August 2020 – Kyle Cordes

Design your content for effective video

This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:

Technical setup
Process
Content (this post)
Promotion (coming sometime)

Your goal is results, not Minutes Watched

YouTube is full of videos that take 10+ minutes to deliver 30 seconds of information. Why? Because this content is on channels that make money by showing ads. They need each video to be at least 10 minutes, and more minutes watched means more ad revenue.

But that’s not the context I’m writing about. This post series is about demonstrating expertise and competence on video:

A small-scale, mostly-one-take video production process

This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:

Technical setup
Process (this post)
Content
Promotion

Create an outline

Outline your video in some detail, and make that outline visible (either on your screen, or printed on paper) during your video recording. Not too much detail, though; the outline shouldn’t take long, perhaps just a few minutes.

Then iterate on the outline, and get feedback from others if the video is important or if you are new to this kind of content. Rearranging text in an outline is tremendously easier than re-recording or video editing, so make the most of this stage.

Audio-video setup for meetings and videos

This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:

Technical setup (this post)
Process
Content
Promotion

So you want to show expertise and competence on video…

Recording a technical talk? Creating a video about a management tool, to be used as an advertisement for consulting services? Working on the perfect conference talk for an online conference, hoping to gain another 1000 Twitter followers among the community using a library you work on?

These are all cases where demonstrating competence and expertise in a video, to an audience who can leave with one click at any moment, pays off. Here are tips I have found around the web and from my experience.