Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Course: So welcome to this online
course Master class. I'm super excited right now because I've put
all the information that I've learned for the
past five or six years being an online course creator, and I've infused that
into this course. So let's not waste any time
and get right into it. So I'm super excited because
you're going to go through a massive transformation
after completing this course. With all of the skills and techniques that we're
going to go over together, you're going to
be able to create your very own course
in the next 30 days. And what this is
going to do is lead you to growing your
own online audience, giving you more freedom in life through making
passive income, and you'll be able
to help others around the world
through your passion, your skill set, and the knowledge
that you have to share. We're going to build
this step by step. So in each chapter, we're going to learn
a specific skill. Some of these main
steps are going to be how to plan, organize, write, film, edit, launch, and finally, market your course. And throughout this process, I'm going to give you all
the slides that I created as downloadable PDFs
for each chapter. So you don't have to
worry about taking notes. You can sit back, relax,
enjoy the information. And then we're going to go
through learning exercises to actually implement what we've
learned and take action. Now, before we dive into our
very first lesson together, here's just a quick snapshot
of me, my background, and why I'm qualified to be giving you all
this information. First of, I've been a
full time filmmaker for over ten years. I've worked with brands
like Discovery Channel, Red Bull, Hermes, and cascade. And during these years, I've created
literally hundreds of client videos in all
different genres, like music videos,
documentaries, short films, commercials, multi
episode, shows, reels, and even
educational series. After working on so
many of these projects, I felt that there
was more that I wanted to do with my
filmmaking career. That's when I wanted to
shift from freelance to more helping other filmmakers
and teaching online. Since then, I've become a best selling teacher on Utomy for the past five plus years and also done in
person workshops, while also creating my own
online education platforms like Film creator Academy
and Life Academy. So for all of my courses, and really throughout
this course, what I'm going to do
is teach more than just the surface level of what you can find in a Google Search. But we're also going to be diving into
information where you will be able to grow an
up level as a person. With that said, here
are just a few things some other students have
said about my courses. And the cool thing
about this is is that the techniques that I
used to create courses that got these reviews and
actual experiences from students is exactly what I'm going to be sharing with
you in this course. So by the end of this course, you're going to learn
everything I've discovered in gaining 140,000 students with 7,500 reviews
in over 130 countries. So that does it for my
little teacher introduction, and now let's get right
into the course content.
2. Research Your Course Topics: You should have just
completed creating your brainstorm list of ideas. Now, put that list
on ice because we're going to revisit that
later in this chapter, and the next thing that
we want to do is research your potential topics
using UTM Insights, VD IQ, and Google Trends. The goal of this part is to
take what we've brainstormed, have that as our direction. Then we want to look online and see what lines up
with what is actually performing well online and how we can start to put
on our marketing mind and brain and title these courses in a certain way that's
going to drive the most amount of
students possible. So if these things I
start talking about in this first chapter don't make a ton of sense yet, don't worry. I promise this is something
that we're going to really start to dive deeply
into throughout the course. So we're going to build
from the ground up here. Now, we're going to be
talking about UTM Insights, VDIQ, and Google Trends. And the reason
being is these are the three most effective
tools that I found as a course creator to determine the course profitability and the demand, like I mentioned. So it's important to find the right amount
of, what I would say, nihness of your topic, because if the student
demand isn't there, you're not going to be able
to make any core sales. So what I mean by this is an example of a good topic would be seven steps to write
your own book in 60 days. This is a topic that is broad enough for a decent amount of people who want
to write books. But if we said something
like how to write a book on how to write a book on,
we're talking about cooking. So how to write a book on
making sandwiches in 60 days, that took a very broad
topic that's going to reach a lot of
people and niched it way down into a topic
where maybe you have ten people buy that
course a month or a year. So this is something
to keep in mind. So yeah, and I kind of just explain this with
a different example. But another not so good
course topic would be how to write sci fi books, like Frank Herbert's Dune. I've been kind of obsessed
with the Dune series lately. So, like I said, this would be too
much of a Niche topic because not enough
people would enroll. The student demand
is not high enough. So let's keep moving into this. Now, the best way to find this out are these three main tools. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to list out these tools. And then individually, I'm
going to go in and one by one essentially do a
case study or a walk through with you so that
you can do the same thing with your brainstorm
listed ideas and find out if they're actually going
to be solid enough topics. So the UME Insights tool. This lists out the top
revenue and the top performing courses on the
entire UtomE website. It's going to show you
the monthly payouts that the top courses are getting in the genres
of, let's say, painting. Photography, video production. It's going to list out the
top courses in that topic, which is perfect
because it gives you an insight into what's performing well and what
students actually are clicking on and what they're enrolling in. So
we'll dive into that. VID IQ is another
really good one. This shows the performance of key words and
competitors videos. This is basically a
plug in that I've used for years that
connects to YouTube. And what it does is it
shows what key words. It gives an overall score
of what's being searched, what's not being searched, what's being searched a lot, but already has tons of
videos in that topic. So, for example,
if it was a course on how to create
cinematic lighting, or technically, if
it was a video on how to create cinematic
lighting on YouTube, it could have a really
high search score where a lot of students are
searching this online, but a terrible competitor score, meaning hundreds
of YouTubers have already created videos
around that topic. And even though we're looking
on something like YouTube, which is not a online
course platform. It's just a video sharing
platform. That's okay. What this does is it
allows for us to cut a temperature of what people
are looking for online. So for the UTM Insight tool, we're looking directly at course related analytics,
which is perfect. But that's a much smaller
amount of information. With something like VDIQ, we're looking at
millions and millions of potential video topics, with millions and millions
of billions actually of people engaging with
these videos per day. So you're getting
similar information from a slightly different angle. And that's why I also have
a third option for this, which is Google Trends. So we're getting information from three different sources, which is going to
allow for us in this pre production
phase to make a better decision
right out of the gate. So Google Trends is going
to show us what's on the rise or decline in
your country? Or globally. The reason I like
using this website or this search
functionality is because it's going to not just
show you the score, the number, the demand, it's going to show you a graph
on if it's on an incline, or if it's on a decline. So there'll be things
that celebrities say, things that happen in popular culture that happen on the news, that when that keyword comes out and it's seen on a
viral video of someone saying something that gets seen by millions
of people you're going to see a spike on
Google trends of Wow, Okay, now this specific topic would make for a great course because I can see
that it's steadily increasing because of what's
going on in popular culture, for example, something
like a bitcoin course. If you wanted to create
a bitcoin course before the cryptocurrency boom
happened years and years ago, if you looked on
the Google Trends, you would see a very flat line. It's not being
talked about a lot. And then it started
to make it into the mainstream media,
and like, moms, dads, uncles, grandmas, everyone's asking about
bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you would see that on
the Google Trends. So it gives you, like I said, similar information from a different viewpoint
so that you can more accurately see which courts
topics to really go after. So now that you have a
overview of these three tools, in the following lessons, I'm going to break down how to actually use them and
we'll do a walk through so that you can use these for your specific course topics.
3. The Simple Course Formula: Welcome to Chapter
one of this course. In this chapter, together, we're going to be doing
our course planning and maximization. The reason being is
behind this processes, before we go into production, post production, releasing,
marketing our course, and trying to get it out
there, we want to make sure that you are creating
the right course, with the right genre,
with the right direction, with the right overall
course outline for your target audience. Before getting into the
rest of this process. So right now, we're
building the structure. Building a solid outline
for your course, and we're going to dissect this process with just
a very simple idea, which is what I call the
simple course formula. And this is going
to help you choose the best course to create. So, the simple course formula, actually, first, let's talk
about the main problem. We have our ideal student, and students are just like us. They are just other
people wanting to get information from books, magazines, articles,
websites, social media. We want to get as much
information as possible. In the shortest amount
of time possible, with the least
amount of friction, and essentially kind
of selfishly siphon off as much information as
we can without wasting time. So when you Google something or YouTube something,
you're doing this, and people feel that
same way for courses, books, everything like that. So we have our students out out there in the world
wanting to learn a skill set or a topic that they can use in their life
the easiest way possible. Now, the issue comes in is because the knowledge
that they're looking for is essentially a mountain of good and bad information
online in books, like we were mentioning before, on social media, conflicting
information everywhere. It's not organized,
it's not structured, and it's not filtered. That's where you, as the instructor and
online courses come in. We're taking information that pretty much is already
available online. Everything that you
can possibly teach is kind of a Google
search away already. So the goal is to take that
information and structure it. And the way to go about
thinking about why a student is purchasing a course is with this simple
course formula. So we have our student wanting to learn as
much as possible, with the least amount of
friction as possible. Plus money that
they're willing to pay in order to receive
that information. So the payment you can
think of as an exchange for their time and getting
more time in their life back. So if I pay you for something, if I go to a restaurant and I pay the restaurant
for a sandwich, I'm literally paying them for the ingredients and the time needed to prepare that sandwich. I can go and do the same thing for much cheaper. But
what's it going to do? It's going to take an
hour out of my day, 30 minutes out of my
day, whatever it is. So money is in exchange
for me to save time, give it to someone else,
receive value, in exchange. So these are super basic, but also really important
just bare bone structures of why students are
purchasing courses. Now, these two first things on this top layer are going
to equal the following. The student is going to give
you the money, essentially, in exchange for the time
needed to research, organize, and structure
the information. So this is where you
come in as a teacher. That plus the knowledge and background and
expertise and skill of a specific course topic
is going to equal this healthy exchange of why a student is going to feel that they want to
purchase your course. They're going to save a
ton of time and energy, receive a ton of
value in exchange for giving you the
money to give them the time savings and the
knowledge that you have from the expertise and the background of your specific course topic. This is why people buy almost everything is for
this type of exchange. So a little bit of an insight psychologically boil down in the kind of interesting
formula equation. Now, the next thing is
brainstorming our course ideas. You either want to have a
specific course in mind, Or, and this is totally
fine if this is the case. You have no idea which
course you want to create. Do not worry if this is you. The goal of this
first chapter is to get incredibly clear on this, no matter where you
are at in the process. So we're going to start
with openly writing down all of our
potential ideas because the first and actually the perfect course is a
mix between a skill which you've gained experience
in over a long period of time and your enjoyment of
sharing that information. So, for me, for example,
I like cooking. I've cooked my entire life. I've done many years refining this skill,
naturally, right? I don't really enjoy cooking or teaching people
actually how to cook. I don't want to teach anyone
how to make a sandwich, even though I'm good at it. Filmmaking on the other hand is something that
I've done for years, and I actually really
enjoy teaching it. So you want to have
a skill set with these topics that we're going to brainstorm in this
learning exercise. And then you want to also enjoy talking about
it with your friends, talking about it
with your family. There's a natural part of
it that lights you up. So keep that in mind if
you are in the stage of narrowing down exactly what
it is that you want to teach. So now what we're going
to do is actually put what we've learned
so far into practice. So I want you to get
out a piece of paper, or you can type it
up on your laptop or phone depending on
what's best for you for brainstorming and write down your main topics that
you could potentially teach others that line up with everything that
we just talked about. Don't worry about
being specific. Do not hold back on your ideas. This is just an introductory exercise to get
the ball rolling. Once you have that handful of ideas could be
one, two or three, then I want you to create
a new bullet point and type out or write out how many
students you want to have, how much money do
you want to make, and how will this course
positively affect others? The reason we're going to
do this is so that we can start to really call in and make your initial step
more of a reality versus not fully knowing
which direction to go in. So do not worry about getting
specific on the details. We are going to get
deeply into that in the following lectures and
chapters of the course. So go ahead. Do this enjoy this? This is really a quick win. I want you to feel that
you've already gotten something right out of the gate at the
beginning of the course. Take the time now to do this
first learning exercise, and I will see you
in the next lesson.
4. Market Research with Vid IQ: Second most important
analytics tool that I always use for creating a
new course is VD IQ. Let's hop over to see what
the interface looks like. This is the dashboard.
If you don't have a YouTube
channel, do not worry, but it gives you a
really cool breakdown of what your audience is doing. And how they're engaging
with your content. But if we flip over to
our standard Tube layout, and there's a free version of this and there's a
slightly paid version. So you can look more into that, but if you do want
the free version, it is available online. Now, let's see if we go ahead and search something
like filmmaking, it's going to show us a score that's similar to what
we saw on UTM Insights, but it's going to show
it in a different way. So we're going to
see a search volume. That was like the
student demand. But remember, rather than being just on an online
course platform, we're seeing every single piece of analygs pulled
from all of YouTube. So our volume, the
higher the number, the higher the demand, the lower the number, the
lower the demand itself. Now, our competition
score is going to be just like on UTM as well, where we can see how
many other people are creating content
in that genre. So filmmaking is a
little bit too of a broad term to look up
for this specific thing. What we want to do is niche this down because
there's going to be a massive amount of people already creating
content around that. So let's go ahead
and think about something like
cinematic lighting. Okay? So that has a slightly better search volume and a slightly better
competition score. So it's slightly more
of a niche topic, and you can see what people where all the
views are going, basically. What are other people doing? So you're just keeping in mind that this is your pre
production research. You know, you want to
make sure that let's say, if you were an
author, you're going to write a book
that's uniquely you. You don't want to write a
book that someone's already done the same exact
thing before, and it's a best seller
out there in the world. So you're using this to really
kind of dial in you know, what people haven't done
at the end of the day. So if we now go and
we can see here, we get a little bit
more information on what's being searched, and we can also see, which is pretty helpful
the related terms. And what we can do is we can categorize this by
the overall score, the higher the
number of the score, the better of a
topic is for you. We can do it by competition, search volume, all
these different things. At the end of the
day, for this to be practical for you is
you want to go ahead, go down a rabbit hole
on your specific topic. The next course that I'm
working on personally is going to be a photography
master class. So I'm going to look on tomy at all the photography topics and courses that are
already out there. Look at all the related
keyword search terms. And then in my notes tab, I'm going to put out
that information into a note section,
so I can see, Okay, photography is related to, you know, iPhone filmmaking, possibly or video lighting, and I'm going to start to build what my overall direction for that photography
course is going to be. And then I'm going to
go on UTM, not UTM, but YouTube VID IQ and start
to look up photography, photography lighting, iPhone photography,
mobile photography, and see which terms are searched the most with the least amount of competition. That's going to give
me some direction on what course to
really go after? You can go in so many directions on something like a
photography course and hit it from different angles or for any course
that you're creating. So have that more practical way of looking at it in your
mind that you want to create a list of your best key
words that are going to make your course perform the
best once it's released. In the next video,
we're going to be talking about Google trends, and then that part is going
to wrap up our analytics pre production searching
before moving deeper into the course.
5. Market Research with Google Trends: Ley. We have our
Google Trends data. This is one that I use just as a little extra cherry on top. VD IQ and UTP
insights are really the holy grail for me when
looking at course topics. This one is just a little bit of the extra sauce that shows you where things are going around the world
or in your country. So let's hop over, and let's
see what this looks like. So, we have the home page here, and we could see things
that are trending. We got Taylor Swift, we got
Kim Kardashian, football, all that stuff,
everything that you'd expect in the mainstream media. If I were to go ahead and look at some of my key words that are doing really well on
tomy that we looked up, Let's go ahead and copy this, and let's see video editing. And we can see if
we pull a little bit more of a
different view here, we can see in the United
States our interest over time. This is actually really interesting because
it's showing us in the past 12 months how
interested people are, relative to the amount of
searches they've been doing. And the other cool thing
you can do here is actually compare
different terms. So if we had similar terms on here where one is performing
better than the other, we could verify that
globally literally through Google searches by typing in something like a
little bit more specific. So video editing
versus after effects, which is a video
editing software that a lot of people use
for special effects. Now, if we search that up, we can actually see
that the interest, even though technically, After
Effects is talking about, it's a video editing term, we can see that the demand
of searches is actually quite high for that
specific keyword. Now, what this means is, if I'm going to create
a video editing course, and I see this on After Effects, That tells me that I
only not need to do a video editing course
that's broad like that, but it would help to bring in a little bit more focus on something that's
being searched almost four times three to four times as much as just a
video editing broad term. That I would not have seen without using the
Google Trends tool. Now, let's see what
other functionality we can bring up in this. We can look country by country, or we can look globally. And the cool thing
about online course of course is that you can
have a global audience. So you'll be able to see that
certain terms are searched more country by country in more countries than
other essentially. But it is nice to
pull up and see, you know, if you're from
the United States to see how it's being searched
in the United States, if you have a worldwide audience that you're trying to appeal to, you can change that detail of the information
that it's sharing. The next cool functionality is that if we scroll down here, we can see our related searches, and we can see what has boomed and gone way up in
the recent time. So some of these have just gone crazy so best free video
editing software for windows. These are booming, basically. They're trending online. Also, best laptop
for video editing. This doesn't mean that we're
going to create a course on choosing a laptop for video editing in
2022 specifically. Even though if we click this, we can see, it's probably
spiked massively. Yeah, so it's gone through
a lot of peaks and valleys, but recently it's spiked
almost to its highest. It looks like about a month ago, it peaked for whatever
reason in that month. Now, it doesn't mean we're
going to create a course on choosing a laptop
for video editing, but that might help us determine
the topics that we talk about because it's related to the course that we're doing. If I'm making a video
editing course, and I see that, Wow, people want to
know what software or what type of computer to use. That's going to help me determine what I'm
going to talk about, which we will get
into of developing. Okay, I have my topic, I know that there's a demand, I know that I'm going to
have an audience for it. Now, what is actually
that course made out of? This is something that will help point you in the
right direction of potential topics and chapters
to include in your course. So to summarize
these three tools give you information from a slightly different
perspective with slightly different
criteria that will assist you in creating the
best topic to go after. Next up, we're going to put these three keyword
search tools into a learning exercise
so that you can search up your best
potential topics.
6. Learning Activity: Complete Your Research: Know that was a lot
of information. We went through three different keyword search analytics tools. And now what we're going to
do is a learning exercise. So I want you to create your UME profile and
start researching the potential course
keywords that you wrote in the previous lessons when we were doing our
brainstorming phase. Something to keep in
mind is that Utomi won't always have the exact
wording that you type in. So it's not like YouTube
where you can type in how to bake a vegan
gluten free cake. I do a lot of
analogies with food. But that's beyond
the point. You can't get that specific with tomy. You're gonna have to keep it
to a little bit more broad. Like how a baking would probably be the keyword
search that would show up. So that's just
something to keep in mind with you to
me specifically. I want you to then take bullet point notes like
I showed you of mine, of the best performing topics and see how you can combine them all into your course your
overall course topic, so you can maximize your
potential title and get your best sounding and most effective
student angle, which don't worry about that. We're going to get
into that soon. So I'm going to do
the first part of this learning exercise with you because my next course is going to be a photography
master class. I'm going to look on one of
the three analytics tools. I'm going to look
on U to be Insights and search related keywords. Go down that rabbit hole,
pull the information. You'll be doing the
same, but for all three of these online options. So I'm going to pop over
now to U to me Insights. Perfect. So here
we are on UT tome. I have my notes tab ready to go of my photography
master class keywords, and I'm actually
going to type in UT tome keywords because
I would do this for Um, I would do it for VD IQ. And, you know, you don't
have to go crazy into this. You don't need ultra ultra
detailed copious notes. But I would say that the more time you put into
it in pre production, the more time you're going
to save in production, and the potentially
more lucrative and a larger payoff you're going to have when
you release the course. So you can do all three, which I would recommend,
but don't worry. Don't worry about getting
caught up in this process. It should be fun and it
should feel illuminating and that like you're really
connecting with your student. So my course is going to
be photography course. So I'm just going to go
ahead and just type in photography here and
see what we find. Okay, so photography business,
Lighting, composition. Let's go ahead and
click photography. This is an excellent
course to go after. The student demand is high. The number of courses is high, there's not much you
can do to get around that in this day and
age, like I mentioned. So I'm going to say,
this is photography. I always put this a demand high, and then number of courses,
number of courses. High. And then I'm
going to put an equals, and I organize it this way so I can see
what the payout is. Then now we go to
the next topic. So I'm going to scroll down, and I'm going to click on
digital photography. Interestingly
enough, just adding the word digital in
front of photography is a completely different
keyword search result. We had almost $10,000 from our first option
of photography, and digital photography
is slightly more of a niche term that's not
getting as much hits. So I'm not even going to really
bother putting that down. It's also not much of a variance of the previous keyword, photography, digital
photography. It's kind of one and the same. So why would I even bother adding it into my
list of keywords. But composition is
definitely a related topic. Let's see how this
is performing. Student demand is
high. That's perfect. Number of courses
average. That's perfect. The revenue is not super
high, but that's okay. This is more of if you know
anything about photography, you'd know that
composition is going to be definitely part of
one of my chapters. So I'm going to type
in photography. Composition. And demand is what was it high?
Demand is high. And then number of courses is
average, which is perfect. I'm just going to
courses average. And then this is
making 350 per month. And that is also not
to say that you can, I would not say that
that's your ceiling. If this course that's out right now is making 350 a month, that doesn't mean that you
can't make $1,000 per month. If you bring your student base, if you create a course that
has better production value, you teach better on camera, you're offering more value and all the other
things that you are going to discover
throughout this course, it doesn't mean that you're only going to max out at 3:50. That's just something
to keep in mind. That's just only what
the current people are doing right now. So don't think that
that's a hindrance. I'm going to just kind of
format this a little bit, so it's easier to look at. And we'll pull another
keyword as well. Let's see if we can spell
photography right here. Photo, here we go. Graphite Perfect. Okay, let's
see what another related. Maybe what we can do for
photography is photo editing. Let's find out
because that is also a large part of the
photography process. So this is a perfect example of a key word that you think would be
performing really well. But there's not
enough search results for there to be any data. What I assume is people aren't searching on for online courses, for just photo editing. What I assume is
they're typing in the softwares that people
use for photo editing. For example, Light room
is one of the really well known adobe softwares
that a lot of people use for photo
editing and boom. There you have it. The
student demand is high. The top monthly
revenue is two grand. This is excellent,
excellent news for us. If we're creating a
photography course, and we want to include this
into our course, for sure. So I'm going to type
in Adobe Lightroom. Okay. Demand is high
slash courses, high. And this is making
two grand a month. We don't have to put the exact exact number down to the scent. We just want to get
an overall view of how much it's making. And then I can continue to
go down this rabbit hole. Also the search percentile is
excellent for this course. So I can go down this rabbit
hole of the related topics. And then I can also look at
who the competitors are. I can click on their courses, see what they're doing well, see what they aren't doing well. And this process is what
you do for UM insides, VID IQ, and Google Trends. What you'll end up with
at the end of this all is a super detailed list of the exact direction that
you would want to go after for a super
successful course.
7. Finalize Your Course List: Fully, you gathered
some great insights from that learning exercise of getting all the information
that's available online for your
specific course topic. Up until this point,
you should have brainstormed your
potential course ideas. I can do this topic, this topic, this topic. And then we looked online for what was actually
going to perform well. You can create a course on how to do fire spinning
with a Hula hoop. But if the demands not there, It's not going to be a good course to create
at the end of the day. So we would remove that topic
from your brainstorm list, or we would have found related search terms that actually would
allow us to create a similar course with our same expertise
and background and knowledge and joy of what we teach naturally and what we
enjoy teaching naturally. But we would remix
it just a little bit from the information
we found online. Then you should
have narrowed down from your potential list to what is really going to be
the core of the core of the direction that you
want to teach in. Okay. Now what we're going to do is
finalize this course list. So we should have clarity on
our overall course topic, how it's going to
perform online, and the overall student demand and the amount of money
that it's making. So there are some
important points to really remember
in this process. The first one, you
do not want to choose two niche of a
topic, like we mentioned. It should be broad
enough to have a large online audience, but specific enough
so that students will basically just really benefit from having what I say, a user's manual for
what you're providing. So an online course is essentially a complete
user's manual. A YouTube video is going to
go and it's going to give you a little granular granular
skill set or tip on something. But an online course is essentially 100 YouTube videos
that give you a bunch of tiny understandings and
skills that lead to a larger skill that's
gained in your life. So that's why I use the analogy that it's
a user's manual. Even though people don't really use users manuals these days, online courses are a little
bit the new version of that. Okay. Secondly, we
want to combine our top performing keywords
that are aligned with your skill set and gather the relevant topics and mix
them into one complete guide, AKA user's manual
that you're going to be completing and creating
throughout this course. Lastly, you don't have to be the biggest expert in the world on the topic
you're teaching. But there's a fine balance here. You do want to have enough
years of experience to be comfortable answering
most questions that someone might have
about that material. So you don't have to be the leading physicist
yada yada yada on quantum mechanics to do
a quantum mechanics course. But you want to
have some years of experience and dedication
and understanding of the knowledge that
people are going to be seeking when they want to
learn more about that topic. So I get that question a lot. We're going to have an FAQ
section in Chapter two, as well that address all
these initial barriers and really questions that you might have going into
this course process. Lastly, you can
always benefit from asking your audience
directly what they want, doing a poll on
Instagram, doing a post, and asking what
your student base or online audience
wants to learn from. But I just also want
to say that long term, it's more beneficial
to appeal to a wider audience that is outside of your effective
general audience. So you might have, you know, 100,000 followers
or 1,000 followers. It is good to ask what they
want to know and learn about. But it's also good to keep in
mind that you want to have a broad search function
that we've been using, and you can combine
both of these to get a good blend of the
right course topic. And now that Chapter
one is complete, like I mentioned
before, you should have your solid direction. We don't need to have a
finalized course title yet. We're going to refine
that. But you should know, as I know for my next course, it's going to be a
photography master class that includes photo composition, lighting, and photo editing. But from our searching,
we found that focusing on Adobe light room would actually
be a lot more effective. So, be sure that you
have that core meat and potatoes of what your
course is going to be See, another cookie metaphor. I guess that's just going to
be a theme for this course. But like I said, be sure you have your direction
that you're going in, and in the next chapter, we're going to address all the main frequently asked
questions that you probably have getting into
this course creation process.
8. Course Creation Timeframe: Welcome to Chapter
two of this course. And what I wanted
to do right out of the gate is dispel any of the common FAQs frequently
asked questions that I see the most from students who want to create
their own courses. Now, because creating
an online course is such a complex matter. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of questions
that happen up front. So if you are comfortable
with the process and you want to get right into the next stage of putting
your course outline together, you can skip this chapter. I would recommend for
everyone watching the entire course from start to finish to get the
most benefit for you. But if you are ready to
get in the next stage, you can skip a little bit
through this if you need to. But what we're going
to do is answer all the most important
FAQs so that you can get your questions out
of the way and focus on the creative side
of the process. So let's get right into it. First question I get
all the time is, how long does it actually
take to create a course and what should you expect
from the creation process. Now, when we're talking
about creating a course, it's a little bit of a
hard question to answer because there's so many
different variables. But basically, it comes
down to your course length, the time spent per day, your familiarity with the
main steps of the course, AKA, how experienced you are with that specific
topic and consistency. So these main things are
going to determine for you how quickly you can
put your course together. I would really recommend
the consistency. You're so much better off
putting 2 hours, 3 hours, whatever you can, five, six days a week versus trying to chunk it,
get a lot done, take two weeks off
because personally, from my own experience,
every time you take time away from the course,
when you come back to it, there's so much
restarting your mind in getting refamiliarized with what is actually being taught. Trust me. Consistency is
really the biggest thing here. So I would personally shoot for two weeks of pre production, That's everything
that we're doing in these first few
chapters, planning it, organizing it, outlining it, getting everything together,
and one week of production. That's lighting it,
filming it, setting it up, getting all your footage,
getting all of your audio, filming all of your
lessons and lectures. And lastly, one week
of post production, taking all that content
that you've shot, editing it together,
putting it in, exporting out,
uploading it online. Now, For a week, I am saying seven days, pretty much dedicating
your entire amount of creative energy each
day to that work. You can do that in a week.
It's tight. It's hard. There's a lot of work
there, and you get faster the more you
create the courses, or you can take those two weeks, for let's say, pre production,
that amount of work, and depending on if
you have another job, you work part time,
you have family, you have kids, whatever it is. It's going to take
around two weeks of undistracted focus to create
the pre production content. So that amount of
work can happen in two weeks if you're
really focusing on it, or that amount of work can happen over a
long period of time, depending on your
consistency, your schedule, and what we talked
about about your familiarity with the topic, the time you can spend per day, and how long your course is. So all of these really
come down to you. Next up is after learning
all this course material, if you really work
five days a week, like I mentioned,
on all the steps, you should be able to complete your own course within
a 30 day time frame. That should be your goal
that you're going after. But if you work another job or you don't have as much time, 40 to 60 days is
super reasonable, and it's also a great
goal to hold yourself by. The more courses
that you do create, the faster the process is going to become,
like I mentioned. For me, the first course I
did, took a bit of time. I was a bit of a perfectionist. I didn't really understand
the process yet. And now I'm teaching you
everything I've learned over these five and six years
of creating courses so that you don't have to
waste as much time as me. So we're going to learn
all those techniques, and it's going to
help you create a lot more courses a lot faster. Next step, we're
going to talk about proper course organization
and course lengths.
9. Proper Course and Lecture Length: Second most asked
question is going to be our proper course and
lecture length, right? How long should our course
be and how long should the lessons a lectures be within that course.
So let's dive into this. The best courses are kind
of the middle ground between a Google search, which is a very short
form piece of content. Could be an article
or just one video that you find on YouTube or anything that you find on a website that's not going super deeply
into the information, but giving you just
enough to give you that one answer
you're looking for. On the other ground
or the other side of it is a semester's length class. This is long form content. You can relate this to going
to an actual school or college and taking
an actual enrollment in some type of class, where it's really long term. You're going for a week, a month, six months, a
year, whatever it is. That's all the way over here. So when people have questions, they'll do one of two things, and I didn't fully understand this before I created my course, because when my
friend who got me an online courses shout
out Brandon Hakim. He's another Utomi instructor, He's actually a guest
in this course. So you'll have met him. Or
you will be meeting him. And he was telling me
about online courses, and I said, Brandon, do people actually
take online courses? When they just Google it
or go to class or school? That's all the way over here
is to Google it for free. And all the way over
here is to drop spend $40,000 on an entire education. What I didn't realize is
there's a whole gray area in the middle of people that want a little bit more
information than a Google Search
or YouTube video. They want a little
bit more information than that, or on this side, they want less
information and time and dedication to a long
term schooling program. And that's where
these online courses come in as that middle ground, where people will spend $10, $20, $100 on a user's
manual complete guide to learn a specific skill. So the best courses are
in that middle ground. So your course, it shouldn't
be completable in one day. This is not going to feel like a full course
for the student. They're not going to feel like
they got what they needed. And if your course is
completable in one day, you're probably not choosing
a wide enough of a topic. On the other side,
it also shouldn't take a month to
complete the course. If your course takes an entire
month or longer than that, it's very likely
that your course is actually too detailed, and it should be split up into more courses and you're actually leaving
money on the table, putting way too
much information in one course that takes
a month to complete, when you could have two
separate courses broken out, where you have two products
online that are at a more manageable
length to complete. Next, Generally, five to 10 hours is a great
time frame for courses. The student will feel like
they got what they paid for, and they're able to get all the information in
a reasonable amount of time and not falling off
50% through the course, 60% through the
course and giving up because it just takes
too long to complete. The lessons themselves
should be anywhere from around three to 8 minutes
is a great guide them. It is a great time frame
to really go after. So less than 3 minutes
is not going to really feel like enough of time, a sufficient amount
of time rather, to get a concept explained. And a lesson that's over
eight to 10 minutes, the students going to
begin to lose interest. So the best YouTube videos, they're longer
than 3 minutes and pretty much below 8 minutes. You want to think about
every single one of your video lessons
as if it could be a standalone YouTube
video that lives online. It's something that
someone would click to understand a
specific concept, get a specific piece of
valuable information. And it's a complete
story that's being told. And I don't mean story like there's a character
that goes and there's friends and family and an antagonist and protagonist, but the information is given
and it comes full circle. There's a beginning,
middle, and end. So that's the best way to think
about lessons themselves. And each one of these lessons should be easily digestible, explain one thought
or understanding, just like I mentioned, and not have any of
that extra fluff. That's where the videos start
to get a little too long, and you ramble on for too much. So we're going to go
over how to do all of this in the later chapters. And to summarize, your online
course is going to be in between a free Google search or YouTube video and
traditional schooling. It's going to be that middle ground that
a lot of people in the modern day are looking
for easily accessible, not too expensive, and fun
to watch and engage with content that gives them a specific understanding
and skill set. That course that's
going to be anywhere 5-10 hours is then if
we zoomed into it, that course is broken up into
handfuls and handfuls of video lessons that
are kind of like YouTube videos in
chunks in chapters, which we're going to dive into how to organize that properly so that the student is getting
as much value as possible.
10. The Best Way to Organize Your Course: Now that we know the proper
length that your course should be and how the
individual lessons that create that course should be as well to teacher student without
losing their attention. Now what we want
to do is to look into how the course
should be organized. And this is going to really
break up into the course formatting and how the students are going to actually
consume that content. So when we're talking about
organization for the course, the best way to think about
it is that each course is made of larger chapters,
just like a book. We have the title of our
book that tells the reader, the book reader, or the audience what the books
going to be about. And then in each one of those
chapters is a separation of large main events that
happen in that book. Okay? And instead of events, they're going to be actual
skills gained by the student. With these chapters, the
course should be modular. The way to think about this
is a student should be able to sit down and
watch one chapter at a time for a specific skill that is complete
teaching on its own. Then they can come
back another day or later on to do another module. Each chapter is made up of the lectures that
we've been talking about. And each lecture is one of the main thoughts
or perspectives and understandings that lead the student to learn the main
skill from that chapter. So we have our main chapter
with a specific skill, let's say, for the course I'm creating next, the
photography class. We're going to have a
chapter on Light room. How to edit photos
in Light room. That's going to be the
goal of the chapter. And I'm going to zoom
into that chapter. And there's going to be
individual video lessons that teach the
little tidbits that are important
understandings that lead to the larger skill of anyone
anywhere in the world, being able to edit their
photos in light room. So you have the goal of the
course, Zoom into that. You have the main steps
of getting to that goal, AK, the chapters,
you zoom into that, and you have the
little thoughts and understandings that build
up that larger thing. And that's how we're
going to get to our students ending goal
for taking your course. So these groupings of
lectures create our chapters, and these chapters lead the student just
like what we were saying to the ultimate goal
of enrolling in the course. And I like to use
food metaphors, apparently, so it's kind
of like baking a cake. So let's talk about how to
make a cake and organize it in the way of as if we were creating a course
about the process. So if our main goal is to bake
a cake from A to Z 0-100, and we wanted to teach anyone in the world how to do that
process, what would we do? We would break it up
into the main steps. Step one, logically, would be we have to go and
purchase our items. So we have to go to the store. That would be Chapter one. We would then break
up Chapter one of purchasing your items into
going to the right store, how to choose the
right store, right? Going through the aisles and
choosing the right products, probably even setting a budget, and choosing really what
our cake is going to be. These are all things
that are going to dictate what items we purchase. So as you start diving
into these chapters, you'll see there's actually
a lot of micro steps that make the larger main
step of the course. So we have our first step
of purchasing the item. We break that up
into smaller lessons that explain to the
student how to do it. The next step after we've completed Chapter
one, AKA step one, we move to the next main step, which would be to prepare
your ingredients. That's the goal of this chapter
of this made up course. And for preparing
the ingredients, there's washing it,
cleaning it, preparing it. That's kind of a term that
we're already using there. But basically organizing it, getting everything set up,
having the right tools to use, so you can break
that up into many, many smaller video lessons about the right gear equipment. See, I come from the filmmaking. We call things gear
and equipment. But in the kitchen,
right utensils, right? The right things to use, the kitchen aid,
the pots, the pans, all those things that are broken up into different lessons that lead towards the goal of how to properly prepare
your ingredients. Next up is baking and cooking your assembled cake at
the proper temperature. So once we have all
of our ingredients, we've prepared it,
we put it together. The next logical step is to
then do the baking process, which can be, again,
broken up into multiple different video
lessons and skills. And lastly, probably the most important is slicing
and serving this puppy. So this is our last main
step of this course, and that can be broken up too, different kind of
placement settings, different kind of
ways of serving it, different ways of cutting it, what to enjoy your cake
or pie with, right? All these different
things that we can add. Now, what we did to create these is to have the final goal in
mind and to work backwards. If I want to bake a cake, what's the second to last step? Well, I got to serve
it, prepare it, make sure it's cooked properly. Okay, Boom, that's a chapter.
Then what's before that? Well, I have to gather the ingredients and
prepare everything, okay? What's before all of that? Well I have to go and
get everything and plan and decide what cake
I want to make? Boom. In that little bit
of an exercise, you can uncover what the main steps are going
to be of your course, because that can
be a little bit of a daunting, confusing task. I was like, Okay, well, I
know I want to teach this, but I don't know exactly
what to explain. So start with the
larger chapters first. Then you can go into creating
the video lessons that allow the student to understand the goal of that entire chapter. And in the next lecture, we're going to get into
even more additional steps for properly organizing
your course.
11. Additional Course Organization: We're continuing to
really zoom in and get clear on what a
course actually is. The goal here is to really
set your student up for success by organizing
everything in a way that's actually a value. And the reason we're
talking about is so that you understand how to
lay out the course, so that it's clear in your mind so that when the student
takes your course, it can be clear in
their mind as well. So let's take a look at
what else we can do here. Let's start with that
each chapter should begin with an
introduction that's going to tell the student what
they're going to learn and a conclusion at the end of that chapter of
what was learned. So if I start at the chapter, for example, the
one we just did, at the beginning of the
chapter, a few moments ago, I said what we were
going to get into, why was important, what
we're going to do. And then at the end
of the chapter, I'm going to give a summary of everything that was learned. Why? Because this is
how the brain works. You want to know
where you're going so that you have a little
bit of a framework for the information to come in after the knowledge has been given, then a recap helps
to synthesize and ground all that information that was learned
for the student. And the reason the structuring
is so important is because if your course
has no structure, and you just say, k, well, I want to teach how
to bake a cake. I'm just going to film a 30
minute video and then boom, hopefully that they
understand that. Maybe it's going to
be an okay course, but there's not going
to be moments for the student to implement
what was being taught. It's not going to be
moments for the student to recap and to know where
you're going as the teacher, and really just have
those moments that are little gem takeaway
understandings that they're going
to take with them after finishing the course, because that's really
what we're wanting to create those moments. This can lead to
learning exercises. Like I mentioned,
we want to provide a check for understanding and just moments for the
student to really implement physically what they've been
listening to as you speak. So I find that this is a great
addition to each chapter. I like to put learning exercises towards the end of a chapter so that the student can put into practice the information
that was learned. Now, ideally, each
lecture includes one or more visual assets such as slides that you're
looking at right now, cutaway shots are a huge plus, and photo enic video examples
are also an excellent, excellent plus while
you're teaching. These are just basically
visual aids that further explain and demonstrate what you're saying on camera. If there weren't
these visual slides, it would be a little
bit harder to pick up on all the information
that's being said, because once I say
it, it's gone. But if it's in a visual
format that gives your brain another opportunity to
pick up on the details. Next, additional resources
like PDFs articles. These are all great things that I always recommend
adding to further expand on areas that need a little bit more
information or explanation. There's going to be PDFs that are downloadable and articles in this course that
I'm giving to you because I can only say
so much on camera, and sometimes it's nice to help expand on certain
areas where there's a step by step process
that's easier to see in a downloadable
written format, or there's just areas
where it's beyond the scope of speaking to for
a specific course on camera. But having a link to an
article or a website that goes deeper into
that information for your students can
be very beneficial. So these are
additional things that we're going to put into
your course that are going to help further have a structure and add more
value for the student. So like we talked about
in the previous lecture, students want as much value and information in the shortest
amount of time as possible. So structuring these things is going to make it a simple and easy process for the students
to progress through.
