Attention and connection are the two main reasons that video is a great tool for entrepreneurs when it comes to marketing their products and services, teaching their customers or community, or growing their audience.

We will discuss why we should bother with video and some foundational motivations for investing in it.

The first reason why it is important is that Video makes things human when you're not in person.

We have gone into a very remote, very distributed world, and every day more and more digital and video is this way that we can kind of bridge the gap to the old way of doing things where the relationships we built and the connections we made were usually done or done best in person.

Nowadays, that usually isn't the way that we do it. We meet most people online, whether we sort of realize that we're meeting people or not and video can keep that kind of human or personal touch, even when you're never going to meet these people in person.

So we use video to help build that personal with your customers, potential customers, business partners, or whoever it is. Using video does a great job of that.

The second reason is a bit more tactical and is pretty simple. Social media platforms want more videos.

The reason that they want more video is it is incredibly engaging. That is the reason that social media platforms are investing so heavily - it gives us individuals who are using video in lots of different ways, some comfort in the benefits or the magic of video.

Social media platforms know that video is the way to keep eyeballs on their apps and their platforms and for them to make advertising money out of it and we can kind of take our interpretation of that for video as an engaging tool for us to use in our way. It's a way to keep people's attention on the things that you're putting out there.

Just in the last few months, Elon Musk has Tweeted several times about how video is going to perform better in the new X algorithm. For those reasons, it keeps people watching content for longer and therefore they can earn more money from advertising dollars.

There's kind of this motivation for us to be able to put a video out there into the public domain.

So social media platforms want video - it's engaging.

The third reason is a quote from my old boss, Clark Valberg who was the co-founder of InVision. He said that "The screen is the most important place in the world".

InVision is a UI or UX Software company. They built tools for designers to design user interfaces, and design things for screens. And that made a lot of sense, the idea that the screen was the most important place in the world and everyone that worked in InVision was building tools to help people build cool stuff for screens.

This also applies to what we're going to discuss.

So much of what we do, the relationships we build, the time that we spend learning about things, and the time we spend scrolling through social media, so much of that happens on screens and still, our computer screen and video gives us this way of converting what happens on our screen into content that we can put out and teach people about and show people things.

In this course, you're going to be learning about how you can take what happens on your screen and turn that into content. It's an endless resource of things that you can share with the world.

Once you realize that the screen is this incredible place, with so much action, to record your screen is just a way to be able to capture what happens on there and share that with anyone else in the same way that if you picked up your phone in public and started filming something funny on the street, that's your way of documenting that and sharing that with the world.

So what are the videos that we're going to be making?

There are three kinds of categories that we're going to be looking at. We can break these down into smaller things, but generally, these are the three categories that we're going to be talking about in this course that you'll be able to make by the end of it.

• Demo Videos - where you show how something works, or show what something is.

• Tutorials - These are where you teach people how to do something.

• Online Courses - This is also where you teach people how to do something but at a deeper level. You are teaching people a new skill or helping them solve a big problem or overcome a challenge in their life.

These are the three videos that we're going to be focusing on and will be able to make a difference in your business.

Demo Videos

These are easy to make and short, so they're really easy to watch and are good for social media because you can quickly show how something works on your screen. It could be how your application works, or your software product. It could be a tip or a trick that you found, that you want to capture and share with your audience.

Maybe you've learned a new shortcut in Notion or you found an interesting way of reaching people on LinkedIn, a demo video is a great way to capture that quite concise thing and then share that with the world.

Demo Videos are really good for building hype and awareness because they're short and they don't take much effort to create. You can create a ton of these throughout a couple of weeks and then push that out to your audience.

It could be through social media, you could put it out in your other marketing material or newsletters. They're a very low barrier and they have a really good impact.

Tutorials

The screenshot is from a YouTuber called Rachel How. She's a design YouTuber. She teaches people all sorts of different interesting things with UI design and goes into a lot of detail, about that. All her videos kind of range from ten to 30 minutes and that is the foundational content for her whole channel.

So Tutorial Videos are a bit more complex. They go into more detail and that means that they're longer. As a result, they are usually more informative so you can learn more from them. Because of this, they're also really good for YouTube since they appreciate longer forms of content.

Tutorials are also really good for help centers. So if you are building software, or maybe you run an online course and you need a help center to help people understand what they can and can't do in the community or the product, then tutorial videos are perfect for that. They're a great way to activate and onboard customers.

The best thing about a tutorial is you're teaching people how to do something. Demo videos can be more for kind of entertainment, but because they're smaller, you're not going to teach people a ton. You're just trying to get them excited about something and get them interested. Tutorials let you go into things in more detail and teach people something.

Online Courses

Online Courses are also tutorials or a collection of tutorials but you can think of it more as a small project and requires some planning. For Tutorial Videos, you can quickly think about what you want to cover there and then just hit record and go through it.

In an Online Course, you need to take a step back and put some initial upfront work in so that you can kind of create a learning journey for students. They are much longer and more informative and most importantly, they're high value.

They give students or the people who are attending the course or watching the course a ton of information that they can then take into their own lives and do something with.

Typically, you wouldn't put these in a big public place like YouTube since the algorithm is not going to appreciate a full online course which would be a bunch of long videos in some kind of sequence. Instead, you want to host it on a course platform like Teachable or something a bit more hybrid like Circle if you want a community aspect. You can also publish these to a big course aggregator like Skillshare or Coursera.

Because they have a ton of value in them, Online Courses are great for revenue and lead generation. For a lot of different types of entrepreneurs, an online course is a big part of their revenue stream. If you're a solopreneur, freelancer, or maybe a creator, an Online Course is a great way to add to the ways that you make money by sharing your knowledge and adding a lot of value, and then people be willing to pay you for it.

The other way to use it is for Lead Generation. This is useful if you are a software company or a small business where you are not going to make relatively a lot of money from selling online courses but it might be a good way to get new customers who are interested in what you have to say in the course and then get them interested in your product or service as a sort of side effect.

You can think of an online course as the more advanced of the three types of videos that we've covered.

Summary

All right, we hope you've been able to get a sense of why video is important, the way that it creates a connection with other people, and how it holds people's attention. And you've got an idea of the three types of videos that we are going to be focusing on, and how they help your business and ultimately ladder up to those goals, whether that is reaching new customers, educating customers, or growing an audience. See you in the next lesson!