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In this article we are going to discuss how to make free videos using windows movie maker, how to publish them and how to use them in viral marketing. The topics would include, 1) How to work on windows movie maker, 2) Where to get nice free pictures for the movie and 3) How to publish the video.

There is a misguided belief that it takes cutting edge animation to make a successful video and that is a hard nut to crack. You can make awesome videos only by choosing the right pictures and text along with clips. In fact, stills linger on the viewers mind for a longer period of time rather than animation. If you can find picture that can connect emotionally with the audience, you can definitely succeed. That is why those adverts on television with starved children or civil war torn countries have a huge impact.

Windows movie maker is an application that is installed on all modern computers especially desktops and laptops that use windows Vista. You will find the programme in the usual way by hitting your start button, all programmes and then windows movie maker. At the bottom of the movie maker programme you will see there is a time line to indicate the minutes of the movie and 3 sections of the time line video/pictures, audio/music and title overlay it is here that you build your movie. Everybody has their own preference on which way around to build their movie but I am going to describe the way that I do it then you can devise your own methods from that. First of all decide on the movie that you wish to make and write down some meaning full phrases to do with the subject as the words will appear over or before a particular clip or clips you want to avoid rambling and just write key phrases. When you have several key phrases together that tell a story then it is time to write these up into movie maker. On the left hand side of movie maker you will see that there are three sections Import, Edit and Publish to, to write up your phrases you need to use titles and credits in the edit section.Once you have clicked on titles and credits you will be presented with the option of having your phrase at the beginning, before your picture comes up or over the top of your picture, whilst your picture is showing in this example I’m going to use, title on the selected clip. When you click on title on the selected clip you will see the box appear for you to write your text and the video screen will now show a default screen shot so as to show you what your text is going to look like as you’re typing it. You will also notice that under your text box there are more options for you to change the animation of the text and the size, colour and font; we need to cover this section before you can write your text.The length of your phrase will determine which animation you may be able to use the best thing in this case is to chose one that will except long phases and then experiment later, click on change the title animation then scroll up or down until you find “scroll, perspective” click on this option then click again on “edit the title text” you should now be back with a text box. Type you text into the box and watch it scroll up the default picture as you type. Once happy with your text click on “add title” and your text box will appear on your time line, from hear you can stretch your text to move as slow or as fast as you like through your time line.

Now it is time to add a picture to your text, I will show you how to get pictures for free off the internet in the next section of this article but for now let’s presume you have your required pictures saved on your computer. In the import section on the left hand side of movie maker click on pictures then locate the picture you require in your files and click on it then click on “import” you will see the picture appear in movie maker from here you just simply drag and drop the picture in to the video/picture section on the time line, again you can stretch this to match your text. You follow the exact same process to add audio or music to your time line first import it from your computer then add it to your time line. As music is a set time by stretching and shortening it you will not change the composition of the song it will only cut the song short if shortened. I recommend you only use parts of songs that you don’t have copyright privileges for otherwise your video will not be published. Now you can build your video by adding more text and pictures as you move along the time line try and stick to subjects that are relevant to your particular business and put some text at the end to promote your particular site.

The simplest way to find thousands of up to date photographs on your video is to open Google, type the keywords relevant to your need in the search bar and click on images button in the left corner. You will get a bunch of pictures on the screen. You can click on anyone of them to enlarge the picture. After zeroing in on one of them, right click on it and then choose “save picture as” and also select the folder on your PC where you want to save it. This trick works with Yahoo and most other search engines too.

First of all you need to publish your video from windows movie maker to your computer. Simply click on “this computer” in the publish to section on the left hand side of the movie maker screen, choose the name you want to call your video and click next. On the next screen you are given the option to compress the video but I always find it better to leave it as the default which is best settings for playback on my computer click on publish and away you go. There are two different sites that I recommend for publishing your video to multiple sites which in turn will rank your video on Google in as little as 10 minutes the services of these sites do charge a monthly subscription but the traffic that they can drive to your website can be priceless tubemogul.com is one of these sites and they give you a certain amount of uploads free every month but can be very strict on the content that they will allow you to upload and close your account without warning and the other site that I use more often is trafficgeyser.com they have a 30 day free trial and then a monthly subscription of $99 a month I certainly recommend traffic geyser to start with, get a load of videos made up in advance then follow there on screen tutorials to get you started.