12. The Reasons People Purchase Courses: We're continuing to
dive deeper into this whole course
creation process and this next FAQ lesson honestly is an extremely important lecture
in this course. Let's really hone in here and dive into these details
because we're going to talk about how people decide
which course to buy and really the top
reasons people purchase a course
in the first place. I started off below are ten of the top deciding factors that people generally consider when researching what's
available to learn online, whether that's a
dscired skill that they want to enhance
in their life, and really how they go about comparing your potential
course to others on the market and what decision
making process is involved when they make the decision on
purchasing a course. The first thing, is
going to be the price. So does the course price justify the skill
set they're seeking? Before we go further into
this, what I want to say is, I'm going to outlist
these main these are basically
psychological triggers. These are deciding factors when Someone is looking online and they want
to buy something. Honestly, in these, you can
apply to anything when you buy food from the grocery
store or you buy anything. There's a certain amount
of psychological triggers. You want to minimize the barriers of
resistance towards people purchasing something that
you're offering and maximize the value or the upside of
what they'll potentially gain. And receive from I'm
going to give you money, you're going to give me
information, value in exchange. That's a little bit of the mindset as we're
diving into this. The price, this is the most basic, most
straightforward one. Does the course price
justify the skill set? If they're going to spend
$200 on the course, do they feel they're
going to get more than $200 of
value in return? Next, the course
image and title. The very first piece
they engage with and is going to help them decide or allow for
them to decide, are they going to click
on what you have or not? Like I said, the course
image and the title, this is like the book
cover of the book, just like walking in a library, thousands of books
on the shelves. But you're going to see one that catches your eye for
whatever reason, and the course image and the title just like
on YouTube as well, is a huge deciding factor that hooks your
audience right away. They're going to see
the price, they're going to see the course image, they're going to see the title, and then they're also
going to see the trailer. This is going to give
the student a snapshot of the what do we call
perceived value of the course. The trailer is a hyperly
condensed version of what the entire course is. It's a synopsis of what
the entire course is, and it's giving them a snapshot
on who the instructor is, what the content is, what the overall energy
level is of the course? Is it going to be
exciting? Is it going to be boring? Is there
going to be value? It's giving a perceived
amount of they are assuming many things
from the information. They're gathering
from your trailer. We're going to be
creating a trailer together later in
the course as well. The teacher, are you
knowledgeable, trustworthy, liable, and a yes
for the student? More than what you say
is how you say it. Coming across
trustworthy, coming off engaging, coming
off authentic, is going to go miles beyond
a little piece of paper that says a three letter acronym
like PhD or whatever it is. It's really how you present yourself is
going to go a long way. And the students will pick
up on that. The reviews. So now we're going from more of things that you
are controlling. You're controlling the
price, the course image, the trailer, you as the teacher. Now the reviews is something you have a little bit
less control over, but this is social proof
because it's influence of the community around you that has an influence
on potential customers. We trust our opinion of
our friends or family, or people that we
know or look up to a lot more than someone
that's saying, buy this. It's going to change your
life, yada yada yada. So social proof is an extremely large and
effective psychological trigger for when people are purchasing. If you have an amazing
course with huge claims, and you're going to
change people's lives, and there's zero reviews, or there's negative reviews. It's just like on Amazon. If there's something
you want to buy, and you have an item
that's 50 bucks with amazing reviews or
an item that's a little bit cheaper
with terrible reviews, the social proof is going
to outweigh the pricing and pretty images and the stuff that it's saying it's going to do
for you in the description, you're going to actually
see the social proof, and that's going to be a
psychological trigger to say, You know what? This
is a better deal. I don't really trust that. So trust is a very large part of why people are purchasing. And these are things that
you're doing on a daily basis, but you probably haven't
put the awareness into what actually is determining all of the buying choices that
you're doing each day. Now, the next thing
is enrollments. This is another version
of social proofing. Think about it as
a mob mentality. It's the tendency to make decisions based on what
a large group does. So if you have 100 enrollments, 100 students, that's a bit of a difference
compared to 100,000. That's another level
of social proof. So people unconsciously
will say, Wow, Okay, 100 people
have done this. That's cool. But if they see 100,000 people have
enrolled in your course, that's just more of a
push towards trusting and a belief that the perceived
value is higher because, hey, so many other
people are doing it, I should jump on the bandwagon. People aren't really
consciously thinking this, but it's happening
in the background. Next up is the course length. This is a huge selling point for the belief that the course
is going to offer value. This is a very big one on to me. If you compare side by side, a seven hour course
with a ten hour course, and they have roughly the
same amount of reviews, roughly the same
amount of students, and of course, the same pricing, There's going to be
more enrollments very likely that are going to go
towards the longer course. The problem with that
is that you better be offering value with
that course length. You do not want to
just get more sales by making a super long course
with a lot of fluff and a lot of airiness
that's not actually delivering actionable
takeaways to your student. So know that it's a strong
psychological trigger because it's
inflating the value, saying, Wow, this is
a 15 hour course. There's going to be so
much that I want to learn. Versus, Wow, this is
a five hour course, but there's going to
be tons of information that actually is of value. So use this, but be sure that you're not bending
these rules and actually creating a student that's going to leave a
bad review because you're trying to use these
psychological triggers and not actually
delivering on content. Next up is the description. This is a further expansion
and explanation of the details and key insights your course is going to offer. This one is extremely straightforward. It's
the description. It's the A to Z on what the
course actually entails. We're going to dive
into the proper way to structure that writing, how to really stack
the value and outline in a written way to your student so that
they clearly can read through and see
what the course entails, but the description is
pretty straightforward. It's telling the student exactly what they're
going to get, how they're going
to get it, and what the benefit is going
to be of the course. Next is the additional assets. This is a huge addition.
Downloadable content. Learning activities and articles are an excellent plus that you add that are beyond
just having video lessons. So these are the
downloadable PDFs. These are the auxiliary
external articles that the students can click on that you have
hyperlinked URLs to further expand on information that you didn't get to touch on. In your lectures, and you can
add a lot more information. And on to me, specifically, these are all going
to show up on the side bar that's right
below your trailer. It's going to say the course
length, the amount of time, the amount of lectures,
the amount of downloadable assets,
the amount of articles, and the more you can
stack that value, the more you're shifting
the potential student from, Okay, this is going to give me something to Wow. This is a yes. This is a yes. This is
a yes, this is a yes, the more you can do that, the more likely they
are to purchase. And Lastly, recommendations,
people will generally purchase your course over
others if it is recommended. Similar to social proofing, this is just another way of enticing your audience that
you currently have or your friends and family to help out a little bit with
your course sales. You don't have to go and be
this, used car salesman, but the goal here is to really know and see all of
these as extremely integral to the student actually purchasing
your course or clicking to the next
available course online and never
enrolling in yours. That wraps up this list of top reasons why people
purchase courses. I don't want this list to be
overwhelming or daunting, talking about large
numbers of enrollments, large amounts of reviews, having a huge audience. This is something that's
done step by step. I personally started
with zero students, and worked my way
up over years of getting to where my
student base is today. And I didn't know any of
these things as well. So the growth time was
actually quite slow. So take this and use this
as something as a baseline, a structure that
is going to give you a little bit of
a heads up against your competition
and just allow for you to have a more
successful course as a tool, not as something that's
going to be overwhelming.
13. Teacher Qualifications: Now that we've learned
the top reasons to get students to enroll
in your course, let's talk about one of the biggest questions
that I also get about being
qualified to teach. Now, a lot of people
have questions on if they are an expert enough or an authority enough in their specific genre
to teach online. And I really have to
say you do not have to be the world's leading expert in a course topic. You don't. But I would also add
that you do need to put in the work and have knowledge
that the student wants. So you don't have
to be this huge, multi certified person to teach painting or cooking
or any of these topics. But you have to have what
the student is wanting. You have to have the years of experience and confidence doing a specific task and
a specific skill set to develop what the
student is looking for. Because at the end
of the day, they're paying you for what you have so that
they can have it to and implement
it in their life. So this should be something that builds you up and makes
you feel, You know what? Actually, yeah, I think
I do have what it takes. So virtually all the
information that you can share in your course
is already online. It's already in books, and
it's already available for students all over the world
in so many different ways. So they're paying you to
do the work for them. We touched on this in the
online course formula towards the beginning
of the course, but this is just to reiterate. You have something
that they want. They want the information
and the value. It's already available online. They can spend the
time to go do it, but you are saving them time. So Really, the mindset is that
they're there to see you. They're there to learn from you. They showed up and
paid you and want to get that
information from you. So you're already kind of set up to win in
that kind of aspect, and it can be a
little bit daunting, getting on camera, getting
your outline together, gettingthrough the
production process. But if we slowly shift the mindset to,
Hey, you know what? I actually am really
knowledgeable in this genre, and all my students
are going to want me to succeed so that
they get what they want. That takes away a little bit of the fear and a little
bit of the uncertainty of not being sure if you're
ready to teach online. So next up, of course,
they can 100%, click through all the stuff
online, go to trainings, and spend time sifting through
good and bad information. But you at the end of the
day, are saving them time. This is the exchange of you researching,
organizing, synthesizing, structuring and explaining
all the information in a frictionless and
simple way for the student. So as long as you
have these years of experience with the
information and put in the time to create a
roadmap that we're building together
for your students to receive the knowledge that you are saying that they're going to have in the course
that we create, then you are going to
be a qualified teacher.
14. How Revenue Share Works: Let's talk about getting paid. One of the most important
parts of creating an online course is getting
the financial freedom, right? We want to use all this information that we're learning together so that you can affect positively
as many people as possible while
also bringing in money so that you can live a more fulfilling
and free life style. So let's talk about getting paid and how the
revenue share works. If you do choose to use tomy. Like I touched on a moment ago, if you make the sale for
one of your courses, you get to keep 97%
of that enrollment. So for example, if you
sell a course for $10, you're going to keep $9.70
of that enrollment price, and U to me is going to
pocket $0.30 for letting you use the platform and all the other benefits of
having it on their website. Now, if U to me drives the sale, they keep 50% and you keep 50%. Once you drive your
initial amount of enrollments and
get your audience, no matter how large or small
to enroll in the course, Unit is going to start driving
their own enrollments with their magical
algorithm in the sky. And when this starts happening, it's a bit of a trade off. You literally
didn't have to lift a finger and
enrollments happened, but they're going to keep half of that money that
comes in from that, and you get to keep half. So you're making a
little bit less, but you're not really
putting in any extra work. That's a little bit of the relationship
that you have with the platform when it comes
to them driving the sale. Lastly, you get to
receive a paycheck of the previous month each 30 days. That's the structure of how
the payments work on U to me. Now let's talk about an overview of how this is going
to play out over time. You're going to drive
the initial sales once you're up and
running with your course, get probably 90% of most of those sales
right out of the gate, and that's going to get
you into Utoms algorithm. You're then going
to be able to make two monthly announcements
each month, that's going to continue
to bring in sales. You can post to your
socials, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, wherever you
are most active online, and UME is going to continue
to market your course after you get the ball rolling for your course launch and release, which we're going to dive into. And then the cool
part is you get to focus on your next project. So, that wraps it up for
the end of Chapter two. We just dispelled any
questions you may have on this very complex
course creating process, and we're simplifying,
minimizing, getting the problems
out of the way, and getting more clear for you to create a more
successful course. And with everything
that we just covered, these details and information, this information is
applicable to you, whether you want to upload your course to U
to down the road, or you're using this
course to create your own course for the
platform of your choice. It's going to work
for both options. So now in the next chapter, we're going to get into, which
I'm really excited about, actually, writing and
organizing your very course.
15. Introduction to Writing and Organizing Your Course: Welcome to Chapter three. This is honestly where the
course I feel really begins. In the first chapter,
we were just getting an introduction to what we were going to be
learning in this course. In the second chapter, we were getting all the questions and problems that might
be holding you back mentally from creating
your own course. And in this chapter, we're going to
actually be writing and organizing your course. So let's get into the details of what this chapter
will entail. We're going to be
getting into the outline, the writing portion, structuring, optimizing
your information to be best and most easily
digestible for your student. And then we're going
to get into adding the media assets that we talked about, like downloadable PDFs, learning exercises, and all the little extra bits that take the student's
learning experience, to the next level. So this chapter is going to
walk you through the step by step process of writing a successful course
that's educational, engaging, and ultimately at the end of the
day, fun to watch. So before we get into
the next lecture on finding your target audience
and target demographic, let's make sure that we're
all on the same page. Up until this point
in the course, you should now have
brainstormed your ideas come up with the ideal
concept and direction to go after from the
research that we did on the analytics tools and looking online to find out what your potential students
actually want to learn online. We took that and we
combined it with your skill set and
knowledge of what you can teach and turned it into a direct clear course
topic to go after. So be sure that you
have that ready to go. If you don't go back to the previous lessons
and be sure to finish the learning exercises
where we completed these parts before diving
in to this chapter.
16. Learning Exercise: Find Your Target Student: So this is where things start to get more fun and interesting. In this lesson, we're going
to find your target student. Really dial in, who
your audiences, who are your students
going to be that are going to find you and enroll
in your course. And for this section,
I'm going to be working on my next course, along with you so you
can complete this alongside with me for
these learning exercises. I'm personally going
to be working on my photography
master class course. Now let's hop into this. So for finding your
target student, this is ideal to do before creating your title and outline. We want to know who
we're selling to first, before getting
into that process. And the real we're
going to do it is with a quick learning activity, and we're going to fill out and identify the target student. Let's first start with age, background, focus in life,
hobbies, and profession. This is going to help
you build a bit of a profile for who
your ideal audiences, which will lead to you
speaking in the proper way, teaching the right information, and really sharing the right
content that's going to resonate the most with
your ideal audience. Next, what do they dream of? What do they want
to be able to do? For example, make a
certain amount of money, create their very first song, do their very first painting. All of these things are
going to help to deepen the profile that you're
building on your audience. Next up is the
problems that they likely have and the solution
they're looking for. This is at the core of all products that are
sold around the world. What problem are you
solving and how are you going to make someone
else's life easier? So getting honed in
on this is going to also help identify
that audience. Next, what websites
do they frequent? Is it online, in person tools? What might they be using
already that's helping them with what they want to learn and
who they want to be. Number five, are they beginner, intermediate,
or advanced? This is going to help with
knowing how you want to approach the way you
speak and use words. If I'm teaching a
beginner filmmaker, I'm not going to say
things like OTS, POV, 50 mill 1.2. Like all of these terms that you know as you advance
as a filmmaker, they're acronyms that you
know and learn over time, but if it's a beginner course, I'm going to spell these
things out for the student. I'm not going to skip
right past them. So knowing your students skill set as well or getting
at least attuned with it with this exercise is going to make it so that you're
resonating with them and you're not creating a course where they're
frustrated because you're teaching concepts
and topics that are too advanced for them
or doing the opposite, teaching them things
that are too dumb down when they have a higher
skill set and a skill level. Lastly, we want to answer all these questions before
moving on to the next lesson. So what I'm going to do
is open up my version of this and fill it out while
you are doing the same. So go ahead and download this
PDF if you haven't already, or you can use a notes tab
on your phone or write down your version of this exercise on a piece of paper
as I fill out mine. Now, for my target student, I already know
previous experience mainly 20 to 30-year-old. Okay. And we don't
need to go crazy, hyper into detail here. We just want to develop
an overall profile of who we want to connect with. Now, the background
and focus in life from my specific audience
are photographer, slash, ideographers, that
create online content, okay? The previous skill set,
a lot of my audience already has introductory level, experience shooting
personal projects. This is going to
inform me. Okay, I'm connecting with 20
to 30 year olds. So I'm not going to speak
overly professionally. I'm not going to wear
a business suit. It's not going to resonate
with my audience. It's photographers
and videographers. So these are people
that own cameras. They appreciate aesthetics. They appreciate good
production value. That's something that
I can align with, too, and it's going to inform the way that I speak and
it's just going to inform the way I act on camera and the information
that I choose to convey. Next up, what do they dream
about being able to do. For my course, shoot. And edit their own
high quality images for personal and
professional projects. I also want to add that this
exercise should be a bit of a GPS and a roadmap for
your ideal student, while you're in the
course creation process. If you have a question of what to put in, what not to put in, or any kind of confusion during this course
creation phase, Come back to this. Come back to who your target student is, and imagine, put
yourself in their shoes. What problems do they have? What questions do they have? What things do they want solved? That'll bring a little bit of clarity and maybe get you out of a rut when you're in the writing
or the shooting process. So let's keep moving on
to the third question, and problems they would likely have and solutions
they're looking for. So for me personally, I know my audience wants
to focus on confidence, using equipment
out in the field. This will inform me and let me know that I need
to really focus in on doing learning exercises of me with my equipment out
in the field in this course, where students can
follow along and develop confidence so that
they can do the same thing. So they want to develop confidence using their
equipment out in the field, really just understand the ins and outs of their
camera settings. It's another huge thing that'll probably be a chapter in
this specific course. And they're looking for the lowest cost solutions for shooting with the highest
quality looking photos. So what I mean by that is
there's really simple well, there's simple things you
can buy for photography, like a $30 reflector to bounce
light onto your subject, or you can buy $3,000
professional external flash, that'll also get you light
bouncing off your subject, but there's an expensive version that'll get you a certain look, and then there's a more
affordable version that I know personally, my 20 to 30-year-old students
will be more interested in. So I'm not going to talk about the $5,000 version of something. That's not going to make
sense for my target student. If I didn't do this
learning exercise, and I didn't have
this guide map, then I would probably go
on tangents that are just not going to align with
my specific students would cause frustration for
them and confusion of why is this teacher talking
about some things that do not relate to me. So I think you can
start to see why this step is important before we start
shooting our course. Now, let's talk about briefly what websites are they frequent. For me, I know 100%. YouTube is the biggest I'm
just going to put YouTube, and I'm just going
to underline it here because I know that
my audience uses that platform the most to learn and watch tutorials on the filmmaking and
photography process. I'm just going to minimize
the size of this real quick. And I know that for
this specific course, I'm going to be
appealing to beginner to intermediate level students. Beginner to intermediate. So go ahead and
continue to complete this learning
exercise on your own and get super clear on
your target student. It's going to save
you a lot more time in the production process. And honestly, it's
going to give you an idea of who you're
actually speaking to.
17. Learning Activity: Create Your Title: So you just found out who your
ideal target student was. And as we continue to
get closer and closer to the core of you creating
your best course, the next step is going to
be creating your title, which is 50% student end goal, which we'll talk about,
and 50% keyword analytics, which we've already gone into
in the previous lessons. So there's two main parts for coming up with
the best title. The first part is the end goal, AKA, why the student has
enrolled in the first place. There's always going
to be a transformation in every single course, just like at what I said at the beginning of this
course that you're watching. I told you what your
transformation was going to be because when
someone enrolls in a course, they're here, they
want to be here, and they see your course as a bridge to get from
point A to point B. That's the end goal
of the student. The well, technically,
the course is the bridge, and the end goal is where
the student wants to be. So you have to
kind of determine, okay, if I'm doing a
photography master class, my student end goal is going to be something
in the direction of being able to
confidently shoot or plan, shoot, edit, and release
awesome looking photos. That's the direction that
we're heading towards. That's P one. Part two is the key words from
the analytic search that we did previously, which is going to be
the combination of all those key words
that are going to make your course show up
when searches are being done for your target student that wants to find your course, wants to find a course, and our goal here is to
lead them to your course. We want to know who they are, how they think, what problems they have, how to solve them. We're going to create
that course to do it. We're going to use
our knowledge to infuse that course with the
information that they need, and we're going to
create an amazing title so that at the end of the day after we've done all this work, they're actually going to find the course that we created. All this stuff is
fitting together to create a course that's
actually successful. The last thing I want
to say about that is do not worry about
making this perfect. We're going to refine our
titles before we launch our course in the final
steps of this process. This is just to give
us a clear idea and direction now that
we're starting to move out of the research phase and
starting to get our hands dirty in the actual
writing process. So when it comes to determining
our students end goal, we want to ask ourselves, what is the transformation that the student wants to
get from your course? We know the theme, we know the topic that
we want to create. But what is that big
massive change in life, that value add that
is going to give them something actionable
that they can walk away with. The way we're going to
hone in on this is with this quick learning
activity that's going to give us the questions that point us in the
right direction. The first question is what big problem are you solving
by creating this course? I want you to consider a
specific ability like skillfully being able to complete a large task completely
from scratch. For example, understanding all the functionality
of photoshop. Number two, where is your student now and
where do they want to be? It's a similar question
as number one, but asks things in a
slightly different way. Think about it like this.
The goal of your course is to be the bridge that gets them to where
they want to be. For example, being
able to create custom art and photoshop
just like this. Boom. Got I love the baby Yoda, or maybe this, and
I'll jokes aside here. But let's move on
to the next slide. So let's go ahead and complete
this learning exercise. I'm going to do my version while you are completing yours. For my version of my course
that I'm working on, what big problem are you solving
by creating this course? We want to consider
specific ability and a specific skill set. For me, personally, that
skill set is set is complete understanding
and technical knowledge of setting up a photo shoot, shooting high quality photos, and editing a final
professional product. And to focus more on the big problem that's being
solved with this course, there are not many
different tools for new photographers
to get a full handbook, a full user's manual on the entire photography
process because there's so many different
facets of setting up, shooting, and editing, lighting, cameras, lenses, all the different
equipment and accessories. This course that I'm working on, is going to be a
full complete guide on that entire process. So it's going to
be a one stop shop for up and coming photographers. And if we move to number
two to get even more clear on the value that
we're offering our student, because that is really the most important part
of this exercise. Where is your student now and
where do they want to be? So to identify this, you really want to think of how your course is acting
as a bridge, right? Bridge gets you from where you are to
where you want to go. It allows you to go across potentially dangerous
geographical location, whether it's a canyon or a river or a mountain range,
whatever it is. Your course is designed
to be the easiest, quickest and clerest
way to that end goal. And so for this
course specifically, the end goal is to book, and you want to get
really specific as possible with the end goal. So I'm going to go ahead
and put down to book your first paid professional
photoshoot. Job. This is an attainable, accessible goal that a
student can work towards and ideally get to once all the information is
received through the course, and they have a huge
transformation and a huge win of something that
they can attain at the end of the course
once completing it. Take the time now to finish your version of this
learning exercise so that you can hone in on
your ideal students and goal.
18. Upgrade Your Course Title: We've honed in on
our course end goal. This is going to act as
a roadmap in the GPS to keep us aligned on making sure our course is going
in the right direction, for our target student, for our target audience, and it's also going
to act as a part of our course title that
we talked about being extremely important for
being the first piece of content of our course that our potential student is
going to engage with. When they see it, if it
catches their attention, because they want
that transformation, they're going to click on it. We're going to take that and now we're going to combine it with our key words
that we found earlier. So now let's take our
list of keywords, choose the best ones that match up with our
target audience, their end goal, and combine them into a course title
and subtitle. And to break this down
a little bit further, the main title is really the big headline
that's going to show up underneath your UTM thumbnail specifically if your
course is on UT. Even if your course
is not on U to me, you're still going
to have a course main headline and a subtitle. So regardless of where
you're choosing to upload your course at the end of
the day, this will apply. So the main title
can be thought of as the core explanation of
what your course entails. You can use this on
social media posts, but at the end of the
day, it's going to be the first thing
that the student sees. Now, the course subtitle,
on the other hand, is the extra sentence
or phrase that then goes into the specifics of
what your course entails. A book example of this
would be Peter Pan. That's the main book headline
or title in this case. And then the subtitle is
the boy that never grew up. So Peter Pan, Boom, the main title, we know
exactly what this book is. And then the subtitle, the boy that never grew up, is giving us a little
bit of context to what the book entails. Now, a course example
of this would be start your video
production career. Colon, turn your
videography skills into a filmmaking business with
our seven step process. The initial title, start your
video production career. Boom, that's the headline. The second part is the
subheadline that gives context to what will be taught. The key words that do well online are going to be intentionally used
in the whole title, which I've bolded and
underlined in this example. These were the key words that
we pulled from Utomi and YouTube that are
performing really well and have a high search volume. We're taking the
student end goal and we're combining it
with these keywords. To recap this, the title explains exactly what the
course end goal is and the subtitle further expands on how that end course goal
is going to be attained. Now, let's get into
some more good examples and bad examples of titles. A good example would be
photography master class, using lighting, composition, and adobe light room to
create stunning photos. Very clear, very
direct, very concise. The student knows exactly what they'll get from this course. Now, a bad example would be
shooting and editing photos, how to better take
pictures with your camera. Yes, you're explaining and going in the same direction
as the previous example. But there's no specifics. We're not using any keywords. We're not giving the student
a really solid end goal, and we're not putting together a cohesive sounding title that's going to get people
excited about the course. The key here is to
be clear, direct, and use words that are in
line with your audience. And online searches
and resonate with their end goal from the
research that you've done. So now it is your turn. To do this learning exercise, you've seen in
some good examples and some bad examples of titles. Now it's time for you to take your end goal, your keywords, combine those together,
but also do not worry about making this a
final immaculate masterpiece. This is creating the core value of what your course
is going to be. We'll refine the exact
words later in the course, but we are going to create
your course main direction. The exact meaning and purpose for the student
taking that course. We're going to zoom into that in these upcoming lessons and then start developing
the chapters and the steps that build towards that end goal and that transformation that
the students going to have. Then we're going to zoom
into that even more and get into the video
lessons and learning exercises and
downloadable PDFs that build up getting to
that final end goal. So continue to take this
one step at a time. Go ahead and complete
this learning activity, and I will see you in the
next learning lesson.
19. Course Main Steps and Chapters: Now let's dive into our main
course steps and chapters. So what we're going to
do here is organize the important sections
of your course. And I want to start with
this bridge analogy. So we have this first point. This is where your
student is today, k? And we have the second point. This is where your
student wants to be. And this entire bridge is your course that's going to get them to where
they want to go. So what we were
just working on was identifying this first
arrow on the left. This is your target student. Now that we know who they are, we can actually
create a course and content and appeal to
them specifically. You don't know how
to solve someone's problem if you don't know who you're solving it for and what their problem actually is. I see a lot of people going and creating courses without
doing this initial research, and they either lose steam halfway through the
course because they're not connected to their
audience of who they're actually going to be
affecting positively. Or they release their course and they don't get much traction because they're not actually going after a specific audience. So we have our
specific audience, and we have our endpoint, which is the end goal that we worked on of where
they want to go, and we took the time to identify that that's
giving us our direction. Now, if we look at this
bridge in sections, we have these three sections that are separated by these
two vertical pillars. We can think of these main
blocks, main sections, main steps of our bridge
as the course chapters. So the first third of this bridge can be the
introductory to your course, explaining what's
going to happen, what the students
are going to learn, what they need to know, and how they're going to
advance through the course. The second chapter can be the next logical
step that leads them to attaining the final goal and the third chapter as well. So we want to work backwards
from our main goal, develop that into the
main steps to get there. And if we zoom
into this further, we have these other
vertical sections of this bridge analogy that can be thought of as
the video lessons. So we have our large sections, but there's steps within those large sections to
reach the destination. So hopefully, this
is making it more clear rather than complex
with this analogy, but essentially we
have our main steps, and our video lessons
act as the one step at a time crossing that bridge to get to the final destination. So let's go deeper into this. Now that we have
our course title, end goal, we've seen
our bridge analogy. What we're doing now at
this step in the process is working backwards
from the end goal to create our main steps, just like the Kake analogy that we had earlier
in the course. Step one, step two, step three, step four of our bridge, leading to that
final student goal. These are the essential
concrete skills and understandings that
build on top of one another to create a
complete understanding that your student
can only get from an entire course
and not just from one simple YouTube video or
one simple Google Search. And I use this process to create the outline for
my photography course. So let's take a look at what the main steps are
for that course. Chapter one, course
introduction and overview. It's going to give the
student a brief overview of what they're going
to get from the course, and it's going to
introduce me as the teacher so that
they know who I am, why I'm qualified to
teach what I'm teaching, and how to progress
through the course. Chapter two is going to be the next logical step that makes the most sense for
the student end goal of this photography class, which is choosing
the right equipment. We need to do that
before we start filming, before we start editing, before we start
shooting any photos, we have to have an understanding
of the equipment first. Once we have our
equipment, of course, the next logical
step beyond that is the camera settings
and functionality. So as I'm going through these, put this towards with the course that you're currently
working on and think logically what makes
the most sequential step by step process to get through the bridge
of your cores. And after the camera
settings and functionality, the lenses, tripods, and accessories make the most
sense to speak about. Then we have composition
and framing. Once you have all the gear, all the equipment, you
know how to use it. Then, how do you actually
have the creative side of composing your
frame and your shots? After that, it makes the most
sense to focus on lighting, artificial lighting,
natural lighting. At that point, the student
would have all the information that they need to shoot
their own photos. That's why Chapter seven
is going to focus on post production and
editing in a software. Now that they have
their photos taken, it makes the most sense to
move to the editing process. Once that's done, the
next logical step is exporting and sharing these
upgraded photos online. So you can see how taking
a massive course like a photography course and
chunking it down into easily digestible and
logically ordered chapters is going to make the
student learning process easier and more efficient. So a good chapter
is a concept or a large part of the
overall course topic, which then can be broken
down into multiple lessons. A bad chapter, on
the other hand, is something that's too
large to explain in, let's say five to
15 video lessons, or can be easily explained
just in a few lessons. When you're mapping
this out and you're not sure if you have a
concept that should be a video lesson or a concept that should be a chapter,
you can ask yourself, is this important concept, something that I can
explain in one video, or is this concept, something that needs
multiple videos to really explain that overall skill
and that overall concept? If it's five to 12, video lessons to explain this
concrete idea and skill. That would be a perfect chapter that's going to be broken up into multiple video
lessons that are around three to 8 minutes each. If it's something that can be explained in just a
handful of video lessons, that's probably not
a big enough skill set that it doesn't need to
be its own chapter on itself. It can probably be combined
with something that's a similar direction or similar concept to
create one full chapter. A student is going to
sit down and they're likely going to consume one chapter of your
course at a time, so you want each chapter to be its own cohesive full circle
of one specific skill. If your chapter is too large, then you can break it up into two chapters, like I mentioned. If your chapter is too small, like we just went through, it can likely be a
lesson or two that can fit into another chapter. We should have a solid
understanding of creating our individual main
steps, AKA chapters. Now it's your turn to
start writing down all of the main steps that come to mind for your specific course. And think about if they are in the right size for
the proper chapter, anywhere 5-15 video lessons would be the perfect
size chapter. Once you do this first
step of just go ahead and brainstorm all
the individual steps, then you can worry
about ordering them in the most logical way possible after you've gone through that
brainstorming stage. So take that time now to work backwards from the student angle and break down the most
logical main steps for them to reach that. Write that down and
then organize it into the most logical
order as possible, and I will see you
in the next lecture.
20. Learning Activity: Outline Your Chapter Lessons: We've worked together to build the main steps of your course. At this point in the chapter, you should have completed your main chapters
of your course. In this lesson, we're going
to outline the lessons or sub steps of the chapters
that you put together. So let's get back to
our bridge real quick. We have our target student
with where they're at today. We have the end goal of
where they want to be, our course is going
to get them there. We have our chapters that are the large main important steps for them to achieve that goal. And what we're going to focus on now are the video lessons or sub steps that get the student through each one
of our chapters. Look at our photography master
class, Example main steps. We saw that our second. No, excuse me. We saw that our third chapter is our camera settings and
functionality chapter. So if we were to zoom
into this chapter, what we would see are the video lessons that constitute all the
information of that chapter. And it's the same process. You did the logical steps of your main chapters to
get to the end goal, and you zoom in, and then you do the logical steps of a chapter to get to the
end goal of that chapter. So it's a bit inceptiony,
it's a bit meta, but let's continue to
dive into this concept. So we have our main chapter, camera settings
and functionality. And the very first
logical step for this specific topic is
navigating your camera's menu. Now, that is a topic
that'll take me three to 8 minutes to explain so that the student
can understand it. After that, the
next logical step would be photo quality settings, followed by the next lesson, which would be
adjusting the exposure with ISO and shutter speed, aperture depth of field will be next and picture profiles, contrast, saturation, and so on. This makes the most sense
for this specific chapter. You can see our goal was 5-15
lessons for the chapter. This one has eight,
so that's perfect. This is the perfect size chapter with the right amount
of video lessons. Each one of these video
lessons is going to build on the previous
lesson sequentially, and it's going to take around three to 10
minutes to film. If a video lesson
that you want to explain is explainable
in less than 3 minutes, it's probably a small concept that should be part of
another video lesson. If it takes longer than
10 minutes to explain, it's probably the opposite. It's probably too big of a video lesson for
one or too big of a concept rather for
one video lesson and should be split up into
two separate lessons. Keep in mind that when you're outlining these video lessons, you want to keep everything in the most logical order as possible in a step
by step format. At the end of these
video lessons, it's super beneficial to
include a conclusion that summarizes all of the content in that video lesson
or in that chapter, and then a super bonus, which I really recommend
doing is to have a learning activity at the
end of these chapters. So we could say that
number eight, recap, and test your photos, this is actually going
to be a learning lesson. That's a perfect example
of the right place to use a learning activity
where students can actually apply what was
learned inside the chapter. And now that we understand
how to organize our chapters and use video lessons in the right
structure for your students. What I want you to do is
create the lessons for each of the chapters that we outlined in the
previous lectures. So first start with writing down all the lessons that come
to mind for each chapter, think about if it's
the right size for one lesson, each concept. What I mean by that is that
it should be explainable in three to eight or 10 minutes. Don't worry about
ordering everything, worry about getting it
all out on paper or written all down on
your laptop or phone, and then organize everything
in the most logical order, just like how we did
for the chapters. One thing I wanted to add here is this process can take time. If you've ever created
a YouTube video or a piece of content for another
social media platform. You know how much work
can go into one video. So do not worry too much about getting all this done
today in a short time frame, really take time to put
together at least one chapter, slash, one set of lectures. Then we can move to the rest of them while you're going
through the course. So go ahead and choose the
chapter that you feel the strongest about and create all the video lessons
for that chapter. Just worry about the titles. Don't worry about the
content quite yet. Just worry about what the
video lesson names will be, and that will tell
you what you will end up talking about in
those video lessons. And once you finish that, I will see you in
the next lesson.
21. Script vs. Lesson Outline: Brings us to another
really essential part of the pre production
process when we're putting together our
outline. We've gotten our. We've gotten our sub chapters or lessons for at
least one chapter, and I want to talk about the difference
between a script and a lesson outline before we get into the actual writing process. Now, the two options for
teaching on camera are, like I mentioned, a
script or an outline, and here are the
important differences. A script can be thought
of as a word for word written text
that you're going to say to camera a lot like a
news anchor or an actor that's following an already pre
written set of lines. An outline, on the other hand, is an overview of all the essential
information that you want to convey in kind of condensed
bullet point form, which you elaborate on
while you're speaking. I like this because it creates a much more genuine
type of teaching and a certain amount
of freedom and improv in the video lessons. Scripts can honestly be most beneficial for
trailers, voiceovers, and one off social media
videos where you want to get a very specific
amount of content or words across in a
short amount of time. For courses specifically, I always recommend going
with the outline option. It's going to take less time during the pre production
writing process, and it's going to
free you up while you're actually
teaching on camera to improve and say things that
come up in the moment. So your lessons themselves are going to come off as
a lot more authentic, engaging and fun for
the student to watch. Now, if I were to script out all the words that I've
said in this course and I was reading a teleprompter
off the camera, it would look a lot
more like this. So in this lecture, we're
going to be learning how to script and
outline our lectures. So cut, right? That would be a little bit distracting for
you, the student. I would have to be
really skilled at reading a teleprompter
in a way that seemed organic and natural that trained news anchors and
actors do very well. Most people do not
have that skill set. I don't recommend
it, and it also is very time intensive
in pre production. The other part is that, while I'm speaking right
now freely to you, there's ideas and thoughts and concepts that come into
my mind that I did not even intend on expanding or going into that
happen in the moment. And using an outline, like these keynote slides, allows for me to have a structure of what each
lesson should contain, just like the chapter is the structure of what
the main concept is. The video lessons are
the structure of what each topic or mini
lesson is going to be. And then the keynote slides, the bullet point information, keep me on track
of giving you as the student the
right information with enough freedom where I can teach things that
come up in the moment and go into more detail that I didn't even plan
on speaking about. So, personally, for me, highly recommend in your course, not using a script
for every lesson. But if that is something that you really,
really want to do, Then you can take the information that
we're going to go over in these following lessons
for writing an outline, and you can use that
same concept and these same techniques
for the script process.
22. Lesson Writing Main Steps: Let's keep diving deeper
into this writing process. The next step is
going to be getting into the lesson writing main steps and really
understanding your lesson content. So the easiest and most
authentic way to teach, like I mentioned is by
using bullet points to hit the main concepts and
explanations of each lesson. And then you can
elaborate in real time, just like I'm doing right now. I'm looking at my bullet points. It's keeping me on
track of where to go, and then I can riff and
continue to go on and teach more in depth and
more freely in the moment. Next up is to use these bullet points as a
framework, like I mentioned, to ensure you're getting all of the information
that you planned out ahead of time before getting in front of the camera
and potentially missing something important. You can understand
a concept really in depth really intensely. It's one thing to understand it. It's another thing
to explain it. So even if you have
your knowledge, your background, and your
skill set really locked in, and you can sit down and
create something very easily, It's a whole another
chata when you have to sit in
front of the camera and convey that information. So ahead of time, you use the freedom of not being
in front of the camera or in front of someone else actually teaching and use that time to strategize and organize
the information for each one of these lessons. So here are the
main steps that are best for creating this
lesson outline. First step. You want to start by choosing your lesson, like we mentioned, and then brainstorming
and writing all of the one to two sentence, need to know pieces
of information, which will lead to a student fully understanding the lesson. Again, you want to
do this freely. Don't worry about
the formatting, don't worry about
the organization. Just search in your mind all of the bits that you
need to know to fully grasp the whole purpose of each individual lesson and do
this one lesson at a time. If you are having some hard
time coming up with the info, you have a little bit
of rider's block, or you're feeling stuck. You can always Google
Search on online. Let's say I'm trying to
come up with a lesson for let's say cinematography. And brainstorming
on brainstorming, a, camera movement, framing,
okay, the lighting. And then I hit a wall. Honestly, you can Google main steps of the
cinematography process. And just in a few glances at
a few Google search results, it'll reignite a memory of what you actually knew the
whole time but you just couldn't remember how to put
it into words or totally forgot about that specific
part of that larger lesson. So that's a little
bit of a way to get out of being stuck in
the writing process. Once you do this
brainstorming process where you're freely coming up
with these bullet points, you can then organize
the information. Our favorite thing
that we've been doing consistently in this process, which is putting them in the most logical
step by step way, just like the
chapters and lessons. Once you've done that,
then it's time to review your outline of your lesson content
to ensure you're hitting all the points
concisely and clearly. Now what we're going to do
is look at an example of me writing a lesson for my
upcoming photography course. So let's get into this. This is going to be an example
for one of my lessons. This happens to be
for Chapter seven, photo editing and software. This is lesson number 94, and the title of
this specific lesson is Color Correction and styling. What I did was bullet point
out the goal of this chapter because this is the
very first lesson of this example chapter. The goal of this chapter is
to teach the student how to do basic overall editing
on their photos. To give you a little bit of context before we
dive into this, the goal of this
specific example chapter is to give the students an overview on the
photo editing process and how to use the software. So here are some of the main
bullet points that came to mind when I was doing the brainstorming process that we were just talking about. The first thing that
came to mind would be the very first step of the
photo editing process, which is to import your photos, then balance the exposure, AKA, the brightness of your image, adjust the saturation
of vibrance, to change the tonality, increase and change the
texture and sharpness, to give it a little
bit more clarity. Change the other filters like clarity and the individual
HSL parameters. If you don't know what
that is, do not worry. You haven't taken
the course, but this is just an example. Number six, Vignette and
Denis, number seven, reference the befores of what was unedited
with the afters, of what the student would
edit with this process. And finally, the export
settings for them to export that specific photo. These bullet points are just the very basic structure of what the lesson
will actually be. So what we're going
to do next is see how these bullet
points translate into the actual video lesson as if it was being filmed
for the actual course.
