AskPat 739 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everyone? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 739 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

Here is today's question from Mary.

Mary: Hi Pat. My name's Mary and I'm a college level instructor. I'm looking to develop an ebook and a video series on a topic that my students seem to really struggle with. My question for you is, should I focus on the ebook, the video series or both? What platform would I use to create each of them. I really just don't know how to get started so I'm looking for some advice on that. Thanks so much for all that you do.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Mary, thanks so much for your question. Really cool that you sort of are an instructor and you want to use these different tools to help your students. I think that, that's great. There's a lot of different options for you. Now first let me talk about ebooks. Ebooks are a great way for you to deliver content, everybody's reading on their Kindle or reading PDF files on their computers now, which is great. Back when I started writing ebooks in 2008, not as many people were doing that but I still was able to develop an ebook and write it and sell it and it worked out really well. I share that entire process on how you can outline the ebook, how you can get it created, how you can market it and do all those things, the different platforms you can use to sell it or distribute it if you want to give it away for free. However, you want to do it, you can check that out at EbooksTheSmartWay.com, 100% free. Check it out again EbooksTheSmartWay.com. It's just been actually redesigned that book in particular to help you even further with the clarity on what it takes to become an ebook author.

Video is also a great thing you could do. You can do very simple, very simply Mary, just YouTube videos and creating a playlist. If you wanted to give it away for free, start to build an audience, start to be able to answer questions that your students have and show them a process for example without you having to do too much work because you're just trying to help them out. Again, they're going to know how to watch YouTube and YouTube is there already and it's a platform that you can use for free to upload videos and create an account. You can do that.

Now if you wanted it to be behind some sort of paywall or a place where people wanted to login. One of my favorite tools to do that would be to use Teachable. Teachable.com is really cool because you're able to set up essentially a course, which combines the videos that you're going to set up in lessons and modules and that sort of thing. Which would in a very nice way, in Teachable this is what they're great at, helping lead students through a process. Different modules, different lessons, videos within each, you can add work sheets, you can add text in and around those videos. You can have resources available too. You can have people when they sign up they are given access to it through a user login and a password.

Then you can even keep track of who's in the course, who's taking it, who's still sitting on video number one, who's completed it. You can even offer quizzes within that as well. I would recommend using Teachable. If you're going to do videos you might as well turn it into a really nice course that you can then either give people free access to, which I do on my own with my Will it Fly? book. I have a free companion course so I know how that works. It works really, really well. I use it for legend for collecting email addresses and to better serve my reading audience by giving them videos, worksheets, links for everything that I mention in the book, that sort of thing.

But I'm also selling the course through Teachable and that works very well too. However, you want to structure the course or sell it, give it away for free, I still think Teachable will be a great answer for you to be able to do that for your platform. You can check that out at AskPat.com/teachable. Hopefully all that information helps Mary and gives you some ideas and places on where to start. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, best of luck and I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. My assistant will reach out to you in the next couple of weeks or so to collect your information so we can send that over to you.

For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Then finally, as always, to finish off the day and the week here's a quote from Susan Cooper. She says, “Engage, enlighten, encourage and especially just be yourself. Social Media is a community effort. Everyone is an asset.”

I love that. Take care everyone and I'll see you next week in the next episode of AskPat. Bye for now.