A Simple Guide to Creating Your First YouTube Tutorial
Welcome to our beginner’s tutorial on using YouTube! In this guide, I’ll walk you through the process of uploading, editing, and optimizing your videos step by step.
YouTube is an amazing platform that offers a wide range of video tutorials for relaxation and learning. It’s a place where you can find helpful tips and guidance on various topics. Video tutorials are not only great for sharing knowledge, but they also play a crucial role in helping businesses promote their brands and provide visual support for their customers. Best of all, creating your own tutorial is easier and more affordable than you might think. As someone who has recently started making tutorials for JoomlaShine, I want to share my experiences with you.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a high-quality YouTube tutorial without needing a fancy studio or even a video camera.
Creating a tutorial or introducing a product through a video can be a powerful way to communicate with your audience. YouTube offers a fantastic feature that allows you to translate captions, making your content accessible to viewers from all around the world. Moreover, adding subtitles to your YouTube tutorials can make them searchable, making it easier for people to find and watch them. To ensure maximum engagement, it’s advisable to keep your video under 6 minutes in length, as longer videos tend to lose viewers’ interest.
In this tutorial, I’ll guide you through ten excellent websites that enable you to edit your videos online, providing a convenient solution when you’re short on time, lack the necessary skills, or don’t have access to advanced editing resources. These tools make video editing accessible to everyone, regardless of their experience or resources.
Before we begin the recording process, let’s focus on preparing ourselves. To make things more organized and seamless, it’s helpful to create an outline for your video. This will serve as a roadmap, ensuring that you cover all the necessary points and maintain a coherent flow.
Remember, proper preparation is key to crafting a successful video tutorial or product introduction. Let’s move forward and explore the exciting world of online video editing and how it can enhance your content creation process. Exciting times await!
Here’s how you can prepare the outline for your video, in a clear and straightforward manner:
- Read the outline multiple times to become familiar with it.
- Arrange the text to match the flow and delivery of your message.
- Consider using bullet points and numbers to organize the content.
- Make sure the outline is easy to follow and understand.
- Keep the language simple and accessible, suitable for a 5th-grade reading level.
- Use contractions to create a friendly and conversational tone.
- Vary sentence lengths and structures for engaging readability.
- Maintain the first-person perspective by using ‘I’ and ‘you’.
- Preserve the HTML markup intact, ensuring all tags are correctly closed.
- Verify that the code is valid and functional.
- Keep the essence of the original content while expressing it in a fresh and engaging manner.
By following these steps, you can create an outline that effectively delivers your message and engages your audience.
Contents
Enhancing Your Tutorial
Make your tutorial more appealing by adding callouts, video illustrations that incorporate text or pictures, along with some dynamic effects or PowerPoint slides. Gather the elements you wish to include in your video and ensure they harmonize seamlessly.
Pick the Right Recording Tools
I personally rely on Camtasia for recording my videos because it offers a wealth of practical features and special effects. You can take advantage of a free 30-day trial period or purchase it for $299. For a superior video quality, it is recommended to choose at least Full HD: 1280×720 resolution.
Recording with Finesse
Organize Your Recordings
When you’re making a tutorial video, it’s important to keep your video and audio instructions separate. Start by recording the video tutorial first, and then record your audio instructions. This will help you avoid mistakes and save time during editing. Before you start recording, make sure everything you want to include in the tutorial is set up and visible on the screen. Remember that Camtasia can capture everything on your screen, including browsers and folders.
Recording the video
Take your time to record the video tutorial carefully. Slow down by about 20% and focus on each step. Try to avoid making mistakes and unnecessary actions. It may take a few tries to get it right, so don’t get discouraged. Practice makes perfect!
Recording Your Voice
Before you start recording, it’s important to write down a transcript of what you want to say. This will help you avoid making mistakes and keep your recording on track. When it’s time to record, find a quiet room where you can speak clearly and naturally.
Remember to control your voice and add emphasis when you want to highlight something important.
20+ Free Audio Editors for Your Computer
There are many free digital audio editors available online. Here are more than 20 options for you to explore. Read more
Editing Your Recording
Adjusting Dimensions and Clip Speeds
When it comes to recording videos, the dimension you choose for editing is key. For the best quality, go with 1280 x 720. But here’s a tip: you can make your video even better by removing any unnecessary frames. That way, it’ll play faster when people are downloading or setting it up. And hey, let’s face it, we all know how to search for something or type text, so there’s no need to take up unnecessary time explaining those things in your video. Keeping it shorter and sweeter will grab your audience’s attention and keep them coming back for more.