23. Case Study: Example Lesson Outline: So now let's look at
two potential options for outlining your
video lessons. There's going to be a
simplified option depending on how much you know the content and you
can just easily boom, boom, riff off the information. And then there's a slightly
more written out version. So let's take a look now and
see what these look like. So we have the bullet
points that I want to hit in this example lesson. We got importing the photo, balancing the exposure,
saturation, all these items. Now, here is a more
written out version. And this is designed
to give you structure. This should not be an overwhelming
thing of, Oh, my God, I have to write down all of these bullet points and
all of these items. You don't have to go point by point and
write out all of it. Some lessons can just
take two bullet points that you can riff off of
and explain for 5 minutes. Other lessons, there's a
lot more specifics and details that it's easier to just write it out beforehand so that like I mentioned before, when you get to camera,
you're good to go, and all you have to
do is glance at it. So this style right here is more of the style
that I'm doing for this specific course because we're taking a very
complex process, which is creating a
course from scratch. And I'm boiling down all that information
into the most concise, easily digestible
way as possible. And that takes some
specific bullet points for me to give you
that information. Because like I mentioned, it's one thing for me
to understand it, it's entirely another
thing for you to understand it through
me explaining it to you. So what we're going
to do here is take these actual bullet
points and film the actual lesson for
this upcoming course. Welcome to the photo
editing chapter of this Photography Masterclass. In this lesson, what we're
going to focus on is editing your very own photo from
scratch in Adobe Lightroom. So what we're going to
start with is importing your photo into the
actual editing software. So let's go ahead and navigate
to our example photo, which we have right here. And I'm going to go ahead and drag this into our software. I'm going to import I'm
going to double click it, and I'm going to pull up
our develop functionality. This is going to allow
for me to actually edit and adjust all the
parameters of our photo. And the first thing that we
want to do in this step is to balance the
exposure of our image. That's the most important
part of any photo that you've ever seen that
is aesthetically pleasing, is a well balanced exposure. So I'm going to go ahead and
bring up the shadows here. That's going to help a
lot with our exposure. I'm going to increase
the brightness. That's starting to
look much better. I'm going to boot the
shadows just a little bit more without losing
detail in our clouds. Now that we have that
looking pretty good, let's see what our next
step is going to be. After balancing our exposure, we're going to push the
colors a little bit and mess with our saturation
and vibrance. I'm going to boost
the saturation to give it a little
bit more life. I'm going to bring
up the vibrance to bring up the
color of the clouds, the blue shirt, and
the blue in the sky. That's starting to
look pretty good. Now that we have the
vibrance and the saturation going to get that more
high end photography feel. The next thing we
want to do is adjust our texture and sharpness. What this is going to do is
crisp up our image and create that really glossy
professional look and feel that you see
in magazine photos, billboards, and just overall
high quality images. If we have our before and after, you can see the
detail that we're really starting to
get in our image. Now that we have a pretty
great looking image, one of the best tools that I found personally
in Light room is the clarity filter which we just added and the HSL parameters. This is going to allow
for us to individually change specific
colors in our image. If I wanted to change the blues, I can literally make this a
very realistic looking image or change the tint just of the blues to make a more
dreamy kind of feeling. If I wanted to just
affect the landscape, I can do the same thing
just for the color of the ground and all
the other colors that we have on the scale here. What I want to do
is just give it a little bit of a uniqueness by boosting and changing
the blues to a little bit more
of an aqua color. I can also increase the
saturation as well. We'll leave that
right there. And now it's time for the final touches. This is where it
comes in with adding just a little bit of
vignette, just like that. This helps to guide
the viewer's eye more towards the
center of the image. So you can see that's
without, that's with. There's a lot more of just
an overall cohesive image. Lastly, we can also adjust the sharpening a little bit
just to crisp things up. We don't need to add
any noise reduction, but this will smooth
out the image subtly. So you can see there's
a lot less detail, a lot more smoothness. And then there we get a lot
more crisp of an image. Lastly, before hitting
the export button and sending this
photo off online, we want to just double check
the before and after to ensure we haven't over
edited our photo. So this is not that great
of the looking of an image. And once we have it here, we see the color,
we see the detail, we see the exposure is correct. It's crisp, but it's
not overly sharpened. It's stylized, but
it doesn't look like it's been edited too much. I'm going to turn down the
clarity just a little bit, and this is looking
pretty damn good. So now we're ready
to export our image. So we're going to go to export. We're going to choose the destination of
where we wanted to go. We're going to put in
the downloads folder. We're going to be
sure that we have our settings up to Max quality, and then we're going
to hit Export, and this photo is ready to be shared online with
your audience. Boom. So that is how
you can practically use these simple bullet
points that gave me an entire video lesson to
speak on just like that. There's going to be minimal
editing and post production. I didn't have to pause,
look for my lines, look at a script, and be tight on just reading
a teleprompter. It allowed for me to have some improv to speak on
these points in detail, to move to the next thing and to just really flow in
the video lesson. So hopefully, that example
video lesson that I just filmed for you gave you some insights on how
the bullet points, whether you want
to have complex, detailed bullet points that
completely map out each step, or you want to have
much more simplistic, a handful of bullet points for each lesson that
you riff off of. Either way, whichever
way you choose to do it. The goal is to make
the filming process much easier and much more simplistic in a way that
will save you time in the production and the
post production process.
24. Learning Activity: Write Your Lesson Content: You've seen my example on how the bullet point technique translates into an
actual video lesson, ideally, you're taking
what's working for you. You don't have to follow this rigidly and do exactly
the same exact process, but this is a tried and true way to save you time during the
course creation process and also get all of the important points to your
student and give value. Now let's get into writing your lesson content and
creating your written outline. So in this learning activity, what we're going to do is
break down the concept and goal of one of your
lectures into the mini steps, AKA bullet points that you
can keep simple or complex. Which are going to lead to an understanding of the
student of the skill or the realization
that the lesson is supposed to convey
for the student. It helps to have the
first bullet point be an explanation of
the goal of the lesson. That's just a bonus so
that they know where they're going in that
specific lesson. And once you have
the mini steps, then you can complete
the process. It also helps to have
the first bullet point be an explanation of
the goal of the lesson. It just gives the student
a little bit of a heads up on what they're going to be learning in that
specific lesson. And just as a sidebar, if you are choosing to go in
the script writing route, then you would write down what you're actually speaking instead of these abbreviated bullet
points that we've been using. Take the time now to write
down your video lesson, and you can always refer back to the previous lessons if
needed for more clarity. What I want you to
do is step one, brainstorm and write down one to two sentence bullet points of the need to know information that leads the student
to understanding the concept that
you're conveying in that specific lesson. It can be a simple bullet point, which is a few words, or it can be one
to two sentences. I want you to get out
all of those thoughts first and do not worry about the formatting or organization. You can just get them all out in a brainstorming, creative, you know, unedited way and
then organize that content. And you can always look online if you need
more ideas or you get stuck not being able to come up with enough bullet
points for your lesson. After you've done that, organize the information in the most
logical, or favorite thing, step by step way, and be careful not to overdo the amount of
information per lecture. You really want to keep
this under 10 minutes. For that photo editing example, I talked about the main
standard way of editing photo. Technically, there's masking,
cloning, rotoscoping, all different other techniques
that are technically, I just technically three times, that are technically
photo editing, but I'm not going to put
those all into one lecture. That five to ten
minute lecture that we did as an example
was a great length. But if I did all those
other techniques, it would be a 20 or
30 minute lecture. So those clearly would belong in their own separate lecture. So be sure to not overdo the amount of content
in each video. But once you have that done, review the outline to ensure you're getting all
the points across, and the student can understand the goal of that
individual lesson. So take the time now to
complete your outline using this process for at
least one video lesson before moving further
in this course. Because in the next lecture, we're going to talk
about actually creating the video slides that are a great visual asset
for the student. If you are excited about doing more than one video lesson,
that's totally fine. You can complete a
whole chapter's worth of lesson outlines. But at the very minimum, do
at least one video lesson, and I will see you in
the next video lesson.
25. Transfer Your Lesson Content to Slides: Now we've made it to the part of the course where we're
actually going to focus on creating our slides. Now, this is not 100% necessary to have in
every type of course. Some courses are
more demonstration based like painting,
for example, a lot of these lessons in a painting course would be
you physically demonstrating something where you
don't quite need cutaway shots of video slides. But at the beginning of an
art course, for example, there may be an introductory to art history to where
it comes from, how it's developed
over the years, different famous artists. In that situation, you
probably aren't going to remember all of that information off the top of your head. That's where video slides in this bullet point
format that we've been working on would be
perfect and come in handy. Then for demonstrations,
you don't need it. So don't think you have to have elaborate slides for
every single lesson. It should be a tool that
makes the process easier, not a hindrance that
gets in the way of, Oh, my God, this course
takes so much work. It should be a helper
more than anything else. So let's get into
creating video slides. The goal here is to transfer
your video slides or to transfer your outline
into the video slide format. Because if you're writing
down your notes on a notes tab or just written
out on a piece of paper, you can't really use that as
a cutaway shot on camera. And these cutaway shots give another angle for
the student to see. So right now, we have
our main camera, our secondary camera, and we have a third
camera, essentially, which is the cutaway
shot to our slides. So that's doing
one of two things. It's giving the student a
variance of shots to look at that makes the course inherently more
interesting to watch, because there's more
variety of footage. And it's also giving me, as we know now very well, a template and a
roadmap for me to follow to make sure I hit all of the most
important information. So I prefer giving a dynamic look to the course by putting my bullet points rather
than just in a notes tab, but I put them actually
in a presentable, esthetically pleasing
format like these slides. Like I mentioned, it's
not 100% necessary. You do not need to do this, but it will increase your production quality and enhance the overall
student experience. So the trick I've learned is to start with the mini lesson steps on a notes page and then write the information
directly on the slide. So what I mean by that
is I'll generally write the outline
of the chapters, Chapter one, Chapter
two, Chapter three. And the video lesson names in a notes tab that I
can easily brainstorm, reorder, edit, and
change around. Once I have this process done, that's when I move to the
slide creation process, where I take my
video lesson name, and I put that as the
headline for my slide. And then I fill in the bullet point information on
the slide itself. So then that way, I'm not
typing it on my notes tab, copying and pasting it into my keynote and adding
more work for myself. This saves a ton of time, and you don't have to deal with reformatting and all those
other things that come up. So in the next lecture, I'm going to demonstrate this process of putting
together these slides, bullet point by Bullet
point in keynote. You don't have to use
keynote to do this. You can use Google Slides, PowerPoint, or any of
those other softwares, and it will be the
same principles and techniques to create it, you can just do it in the
software of your choice. So let's get into that
in the next lesson.
26. Case Study: Slide Creation Process: So go ahead and open up the slide creation
software of your choice, and let's hop into this. So we have the notes here
on my photography course. We have all of our
chapters of the course, and I bullet pointed out
from our example lesson, the main points of one specific lesson for camera settings
and functionality. So now what we want to do once
we have this portion done, which we completed together
in previous lessons. We want to go to Keynote. And let's do this from
the very beginning. So we want to go to new. And we can choose
a theme in here. We can choose different
color schemes. There's a lot of options. I'm not going to go super
into detail on this, but let's just say that we want to do this
dynamic dark theme. It's going to match up
with our personality, with the course that
we're teaching, and just really align with our
ideal student demographic. And what I'm going to do
is I'm gonna take these, and I'm going to paste
these into our new keynote. Okay? So here we go. We have our photography
master class. The reason I pasted
these in is because I wanted to show you what I feel is the four main slide templates that
you want to have. You want to have a main title card template for
the beginning of your course and any other headline type information
you want to share. So what that looks like on the actual course that
we're watching is, I use it as a title card page. And also as a stand
out headline page with a light amount of text, but that are very
bold and headliny. I always use this style
for those slides. There's always going to be
a chapter slide template that you can copy and paste. For example, we can
copy and paste it, easily type in Chapter four. You're not redoing any work. You're saving time doing this. And then I always use a title
card for specific lessons, followed by the actual
lesson content. I found this to be the best just workflow and
the best way to really structure the keynote or this slide software
that you are using. Let's begin with titling
our first page here. This is camera settings
and functionality. Okay. Let's go ahead and just change the sizing here very quickly. Perfect. Subtitle. The
subtitle is going to further explain what the actual lecture
is going to be on. We'll say dialing in
your camera settings. We can dial that in a
little bit more later on, but let's just get to
now, the next step, which is going to be putting in the actual information
that's going to be conveyed in the lesson. So now we have all
of our bullet points that we want to hit in
this specific lesson. So I'm going to go
ahead and copy, and I'm going to paste
these in and you can see it changes of the formatting
right out of the gate. So what we're going to
do is go to format text, and we're going
to change this to the correct style to match
our actual course aesthetic. So po, that'll do just fine. And now what I can
do is use this as a visual aid that
shows up on camera. As a cutaway shot as it is, or I can go in and type the more cohesive
bullet point notes. Like I mentioned before, it
really just depends on how specific you need to be
on your specific course, it's going to make you the best teacher as possible on camera, save you time and be
valuable for the students. Use your own discernment on how complex you want to
go on this step. And once you dial in
your first slide, and you have it where you need
for your specific course, the next thing that we can do is copy and paste
what we've done. That way, we're
not starting from scratch on every
single video lesson. So now I have another
template slide, essentially that I could easily change to editing your photos. Then I would change the sub
headline, the subtitle. Then I would go in and put
in the correct information, the correct bullet points, and Rinse and repeat, you
keep doing this process. Let's say I get to
the next chapter. I just drag down and
copy my previous one, hit the next chapter, put
in the right information, and then you can quickly develop your entire course
outline that looks nice and is a cool cutaway
shot for the students, so we can see if we play it. And that actually reminds me I wanted to just bring
up a little bit of an extra special
sauce you can add to these slides is an animation. So with whatever
software you're using, there's going to be some
type of animation function, you can select your
asset in your slide, go to the animation
function and choose any kind of different
movement that will allow for a little bit
more dynamic visuals that aren't quite so static and potentially boring
for your students. The goal is to give you a
roadmap of what to speak on, when to say it,
not get caught up, and mess up your lines or forget any important information while also giving something that's entertaining and
engaging for the student to follow along with
in your video lessons.
27. Learning Activity: Create Your Course Slides: Now we've made it to the part of the course where we're
actually going to focus on creating our slides. Now, this is not 100% necessary to have in
every type of course. Some courses are
more demonstration based like painting,
for example, a lot of these lessons in a painting course would be
you physically demonstrating something where you
don't quite need cutaway shots of video slides. But at the beginning of an
art course, for example, there may be an introductory to art history to where
it comes from, how it's developed
over the years, different famous artists. In that situation, you
probably aren't going to remember all of that information off the top of your head. That's where video slides in this bullet point
format that we've been working on would be
perfect and come in handy. Then for demonstrations,
you don't need it. So don't think you have to have elaborate slides for
every single lesson. It should be a tool that
makes the process easier, not a hindrance that
gets in the way of, Oh, my God, this course
takes so much work. It should be a helper
more than anything else. So let's get into
creating video slides. The goal here is to transfer
your video slides or to transfer your outline
into the video slide format. Because if you're writing
down your notes on a notes tab or just written
out on a piece of paper, you can't really use that as
a cutaway shot on camera. And these cutaway shots give another angle for
the student to see. So right now, we have
our main camera, our secondary camera, and we have a third
camera, essentially, which is the cutaway
shot to our slides. So that's doing
one of two things. It's giving the student a
variance of shots to look at that makes the course inherently more
interesting to watch, because there's more
variety of footage. And it's also giving me, as we know now very well, a template and a
roadmap for me to follow to make sure I hit all of the most
important information. So I prefer giving a dynamic look to the course by putting my bullet points rather
than just in a notes tab, but I put them actually
in a presentable, esthetically pleasing
format like these slides. Like I mentioned, it's
not 100% necessary. You do not need to do this, but it will increase your production quality and enhance the overall
student experience. So the trick I've learned is to start with the mini lesson steps on a notes page and then write the information
directly on the slide. So what I mean by that
is I'll generally write the outline
of the chapters, Chapter one, Chapter
two, Chapter three. And the video lesson names in a notes tab that I
can easily brainstorm, reorder, edit, and
change around. Once I have this process done, that's when I move to the
slide creation process, where I take my
video lesson name, and I put that as the
headline for my slide. And then I fill in the bullet point information on
the slide itself. So then that way, I'm not
typing it on my notes tab, copying and pasting it into my keynote and adding
more work for myself. This saves a ton of time, and you don't have to deal with reformatting and all those
other things that come up. So in the next lecture, I'm going to demonstrate this process of putting
together these slides, bullet point by Bullet
point in keynote. You don't have to use
keynote to do this. You can use Google Slides, PowerPoint, or any of
those other softwares, and it will be the
same principles and techniques to create it, you can just do it in the
software of your choice. So let's get into that
in the next lesson.
28. Learning Exercises and Quick Wins: As you're continuing to
improve your course outline, getting closer and closer to the production side of
shooting your course, which I'm getting really
excited about because we're making our way
through this process. The next thing we're
going to do is going into these learning exercises
and quick wins. Now, these are going
to be a handful of additional assets to keep
your students engaged and active that go beyond just passive listening
to video lessons. So we've created our
first set of slides or script depending on which
direction you decided to take. Now what I want to
do is dive into these three main ways to
keep your students engaged, maximize their experience,
and just really uplevel your course
one step at a time. These three upgrades are learning exercises
and quick wins. Downloadable PDF and articles. And lastly, adding photos
and videos to your slides. Firstly, let's hop into
the learning exercises. And the purpose of these is really, like we
mentioned before, an ability or a time
frame for students to put into practice what you're giving them through
your video lessons. It's a check for
understanding to ensure that they're integrating the
information learned. Now, this keeps the students
active instead of passive, which is a huge
plus because that's one of the downsides of
an online course is that it can be a little bit more
passive than traditional in the classroom with
other students and a teacher learning style. So these learning
exercises should all be fun and easy to complete. Little bit challenging,
but definitely completable within a
15 minute time frame. You're giving the students
to apply this information, and you want to give
them a feeling of satisfaction from completing
these learning exercises, which we can also
call a quick win. This releases dopamine
and gets the brains firing and gets people
more hooked and more invested in
the next sense of achievement or the feeling of completion and getting
further and progressing. In my experience, these work really well, like
I mentioned before, at the end of chapters to summarize all the teachings
and put them into action. You don't have to have just
one in the chapter, though. You can have multiple, just like what we've done
in this chapter. There's been multiple,
multiple learning exercises, and I feel that the more active exercises you have versus
passive, the better. So feel free to make as many as your specific course needs. Now let's talk about quick wins at the beginning of the course. A quick win is essentially
a learning exercise that creates that sense of fulfillment that we
are talking about. Research shows that if a student doesn't finish the first 15 minutes of a course, there's a steep drop
off of percentage of the students finishing
the rest of the course. But if they do finish that first 15 minutes
and they're hooked in, it's way more likely
the percentage goes way up that they'll actually
complete the rest of the course, which is good for
you as the teacher. It's good for the
student because then they'll gather all
of the information. In the course. How
do we do this? Well, this is what's
called a quick win, a fun and easy
learning exercise in that first 15 minutes that gives them a sense
of satisfaction of, Okay, cool. I enrolled in this. I just started taking it.
I've already done something. It feels like an active
engagement and gets the student just more involved in finishing
the rest of the course. Quick wins are a cool little
online course hack that you can use to excite the
student and spark interest. In the next lesson,
I'm going to create an example Quick win
from my upcoming course, and then you're going to
create your very own.
29. Learning Activity: Create Your Learning Exercise: When it comes to a quick win, you want it to be an
easily accessible task that anyone can do without
having to go to the store, buy supplies, or take too much time out of
the day to complete. Because we're adding learning
exercises into our course, we don't want those
to be a hindrance to get too difficult. So there's a fine line
between challenging and fun and then
difficult, Oh my gosh, now this is now a wall
or a barrier that's stopping me from progressing
into the rest of the course. So two examples of potential Quick wins for my photography course would be one, a downloadable photo of a really epic unedited landscape still shot that the students
can get their hands on, upgrade what they do, export, and then they'll
get the same photo at the end of the course, and they can compare their editing style and
how much it's improved. So they'll get that
initial hit of Dopamine, that little hook
at the beginning to make a little
bit of progress, edit a piece of
content that they've never gotten a chance
to get their hands on. And then at the
end of the course, we kind of tie
things all together. So you have to do it this
way, that's one option. Another idea is for
a prompt that tells them to take their
lens and their camera, shoot something in their
house and save that photo, not using any of the
techniques in the course. And then later in the course, they'll shoot that same
exact subject or object, but with the upgraded
mindset techniques and understandings that they gain from the course lessons. Similarly, this one kind of loops from the
beginning to the end, which you don't have
to do, but it's kind of a little
bit of an addition. So let's take a look at what the Quick winds should list out so that the student
knows exactly what to do. You want to give them
the information, tools, software,
whatever they need. You're going need to
let them know that they'll need it to
complete the activity, but please keep it as simple as possible
so that there's not any kind of barrier
that's going to stop them from actually doing
the exercise. Secondly, it should be
slightly challenging, but not frustrating in any way. You want them to
actually complete this. Third, the activity should
allow for the student to apply what they've learned
in a hands on way. And lastly, it should
be completable within 15 to 20 minutes and
very importantly, match up with the skill
level of the actual student. So we don't want to give an
introductory level student some wildly expert level learning exercise
where they have to, choose the right lens, choose the right equipment,
choose the right, whatever it is
that's specific to your course right
out of the gate. That's going to be a
no. But now that we understand the basics of how to create these
learning exercises, you when to use them. Generally, you want
to use them as a summarization of chapters so they can implement
what was learned, or you want to put
them at the beginning of your course to
hook the student in. But really dynamically choose these moments that's actually going to be beneficial versus just putting them in random
parts of the course. When it's time for the
students to be active, that's where a learning
exercise should go. When it's time for the
students to listen and understand different
knowledge and techniques, that's where a normal
video lesson should go. So take the time now to create your first video lesson quick
W or learning exercise. And then I will see you
in the next lecture.
30. Articles and Downloadable PDFs: L et's continue to dive into additional assets that help the student learning experience. Now, if you just
want to stick with video lessons for your
course, that's fine. But adding these and taking
the time really are going to up the quality of your course and add value to your students. So after going through
the learning exercises, the next addition that you
can put into your course is downloadable
PDFs and articles, and these act as
supplemental content and additional resources
for your students. So this is an excellent
way to add value. While also breaking up the
passive course lessons, the same way as the
learning exercises. Firstly, we have our
downloadable PDFs. These are documents
that a student can fill out or their instructions
for learning exercise. They can list important
content or a specific process. There's a lot of different
uses for downloadable PDFs. Articles, on the other hand, are more hyper links to blogs, research papers, additional photo and
video content links, online quizzes, anything that's an online resource
that will help the student learn whatever's
in that specific lesson. And the more you add
these into your course, the better because
they're going to show up, and you can use these as kind of marketing material, saying, 180 lessons, ten
downloadable PDFs, five learning exercises,
six learning articles. All of these things you
can add in as sales tools for stacking the perceived value that we talked about towards
the beginning of the course. But be sure that they actually do add value
for the student, and you're not just adding
them just to add them. So now let's look at an example PDF from a previous
course, like I mentioned. This is an example of a numbered list of how to
create better looking videos. So it's a step by step process. Step by step stuff
is really great for PDS because I can
say this on camera, and even if you do
say it on camera, It is really beneficial
for a student to have a written copy of it that they can then implement
into their lives. So I specifically chose to do this one for that
specific course because this is a repeatable thing
that the student should be doing for every one
of their videos. That creates the
perfect opportunity for a downloadable PDF. So for this specific lesson, I'm not going to
recreate a PDF from scratch because it's
pretty straightforward. The PDFs are great for
lists and processes that the students can follow along or repeat over a period of time. They go and they parallel
with learning exercises, and anytime there's a repeatable
step by step process. So you should have
a good grasp on that enough to
create your own PDF. Now let's take a look and see what example articles
can look like. So what we're seeing here is Chapter three
of a past course, and what we just took
the student through was a process on how to shoot
their own personal projects. And what we did is we added this article at the end of
the chapter After we explain the whole process for
them to watch some of my favorite demo reels from other inspiring
video creators. These are all hyper links
to those specific videos. This is a perfect time to use
these because it just gives a little extra inspiration
and excitement for the student to continue progressing through the course. These articles can
be video links. They can be blogs, they
can be social media posts, they can be YouTube links, really anything
that's going to add value and add onto
information you've already covered that you
want the student to get a little bit more
information from that you didn't physically
say on camera. Use these learning exercises and articles as a way
to really upgrade, it should improve the
student experience. So now it's going
to be your turn. If you'd like to, this is an
optional learning exercise. You can create your
own downloadable PDFs for one of your lessons or find an article that you can link to online for the course
that you're working on. If you want to do that,
you can do it now. If not, let's move
into the next lesson.
31. Add Images, Videos, and Citations: Let's keep this process moving forward as we're
steadily upgrading the quality of your
course outline and your course content. Now we're going to talk about
adding images and videos. What these are going
to do is upgrade the slides with visual assets. Photography and videos are
a great final touch for your course slides so that it's not just showing text
the entire time. Of course, these should
be purposely chosen. We don't want to choose any
random photos and videos. It should be dynamically
useful for the student. So you do have to
be careful though, I will say, with copyright laws. So you never want to imply that the content you put in your
slides is owned by you. And what we're going to talk
about in this lesson is how to be sure that you don't
get caught up with that. So all assets that you
download should be used very strictly as a teaching tool for educational purposes and
cited very properly. You do not want to imply, Hey, this is my content, an original piece of work that I created when it comes
to downloaded content. It should be always used
as an example for learning that you and the student are
Using as a teaching element, very, very, very important. Do not get caught up with any legal things
from this course. We need to do this properly. When we want to cite
things properly, this is the structure
to use when you're getting content
from a web page. You have the creator's
last name, first name, the image title,
the year created, the website name, and URL. This is an example of exactly
what that would look like. Here's how it actually
look on a slide. So you can see, we
have our image on the right middle of
the slide itself, and then we have the
proper citations right under that
piece of content, very much stating that
we do not own it. Here is where it lives. And when I'm speaking on camera, I'm talking about it
in a way that does not elude to me
somehow painting this. I tell the student, verbally, who created it,
what it is about, what year is created, and what we're using it
for as a learning tool, not as an original piece
of artwork created by me. Be very clear on that. So here I added a few bullet points
so that we could just do an example teaching
session of how I would actually cite this properly
and teach it on camera. So, as you can see, we have
this piece of artwork created by Eugene Bauden in 18 65. His beach scenes
are what he became very well known for as
an artist because of his unique aesthetic
approach and the imagery that he would choose for
all of his works of art. What we want to do
is take a look at how he uses composition, color, and lighting to
tell the story of his subject inside his framing and shot
choice of the painting. This style is what
helped lead to the development of the impressionist movement
of that time. And cut that example lecture. You can see how I use this as
a learning tool and device. I did not allude
that I owned it, I didn't paint it,
I didn't create it, but it was very
specifically used for the students benefit in
an educational setting. So that wraps it
up for citations, whether it's photo or video. Please do these carefully. Please do these with
purpose and do not get caught up in any legal
problems with citations.
32. What We've Learned So Far: Now, we are at the last
lecture of this chapter. I'm going to be getting excited because in the next chapter, we're actually going to
be talking about how you can more confidently
speak on camera, present yourself,
use hand movement, use pitch changes, and change your cadence to be a
more dynamic speaker. But I just want to
do a quick check in before we get
to that process. At this point in the course, you should choose one of the following two
options that best suits where you
currently are at. Option one is to take a look
at what you've created, refine what we've covered so far and all of the
content that you've done, and then move on to
the following chapters with whichever amount of
stuff you've completed. The second option is to schedule the time
needed to complete your full outline or a solid amount of it
with your video lessons, your chapters, everything
written and done, with your slides, everything, and then move on to the
following chapters in the course by completing
everything in chunks. The best way to
choose which option is best for you is to
think about it like this. If you want to get
a full look at the entire process and complete all the learning
exercises first, then choose Option
one and complete your course after finishing
this entire course. This is a good option
if you want to see the entire rest of the
process of filming, editing, speaking on camera, releasing your course
and marketing it. If you want to see that all
the way through and then come back and complete your course,
this is a good option. For the next option, if you want to complete
your course while progressing through this course in parallel simultaneously, then I would recommend
completing a chapter, doing the learning exercises, and taking a break to bring
your course up to speed with where we are at in the learning process
of this course. If that sounds more beneficial to where you're at specifically, then you can choose
option number two. So take a moment to
reflect on what makes the most sense for your benefit so you can create the
best course possible, and I will see you
in the next chapter.
33. Introduction to Presenting on Camera: So welcome to Chapter
four of this course. I'm starting to get really excited because we're
getting through the pre production phase where
we've done our research, we've organized our outline, we've put together our content. We're building a successful
course from the ground up, starting with a
solid structure with the research and the
analytics that we've done to ensure that our course topic and the information that we're speaking on is highly searched
by our ideal student. We've identified who they are, and we're speaking directly to them as their online instructor. Now we're getting to the point where we're going to
get into production. And that's why I'm getting excited because now we're going to talk about
presenting on camera. So before I walk you
through how to set up your actual film set or your at home DIY studio, we're
going to get to that. But before we do that,
more importantly, is you, the one standing
in front of the camera. So in this chapter, it's going to be all about you presenting and being a calm, confident and comfortable
speaker in front of the lens. So in this chapter, we're going to talk about preparation, speaking to your audience, making the right
amount of eye contact, using hand gestures, changing your tonality
and speaking cadence. And lastly, using the
proper wardrobe that matches with your unique style and the audience that
you're speaking to. The goal of the end of this course is going to
be that you're going to have all the tools
that I've learned over the last five to six
years teaching online, and you're going to be
able to confidently speak on camera and most importantly
connect with your audience. Before we get into the
actual lectures themselves, I want to do a little bit of a fun learning exercise or learning activity
before we hop in. What I want you to do is
take out your smartphone and record a one to two minute video of you speaking
directly to camera. Don't worry about
lighting, don't worry about cinematography. We're definitely
going to get deeply into that in the later chapters, but this is just about
your performance. So choose a lesson from the
course we've been putting together and speak on
camera to your phone, you can hold it in selfie mode, or you can put it on a
tripod and speak to it as if you were filming
the course for real. Just be yourself, speak normally as if you were explaining
something to a friend. Don't try to try. Just really do it as
it naturally comes. I want you to And then I want you to save
this video for later. And at the end of the chapter,
this is where it gets fun, we're going to compare how you present now versus
how you present using the eight up level
techniques that we're going to be diving
into in this chapter. So again, do not worry
about the lighting, don't worry about
the cinematography. We're going to get into all
of that stuff to create a really professional
looking and sounding filming space for your course
in the later chapters. So this learning
exercise is just about capturing your
organic performance, and then we're going
to see how much you've improved after
completing this chapter.
34. Your Mindset and How to Prepare: The first thing
we're going to dive into in this chapter is how to prepare the
proper mindset. The reason being is that
everything that you are feeling, doing, and saying on camera
shows up for the student. This little lens
standing right in front of me is recording
this entire situation. So whatever energy,
vocals, sounds, feelings, and movement and motion I'm putting out gets
translated to the student. Preparing ahead of time
is just going to give you that little extra
edge to show up with confidence and perform
well on camera. Let's get into what
this looks like. This is your show.
This is what I always like to tell my students. Your audience, AKA, your
students, came to see you. They've enrolled in your
course, they saw your trailer, they're excited about
what you have to teach, and they want the value
that you're offering. So you're already set up to win. And the way you can think
about it is that you're the main character of your show, and you have something
valuable to give. So nerves will be there, no doubt, every time you
film. That's totally normal. But embracing that this is
your show will kind of help to nudge you into the
right mindset. Even though I've been
filming for years, on screen, on camera, I still get nervous at the
beginning of each shot. There's just a little
bit of, like, Oh God, I hope I remember
everything I want to say. I hope I don't mess up. You know, you wanted
to go smoothly. So those feelings
never fully go away, but the intensity of how much those feelings rock you get less and less with time. So, another thing
with mindset is to be patient and as kind as
possible to yourself. You don't need to add
any more stresses by being your own worst
enemy when you're filming, feeling not good enough.
These things will happen. They will pop up,
but trying to keep the reaction and the reactivity to what's naturally
going to occur, which is stress, overwhelm,
wanting to do it. Going to happen,
but try not to go too far down that path,
because at the end of day, you're going to improve
if you continue to film and shoot your lectures. So when we're talking
about mindset, the most important
tip is to try to keep the time between creating
your slides or your script, if you went down that
route for pre production, keep that time of
shooting to a minimum. For me, personally, it
can be a little hard sometimes with a work schedule
of creating the slides, and then filming it two to
three weeks later. It's tough. It's so much better if
you can try to keep that time to a few
days or a week. It's going to be so much
more fresh in your mind, and you're just
going to be able to translate the
information on camera, because as you will see, you write it down, you're
like, Oh, this is perfect. It goes in your slides. You
think it's a great concept. And then when you look to go three weeks later to film it, if a lot of time has gone
by, you will be like, what the heck, am I why
would I saying this? It makes no sense.
So try to keep that time to a minimum so
that it's fresh in your mind. So, what you're
feeling on camera, like I mentioned before, is going to translate on
screen while you're teaching. So if you're feeling
comfortable and relaxed, it's going to show. If you're having a
hard time remembering why you wrote things down, just like we said, that's
going to show as well. So you want to keep these
things to a minimum. If you're uncomfortable
on camera, the student is not going to feel engaged and comfortable
watching you. So set yourself up for
success at the beginning of this process by having everything fresh in your
mind ahead of time. So what I like to
do is review slides the night before or the day
of to refresh your memory and keep a close eye on and just have it there of what information
is being covered. So this is going
to go a long way of knowing what comes
next on your slide. And the good secondary
addition or add on or upside of
reviewing, excuse me, of reviewing your slides the
day before is that you can double check triple check for spelling errors or any part
that doesn't make sense. And really what
you want to do is just make sure you're ensuring everything is understandable in the eyes of what level
your student is, if they're beginner or
intermediate level. So put yourself in
that mindset that the student is there
wanting to learn from you. They're not here to judge you. They're not here
to be like, Wow, this person doesn't know
what they're talking about. They paid to see you, so they want what you have
to give. Trust me. Anytime you go and you pay to go see a movie, you're
sitting there. You're not like, Oh,
I hope this movie sucks. You know, I paid for it. No, you want to go to
the theater and see a great movie and be
entertained and receive value. Every time you pay for
something, you want that. So they're already wanting
that from you from the get go. The analytical,
the judgment mind of yourself is the
one that says, Oh, I don't want to be judged, they're going to think
I'm an impostor. I'm not good enough.
It's going to happen, but they want you to
succeed. Trust me. They made the choice to enroll, so really embody and
believe this in yourself. And if this is your first
time being on camera, I really highly recommend
filming a few Mock lectures. Just like what we
did in the learning exercise at the
beginning of this, we're going to do
this together at the end of the chapter as well.
35. Speak to Your Audience: Now you know how to prepare before getting
to the filming process. And the next important
thing I want to talk about is knowing your audience, and this is something
that we've touched on in previous
chapters, but here, I want to talk about speaking at the same level as your students. And what that means is with
knowing your audience, it's really important to
speak their language from the standpoint of both
really aged lifestyle and their skill level. So you want to be yourself, but you don't want to speak
to a mature audience like a surfer bro or speak to a younger audience like an
overly serious businessman. So what we want to do is take what we learned
in Chapter three, about our demographic,
about who they are, about what they do, about what
their dreams are in life, about their hobbies, and
what they want to achieve. And if you're
teaching a course on business, you don't
want to be like, Yeah, man, so today, we're going to talk about making the sweet Cheddar, you know? We're gonna make
tons of money, Bro. That is not going to be speaking directly
to your audience. You want to have some type of cohesiveness there so that they feel hurt, they feel engaged. And it's something that
might sound silly, but you could easily
forget because it's easy to lose track of who is on the other
side of this lens. They're not standing
in front of you. They're behind a screen at a different
point in the world, but we have an idea of who
that person is going to be. So we want to keep
a tab on that. And to recap that, it's easy to forget on who's on the other side of the screen, and we want to take what we learn in Chapter three about our demographic and speak
clearly to that audience. So outside of speaking style, terminology is also
extremely important. You want to keep an idea of
your students skill level. So you don't want to use terminology that they're
not going to understand. And if you do use complex terminology for an intermediate or an
expert level student, you want to break
it down for them. So for example, in filmmaking, there's acronyms like OTS, which means over the shoulder. It's a type of camera angle. There's also industry
specific words that can be in your
genre of course. And for my genre of courses, a stinger is an extension cord. And if I were to say, we're
going to grab the stinger, and I don't explain
that to the student, and they have no idea
what I'm talking about, it can be a little
bit of a turnoff, and we don't want our
audience to get lost. We want to really
hold their hand through the learning process. So as you're preparing
to speak on camera, imagine who that student is on the other side of your lens. Keep in mind the terminology they're going to
be familiar with. Keep in mind all the things, as if they were a
friend sitting across a coffee table from
you at a coffee shop, you want to have a connection, you want to have engagement. The more we forget about them, the more the student
feels left out, and they're not going to
progress through your course. So treat it as if it's a friend in a real life situation
that you're talking to.
