Note: you don’t need to know Premiere or AE, but it helps for finishing touches.
I do a lot of webinars and interview a lot of people– like 2 to 3 per week.
Most of these go for about an hour–but could be 30 minutes or even 2 hours.
We upload the video from Zoom or the camera into our favorite writing/editing tool called Descript, which allows us to edit video/audio/text just like editing words in Google Docs.
We do some basic processing in Descript (the tool automatically cleans up the sound, removes filler words, and transcribes). Then correct the transcription errors, which get better every month as the AI gets smarter.
Some of my digital marketing guests use a lot of jargon (agencies are the worst), followed by doctors who use medical terminology.
And because people don’t speak as naturally as they type, we have to reword bits– whether through AI tools like Jasper (formerly Jarvis) and/or manually.
Sometimes we can make an ebook out of the episode, if there’s enough material (which is not this particular project) and still generate a podcast episode, too. But just so you know, we can push the transcript into Designrr, which is an AI tool that instantly generates a book with the cover, TOC, chapters, index, etc– to tune up the transcription into a book.
To make things faster, we use Transistor.fm to publish the podcasts instantly– for ourselves and clients.
We have 3 levels of effort in podcast production:
– SIMPLE: just get it done roughly and economically– no need to make it pretty, but do fix transcriptions (since people don’t speak as well as they write). Then just publish on our YouTube, Apple podcasts, and a few other channels. Make sure we publish “show notes”. Generally $75-100 per video is our budget (with no additional freelancer budget for graphics or video effects– so simple thumbnail grabbed from poses at end and lower thirds template used in Descript).
– MEDIUM: A higher-powered guest means we put more love into the processing– adding in a b-roll with pictures/videos of them and me, sometimes sprinkling in a few diagrams from our “master presentation” to visually demonstrate the process. We have a lot of courses and products to display, pulled from the Asset Tracker (google sheet). We can get a few $10 or $20 jobs on Fiverr or whatnot to do light graphics support, then maybe editing a few pictures or diagrams. $125-200 per video (with $50 for other freelancers). Reach out to 5 of the people we list to collect testimonials on the back cover.
– HIGH: we can spend a few hundred dollars on freelancers (besides you) to get everything nice, since we’re going to drive sales of a course or product from it… $400-800 per video plus $200 for a freelancer budget. Pull out 10 video snippets we can use for social media posts, using our Descript templates. Help us make sure we have a strong “landing page” that has highlights from the video/webinar.
The beauty of all these tools is that we can quickly turn most videos (even from years ago and even if not originally meant to be a podcast, like a client Zoom calls) into respectable episodes that we repurpose in our Content Factory process.
I’d expect that 80% of the videos are in the SIMPLE category, 15% are MEDIUM, and 5% are HIGH.
We used to use various podcasting tools and had fancy video editing– messing around with a lot of back and forth that took weeks. Now we’ve been able to crank these out in a couple of days each, which surprises our friends. Use the keyword ‘transistor’ in your response so I know you pay attention to details.
Most “podcasts” are video, too– which makes it easy to pull out social snippets that we post on multiple social channels and use to promote the episode, sometimes with “dollar a day” ads.
If you like what we’re doing here, even if you don’t have experience yet in the various tools, that’s okay. Do show me you understand this process and can grok the content well enough to come up with snappy headlines for our webinars that we turn into books.
Do not send me your resume or canned introduction. Write a message from scratch that thoughtfully demonstrates your understanding of what we’re doing and your interest.
Many entrepreneurs want our help– and we want to employ a lot of freelancers who can demonstrate they can do this (not just confidently say they can). My name is Dennis Yu.
I’d expect a 3-day turnaround on most videos- but there may be delays based on feedback cycles or other freelancers getting back to us.
But if you haven’t created quality ebooks from videos, then perhaps best to go through our training to qualify:
For those who can demonstrate initiative to implement what we teach, I’m okay with hiring hourly or on a small test project.
Here’s a great example of a video and show notes: