A friend and I were talking about putting together a series of videos, suitable for YouTube, but neither of us has the kind of equipment necessary to do a Hollywood-quality movie.

So we improvised.

Here's how to create a simple video from software you may have laying around. Like Powerpoint and Adobe Premiere Elements (Elements is really inexpensive and you can use a Powerpoint substitute like the one in OpenOffice). Any presentation program will work as long as you can save or export each slide as an image (JPEG or PNG for two examples).

It's a 3 step process:

1. Make your slides and export them as .png (or .jpg)
2. Import them into Premiere Elements and make the movie. Create transitions, do voice over with a $10 microphone that you can plug into your PC, and save as an AVI file.
3. Upload to YouTube

If you want to get real fancy, you can import music too. Add titles, graphics, etc. Plus, you can embed links in the video such that when a user clicks on a link, he's taken to your website. This would entail Step #4:

Linked Tube

Once your video is "on the air," tell everybody through Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm, etc. and hope it "goes viral."

If it does, you could very well see hundreds, if not thousands, of hits to your website.

You can use videos to drive people to your own site, an affiliate site, or to a squeeze page to capture their contact info. The possibilities are endless.