36. Be Engaging on Camera: Next up, and what I
honestly feel like is one of the most important for this chapter is speaking
at the right energy level. And what this is going to do
is keep the student engaged. And we keep coming back to
the student engagement thing because this is one of
the biggest drawbacks of, well, it happens in person, too. I mean, think about when
you're sitting in a classroom, teachers way in the distance, you're not engaged,
you're on your phone, or you're thinking about
doing something else. That can happen in
person or on a course. So the key is that
you as the teacher, you want to hook the students, and that's going to take a
certain amount of energy. I like thinking things
in a more deeper level. So the reason one of the reasons I got so
interested in film from the beginning of
my whole journey is I loved how when I was
watching something on screen, if it was a sad scene, happy
scene, exciting scene, action scene, I instantly
was feeling that in my body. That's one of the beauties of filmmaking is what
you see on screen, and what you hear is what you see and feel and
hear in the body. So I was always really
interested in that kind of synced up sync synergy there. So the same goes for
you as the teacher. Now, With what your
energy level is, the student is going to mimic your energy level? They're
going to meet you there. If you're bored, not excited about what you're doing, they're going to meet you there. If you're excited, then they're going to meet
you there as well. So let's talk about on
camera versus in person. So I know we've all been there. You see yourself
or hear yourself from your friend's
video recording or a video on your phone, or you hear your own voice
note or whatever it is. You thought you sounded a certain way when
you were speaking. But when you hear it back, you're like, Does I
really sound like that? I know we've all been there, and it's taken me personally years to get used to
my speaking voice, and understanding how I sound in real life versus
how I think I sound. So we're going to
help break down these blind spots and get a lot more accurate on
our own speaking style. So the reason this happens is the camera and the screen takes down your overall energy level and enthusiasm quite a bit. And the reason this
happens is you can feel someone's energy a lot more face to face when they're standing
in front of you. Versus when they're on screen. So when I'm on screen, there's me standing
in this room. There's a lens that's made of glass, plastic, electronics, and the camera behind it, that's getting translated onto another screen that's
then hitting you. You're seeing it, you're hearing it. You're experiencing it. If we're in person face to face, you're going to be boom feeling my movements,
everything like that. We're going to be a
lot more synced up. I have to then bring up my overall energy level
when I'm speaking. More than I normally would
if we were face to face. That way, when the camera, the lens, and the screen that
you're watching me through, and the speakers you're hear me through bring down my energy, I'm actually at
where I should be. So we actually have to add a little extra energy when
we're speaking on camera. So the key here is
to add an extra ten, even 15 or 20%, more enthusiasm when
you're speaking on camera. I'm personally pretty calm and subtle when
speaking in person. But when I'm on camera, I turn up my persona and
my speaking style more. Otherwise, my natural kind of calmness, chill personality. When I do that, how I
normally am on camera, it really is quite boring. It very seems like I'm
uninterested in what I'm saying. Even though I feel great
while I'm doing it, it doesn't translate
well on camera. And all great actors, news anchors, people on
camera, people that do plays. They all have this performance
persona developed. It's not being fake. It's not being not you, but it's a certain
version of you that has tweaked the dynamics of how you speak and how you
act to perform well. Like I mentioned,
it's your show, so you want to be
a great performer, and all great actors
understand that. This is going to counteract
your camera's effect on your performance
bringing down your energy. After a little bit of,
you know, trying this, you're going to
begin to find out what that speaking style
and persona is for you. This is really one of the biggest takeaways from
this course and this chapter. You want to develop your speaking persona
and teaching style, and that's only going
to come from trial and error and creating courses
and shooting content. Like I mentioned, the
key here is what you are projecting is what the
student is going to feel. And this mimicking that I was talking about,
this copycat thing, and this actually has
a scientific term called brain wave entrainment. And this is what happens
when, for example, you listen to a song, and this song is very
upbeat, very exciting. Your brain is playing
copycat all the time with your surroundings and matching the energy level of what's
going on around you. So keeping this in mind, what we do is what the
student is going to feel. Like you listen to a happy
song, You feel excited. You listen to one of those
like, sad depressing songs. You like God, my life, right? So we want to keep this in
mind that we're affecting our student throughout
our entire performance. Now, there's a balance between engagement and over the top. So you want to find that balance between sounding
enthusiastic and speaking with confidence and not being
that overly happy go lucky, little bit of fake
pushing it too far that we've all
seen sometimes. The big takeaway
here is that you want to give that extra ten, 15, 20% of your normal self
and just amp it up a little bit because
then you're going to come off as you should be, which is engaged and interested
in what you're teaching. Now, this is going to take time. This is not something that's
going to happen overnight. But I will say that the more you watch
yourself on camera, the more you do this and
do this trial and error, you will have leapfrog moments, where all of a sudden,
you'll speak a certain way, and something will click, and you'll look
back and you say, Wow, I look great. I sound great. It's
not about aesthetics. It's just about the energy level that you're bringing
and the amount of hooking you're able to engage and grab
that student in. So, do it take time,
take the practice, and you're going to have
those moments where you start to click in
to that persona. And as a final final, final, little tip and life hack, I personally listen to every single voice note that I send my friends and
family when I'm texting. It's not something I used to do, but it's something
that when I started to realize how I sound in my ears versus how I sound through a microphone,
is night and day. And I thought to myself, Wow, there's a huge blind spot here where I'm thinking I'm this
way and I'm completely not. So every time when I
send a voice note, I always listen back
to and and say, Okay, Yeah, in that moment
when I was speaking, I felt like I was
really confident, but when I hear myself, everything went a question
at the end of the sentence, and I didn't sound like I was really certain about
what I was saying. So you hear your
own inflections, and we're going to get into
the tonality inflections and speaking style. But this is a bit of
a little life hack, a little bit of an extra tip to hone in on what the
right amount of energy level and
confidence speaking style you can have so that you can
lock it in for your course.
37. Inflections, Pacing, and Candor: Now you're understanding what's going on underneath the hood, when you're watching someone
on camera, on a video, and you like the way that they feel when you're
listening, right? A lot of these things
are happening. You probably couldn't
put words into it of why this person sounds good and why this person doesn't sound good, but we're going to
start to unravel what's actually going on and how you can continue to implement it into
your speaking style. And that's what's
going to lead us to inflections, pacing, and candor. And these three parameters are going to help you
speak like a professional. So speaking cadence,
let's get into this. The first thing
is pitch changes. Now, changing your pitch
and adding emphasis to specific words helps to keep
the student's ear engaged. A lot of the times we speak in monotone where everything that we say has the same
amount of pitch, and nothing really changes in
the style, stays the same. This is if we were to see this on a graph, it
would look like this. Oh. No contrast. There's no peaks and valleys. There's no ups and downs. There's no change that creates a certain
amount of zestiness. Life is always more interesting
when there's contrast. If everything is just
flat and neutral, we tend to get bored
in life, right? So we want contrast to
give some variance. We don't want too much contrast, where if life is getting too contrasty and there's
so many ups and downs, can be overwhelming, or you
want to disengage from that. So there's going to be a
proper balance here with that as well that you are going to be able to
develop over time. And that's going to go for all these speaking
cadence parameters. So with pitch, It's something that's going to
start to come intuitively, but you're going
to have to do it more purposely at the beginning, where when I'm speaking, some of the words go down
and go up and pitch, and it's going to be an
intuitive understanding that's going to click in slowly
over time of you doing it. But the big takeaway
is to realize most of us speak
in a monotone way. We want to avoid that, and we want to create contrast
and variance in our pitch. Next up is pauses and breaks. Now, what this is
is creating space, creating interest and creating
time in between our words, which allows for our
students to reflect and really take in the
words that we're saying. One of the big things that
I see with students is as soon as the red light on the camera goes on, we
hit the record button, we feel like we have to speak
and have no more pauses, and every single moment has
to be filled with words, and then if we're like quiet,
it's going to be weird, and we don't want
the students to be bored, so we have
to keep talking. No. It's good, and it's
okay to take pauses. And breaks because this adds more of a
storytelling aspect. Good storytellers
will build something. And then we say,
we're going to go to the top of the Malin
he's going to reach. And finally, he made it. So this pause right there
creates more of an engagement, creates more of an
ebb and a flow, and we do not have to fill every moment of
silence with words. It's okay to stop.
It's actually very natural and normal to
gather your thoughts. Change what you're going to say and move on to
the next thought, and there's going to be a
flow of natural speaking. When people speak naturally, they don't keep speaking
like this, da da ba. That's something that you
force at the beginning stages. You try to just like
do the right thing and lock in and
staring at the camera. People are moving
when they're talking, they look up to think, they gather their
thoughts, they move. They're going down in pitch,
they're going up in pitch, they're pausing, they're
breaking. This is organic. This is normal, and
this is authentic. And this is actually
going to be a lot better for the students
ear to listen to. Lastly, we have our
rhythm and our pacing. And what this is is
intentionally speeding up or slowing down the way
that we're speaking to create a more dynamic story. This is something
that's going to also happen organically
and intuitively. While you're telling a story, while you're
explaining a concept, when it's something that
you're excited about, you're naturally
going to start to speak faster with a faster pace, and it's going to go up, and that's going to also grab the attention
of the student. When things slow down, more thoughtful,
saying something, more introspective,
more receptive, thinking it through, that is
a different style as well. So the more we're aware of what affects our
speaking style and cadence, and knowing it's there, knowing it's a parameter, but allowing it to
happen organically, That's what's going to make
it sound like a professional. And that's what's going to
start to have the ear of our student be piqued and interested by what
we're having to say, because it's not as much, Well, of course, it's
important what you're saying. But just as important as that
is how you're saying it. And this is a
demonstration right here that puts that
into perspective. So let's see how our speaking cadence can
affect a simple sentence. So here's what we have.
We have just a question. So what are you trying to say? If I use pitch and inflection
on different words, I can actually change
the meaning of this sentence without
changing any of the words. So if I say so, what
are you trying to say? That sounds a lot
different than, so what are you trying to say? The first option was
a little bit of a detached, not caring version. And then the second
version that I said, where I put a lot of
emphasis on the you. It was making it a
lot more pointed towards who the person
is speaking to. And if I were to
change again and say, so what are you trying to say? That makes it sound like I
don't really understand what the person is actually
trying to say rather than so, what
are you trying to say? And I don't care or so what
are you trying to say? And I'm speaking
directly to this person. The last option that I
just sta is more of, I don't really understand what the heck they're
trying to say. Or so what are you
trying to say? That puts more emphasis
on the trying. So we have the same
exact sentence with four totally different outcomes using our speaking cadence. So we could have the same
script as someone else, but our speaking Cadence
and style can have a totally different effect
as someone else using the same words on the
audience that's hearing it. So the takeaway here
is that all this is happening all the time with every engagement and
conversation you're having. But it was probably happening
at an unconscious level. So what I want you to do is take pitch changes,
rhythm and pace, and pauses and start
to really consciously add that into your daily
speaking with your friends, with your family, and
start to work it in so that it's developing a
organic speaking style. That's more captivating
and more interesting than without using these
techniques consciously. As you start to do that,
then it's going to start to work its way into your
video recordings, and you're going to start to be a confident professional
sounding speaker on camera.
38. Eye Contact, Gestures, and Distances: Last lesson we learn how
you can start mastering and consciously using cadence
to sound better on camera. Now what we're going to
focus on rather than the speaking is
the body language. And what this comes
down to is eye contact, gestures, and your distance. What we're going to do is
use this body language to connect with your students. So when it comes
to body language, this comes down to
three main parameters. Eye contact is the first one. Now, this is going
to have a balance. We don't want to be looking at the camera
the entire time, and we don't want to be
looking away the entire time. So about a 50% 70 at the most is a good way to develop engagement and trust
with your student. And the mindset here is that
the lens is the student. The lens is the person sitting across from
you at the table. And you want to treat
that as if it is a real human in a real situation that you're sitting
eye to eye with. And if I just do this, and
I'm speaking the entire time, just like this, staring at you, it's going to be a little
bit uncomfortable. It's a little too
much eye contact. On the other side, if I do this, and I'm speaking and I'm giving you some really
good information, and it's really important
and it's helping you. But I'm not looking at you. That's going to create a
little bit of separation. So we want to look at
the camera, S our lines. Sorry that my desk is squeaking. I'm trying to ignore it and
make eye contact with you, but we want to say our lines and let the eye contact
move and shift. We don't want to get too hawk eyed and just too
laser focused in. I've seen some students do that. I've seen some students go
in the opposite direction. That's why we want to
find the middle ground, get in that 50% mark, where we deliver our sentence, let the contact move, think about what we want
to say, bring it back. We're going to
engage our student without being too crazy, overwhelming directly
into camera. Now, the next thing is gestures. We want to speak
with our body to create a sense of
purpose and intention. If we are naturally
speaking organically, the body is going
to move itself. You're going to feel
what you're saying. A lot of people when they
first get in the camera, the first tendency is to
freeze and get tense. Okay? We don't want to do
that. It might happen. So if it does happen, cool. No worries. We're
going to get better. We're going to
continue to improve. But just know that If you are frozen and you're
speaking like this, again, you can be delivering
a lot of good information, but it's going to feel weird. G, and the other thing with
that is that with gestures, we have a subconscious
non trust, if we can't see someone's hands. So if you're sitting
down or standing, if you're sitting at a desk or standing up while
you're filming, basically, try to
show your hands. If I'm sitting or
standing like this, you can't see my hands,
A, they're not moving, so it doesn't appear that
I'm feeling what I'm saying, because if I'm feeling
what I'm saying, there's going to be
a natural movement. So that's going to happen. And the second thing
that's going to happen is you're not going
to really trust me. It's like when someone's
wearing sunglasses. If you can't see their eyes, there's a sense of
mystery and the sense of There's something
being unseen, and we want our students. We want to shine
for our students. We want them to be able
to see everything. So we don't want
to hide our hands. We don't want to have
the one of the table. We don't want to be
locked into one position, and we don't want to overly do gestures and be too dramatic, but we want to take up space. We want to take up the room. We want to fill the room
so that we're not quiet, you know, just unassuming, barely talking, barely moving. We want this to kind
of organically happen. And we want to
change our gestures and we want to let
these things flow. So watch out on the not moving and then watch
out on the overly moving. And I will say,
you'll probably go through a phase where you'll
be stuck in one movement. When I look back at
my previous courses in YouTube videos, I call it the claws, and I see students do
this all the time. You kind of get
little tense hands where you're starting to move, but they don't change position. You want to have a quality. You want to have a nice I don't know any
other word than quality, but there's got to
be a nice rhythm and movement to the hands. It's a whole teaching in itself, but this is going to feel
a lot different than this. This is going to feel a
lot different than this. If I say, go pick that up, that's different than
go pick that up. Just the pitch change, but also the movement
of the hands also change the way the student
reacts to what you say. That's a lot of information that we're
not going to be able to do logically and think
and speak at the same time, Oh, it's time to move my hands. It's something that's
going to unlock. And again, these are
things that you're observing that are
happening unconsciously. Now you know they're there, and the goal is to
slowly start to implement these
things consciously into your speaking style. Now, the last of these three parameters
is called distance. And this one is
slightly different than the other body language items that we've
been talking about. All good filmmakers
use very concise, what we call blocking
or positioning of where the subject is in
relation to the camera. So here, I'm at a
comfortable distance between me and the camera, AKA, me and you on the
other side of the screen. If I were to take a step back, we see a different
connection, right? I'm a little further
back. There's a little bit more of a detachment. And if I were to walk
in and say something, there's a little bit
more of a connection. And if I were to lean in, M cameras probably out of focus, but if I were to lean in, and say the same exact words. But closer to camera, there's going to be more of
an emphasis on what I say. So if you watch movies, you're going to
start to notice that on those important punchy lines, where there's a dramatic
part in the story or the character says something
that's super heroic or epic, they're going to use a close up. They're not going to use a wide shot where they
can see everything. They're going to see the
character's expressions, their face, and it's going to be a shot
that's punched in. So you can do this
consciously with the camera. You don't need to
have someone that's zooming in and all
these kind of things. You can actually move.
You can move away, and then you can move closer. And what this is going to
do is is going to change the variance of the connection between you and the viewer. So you want to set
up your footage. We'll get into
setting up our set, but you want to just
have this idea that your distance is directly affecting your connection
with the viewer, just like hand movements, just like eye contact, and the amount of
distance that you have is going to
create a variance on how connected you are and how engaged they are with
what you are saying.
39. Purposefully Choose Your Outfit: We've been working really hard to bring to the
surface all the things that are happening
in the background as you observe people
in conversations, people presenting on camera, people speaking in YouTube
videos that you're watching, and we're putting together why certain people sound
good and look good on camera and why some aren't. And now you're understanding
all of these techniques so you can start implementing
them in your daily life. And kind of a cool bonus is that it goes beyond just showing
up on camera this way. I can say for myself that
speaking on camera and improving and seeing my
personality blind spots, and I thought I sound this way, but actually
sound this way. It's actually greatly
improved my daily lifestyle, socializing, speaking in public, speaking to friends and
family, all those things. I'm a better speaker
in person and a better person in general
because of filming courses. So I think that's a pretty
cool little extra bonus that you're going to
be able to gain from this course if you
directly implement and consciously use all these techniques that
we're talking about. And this is going to
lead us to wardrobe. Now, wardrobe is important
because we want to purposely choose your
outfit on camera, so it matches your
specific style. And one of the
things that really stuck with me in
film school is that whatever you put in your
characters hands and what they wear tells your audience all they need to know about
who your character is. This goes for more
cinematic storytelling. This was the where I heard this insight from was more
about actual film films. This is more of an
online course situation, but the same principle applies. What your character is
wearing, what they're holding. If they're holding a briefcase, walking through
with a cell phone, the audience is going
to see this and without the character even saying
anything on camera, they're going to
know how this is a busy person that's likely a businessman or in some type of financial activity,
whatever it is. This is going to tell them
everything they need to know. So since you are the character in your
show, in your movie, that is your online course, what you wear is going to tell your
audience a lot about you. So what this is doing is giving your student an impression
of your background, your skill level, and
your accomplishments, and really how you
show up in life. So if you have the best
lighting, the best camera setup, but your outfit does not
match what you're teaching, the student is
going to feel that something is off subconsciously. This can be a little bit easy to forget when you're focused so much on all of these other complex steps
we're talking about, Cadence, pitch changing,
hand movement, you know, course outline, speaking notes, everything else. It can be easy to
forget about wardrobe. So it's not something just
like everything else. It should come organically. I know my audience is 20 to 30 creative
minded people that are looking to improve
their filmmaking, photography, and
overall creativity. I'm not going to show
up in a business suit, and I'm not going to show
up in flip flops and a surfers outfit because
that's not my audience, and that's not really
my personality. I'm going to wear something
that's comfortable, casual, and that matches really, you know, who my audience is. So we want to keep that in mind when we're
choosing our outfit. So you don't have to
wear a suit and tie, but you should be
dressed in a way that is respectable and credible. For the audience you're
trying to reach, and regardless of how you would categorize your specific
style of dressing. Overall, you want to have
it be clean and something that you would like to see yourself in five years from now. So the mindset behind
this is to think of yourself as your
own personal brand. And you're crafting your
image of that brand, just like any of
the other brands that we see out on the market, out on social media, that are advertising something, you are kind of similarly
doing this with who you show up as and the wardrobe or
outfit you're choosing. So this should be something
that comes naturally to you. You shouldn't have to
think about it too much. But what I will say is
we want to stay away from neon colors, stripes, complex patterns, large logos, or what I put in
quotation marks, showing too much, AKA, showing a little too
much skin on camera. We want to keep everything
respectable and professional to all
different ages. Now, those are what you
want to stay away from, but what I would gravitate
towards are vibrant colors. That's a great way
to make yourself pop on screen and
enhance your look. Generally, I wear blues, greens, something that has a
little bit of a pop to it. Today, you happen to catch
me in my white shirt, but it works for the
scenario because my background is actually
darker, it's Matt black. It's a little bit more moody. So this is still going to
pop against my background. Would never wear
a white shirt on camera with a white background, and I would never
wear a black shirt on camera with a black background. So just keep in mind
that you want to wear something that matches
with your unique style. It matches up with who your
audience would see you as. And it also has a
certain amount of contrast and a pop
from your background. So don't worry about
if you don't have your background dialed in yet. That's something that
we'll be getting to in the upcoming chapters, but you want to wear
something that you feel great in, you look good in, and that you just overall
feel confident in, and it's going to allow for
you to pop on camera and allow for the student to
really dive into what you say.
40. Learning Activity with Recap: Film Your Test Lesson: So we just went through
a lot of information. We went from the
psychological side of how your student
is responding, and there's brainwave and trainment happening
when you're on screen, and the student is
listening to you and syncing up with how you
come off on camera. We went through that, went
through body language, we went through wardrobe, we went through speaking
with pitch changes. We went through a lot. Now it's time for
you to implement these upgrades and these changes that you now have a
solid understanding of. So what we're going to do here
is film your test lesson. So you can practice and review
your new skills on camera. So let's do an
overview of all of the most important takeaways that we learned
from this chapter. First off, we started
with mindset, right? Preparing the mind before you even stand in
front of the camera. This is about prepping
the night before, prepping the day of knowing
that you are set up to win. Your student has paid to see
you and gain value from you, just like when you buy a movie ticket to
go to the theaters, you are not expecting that
it's going to be bad. You want to see a good movie, and you want to leave
happily and satisfied. So that is what the student
is wanting from you. They're there for you to win. Next, we talked about knowing your audience and speaking
to where they are at. We're not going to
be a surfer bro speaking to business people and also being mindful of the terminology and
words that we use. We want to make sure
that we're meeting the student at their
experience level, so we're not overwhelming
them or making them feel like they don't know
enough about the topic. So if we do have to use
more expert level or industry standard
terminology and words, that's totally fine. Just be sure that
you break it down and you define what
these words are. And next, we talked about giving that extra 10% on camera. This is part of you developing
your on screen persona, because what you think you sound like is differ than what
you really sound like, and what you sound
like in person is then even more different than what you sound like
through a microphone, through a speaker, and through a computer screen that your student is
viewing you through. So you want to not be
fake, not pretend, be yourself, but turn up
your energy level, ten, 15, 20% so that when you are heard by the student
through the camera, you are coming off at a solid baseline of
excitement and engagement. And this is going to come
with trial and error. It's not going to
happen overnight. This is going to be
something that you will build and develop. And you'll start to
have breakthroughs as you film more and more, and you'll click into Oh, yes, it sounds good when I
speak with this cadence. Oh, yes, it sounds good when I speak and use this
specific word. This sentence, and this
word always gets me going and lights me up and
ready to start speaking. That is when we moved to
our speaking cadence. Here we dove into pitch changes, pauses and breaks,
rhythm, and pace. First up was pitch changes. This is where we use our inflections and changes
in our overall pitch of speaking pattern to focus on specific words and
make them stand out. Remember, in this lesson, we took one sentence and said it a handful
of different ways. Without changing
any of the words, we completely changed the
meaning of the sentence. We were using that
with pitch changes and focusing on different
inflection points. That's when we got into
pauses and breaks. Remember, we do not have to fill every single moment of
our video with words. Having that space,
Having that breath, having those pausing moments are actually something that
will keep your student engaged because they're wanting to hear what you
have to say next versus being overwhelmed with constant consistent speaking. Lastly, for the section, we went into rhythm and pace. This is where we learned
that we can speed things up or slow things down dynamically to create more
excitement when we're speaking about something
that we feel passionate about and then slowing down. The way that we speak when we're saying something
that naturally comes out as more thoughtful
or more introspective. You say it in that specific way, and then the student
is going to have the opportunity to take
in what you're saying. That is when we went
to body language. So we talked about eye contact,
gestures, and distance. Now, eye contact is
an important one because this can be
very easily overdone, or I'm just staring
directly in the camera. I don't break the eye contact
is a little bit creepy, or it can be underdone where I do not make eye contact with the camera because I'm feeling uncomfortable and it's
coming off very unnaturally. It doesn't matter how important the things are that I'm saying. The student is not going to feel like you're
connecting with them. After that, we got
into gestures. We want to get away from the frozen deer in
the headlights that generally will tend
to happen as you start to be on camera
for the first time. Over time, you're going to
build a natural way of moving. That's not the clause, remember, It's not hiding your hands, so you feel a little bit untrustworthy as if you're
wearing sunglasses. People can't really connect
with you see who you are. But you're naturally moving. You're using gestures
that come naturally, they're flowing with
the words and you're feeling in your body
what you're saying. That way it's going to
resonate with a student. It's something that
comes intuitively and organically
and naturally and has a certain quality
to it that's not too rigid and it's
not too quick. We don't want to
overwhelm or be too much, but again, we want
to take up room. Your space is yours. You want to fill the room
with you as the presenter. That's when we move
to our final aspect, which is distance
from the camera. Remember, all great filmmakers use blocking of characters in their scene by changing the distance of the
subject to the camera. And doing this purposefully
will allow for you to create more impactful
moments on screen. And when you are setting
up your framing, keeping this distance in mind is important because you want to find a comfortable space that you can stand or sit for the
majority of your lessons. That doesn't mean
that you can't step back a little bit or get
a little bit closer, but you don't want
to do too far back, where now we're too far away, as if we were having
a conversation. I wouldn't have a face to face conversation with another
person this far away. I would feel a
little bit strange. If this was an in person
conversation and I was treating the lens of my camera as if it was a real life
student in person, this would be a
comfortable distance, and that's why this framing
feels good on camera. So we want to be aware
of the distance. It doesn't mean that we can
lean in and say something important if it makes sense at that specific
moment in our lesson, but we want to find
that happy balance because we can use all of
these different techniques. But if I'm standing
way back there, something is going to feel off. So all of these
techniques work together, if you use them
consciously to become a more professional
speaker on camera. Now, because we made it to
the end of this chapter, we've learned all
these techniques, it is going to be time for you to implement what
you've learned. So like we said at the
beginning of this chapter, you filmed an
example lecture with your smartphone of you speaking not knowing any
of these techniques. What we're going to do now is record that same
exact lesson for two to 3 minutes of you
speaking to camera without worrying about lighting
or cinematography because that's not the
focus of this section. What we do want to focus
on is your performance. So choose that lesson from your course that you
did at the beginning of this chapter and film it as if you were filming a real lesson. And while you're doing that, I still want you to be yourself, but try the best you
can to implement the eight up level techniques that we went through
in this chapter. And after you
record that lesson, I want you to review the
footage on your phone and pay attention to how you sound and present yourself on camera. And then what I
want you to do is take what you
learned from viewing your upgraded lecture
and write down or take mental note of what you still
want to change and upgrade. These can be things like maybe you are actually now
using hand movements, and the way that they look
don't really feel organic, or maybe you are
using pitch changes, but the way they're coming off could be
a little bit better. Take note of that and re record this lesson a second time
with the upgraded techniques. That's going to even
take things more deeply so that you can
really start to dial in. Here's how I was
before. I didn't know anything about
speaking on camera. Now I know these techniques and I'm trying to
implement them. They're coming off okay. So I watch that, and I
see that there's still some upgrades I can do to
come off more organically. Now you're going to re record
that and do it again on your smartphone so that when we get to the
following chapters, you're going to be warmed up and ready to present on camera. So go ahead now and complete this learning exercise before
moving to the next chapter.
41. Learning Activity: Choose Your Filming Location: Welcome to Chapter
five of this course. We've worked a lot
together to create your outline, to
research everything, to make sure you have
the right topic, to enhance your speaking
style on camera, and many, many other things. And now, it's time to create your course production,
overall shooting style. And what we're going to do in
this section is pretty much create everything that
you see on camera here. The lighting, the location, the background, the lenses, the cameras, everything
that's involved in filming a course we will cover
in this section. So if you're a novice filmer, beginner filmer, you have new equipment you
never used before. Do not worry. I've got
your back covered. We're going to work
together to get really comfortable and not just build confidence in
front of the camera, but have the confidence
to shoot and set up a nice looking image so that our course looks cinematic and aesthetically pleasing
for our students. So let's get into this chapter. And what I want
to start off with first is choosing your location. And this is going
to be about finding the best backdrop
for your course. And before we dive
into this content, I just wanted to put a
little side note here. I have a course for
this exact process. We're going to cover in
this specific course, the need to know information. But if you want an
entire course on creating your own professional
at home filming studio, There will be a
link at the end of this entire course to that course specifically
and all my other courses. So don't worry,
we're going to cover everything that you need
to know to get up and running to get a great
looking course image and great sounding audio. But I'm only going to cover
what we need to know, and there's more in depth information on those
other courses. So now that we have
that out of the way, here are the most
important steps for choosing your space. Number one, you want
to walk through the best potential backdrops at the location you like to fill in and use the following criteria. The backdrop should be in
line with your course topic. So for example, having
a bunch of trees and plants would not align
with a tech based course, let's say for
something like coding, computer science, or anything
super technology oriented. But art and sculptures in
your background would, in fact, align with something
like a painting course. So you can set the design of your backdrop
to further match your course, but you want to be
mindful on what the bare bones that you're
choosing to build from. Originally, these were empty
walls in the perfect space. They didn't have
much natural light coming into the image that I had to deal with when
setting the lighting. I didn't have very
much external noise. It was at the right location, so it was perfect for my course. And I built on top of what I started with for the
specific location. But if you're walking through your house and you're
going to choose a backdrop that has all this
artwork and sculptures, but you're going to teach
a technological course, it's not going to
be a good decision. And the same goes
for the opposite. So keep that in mind when
walking through your space. Next, you want to pick a
backdrop that's clean? You can control
the natural light, and there's not a lot of
excessive external noise. You want to stay away
from plain white walls, and ideally, you
want to have a pop of color, if possible. Shelves are also really
great for props. So you can see in this location, we don't have a pop
of color on the wall. It's actually Matt black, but I use the lighting to
create that pop of color. We have the blue shade, and we have the shelves where I'm able to put
props on that add characteristic and
personality instead of just the plain white walls. Because after taking this
course, you have to promise me, you're not going to
have any bland looking, uninspiring backdrops in any of your course content, okay? No white walls, no
blank empty spaces. We want character
and personality that matches up with the topic
that you are teaching. Next, you should be able to leave your equipment
in the space ideally for an
extended period of time without it getting in the
way of your daily routine. You know, this is
just a little bit of a tip from experience. You don't want it to
interrupt your work flow in your living room or your living schedule in your living room, and it's annoying and
frustrating and in the way. Ideally, you can choose a space where you can keep it out of
the flow of your daily life. That way, you have a work space, you have your daily life. If it can be dedicated to a
room on its own, perfect. If it can be in a
living space that's a little bit off to
the side, perfect. But the goal is that
it doesn't become a hindrance and an annoyance
that you then like, Oh, I just want to
fill my lectures, to get this stuff
out of the way. That's just going to not add any value to when
you're teaching. Next, the space should
be customizable. So try to find a backdrop where there
already are existing shelves, or you can add shelves,
you can paint, you can hang things,
all the little additions that make
it look uniquely you. And my very last tip here. You want to be able to
choose a room that has sufficient enough space between
you and the background. The point being is that
this is going to create more depth and a more
cinematic looking image. So as you can see in this
background or in this setting, I'm about five to six feet
away from the walls behind me. This is going to allow
for the background to fall out of
focus a little bit, and for there to feel
like I have room myself to really take up
room inside the room. It makes it not feel
compressed and that there's a little bit of a lack of room for me to really
expand in the space. You want to be comfortable,
and cinematically, you want to have
space behind you. So it's a very important
last bonus tip. So now what I want
you to do is choose your filming location
if you haven't already. So use the steps that I
just previously outlined in the previous slide and narrow
down your filming space. You can narrow it down to
the top two or top three, or you may have a
super obvious choice that's definitely
going to be the one. Regardless, you can film a test shot with
your smartphone, see how it looks, see
how much room you have, and see how the different spaces stack up against each other and try to weigh out the pros and cons of what each space
is going to offer. Once you've completed
this learning lesson, and you have your space
chosen in the next lecture, we're going to gather inspiration
online on how to create the space and make
it uniquely yours.
42. Learning Activity: Gather Location Inspiration: Now at this point, ideally, you have your location chosen, and you're ready to look online to gather
some inspiration of how you can upgrade your space and make
it uniquely yours. So let's dive into
how we can find other creators' backdrops online and gather some inspiration. One of the main
points here is to create a space that does
our favorite thing. It engages the student. And in other words, it
puts them in your world. Otherwise, your lessons are
just going to look bland, and they're going to look
like any other plain video that's out there online. So what we want to
do here is start by searching different video
creators on YouTube. You remember liking or seeing,
and it caught your eye. On top of that, you can
also keyword search different art direction
ideas on Pinterest. Then what I want you
to do is screen grab your favorite looks and choose the top ones
that really match up with something that's practical and actually
achievable for the time that you have
in pre production and the budget that
you're willing to spend. So it's important to
really think about, Okay, I want to shoot a course,
I want it to look good. I want it to match
up with the style of personality type that I have and the topic of the course
that I'm actually shooting, but I don't want to
spend more than $100. Or I don't want to
spend more than $100. It doesn't really matter
exactly what your budget is, but it would be good at
this moment and time to determine a
ballpark of what you want to stay in because you
don't want to be looking at all these inspiring spaces online that are going
to cost $10,000, and you're looking to
spend a fraction of that. It's not going to help. So, just remember to keep in mind
that you should have a budget number that you
want to stay close to. Now, what I'm going
to do is look on Pinterest to find
some inspiration for my upcoming photography course
and see what kind of ideas I can pull together
for how I want my backdrop to look and feel. So here we are on Pinterest. You can either pull stills from YouTube Pinterest
or really any kind of social media platform. But for this specific lesson, I'm going to go ahead and
type in modern film studio. I'm going to see what kind
of results start to pop up. And what I like, I'm going
to open up in a new tab. So let's say I like this one. I'm going to open
it up in a new tab, and it's going to save it
on the side of my browser. So anything that catches my eye that I think visually
looks interesting, and I feel is doable with my time frame and budget,
I'm going to save. And I'm not going to worry about things may be
working and not working. I'm just going to do this as an initial brainstorming
phase to start getting the creativity going and seeing how I want the aesthetic
of the course to feel. So I naturally gravitate
towards the darker tones, the matt black walls. So that's kind of
my personal brand. Now, when you're doing this, you could have a totally
different look and feel. Maybe your look and feel
isn't modern and minimal, maybe it's the exact opposite. So be sure to be true to your specific style when
you're doing this process. So I'm just going
to look through here and pull a few more. I really like this. So now that we've found
some photos there, I'm going to try a
different keyword search. I'm going to type in unique
YouTube filming space, and we're going to see
what comes up here. I really like this
texture of this wall in the background.
This is perfect. I'm also thinking in my mind, the topic of my course,
is photography. So I want there to
be a certain type of element that feels photography related for this
course specifically. And I don't really know
exactly what that is yet. But hopefully, looking through this inspiration really starts to point me in the
right direction. And as I'm looking
through these, I'm seeing some production
elements in the shots. For example, this one,
we can see the lighting. And you know what
I'm thinking is because it's a
photography course, what would be kind of unique is rather than having a
really clean image, like what we have here, you're not seeing any of the lights, the key light, the fill
light, the hair light, all the electrical elements
and cables and cords. You're not seeing that
in this specific shot, any of these angles because it doesn't match up with the style. But when I'm seeing some of these examples where we do
see some production elements, I'm actually thinking for
the photography course, it would be cool to have production gear in
the actual framing. So as those ideas
start to come in, be sure to get the images that are
going to remind you of, Oh, yeah, that's the
direction I want to go in. I want to get that
specific style. So I really like that direction. What I'm going to do
here is save this image. And I'm going to
just look through. That one's a pretty cool look. I like the way this one
feels, but honestly, it's a little too similar to what the setup is that
I'm already shooting in. Oh, I like this one, though. This texture is really cool. And for some reason, the
geometric design mixed with the studio lights in
the background is definitely a great direction
for a photography course. So I'm going to, let's go
ahead and get rid of this one. I'm going to keep
these two, and I'm going to use these two as a template and a main source of inspiration for my
upcoming course. Now that I've spent only
literally a few minutes to just go online and find
some reference ideas, I have an entire concept
that's ready to go. I want to put the
production elements and make it feel like the student is on set with
me for an actual photoshoot. I didn't not even have that idea before I filmed this lecture. Now I know exactly what I
want to do for that course. So now what I want
you to do is take the time to do exactly
what I just went through. Go online, pull your
inspiration images, do screen grabs,
go on Pinterest, download whatever
you need to do, and look through
things so that you can find your spark
of inspiration of how you're going to
make your course unique and creative for the
topic that you're teaching. So take that time now. Gather your main hero
reference images, and I will see you
in the next lesson.
43. Learning Activity: Props and Decorations: Now, you should have a super
inspiring unique direction for what your filming space
is going to look like. There's going to be a
unique look and feel, and it's not going
to be a standard cookie cutter plain
background, right? Perfect. Now what we're
going to do is get into the props and decorations. The goal here is to
set up your space with some inspirational and
creative looking props. As you can see from
the film space that we've been in
for this course, there's video related props
in the background that creates a certain world
or environment for you, the student to place yourself in while you're going
through these lessons. There's two ways
to get your props. You can either grab
items that are already available in your house or you can buy things online once you have your
direction locked in. This is going to
help further create that world that the student
is going to live in. So keep in mind a budget
that you want to stick to for the props
and decorations. I would, highly, highly
recommend setting aside a little bit of money for at least one practical light. And to clarify what a
practical light is. This lighting source
is a key light. It's not showing up on camera, but it is acting as something
that's actually lighting, what our scene is. This light, on the other hand, and that light and
that light are known or what's known
as practical lights. They're not being used
to light me the subject. They're just simply there for aesthetic purposes
in your scene. Having at least one of these
puppies in your setup is going to really help upgrade and just make
things look better. So I really highly recommend setting aside some money.
It's not that expensive. You can buy them on
Amazon for 20 bucks, really purchase anyone that matches your unique
look and feel. Now, what I want to share
with you is a link to every single item I've personally purchased
for my filming space. This will give you an idea
of what things can cost and how many items to buy to properly outfit
your background, so it looks full enough to have character without
being too cluttered. So here's a link for
every single piece of gear I have for my at
home filming space. I'll link this for you inside the course so
you can click it, check through everything and
see the prices for items and choose if one of these relates to
something that you need. So here we have a great
example of a practical light. You can see how it
looks in the image versus how it shows up on set. The next item you can see
is this circular light. So that's how it
looks in the image. I thought it looked
pretty cool and modern. I think it was only 30 bucks, and this is how much
it shows up on set. For example, if I were to cut
it off and speak to camera, the image itself loses
a lot of energy. There's a certain
warmth and the glow that practicals in the
background are going to convey and bring into your footage that makes
you feel like you have a little bit more energy
to when you're speaking versus having a dark
plain background. So let's put this puppy back on. And what I want you to do is just take a look through
this as a reference. I also have specific gear that I recommend at
different price points. So we have a three
point lighting setup that's our moderately
priced option. We have a smaller
lighting setup, that's a two point lighting setup
that's super affordable. And then you can go into the adjustable ring light
style that is very, very, very inexpensive, and
will still give you and will give you a portable
source of studio lighting. So you have the links to everything that I
purchase from my setup. You can see what it
looks like having practical lights and props
in the background that are aligned with the course
being taught and gives a cool world for the student to be involved
in while you're teaching. Now what I want you to
do is take the time now to gather your list of items and purchase what
you'd like to get. You don't have to
spend $500 $100. You can just put aside, maybe 50 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever works for your budget, purchase three to four
nice looking props that are aligned with
your course topic, and definitely get
a practical light, at least one for
your background. You can also go
through your house and grab any cool
little items that are going to add a character and a unique looking feel
to your backdrop. And complete this before moving to the next
lesson where we're going to talk about
your equipment that's needed for filming.
44. What Gear to Purchase: Want to talk about now
is gear and equipment. And if you are at the
spot or the space where you already know
the gear you want or you already have
the gear you need, and you want to skip
forward to getting into lighting or getting into
the actual filming process, you can skip forward to
some of the next lectures. But if you're in
the boat where you don't know exactly what
you want to purchase yet, then these lectures or
this lecture is for you. So let's talk about the
equipment needed and what gear I would recommend
you buying for your course. So I have an entire course on equipment settings
and composition, like I mentioned,
that's going to be linked at the
end of this course. So let's go ahead and
talk about the need to know information
on equipment. This is all of the gear that
I would recommend in each. One of these, is a different slightly different price point. We have the Sony ZV one
with the flip screen. This is going to be
our low price point. We've got our mid
price point, the 70 d, and our more expensive item, the 60 mark two. So you can really dive in
and the A seven mark three. So there's a lot of
different cameras in here, a lot of different options. I'd really recommend
going through and finding out what
works good for you. There's a three point
lighting setup, two point lighting
like we went over, different tripods,
different microphones, each at a slightly
different price point. I tried to organize
everything at a low medium and high
price point so that you could ideally find the piece of equipment
that works best for your specific budget. So you can take as much or as
little time needed for you specifically on
the equipment list that you need to go
through for your cores. Now what I want to
do is go through a basic gear setup
with the bare bones, minimum three things you need, and then a slightly more advanced setup that's
going to give you an overall more
professional looking setup. We'll go through
that list as well, and you can decide which
works best for you. So for our basic setup, we need our camera of some sort. We need either a phone, a DSLR, or a mirror list camera
that will shoot ten aightP to four K. Not a whole lot to explain there.
