If you think that recording your own videos is intimidating or that it’s too hard for you too do, then just watch the above video and learn how easy it really is to make your own videos. You don’t need to go out and buy expensive software or go out and spend 10 grand on setting up your own studio. You can make good quality videos with just a video camera, computer, firewire cable, and a tripod.
This video covers the tools you need in order to get started making your own videos and putting them online.
While you can get considerably more advanced, the basics you need are a computer with firewire port, digital video camera, firewire cable, and a tripod.
Both Windows based computers and Macs come with basic video editing software so you won’t even need to buy any new software until you’re sure you want to make video editing a hobby or part of your overall business strategy.
Recommended products:
Panasonic PV-GS500 - a great 3CCD camera for making high quality videos.
Tripod - Nothing ruins a video faster than jerky video.
Firewire Cable - Allows you to transfer video from camera to computer
Dell XPS Or Apple Macbook - Make sure you get a big hard drive, faster processor, and plenty of ram - raw video files take up a lot of space and resources.
I think one of the coolest things you can do to give you blog a little life and a some uniqueness is to start adding videos to your blog, hence making it a vlog (video weblog).
However, just grabbing a clip off Youtube or Metacafe and embedding it into your blog isn’t always straightforward. Sticking those videos on a normal web page is a piece of cake, you grab their embed code and paste it into the html. However, when dealing with a blog, that just won’t work.
Fortunately, there are a lot of plugins out there for putting videos into your Wordpress blogs. Some of them are very simple, while others are more elaborate and support multiple video sharing sites.  For example, just about any plugin you find will support Youtube, but there’s more to online video than just Youtube.
One thing you do need to watch out for is compatibility with Internet Explorer 7. I used to use a video plugin called Extreme Video, and it worked great and it allowed me to post videos from several different sites as well as my own videos. However, when the new Internet Explorer 7 was released, the videos no longer worked properly. Only the first video on a page would play, and the rest would just show up as blank spaces.
While the author of the plug-in has never fixed the problem, some better solutions have come along.
The plugin that I’m currently favoring and using on this blog is the called the Wordpress Video Plugin.
It allows you to insert videos from Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Vimeo, Grouper, and several others.
When you got to the plugin page, you’ll notice it’s in German - just scroll down for directionson how to install the blog in English. Â After that, it’s all pretty straightforward - it takes about 1 minute to install, and using it’s a piece of cake.
So If you’re looking for an easy way to add more life to your blog, then installing a video plugin and vlogging is an excellent idea.
I just wanted to talk about a video upload site that you should be using if the videos you make are about popular mainstream topics - AOL Video. Now we all know about Youtube, and everyone who makes videos should probably be using it, but AOL Video is no slouch. As one of the ten most popular online video sites, AOL videos can get a lot of traffic. I’ve actually had videos on AOL video get 5 times more views than the same video on youtube, so this is one place that I like to upload my videos to.
Here are a few more benefits to AOL video as well. AOL promotes their site via TV, which helps drive mainstream traffic to the site, and they also have a lot of professional videos, like music videos and television programs which helps attract a bigger audience.
nd uploading videos to AOL is usually really fast since the VideoEgg program they use for uploading compresses the videos on your computer before uploading, so the file you’re actually uploading is quite small.
Now if you’re videos are mostly geared towards business or marketers, you probably won’t get a lot of traffic, but if you make funny videos or videos about items in the news, then you can get a lot of traffic using AOL Video.
So that’s AOL video in a nutshell, give it a try.