Quick Guide to putting your trainings online

How to create professional content on a string-shoe budget?

Well there are different ways you could approach this, but I believe in many cases recording on your smartphone might actually be good enough. Notice though that the choice of the room where you will record your videos is maybe as important as the device you use for recording as that could help minimize echo. What has worked very well for me is recording videos from my living room using my iPhone on a tripod. The video quality is certainly good enough.

The question that bugged me for a long-time is whether I should use a separate microphone, but as said, since i don't have much echo I thought it is good enough. In addition with a good video editing software you can also slightly readjust the pitch in your video, so that worked really well to do adjustments.

What really mattered for me then is to make the environment look great, so I decided to record all my videos on a green screen. While I was shopping for equipment I found that a complete kit with 2 lights on two separate tripods, and another set of tripods for the green screen, would cost less than 200USD. That is definitely an investment really worthwhile taking.

Now I was all set to shoot the raw content.

Choosing and setting up your video editing equipment

The next thing is to decide how you are going to process the videos to give them that professional finish and also what type of brands you should use to make the process as smooth as possible.

Starting with the process, I am a big Apple fan, so for me it is was an easy choice to use my iPhone together with my MacBook Pro, but what is really efficient in the process is the usage of the Airdrop functionality. This is priceless, I can keep my iPhone on the tripod and just beam over the videos to my Mac for editing.

When it comes to the video editing, I believe that Wondershare's Filmora does an awesome shop. It provides drag and drop functionality so that can easily add and edit layers in your projects, the chromakey function is impeccable and removes the background pretty well even if you green screen had a few foldings or shadows, you can increase the audio pitch and can export to various types of video formats. In addition Filmora provides you access to ton of video elements, transitions and content that can really bring your videos alive and make them look really professional.

Having curated all my initial video content with Filmora I was really happy with the results and now I only had to figure out how I would put up this content as part of various types of training curriculums.

Choosing the right platforms for your educational content

So once you have design a training curriculum and shot your training videos, the key remaining question is where and how do you publish this content? What platform will allow to best sell these trainings and how can you best monetize it?

There are two main options you need to assess one is to upload your content a global platform like Udemy, the other approach would be to set up your own learning management system.

I decided to go with the second option for three reasons: the first is that I believe I have a large enough network that I can reach out to directly to sell these trainings and also because I have some doubts that my content would stick out enough on Udemy. Secondly, I believe that Udemy takes a far too large revenue share (50%) on the content. Third reason is that if my plan doesn't work out I can still go back and try to publish on Udemy.

But setting your LMS is a bit more complicated as it sounds. When it comes to design and layout and design, that part is pretty straightforward especially if you have been using Wordpress to design your website. There are plenty or educational Wordpress themes and education plugins available to design the courses in any way you want. You can design lessons, quizzes, give assignments, schedule lessons, provide final exams, deliver certificates and even social share your achievements. Personally I went for the Eduma Theme in Wordpress that builds on LearnPress plugin, it might not be the best and I am still evaluating a move to LearnDash, but it does the job to get started.

Now that all of this is setup you also need to integrate it with e-commerce functionality, luckily here as well Wordpress has plugins like WooCommerce that allow you to see it up really quickly. The one thing I didn't go right away is to integrate with a payment gateway, the main reason is that these guys charge monthly fees and you don't want to pay for that until you have some proper traction on your training. Initially I am just planning to use paypal.

Last but not least you probably need to have a look at your current hosting plan. A typical hosting plan that is used for a corporate web page will usually not be good enough for e-commerce or a Learning Management System. Best is to have a chat with your hosting provider on what would best suit your initial launch. Just make sure it is good enough, or students will start writing poor reviews about your training offering.

Summing it all up

By getting hold of an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, a green screen kit and a video editing software like Filmora you can create really good content, which I believe is not far from professional quality. If you combine that with an Wordpress based LMS and host it on an upgraded hosting plan then you can get your trainings going in almost no time. I took me about two month to develop everything and put my first training about innovation management online and ready to sell.