Pretty straightforward. Secondly, we need
our microphone. This may be obvious
to some people and not so obvious to others. The onboard microphones on
cameras and cell phones is not ideal for filming video lessons with
audio and dialogue. The further away that the audio source is from your
subject who is speaking, the worse and more echoy
and lower quality, the sound is going to sound. So in this situation,
we're using boom, a lavalier mic, right here, right by my voice. And if I were to cut to
the microphone that's the onboard mic on my camera, this is what
it would sound like. So you can see, it
sounds really far away. Pretty echoy. We
can hear my voice bouncing off all the
walls of this room, not an ideal situation. So no matter how fancy it is, you still must have the microphone close
to you the subject. This can be a lavalier
mic or can be a shock and mice
just out of frame. Next is our key light, and I would always
recommend shooting in a controlled
lighting situation. We don't want to rely
on natural light because minute by
minute, hour by hour, the color temperature of that light is going
to change and the exposure level
or intensity of the light source from the sun being natural light is
going to change as well. So your foot is
going to look wildly different from one
moment to the next. The goal and the upside
of having studio lighting is that it's constant consistent lighting
that you can rely on, and it's not going to change. So this basic gear
setup just really boils down to these
three main things. A solid camera, whether it's a phone or a DSL or
a Mreles camera, a microphone that's as close
to your subject as possible, and a key lighting source to
illuminate you the subject. Now let's take a look at a slightly more advanced
professional gear setup that, of course, is going to come
at a higher price point. Again, we're going to have
a camera that's necessary, a mic and a key light. But what we're adding on to this more professional
setup are two new lights, which are a fill light
and a hair light. And what I actually want to
do, and in the film business, we call this Hollywooding
it when you just kind of do the necessary thing
in the moment quickly, and not at a super
professional level, but you get the job done. So what I'm going to do is
record my setup so you can easily see what I'm actually talking about with
these three lights. This is my key light, okay? A large soft box that's illuminating my face right
here as my main lighting sore. Then we have a fill
light that's filling in these shadows on the side of my face opposite
of the key light. And then we have our hair light, which is giving me this rim
on this side of my body that acts as a high light and a little bit of a kick to
help the subject stand out. From the background. It's
like a bright outline. Next up on this more professional
setup is the RGB light, adding a splash of color. And as you can see from our
two main camera angles, we have our RGB lights, adding that splash of color and just a little bit more creativity
in depth to our image. Now, if I turn off this light, you can see instantly,
the color disappears. It's subtle, but it creates
a pretty different effect. And if we turn off
our other RGB light, This could be maybe what your setup would
look like if you didn't use any splash of
color in the background. The problem with this
is that it's doable. Trust me. A lot of people
shoot their videos like this. But that little extra step of the color And the
contrast between a natural looking source of
light on the subject with a contrasting color
in the background is a really cool way for that
little professional touch. Now let's move on to the last
piece of gear that I would recommend to you
if you're going in this professional
gear direction. Now, a low light lens is an excellent way to
create a really sharp, really clean looking image. And what I would recommend is a 24 millimeter to
a 50 millimeter. Now the millimeter is going
to determine the width or the field of view that the subject is going to
see through the lens, depending on how it's
bending the light. There's a lot of
science behind it. I don't fully understand. But 24 is great for more
of this portrait style, that's wide, so you can get more half body like
what we have here. And 50 is more of like what
we see on this angle where it's slightly more shallow
of a field of view, creating a really clean look on your subject nice in focus with a shallow depth of field
in the background so that we get some of that
cinematic blurring effect. And it's going to
make things just feel a little bit more professional. The next part of this
is your aperture, lenses that are 24 to
50 with the 1.2 to 1.8. The lower the number of the
F stop, AKA, the aperture, the higher amount of light that's entering the lens and hitting the sensor
on your camera. So the two main advantages of having a low
light lens is that you're going to be able to shoot cleaner looking images
in darker settings, and you're also going to be able to get that shallow depth of field where you on
camera is sharpen in focus, and the background
behind you blurs out and has that nice
looking fall off. That wraps it up for our
mini equipment crash course. I really want to just cover the essentials that you'll need to know to get a
great looking course. If you do want more information, you felt like you didn't quite get what you
were looking for, I would highly
recommend checking out my other two courses
on this very subject where I spend hours and hours
and hours and hours going deeply into all the ins
and outs of equipment, settings, setting up
your composition, getting your framing, and all of those cinematic techniques.
45. Mobile Recording Apps and Settings: What we're going to do
is a mini crash course on phone settings
and camera settings. What I want to do is
go through how to maximize your phone's
visual settings. Now, you can either use the native application
on your phone, which I assume most of
you might want to use because if you're going with the phone route as your camera, you're probably going in
the cost saving direction for just ease of use, something that's simple
and plug in play, and you can use the
native application. But what I want to
do is recommend a few solid third party apps that allows you to get a
higher quality image output, and allows for you to control the aesthetic of your
image a lot better. So here are my top runner
recommended iPhone apps. We got Pro Movie, Film
McPro, and Pro Cam. Some of these are free, and
some of these are paid. We also have for Android
Cinema F V five, Film McPro again,
and Po teg camera. These are all great
apps. Like I mentioned, some are paid, some are free, but you can use these to control the quality and settings
of your smartphone. Now let's talk about the actual recording settings
that you want to use. So I want you to set your video
resolution to at minimum, tenDP, this is the
standard resolution of most phones or four K, which a lot more phones these days are all
shooting four K, which is just going to
be a higher resolution with more pixels, a slightly sharper image, more information for your
phone sensor to gather, and overall better looking
image with a trade off of the four K footage taking
up more storage space. Now, that is for the resolution. Now what I want to do is kind of Hollywood it again like we
did in the previous lesson. But as I'm walking through the best settings that you
can use for your phone, I'm going to grab my phone, and I'm going to
set it up alongside with you. So let's go ahead. Let's Hollywood this puppy. I'm going to throw
this right over here, make a little bit
of room on my desk. And so here you can see me
here and you can see me here. So you can see that we
have Oh, and by the way, I'm personally going to be using P movie as my third
party application. This is my personal favorite
for shooting stuff. On my phone. So the first thing I'm going to do is
go in and change. I'm going to set my
resolution to four k because I have enough room
on my phone personally. I'd like to have the
extra resolution and higher sharpness in my
footage over ten eightP, but I have plenty
of storage space. After that, I'm going
to set my frame rate to 24 frames per second. Without getting two into detail about why
I'm choosing this, just trust me that
all feature films are filmed not at 30
frames, not at 60, not at 120, but
they're filmed at 24 frames a second
because 24 happens to be the most aesthetically
pleasing frame rate that is most comfortable
and replicates the motion blur of the eye. There's a lot more
to explain there, but that's beyond the
scope of this course. So you're going to have to
just trust me on this one. Set your frame rate to
24 frames per second. And with whatever
app you're using, it might look different
than my layout, but they're all going to have
very similar functionality. You can then set your quality
to whichever you like. And if you're just using your
native app on your phone. Some of these changes and parameters you're not
going to have access to. So don't stress out about that. These are just kind
of bonus additions. So here we go. We have were
set at the right frame rate. And next, what we're going to be talking about is white balance. Now, most phones do a pretty damn good
job these days about auto white balance. So we're not going to spend
a lot of time on this part, but I'm going to show you my phone specifically is
shooting on auto white balance. And you can see the skin
tone is pretty accurate. It's doing a good
job of analyzing the temperature of the light in my scenario and
guessing how to set the white balance to create
a natural looking image. So if I were to take the auto white balance
and set it to, let's say daylight, This
is going to look really good because our key light is at the daylight temperature. If I were to set
it to fluorescent, It's going to change
the color scheme. I'm very blue and purple. That's not the ideal
look that we're wanting because this is clearly
not fluorescent lighting. So setting the white balance there is not going to
get the look we want. Same for Tungsten,
same for Cloudy, and same for in the shade. It's going to change the overall color temperature of our image. So depending on your camera and your situation that
you're shooting in, you can probably get away with shooting at
automatic white balance. If you have the
functionality to change, and you want more control, you can set it to manual, and you can adjust the
white balance manually to match the actual color temperature that
you're filming in. Next up is exposure. Now, we want to set
our exposure level to the person's skin tone on camera rather than what's
in the foreground or what's in the background. And it's okay if the
background comes out to be a little bit
bright or a little bit dark. The key here is to have your
subject properly exposed. Now, this is something
that honestly, cameras or phones have gotten really good at doing in
the last few years because the quality of the
sensor that's going into these phones these days
is just really damn good. So most of the time, you'll be able to click or press you as a subject to
get the proper exposure. But of course, you can go
in and change the ISO to adjust the exposure
or the shutter speed. But I assume that in
90% of your situations, you'll be able to
simply tap to focus and to get the proper exposure
by tapping you on camera. So now let's talk
about audio levels. So most phones do a pretty good job of
controlling the gain automatically so that
your voice is peaking between negative 12
and negative six. So depending on
your skill set and your specific smartphone setup, you can either use the
automatic audio settings or if you're using a microphone that gives the manual option to
adjust your audio levels. I would also recommend using
those manual settings and getting your vocals to peak between negative 12
and negative six. This is going to get all of the vocal audio
information that you need into the microphone without peaking too far and red
lining your audio where there's actually going
to be distortions in the final recording. And so just to recap, what you want to do is set up your phone at 24
frames per second. You want to have the resolution
set to ten ATP or four K, depending on how much storage space you have on your phone, and you want to have as many of the manual settings as you
can set up as possible. It really is hard to create an all encompassing
tutorial for this because there's so many
different phones with applications and
different variety. But the more manual
settings you use, the more control you're
going to have over your image and audio
at the end of the day. But I also assume that if you are going in the direction of
just using your smartphone, you're probably just going
to want the easiest plug in place solution where you can
just set it up, hit record. And ideally, we
can lean on having a nice setup with you presenting well on camera that
you can sit down, hit record, and just get as many lectures and
lessons done as possible.
46. Maximize Your Camera's Settings: Before we get on
to really setting up our film shoot and
lighting our scene. The last thing I
want to talk about is camera settings
if you are going in the direction of using a
DSLR or mirrorless camera. What we're going to be
talking about is maximizing your visual and audio settings. Again, you want to set your
camera to ten ADP or four K, just like on the phone,
not much different there. You definitely want to
set your frame rate to 24 frames per second. Do not use 30 60 or 120. These are different frame
rates that are more optimized for other scenarios that is
not talking head footage. Okay? These following
settings are the real parameters that you can use to get a more
professional look on your footage when you have
the right control over them. So this is focal length,
aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance,
picture profile, and manual sound levels. Now, this is a course on
its own quite literally. So what I'm going to
do here is splice in some lectures where
I dive deeply into all of these settings
so that you can get a professional level
understanding of how to manually set all of the settings on your DSLR or Mireless camera. So let's cut to
those lectures now.
47. Light Your Set: Now, let's continue going into this mini cinematography crash course portion of this course. And what we're going
to talk about now is lighting your set. And the goal of this
is to really create a more dynamic looking image. Now, what I want
to do is go over the three main lighting types. For modern purposes, I added a ring light to the
very first portion of this list because
this has become a much more widely
used form of lighting, which is not very normal. I mean, for the
years and years of photo shoots and video shoots. Up until relatively recently, ring lights like this
just weren't available and did not even
exist on the market. So what we have in
today's day and age is a really simple,
really cheap, really, also easy to transport source of light that you
can get for 30 bucks, 40 bucks or 50 bucks on Amazon. Now, this is going to act like a direct lighting source that's right in
front of the camera. The prose to this is that
it's going to kind of remove wrinkles and any
areas that have shadow, which is going to give you a
more beauty type lighting. This lighting source
is off to the side, and it's hitting my face
from that side angle, and it's casting shadows. The more shadows you have, the more contrast in the face, the more you can
see imperfections, all the features of the face. But when you have a
ring light that's directly where the camera is, it's going to help to take
out those imperfections. So it's nice for traveling
and just overall having a very minimal setup that'll get the job done
when you're on the road. Next up is our two
point lighting setup. This is going to give you
a much more dynamic look because you're able to
get contrast and shadows. And some of the benefits of
using this is you can really adjust how much contrast and how much shadow
you're getting. If you want a more
dramatic looking image, you can have your fill light set really low so that
the shadow part of your face is pretty
dark compared to the lit key light
side of your face. The other benefit to this
is that if you're using a larger lighting source
as your key light, you're going to get really
beautiful eye lights in the subject's eyes, and you're also just going
to get a much more milky, smooth looking image with
that lighting source. So with the ring
light, you're going to get a much flatter, beauty, makeup f logger
type of aesthetic, but it's a lot more portable. With the two point
lighting system, you're going to be able
to get a lot more control and really get a more
cinematic looking image. Now, with a three
point lighting setup, we're going to use the
same lighting positionings for our key light
and fill light. But what we're
going to do is add a back light that's going to add a kick and a pop that's going
to highlight the shoulders, a part of the jaw,
and the top of the head or the hair
of our subject. And like I mentioned before, this is going to help to cut them out from the background. Give them a slight
glow, and overall, really just give a
fuller dimension to the image and the subject. And because lighting,
composition, all of these techniques are such large concepts
on their own. What I want to do is dive into this more deeply by
watching some of the in depth lighting and composition tutorials that I've created for my
cinematography course. So this is kind of going
to be a little bit of bonus for you guys
that you're going to get the benefit of a more
filmmaker understanding from these specific
filmmaking courses of lighting and composition. So sit back and enjoy these in depth tutorials on
lighting and composition.
48. Recap of Setting Up Course Backdrop: Now. I hope that you enjoyed those extra lighting tutorials that I really wanted to just add into as kind of an
additional bonus of the course to really make sure you're landing these
key concepts and techniques. Now what I want to do is take a look at everything that
we've covered so far in this chapter and
kind of dissect how this setup came together
so that you can start to see how you can
apply it to your own setups. So we're going to talk
about composition, fine tuning, and all the
techniques that we've covered. So, first off, let's
start with location. This is where you went through your own house or your workspace that you're
going to be shooting in, and you narrowed it down
to the top two top three, or maybe you knew right away the exact location
you wanted to use, that was going to give you
a sufficient amount of customization and a sufficient
amount of room to fill in without a whole lot of external sound sources
coming from outside or any kind of
distractions that would bother you or stop you
from filming your content. Then we went through
our inspiration phase. This is where we looked online on things like
Pinterest and YouTube to find other video creators
and spaces in general, that sparked some
excitement and inspiration of where we want to take
the aesthetic of our space. And most importantly, while staying on budget
and in line with the pre production time that we want to put in for our backdrop. That's when we move to
props and decorations. So if we look at my setup, you can see we have some
speakers, we have a microphone, computer, old cameras
and lenses that give you a feeling of a film
making setting. And most importantly, you know I love my
practical lights. We added in these practical
lights to give us a warmth and an overall feeling
of energy in our scene. So if I turn these off, we can cut this, And voi, you can see a
massive difference. A lot of people would just
go and shoot a course with this kind of background without
knowing these principles. So just like speaking cadence, body language and hand gestures, in the past, you've seen people that have
spoken on camera, and you either like what they're saying or don't like
what they're saying, but you didn't know
what words to use to explain what you were seeing that you liked
and didn't like. The same thing is
happening here. Now that we see the same exact set without our
practical lights on, there's something that
we're not excited about, and now we can put words
to what those things are. Practical lights that are adding a glow and energy to our set, props and decorations that add characteristic
and a feeling. To what the teachers saying. So now that we
talked about props, now let's get into the gear. So as you remember,
we want to have our camera set to 24
frames per second, ten ADP or four K resolution with the proper white balance, proper ISO, shutter speed, everything that we
went into detail with. After we have that setup, we want to make sure that
our lighting is good to go. So what I want to do is turn
off some of these lights so we can see a difference
of before and after. So I'm going to cut
off my key light. Now what we have is just our fill light and
our hair light. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be massively underexposed here. So if we were trying to use
ambient light in our room, we would not have a
good looking ors. Now I'm going to turn
off our hair light. So as you can see or
possibly cannot see. We just have our fill light on. And even though we have an
excellent looking background, if we don't have
proper lighting, it's not going to be a
very good looking image. So all of these things we're
covering in this chapter have a symbiotic
relationship to each other. So you want to bring
all these aspects up together to get the best looking final
product as possible. So what I'm going to
do now is flip back on these lights and boom, as you can see, we have all of our lighting, all
of our settings, all of our decorations
in the back, with our practicals ready to go, and we are now ready to
film our course lectures.
49. Introduction to Audio Recording: And before we move on here, I actually wanted to add a few more additional
lectures to focus on audio, because audio is just as important for your
lectures as the video. We can have an incredibly clean professional
looking image, but if it's buzzy, echoy, unclear, or grainy, it's going to be really hard
for the student to watch. So I really want to
make sure that we land the principles and techniques
for audio as well. So what we're going
to do is now go into a few more lectures on
microphones and audio recordings. So like I mentioned, we know now how to expertly create an awesome looking image. And in the next few lessons, we're going to
watch some in depth lectures from my other
filmmaking course on how to create your own filming
space and really dial in crystal clear audio.
50. Case Study: BTS of Shooting a Lecture: We made it to the
end of this chapter, and I wanted to add
one extra lecture. We went through and we
found out the step by step process to create our
very own filming space. We went through the
technical side, we went through the
equipment side. And what I want to do in
this lecture is give you a BTS view of the actual
lecture and lesson recording. Process. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to film one of my real lectures that I put together for my upcoming cores. And I want to give
some new angles for you to see it from so
you can actually see what it looks like from the
unedited raw version of getting the recording to then getting it finally
done and released. So what I want to do first for this example lesson is break
this up into sections. And the part of this
lesson that I'm going to knock out is
the introduction. So I'm going to let the student know what they're going
to gain from this lesson, what we're going to learn and the actionable takeaways that they're going to walk away with. So now let's hop
into this intro. Okay, so welcome to Chapter three of this
photography master class. In this lesson,
we're going to be walking you through how to edit your photos in Light room
with these main eight steps. So that would be the
intro for the lesson. Now what I'm going
to do is actually go into the bulk of the
content where I actually give the students
value and teach them the purpose of
this specific lesson, which is going to be editing their photos from
scratch in Light room. Now let's hop into what that actual filming
process would look like for this lecture.
Now we're in Light room. I'm going to go ahead
and import this photo. Boom, there we have
it. I'm going to navigate to the
developed settings. And I'm going to walk through
these main eight steps. So we imported our
photo, step one. Now we're going to
balance our exposure, adjust our saturation
and vibrant. Step three, Add the texture
and sharpness in step four, do the HSL parameters
and the final touches. So let's go ahead and run
through this process. I'm going to pull up
the shadows just a little bit to balance
out the exposure, and bring down the highlights just to balance
out the exposure, boost our saturation, bring up our vibrant so that the
blues pop in the shirt, the water in the
background, and the sky. Boost our texture, just like
we mentioned in step four. Boost up these shadows
a little bit more. Now this is looking
clean and sharp. And one of the final
steps I always like doing is adjusting the blues to give a little bit
more of a stylized look. So right there, I
just went through my main bullet point notes. And once my natural
train of thought or what I had to
teach came to an end, that's when I transition
to my slides, and I look at my
next bullet point to get my brain going and get the next train
of thought of what should be taught in
this specific lesson. So teach freely using the bullet points that
you have in your slides. And once you run out
of things to teach, that's when you queue up
your next bullet point, and that's what's
going to lead you and keep you on track to the information needing to be taught in that
specific lesson. So that's what I'm
doing right now. I'm looking, k, my
next bullet point. We did the HSL parameters to adjust the tonality of our blue, to create a more stylized look. Now I'm going to go
to step six and do the vignette and final touches. So now we're going to get back
into the example lecture. So now we're at our
final two steps. I'm going to go
ahead and bring down our vignette just to create
a little bit more of a stylized look and concentrate the viewer's eye towards
the center of the image. I'm going to bring
up the sharpness, just to create a little
bit more clarity and a little bit more
pop in the image. Bring up the noise reduction
just a little bit to make a little bit more
of a smooth image. And before I hit Export, I always toggle back and forth between the edited version and the raw version just
to make sure I'm not overly stylizing
the look and feel, but still creating a
unique looking image. So I really like how
this turned out. Now it's time to
export our final edit. So I'm going navigate to export. Be sure to set my destination
for my final file. Sure that we're set to 100% on quality and then
hit Export. Boom. So that wraps it up for
this example lecture. And I also wanted to add, you don't have to worry about
pausing or taking time to compose yourself before talking and spewing out sentences. It's so much better in the
filming and editing process. Because you have this
camera recording it, you're not presenting in
front of a live audience. You can always take breaks,
reference your slides, take a second to compose your
train of thought on where you want the rest of the lecture to go while you're speaking.
51. Introduction to Editing Your Course: Now you have made it to the editing portion
of this course. So we've done a lot
together, organizing, planning, creating your slides, putting your entire
course together, learning how to
present on camera, setting up your entire film
set so that you can get professional looking and
sounding video lessons. And now what we're
going to do is learn the editing process. So, this can be something
that can be a little bit daunting for most people,
but I promise you, what I'm going to teach is
really the fundamentals that you will be able to apply
to any editing software. So it's a little bit impossible to be perfectly
honest for me to do a tutorial with every
single different type of mobile video editing app, desktop video editing
softwares like premiere, final cut, Davici
Resolve, I can do it. So what I am going
to focus on is the workflow process and the overall goals and
techniques that you want to have kept in mind
so that you can create clean straight to the point and understandable video
edits for your students. So now that we're getting
into the editing process, what I want for you to gather is at least one fully
filmed video lesson. It can be one angle, two angles, whatever it is that
you shot it with. Don't worry too much about
the level of production. But what I want you
to be able to do is to watch the lectures that I'm teaching and then apply the edits to your
very own lessons. And I really wanted to organize this into the main steps or the main chunks of
the editing process to really simplify
things for you. And what these main
steps are going to include are organization, creating your initial edit, adding music, text,
color correction. And finally, exporting
your footage with the proper settings so that they have the right
dimensions for whichever social media
platform you're choosing. So in this first chapter, I'm going to be doing
a lot of hands on demonstrations of
the editing process. So like I mentioned, be sure you have one of your
lectures ready to edit, and you can edit along with me, or you can watch the entire chapter and
wait till the end of the chapter after
reviewing everything that I've taught and then
do your own edit. So do whatever
works best for you.
52. Organize and Backup Your Content: Let's first start with organizing and backing
up our content. The point of this
lesson is for us to make sure that we have
everything in the proper place. It can get pretty
overwhelming if you have 100 lectures and things
aren't organized properly. Organization is key, and then backing up your
content is key. Hopefully, we never have
to use our backups, but you always want to save your footage in two
different places. So what I always do
is I have a copy on my laptop that's
easy to access. I can do it wherever I am. And then I have a backup on
a separate hard drive that has an exact duplicate copy of my content so
that no matter what, I'm never going to lose
my original files. So let's go ahead and
get into what we have. So we have our photography, master class example lecture. I have my ACAM, my BCM, and my screen capture. And after creating a backup, I'm going to go to
my editing software, create a new project. And like I mentioned, this
is going to look slightly different than your software if you're not using premiere. But I don't want you to
focus on the technical side. I really want you to focus on the overall arching steps and
workflow that I'm focusing on because this is
going to apply to you no matter what
software you're using. So I'm going to label example,
photography, lecture. Quickly going to choose the location to save
all of my content, and the title this premiere. Save everything there, choose, create my project file. Now that that's done,
I'm going to quickly drop my footage into my folder, I'm going to create
a multi cam sequence with my three angles. If you're wanting a lot more of an in depth editorial
on this whole process, I do have an entire video
editing master class. That's a 16 hour course
on this process. We're going to cover
the important parts, but we're not going to quite
go into the nitty gritty. I have my three angles
synced up, ready to go. Let's go ahead and
view what we have. Angle one, angle
two, angle three. I'm going to go ahead
and click into this. Scale up my screen capture. Perfect. So by the
end of this lesson, what I want you to have is however many angles you
shot with with your audio, all in your editing software, and ready to hop into the
next lecture where we're going to create our
initial rough edit.
53. Create Your Lecture Rough Edit: We are in our edit. What we want to do here is make sure we label our edit properly. I know this is Chapter three. And this is really the
best way that I found to organize the numbering
system of your lectures. Let's actually
spend a minute here to just clean up our sidebar. We have our sequence. If
I could spell it right, we have our sequences,
and we have our footage. This is a sequence. It's going to go on
our sequence folder. Our raw footage is
going to stay there. And what it would look like
is 3.1 would be that way, 3.2, and so on. And that's going
to keep everything numerically organized. I'm going to do
3.1 photo editing. In light room. We can delete this extra one that I
was showing a as an example. Open it up. So I did do a little bit of pre cutting
here to shorten this down so that the
teaching process for you was going to be
a little bit faster. My original raw footage
was about 15 minutes, and I took out all
the pauses and time of me not
speaking to camera. So it's totally normal for your 15 minutes of raw
footage to turn into, let's say, a 7.5 minute edit or 20 minutes of raw footage to
turn into a ten minute edit. So let's first start with
listening back and playing through our raw footage so
that we can pull our selects. And welcome to Chapter
three of this course. In this lecture, we're
going to be talking about editing your photos
in Lightroom. So there's going to
be eight main steps that we're going to cover to get your unedited raw photo from
your laptop or computer, import it into Adobe Lightroom, edit it and export it. So let's go now and do
this step by step process. If I go over to my
laptop and navigate to the photo that I want to edit that has not
been touched yet, what I'm going to do is
go ahead and grab it, drag it and import
it into Light room. Now our Light room. I'm going to go ahead and import this photo. So you can see, we actually had a pretty smooth introduction
to this lecture. Our first mistake was at
around the 36 second mark. So let's play it back, and let's find out how we can smooth out this inconsistency. It has not been touched yet. What I'm going to do is
go ahead and grab it, drag it and import it into light room. Now
we're in light room. I'm going to go ahead
and import this photo. Boom, there we
have it. I'm going to navigate to the developer. So I'm going to just
delete and get rid of this first sentence because it's making the edit not smooth. Have it, drag it and import it into Light room.
Boom, there we have it. I'm going to navigate
to the developer. Perfect. And I'm going to walk through these
main eight steps. So we imported our photos. Before I play further in this, what I'm also going
to start doing now is dynamically choosing the
right angle to cut to. If you have one angle, you
won't really need to worry about cutting the multiple
angles, but the goal, if you do have a ACM, a BCM, and a screen cap,
which I'd highly recommend at least
having a screen capture. That's going to give
you a cutaway shot, like we've already been
mentioning in this course of having the slides for
your student to see. So at the very least, ideally you have your
video slide screen cap. What we want to do in
the thought process is to be showing the student the ideal thing
they need to see in that very moment to get
the most out of the edit. And welcome to Chapter
three of this course. In this lecture, we're
going to be talking. I just added a cut right there. Photos in And you always want to cut on
B of you speaking. You want to really pay attention to the sentences
that you're saying. When you change thoughts, when you change sentences, when you change the overall
theme of what you're saying, these are great points as
an editor to make a cut. O this course. In this lecture, we're
going to be talking about And now that I'm
looking at my laptop, I'm going to go ahead and show the student where I'm
looking because clearly, that's the ideal for them to see as a visual in that moment. About editing your
photos in light. So there's going to be eight main steps that we're going to cover to get your unedited
raw photo from your. And as you can see,
as I'm looking and reading off the screen and I transition to looking at camera, this is a good moment
for me to then cut to the ACAM or the BCM. Or unedited raw photo from
your laptop or computer, import it into Adobe Light room, edit it and export it. So let's go now and do
this step by step process. If I go over to my laptop. Okay. That's where I want
to cut to my laptop. So let's go ahead and
make that happen. So you're always
thinking, what does a student need to
see in this moment? What would be the
most beneficial angle and visual for them to see to understand
the information that the teacher is
trying to convey? Step process. If I go
over to my laptop and navigate to the photo that I want to edit that has
not been touched yet. What I'm going to do is
go ahead and grab it, drag it and import
it into light room. Boom, there we have it.
I'm going to navigate to. Okay, so that's a
mistake. Let's fix that and go to our screen cap. Put it into light room.
Boom, there we have it. I'm going to navigate to
the developed settings, and I'm going to walk through
these main eight steps. So we imported our
photo, step one. Now we're going to
balance our exposure, adjust our saturation
and vibrant, step three. Add the texture in sharpness. This is a moment where there's a little bit of an extra pause. Luckily, we're not speaking
in front of a live audience, and we can fix these moments. I always recommend going through any of those
moments that are going to distract annoy or just really what we call
throw the audience out. This is a term in filmmaking, where if you're watching a
movie and something strange happens on the screen
audibly or visually, it throws out the audience. It wakes you up out of the entrainment of
you watching a movie. You forget about the outside
world and everything else. But as soon as something
distracts you, you're like, Oh God, I'm watching a
video, and that was weird. You don't think all
that consciously, but subconsciously,
that's what happens. The goal of the editor is to keep the viewer
completely ingrained and interested in there of the into the edit itself
without getting distracted. Extra pauses, little
blips of audio, saying m and a repeat
words too many times. We're going through with a very calculated eye and
removing all of these moments to create a seamless flow of you
speaking on camera. Frans Step three, add the
texture in sharpness. The funny thing is is that
if you're a good editor, it's almost as if what
you've done is invisible. People are actually not
supposed to notice any edits. That's the telltale sign
of making a good edit, which is funny that way is
that it should be unseen. Because if you make a bad edit, then it's a bit of a distraction or super
obvious to the viewer. Adjust our saturation
and vibrant, Step three, add the texture
and sharpness in step three. So the reason I mentioned that
is because we want to have the spacing here sound
like a normal sentence, and we don't actually want our
audience to know, Oh, wow, that person spliced two
different sentences or words together to make
one seamless sentence. So ask yourself that and really keep an eye on the edits
that you're making. Make sure that they sound and look as seamless as possible. Three, add the texture and
sharpness in step four, do the HSL parameters
and the final touches. So let's go ahead and run
through this process. I'm going to pull up
the shadows just a little bit to balance
out the exposure, bring down the
highlights slightly so we don't have any overly hot I I'm going to boost the shadows and bring down the highlights just to
balance out the exposure. Okay, so we have
a mistake there. Let's go ahead and
try and take it from the beginning
of this sentence. I'm going to make a cut. Going to boost this shot. And I'm going to find where
because a lot of the times what you'll see is you'll
restart lines multiple times. So you'll have the same take, and you did it three times where you say the same
part of a sentence, you mess up, you restart again. You want to identify
those moments as quickly as possible. It's always going to be
the last take that you do is the one that
you want to keep. So if I restarted here, restart, restart and restarted
one last time, I want to take the
beginning of that one, slice out the beginning
of the sentence, and slide it over so there's
no repeat sentences. I'm going to boost the shadows. So now I'm going to find that
same sentence earlier in the edit and the final
to pull up the shadows. I'm going to pull
up the shadows. Right there Perfect.
Let's slide this over. And run through this process. I'm going to boost the
shadows and bring down. So there was a little bit
of an extra pause where the audience would probably
get thrown off a little bit. And know that there
was an edit there, so let's go ahead
and clean that up. It's a process. I'm going
to boost the shadows and do on the highlights just to balance
out the exposure. Boost our saturation, bring up our vibrant so that the
blues pop in the shirt, the water in the
background and the sky. Boost our texture, just like
we mentioned in step four, Boost up these shadows
a little bit more. Now this is looking
clean and sharp, and one of the final
steps I always like doing is adjusting the blues to give a little bit
more of a stylized look. I'm going to add an
edit right here. So now we are at our
final two steps. I'm going to just trim out this extra space we don't need. And you hear that little audio click? That's just something. You just take the little
extra time to take that out. You'll find as you're
editing footage of yourself that you
have certain mannerisms, that you say the same words at the beginning of sentences
or you do the same noise. You're just going to want to find those and slice them out. Orlized look. So now we're
at our final two steps. I'm just going to show the
A camera in this situation. Even though I'm not
looking a camera, I just want to break up how often we're seeing
this screen capture. Because this is a photo
editing tutorial, it's very heavy on
the computer screen, and it's nice to just give a
little bit of shot variance to keep the student
seeing different images. So now we're at our
final two steps. So now we're at our
final two steps. I'm going to go ahead
and as you can see, that's another version
of a repeating line. Let's take the second time we
started it, slide it over. I'm going to make
this cut and show the ACAM in this beginning
moment. Let's take a look. A little bit more
of a stylized look. So now we're at our
final two steps. I'm going to go ahead and
bring down our vignette, just to create a little bit
more of a stylized look and concentrate the viewer's eye towards the center of the image. I'm going to bring
up the sharpness, just to create a
bit more clarity and a little bit more
pop in the image. Bring up the noise reduction
just a little bit to make it a little bit
more of a smooth image. This is me referencing back to my slides to see what
point to talk about next. The student does not
need to see that. Before I hit Export, I let's go ahead and
take that moment out. With image and before. Okay. There's a little
visual blip there. So there's a few ways
we can address that. What I'm going to do for this
specific situation is this is the one that we need to
remove the front of it. So I'm going to slice
just the video. And I'm going to drag over the ending of the previous clip, which it should now
seamlessly play together. And before. Perfect. So now we don't
have that blip anymore. And before I hit Export, I always toggle back
and forth between the raw version and the
before I hit Export. That's another duplicate.
Let's take out this extra. Bring it over. We we might actually now not need
that extra clip. Let's see. Before I. Okay perfect that
plays seamlessly. Before I hit export, I always toggle back and forth between the edited version and the raw version just
to make sure I'm not overly stylizing
the look and feel, but still creating a
unique looking image. So I really like how
this turned out. Now it's time to
export our final edit. I'm going to now to export. Be sure to set my destination
for my final file. Ensure that we're set to 100% on quality and then hit Export. So that's pretty much it. And now we have
our initial edit. We've cut out all the
parts we don't need. We've used the specific
angles that are ideal for the student to
see at the right moment, and now we're ready to move
on to the refining process.
54. Choose Your Music: We have our rough edit, and we could stop
there at this point. But what we want
to actually do is those little extra
production steps to raise the production quality
and value of our edits. There's a few ways to do that that we're
going to go into. The first one I want
to talk about is adding music to your lectures, and the key here is finding
the right soundtrack. That's going to make your
visuals more engaging. So when it comes to music, your selection can either improve your edit or
be a distraction. The right song itself is going to make your presentation
more engaging, while the wrong track or
song that does not match the vibe of your speaking
can do the opposite. What I want to say
as well is that, in general, you want to
stick to instrumentals. You don't want to have
two vocals clashing. I'm speaking right now, and that should be at the forefront audibly of my video edit so
that you can hear me clearly. If there's music in
the background and then there's a
voice in that song, it's going to clash with you trying to listen to me speaking. So the goal is to
have the mood of your speaking match
the mood of the track. You wouldn't want to have a
biology lecture, for example, match with a heavy metal song
or a really hard EDM song. But on the other
hand, if you're doing a trailer for your biology
course, not the lecture, but making a more
energetic trailer, that's when we would want to use a more energetic song to
bring up the excitement. But if we're teaching and
offering information, value and knowledge, we
want to have a nice, relaxing song that
people can have play in the background
that just add a little bit more of
an interesting vibe and bring up the production
value of your lectures. So I personally use
epidemic sound for all my videos because I really
like their sound library, but there are tons of free online platforms
if you don't want to pay the monthly fee for
something like Epidemic Sound. So some free options I
want to share with you are Free Music Archive dot work
and freetock music.com. The downside to the free stuff is that it will traditionally have that more basic stock
music sound to them. So what I want to
do now is go on epidemic sound and start to find the best options
for our example Edit. I always choose one, two, maybe three or four tracks
even to start with as options. I drop them all on the timeline, and then that tells
me which track is the perfect track
to use for my edit. So let's now hop over
to Epidemic Sound. So there's a lot
of different ways that we can go about
finding our music. We can search, we
can go and browse by the different genres or
moods for this situation. Let's just go ahead
and go with genres. And for me, I have a pretty
calm way of speaking, and there's not a whole lot of high energy content that is going to be in this
specific lecture. So I want to choose a
pretty laid back track. So we're going to
go off with beats, and we're going to make
sure that we turn our instrumental on so that
we don't get any vocals, and let's go ahead and choose some of
the parameters here. We can do laid back We can also do more of a hip hop style. Let's do old school hip hop. Let's just play through
a few of these and I'll mention why I would or
wouldn't choose these tracks. And I'm going to go ahead and skip through these
songs as well, because we don't really need to hear the beginning to end. Okay, I actually
really like the song. So we're going to go
ahead and download this because this is
a solid potential. This is another good
option as well. It does have a slightly
slightly darker element to it. It's very subtle, so I'm not going to actually
download this option. Okay, so this actually
has a pretty cool sound, but this is a little bit too
laid back and too dreamy. When I hear this, and I consciously listen to how
this song makes me feel, I kind of want to
chill out, take a nap, and we don't want to go too far in one direction
with our music. Like I said, we don't want to have crazy heavy
metal that's too overpowering or ADM electronic
that's too high energy. And then we don't want to go to the other side and have
more of a Lula by track. That's going to bring down
the energy of our lecture. So it's really a fine line and
a balance of you listening subtly to how the
track makes you feel because that's how it's going to make your
audience feel. It's not something we need to overcomplicate or overthink. It's just a little bit
of an intuitive thing that we want to
pay attention to. Now that we've gone through our music library to find
some potential tracks, now I want to listen
to what we downloaded and then choose the
best one for our edit. I have our four tracks here. I'm going to go ahead and drag this songs folder into our edit I'm going to go ahead and
turn off the multicam view. I'm going to lock what
we've done so far so that I can just add
the songs underneath. So now we have our four
options in our timeline, and we're going to listen to how these tracks match up with
our audio of us speaking. So I'm going to bring down
the volume those in light. So there's going to
be eight main steps that we're going to cover to get your unedited raw photo
from your laptop or Okay. That sounds cool. Let's go
ahead and see our next option. So let's go now and do
this step by step process. Go over to my laptop
and navigate to the photo that I want to edit that has not
been touched yet. What I'm going to do is
go ahead and grab it, drag it and import it into li. So clearly, this
is more of a song that has a build and a drop. This is not the type of edit where we need
that type of energy. There's no build of
what we're doing. There's no drop with
an exciting part. We really want something
that's consistent throughout and has the
right amount of energy. So I'm gonna go ahead and
delete this track because it's got a little bit too
much of the EDM vibe. And let's play our next one. And welcome to Chapter
three of this course. In this lecture,
we're going to be talking about editing goof. Okay, so this one's got a little bit of a
goofiness to it. Photos in the light. Somehow, it feels
kind of more like a funny track for
a blooper reel, because we're not
trying to make our audience laugh and it's not maximizing the information
that I'm teaching, we're definitely going to delete that option. Okay? Next track. And welcome to Chapter
three of this course. In this lecture, we're
going to be talking about editing your photos. Actually, really like this song. It's kind of got a
Stranger Things vibe, but it definitely
feels more like a murder mystery trailer for
more of a crime scene show. This is not our vibe for
this specific lecture, so we're going to delete
that one as well. And what we have is
our Best choice. This has got the right
amount of energy. It's got a cool
lecture feeling to it. Editing your photos
in light room. So there's going to be eight main steps that we're going to cover to get your
unedited raw photo. So this is with
Laptop or computer and this is without
into Adobe Lightroom, edit it and exploit it. So let's go now and do this
step by hand, this is with. I go over to my laptop and navigate to the photo
that I want to edit. So it simply just kind of
keeps the edit moving forward. Having a track or music
in the background, keeps and makes things feel like they have
a forward motion. And I think it's
easier and feels more interesting for the student
to watch lectures with music. Now, with that said, you always want to
have your levels right where your speaking
is in the foreground, and the music is
in the background. So audibly, take a
listen and be sure that you're not
sacrificing the clarity and quality of your
voice for having that little bit of an extra
energy addition with music. And I will also just
mention one last thing, it is not 100% required
to have music. Some lectures don't need the m. You have to really use
your own discernment, and overall, it's not a must, but I would recommend
it because it does give a little bit extra production
value and a bonus for your students to
have to continue to watch all of your edits.
