One money-saving strategy is to use PowerPoint and YouTube to create compelling blog videos that attract traffic to your website and keep them coming back for more of what social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk calls “infotainment” in his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.
Don’t believe me? Relax. I’m a hands-on type of guy.
We’ll take a step-by-step look at how you can quickly add all the elements you need to create a multimedia PowerPoint presentation. Worried about uploading your slides to YouTube? That’s a snap too. Who knows? You may even get some ideas for a visual book review that you can disseminate via social media.
Just one caveat. Available technology is so exciting that I’m constantly tempted to dive in and fool around with the myriad of cool bells and whistles. I have to remind myself to first research and analyze my audience’s needs before designing a message–whatever the physical format turns out to be. That effort usually includes visual storyboarding and refining my preliminary ideas before actually writing a blog draft.
Videocam It
I’ve got an old HP Presario C700 laptop with 4 gigabytes of RAM that cost me $250 back in 2007. Even that lovable dinosaur has a built-in videocam and easy-to-use software called YouCam that captures fairly good quality sound and video content.
Just boot up the YouCam software, then click on start and stop buttons to record your interview, storyline narrative, dialogue, rant or singing. Save your videocams in .wmv file format, which is the default (for me anyways).
Whoa! Before you add your videocam to a PowerPoint slide, first set your PowerPoint slide size to 17.78″ wide by 10″ high in landscape orientation. This tweak will improve the quality of the final YouTube video that the audience sees on your blog.
Click the PowerPoint Insert tab. Find the Video menu item on the top right of the screen, then click Video on My PC from the dropdown list to insert your videocam into the slide.
Once you place the videocam on a slide, you can fiddle with the videocam’s size, timing, volume and other settings on PowerPoint’s Playback tab. The Playback tab appears after you click the videocam where it appears on the slide.
Use YouTube for PowerPoint Audio
YouTube has a royalty-free music channel that provides songs and playlists covering a wide range of emotions from silly happy to fighting mad.
You could insert one or more YouTube videos into your blog. But to just use a song as background music, then you have to convert the YouTube video (MP4 format) to an audio file (MP3 format).
Fortunately, there are lots of video-to-audio conversion sites you can Google that neither require registration nor charge a fee. Some examples are ClipConverter.cc and OnlineVideoConverter.com. Both of those simply ask you to paste in the URL for a short YouTube video and then allow you to download the resulting MP3 sound clip.
You can then place the MP3 song file into any slide in your presentation using PowerPoint’s Insert tab and Audio menu item. Like video, you can fine-tune the audio settings using the Playback tab that appears when you click the Audio icon on a slide.
PowerPoint Video Magic
PowerPoint lets you animate images and text that appear on each slide, as well as the transitions from slide to slide. I just scratch the surface of the many available features in the blog video below, but I’m sure you can find lots more animation tricks by searching PowerPoint’s online help, YouTube how-to videos or just Googling something like “PowerPoint animation.”
According to Forrester Research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.
So please take a couple of minutes and look at our blog video which highlights the audio and video features available when you harness the readily available features of PowerPoint and YouTube. Otherwise I’ll be forced to write up millions of words in dry technical language guaranteed to put you to sleep!
Bonus: How to Monetize Your Blog
Immersed in an online Social Media Marketing course that I’m taking, I’ve learned first-hand that bloggers come blessed with many different talents and mindsets. Our class features a passionate group including gourmet food specialists, fashionistas, sports marketers and techie geeks like myself.
Did you know that Amazon.com offers a dynamic affiliate marketing program that not only enables you to monetize your blog, but you can also include your affiliate links on social media like Twitter and Facebook? Amazon.com is the world’s 35th largest company according to Forbes, so I’m not worried that online retail behemoth Amazon will run out of affiliate marketing cash–at least not any time soon.
Below is a sample custom ad display that I prepared especially for social media marketing enthusiasts.