SPI 771: How to Consistently Create Videos to Grow Your Business with Caleb Wojcik

You just need to make the right videos that will attract the people that then will buy your courses or hire you to do something. You don’t need a million or even a hundred thousand subscribers to have a YouTube channel making a significant impact on your business. You can do it in the thousands.

Pat Flynn: What comes to mind, or rather, how does your body and your mind react, when I say the following phrase: recording video. If you, when you hear that, cringe a little bit around the thought of you creating video, or perhaps worry because it’s something that you know you need to do but just haven’t started yet, or it might give you some nightmares because you’ve tried it before and you have failed. You’ve started it and then you’ve stopped. The only thing consistent is that you’ve stopped doing it. You continually stopped doing it after starting. Well, if that’s the case, then this episode is for you.

We’re bringing on Caleb Wojcik. Great friend of mine, co founder of SwitchPod, friend of SPI, previous guest here on the podcast. He’s talked about what it was like to have young kids as an entrepreneur. And we have talked about video before, but we’re going to go in depth today to talk about specifically consistency because it’s one thing to just start doing video, but if you stop, then it kind of is for nothing.

But if you continually create it over time and if we can help you answer the question of, well, how often should we go? Like, how do we stay consistent over time? How do we do it for YouTube, but also how might we do it for online courses? If we’re going to be doing that, what’s the approach? How does it differ?

We’re going to talk about and uncover all those things today. Plus we’re going to welcome Caleb as an official EIR expert in residence here at SPI, somebody who you can get access to inside of SPI pro to help you with your video needs. This will be a fun episode. Check them out. This is session 771 of the SPI podcast, Caleb Wojcik.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he once hated oysters. But now? Orders them whenever he sees them. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Caleb, welcome back to the SPI podcast.

Thanks for being here, man.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been a while. We’ve been on a few times together. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: It has been a while. The last time you were on the show, we were talking about how you had just had twins and you and your wife were, you know, wrangling cats, if you will, while being an entrepreneur.

Any quick update on life and family and how are things going now?

Caleb Wojcik: It’s easier in some ways and harder than others. That’s all I’ll say. You know, like, We’re we’re close to all three of the kids being in preschool.

Pat Flynn: Kids in preschool. So a little bit of time gotten back, but I remember what that was like. I mean, two and a half hours to three hours in preschool that goes by so fast.

I mean, you almost don’t, don’t have time to start anything, right?

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, I know. But it really makes you focus. I feel like pre kids, you have all day, all weekend, all night. You know, it’s like time is like unlimited when you don’t have that, you tend to focus a little bit better. So I feel like that’s efficiency and like, you know what to work on.

It’s like you have limited time. It kind of forces you into doing what’s most important each day.

Pat Flynn: That’s so true. And you and I had started building relationship, you know, over a decade ago when Keoni was born. And I know that you were kind of watching me from the sidelines, raise a kid and try to be an entrepreneur.

And it’s true. It did make me become more efficient. We’re not saying that if you want to be more efficient, you know, go have kids. That’s not, no, that’s kind of opposite, but we will be talking about efficiency and consistency with your video today. And Caleb, first of all, I just want to welcome you officially into SPI as one of our newest EIRs or Experts in Residence with a video background, with the opportunity for people inside of pro to get some help from you.

Welcome in, man. What are you excited about most becoming a part of SPI now more officially?

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, I think just having the face to face interaction with people on calls because we did, we did YouTube From Scratch kind of cohort or whatever. So I got a little taste of the community and like did some weekly calls with people and just seeing people take advice one week and put it into action and come back the next week with more questions is like, I love that.

I love just seeing the people that are in there.

Pat Flynn: That’s what Pro’s all about, you know, the community, the connection, and now an opportunity to connect with you, a video expert, as we are now in a world that is so video centric is, is key. So we’re just really happy to have you and welcome in. But today I wanted to talk for those who are excited about video and maybe even not excited about video because again, we have to be putting video into our content in some way, shape or form.

And there’s a lot of different kinds of videos we can talk about. But before we get into YouTube versus creating course video content versus, you know, social, just talk about the mindset of video. We’re not going to talk about equipment today. We’re not going to talk about the business plan per se around video.

We will be talking about creating and the production a little bit, but the mindset going into video is really, really important. And what would you say today is most important when it comes to creating videos and for those especially who are a little bit apprehensive, maybe not have done it before or have started and stopped, like how can we wrap our heads around just doing it?