55. Add Photo and Video Assets: As we continue to upgrade the quality of our
video lessons, the next addition
that we can choose to use is photo or video assets. The goal of this is to
add additional context through choosing different
photos and videos that you've either filmed yourself
or you've found online. Now, what I want to
do is walk through this process and just talk about how we're
going to do this. So we have our edit cut
down, we've added music, and this next step is really
going to help to add value. So adding photos and videos as cutaway shots,
like I mentioned, is so that we can
further elaborate on what's being explained when
it comes to complex ideas, or things that need
to be more easily understood through
having more content. This can also add as a bonus, definitely a solid amount
of engagement by breaking up the speaking footage
with a variety of shots. As you can imagine, courses
can be pretty long, lectures can be pretty long. The more we're just
seeing your face, I'm sure people would
love to see your face. But it's just an
additional bonus add on to give a variance of
what the student sees because it keeps them
interested and wanting more. So the same principle for music is applied to
the visuals as well. They should add value and interest rather than
being a distraction. So we want what we
show on screen to be cohesive with what's
being said on camera. Let's take a look at one of the example edits
I pulled up and see how the additional
visuals we have add value. For this example lecture, what I want to do is actually
show you a lecture from a different course rather
than our edit here. Everything that the
student needs to see for this lecture
we did together, they see it on
camera and they see it on the laptop video angle. There's no real cutaways
that are going to add value to this
specific lesson. But I do have
another course where a lot of the lecture
is voiceover based, and it's almost all
cutaway shots that showing the student exactly
what they need to see at the exact moment. And we have made it
to the final step. Now it's time to really sit back and enjoy our masterpiece. And I really want to do
this MTV crib style. So let's get into this
transformation. And whoa. Who? I mean, this is the
thing of beauty right here. The space feels great. The lighting is exactly
what I was going for. All the little touches really brought the
whole thing together. And I love not only
filming and editing here, but seriously just,
like, chilling in here. And that was really the goal that we set out when
we first boomed. So as you can see, if this was just a visual of me
speaking to camera, it would not at all
have the value and information being
given to the student of what took place
in this lecture. So you really want
to map out and have an idea of where
in your lectures, it would be a value add
to have cutaway shots. Once you've mapped that out, you can go through and shoot
all of what we would call B role or a list of cutaway shots to add
into your lectures. Now, this is not 100%
needed just like music, so don't feel overwhelmed
or anything like that, this is just going to be
an additional value add. For this specific example, I went through and I
filmed all this content. But let's say, for example, we wanted to have cutaway shots that we didn't have footage of. There are options online, such as RID is one of my personal favorites because
just like epidemic sound, all their stock footage doesn't have that
stock footage feeling. That's one of the downsides
of online music libraries and online footage libraries is that they feel a
little bit fake. A lot of the footage on here is a lot more cinematic
and real feeling. The reason I want
to get away from that stock look
is because again, that might be something
that distracts the student of them thinking, I'm looking at stock footage. We don't want any of
those distractions. In my example lecture, let's say I didn't have
footage of studio lighting, for example, and that's something that I
was talking about. Let's go ahead and
search up and see if we can find an example
of studio lighting. Here we have some examples here. I just want something
where we can see the actual production
lights of a set. I'm going to go ahead and
open these in a new tab. Let's scroll and see
what else we have. This is cool. Again, I'm looking for something
that's going to add value and further
elaborate on what's being explained audibly.
Let's go ahead. Okay. Perfect. Let's go ahead
and grab this last one. It's a little bit of
the same process. We want to play our
footage or play the online footage rather and see what's going to
be the best addition. That's not really quite the
right vibe for the course. Same with this, a
little too dancy. Let's just say that this
was the perfect footage that we wanted to
find for our lecture. We would go ahead and go through the download process the same exact way that
we did for our music. We would drop it into
our edit and only try and use additional footage when it's actually adding value. That should give you some
context on when to add B roll or cutaway
shots to further explain and elaborate on
what's being taught on.
56. Add Text Animations: So, we've created our
initial rough edit. We've added music, and we've
added cutaway shots and B roll to upgrade the production
value of our lecture. In this lesson,
what I want to talk about is adding text animation to improve what's happening on screen inside of
our video lessons. Text can be used as
many different things. It can be used as title
cards for chapters, lesson names, key words
that you say, dates, times, and definitions
of important words that you mentioned to give the student just a little
bit of extra context. It should be used
as a tool to bring focus towards need to know
information on screen. What I want to talk about
is positioning, size, font, time on screen
because they all play a role in making the text that you're using effective
for the student. So what we're going
to do now is look at two past lecture examples to see the perfect
moment to add texts. And just like our
other production adding value additions, it's not 100% necessary, but adds value and
should be a tool that helps the student
in the learning process. So let's play through
this lecture and see how the text positively
affects the lecture. Now that we have literally
all of our elements in place, I want to walk
through a start to finish and a breakdown
on the lighting setup. So this is from square one. This is just the ambient
light that's in the room. And the first thing
that I'm going to do is start with turning on both of the practical lights
that we added to our shelves in
the background. H, yeah, and I forgot those
tiny string lights that I added to one of the vintage
cameras in the top left. And that's kind
of our base layer of what's going on
in the background. Now, the circular light is
also giving me a little bit of a rim light and a little bit of a kick on the left
side of my face. This is exactly what
you want to do in your setup is have
some kind of light, that's either giving you a
hair light on the top of your head or a rim
light around on your jaw or shoulder area
because it's going to give you a high light that's going to make you stand out
from the background. And boom, there is our
main lighting source, which is called our key light. This is the soft and diffused lighting
source that we set up earlier that's about 45 degrees off to one side of the camera. And this is where our rim
light in the background that's adding that high light on the side of my face
comes in Andy. So if I flip this
off real quick, you can really quickly
see that the side of my face opposite of my keylight, now kind of blends into
the background too much. Perfect. So you can see
we're using text on screen to list out and further show
a step by step process. As I scrub forward in this edit, we also have a second time when I use the text for a
slightly different scenario. So let's go ahead and
play this through and see how it's used. I opposite of my key light now kind of blends into
the background too much. It looks great. But if you're really wanting to get that professional look, then you really want to have some type of rim light
in the background. It could be a lamp, it could be an LED panel, whatever it is, just something that's gonna
highlight and outline the side of your body
opposite of your keylight. And our next edition is just that little splash
of background code. Like I said, this is
an excellent addition because with very little effort and a very low amount of money, we can instantly change the color palette and the emotion that our
backdrop is going to. So in this situation,
rather than listing out a step by step process, we're showing a with and
without a before and after, anything like that, which
would be a little bit confusing on screen
for the student, if there wasn't some type of text showing them what
they're looking at. So, this is a perfect
example of how to positively use text to further explain what's
happening on screen. That was just a few practical
use cases of using text. Now what I want to
talk about is more on the editing side of
the size of the text, the positioning of the text, and the time that the text
is spent on screen to make sure that you're giving the student the
information that is key. First up, we want to keep
the text in an area on the screen where it's going
to be clearly legible. This is done either
on the lower third, lower part of the screen,
it can be centered, it can be off to the left, or it can be slightly
off to the right, and it's just nice to find a
point on the actual framing, that the text can just be
nestled and fit into the frame. So you can mess with
the position to find what works best for
your specific framing. Once you find that, the
next thing is size. We want to find a comfortable
size that's legible. It's easy to read, and it doesn't take up too
much of the screen. So if we were to scale this up, This is definitely legible, and it's easy to read, but comparatively to the rest of the items in this
specific framing. This sizing is just way too big. Let's go ahead and
scale this back down. Boom. That's a more
comfortable text size while still being easy
to read on screen, really, there's no concrete
rule book for this. It's something that you
want to look at through the eyes of a student seeing
it for the first time. And that leads me to
time text is on screen. You really want for
your text to come up you read it as if it's
your first time seeing it and give an extra beat or two or an extra second or two for
just to hang onto screen, because the last thing
that you want is for important text to
come up on screen. The student doesn't
have enough time to see what's happening inside the video plus the text that's on screen, and
then it goes away. And then they're frustrated,
they have to rewind. You want the text
to do the opposite. So finding that perfect
little cushion of time is all about adding
your text letting it play, reading it twice,
and then having the text fade out
or animate away. So this should give you
a solid understanding of when, where, and why to add text on
screen for your edit. Now, because the process
of adding text for each software is so
vastly different. What I would recommend
after completing this lesson is going
and YouTubing or Googling online your specific
editing software and asking what the process is to add text on screen
for your edits. If you need to look up
a tutorial now before moving on to the next
lesson for your software, you can do that, and then I will see you in the next lesson.
57. Color Correction and Grading: Now what I want to talk about is color correction
and color grading. The goal of this
lecture is to fix any color inconsistencies
that you have with exposure, coloring or overall
aesthetic in your footage. We're going to do
that first with the color correction process. And then we're going to go into the color grading
process where we want to actually stylize our footage and give it a unique look. First, we're going
to color correct, do the color grading process, we'll review our changes
and then render our edit. So what I'm going to do
first is navigate to my editing tab in my
editing software. For Adobe Premiere, we
use L lumetry color. So go ahead now and find whatever color
correction software is correct for your
specific software. Now that I have my color
correction filter, I want to give a quick
little rundown of just these overall parameters so that you know how
they affect your image. If we start at the top,
we have temperature. This is going to
affect the blues and the orange
tint of our image. The higher the temperature, the more warm and
sunny our image feels, the lower, the more cold and wintry or blue our
image will have. The same goes for tint. In this parameter,
we're adjusting the purple to green
ratio of tint. So we use this to balance out the coloring
tint of our image. For example, if the skin on our image is looking
a little too purple, we would bring the tint
down to add green to our image to counteract
the purple tint. If our image was too blue, we would bring the
temperature up to counteract the excess
blue in our image. Saturation is next, and
that's pretty obvious, the lower the saturation, the more we go to
black and white, where the only values are the
highlights and the shadows. There's going to be no color. If we increase this, it
obviously does the opposite. So let's go ahead and
leave that at 100. Then we have our
overall exposure. What this does is it takes all the information
and pixels of our image and increases the
bright value of our shot. So we're going to go ahead
and put this back to zero. Then we have our contrast. The contrast is the
difference between the darkest part of the frame and the lightest
part of the frame. So if I take this
all the way down, we're going to decrease the separation and contrast between these two
points of our image. So a high contrast is
going to really crush and lower the blacks while
pushing up all the highlights. Put that back to zero. Then
we have just our highlights. This is increasing
the bright value of the bright parts
of the frame. For shadows, we increase the bright value of the
dark parts of our frames. For the whites and the Blacks, this is basically the same thing as the highlights and shadows. I'm not going to go into
detail on that because that is just slightly beyond
the scope of this course. For this example, let's just focus on adjusting highlights, shadows, contrast,
exposure, and saturation. Using these alone will give
you everything that you need to color correct
any footage you have. In looking at the shot,
It's pretty dark. We definitely can see that this wall is really
under exposed. The skin tone here is
slightly darker than normal, and the overall image
is feeling pretty dark. So what I'm going to
do first is start with boosting the exposure. This is going to raise
the overall values of the entire image. And once I do any
change to my image, you're always viewing
it in a still frame. But after you make the change, I always like playing the actual image because it's going to look
slightly different. You're going to see more when there's movement in the
image versus a still shot. So this is actually looking
a little too bright. Someone brings it down slightly. And now what I want to do is I like the exposure on the skin. And really, the most important thing
with color correction is dialing in proper
looking skin tone. It's not too over exposed, it's not too underexposed, and it looks as natural as possible as if you were seeing
it with your naked eye. That's really what throws off
the viewer the most is when the skin tone is not matching what it looks
like in real life. The skin tone here is
looking pretty good, but what I want to do is
bring up the shadows because this overall image is
still feeling pretty dark. I'm going to boost up the
shadows just a little bit. Now you can see some definition coming in the wall behind me, and the shadows aren't quite so contrasted and dramatic
on the sides of my face. We can just see real
quick before and after. This is our original image coming directly from our camera, and this is just with the slight little color correction that
we've done so far. And because I really
want you to dial in this proper skin
tone coloring, what I'm going to do
is with this image, our skin tone is
actually pretty good. But I'm actually going to put another color
correction layer on top to mess up the skin tone, and then we're going to use
our filter to balance it out so that just in case it's
happened to your footage, happens on a lot of cameras, you're going to know how
to fix your skin tones. So, real quick, I'm going
to add this layer on top. And I'm just going to
kind of randomly mess with the overall
temperature and tint here. 2020, boom. And you know, while we're at it. Let's just mess with
the saturation. So here's our image. This is what it
should look like. This is what it looks like if maybe your white balance
wasn't set properly. The lighting that was
in your scenario that you were filmed in was
not the most ideal Something happened where where the information that
was captured on the sensor of your camera just did not get proper
looking skin tones. So let's start by
undoing this problem. So let's say we had not
very looking skin tone. Right away, I can see that
we're obviously oversaturated, so I'm going to bring my
filter down a little bit. You can see if we zoom in, there's a lot of green and
it's just touting tan. So what we need to do is counteract the green by
bringing up the tint, AKA, the purple in our image, and then bringing
down the saturation. Okay. That's starting to look a lot more organic and
a lot more realistic. So that's before, that's after. Now in the next lecture, we're going to talk
about adding a lot and overall color grading to
stylize your footage.
58. In Depth Color Grading: Now we're going to talk
about color grading. And before we get into that, I also wanted to mention an important point with skin
tone and matching colors. So if we take a look
here, we have our ACAM, and what I did was I applied the same filter of color
correction to my BCM angle. Now, in my scenario, I'm using the same camera
with the same settings. So this filter matched
these two angles. But what you'll find is that sometimes you're using
two different cameras or maybe the white balance
or the overall saturation or the picture profile could be a lot of
different things, we're not set to the same
as your ACM and the BKM. So if that happens, you're going to use
that same process of adjusting your temperature
and your tint, your saturation, and
potentially your contrast, depending on how different the two angles look
so that you can get the same looking image
because what you don't want is for one camera to
look something like this. And then when you
cut to the BCM, the exposure, the values of the coloring and the
contrast are different. Why? Because as we know by now, we don't want anything
that's going to throw out our audience and create
any kind of distraction. So if you notice
this in your edits, take a little bit of
extra time to create a color correction filter
layer for your ACAM, and make a fine tuned slightly different version
for your secondary angle. That way, all the coloring and the exposure fits
together seamlessly. So with that out of
the way, now let's move to color grading. Now, this footage looks great. It's just not stylized yet. And this isn't an
additional extra step that you can choose to take, or you can simply choose
not to because courses are more about the information being explained and
given by the teacher. It's a very different
scenario with a music video, a documentary, a short film where
you do want to have a really unique stylization
and color scheme. Think of the matrix,
think of 300, think of these big movies where the coloring is very unique
and different from real life. So we can do that, but we really want
to keep it minimal. So when we're doing online
lessons or online courses, so when we're editing the
lessons for our courses, we don't want to
get too stylized, but I do want to just
cover briefly how you can upgrade and just overall
create a unique look. One of the easiest
ways is to simply adjust the shadow
tint of your image. You'll have to navigate to where that is in your
specific software. But what the shadow tint is going to do is it's
basically going to be similar to the temperature and tint parameters that we
already went over, but it's only going to apply that change to the dark
parts of the image. So if I move this around, you'll be able to see more of a blueness on the dark parts, more of a green, more of an
orange, and more of a red. So we'll be able
to warm things up, cool things down, get some more of that green
matrix type look. But it's only going to apply to the dark
parts of the frame, so it's not going to mess with skin tone as much as
if we did it up here. This is going to apply it
to everything in our image. Down here, we can
just change slightly the coloring of our darkest
parts of the frame. If we wanted to take
it one step further, we could then take
the highlight tint and go in the
opposite direction. This is going to create a more contrasted color
palette of our image. So here we're adjusting
more of the highlights, AKA, the lighter
parts of the frame, and the skin tone slightly. We can continue to
drag this up into the left to keep our skin
tones and our whites, this more tan warm feeling
and continue to bring down our shadows into more of a
blue cooler color scheme. This is without, this is with, this is without,
and this is with. Now, if I undo that, we have something called
Luts and what Luts are are pre created
picture profiles, essentially, that are an entire color correction
filter in itself. If I go to this first example, you can see the style is very, very crushed on the
blacks, very tan. Of course, it's too much
for the specific image, but I just want
to scroll through these different looks and
feels so that you can start to see the different custom looks that we can get
all from one image. This is with That's without. This is with, That's without, giving us a little bit more of a retro vintage
VHS kind of look. And there are so many
different kind of luts that should come with
your editing software. This has kind a cool
Instagram kind of vibe. And if I wanted
to apply to this, I would also need to
make sure to apply it to my secondary
angle as well. So here's what that looks like. And welcome to Chapter
three of this course. In this lecture, we're
going to be talking about editing your photos in light. So the goal of this
section was to first color correct
all of our footage, to make sure our inconsistencies
were all taken out, the exposure, the contrast, the saturation, the shadows,
and the highlights. After we did that, then
we went through and added just a slight
uniqueness of color grading and
potentially using a lot for our footage to give it a little bit
of at special saz. Now what we're going to do
is set the proper settings to export our lectures for
the right online platforms.
59. Export Your Lectures for All Platforms: Now it's time to export all the content that we've
been working on together. This is the final step of
the post production chapter. So what we're going to do is
do a mental checklist and walk through these
specific steps before hitting the
export button. You always want
to make sure that you've rewatched your lecture. And what I would highly
recommend is taking a break. Just take 5 minutes, take 2
minutes, go grab a coffee, do whatever you got to do,
walk away from your lesson, sit down and rewatch it. And this is what we
call quality control. Because these lectures
are going to live online and be seen by as many
students as possible. You want to take that
extra step to watch every second of every video
in every course that you do. Do not cut corners on this. Trust me. You want
to make sure that all the inconsistencies
are taken out, all the distractions are
removed, everything. All the coloring is the same. You really want to just double check all of these parameters. So always rewatch, and always
take a break in between so you can come back to your
edits with fresh eyes. This includes making sure all of the visual elements are properly synced up
with your audio, The color correction is done along with
the color grading. There's text that's been added, if needed for that specific edit without any mistakes
or spelling errors. And the audio levels between the speaking and the
music are correct. So when you're thinking
about all these, be sure to watch the edit
as if you're the student. Put yourself in the
mindset of the student, never seeing this before. Although you may have already seen it so many different times, you really want to put
yourself in the mindset of someone who's never seen
this content before. So let's actually go to
the end of our edit. So I've gone through, I've
done the quality control. I've re watched every
moment in this edit. Everything is synced up,
and now I'm ready to just refine and fine tune
the ending of the edit. Now, luckily, our music track, you can see it down here fades out right at the
end of our lecture, which is perfect because I would actually go and I would do this manually by key
framing with the pen tool, making the music go down, or I would go and grab a
cross fade to add to the end of the song so that the
music gradually comes down rather than abrupt ending
at the end of the video. So I'm also going to do that for our vocals
because we don't want any crackling or buzzing
or hissing that's in the background of our recording to just drop out at
the end of our video, cause that would
be a little bit of a distraction and a
weird way to end things. And lastly, I recommend adding a cross dissolve to the
end of your video footage. So let's just go
ahead and play this and see how it ends. Expo. And then hit Export. So you can see that
abrupt drop of frame from what we have on screen
to a black screen. It's okay. You're totally fine doing that, but adding a little bit of a
cross dissolve at the end, along with a cross fade on
the audio is just going to smooth and create a
nice gradual ending. Quality and then hit Export. Perfect. So you
can just see that subtle change really creates
a much nicer ending. So these are the final
steps you need to do for your lectures to ensure
quality control has been done. Now let's get into the
actual exporting formats for online use. First up, we have
anything for YouTube, VMO, or Linked in. We want to have our content
set to 16 by nine and export at ten ADP or four K. Next
up, we have Facebook. Now, for something that's
a news feed based platform like Facebook and
Instagram, 16 by nine, which is the traditional rectangular aspect
ratio that you see on TV and computer screens actually doesn't perform that
well for news feeds. So I'd recommend a one by one aspect ratio or a four
by five aspect ratio. And on Instagram, we
really don't need to go above ten ADP resolution because the platform
itself is not going to display four K images. Lastly is TikTok.
This is pretty much a strictly nine by 16 platform. You do not want to
use one by one, 16 by nine or any other
ratio besides nine by 16 because all of
those ratios are just simply not
optimized for TikTok. So now that you've
got your ratios down, let's make sure we
have our endpoint set at the beginning of our edit and our outpoint set
right when our edit ends. On premiere, the
shortcut for that is I for endpoint, O for outpoint, or you can simply drag these
points in the timeline. Now, I'm going to go up
to file, E export media. This is going to look
slightly different for whatever editing
software you're using, but it's the same principles. I'm going to ensure that
my file name is correct, which it is 3.1 photo
editing in Lightroom. Now, you always want to
make sure that you're using this numerical value at the beginning of
your export names. If I were to just use photo
editing in Lightroom, and then the next
lecture, let's say, was how to use color correction, Every time you export one of these and it goes in a folder
where you want to live, it's going to start organizing
these alphabetically. Everything is going
to get out of order. And once you have 100 lectures with all of your
edits out of order, it's going to be a nightmare. So you want to use your
chapter number followed by your lecture number or
lesson number for your title. This is going to
keep everything in a sequential ordering,
very, very key. You do not want to
get a messy folder with all of your edits
in the wrong order. After you label your lectures, make sure that you're
setting all of your exports to go to the
proper export folder, so I just created
a folder for it. And now we're going
to scroll through our presets to make
sure that we're optimizing all of our
content specifics for the platform
we're exporting for. When it comes to
exporting stuff to UTM, I basically treat these exports as if they were YouTube edits. So I use the same exact settings for uploading to UTME and all my other online course
platforms the same as YouTube. So I'm going to click
YouTube ten ADP. That's going to give
me the proper preset. I'm set to 16 by nine. The actual resolution for
that is 1920 by 1080. I always choose render at maximum depth and use
maximum render quality. It's going to take a
little bit longer for each one of your exports
to get exported, but it's just going
to create a little bit cleaner of a
final video file. Once you get to the audio tab, you always want to make sure your bit rate is set
to at least 320, Your channels are set to stereo, and that your sample
rate is set to 48,000. That about does it for
the export settings that you'll need to
really worry about. All of these other
settings are much more for a higher professional
level style of parameters that you
won't need to focus on for online course lessons. So I have everything
set up properly, and now it's time to hit export. Now that we're done
with this lesson, I also wanted to add a few more lectures
from a previous course where I do dive more into exporting for
multiple platforms, just to give you a little
bit more tips and tricks for anyone wanting to export your content for more
social media websites.
60. Course Image Overview: Welcome to Chapter seven. Now, we've gone through a lot of different stages of the
course creation process. So together, we've
completed a lot of content. And at this stage, what we're going to be doing is creating potentially one of the most important pieces of video content out of
this entire course, which is your course trailer. So in this section,
we're going to be putting together, writing, outlining, filming and
editing your course trailer. And on top of that,
we're also going to be creating kind of the second most important
piece of content, which is your course thumbnail. This is like your book cover, you're covered to your magazine, you're covered to your
movie that people see that catches
their eye and gets them to click on your very
course and potentially enroll. So let's get into it. So in this very first lecture, let's first dive into
our course image and really how to create an
eye catching thumbnail. Now, like I mentioned,
your course image is one of the most
important aspects of your course alongside your trailer and
your course title. So the best course image is eye catching while being simplistic, no extra bells and whistles, not a lot of texts, not a lot of extra or unnecessary details, but still gives your student a feel for what the
course entails. Now, there are two types
of course thumbnails. There are icon based
and photography based. And actually, let me
take a step back here. Technically, there
are three types. And the third type, which is what I would
recommend personally, which is blending
both types together. This is generally going to be the best looking course
image because it combines the best aspects of both of these
creative directions. So what creates a
good course image? We want to show your face. We want to use vibrant colors. We want to have
background imagery and symbols that are
relevant to the course, and we want to be
able to provide an easily understandable
image that shows the concepts that the
course is going to cover. What we don't want to
include, on the other hand, is excessive written text, complex images and
graphics, like I mentioned, stock footage that shows
faces or feels inauthentic, and just overall,
anything that's bland or generic
looking and feeling. So now that you have an
overview of what makes a good thumbnail and what
makes a bad thumbnail, we're going to dissect and dive into these three main types. Look at what works,
what doesn't work. And then we're going to do
a case study on some of my past course thumbnails that led to best
selling courses, and then you will create
your very own course image.
61. What Creates an Excellent Course Image: So the first type is really the icon based course thumbnail. This shows what the
course entails, but it's a little too generic and doesn't really
catch the student's eye. The positive, though, is
that it allows for you to show in a very simple way
main themes of the course. For example, with what
we see here on screen, this is a photoshop course, we see an instantly recognizable And it
offers something that's familiar to what a
student would pick up on and should be connecting to
what they're looking for. So you can use really
simple imagery like this, but the downside is that it's going to have a generic
look and feel and not really stand out against the s of other courses online. Now, the next style is a
photography based style, where we use real life
imagery that can show you, which is an excellent plus.
It can have more color. But what it's really missing is what the course
actually teaches. Remember, I said it's key that we do want to
show your face, but we also want the
student to be able to get a feel for what they're actually going to
learn from the course. Now onto the third style, which blends together
the best parts of both of the previous styles. So what this is
doing is conveying all the information
that's going to be in the course
or a gist of it. And it's got a more unique
feeling. It's more stylized. It has the pop of color. It has the vibrance. It shows something that's
instantly recognizable. We see a photoshop icon, and adobe illustrator icon
and an in design icon. It also shows students
in the background, so it has a little bit of
that real world photography. Although it doesn't show the teacher, which
would be ideal, this is still a great
example of how to create an eye catching and
informative course image. So we want to think of this a little bit like a
YouTube thumbnail. You're going to click
on the one that's eye catching, that hooks you. It shows it before and after, or it shows something
that piqus your interest. Now, with thumbnails, I
will say, on YouTube, they do go in a little bit more of the dramatized
thing where they exaggerate certain things or they're a little click baby. We want to be careful on having something that
catches our students eye without ever over promising
and under delivering. So you don't want to do any
crazy before and afters. You just don't want to
do anything that's too sensationalist and comes
off as in authentic. So now that we have that
understood a little bit more, let's look at a few more
good and bad examples so that we really lock this in because the course image is so important for
your course success. So on the left here,
we have something that conveys business, collaboration,
and productivity. Now on the right, we
have something that shows the similar type of
theme that we want to say, but it feels pretty dang stock, pretty dang generic, even though it's people
in business suits. They're doing a handshake, so it offers a little bit of the same theme
of collaboration, working together and teamwork. So you're conveying
the same message, but doing it on
the left in a way that feels cool,
engaging and organic. And on the right, this is a bad example where we'd want to stay from showing stock footage
of other people's faces, especially if it
feels flat and bland. And the other reason it
feels flat and bland is that there's really no color on
this image on the right. The image on the left, on the other hand
has a pop of blue, and it has an overall feeling of movement and productivity. Now let's take a look
at the bottom example. So this is for a techy
coding type of course. On the left hand side, we have a simple
image that clearly conveys coding and programming
and using technology. On the right hand side, we have more of a goofy, messy look that shows a bit of an odd picture with someone looking directly at the student, which naturally feels a
little bit uncomfortable. There's too many key words, or there's too many words, I mean, and symbols
in the background. And there's just really not aesthetically
pleasing looking large green font in front of the subject of this
specific thumbnail. So, again, we're
conveying the same thing, that this is a coding
and programming course, but we're doing it in a
way that's clean, simple, eye catching on the
left, and messy, dirty, and something that the average
student would probably scroll right by this
example on the right. Now, in the next lesson, what we're going to do is
create a course image, using the best of all of
these examples, icons, graphics, real world
photography, and simplicity. So I recommend either pulling a photo that you
have of yourself that looks professional
and would match with the vibe and theme of your
course you've been working on, or you can pull a screenshot
from your camera angle of you actually being on camera in one of your
course lectures. Then we're going to add some elements in
the foreground and background to create
an eye catching image.
62. Case Study: Successful Course Image Examples: Now let's get into
the actual process of creating your course image. Like I mentioned, we want
to be able to use icons. We want to be able to use
graphic design elements, but ideally we have something that's authentic and relatable by showing you the instructor of the entire course in
the image itself. What I want to do
is break down and really do a case study on two of my course images that led
to best selling courses. So here we have
the video editing master class course
image slash thumbnail. So course image and
course thumbnail can be used interchangeably. But if we break this down, what we have is me, the teacher in the foreground, a laptop that's
conveying something about using a computer to
create something, right? AKA editing. And I
added these symbols that would be easily recognizable to someone
who's familiar with editing. And on the right, we really
have symbols that are worldwide and recognizably
known by anyone. We have play button, the pause
button, the stop button. Fast forward, rewind
all those things. So that gives another feeling
of something video related. We then have the cinematography master class thumbnail as well. This gives a feeling of, ok, the teacher is
holding a DSLR. Meaning there's going to be something that's
going to be filmed, and then also holding
a smartphone, meaning that it's going
to be applicable not just for professional
filmmakers, but also the mobile
modern day person that wants to shoot stuff
on their smartphone. So before you go and you
create your thumbnail, you want to ask yourself, what would be the
most ideal image for the student to see to perfectly
understand the course, what the goal is, what the
transformation is going to be, and what the information
is going to be taught in the actual lectures. So what I highly
recommend doing is brainstorming handful of ideas. You could have yourself holding a certain tool or a
certain piece of gear. You could have
yourself in action. You can have yourself in the actual space you're
shooting in. It really depends. If you're doing a
painting course, you probably want to hold the
tools that a painter would hold so that someone could
instantly recognizably see, that's what the course
is going to be about. So that's the overall theme and direction we want to go in. Now, let's actually break down the editing files of these
actual course thumbnails so we can see how we got from a raw image to the final
exported refined image. Alright, so we are
in After Effects. Now, I might be crazy because
I don't use photoshop. I really like the layout
of After Effects. I've used it for over a decade, and I edit my photos that need photoshop type of editing
in After Effects. So don't judge, but you can use any kind of editing
software that you have. Okay? So let's now click into
what we've got going on. So I took my original photo,
which is this right here. Me standing in front of
this is really not clean. This is actually pretty wild. This is the way that I did it. But I at least got
the lighting right. So I had a little bit of
a hair light over here. I had my key light
off to the side, and I knew the
overall positioning that I wanted to convey. I wanted to be holding
something to the camera. So I did a few
different options, some testing, some
different positioning, because I had a just direction, but I didn't know exactly which
thing I was going to use. I then pulled some
stock photos from online that I felt would
do well in the background. So we have some of
these, just really stock images that I searched up
that conveyed cinematography. So I was typing in lenses, cameras, aperture, F stop. And once I found what I felt was going to do well
in the course image, I first tried to rotoscope or mask out myself so we can
cut out the background. And I tried to do this little four block thing
in the background, which I've done in
a previous course, and the final product actually
turned out pretty well. But for this course,
in particular, for whatever reason, it
just wasn't working. So this was my V one, and
I do want to mention, your first edit doesn't mean it should be the final one
that all your students see. Feel free to make
multiple revisions, multiple edits, and
multiple styles. So that you can land
on the final one that's actually really awesome. And so, as I was saying, this one wasn't the final. I thought this is what I
wanted to do was basically to show the different aspects of cinematography
in the background. So you want to
think in metaphors, and you want to think in just
overall examples of showing the students visuals
that give them a sensation of what the
course will entail. So we have lenses in all
things cinematography related. So as you pull and
choose stock photos, make sure that they're not
going to be bland and boring, and they're also
going to be pushing towards the theme of the course. Now, because this option
really wasn't working. What I ended up doing was trying something in a slightly
different direction. So I found two similarly
colored images that had a warmth to them. They felt engaging,
and they just felt aesthetically
pleasing to look at. This is cracking me up
seeing this holy mole. So what I did was took
those and I replaced the four block images with these two much more
simplistic two part images. And I felt that this had
a way better balance. It wasn't confusing and
overly complex for the eye, and it was easy to look at. Now the next step, so this is it without me, and
this is it with. So without, we could
have had this and it would have been
telling the same story. Okay, this must be a
course on filming, but it wouldn't have the relatablenss of having
the teacher on screen. Now the next thing
that I did was replace what was on
my phone because this was a pretty front facing
part of the image. So you can see that's actually
what was on my phone. And I went ahead and I pulled another stock footed
shot that was a BTS angle of someone filming. And that's what I put
on the actual phone. And what that translates to is a final product
that tells a story. It's engaging, there's
color, you see the teacher, and the student knows
exactly what they're getting into when
they see the image.
63. Additional Course Image Editing Breakdown: Because I really want you
to land the concepts on the different directions
that you can go in with the essential course image. We're going to look
at a second option. So let's check it
out. Here we have the course image for the
editing master class. So we took a look at the
cinematography course. Now we're looking at the post
production editing course. And I want to just break down the different layers
that's going on here. We could have easily just had meat right there as
a teacher on camera, but that doesn't add any of the little extra eye
catching qualities that we want to make sure
our course image has. So you can see if
we break this down, we have all the
different layers of icons that are relatable to the course and add
just a little bit of extra special sauce. And because color is one of the most important factors for catching people's attention. If you know, in a lot
of advertisements, companies use a lot of red, they use yellow, anything
that's eye catching, I chose to do a nice,
vibrant orange. So if we undo our gradient of color that I added to
these arrow elements, you can instantly see how this image loses its vibrancy and loses its eye catchingness. If that is a word, I'm
going to use it as a word. So what you want to
do is be sure to have icons that are also
colored, not just you, not just your background, but anything that you add
on top in the foreground, it's got to have a
vibrant look and feel. The other thing that's
different about this option is my last
thumbnail that we went over, I did an actual photo shoot
for that specific image. So I thought about what would be the most traumatic eye
catching style for me, the teacher to be in, and
I went out and shot it. For this example, all I did was a screenshot still image of an actual video lecture
in the course itself. So if I open the sub,
you can actually see, this is just part of
one of my lectures, and I went through
it and grabbed the moment that I felt would
make a good still image. So even if you don't
have the time or energy to go do a
photoshoot for your course, you can still scrub through
and pull a still image. And there's going to be
two ways to do that. In your editing software, there's going to
be some style of a freeze frame or a
frame hold option. So if you have your
footage and your timeline, you want to right click it, have the player head
at the point of the actual video file itself
that you want to freeze. After you right click it, look for the term frame hold, freeze frame or
something similar. Once you click that, it's
going to instantly create a frozen image in time of that video clip that you can
then use as a still image. The other option is
to scrub to where you want to do a screenshot
of the image. Open up a photo editing
software similar to what we have for
MAC, which is preview. Depending on if
you're on Mac or PC, it's going to be called
something slightly different. But whatever it is, find a photo editing
software on your laptop that allows for you to take
a screenshot of your video. Once you do that, navigate
to the selection tool, and you can go ahead and shoot a still shot of that video clip. It's going to export,
it's going to go to your downloads folder
or your desktop, and then you can drag it into the photo editing
software that you're using to add icons and
imagery on top of that image. Then what I do, once I have
everything nicely placed, and the composition
looks and feels good for my image. I then export it. And what I'm going to
actually do real quick before exporting is I'm
going to show you the final step of this process. So I'm going to drag
an adjustment layer on top of my content. I'm going to add a color
correction filter, and I'm going to bring down the exposure to make it
a little bit more dull. And I'm going to bring
down the saturation to do the same thing as well. So now we don't have
quite as much of a e catching image, but
we're going to fix that. So I'm going to go ahead
and export this out as a JPEG. Okay. Boom. And then I'm going to
drag it into Light room. So if you have light room, you can use it to add a little bit more
gloss to your image, or if you have photoshop or any other editing software
that you're comfortable with. As a final step, I always
pull my thumbnail into photo editing software
just to gloss it up and enhance the colors
and the overall clarity. Perfect. So we
have our thumbnail inside of our editing software. And now, the reason I'm
doing this is because maybe the content you have doesn't quite have that
final glossy layer. And because this is an addition
I always do at the end, we want to bring
up the vibrancy, bring up the saturation, make sure our
colors are popping, and make sure that our
overall image isn't dark. We want to stand out against all the other thumbnails
that it's going to be by, because you want to keep in mind your thumbnail is not going
to be standing on its own. It's going to be in a library with hundreds and hundreds
of other thumbnails. So go ahead and take the time to change the
parameters of the exposure, the saturation, and get
it to a point where you feel like it really feels like there's
energy in the image. So I'm going to sharpen
this up a little bit, and I'm going to add
some noise reduction and just smooth out
the overall image. I'm going to bring up the
vibrancy a little bit more. And here's before. That's
not going to stand out in a sea of
other course images, and here's the After. This is really a lot
more eye catching and has a lot more vibrancy. Once I have that dial in, I export it at the highest
settings possible, and then I bring it into
whichever platform, I'm hosting my course online.
64. What Makes a Great Trailer: Should now be having an excellent looking course
image that's going to draw in students to check
out your course and then see your course trailer. So that's what we're going
to now shift our focus to is focusing in on how to
create an epically awesome, really engaging and fun
to watch course trailer. Now, what makes a
good trailer and what makes a good
effective promo? So, here are the
main six parts that make an excellent looking
and sounding trailer. The first part is going to
be your introductory hook. This is the sentence or
statement or even a question at the very beginning that
opens up your trailer. The next part is establishing
instructor trust. This comes down to
social proofing and why you're qualified
to teach this topic. Think back to the beginning of this course when we were talking about the reasons a student purchases a course
in the first place. There's a trust and there's value being established
that the teacher is conveying that they feel like they're going to gain something
from pursing the course, and they're not going
to do that unless there's trust of the teacher. Social proofing is a
great way to do this. AKA is saying that this
is your fifth course, and you have 100,000 students and you've
helped this many people. You don't have to use that exact phrase if it's not true for you, but you want to say
there's some type of certification that
you've attained or done or your years of
experience that allow for you to be the proper
teacher for that course. Next are the key benefits. What is the epic
amount of value that the students are going
to gain from the course? You want to list
these things out. You want to say, you're going to be able to do this, this, and this by the end
of this course, and they have to be big, big, key value items. Next is the demographic. You want to speak directly
to your audience. Like we mentioned before, you don't want to be speaking bro style like a surfer if
you're speaking a businessman, and the opposite is the same. So take the things
that we learned in the previous chapters and
combine those and use all those elements
into your trailer to really speak to the
right target audience. Next is the transformation. You already are clear on this because we went
through this process. Now you're stating
it for your student. So you want to say clearly
in one to two sentence, what is the massive change
that they're going to have in their life from
taking your course? Lastly, is a call to action. This is what you
want to end with. So now that you've
inspired your students, you want to tell your
potential student what the next step
is to get started. It could be something like, so, if you're ready to enroll, you can click the
sign up button, and I'll see you
inside the course. It's a simple little
nudge on giving them the next step for them to do
after seeing your trailer. So if you work these six fundamental elements
into your trailer, it will be a successful
sales tool and really inspiring piece of
content that you can share on social media and have on
the main landing page of your course to really
drive tons of sales. So you can take this structure
of these six elements and remix it and have as much creative
freedom as you'd like, just be sure to find a way to organically fit in
these six main points. So now that we have
that, let's look at some past scripts and see how they translated from
written on a piece of paper to the final
product on camera. So just be sure that while you're watching these examples, to pay attention to the
delivery, engaging the students, the ideal demographic
is being addressed, there's a concise list of benefits from
taking the course, and also pay attention to
the ending call to action. So in the next lecture, we're going to watch
all of these examples.
