It is early august. For many of us around the world that means a slower pace. For many people it is vacation week. For some lucky ones especially in Europe, it might be an entire vacation month. For others if you are still working it may be a slower time because so many of your customers, vendor’s distributors, others, are on vacation. The whole world tends to slow down a little bit this time of year.
so what are you going to do with your extra time? Now you may want to go to the beach go to the pool vacations and, that is great I like to do all of those things too but sometimes you can just run out of ideas to do. I have got an idea for you. What if I told you, you could do something that would be a little bit fun, a little bit interesting you would learn an important skill that might help you throughout your whole career. You could make some money for yourself possibly, or you could make some money for your favorite charity. And you could help the community in your world and you would not have to leave home. I hope untreated you yet. Here is my suggestion. You got a slow day this august. You got an extra vacation day and there is nothing to do and you do not really want to start that home painting project or that garage cleaning project.
Here is the best way of legitimately procrastinating those other tasks. Here is what I recommend. Make an on-line video based course on some subject you care about. Now it is simple you may have thought I should write a book on that. I could write a book on how to be good at canoeing or how to make lanyards or how to carve whistles from whatever your hobby is or you may just have great advice on the best possible way to keep your kitchen clutter free and people have asked you for tips over the years.
Why not just make a course? Now these days it can be as simple as holding your cell phone up and recording it with the video recorder on your cell phone. Cell phone quality of video is excellent these days if you have decent lighting. It is quiet enough and you can get decent audio now. I am not suggesting you do this trying to make a million dollars. I am not suggesting that this is something you can do boom 550 lectures about. Now I make a lot of courses that are five hundred and fifty lectures long three, no three hundred but thirty hours long. It does not have to be that. How about something that is just thirty minutes long. That is the minimum length on some major online course platforms with some platforms it is only ten minutes long.
So here is what I’d suggest. Keep it simple just block out one morning. I have made really long courses where I have spent months developing them but I have also done courses in a couple of hours. Why not just pick one subject? It could be whittling. It could be macramé. It could be how to speak simple words in a foreign language and just talk about it as if you were trying to help one person, one student right in front of you recorded on video. Make 5, 10, 15 short little videos and then publish it on an existing on-line platform. Could be Skillshare, Udemy there is tons of them out there I would not recommend building it on your own site and building everything from scratch just make the videos label the videos and tell people what they’re going to get out of it. This is literally something you can do in one day. It is probably something you can do in a half day. I have done many a course in just half a day.
Here are the things you will learn, you will learn your subject matter better. Because when you are forced to speak on something, it forces you to really know your stuff. It will also make you much more confident in your public speaking especially speaking on video, in these days with skype conferences, zoom conferences, someone asking you to do a Facebook live, it could not hurt to be more comfortable speaking in front of video.
Now I am not going to lie to you and I am not asking for a cut of your revenues believe me. I am not asking anything from you but I do want you to realize you could make some money. You are not going to get rich from a course you make in one morning or one afternoon but what if you did a course for example on great ways of teaching life-saving faster to young swimmers and you made an extra $20 a month from that after making it in one day. Would it really be a bad thing to have an extra $20 and if you do not need it or you do not want it donate $20 to the local swimming pool in your town. That is always looking for money to buy more lifejackets. Think of anything where someone else has asked you to help them and explain something. Maybe you are frankly just tired of having to tell people for the 10th time how to cut grass a certain way. So that it does kill certain plants maybe you do a handful of video tutorials on that subject.
The next time someone asks you, you just send them the link. I know it does not sound like as much fun as going to the amusement park or the beach for your day off but again if you have taken your days off. You have a slow vacation day or a Saturday or Sunday and it is a lazy august why not try it could open doors for you. It could present other possibilities. It could get attention for you in a way that you were not anticipating but entirely in a positive way. It is never being easier to make an online video based course. I have been doing these since 1997 I got to tell you it was really hard time consuming and expensive to make an online course in 1997. It was dumb to do it then my mistake and it was not productive at all. Now it is really, really easy so give it a try there is a lot of tips a lot of information on YouTube other courses on how to make a course but you do not even need that just start recording video of yourself giving good information label it uploads it, and it is trust me it is a thousand times easier then self-publishing a book for amazon kindle. You do not to worry about spelling and formatting and images and all that it is really easy. So I won’t take up any more your time if you are watching this on a vacation day but give it some thought make an online course on this vacation.