Caleb Wojcik: Well, I think a lot of people I talked to, I’m like, Oh, like, what are you doing with video? They’re just like, yeah, I should do that. And it’s like, we all know we should do that, but a lot of people don’t. And I think it’s the fear based thing, or they don’t want to put themselves out there. And I mean, I’m similar, like I would prefer to be completely unknown, honestly.

Like if I was anonymous and people didn’t know who I was, like, I would prefer that, but in this day and age of running a business, running a, whether you do like freelance stuff and you need clients or you have digital products you’re selling, or you’re trying to grow an existing business, having some sort of personality, some sort of face to that brand really helps people connect with it.

Otherwise you’re competing with the faceless brands, Nike and Apple and these that have these huge budgets and they can hire people to be in their commercials and things like that. You want to have some sort of one on one connection with people and podcasts are a way to do that. You know you’ve talked about this a lot where you get them for a half hour an hour at a time. They really get to know you. When I think of people that have big brands or I want to check out what they’re doing online, it’s because I feel like I know them even though I don’t actually know them because I’ve watched them on video so much.

So it is a one on one connection like this almost when someone’s watching your video. So that’s why I think it’s so powerful.

Pat Flynn: And it’s now seemingly more important than ever because of things like AI that are creating video and just automating everything content is so plentiful now and even podcast people can use ElevenLabs to replicate somebody’s voice and you don’t even know it’s real anymore and true video is getting to that point with OpenAI’s Sora that just came out, right?

We’re seeing these videos that look like they were professionally shot. But the face to camera videos, even though there will be a point where that is AI as well, it’s important to get on video so you make that real connection because that’s going to be more and more necessary and needed in order to build trust and authenticity online.

So there’s a lot of reasons to get into video and you’re doing yourself a disservice, you’re doing your audience a disservice by not showing up. So that’s why we’re here and why we’re talking about this today. And of course you and I have created YouTube From Scratch, which has helped loads of people start their channels.

Some of them have now gone full time with them, which is amazing to see. And we w we just want more of that. So let’s go into being consistent with video for somebody just starting out. It can be. a lot of friction to get started and even hit record on that first video. And, you know, while recording, it’s just a pain and then, you know, the editing process of it and then kind of having to do that again and again and again, it’s so overwhelming.

What are the things we can do while we get into video to reduce that friction as we start to want to be consistent with this?

Caleb Wojcik: I mean, the biggest thing is that the tools that are available now are much easier. They’re easier than they’ve ever been. Like, you can film high quality video on your phone now when we started doing that 10, 12, 15 years ago like you had to go buy a camera a Best Buy and you had to like figure out how to focus it on yourself and you had to do it. Like the tools are just more available now. So you just need to decide what you’re going to film on. Draw the line in the sand and be like I don’t need anything else to do this right now.

I need My phone and I need a SwitchPod. That’s all I need. Yes. Yes. Push people to our products. Shameless plug right there. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: You can’t film videos without a Switch Pod. This is our product, by the way, in case you didn’t know.

Caleb Wojcik: I’ve run a video production company for 10 years now. And there’s always that like additional piece of equipment that you’re like, Oh, if I just had that, I could do whatever, you know?

Like if I just had that one more piece and it’s like, that never goes away. It doesn’t matter. Like you’re always going to want something. It’s, you know, the hedonic treadmill. There’s always going to be another piece of something that you want to buy. Yeah. So don’t let that keep you from just hitting record.

So just commit to whatever you have now is good enough for the next one to three months. That’s the equipment I’m going to use. I just need to film. And quantity will help increase your quality. So there are plenty of videos that I filmed in the beginning that I will never let anyone see. They are not on the internet anymore.

I either deleted them and didn’t upload them or they’re now hidden. Because I’m so embarrassed of what I look like and sound like and how I act on camera like completely unnatural. So I know some people leave those up and you can scroll way back in the archives and that’s encouraging to see you like Massive youtubers now and the first videos they put out sometimes when they were children, but mine are hidden. So don’t be afraid of the like your first few videos.

You can always hide them later as you get better.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I want to expand on this idea of quantity over quality. Usually we hear the opposite, right? Just get something of value out there. And yes, of course we want our videos to be good enough and actually, you know, help people or entertain or, you know, provide information, but it is so important in the beginning to get your reps in.

So that you understand how this process works. So you can get more confident on the camera. So you can learn your editing skills so you can learn what to hand off to other people. And you can have, I mean, I think it was MKBHD who was on this show, who said that his first 100 videos were for less than a hundred subscribers.

And that was so powerful to hear from somebody who now has nearly 20 million subscribers and is the most prolific YouTuber or one of the most prolific YouTubers in the world. And, you know, I’ve kept my old videos up and they’re trash, but you know, you gotta get, I think it was JLD who, who said you got to be a disaster before you become the master.