Zooming and Transition
When you’re inputting text or displaying a website URL, make sure to use the zoom function. This will ensure that your video appears in a smaller size on Youtube, so you’ll need to zoom in for your viewers to see everything clearly. To create a smoother zoom effect, set the duration to 1 second. To add some visual flair, try using transition effects when transitioning between different parts of your video. Personally, I really like the Page Turn, Cube Rotate, Fade, and Fade Through Black effects, all with a duration of 1 second.
Callout and Effects
If you want to draw attention to something specific in your video, you can add an extend frame. This will cause all activities in the video to pause when the extend frame appears. Make sure to give the extend frame enough time for viewers to understand what you’re highlighting. Generally, I like to give mine about 3 to 5 seconds.
If you want to add more effects to your videos, my top recommendation is Sony Vegas Pro. At first, creating effects manually might seem tricky, but with Sony Vegas Pro, you can easily achieve any effect you desire.
If you find it challenging to create effects from scratch, you can give SWiSH Max a try. SWiSH Max comes with a range of pre-built effects that you can apply to enhance your videos. Personally, I often use SWiSH Max to create type writing effects for text in my videos.
Create an Engaging YouTube Tutorial
Exporting Your Video
Don’t rely on the default Camtasia presets because they tend to make your videos appear darker than usual and reduce the clarity of details. Instead, follow these steps to export your video in high quality:
Under the section called “Custom product setting,” you’ll find a button labeled “Add/edit preset.” Click on it to create a new production preset. You can come up with any name you like for the preset, such as “Custom HD.”
To have high-quality videos with true brightness, make sure to select AVI as your video file format. This format will give you the best results.
When setting the frame rate, choose 15 frames per second (fps). This will give you a nice video while keeping the file size small. The ideal frame rate is 30 fps, but using it will make your video very large.
Uploading a YouTube tutorial
Title and Description for Your Tutorial
When uploading your tutorial to YouTube, it’s important to create a title and description that accurately represent the content and include relevant keywords. Your title can be up to 70 characters long, but only the first 40 characters will be visible when your tutorial is shown as a related video. In the description, provide a brief overview of your video and remember to include your link within the first three lines so that viewers can easily access it without clicking “show more”. Be sure to incorporate keywords that are relevant to your tutorial.
Using tags is an important way to make your video more visible to people who are interested in the same topics. When you add tags to your video, it will show up alongside other videos that have similar tags. This means that more people will have the chance to discover your video and watch it. To make sure your video gets seen by the right audience, use longer keywords as tags and add as many tags as you can.
When you upload your video, make sure to set the privacy settings to public. This way, anyone can find and watch your video. Additionally, you should also enable the option for your video to be viewed on mobile phones and TV. This will allow even more people to access and enjoy your content. Lastly, don’t forget to allow comments or responses on your video. This way, you can engage with your audience and create a community around your content.
When you’re creating videos, it’s essential to add annotations. These are like little notes or reminders that you can include in your videos to engage with your audience and keep them interested.
Annotations can serve a few different purposes. Firstly, you can use them to ask viewers to subscribe to your channel. This helps to grow your subscriber base and ensures that your audience gets notified whenever you upload a new video.
Secondly, annotations can be used to redirect viewers to other videos in your channel. This is a great way to keep people engaged with your content and encourage them to explore more of what you have to offer.
Finally, annotations can also be used to guide viewers on how to watch your video in the best size. This is particularly important if you’re uploading high-quality videos that may need to be viewed in full-screen mode to appreciate all the details.
By adding annotations to your videos, you’re making the viewing experience more interactive and engaging for your audience. So don’t forget to include them in your video editing process!
When you create videos on YouTube, it’s a good idea to group them together in a playlist. This way, viewers can easily find and watch all of your tutorials without having to search for related videos one by one.
By organizing your videos into a playlist, you make it convenient for your audience to follow along with your content and learn from you. They can simply click on the playlist and watch all the videos in chronological order or pick and choose the ones they’re most interested in.
Final thoughts
And that’s it! You’ve successfully completed your high-quality YouTube tutorial using just a computer and some software. Now it’s time for you to get started on your own tutorial or, if you’ve already created one, share your tips and experiences in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
