Free Image, Audio and Video Creation Tools for Marketing and Content Creation | Small Biz Marketing Specialist
Free Image, Audio and Video Creation Tools for Marketing and Content Creation

Free Image, Audio and Video Creation Tools for Marketing and Content Creation

On this show “Digital Dave” spends a few minutes talking about the future of Digital Marketing and some of the risks of putting all your marketing eggs in one basket. “Digital Dave” then shares many great FREE tools for video, audio and image creation and editing that you can download for FREE today. Download links to FREE software are provided below.

Software Download Links

Window Movie Maker – http://www.windows-movie-maker.org/
Paint .Net – https://www.getpaint.net/download.html
iMovie – installed with Mac OS
Any Video Converter – Any Video Converter Download

Episode Transcript:

Hello everyone. This is Digital Dave. We’re here today to talk about some free tools that you can use in your marketing efforts, particularly to create content for your websites and your social media sites. Before we go into our episode today, I want to talk a little bit about marketing in general and really taking a step back and listening to your customers. This came up because somebody on our website, smallbizmarketingspecialist.com, we have a ask a question portion of our website, where you can go and actually ask us a question and we will answer it on one of our episodes here. It really wasn’t a question, it was more of a statement, in that, “Why don’t you present more technology related content on your show?”

That is I guess a really good question and statement, so I wanted to answer that by saying, first of, we hear you. We’ve been trying to stay away a little bit from the technology in the early episodes to try to make ourselves a little different. We understand from doing marketing for many, many, many years, both Stacey and myself, that internet marketing is wonderful. It’s a tremendously valuable tool the internet and online digital marketing, but the rules change and so you really need to make sure you diversify your marketing into some offline strategies as well.

We’ve been trying to give you some of the offline strategies that we’ve been using up to this point that have been effective for us in the early stages of our shows here, so that you have different I guess trick in your bag, other than online marketing. There’s a lot of things changing online as we speak. Number one is there’s this whole, I guess, battle for this net neutrality. What this is, the internet’s been free space for everyone equally and who knows how long that’s going to continue? These big companies constantly fight to take over the internet and I’m not too sure at some point in time some of us little people are not going to be affected by this. This could affect of all that marketing that you put in place for all those years. Now I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen for sure. Nobody knows, but net neutrality is a big thing.

Another thing is that say you do a lot of SEO work, which we do and everybody I think that has a website should be doing, you’re in the hands of Google. A lot of times what can happen is Google will just change their rules on you. We’ve seen the updates, the Panda update, which I’ve heard many, many, many stories of people losing some of their sites that they’ve had 50%, 60%, 70% of their revenue overnight, just because Google changed their search algorithm. We do want to obviously, and we will, be providing a lot more technology content in future episodes. We all want you to stay tuned for that and certainly we’re going to try to give you some tips and tricks and the things that we do that work online.

What we also want to do is make sure that, number one we’re trying to be a little different from everybody else and make you a well rounded marketing person and give you great tips and tricks that work offline as well. We hope that you take that into account in your marketing. We also hope that you like our episodes and our shows, that you’ll go on iTunes and you’ll go on YouTube and like us and follow us and subscribe to our shows, because I think one of the things that we do provide is that we do provide a little different perspective on marketing and that it’s all not focused on online or digital marketing.

With that let’s go into today’s content and episode, which is some free tools for marketing and content creation. I’m going to start by walking through some of the tools that we use now, and I’ve used even for years now, that are free. Some of which are not free but I highly do suggest that you look at tools like this for your content creation. In fact, I’m using one of those to record this episode right now.

Let’s talk about some tools online that you can use for content creation. Many of you I’m sure want to create beautiful stunning images that you can use to post on social media and your website. We use a couple tools for image creation that are … one is free, one not so much free, but I’ll give you a free one as well. It’s called Paint.net, and Paint.net is simply an application that you can download from the internet. You can find it at https//www.getpaint.net/download.html. That’s where you can download this. This is a free image creation and manipulation tool, editing tool, that we have used for many, many, many, many, many years to create images as well as edit our images. You can see, there’s quite a few of them right here already loaded in my Paint.net editor. Paint.net is a lot … First off it is free. One of the things we do do is they do provide this to you free, that we highly suggest and we have in the past given a donation to them via Paypal for the software. This is really actually a very nice little piece of software that they pretty much offer for free, but I do highly encourage that you give them a little bit of money or something just to keep these guys happy or ladies happy and continue to develop the application. They do come out with updates all the time. This interface is based on the premises of Adobe Photoshop, to a degree. It’s got some basic features and functions of Adobe Photoshop but it is not as fully functional as Photoshop.