65. In Depth Trailer Script Template: So what I want to do now is dive deeply into this trailer
creation process. We already know how
important it is. We've already taken care
of our course thumbnail, and now we're going to
create this piece of content and write
it in a certain way to make what you're speaking about as
engaging as possible. So what I want to start
with is taking a look at the trailer script template
I put together for you. And this is also a
downloadable PDF, so you will be able
to download a copy of this onto your phone
or on your laptop. Now, I broke this down
into four main sections. So we have our big
intro moments, our two liner examples, and then our ending
call to action. And what I first want to do is briefly just touch on what
each one of these moments do. And then we'll go into the
actual video examples and real scripts that were used
to create past trailers. So, like we already mentioned
for our big intro moment, we want to hit the student with a cool breakthrough
ah ha moment, epic realization type of
feeling, right out of the gate. So what I put together
are some prompts that you can use and
replace these XYZ. XY Z just means
this is an example. So one misconception
about XYZ is dt, dt, dt, when the truth is actually
XY Z. Okay? Next one. I've been an X Y Z
since da da da da, and I've never heard anyone share this in this specific way. So these are set up in a certain
way to create inspiring, fascinating facts
and a paradigm shift in someone's
understanding of a topic. Another example, the
biggest misconception I've heard about dot
dot dot is this, but actually, it's all
about dot dot dot. So that sentence is
structured and set up in a way that's going to
catch someone off guard, where they think they
understand something, and they hear you say it in a different way.
Boom, they light up. They start listening
to what you're saying. They're not scrolling through
their news feet anymore. You've caught them off guard, and you've hooked them
with an intro moment. So you can get as
creative as you want and expand beyond just
these examples, but I put these together
to really give you a concrete direction to go towards for these intro moments. The next section is our first
part of two liner moments. So these are fun, quick, fast paced lines that aren't really teaching, but
they're inspiring. This acts as a way to
really continue to hook the student in while also showing that you know what
you're talking about. And the perfect example of this is this Neal the
grass Tyson trailer. So let's go ahead and
watch this for a second. The great challenges in
this world is knowing enough about a subject
to think you're right, but not enough about the
subject to know you're wrong. There's like a gazillion
hours of me on the Internet. In almost every case, I'm talking about the universe, black holes, the big
bang, time travel. God. What I'm going to do in this master class
is how to think. Boom. So he's not actually
teaching in this trailer yet. He's just spinning out
these epic, cool, quick, fast paced lines that get you engaged and get you excited
right out of the gate. So that is the goal of
these two first sections. We have a big moment with an intro sentence that
hooks the student. And then we have a bunch of these recorded quick one liners that aren't
necessarily teaching, but they're a little zesty. There's a little
spiciness to them. After that section,
then we want to actually move into takeaways. That are pronounced and that are explained a little bit more
methodically and slowly. We're actually sharing
teachings in this, let's say, third
act of the trailer. So, for example,
this first line, now we're at my favorite part. This is where we take X Y Z, and this is how you make it dat, dat, dat or the next one. These techniques are perfect
for the blank person that wants to really boom
boom boom with their life. Or what we're doing in this learning lesson is
dt dt dt and data dat, that way, you'll really
be able to do da dat. So, again, these are just
structured sentences that will allow for you to drop in your knowledge,
your information, your specifics on the
topic you're teaching to create not just the
inspiring sentences, but actually show
a little snapshot of what's being
taught in the course, AKA, the takeaways that the
student is going to have. So if we move on to now
Act four of our trailer, this is where we've inspired,
we've hooked the student. We've given a little bit of insights on the
takeaways of the course, and we're doing it
in a creative way because we can easily just list out that you're going to be
able to do this, this, this, but putting it in a more zesty sentence format is what's going to make
your trailer not boring. So on the final act, after we've delivered
all these lines, now it's about your
call to action. And some of the best
ways I found to wrap up Act three of the
trailer and get in Act four is with a few
of these sentences. These will help you
get out of the fun inspiring moments
and into the slower, more heartfelt final statements. So, this class is an
invitation to learn on your own terms and truly
become an XYZ or dot dt, dt and really be
able to dt dt, dt, or each one of these
lessons, premium, dot, dot, and blank, blank, blank will give you the tools you need to finally And then
that's where you would insert the ending transformation
of the entire course. So this is a perfect time to put those big transformation
statements. And then we can end the trailer with a final call to action. An example of that would be so, if you're ready to get started, you can hit the enroll button, and I'll see you
inside the course. Simple, straightforward,
doesn't have to be complex. You can use that exact CTA, or you can remix it in
any ways that you feel creatively works best
for your speaking style. Now that we've seen this trailer script that
you can download, let's now take a look at
some past trailers that I've written and see what
the written version looks like versus
the final edit.
66. Case Study: Trailer Script and Final Product: Let's hop right into
this. And let's take a look at the trailer that I put together for my create your
own filming studio course. So if we look here
at our first lines, so you want to create
your own filming space. I ask a question right off the bat to try to
hook the student. I wanted to create my
own filming space, too, and that's how I went from this, and then in parentheses,
Snap to this. So I already knew
creatively ahead of time, I wanted to do a really
cool before and after video example of my
two different setups. And I wrote this really in my own speaking
style. So, Ooh, Wait. Wait, wait, wait,
wait. Now, let's do this MTV crib style. Now, that's a joke
that most people would understand because they've
all seen that show MTV Cribs. So I would highly
recommend trying to inject a little bit of
comedy, a little bit of joking, a little bit of anything
that's going to break up the mundaneness of another course trailer yeah they're going to
buy it or not buy it, but probably going to
be bored watching it. We want to break that mold
up as much as possible. So this was this whole kind of section here is a little bit of my non teaching
introductory hook moments. That's a lot different than the Neil D grass Tyson
version that we saw, but still gets the
point across of engaging the student
without coming off as salesy or trying to really over promise on how wildly impactful the course
is going to be. So, we use a little
bit of humor, a little bit of authenticity to get them into the
beginning of the trailer. And then we go to next parts. Yes. Now, you want to
know how I did this. Another question that's
addressing the student directly, which is a very important part. You want to talk to the one
person on the other side of the screen that's potentially going
to buy your course. So have that target
student in mind. And then I say, Okay, awesome, because I film this exact
step by step process that it takes to find your design inspirations, create
your concepts, buy the right kind of equipment, build your entire
studio, and finally, use the best settings
and lighting techniques to shoot amazing looking and
sounding videos from home. A little bit of a run on
multi sentence there. But what we're doing is
getting the point across of the big teaching takeaways that the student
is going to get. So this is essentially
Act three. And it doesn't have to be
this cookie cutter way of copying and pasting
these exact sentences, because technically, none
of these sentences are really in this specific version. But I still used the same four act
structure of the trailer. After we delivered what they're going to get
from the course, now we get to the final more slowly delivered
closing statements. So if you're ready to upgrade your video quality and create a space that you love
working in, filming in, and simply just enjoy being in, then you can hit
the enroll button, and let's get to work building your own custom filming space. So on paper, there's nothing too crazy or out of
the ordinary that this is not an amazingly
written or produced script. But what I want you to do
is to when you're writing your sentences out to have in mind what the student
should be seeing. So when we watched
this example of what the final product looked
like in video form, going into it in the
creation process, I had mapped out what the
cutaway shots were going to be, what I needed to film, and what should be seen by
the student while watching these different lines that
I presented on camera. So now let's watch
this final edit. So you want to create
your own filming space? I wanted to create my
own filming space, too. And that's how I went from this and made it look like this. Oh. Actually, no. Wait,
wait, wait, wait. Let's do this MTV crip style. And Yes. Now, you want to know
exactly how I did this. Awesome, because I filmed the exact step by step
process that it takes. To find your design
inspirations, create your concept, buy the right kind of
filming equipment, build out your entire
home studio, and finally, Use the best video settings
and lighting techniques to shoot amazing looking and sounding videos right from home. So if you're ready to upgrade your video quality and create a space that you
love working in, filming in, and simply just
really enjoy being in. Then you can hit
the enroll button, and let's get to work building your own custom filming So now that we've got that
first example out of the way, I want to show you
just one more example that has a totally
different approach. So my beginning
hook line was, Hey, this is a trailer for my 16 hour video editing master class. What this allowed me to
do is to really focus on one of my biggest
selling points of this specific course, which is the running time. 16 hours is a pretty
decent size online course. So I knew that ahead of time, and I wanted to use that as an impactful opening statement
to catch the student. And after delivering that, I knew from a creative
standpoint that I wanted to not list out all of the benefits or the
takeaways of the course. Verbally, because there are so many for this
specific course, because there's so many chapters because post production
is so complex. Because of that, I
wanted to do things slightly differently where
I didn't say them verbally, I actually listed them
out on screen as text. So this is a great example of how to properly
use text on screen. Hey, this is a trailer from my 16 hour video
editing master class. So just in the first 10 seconds, we've given the student tons of information on what
the course entails. If I were to do that sentence
by sentence verbally, it could have taken
twice or three times the amount of time to convey that same
amount of information. So next up, with this, after that intro moment, we've gotten a lot of
information across. We've kind of already covered Section two of this outline. After that, we go into
phase three of our outline, where we're talking
about the techniques and takeaways a little bit more deeply and a little
bit more methodically. So let's look at
what was written. This is about learning how
to bring a higher level of awareness to all the
videos that you create. That awareness is going
to lead to you creating videos that actually have
meaning and purpose. So a lot less on the
technical side and really trying to resonate more
with how the student is going to feel
Sometimes it's good to focus not on numbers or
things that are analytical, but it's what's called future
pacing for the student. When we future
pace in a trailer, we're telling the
student, basically, imagine what it's going to feel like to be able to do this. Imagine if you could create videos that you loved
and you were proud of. You're putting
them in that state and getting them to
feel the feelings and satisfaction of
being able to do and get that transformation that they want from taking your course. So future pacing
is a great way to balance out moments
like this where we say, over 150 learning lessons, 300 gigs of steamable
content, lifetime access, and five professional
level projects with downloadable Raw footage. That's a very laundry
list item of Wow. That's a ton of value. But the opposite way to give value is to talk about how
they're going to feel, how their life is
going to change and what they're going
to be able to do now with the information
that's inside the course. So let's go ahead and
watch the rest of this trailer and see
what else we can learn. And this is so
much more than you just learning how to properly
edit a good looking video. This is about
learning how to bring a higher level of awareness to all of the videos
that you create. That awareness is
what's going to lead to your videos actually having
meaning and purpose. So I want you to finally take that footage that's
been sitting on your phone, on your laptop, and
use these techniques to create and edit videos
that make people go boss. You're going to walk
away with all of the most important
editing fundamentals and techniques all organized
in one single course. So if you are ready
to get inspired, build confidence and create videos that you are
truly proud of, then you can hit
the enroll button, and I will see you inside. Perfect. So as you can see
at the very end there, we appeal to their
main transformation that they're going
to walk away with the most important
editing fundamentals and techniques all
organized into one course. So it helps to really end with a big final
transformation statement. And that's when you can segue into your final call
to action of telling them what to do now that
they're so inspired and ideally ready to
purchase your course.
67. Trailer Review and Recap: Now you should have
all the tools and techniques to be a
trailer writing pro. But what I want to quickly do is recap the most important
points that we covered so that you can get into the filming process of
creating your trailer. And quickly, one additional
thing I did want to throw in here is
that it also helps to go and look
online to see what other trailers are already out there in your specific
topic and genre. So what I traditionally
do is I go on UT to me, and I look up trailers for
courses that I'm going to be working on next or for the trailer that I'm
currently working on. This is going to show you what people aren't doing
that's working well, and what people aren't
doing that you can bring to the table with a
fresh perspective. So if I were to look up the top performing
photography courses, because as you know by now, the next course I'm working
on is my photography course, let's go ahead and see
what trailers are out. And here is the first example. That looks great.
Now, front light gives you really nice colors. So, for example,
through our flowers. We've got gray leaning
against a tree. Jane sitting kind of on her hip in between Ray's
legs, leaning on his knee. Don't you just love
taking photos. It's such a great
pastime, isn't it? And so rewarding, as well. Well, I think so, anyway, and I guess you do, too,
if you're watching this. Hi, I'm Bernie Rafi, a professional photographer
and teacher based in the UK. In this course on how to
become a better photographer, you'll not only learn about your camera's various
settings and features, but you'll also learn some
of the neat composition, posing and lighting tricks used by professionals to
get more creative, dramatic and polished images. Okay, great. So we're 59
seconds into this trailer, and I've already pulled some
great insights from this. Once he actually got into the content where we
saw him on camera, and he started speaking
about the benefits of the course is pretty solid, but I did notice that
it took a while to get there with a little bit of an
outdated production style, editing style, motion
graphic style, and overall font choice. So knowing that tells me, I want to get right into
the teacher being on screen right away,
engaging the student. Now, if we go to
our next example, let's see what we can find. Do you have a beautiful
fancy camera, but you always use
it on auto mode. Maybe you look at all
the different settings and don't know where to start, so you end up
feeling overwhelmed. And when you look at the manual, it feels like you need a degree in physics to understand it. Well, don't give
up and resort to just taking photos
on your phone. Your camera really is capable of those beautiful photos you
dreamed of when you bought it. You just need a helping hand
to show you how to use it. I'm Rosie Parsons, and
I'm an award winning professional photographer
with ten years experience. My 12 week camera settings course is
the perfect guide for total beginners to help you start unlocking the
potential in your camera. Each week we'll look
at things like what aperture means and how
that affects your photos. Where do we adjust
it on the camera? And how do you know
what settings you should choose in
different situations? Okay, cool. So she does
a pretty good job of addressing the student with a question right
out of the gate, just as if she read
our main script that we were creating
our trailers off of. So she does a good
job with that. What I'm noticing is it would
be really cool to see more behind the scenes content of getting your hands
dirty with the cameras, the lenses, the
lighting, being onset, shooting with the subject,
being in cool environments. So I know from seeing my competition of trailers
that they're producing, that I go to want
some more action, exciting and inspiring
B roll cutaway shots. So I'm going to be sure that as I'm brainstorming and
planning out my trailer, I want to write that stuff very concisely into my course
or trailer outline. So really be sure
you get online and you look to see
what's out there. And when you get to
the writing process, I highly recommend
starting with a statement or question to really
hook the student. Alternatively and more
of an old school style, is you can say, welcome to
this blank blank course. I would not recommend that, but I do see a lot of teachers saying that
right out of the gate. It's okay because you do want to address the name
of the course, because the name of
the course should tell the student what
they're going to gain. But I would suggest doing a little bit more of a talkative, engaging type of
statement or question. Then we want to give a
one to two second intro that tells the audience
why you're qualified. You can do this
with text on screen that says your name, with
your qualifications, or you can find a cool, creative way to slide
that information into your script in a way
that doesn't sound forced. After that, you want to get into all of the benefits
from the course and what students are
going to be able to do after completing it. These are the main takeaways, and you want to
remember to speak to your specific audience that we found in the
beginning chapters. And remember to be
specific and concise with the skills and concepts that they're going to learn
in the course itself. So think of the smaller skills that you can convey on camera in the trailer that
are going to lead to the students larger
transformation. After you've inspired,
you've hooked the students, you've showed them what
they're going to gain. We have a strong
ending statement. We want to have a strong
ending statement, and then we do our call to action to let them know
what the next step is. And once you have
this framework, I really recommend adding your own unique creative flare of personality and authenticity. So this is designed to
be used as a blueprint. I want you to use
the downloadable PDF and all the direction
that we've talked about as a baseline for your creativity to
build on top of. So you're creating a
really unique trailer that uses different
ways of filming, and then you really end up with a final product that's
uniquely yours.
68. Learning Activity: Film Your Trailer: Now you're ready to finally
film your course trailer. And what we want to talk
about now is really involving all of the aspects and teachings from this course. So when we talked
about stuff like Mindset for your lessons, we also want to apply
this for your trailer, because your trailer,
as you know, is going to be your most
watched video lesson essentially of your
entire course. So it's the best
to shoot this as well within a few
days of shooting all your course lectures so that the benefit and all the
content is fresh in your mind. And you really want to go
all out on the set design, the background, and just
the overall aesthetic. So try to add as
much as you can, just like in the course image
to make things vibrant, unique, and really uplevel
as much as you can with your wardrobe and your on
camera speaking persona. You want to be positive, upbeat. I know that sounds obvious, but sometimes we can
forget to turn it up just a little bit like we learned giving that extra 10%, right? So I really recommend doing
a test run all the way through your trailer and reviewing it before calling
it a day on filming. Taking that little extra time is going to make this
trailer that much better because it's essentially
going to be living online for as long as the
course is going to live online. And when you're onset with
your outline or your script, you want to read things in a way that doesn't
sound scripted. So use everything that we talked about in the previous chapters about gestures, pauses,
inflections, pacing, and eye contact, even though you're reading
from a script, you want to still connect
with your student. And the cool thing about
the trailer is that you do not have to pull it
all off in one take. It's different than the lessons in that way that it's totally cool to read your content
phrase by phrase. So what I generally
do is read one to two lines at a time in two
to three different ways. That way, in post production, I have a few different
personality styles, and I can get that
really strong hit on each line that's as engaging
as possible for the student. So, for example, going back
to the editing course. This first line, I'd
read it mentally to get it basically
partially memorized, Hey, this is a trailer for my 16 hour video
editing master class. I would look at it, and
then I would go to camera, and I would deliver it two
to three different ways. So I'd be like, Hey, this is a trailer for my 16 hour video editing master class. That's one way to
say it. Another way to say would be, Hey, this is a trailer for my 16 hour video
editing master class. A little bit of a different
way of saying it, different inflections
on different words. Once I have that in
post production, then I can pick and
choose and say, Wow, Okay, that take is
really not good. This one is perfect.
Boom bo boom match them together
and have options. So rather than trying to read it all the way
through a one take, try to get different
personalities and different energy levels in
each one of your lines, so you have as much to work with as possible in post production. Now, that wraps it up for all of the most important information for filming your
own epic trailer. What I would recommend now
is brainstorming your idea, really getting all
of your creativity out on a piece of paper, starting to write some lines, starting to write some concepts, start writing what B roll
cutaway shots you want to use, and really look online to find out how you can
upgrade and remix other people's ideas
and make them unique to you and shoot the best
looking trailer possible.
69. Case Study: Editing a Successful Trailer: Right. So before I send you on your way to edit your
very own trailer, there's one more thing
that I want to do, which is a case study on this master class trailer and a case study on one
of my past trailers. So we're going to look
at it in the sense of the entire picture of everything that we've talked
about so far, gestures, eye contact, cadence,
pitch, filming, editing, B roll shots, cutaway shots, delivering information to
camera, writing the script. We're going to look at
it and see how well these trailers are and see what works and
what doesn't work. So let's hop into this now. One of the great
challenges in this world. Is knowing enough about a
subject to think you're right, but not enough about the
subject to know you're wrong. So great eye contact. He's looking directly
in the camera, addressing his student, and he had an excellent
opening hook. Every case, I'm talking
about the universe, black holes, the big
bang, time travel. God. There's a good use of fast paced speaking to create
excitement for the student. Goal here is to train and a great mixture
of different shots. So we're not just seeing the teacher with one
angle this entire time. There's a great
variance of texts. ACM, BCM, and cutaway shots. Personal truth,
political truths at the objective truths that shape our understanding
of the universe. The interesting thing about
an objective truth is that it's true no matter
what. Imagine that. He's explaining
some realizations that the student they are
going to have from the course, but he's doing it
in organic way that does not feel sales information. So it comes off very
natural. Knowledge. Knowledge into wisdom. Some great pausing moments
to let the lines that he's delivering develop themselves
to have more impact. And even here, great
hand movements. You can see, he's really
engaged with what he's saying. He's embodying what
he's saying and speaking with his body language. The good thing about science is that it's true whether
or not you believe in it. What does it mean to be? Some more excellent
cutaway shots. So always map out in your mind. The cutaway shots
what you want to have on top of your
script for your trait. Presented to change their mind. Here's a great use of
a title card that have the main chapters that's
inside the course. That's something that I highly recommend in the second half of your trailer that really maps out and visualizes
for the student, the main steps that they're
going to attain from the courses would
benefit your life. Your life, the life
of your family, and even civilization itself. I'm Neal D grass
Tyson, and this. Perfect. So that's his
version of a call to action because they're having celebrities in these trailers. They don't do a very salesy
direct call to action. It's a little bit more broad saying that this is
so and so's name, and this is my master class. For your own trailer, you
want to be a little bit more direct in sending the student
to where you want to go. Now, this is an amazing trailer. The only thing that really stands out is the running time. This is about 2 minutes
and 15 seconds. I highly, highly
recommend keeping your trailers under
the 92nd window. A minute to a minute and a
half is the perfect length. After a minute and a half,
you really will have to have a spectacular trailer to not lose steam and to really
keep the student engaged. But overall, this is an
excellently produced trailer. You don't need to have all
these bells and whistles, but you can use the same structure and
the same creativity that they used for your own style to really create a more
upgraded look and feel. Now, let's take a look at
one of my past trailers, and we'll do the same breakdown. Hey, this is a trailer for my 16 hour video
editing master class. And again, we have
that opening hook, really quick sentence
with a text montage right out of the gate to
convey a lot of information in a
short amount of time. So much more than you
just learning how to properly edit a
good looking video. This is about learning. So here we go into a montage, showing the editing process, making it applicable to as
many students as possible. And actually showing footage
from the course itself. So that's something that
I did want to mention. You are more than welcome to use actual content from
lectures from the filming of your actual course
and put that in as montage content
inside your trailer. That's going to also
give context to the student for what the
course actually looks like. And it's a great way to have a lot more be roll
accessible to you. And that moment leads
into this title screen, just like in the
master class trailer. Using title cards is a great
way to stack the value. It would take forever
for me to say five editable projects,
ten in depth chapters, 175 learning lessons,
16 hours of editorials, 20 downloadable outsets, 300
gigs of streamable content. That took a while to say. But I can have this all in a five second title card on
screen that's going to say that same amount of
information and really hammer home how much value the course is actually offering. So I always recommend having a title card with the
course main content. In a much more
bullet point form, halfway to two thirds of the
way through the trailer. Here's more B roll of what's
actually inside the course. The different chapters. Close ups of the lessons. And this is where we get to
the final call to action. In build confidence and create videos that you
are truly proud of. Then you can hit
the enroll button, and I will see you inside. It is nice to add a little
bit of an end screen. So title cards can also
be used for the ending. You can have the name
of the course and the final call to action
written on screen as well. So with all of that said
and all of that scene, you do not have to have all these fancy
bells and whistles, crazy transitions,
sound effects, multiple soundtracks,
and overlays. You don't need that.
What is going to go the farthest for you is
being authentic on camera, using all of the structure for your outline of your
trailer that we've used in this chapter and learned in this chapter and
using the examples in case studies that we
went through to really pick what's going to work
for you for your trailers. So please do not get hung up on the production level
or the editing level. It's really going to come off to you being bright
and energetic and illuminating and hooking
your student on camera. So now you have all the tools and techniques that you
need to go out there, film, and edit your trailer.
70. Create Your Course Landing Page: Welcome to Chapter
eight of the course. Now, This has been a journey. We've been on this road
together for quite some time, and we've done every single
step in this process of creating your very
own course from scratch. Now that we've done
our pre production, we went onto our filming, and then we went
into our editing. The next phase of
this entire process is now the releasing of the course and the marketing
of your very own course. So let's get into what we're going to talk about
in this chapter. And up first is writing your course content and creating your course
landing page. So in this lesson, what I want to do is really
outline all the content that is going to be written
on the landing page, AKA, the part of a website where your course is
viewed by your student. And what a landing
page is made up of is main course
objectives and outcomes, requirements, slash
prerequisites for the student. Target audience,
course description, and a title and subtitle. The good thing is, we've already done a lot of the heavy lifting,
and up until this point, we've worked really
hard to create super amazing sounding and
looking video lessons, and now the goal is for an amazing looking and
sounding landing page, which is important because all your potential students are going to view this page when
deciding to buy your course. So like I said, we've already done a lot of
this heavy lifting in the pre production
process of narrowing down the specifics of
who the student is, what the course is about, what the transformation
is going to be. And now you can see how
important it is to get super clear on that at
the beginning stages, because most people will just go into the filming process. What we did first is get
super clear on our student, our goals, our objectives, and our main purpose
for this course. And now it's paying off in the filming process,
the editing process, and it's going to pay off in the releasing and
marketing process. So let's first start with creating your landing
page on to me. And I want to put a sidebar here that if you are
uploading your course to your own platform or a completely different
online course platform, you'll follow the
same exact steps, but your interface and
the look of the website, of course, is going to
be slightly different. But at the end of
the day, it's still going to be the same exact. Process. So what we're
going to do now is, I'm going to walk you
through the process of creating your first
course on to me. And there is a slight sign up step by step that
you'll have to go through to host your very
first course if you don't have one
yet on this platform. So after you log in, you'll have to sign
up, do a few things, and switch your student profile from student to instructor. I'll leave a link attached to this lecture that will show you the process
of how to do that. So once you get that done, let's hop into how this works. This is the home page of domine. And like I was
mentioning before, if you have any questions
about the sign up process, go ahead and check
that link that I'm leaving attached
to this lecture. Once you have your account, so we're going to click
the Instructor tab, and this is going to bring us to the ability to actually
create our course. So there's going to be a lot of different things in here
that you can use to look up. But what we're going to focus on here is to create a
new course feature. So go ahead and click that now. Go ahead and choose course. This is not going to
be a practice test. Of course, we are
creating a course. Go ahead and hit that
and hit continue. This is where you can type
in your working titles. I'm going to type in
photography master class. You can always
change this as well, so don't worry about this
being fully locked in. Shoot. And edit your
photos like a pro. That's not going to
be my final title. Oh, and also there's
a certain amount of words you can
put in like a pro. Perfect. I'm going
to hit continue. Choose the category that corresponds to your
specific course. For this one, this is
just how much time per week you're going to be putting towards
the course itself, towards the creation
process, rather. And this is our main page, where all of our
content is going to go. We have our intended
learners tab. This is what students are going to learn in the course itself, the prerequisites, and who the course is for AKA,
your target students. Then we have a few
tips that you to me is going to offer
on core structure. You can look through
these if you want to. But honestly, we
went deeply through all of these tips
and techniques. There's another setup
and test video tab as well with more tips. You should be a pro
on this by now, so you can look at
this or skip ahead. We have more film and
editing techniques, and then we have our curriculum. This is where you're going to
upload all of your content. After that, we have the
captions page where you can upload captions in Spanish, English, French, whatever
languages you want to. It's totally optional. You're
not required to do this. Then we have our main
course landing page. This is where we're
going to be able to edit our course title, course subtitle,
course description, what the basic info is, for the course, our main
tags, our course image, and our course trailer,
which you should be having a pretty sweet course image and pretty sweet trailer by now. And you'll be able to also go
down to the course pricing. This is where you set the price of how much your course
is going to go for. Now, keep in mind that U to me is going to
be doing sales. So not very often, does your course sell for
the actual set price. It's going to likely, very likely be sold
for a sale price. Why? That's how
the business of U. The business model
of Uo me works. So you can set your
price to what you like. I personally set
it at the highest because I know from my courses, these are not 1 hour,
two hour courses. These always much longer courses with a lot of production value, a lot of detail, and a lot of techniques packed into
the courses themselves. So I feel very confident and comfortable setting
my price to 199. Regardless, the course itself is going to be sold
at around ten to $15. So you could set your course at $20 and it's going to
be sold for ten to 15, or you could set
your course at $199, and it's going to be
sold for the same price. And when we were
talking earlier in the course about stacking value, having a high course price with a reasonable sales
price, of course, stacks the value with showing the student that
there's going to be a value using that word
a lot in the course itself. So keep that in mind when
you're setting your price. It's going to be sold for
what you to me chooses, but you get to choose what the display price
is for the course. Then we have our promotions tab. This is where you
can create coupons, which is extremely important. These you want to have in the
bio link on your Instagram, in the description on
your YouTube videos, shared on Facebook, all
social media platforms. Anytime a student uses your
referral code to enroll, you keep 97% and U to me keeps 3% of that
enrollment price. So I believe you can
create three coupons a month and you have to set
an expiration date for these. And the more sales you
drive with your coupons, the more of that
enrollment money is going to go in your pocket. Finally, these are
your course messages. This is where you can have
your welcome message, which is going to be an
automated message sent out to every single student that
enrolls in your course. And then you have your
congratulations message, which is also going to
be an automated message sent out to every student
that completes your course. So we'll go through how to use these and how to really fill
these out the right way. So now, in the next lesson, we're going to hop through
each one of these sections step by step so that you
can fill them out properly.
71. Complete Your Course Details Page: Right. Let's get it.
Let's hop right into our intended learners section
for our landing page. And what I did here
for time sake, to give you the most value possible in the shortest
amount of time, I want to look at a past course where I have these filled out rather than
write it from scratch, make spelling errors,
delete, type something new, and going through
that whole process, here's what we have. So for this very beginning
intended learners tab, this is going to show up here towards the top of
the landing page. For what the student
is going to see. And what these are are the
big bulk important items. So what you're going to learn
from taking this course. One, step by step process to Oh, and by the way, this is for
the video editing course. So this is A to Z. Start to finish, how to do all of the post
production process. On creating videos. So these are going to
pertain to that course. So one, step by step process, to take your video
footage, organize, edit, and export, an incredible
looking video. To. Choose the absolute
best video, excuse me, audio and video filters to fit
your personal video style, blend together sound effects, background music, voiceovers, and all other audio elements
into each of your videos. So we're not going to read
through all of these, but these are the cool
specific takeaways that the student will
gain from the course. So we already wrote down
a lot of these things, so you'll be able to take
it from your notes tab. What I'll generally
do is copy and paste the info that
we worked on at the beginning chapters so that I have a backup version saved, and I'll rework them and make them sound a
lot more specific. Use some buzzwords
and really make things more clear and concise
in one to two sentences, really in one sentence format for this specific part
of your landing page. I'll make six to
eight, let's say, so that anyone that glances
at it and looks at it, they're going to pick
up on some buzzwords that will excite them
about the course. So we already know who
our target student is, we know what they're
interested in. You want to get in the mindset of what do
they want to learn? What do they want to
see on the course that they potentially
want to buy. That's what's going to
go in this section. So another example
here at the top is optimizing workflow
and understanding of the editing process to create videos as
efficiently as possible. I know that that's a big
pain point for people. Creating professional
looking and sounding videos, using editing techniques, editing techniques with
virtually any footage. I know that people want to
create better looking videos, and they want to use the
techniques and shortcuts and hot keys with any of
the footage that they have. Using multi cam
color correction. Se, these are the buzz words I'm talking about, sound design, transitions, motion graphics, and editing theory to create
more engaging content. So really, think
about the buzzwords, think about clear concise ways of sharing what's going
to be in the course, and that's what's going
to go in this section. If we go back to this page, what we can see next is, like I mentioned,
the requirements. So this is where we list
the experience needed, the tools or equipment that the learners should have
prior to taking this course. The purpose of this section is so that someone doesn't
take your course, needing to have
something important, doesn't have it,
gets frustrated, leaves you a bad review. You don't want that to
happen. So be clear in this section for my
course, specifically, this is an editing class, so the student needs
their own footage, a computer, and an
editing software to use. You can also be a little
bit more broad if you don't have very
specific requirements. So with that said,
you want to keep the barrier to entry
as low as possible. You don't want to cut
off too many students by listing a bunch of complex
prerequisites that they need, this certification,
that training, this piece of gear, that
piece of equipment. You really want to
keep this as broad as possible while still
making the course applicable to all
students without needing a ton of things
prior to taking your course. The next section is,
who is this course for? This is a description of
your intended audience. For me, personally, I wanted
to target social media, Slash, content creators and
aspiring videographers. So YouTubers, Instagram, TikTok, online content
creators, artists, really anyone who's
got a camera, has shot footage in the past, and wants to edit
great looking videos. So that one's pretty
straightforward, and it's going to
live right towards the bottom of your
course description, which is actually what
we're going to get to next.
72. Fill Out Your Course Description: Next step we have our
course description. This is really where
you want to have a synopsis or a summary. Think synopsis is
the right word. But you want to have a summary that describes the main content, the main points, the
main key features to say of your course. So let's hop into
what that looks like. I always start with a hook or a question kind of
similar to the trailer. We don't want to go right into just the list of the
content of the course. We just want to use a little bit of a hook
at the beginning. So I usually use the question. Do you want to learn how to edit your own amazing looking and
sounding videos from home? That's going to apply
to my target audience. Second question. Are you wanting more
professional, unique, memorable, engaging
and impressive videos? That's also going to apply
to my target audience. And then we say perfect. You made it to the right core. So this is a great way to just
create that opening hook. I want you to really use your own creativity
to come up with your own question or statement that's going
to hook the student. Next, I always start with what the transformation
is going to be. So I worded it here in this way. By the end of this course,
you'll work right along with me to create your
own Instagram Montage, Tik Tok edit, YouTube blog, showcase video,
promotional video, commercial, music video, and demoral in all aspect
ratios using these main steps. So right at the beginning, before getting into
the main description, I stack the value, saying, they're going
to get TikTok it YouTube edit Instagram
edit, promo, demo reel. All of these hands on tutorials,
right out of the gate. So you want to stack the value at the beginning
of your description. Most of the time, people
are just going to scan. Think of when you're looking
at something online. You don't really,
most of the time, sit there and read
everything line by line. So you want to use
bolding, strategically. You want to use
italicizing strategically. You can't necessarily
underline on tom, but you want to use
structuring and spacing, so you can see we have
bolding here, space. Then we start
numbering things with a green check margamogi.
I personally love that. These are just small little
tips that you may or may not pick up on that make it
look like holy Mole. This is a huge list of positive
content and takeaways. So stack the value
at the beginning. Then we go into a summarized list of what the main takeaways
are going to be. Now, I generally
keep that to five, four or five, really. Five seems like a
good amount without looking like too
much because you also don't want to
overwhelm the students. So it's a little bit
of a fine balance. Even though in this
course, specifically, let's see how many
chapters we have. There's a bunch. I think,
there's 11 chapters. So I'm not going to list out the benefits of every
single chapter. Then this description
would be total novel. What I did instead is I combined
some of the benefits of two and three chapters at
once into a specific section. So the very first section is the overall editing fundamentals and workflow of the
editing process. I chunk all those lessons
into one brief description. So there's a title for that main section of the course that I
created that's clear, easy to understand, uses as
many buzzwords as possible, and that anyone could just
glance at and understand, Okay, editing fundamentals
and workflow. And then we want to use one to two sentences to describe
what's that going to be? After that short description, I found it best to use a
few bullet points that just really hammer
home the benefits. So we have develop an
in depth understanding of the most effective
workflow from camera to edit, bring together and
synthesize the best methods of organizing and color
grading footage or excuse me, color coding footage, choose the ideal video selects
and music choice. So all these important
things that really summarize what's going on
with all of these lessons. So you got to be a little
bit creative here and use, a little bit of
your writer's mind to really find out how you can creatively combine what's in all your lessons into something that someone
can glance at, because they're not
going to scroll through and read all
your lesson names. But what you want is to
find a way to encapsulate all the benefit of these
lessons into a brief thing that someone can read and
see value. So we do that. I like I said, use
five sections. I feel like using the
bolding, using the spacing, and using the bullet points is a great structure to
really show value. And after the description
at the bottom, I also found it best to add a little bit of personality
from yourself here. Here we're just
listing benefits. Here we want to
show that there's a teacher that is actually
caring about the process. Also, we want to address any second guessing that
someone may have. Let's start with this first
one. My biggest goal for you. The goal of this entire
course is to give you all the knowledge and
techniques that you need to enjoy the
editing process and create videos that you
are truly proud of. That sentence is
not really going to address the logical
mind of the student, but really more of the
feeling for the student that, Okay, cool, someone has my back. This teacher actually
cares about my learning, and they want me to take in these techniques
and knowledge. So it's just a little
bit of a bonus that's not quite a
laundry list of stuff, that you just want
to add a little bit of a personal touch. After that, we have
the next part, which is creating an incredible
video, no matter what. That's what I used for
this, but for you, you could say creating
an incredible painting, no matter what, writing
an incredible book, no matter what, whatever applies
to your specific course. And the reason we have
the section is to address anyone second
guessing, like I said. So whether you're editing Instagram videos,
YouTube videos, videos from
professional clients or personal projects from a smartphone or
professional camera, the actionable takeaways
from this course will benefit you regardless
of your equipment or budget. The reason I
highlighted this part, or bolded this part is
because I know this is one of the barriers that
all students come to me with about
filmmaking in general, the equipment that they have and the budget that they have. So I want to address
those pain points in the description to speak
directly to my audience. And next up is this you'll
have lifetime access to. I feel like this is a
really big selling point on tomy is that when a
student enrolls in a course, they get lifetime
access to the content. So I like reminding about that perk or that plus and highlighting
it in the description. And the information I put below is a little bit
of a stack of value. So here we have the
amount of lessons, the hours of content, the beginner levels
that the course is for, the downloadable assets. I just started doing this, and I think it's a
cool little add on, which is the amount of content. Even though this doesn't have any direct value
for the student, I feel it's pretty cool
to see that there's literally 300 gigs of video
content that I created, exported, and uploaded online for them to have
lifetime access to. A few more that I add are updates to all future
course material because you likely will update a thing or two down
the road of your course, and it's just a nice reminder to know that they'll
get access to that. And then finally, one on one
with me in the Q&A section. This is a great reminder
for the student that they actually do get
access to you as their teacher. By asking questions
in the Q&A section. Some of this information is
already on this side panel, which is the big one of the biggest selling
points of your course. When students see
this, this is huge. They want to see long
course running time, they want to see
additional assets, and they want to see large
numbers in this section. I always also put it
in the description. And lastly, you want to leave your students with a little
bit of a personal touch. So I always have one
sentence with my sign off, I'll see you inside and my name. So I say if you want to
create amazing looking and sounding videos
that you're proud of, this course is for you. So a little bit of a personal
sentence at the end. I'll see you inside boom,
sign off with your name. And that's all the info for
the course description. Now what I went ahead
and did was made a template out of exactly
what we went over. So we have our intro hooks. We have the value that
we're stacking with the different sections
of the course. I outlined everything here, the goal for this course, what they'll have
lifetime access to, and a little bit of a
sign off at the end. So you can take this
and you can flip this and remix it and
get as creative as you want to make
it really geared towards and stylized for
your specific course. So go ahead now and download this template
and start to fill out your course
description before moving on to the next
learning lesson.
73. Course Promotions and Coupons: L et's keep moving down these different sections of
the back end of your course. Now, what we have up next
is the promotions tab. So like I mentioned before, this is where we can
set up our coupons. You can see previous
coupons I've used here. We set our price, we set
our start date, end date, and then the amount
of coupons that are going to be available. So UToME offers three
coupons per month. So if we hit the coupon tab, it's going to give us a
few different options. Option one, we can create a coupon with the
current best price that UTME is offering the
course for at their sale price. So right now they're offering
this course for 999, and I would choose this if I wanted to use that same price and only have the coupon
available for five days. The next option is a custom
price 201299-208499. That number changes depending on what sales cycle they're in and a few other parameters
that you to me decides. But with this option, it's going to be a
slightly higher price with a much longer
expiration period, which I personally prefer. Next up is a free option. I really don't use
this a whole lot. There are just a few
one off friends and family occasions when I do use a free coupon
here or there, but really always keeping it to the custom pricing options. So we have our free option that's available
for five days and our free targeted option
that's available for 31 days. But let's go ahead
and see the process of creating a paid for version. So I'm going to set
my price to $15. And actually, you to recently shifted
their pricing model. They used to use flat
numbers like $13. And I've noticed that
they've shifted that from the flat number
to a cent lower. Apparently, I'm
assuming that this helps with sales because you see it all the time at stores rather than having something
online for 100 bucks, they have it online
for 99 bucks. So must be a psychological
trigger that they're using. So I would recommend continuing that strategy when
setting your own price. I'm going to set this at 499. I'm going to make the
start date today, and the end date is going to be on December
3, a month away from now. Here's where you can enter
your custom coupon code. It's going to default to having a really random set of numbers. But we can say something
like first 100 students. That's going to be the code
attached to this upon URL. So the first 100 students
to use this code are going to get the discount.
