Getting listeners to listen to your own music can be a tough job, especially when you're starting out and therefore we have to try to make use of all the tools that are at our disposal to get our music listened to. One of those tools we have to make use of is YouTube and all the other video sharing sites around the internet.

If you have some video footage of your latest gig or some other great footage then you should be all set and ready to upload some great videos but many of us don't have any video to hand. Not to worry though as we can easily and quickly put together a video containing a collection of pictures or photos instead for the eye candy and your music for the sound.

Here are a few ideas of the sort of images you could use to make your own videos to go with your music...

• Album/single covers.
• Photo's of you/your band.
• Photo's from your latest gig.
• Your or your band's logo.
• Photo's from free stock photo web sites which fit your music.

Once you have your photos and of course your track it is very simple to make a video that you can upload to these sites. If you are using Windows you can use the freely available Windows Movie Maker which should already be in your Start Menu. You could also try out VideoSpin from Pinnacle which is free to download and use. If you are on a Mac or using Linux then I am not sure of any alternatives but I am sure there is something similar out there which will work in the same way.

For my videos I used Windows Movie Maker as it is very simple and quick to use. All we do is import our chosen pictures and music and then arrange them on the storyboard at the bottom. We can also add some simple transitions between the images if we want by choosing Tools > Transitions and dragging the transition we want to the join in the storyboard between the images.

Once we are happy with the result in the preview video we can save the movie (which saves as a .wmv files in Windows Movie Maker) and upload it to our video sharing site account.

This method is not only quick and easy but also quite effective in getting extra listeners to find your music. Make sure you add an extra picture which has the URL of your web site or MySpace page so that viewers of the video can find out more about your music and that you also add the URL in the description of the video.

If you give some tracks away for free as I do, you could even put something along the lines of "If you like this track, download it for free from this website" to encourage them to get MP3 versions of the tracks. For the small amount of work I am sure you will find it worth it.