AP 0792: Which Video Host Is Best for Online Courses?

AskPat 792 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 792 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.

We have a great question from Marie, but before we get to that I do want to mention that today is February 1, for those of you who are listening to this. I'm excited, because at the end of this month I'm going to be launching my brand new course, which is www.SmartFromScratch.com. It's already been validated with over 100 students who have gone and taken the course. I'm excited to share it publicly once we've refined it, and taken that feedback from those first set of students, and then revamped it, and put it out there later this month. If y'all want to check it out and get on the waitlist, check it out at www.SmartFromScratch.com. All right. Now, here is today's question from Marie.

Marie: Hi, Pat. It's Marie here from France. I hope you're good. I have this question for you. I'm preparing an ecourse for kids, and I want it to be really easy to use. I want my videos to be protected. What tools would you recommend, like I heard YouTube is not really good for your video's safety? How about Vimeo, the plus or pro option? Yeah. I really would like to hear your opinion on that. Thank you. Bye bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Marie. Thank you so much for the question today. There are a number of different approaches here, and I definitely wouldn't recommend YouTube for any ecourses that you're doing, unless it's a public course that you're sharing online, similar to what I have at, for example, www.PodcastingTutorial.com. That's a blog post that I wrote that has six videos that all teach people how to start a podcast, and those are on YouTube. They are hosted on YouTube. The reason for that is because it's easy to access. I can get found via search on YouTube, which is important for more traffic, and more eyes, and viewers watching it. Again, like I said, it's freely available, so I'm not charging for it. I use that as a tool to get to provide a ton of great content up front for people, so that they can get involved with the brand and I can start to build a relationship with them, and every once in awhile it's great to promote and put out a course like that, and I would recommend using YouTube for that purpose, for the public sort of courses that you come out with.

If it's something that it's a product that you're coming out with, how do you make your videos safe and secure? Well, there's a number of different approaches, like I said. If you go with a platform that already exists, so you're not using a plug in where you're building your own website and making that secure yourself, but if you're using something like www.Teachable.com, which is an amazing tool that I've been using (I’m actually using that to host my upcoming course, Smart From Scratch). I've also used it to host a free course that is for the readers of Will It Fly? to get their email addresses. That's been working out really well too, so I highly recommend www.Teachable.com. You can check it out at www.AskPat.com/Teachable.

What's nice about that is the platform's already there, so all you have to do is upload the content. It's already laid out the way it should be. They have a team of 20-plus people I think over there who are specifically focused on helping you create your courses and your students succeeding in those courses, which is what I love about them, which is why recently—I don't know if I've mentioned this here on AskPat at least—but I've also become an advisor for this company as well, and I'm going to be using them a lot more.

The cool thing about this is when you upload your videos through Teachable you're hosting it on their own hosting plan. You're not paying any extra for videos. They are secure. They're only accessible through when people log in, and that's already set up for you, like I said. I believe they use Wistia to host their videos, which is an even better bonus, because Wistia, similar to Vimeo, which you mentioned, and I'll talk about them in just a second, but Wistia is an extremely high quality video hosting platform that gives you a lot of insights into analytics and stuff, which you can use within Teachable or even on its own, if you're using other plugins and stuff to create your own membership site or ecourse site. It gives you some fantastic analytics to help you understand how your students are going through your videos, what parts are great, what parts are not great, so you can improve it for your students down the road.

Vimeo is a great tool. If you are hosting your ecourse or your membership site on your own site, not on something like Teachable, then Vimeo, Wistia, those are both great options. I believe the plus or the pro level would work, but I can't confirm that right now, but I have gotten access to Vimeo's Pro before, and I have used it for serving coursework and materials. Same thing with Wistia as well. That's always worked out really well. Yeah. Those are ways that you can put those videos onto a password protected site. That's really where the privacy comes from. On those sites, both Vimeo and Wistia, you can set it so that each video can only be played on a specific domain, so that would be the domain name of your product or your website. That way people can't take it and share it or embed it on their own websites.

Hopefully that makes sense, Marie. Thank you so much for the question. I want to wish you all the best of luck. It's so cool that you're creating a product for kids. I hope it helps many kids around the world, and I hope all is well in France. I hope to visit there some day. Until then, I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd love potentially featured here on the show, just head on over the www.AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. If you have a moment to start off the month and you want to give something back to me, just head on over to iTunes and leave a review for AskPat. I don't ask very often, but it would be really helpful, and I really appreciate that.

Finally, here's a quote to finish off the day by Thomas A. Edison, who has had a quote here featured on AskPat several times in the past, but I love this quote. That quote is, “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.” Think about that. Hustle while you wait. All right, guys. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye for now.