Everything looks good. You want to double check that
you don't want to change anything for the
specifics, hit the link. That's going to create the code. They can either use this code at checkout, first 100 students, or they get the discount simply by clicking
on the hyper link. So anywhere you link this in your Instagram bio or on the description of
a YouTube video, as soon as they click it, it's automatically going to
apply this specific discount. So this is all the specifics
on creating the coupon. Now I will say that U to me is only going to
give you three a month. So you want to be strategic with using
these coupon codes. Now, if you're going to
be doing e mail blasts, social media posts, I would recommend creating
multiple codes. So if I'm going
to do, let's say, four e mail blasts
out of the month, I'm going to I would like to use the same coupon
code to that. That way I can see, Oh, wow, this brought in 200
enrollments in this month. Then for all of my social
media posts or for my Instagram I have
a specific one and for my YouTube channel
I have a specific one. And I can kind of see where my enrollments
are coming from, because it's going to tell
you how many enrollments you drove from that
specific code. So don't make a bunch of codes and one for every
single different thing, but try to find out what makes the most sense for you and your specific
platforms that you use to market your courses and put them attached
to that so that you can start to track where the majority of your
enrollments are coming from. Now, there is one
more style of code, and this is a referral code. This is created as soon as
you launch your course. It doesn't expire,
it doesn't change, and it's always going
to be attached to your course login for that
course that you created. What this does is that whenever
a student clicks on this, it's going to give you the sale. But it's going to give you
the sale at whatever price U to is running that
course for at that time. So we don't get to
set the number here. We don't get to set 14 99, 15 99, or whatever. If the platform is
selling it for 999, and the student clicks
this code and uses it, you're going to get that credit. You're going to get
97% of that price. So the reason you would use this one is because you can
drop it on your website, on your social media channel, in descriptions, and it's
never going to expire. But it will dynamically change price wise whenever U to
me shifts their price. So if you want a
long term option for your website or any
of your online platforms, this is really the way to go. These custom codes,
on the other hand, are the way to go when you're doing a social media push or an e mail blast that's very specific where you
want to set the price, you're running a sale for
a short amount of time, and you want a little bit more
control Like, for example, a Christmas sale,
a New Year's sale, or a fourth of July sale. That's when these kind of
coupons come into play. Another time you would want to use these codes is if you have an ambassador or someone else that's marketing
your course for you, let's say it's a
another videographer that's in the same
genre of work as you. You can give them a
code using this tab, using this section that we went over that has their
name in the code. And you can set the price, and anything that they
drive sales wides for you, you guys can split the profits. This one, on the
other hand, would be a more permanent fixture on
one of your online platforms.
74. Create Your Course Messages: Step are the course messages. Now, these are the
automated message responses that get sent out by you to me as a message form and an e mail form when a student
enrolls in your course, and when a student
completes your course. And what you want to do and use these ads are a little
touch point to say, Hey, I'm here, I'm your teacher. I've got your back. This course is going to be amazing for you. Thank you so much for enrolling. Anything in that direction
is going to be beneficial. When they finish the course, you want to congratulate them and send them to something else. You don't want to send
them off of the platform, but you want to say amazing
job wrapping up the course. If you want to take
things to the next level, you can also enroll
in this course. Anything that's going to kind of give a little bit
more value to them. I would not be salesy
with these messages. You want to actually just use it as a touchpoint, like I said, so that there's a
little bit more of a personalization to the
students experience. So let's hop over and see
what these look like. Let's first take a look
at the welcome message. So I say, Hi, welcome to this course. I let them know that they're
going to be a part of a supportive community of other filmmakers and students
from around the world. And that the tutorials and
downloadable assets in this course are going to give them everything
that they need to know to develop confidence
in editing videos. So you want to reaffirm, as well in these messages, the reason that they enrolled. This is an extra
moment for you to get that confirmation
for the student and really prime their
mind and prime their experience to be a
positive one doing the course. This next line I always
add into the courses now because some students don't complete the courses
all the way. This is bound to happen. And that's just part
of online courses. What I do, as I say, I highly recommend going through the
course of your own pace, but more importantly,
completing it from start to finish to
get the most benefit. You just want to try to
nudge the students in that direction as
much as possible. And because you to me works the way that it does, honestly, in real life, anything less than a five star review really does hurt the
rating of your course. So that's something to
know as an instructor. You want to do
everything you can in your power to get students
to leave five star reviews. Four stars even hurt the course. An average course hangs
out in the 4.2 to 4.4. Really, 4.0 to 4.3 ratings. That's for the average course. So if you're getting five
star reviews, ideally, to get a best seller badge, a highest rated badge, you want to be in the 4.5 range. That general area as much as possible with as many of
your courses as possible. If you're getting
five star reviews, amazing, you will get those
from certain students. Then there's going
to be other students that leave four star reviews, which still in the grand scheme
of things is pretty good, but the four star is going
to bring you closer and closer to a four star rating
than a five star rating, and really you're never going to be at a five star rating, but you want to stay as
high above 4.5 as possible. And sadly, you're bound to
get three star ratings, two star ratings,
one star ratings, it's just going to happen. But you want to minimize that as much as
you can by having as many touchpoints and having your hand basically available for the student when they need. And that's why I say anything less than a five s of you
actually hurts the course. So if there's anything I can do or if there's anything
you aren't happy with please reach
out and message me directly so I can
personally help you out. I know for a fact, and this is a huge tip because
I know for a fact that that little sentence
alone has saved me a lot of one, two, three, and four star reviews because
I've had students reach out with problems saying that
their page wouldn't load, that there was something
with the course that they weren't sure about, and even other things that weren't even my fault
as the creator. Sometimes students leave
a bad review because they say that the content
keeps freezing. That's not got anything
to do with your course. That's a bad
Internet connection, but people will just
leave review when it's time to leave it when you to me prompts them
to leave a review, and they're going
to be honest about their feeling in that moment. So you want to try and keep
all of their feelings and their experience
in the course as much as positive ones as
you have control over. So with this intro message, use it to reaffirm that the student is going to
have an amazing experience, tell them that you're
grateful or that you're excited to have them a part of your course and
your community. Also let them know
that five star reviews are extremely important and anything below that hurts
the rating of your course. You can word this in
any way that you want. But these main points of
this message will help you in the long term keep
a highly rated course. Next is the
congratulations message for when a student
completes your course. I always say, congratulations, and I use all caps for this because this is a
big moment when they've actually done the work to make it through the course. So, congratulations. You've
completed this entire course. I truly hope that you've
deeply benefited from all the information and
ideas we've covered. Be sure to keep you updated on your editing progress
by reaching out online. So I leave that sentence there so that they
feel comfortable staying in touch and actually feel like I am one
of their teachers. The reason being is
the more you can have a student feel that
you are their teacher, not just a random person, and a random video that lives on the other
side of the world. That's what's going to
create more super fans and more dedicated students that will enroll in the
courses that you launch, the new ones that you release. And ideally, you will be
creating more than one course. So doing this now is
going to help you build that solid base
of students that are going to enroll and engage in all the content and courses that you
release in the future. So keep these messages as
personalized as you can. Always have a sign
off with your name. That's going to give that
little personal touch, and keep these value based. Do not market
anything else in it. And be sure to keep
these clear and concise.
75. Course Launch Strategy: At this point, you
should have all of your course content written out on your landing page,
in your description, have your course title
and subtitle ready to go and you're ready to hit
the live launch button. Next step, what we're
going to be talking about is your course
launch strategy. What we're going to
do here is create a successful course
release because hitting, send on your e
mail and releasing your course isn't enough to
create a successful launch. So this course launch is extremely important and
in the same exact way, initial engagement in
the first few hours of a social media post really determine the lifetime of the
post itself for a course, the first one to two
weeks of your release can determine really the
lifetime success of that course. So releasing a
course is not just as simple as hitting, Submit, boom, the course is live, and then you're off to
the race. Jobs done. The prep leading up to that is actually just as important to build momentum and
bring in more students. So, don't get me wrong. You can just upload it, release it, and send out, you know, a few social media posts, maybe an e mail or
two. That's fine. That's not bad. But we really want to
maximize this moment in time where you're releasing something
big into the world. Think of any feature
length film that you see. You see billboards
leading up to it, you see commercials
leading up to it, trailers, content,
advertisements, all leading up to
this launch day where people have engaged with that content in some shape or form far before
the release date. So you do not want your course
release to be a surprise. To your student that they find out about it on the
day of the release. You want them to know
about it leading into that so that they are
a warmed up audience. They're familiar with it,
they're excited about it, and when it gets released, they're ready to enroll. So the general goal of this
process is to really spark your potential students'
attention and share content online for free that
drives interest. And this is going
to help build up the significance or the
value of the course, and all of that is
leading towards a successful and
strategic release date. So what I want to do is go over this downloadable PDF that I created for you so that you can successfully have
a course launch. Perfect. So what I did
here is I broke up the release strategy
into two main phases. Now, phase one is going
to be before the release. This is all about educating your audience on the
overall topic and your expertise and showing the value that's being
offered for your course. So this is free content that tells people the
what and the why. Then it's phase two. This is the releasing phase when we share the course
enrollment links, all of the promotable content that gets people
wanting to enroll, such as the trailer,
the course image, testimonials, everything
that gets people excited, and there's a solid amount of social proofing that
shows value and trust. So the goal here with
both of these phases is to generate as much
demand as possible. By teaching and educating your audience and creating
an understanding of what your course actually
is and increasing awareness of the topics
benefits while building a overall relationship
through offering free content on all social
media platforms that you use. So with Phase one,
the education phase, I really went into detail
here for you guys, and you do not have to use
every single day here. But the reasons I
did this in this way are because these are really
critical moments that you can really maximize and
generate the right piece of content for the right moment in a specific sequential
order that I outlined. So 20 days out, we want to let people know what
course you're working on, what it is, why it's important, how people can use
it, and really the impact it can have in
other people's lives, and the impact even that
it's had in your life. This can be a post on, let's say, Instagram,
for example, and let's use my course where I show people how to create
their very own setup. I can say something like have a photo of my setup as the
main piece of content. And then in the description, say honestly, how much it's changed my life having
a permanent setup at home. I don't have to lug equipment
into my living room, set it up, break it down, It doesn't look good.
I have to refilm. It's in the center of
my like living space. Everything, and those are all
really authentic additions or benefits from having
your own filming space. And that actually inspired me to create that specific course. That, along with other
people's requests for that, because they had
those same problems. So I would share
an authentic thing that helped educate
people on, Hey, guys, I'm creating this course on the actual process of creating this setup because it's
benefited my life so much. I want to do that
for you as well. So you're introducing them to, Hey, this person is making a course. That's
actually really cool. Happens to be in a
topic that I'm actually interested in as well because
I'm a target student, who's following me
as a video creator. I already know that
they're going to like this specific
piece of content because if it works for me or has been beneficial to
me as a video creator, it's likely going
to be beneficial to the video creators
that follow me. So at the beginning phase
of this education process, we're starting really
wide and broad. And as we get closer
to the course launch, then we can start to say more specifics about
what's in the course, about showing BTS content that's showing a behind
the scenes view with maybe a short one to three
sentence write up of something fun
or interesting or facts about the course that would get people kind of excited
about what you're doing. And as we're getting
closer and closer, we can even release
a free lecture. Maybe one of the lectures,
we're not going to put in the final course or
knowing ahead of time that we want to film a quick two minute lecture that's just short,
simple to the point. We can release that for free. So we're offering value, we're educating, we're getting people interested and engaged, and we're continuing
to build this until we get to our
course launch day. This is where we can release a strategic early
discount code that's rewarding the early adopters and early enrollers into the
course with a discount. Ideally, we can release
something that has student testimonials that
we've gotten beforehand, that does not need to happen
on the course release day, but it's nice to have it
within the first few days. And of course, you
want to add all of the enrollment links
through your e mails that you're
sending out to students, and all your social
media channels, and in your bios
for every platform. Because leading up
to the launch day, you've shared more behind the
scenes and organic content, it's really nice to
actually focus on the course trailer
for your release day, that's super professional,
as high end as possible and really shows how much work you've
put into the course. Then a day or so after
your course launch, this is where you
want to address any of the FAQs that
you're noticing. This is great to talk
about, just the kind of logistical questions
that people might have. How do they buy it?
Where do they buy it? How long will they
have access for it? Is there only a
specific time frame? Also, can they get a refund just in case they
don't like the course? All those little things that
basically might be holding them back from making the decision to
purchase the course. That's what you want to address a day or so
after the course launch. So maybe you'll get e mails or comments from students
asking specific questions. Don't just answer that
question on that post. Create a piece of content that answers it for
your whole audience. That way, there's
people that are 90% sure that they
want to enroll, but they're just hesitant
about one specific thing. If you get that answered, that's going to allow
for you to push those remaining students
into the saying, yes, decision to actually
enroll in the course. And after all of that, these remaining days after your course launch are
really just all about incentivizing those students or people that have been
looking at your posts, definitely know
about your course, know what you've been doing, but they haven't really made
that decision yet either. That's when you can release on day four, a surprise bonus, where it's an extra
set of lectures, an extra audio free
audio podcast, really anything that
sweetens the deal. On day six, you can do a big thank you to
everyone that enrolled, and this is a great time to show social proof with
student testimonials, student photos, and any
positive course feedback that you've gotten over the last week of your course launch. Then we have day eight and ten, and I actually forgot to
mention that you want to have an early discount code with
a clear time limit on it. You want to tell students, Okay, boom, this course is
going to go live, and you will be able to get a discounted enrollment
link for three days, for five days, for eight
days, whatever it is. This creates a certain amount of scarcity and a time frame for your student to
make that decision in. If the option is there forever, they're probably not
going to take action. So it's a little bit of a
psychological trigger just to help them decide on
enrolling in the course. So that does it for our
course release strategy. And I would highly
recommend putting this into practice because the build up to your course release
is extremely important. You do not want to come out of the gate with a new course, and people have no
idea what it is. Because the course is
launched, it's new to them. They have to figure out, decide, make all those
mental choices on if they want it or ideally, you've primed them
and warmed them up enough so that their decision
has already been made, that when that
course is released, they're going to hit
purchase right away. So take this
structure, remix it, and make it organic for the types of posts
and the way that you speak online so you can get the maximum benefit
from this PDF.
76. Continuing Course Success After Launch: So we still have a lot
more to talk about and cover in this
chapter with lessons that I'm teaching and also
some guest expert speakers to expand on marketing and having a successful
course launch. But what I want to
do now is go into the overall course
maintenance phase. So we've been
building everything. You have this big launch, and then you're driving as many student
enrollments as possible. Then comes maintenance, which
is what I call maintenance, which is basically taking care of your course after the launch. So we have another downloadable
PDF for this phase. And what we've done
up until this point has gotten our students
super interested, all the early adopters, and people that were kind of on the fence have
ideally jumped in, enrolled, and they've made the decision to
join your course. From here on out, it's all about maintaining
enrollments and routinely sharing content that keep the flow of new students
coming into the course. And here are some of the best
ways that I found to keep interest flowing and new potential students
coming into the course. So we have one to
four monthly e mails. This can either be directly
to your e mail list or using the two monthly e mails that you to me will give you to
advertise your course. So these don't need
to be super salesy. They can be organic and just keep a warm touch
with your audience. And that's actually one of
the biggest points here about course maintenance
is you want to keep a warm relationship
with your audience. What I mean by that is If our students are cold or
our customers are cold. That means we're not on their mind, we're
not on their radar. They haven't thought
about what we're doing, or us as a teacher or influencer or content
creator or whatever it is, that's called being cold
or having a cold audience. On the other hand, if we
have a warm audience, that means they're seeing
our content regularly. They're thinking
about what we have, and they're potentially ready to purchase a product that
we're offering online. So that's the point
and the purpose of all the advertisements that
you see on a daily basis is to keep that specific brand
or product at the top of mind of all of the potential
customers and consumers. So you want to really use
your monthly e mails to have a simple offering
with some type of value. It can be free video, a free audio book, a podcast, or something that's
related to the course with a discount link
inside the e mail. So they see something
gets them interested, and then they can simply
and easily click enroll. You also want to
do a similar thing with the social media post
that you're doing online. Share things that
are fun, engaging, organic, and relevant
to your content. Can be photos, videos,
inspirational quotes, and always remember to link your referral code
to your course, because you want to get
that 97% of the sale. You don't want you to me to
split 50 50 when you were the one that drove the sale from your own
social media post. Next up is transitioning some of your video lessons into more short form YouTube
and Instagram content. This is something we'll
actually get to in a later lesson of how
to strategically choose some of the lectures from your course and re
export them and upload them online to be
standalone pieces of content on YouTube
and Instagram. And last part of the
course maintenance is sharing your
course in person. This is just good old
fashioned marketing and networking and face to face. This is where you can
collect e mail addresses, talk about your course, you know, go to speaking events. You don't have to go and
give a huge presentation. But you can create a
business card with your website on it or linked to your Utomi, whatever it is, and just keep your product at the top of your own mind so that you speak
about it with people. If you're out and about and
you're meeting, you know, 50 potential people a month that would be interested
in your course, and ten of those
turn into sales, that could be an extra
few hundred dollar in your pocket per month with also new students coming in that potentially will share
it with their friends. Because, trust me,
I've experienced this teaching filmmaking
that everyone has a friend or family member that has a camera or shoots
videos or wants to get better at creating YouTube videos or
Instrugam videos online. So even if you get a referral
from someone you've met, that can always turn into
a potential student, which is always a big win. So do not forget to have
that social networking and just that
marketing mind when you're meeting new
people face to face. And that is it for the
maintenance phase. Now, if there are
other techniques that you do or you want to add personally for after
you release your course to drive new students,
feel free to add it, but please use this PDF as a reminder to
continue to bring in that flow of new students and grow the course after
your release date.
77. Choose Lectures for Social Media: Now let's talk about repurposing some of your lectures that
you filmed for your course. In this lesson,
we're going to talk about choosing lectures for social media and using that free content
to drive traffic. So one of the huge
benefits of creating a course is that you're
going to end up with around, let's say 50 to
150 video lessons. This is awesome
because it gives you the opportunity to choose maybe five to 15 of those lessons and add them as free
social media posts. And the purpose here
is to cast as wide of net as possible of
free content, free value, and free publicity or views
so that your audience or new potential viewers can benefit from it and then find
their way to your course. So the lessons you
should choose should basically fully explain one
complete thought or skill. AKA, they stand
alone on their own. There's no second video or third video or introductory
video that is needed for the student or viewer to gain value of
that specific video. The reason I bring that up
is because we're creating all these video
lessons that feed into a chapter and there's an
ending goal of the chapter. Sometimes when
you're going through your potential video lessons to choose, they're all symbiotic. They're all working
together to explain a larger vision and
a larger thought. Be sure that when you choose your video lesson,
it can live alone. It explains a complete
thought and it doesn't need any other videos to
explain anything else. So it should complete
one full thought. It should be engaging, exciting. And the reason I bring up
that as well is because some video lessons are naturally a bit more mundane and
boring than others. If you're just doing a
standard explanation on a little bit
of a boring task, that's not going to be a good
YouTube video to choose. And then finally, you want to
make sure that the intro or outro of that video lesson
you choose isn't distracting, because sometimes you say, welcome to this lecture. In the previous chapter,
we did blah, blah, blah, and now we're going
to do this, or that does it for the end
of this video lesson. In the next chapter, we're
going to do this, this, this. If that's on a YouTube video, that intro Natro is going to be distracting as well
and not make sense to the person who's
seeing it without the context of the
rest of the course. So now let's go through some past video lessons and see how they
performed online. Okay, so here's my
YouTube channel. And of course, you can see all my past online course
trailers right at the top. You definitely want
to do this for your social media platforms, have your course trailers there. And then we can see
these set of videos. And there's actually some
pretty good numbers here. This one has just
around 653,000 views. This one is 21 K, 20 K, 7.4. So high numbers and some
decent numbers here. But the cool thing is, and we have more down
here as well, 157, 372, 121 k, 55 k, 20 k. So the cool thing is, these didn't take any
more work to create. These were videos
directly from my course. And what I did is
I went through and I chose from the parameters
that we already talked about, videos that can
live on their own, videos that will
perform well, solo. And I also used VID IQ, which we talked about in
the previous chapters to choose and find out which
topics we're going to do well. From my research, I noticed
that the rule of thirds, which is a specific photography and composition technique, actually had a really excellent
search score on VID IQ. So some of it's intuitive. You know, I already
know a lot of people are searching about
a specific topic online. So I know that going
through my course, I'm going to use this
topic, this topic, and this video lesson
rather to upload. It can be an intuitive thing, or you can actually search up the analytics to see which
videos will do well. So this is just one
lesson from my course. I put it online, and
then it brought me more than a half 1 million
views, and honestly, countless extra
enrollments because I link all of my courses right
underneath this free video. So I'm sure you can
start to see how beneficial it can be to take the time after releasing your course to choose as
many videos as possible. I would say ten to 15. If you have 50 to 100
lectures for your course, you should definitely
be able to get ten to 15 free YouTube
slash Instagram, slash TikTok pieces
of content that you can cut down and add online. So let's go ahead and look at
a few other examples here. I personally section
off these and kind of organize them into different
categories or playlists. You can do it in any way
that makes sense for you. But if we go to, let's
say this next video, I knew that knowing when to
cut is a certain term and a certain question
that's thrown around in video editing quite a bit. So I knew that this topic was going to perform
really well online. And that's great.
It got me 20,000 extra people seeing my course, seeing my content, and
potentially becoming a student. So sometimes these lectures
that you choose will be the right topic that you know is going to
do really well online. And you may have to trim
out the beginning of it or trim out the
end of it so that in the video clip
that you're using, you're not mentioning, Okay, I'll see you in
the next chapter, I'll see you in
the next lecture. You might need to
take a little bit of extra time to do that, but it will be worth
it in the end. And before moving on
to the next lesson, I just want to talk briefly
about the description. Now, you can do a
mini write up on the specific video you
uploaded or the course. I found that it's just kind of a little bit better to keep
things short and sweet. I've seen a lot of other
video creators on YouTube, just listing out links to what else they offer versus
explaining in detail everything. So I personally use a shortening URL
website called Bitley. This allows for me to paste that super long referral
code that we saw in the previous lecture into a
tinier, smaller hyper link. You can use this or you can just use the main URL that you have, but definitely definitely
be sure to link your actual enrollment URL at the very top of any of these free pieces of content
that you're sharing online. You can also link it along with any of the other
offerings you have, so I have people can buy my studio setup, the
gear I recommend, get access to all of the music library that I
use for all my videos. MI Instagram website,
all that good stuff. So be sure to put a little
bit of time to structuring a really solid looking and
concise description for all of these posts that
you're going to be doing with your free
course lectures.
78. Case Study: Effective Social Media Posts: These next two lessons. What we're going to do is dive a little bit deeper into
social media posts. What I want to do is walk
you through the main types, the three main types actually
of social media posts, and then we're going to go
into e mail campaigns and see how you can effectively use those to drive more enrollments. Let's get into a case study on effective social
media posts and take a look at some of my past posts
to see what we can learn. Because there are so many
types of different posts, what I'm going to
do here is simplify these types into three
main categories, which is a value post, an advertising post
and a personal post. Now, the value post,
it's pretty obvious. It's you adding value. It's teaching, it's
sharing knowledge, or it's a tutorial of some kind that you're
sharing online. An advertising post,
on the other hand, is something that's
a direct form of marketing material
like a trailer that's trying to
drive enrollments. There can be value added
into a advertising post, but really the goal is to
drive traffic and enrollments. The personal post,
on the other hand, is much more of an
authentic you and your lifestyle with
very little marketing, but it drives interest to you as a person and really makes
you seem like a real human, not just an online teacher, or someone trying
to sell products. So we already saw examples of value posts on the
YouTube channel. Really, you can look
through any of these and these are all
tutorial based. So you want to share
as many value posts as possible when you're
creating content for online use because
where value is, eyes and people will
naturally follow because people want to
learn for free online. Now, an advertisement post is just exactly what it sounds. It's advertising your product. And the reason we're
even going over these three main
types of posts is because you want to have a
variance of these three. You don't just want to
have advertisements. You don't just want
to have value posts, and you don't just want
to post personal content. Having a good balance and a
mixture of these three is going to give a
variance of content for your audience to
look at and enjoy. It's going to personalize you. It's going to offer actual value that people are gaining
from your content. It's going to keep
people entertained, and it's just giving a balance of content
to share online. So advertising content,
don't want to overdo this, but it's definitely essential
for driving enrollments. Now, authentic posts or personal posts drive
attention to what you do. So these are great on
Instagram, for example, it's a little bit less for
YouTube and other platforms. But this just shows people you out in the
field, you being you, and it makes you relatable
and shows your passions, your hobbies, and
allows just areas of touch for people to
engage with you. So finding the right balance
between all of these is key, because you're going to
do social media posts. There's no doubt about
it. You're going to release your own course. There's no doubt
about it, and you want to find the
right balance for your specific audience and
your specific student base. A right balance of
these three types of posting that's going to drive as many
enrollments as possible. And I'll also add that
without annoying people, all have those people
we follow that do way too much advertising,
we unfollow them. Then we have other
people that we follow that's way too much
on the personal posts. We don't want to see their food. We don't want to see some of the personal stuff
that they share. We're following them more
for their art form or their creativity rather
than photos of their dog. There's a good balance
between all of these. We don't want to
sell too frequently, and we want to appeal
to our audience. You can use analytics
tools to see on Instagram, for example, how much people are engaging with
that specific post. So if you notice
there's a dip in your advertising
posts specifically, then you're probably
selling too frequently. If you notice there's a
dip in your personal post, then you're sharing
too much personally. On the other hand, if
there's an increase, and every time you
post the picture of you doing something
you really enjoy, and all of your
audience is hyped on it and interested,
that's actually great. That means that you can
continue to share that content. So be sure to pay attention to not only
what you are posting, but how people are responding.
79. Using Email Campaigns: You've got a solid handle
on the main three types of social media posts
that you can leverage. Let's now dive deeper
into e mail campaigns and reaching your audience
with mass messaging. So what I want to start
with here is really, the most effective campaigns
are used either weekly, twice a month or monthly as a means to keep
your audience warm, like what we were
already talking about. So you can also categorize
an e mail blast into the same style as
a social media post, which could be value,
advertising, and personal. But I would highly recommend
keeping all of your e mail messaging that's anything that's mass messaging really to
value in advertising, because you do not
want to reach out with just a picture of you and your dog or
what you had for lunch or any of those kind
of overly personal things. Those can be part of your
value and advertising posts, but never reach out to people directly
from an e mail list or newsletter with just
strictly personal stuff because people are going to feel like you're
wasting their time. So with that said, e mail blast should just be kept to the times where you have something really high of value to add or important to share, which are updates, releases,
surprises, or bonuses. Now, let's take a look at
the template that I put together for your announcements
and e mail campaigns. And this template is coming directly from this
announcement below. So these are ridiculous numbers, nearly 70% open rate
with the 10% CTR. That's bananas. If
you've ever done any kind of e mail
marketing or campaign, you can expect something like a five to 10% open
rate if you're lucky with a one to 2% maybe three or 4%
click through rate. Maybe with also a 0.2 maybe
0.1 0.2% unsubscribed rate. So these are ridiculous numbers, and that's why I
wanted to create a template out of
this specific post or announcement so
that you can use it for your own course
announcements. Perfect. So let's walk
through what this looks like. At the very top, we
have our headline. So I personally like Emojis. I think that they make
it more personalize, more human, and less salesy. So I always add Emojis
into my headlines. Set up, shoot, light, and record like a pro. Very direct, very straightforward,
very to the point. At the very top new
course update, W W W? Got the Sireno Mogi going. We have a hyperlink to the
course that I just launched. I'm giving an update that
it's a best seller now, and that I've added 30 minutes of new lessons to the course. So that's a value ad or
a bonus slash surprise, like what we mentioned before
that sweetens the deal. And helps the people that
are maybe 90% bought in, but still on the fence
and even purchase, when they see
something like that, it can make the sale a no
brainer for that situation. So I lead with that. I have
it at the very beginning. I also use a screenshot of the actual course
to kind of show off and display the
best seller badge boom. And then we have the
five different things listed that are part of that 30 minute
new set of videos, so it makes it more concrete, more real, exactly
what they are, and what they're going to get. Of course, we're using buzzwords in here that are going to appeal to up and coming
filmmakers and video creators. We have the course image and thumbnail that you always want to display in announcements. You want to really maximize the use of this and
make it recognizable. The more times people see this, the better. They see it. They're scrolling on you to me, the next week, whatever it is, they see it again,
they see it again. That's going to keep
them interested and potentially
purchase the course. Then I go into the section
of just showing the value, just like on our course
landing page that we were working on in
the previous lessons. With both of these sections, we stack the value here. So at the top, we're showing specific numbers of what's
included in the course. And then we have examples
of what the big takeaways are and the transformation that will happen from
taking the course. Very similar to the
course landing page. So the cool thing
is, is once you do the groundwork to get this stuff written and sounding nice, you can actually re
use it multiple times. Then down here, we have
a bit of a funny gift. It's a Power Anger
dancing, partying it up. Again, I like to
add a little bit of those things that break the
norm, that break the mold, and that kind of break
people's habit patterns, catch them off
guard a little bit, so it doesn't look like
your traditional run of the mill marketing
or advertising e mail. Then at the bottom of the post, we have a little
bit of reassurance. If you have any
questions about any of the courses or anything
in the course, feel free to reach
out to me directly. Look forward to you
joining the team. I'll see you inside
Boom, the sign off. That makes it feel like that
this is not a mass message, and that this is more of
a personalized e mail. And because this
performed so well, I turned it into an e
mail blast template for you to use for all of
your future messaging. So I'm not going to go
crazy in a detail into this because we just went
into the filled out version, which you can scroll to
the second page of to see, this is what the final
should look like. And then this is the
version at the top of the page that you fill out. So download this PDF and be sure to B sending out an e mail
blast or newsletter or an announcement one to
four times per month and keep these
announcements strictly to value and advertising.
80. Successful Launch Hacks: Now, we've made it to
the end of this chapter. And the final thing that I
want to leave you with are some successful course launch
hacks and really tips and techniques to continue
to use when you release your course and beyond your course release to
ensure your overall success. And ideally, you creating
another course because the first course that we did together was so
wildly successful. So let's go ahead and get into these successful
launch hacks that really are going to
help you to bring in more enrollments right
out of the gate. The very first thing that
I really want you to make concrete in your mind is
that your product, AKA, your course that you offer, has to appear that it offers more in return than the
cost of the purchase. This cannot be more essential to the sales that you're
going to be making. The price that the
student is taking or the money that
they're taking out of their pocket, say it's 20 bucks. They're going to
give you 20 bucks and say, k, this is yours. For them to make that
decision to buy a course, they have to feel that that 20 bucks is going
to go somewhere, leave them forever,
and something much better is going to come
to them in return. So every decision that you make, in all your announcements, in all your social media posts, it should be part of that process of deciding
what you say and how you say How am I showing that this
course is valuable? You've been doing
that, actually, throughout the whole process. We started putting value into the course before
we even started filming. We started that in the
pre production process to maximize the value
for your student. But you want to continue that value mindset
from pre production, into production, through
post production, into marketing and
releasing your course. Next, we have trust. This is your audience believing
in you and what you sell? Your audience has to trust you. They have to believe
what you say, and you have to come off as
authentically as possible, not creating a huge promise, over promising and undelivering. You want to not under
promise and over deliver, but you want to just be honest. You want to not make up
that this is going to wildly change their life or make them a
millionaire overnight. Do not go in that direction. You want to keep the trust with your student and
with your audience as clean and clear as possible
and always live up to the promises that you
make for your audience. Seems obvious, seems
straightforward, but it's a big one. So be sure to keep that trust. Next up is social proof, what kind of is in the
same genre as trust. We want to drive
followers, friends, and family to enroll and leave testimonials
right out of the gate. So every time I
release my course, I always send direct texts
and e mails to, you know, a group of 50 to 100 people
that are close to me in my life that I know either be very interested in the
course right away, or their support
systems in my life, and they'll always back me up with whatever my project is. And getting those
initial enrollments and social proof right away, asking for people's
help, really, to help you make a more
successful course, really is going
to go a long way. Every single enrollment
you can get at that first one to two
week mark is going to help determine the lifetime and success of your course two, three, four years from now. Because everything is run
by these algorithms online. It's crazy. I know,
but you really want to maximize every single
one of these opportunities. So getting everyone
that you can to enroll, getting that social proof, and having that base layer of enrollments and
testimonials from the get go is going
to go a long way. And the next thing that really helps bring a lot of success for your course launch or
surprises bonus content, anything that you can give away as an extra incentive
for your students. So one thing I usually do for each course
launch or actually, always do, is the first 100. So I let the first 100 students always get a major discount and usually get first access to a grouping of
special lectures. So just brainstorming and
finding out what kind of giveaways you can do that will not cost
you a lot of money, won't cost you a lot
of extra time spent, and will be easy for you to get to a small
group of students. Brainstorm, find out what you
can come up with and see. Is it a podcast? Is it an audio book? Is it a special downloadable PDF that's not available anywhere
else that you've created? So there's so many different
directions that take this in and really having
that extra surprise, extra bonus is a
great technique. Leads us to urgency. This is a discount
or course bundle or anything that's
just for the launch, and it's only available
for a limited time. So putting basically
a stopwatch or a timeline on when
something is going to be available really kicks
into gear the part of people's minds and
decision making process of saying yes or no to an item. If something is going
to be available for a great price forever, that's got a lot
less influence over someone's decision making
than if it's only going to be available for a day or
two days or whatever it is. Next is community and creating
a sense of online family. So Justin Bieber
has his believers, and Banc has her beehive. What you want to do is create a similar sense of belonging, purpose, and community
engagement for your audience. So you can come up with
a special fancy name, or you don't really have
to have a fancy name. You can just be so and so
community, whatever it is. The goal here is to create
a sense of connection and purpose and really a home for people to live
where they feel heard, and they feel like they're
around like minded people. And the more people you gather
into your online group, the more that's
going to magnetize other people with
similar interests, similar intentions, and
really similar hobbies and passions in life. The next tool that you
can really lean into is focusing on the instant
gratification aspect. All humans are wired for
instant gratification, getting something right now
right here in this moment. And having that in
the forefront of your sales pitch or just your
overall marketing is that people will get instant
access to hundreds of lectures and other valuable information right
out of the gate. They don't have to wait a week, two weeks for
things to arrive in the mail or anything like that. They can literally access all of this
information instantly. So really focus in
on that and know that that is actually
a huge sales tool. The next aspect of this is
validation and certification. And what this is is
really people's desire to better themselves and show
others how good they are, AKA, the accomplishments and certifications that
they've achieved. So what I mean by this
is that people will feel gratified and feel like they've achieved something from A,
enrolling in your course. They'll have a new sense of self and B from completing
your course. They're going to
want to see, feel, and touch a certificate
of completion. So you to me offers
this for free, it automatically sends it out. But if you are hosting
your course on your own platform, I'd highly, highly recommend
sharing ahead of time that it's going to be available for them to
receive this certificate, because they're going
to want to be able to brag their friends, family, and just them
knowing that and you leaning into that as a
bit of a sales tool. Hey, you're going to graduate
this ten hour course, receive a certificate
of completion, and you'll be on your way, creating better XYZ, whatever your course
specifically is. The more you can lean into that, the more they're going
to be incentivized to say yes to your course. And the last aspect of this to really keep in mind
is to remember to always be removing any
kind of barriers or another way of saying is
reasons for people to reconsider enrolling
in your course. You want to make it sound fun. You want to make it
sound rewarding, and you want it to
be as inspiring and fulfilling sounding as possible. So really hone in on
your target audience, know the buzzwords that
they want to hear, what they get excited about. And on the other side, know and keep in mind what
they don't want to hear. What are the words
that they would be turned off from or they
would shy away from? Knowing this is
just going to help with the overall sales. And using all of these
successful launch hacks is going to give you all
the tools you need to really have a successful
course launch.
81. Complete Course Recap: Congratulations on making it
to the end of this course. I'm super excited to have gone
on this journey with you, creating your very own
course from scratch, from the very beginning process, all the way to releasing
and marketing. And how I want to end
this whole journey together is to briefly recap each main step and process that you learned on
this journey with me. So let's check out what
we learned together. So the very first thing that we learned together
was in Chapter one, course planning
and maximization. This was all about
pre production before the preproduction, doing the research, making sure we're going after
the right topic. Brainstorming ideas,
and understanding the simple course formula that
really paints the picture of what an online
course actually is and why students enroll
in the first place. Then we move to Chapter two. This is where I addressed all of the very likely and
important course FAQs you would have
going into this process. We address things like how long it takes to
create a course, the proper course length, for the course itself and for the individual lectures and other things like the best way to organize your course
and structure it for the best learning scenario
possible for your student. Then we got into
the exciting part, which was Chapter three, writing and organizing
your course. Here we found our
target student, we created our course title. We found our key words, and we inputted those
into the actual course. We did our course main
steps in chapters, and we dove into outlining
our chapter lessons. Then it was onto Chapter four, which is one of my
favorite chapters, presenting on camera. This is where we
learned preparation, speaking to your audience, other things like eye
contact, gestures, tonality, choosing our wardrobe,
other things as well, like how to prepare set
your proper mindset, knowing who your audience is and how to speak
to your audience, and also the things
like speaking at the right energy level, really putting on our
on camera persona, so that we're coming
off confident, calm, and clear on camera. Next up was Chapter five. This is where we had
a mini crash course in the production process. We dove into things like
lighting, camera settings, camera functionality,
what lenses to use, what gear to purchase, how to light your scene, and how to set up
a unique set of props and decorations in
the background to give your course a unique look and
feel while also coming off on camera with the best
production quality possible. Moving on, we got
into Chapter six. This is where we went into
the post production process. We learned how to organize edit, add music, text,
color correction, and just really create a cohesive video
edit by looking at previous video examples of what works really well
and what doesn't work. Ideally, by the end
of this chapter, you had all the tools you need to really edit one
lecture together with me and then go through and do the post production process on the rest of your
course lectures. And after that, the next order of business was Chapter seven, creating your course
Image and trailer. This is where we went
through and created the most unique and
best looking thumbnail as possible to catch students' attention and get
them to click on our course. And then we also went and
created our course trailers. So we learned six
main parts that make an excellent looking
and sounding trailer. And we learned really
how to structure our thoughts, the
goal, the purpose, the transformation, all those
important functionalities and parts of our course, and we learn how to
put that into a clear and concise and really
exciting to watch trailer that would hook in our
students and ideally drive as many enrollments to
your course as possible. And finally, Chapter eight. This is when we
went into releasing and marketing your course. We learned how to make
our landing page. We learned how to fill out all of our online course content, description and information for potential students to find. We learned our course
launch strategy. We chose different lectures for social media to share
online for free, and bring as many
students as possible. We went into other things like e mail campaigns and
marketing and really just learn how to maximize our course launch
success and then also maintain steady and
consistent growth of our course enrollments
beyond our course launch. Wo Yes. And that wraps it
up for this course. Thank you so much for going
on this journey with me, trusting me as your teacher. And I really hope that
you've benefited from all of the information we've done together and gone
through together. So in the next and
final final lecture, it's going to be a
bonus lecture that's going to have a link to all of my other courses at a special discount for
you being my student. So thank you so much, and I will see you
in the next course.
Future Skills, Uplevel Your Future Self
