How to create promotional videos for your blogs with Lumen5

RELEVANCY WARNING: This article was written in 2017 and may not still be relevant.

In the third instalment of our instructional blogs for video content, we’re going to be explaining how to use Lumen5 to effectively promote your blog posts.

We recently published a blog post where we lightly touched on four methods for creating quick and easy video content for your social channels. You can find that here.

Next, we explored Biteable in more detail – a video creation tool that can be used for various purposes. This can be found here. Lumen5 is different to Biteable in the sense that it is (more or less) exclusively used for blog promotions.

If you’re running social channels for business, there’s a good chance you’ve written and then promoted blog posts. Just like the one you’re reading. With Lumen5, you can create videos to promote your blogs; which should result in more reach (as we all know, social media channels are loving video right now).

Step 1 – Creating your storyboard

Create a free account and select the blog you want to promote, then hit the “create video” button at the top-right of your screen.

If your blog has already been published to a website, you can copy and paste the URL of the post into the bar. This will automatically create a draft of the frames for you.

If not, you can click the “copy and paste your content” which takes a little bit longer but works just fine. Do this if you’re creating the video before posting the blog.

Once your text has been uploaded, you can click on the sentences which you would like to feature in your frames. Think of them as highlights of the blog.

Once selected, the “highlights” will appear on the storyboard. They will appear in the order you clicked them, but they can be dragged around in an order that best suits you.

If one of the sentences you’ve picked is a bit long, you can easily edit it on the storyboard.

Step 2 – Adding Media

Now your storyboard has been created, it’s time to select the media for each frame.

Lumen 5 will automatically select random images/videos for your frames. Don’t worry, there are plenty of others to choose from, or you can even upload your own!

There’s a search bar on the left. Simply search for the kind of image/clip you want and drag it over to match your frames. You can also filter to only find images, videos or icons.

On top of the “millions of copyright-free media”, you can upload your own personal images and videos.

Step 3 – Editing the text

You might be able to see that some of your text is highlighted, or in a position that you don’t like.

Next, for each frame, there are options to move the text around, change its size and highlight any specific words/phrases.

Change the size of the text by changing it to a “heading”, “quote” or any of the other options.

Have a play around!

Step 4 – Audio

 Once you’re happy with each frame, it’s time to think about the audio you want on your video.

 The audio process for Lumen5 is similar to that of Biteable.

There’s a range of free audio tracks that Lumen5 offers, which fall into different mood categories such as angry, happy, dark, calm, energetic etc.

There isn’t an endless selection, but we’ve often found that the free sounds suffice for promoting a blog.

If you just can’t choose one that feels right for your video, go ahead and upload your own audio file.

Step 5 – Finishing up

 By now, you should have an (almost) finished video.

In the final tab, labelled “branding” you can upload your own logo to appear in the outro template.

As well as this, you can change the brand colours (such as text highlights) and fonts, to match your brand.

And there you have it. Pick a blog and get creating!