as long as it is not excessively commercial. For an example of “excessively commercial” I mean an advert where you give your number at the end and encourage people to pay you certain sums. That would be seen as blatant and naked commercial misuse of Youtube by the company themselves. If however you wish to, for instance, have endorsements from other people, or just a promotional video there seem to be plenty of those on the internet.

Youtube videos get far more traffic than blogs.

Youtube.

Image source.

There is simply no comparison between the sort of traffic that Youtube videos can get and what blogs get. We are talking a difference of literally millions. I know a couple of highly successful blogs, which would probably get under a million hits a year, whereas on youtube if you have a hugely successful video you could perhaps get millions, even perhaps in days if it is very successful. I am not talking about your average promotional video or advice video, in this case it wouldn’t able to videos trying to promote your business. The sort of videos I am talking about are usually for entertainment or may touch upon a very controversial or provocative topic and led to it being shared on facebook and twitter. In the UK for instance one controversial video received millions of hits in a few days, as it showed a woman in a tram in Croydon, South London in an angry outburst, please click this link to read more about this.

The following video for instance though just over 2 minutes has attracted more hits than famous videos by the likes of U2 or other major names, (at the time of writing 7.3 million hits).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k

So in terms of promotion, texts and meaningful texts will often attract more traffic (but not necessarily, I have read a lot of high quality articles by very intelligent people on WordPress for instance which comparatively get no readers, due to lack of promotion). Texts with pictures will attract more traffic than texts without them. Videos will attract more than blogs with pictures. The majority of people prefer to  be more visual than to read. So here is the hierarchy.

1. Text gets you some traffic.
2. Text with pictures gets you more traffic.
3. Videos, e.g. get you far more.

These are general rules and there are exceptions. So the main message of this blog is that you should learn how to optimize Youtube. I myself have not done that as my long-term plan does not involve that and I am focusing on blogging at the moment, which I have been said to be very good at. However for others, it maybe a great idea, though I do have my own youtube channel which has some videos of personal interest to me, which I myself created: http://www.youtube.com/user/jahanchoudhry

If you don’t want to pay others to do it for you, and you are just starting off in business, then on most computers there will be the programme, “Windows Live Video Maker”, however there are other programmes such as “Adobe premier pro” or “Final cut pro”. Even if you have no experience in making videos, which I didn’t, I would suggest playing around with Windows Live Video Maker and making some videos, you can also install background sounds via Realplayer from Youtube or other sites.

-          Jahan Choudhry.

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