I want everybody to know that although it is great for doing something, there are some things that it lacks that you can do much more efficiently and effectively in Adobe Photoshop, but for most people who are editing images, they want to do very simple things. They want to go in and they want to place one image on top of another image. For instance, this image here is simply an image of a background of a book or whatever a book, stack of books with a transparent image overlaid on top of it that says this is a free bonus. Another image that’s of a similar nature is, this is our thumbnail for our YouTube Channel videos. We simply overwrite this on an ongoing basis, but it’s based on layers and there are several layers in this. We’ll start just by, you can look at the layers. In this particular case it’s not, it’s all one layer but here is the overlay, this is the background, and then obviously we’re just writing on top of that. You can do simple things and simple editing in this. Again, this is 100 … I won’t say … It’s 100% free, based on your generosity. I highly encourage you to check this out, it’s Paint.net.

Another free tool that we use that is really, really good for audio editing and recording if you’re just doing audio recording is Audacity, that’s A-U-D-I-C-I-T-Y. That can be found at http//www.audacityteam.org/download. Audacity is a audio editing program. Again, this is absolutely free. It provides some really great functionality for a free editor. You can pretty much do just about anything that the professionals can do in this program. Again, it’s 100% free. We do use it sometimes clean up and snip and fix some of our audio tracks during recording. Again, a free audio tool, editing tool is Audacity.

Now, a lot of you I’m sure are really interested in doing video. Video’s obviously becoming increasingly more popular on the internet with YouTube and Vimeo and all these you can post videos these days. Obvious video’s interactive on your website. In previous episodes we talk about using video consistently on your sites as well as your social media. There’s a couple tools here that you can use. Now this is a Windows machine so there is a Windows movie editor, which I do not have. I chose not so much not to use it but I have used it in the past. It’s called Windows Movie Maker. You can find that at http://www.windows-movie-maker.org, where you can download this and add it to your computer. It’s a basic video editor that let’s you cut clip videos. You can do things like enlarge, increase speed, reduce speed, adjust volumes of the audio within it. It’s a basic movie editor that you can have for free on a Windows computer.

For the Mac users out there, there’s iMovie. iMovie, I’ve used that many times as well. It has some actually nice features built into it standard as well. It does basic movie editing for you, and just about anyone can learn how to use these two tools for movie editing. They are 100% free at this point in time. One of the things that’s going to come up if you start doing editing of videos, is that sometimes you’re going to want to use a clip that you may or may not be able to use within that editor. There are things codecs that determine whether or not your editor can open and use a movie format with that particular codec. Sometimes what happens is I don’t want to go out and search for the codec, what I can do in a lot of cases is I can simply reconvert that video. Say it’s an AVI file and I don’t have the right codec, I can go into and use a converter, an audio or video converter to convert that to an MP4 and then I can actually use that particular clip freely within my movie making programs or my video movie editing programs. The program that we use is called Any Video Converter. It is free. It’s a freemium. It’s free. It does do all the basic editing … Sorry, basic converting of videos and audios that you probably would need. You can find it at www.any-video-converter.com. What that looks like, for those of you watching, is it looks like this, where we can drag in any video or audio. In this particular one it was because our audio is being produced in a format that our podcast host doesn’t really want to use. It’s not even that, they’ll use it but the problem is some people don’t have this codec on their device to actually open it in this format. We actually put it into this Any Video Converter and convert it to an MP3.

Now, the only downside to the free version is that when you’re done you get their freemium promo that pops up at the end to buy the full version, which I’m sure the full version has extended features and stuff. For us we don’t need those. We have other applications to do things like that, so we choose to use the free version and that’s really the only downside of this program for converting videos that we found, is that it does have this popup when you complete any conversion. This is Any Video Converter.

Now, I am sure many of you are probably interested in doing some type of video conferencing online, where you’re recording with other people. Maybe you’re doing an interview with someone, or you want to do some type of a joint presentation, and there is a free video conferencing program out there called Zoom, Zoom Video Conferencing. You can find that at zoom.us, that’s Zoom, Z-O-O-M dot U-S. There’s also Skype, a lot of people do use Skype for online video conferencing. The only downside to Skype that we have found is that when you go to record those, there is no embedded recording feature in Skype, where Zoom has an embedded recording feature. Skype, there are plugins for Skype, but we’ve had issues every time we’ve tried to pull the video and audio out, where one of the two of them isn’t as good a quality as we would have liked. Skype works, it’s a great video conferencing program in and of itself, where it lacks we think is some functionalities on the recording side, so we use Zoom.

Zoom does allow you to both obviously do the audio and video conferencing, but it also allows you to record those, and you can record them in different fashions where the screen will change based on who’s speaking automatically and record that person from their camera. You can do a dual screen where multiple people show up on the same screen as they’re talking. You can do desktop recording if you want to capture your desktop, it will also show the person speaking in a small panel on that same screen. It has some inherent recording features that are pretty nifty for video conferencing and recording.

Those are some of the free tools that if you’re going to create audio and video content you’re going to want to have. These are, again, most of them are 100% free, some of them have, in fact most of them have premium versions, but for most of what you do and at least a lot of things we do, we have not gone beyond needing to use the additional features. Now there are a couple of extra applications that I highly encourage people look into. Again, we have no affiliation with any of these organizations that make this software, so we want to make this clear, this is just simply some tools that we’ve been using for a long time that we find very effective and we highly like.

