How To Create A Video Course

What is a video course?

A video course is a great digital product to sell or a fantastic marketing tool if you provide it for free.

Video creates a bond with your audience, if they can see you physically at work in a video, but you also could create a software tutorial or a PowerPoint slideshow with screen recording software. Then people would just hear your voice and see your computers desktop.

You could make a series of videos with instructions, lessons, exercises, etc… There are so many possibilities, so the key is to get creative here and maybe you could check out some YouTube movies on the subject that you would like to bring to find some inspiration.

You can provide the video online in downloadable QuickTime movie files or place them on a webpage you only show to people that subscribed or paid.

How to create a video course?

Some good advice I can give you is: prepare in advance. Work out a structure, how many video’s you are going to make, what you are going to talk about, what are the supplies you need…

You can have small HD cameras now for less than 100€ so there is no excuse for not providing quality.

Use a separate microphone for your audio recording or make sure you are close enough to the camera when you use the camera's mic.

Edit your videos. Cut the beginning and the end, cut the bloopers ;-) and pimp your videos with some cool effects and transitions. Don’t go over the top here because unnecessary effects are very distractive and annoying. You don’t have to buy expensive software, you will do as well with one of the free editing software available.

A small intro and/or outro jingle will give you that professional feel.

When you are done editing you can export your videos to any format you desire. I would recommend using Quicklime movie or MP4 both with H264 codec, because that provides a small file to store online and still gives you smashing quality.

When you want to show your videos on a webpage you will have to do this with a flash player. First you will have to convert your videos in to an .flv file. You can use some free video converter software for that.

A little trick I can give you is to create an .mp4 file with H264 codec and change the -.mp4 extension in to flv once the file is finished encoding. Your flash player should be able to play this file and your quality will be a lot better than some of your standard .flv exports.

You can make a nice DVD cover to display on your website with Cover Action Pro.