Different Ways To Monetize Your Website

we're hoping to put some tutorials on youtube of how to use our online web application. Free software like CamStudio is a great way of making online demos and tutorials for the likes of youtube. Putting vids on Youtube helps with your traffic, gets you links and helps saves bandwidth.

I prefer camtasia though when I create vids. I tried camstudio and a host of other programs. Isn't the file size from camstudio rather large? Techsmith's Jing is also good as well. Plus you get unlimited five minute vids for free. I've added tutorials on Youtube before, and we got a few watches and the like, was just not aware that you could actually use adsense on them, so that would be really interesting for future vids.

They are large but I've found that you need to run them through editing software first anyway (like Windows Movie Maker). It's difficult to do a tutorial for 10 minutes and not make a mistake. I'm sure even Speilberg hasn't done a one-cut movie.

Movie maker just exports them to WMV and then I just upload the file into Youtube. I know the output WMV is usually a few hundred MB but it seems to upload ok into Youtube. These are yesterday's first attempts here.

I did try writing a script, but it ends up being thousands of words and I found it was easier just to practise at getting it right and chop it back together with your favorite editor.

I'll try those capture programs that you recommend. :-)

All worth a look, will see what is the easiest for me to use as I am still teaching myself all of this stuff

Out of them all Jing is about the least expensive, with options to save the vid, upload it to screencast (techsmith's own site and tis free). With camtasia, you only get a 30 day trial unless you buy the video editor itself, but all in all, if you create a lot of vids, then 'tis a good idea to invest in. lol I'm not affiliated with them, but I have tried so many other editing software out there, even vegas, and none of them come close to what camtasia can do. The software isn't that expensive either tbh, tis about 2 or 300 dollars, so probably a fraction of the cost of an Adobe product (premiere)


I think so. Especially if you're still learning about how to do it all. I'm quite handy at making tutorials and such, but it was a lot of playing and reading lol. I would still recommend the camtasia trial. Its the easiest to work with because its interface is simple to navigate and use.

(will stop now before I'm banned lol.)

I've used Oracle UPK before in a large commercial environments. It was good for creating interactive tutorials and learning like Macromedia Authorware but I think it costs a small fortune.

Video guides are great to get you started and I think most prefer the human element of a real person talking and telling you what to do. I found our user guides pretty time consuming to produce with writing the text and making/adjusting the screen captures, but it's quite easy to edit and upload pics into through WordPress. I guess this is another good point for CMS Vs pure HTML website as you can get non-tech staff using WordPress for your guides with very little HTML knowledge.

I think user guides and tutorials are something you always improve on over time. Hopefully I'll get chance to try Camtasia this afternoon.

Was using CamStudio before. Spent ages putting together a vid and it kept crashing think it was due to some 2GB limit it has on the audio.

Downloaded Camtasia before and was very impressed. So much quicker and more reliable. Alhough the download was huuuggggeee.

Thanks very much for the advice!

You're welcome. U shud have 8 I think, 'tis the latest one. If u have any probs, let me know. and you're welcome. Glad I could help. Yea, a 2gb file size on audio is huge, camtasia won't get that big unless you create a really big vid.

Now, methinks tis time to learn how to add adsense to vids.

It even gave me a little countdown to prepare for talking once i'd clicked record! James Cameron better watch out!

Noticed that Google indexed the vids very quick and they are appearing in the search results when I try and find our site.

They do. I noticed that once. A company I used to work for had their video tutorials added to their blog, and it was amazing to see how quickly that blog page was indexed and searchable.

Yea, Camtasia rocks. Maybe I should put a thread up today that shows you how to do stuff on it. If you think it could be helpful