One of the things that many people are going to want to do is they’re going to want to do some enhanced video editing. Enhanced meaning that they want to add some transitions, some nice transitions in there, they want to have good control, how to edit a video and a nice graphical interface. In this particular case, we’ve used the free versions for some stuff, like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. For very extensive video editing we’ve even used the Mac Final Cut Pro, which we do have and use when we’re doing some very precise sophisticated editing. But in general the tool that we use to edit most of our videos is called Camtasia Studio. It is not free. It does I think have a free trial to it but it’s a video editor that allows us to do pretty much most of the major types of editing that you would want to do. It has some effects. It has some audio clean up filters in it. It has some screen filters you can apply. It’s fairly easy to use. If you’re new to video, Camtasia Studio, which can be found at https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia, which is C-A-M-T-A-S-I-A dot html. You can find Camtasia Studio there. That is, again, it’s a fairly simplistic video editor that you can do most of what you want to do. You can save effects that can be reused in different videos. It has a library when you can save effects and video clips for future use. It is fairly easy to work with, so we do recommend that.

There’s also one other thing that most people want to do in their online marketing, and that is they want to go capture screens, they want to do screen capture and screen recording. I’m going to show you a free tool, which comes with Microsoft. Again, this is a Windows machine we’re using here. It’s simply called Snipping Tool, which is built into Windows 10 now. I think it was in also some previous version of Windows, but definitely Windows 10. This is a basic snipping tool, which will let you drag and drop and snip areas of the screen into an image, which you can use to paste on your website, save or send to somebody. It works fine for basic stuff. We found that our needs for marketing way exceed what this tool’s capable to do.

One of the things that we’ve invested in is another program. It’s actually by Techsmith, it’s the same people who make Camtasia Studio. It’s called Snagit. This is a screen recording program and screen capture program that allows you to do many different things. First off, it allows you to not just capture a screen, a static screen, but one of the things that happens a lot today on the internet is that you’re going to want to go to a website and the website obviously is longer than the screen, has a scroll bar, and you want to capture more than just the area that’s on your screen there. It allows you to do scrolling screen capture, that’s one of the very nice pieces that it provides. It also allows for you to do audio and video recording of screens, which is what I’m actually doing this recording on right now. I’m actually using Snagit screen recorder to do this actual presentation/episode. It does a very nice job. Actually the audio comes out pretty clean, the video comes out pretty clean. It comes out in HD, 1920 by 1080. It’s based on the size of your monitor what resolution your video will be captured in. That’s called Snagit and it can be found at https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html. I don’t know it costs nowadays, I think it was like $45. I don’t remember, I purchased it at least a year, a year and half ago, and I’ve been continuing to get the current updates, which is, I think it’s on version 13 or something like that. We use this constantly to do screen capture, particularly scrolling screen capture and enhanced screen capture.

That’s something a lot of people, people will ask you for very high res images and you are able to use this screen capture to enlarge your screen to very large resolutions and then actually capture that area as a much more high res image than just your standard monitor may be showing. These are some enhanced features of Snagit. These are the tools, some of the tools that we use, not exclusively. Some which are free, that you can use yourself freely to do and create content, videos, audio and some which do have a premium to them but we highly recommend.

This is it for today’s episode. We hope you’ve got some value from some of these suggestions that we gave you today. What we do hope is that you are getting value from our podcast and our videos and you’ll do us a favor, you’ll go online to YouTube and look us up. It’s Small Biz Marketing Wiz on YouTube, you can find us under Small Biz Marketing Wiz. Subscribe to our channel, like our videos if you think they’re decent. Let other people know about them and our podcast, which is obviously on iTunes. You would go onto iTunes and look us up, it’s Where Marketing Meets Technology is the show on iTunes. If you are on iTunes and you like what we’re giving you as far as content, please subscribe and give us a review. We really appreciate a review, a good review would be preferable but we do want to try to promote our show to other people since all this is truly free information that we’re giving out. We hope people get value from it. We thank you everybody for listening to today’s show.

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About the Author smallbizmarketing

Stacey Riska, aka "Small Business Stacey" is a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about saving small - and not so small - businesses one marketing plan at a time. She helps business owners become a #SmallBizMarketingWiz by teaching them marketing strategies that get MORE: MORE leads, MORE customers/clients/patients, MORE sales, and MORE profit. Stacey's in-demand "Small Biz Marketing Success Coaching and Mastermind Program" is transforming the businesses - and lives - of those who want wealth, freedom, and market domination. Her highly acclaimed book "Small Business Marketing Made EZ" lays out the 6-simple-step plan to get your marketing into ACTION - literally and figuratively. Stacey is also the creator of Cups To Gallons, the place where independent coffee, smoothie, juice bar, ice cream, dessert and snack shop owners go to learn how get into lucrative catering so they stop selling by the cup and start selling by the gallon. In this program she teaches from experience, as it was the key strategy that transformed her coffee and smoothie business from being $500K in debt to a 7-figure profitable business. When not saving the small business world, she enjoys sipping red wine, eating chocolate (who doesn't!) and spending time with her amazing husband.

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