How to Easily Make Videos

Have you ever wanted to easily make videos to add to your blog posts or share on social media or add to YouTube? I discovered a cool tool called Lumen5 which allows you to easily do this for FREE. You can take a blog post you already have and convert it into a video.

I’m going to show you how it works so you can make cool videos too. But first, here is a video I made in less than 20 minutes with Lumen 5:

Easily Make Videos Like This One (how-to below)

How to Easily Make Videos

Go to Lumen5.com and enter the URL of a blog post you would like to convert into a video.  Click Create!

Once it processes (which doesn’t take long) you will be at the Build Story section. Here it has taken the main points of your blog post and displays them on the left and then you can move them over to the right or add in sections you might need to make it work. It will display the current video length on the top right. Edit the text if needed but for the most part you should be able to take the parts of your blog post and just add them with one click to the right.

When your story is the way you want it, you will move on to the Add Media section. This is the most fun part in my opinion. You can choose from TONS of stock photos that are free to use as well as any images from your blog post to use as a background to each slide. Backgrounds are put in automatically but you can change as needed.

On the left will be suggested images based on keywords it takes from your post but you can search for something if it is not what you want. Just drag and drop. You should know that the images are not static meaning they will move during your video (again reference mine at the top.) If you want to preview what the movements will look like, click the little white arrow on the grey at the bottom of each slide.

Besides the backgrounds you can also edit what part of the text is highlighted. Below is what it gave me as a default but as you can see from the video at the beginning, I chose to highlight the words colour and fruit. Just touch the blue A to highlight. You can also click on the down arrow next to the blue A to change the colour used for highlighting. In my video I made it orange.

If your text is all in one box, it will display all at once. If your text is in two boxes as below, then the first line will show up first, then it will fade and the second line will show up.

At the bottom of the slide where it says Text or Title, you can change it to quote if you have something that should be in quotation marks. Don’t forget to add your source.

The images was all done in the media section. If you move to music you will find tons of song choices for background music. These are all free to use. Click the little blue arrow to listen and click the choice you want to select it.

In the branding section you can add your watermark (shown in top right of each slide lightly) and logo (shown at the end of the video).  Although it doesn’t go in automatically, I suggest adding your url to the last slide as well with your logo. See how I did it in my video.

Finally you will check out the preview and see if it looks just like you want. When you are happy with your video click Publish. Please note it will take some time for your video to process. It started off around 20 minutes but my last few took 5 hours. It all depends on how popular the site is so it will change. You can exit out of the site while it processes and you can choose to receive an email when it’s done or just check back.

When it’s all done, go to the website and click on your video to download it as an MP4. Then you can share it! Add it to a blog post, upload to social media, add to YouTube, whatever!

That’s it! Now you can easily make videos.

If you make a video with my tutorial, share it in the comments!

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