And I think that that holds so much truth in the world of video. So create, publish. So when it’s our first go around, like what, what is good enough? What, what does that even mean? And how do we even begin to figure out what to create videos about? Let’s, let’s focus on YouTube for now. And then we’ll focus more in the second half of this talk about creating content for things like courses.

But if we’re getting onto YouTube, which you should, because there’s a lot of opportunity there, especially as SEO is changing on the Google front. YouTube is becoming a place for people to get found. What would we do? How do we even begin? A lot of this is obviously in Smart From Scratch, but let’s bring some of that back for people listening right now.

Caleb Wojcik: I think it’s honestly stop worrying about the technical parts of video and worry about like talking to one person find one person you can help with something and focus on what that thing is you’re going to help them with and then don’t put a ton of pressure on an individual video think of 10 ideas and then just film them and release them. I think getting all caught up I’m like oh what’s the perfect title and thumbnail for this video it’s like when you’re starting out or even when you’re not starting out, quantity is going to get you the views.

You can have more views if you put out more videos. That’s how you get more views. That’s how you reach more people. You have more little army men out there fighting your fight for you is having a bunch of them out there a bunch of foot soldiers each video is a little foot soldier like is a part of the battle for you don’t worry a little like stay back and try to build a tank for like six months and release it have a bunch of things out there trying to help people and you’ll see what works like you’ll get the feedback from okay they like these types of videos or they liked it when I had this kind of title or thumbnail and and that’s how you learn you don’t really learn from seeing what everyone is doing.

You have to do stuff for yourself and see what your audience resonates with.

Pat Flynn: The power of YouTube is, in my opinion, the feedback that you get from the videos that you create and you can’t have any feedback and any sort of results, good or bad to learn from if you’re not publishing videos. So one thing that I think may be helpful for people listening and watching is What could I even create a video about?

My favorite advice is to create videos about stuff you’re already doing. It’s stuff that you know, it’s stuff that you’re involved with already. And you had mentioned like, okay, like help somebody. What if you film the video of you helping somebody already, right? Whether it’s a coaching caller or a person, you know, and they have a problem and you just help them through that.

And you use the video to tell that story and it might not be perfect and you might not know how to edit it just right. But at least the end result is you’re helping this person. And the idea of being people can find this and go, Hey, that person’s just like me. This person knows what they’re talking about.

They got some help and I’m going to follow and subscribe. And I think that’s key. So you might be working on a project. We’ll talk about some of the problems that you’ve had in this project. And you can bring those things to, to light for people and answer those questions, and you might not even have an answer.

You’re just going through the process with people. And people like that. People like to see the behind the scenes and the sort of, as you go kind of content. So you might already have a 10, 20, 50 pieces of content in you already from just the stuff you’re already doing. I think a lot of people think we have to come up with 50 new things and something separate than what we’re doing.

So just a little bit of a, of a piece of advice for you in case you’re like, well, I don’t even know what to create videos about. What are you doing? Showcase that in video format. Now, when we say quality. Quantity. I see. It’s even weird for me to say quality over quantity. It’s been so ingrained in me, but on YouTube, it’s so important.

Does this mean a daily video? Like, should we be creating seven videos per week? And that, I mean, that’s, that’s wild. That’s impossible for a lot of people. What, what is quantity for a starter.

Caleb Wojcik: I mean, I would pick out what you can comfortably handle with your current workload and just have it be something you can commit to because the audience will get to recognize how often you put videos out and they’ll come to expect them, especially if you’re super consistent with it, where you’re like every Tuesday morning, there’s a video.

And, I mean, there’s, there’s certain YouTube channels that are like that, where they, you know, they stick to that exact schedule, partially probably to keep themselves accountable so they don’t miss a week or what have you. So I don’t think it has to be daily. I think social is a good place to put videos out more frequently, a few times a week, or five days a week, or whatever you want to do.

Those are maybe a little bit easier to make and you could just film them selfie mode on your phone easily add some captions and put a song under it and you’re done and that can kind of be a place to test ideas you know something resonates really well in a social video make that a longer more produced youtube video. i don’t think consistent necessarily means you have to do it hourly daily but i think at a minimum very minimum i would say monthly. But i would try to do like two to four times a month.

So try, try to get to weekly. That’s kind of a good cadence for your audience to expect.

Pat Flynn: I like that. Base it off what is just possible for you and commit to it. Like you said, how do we set ourselves up for success when we are in our minds? Like, okay, we’re going to commit to this. We’re going to try for a video per week, maybe two.

I know that. When I started out, it was just such a drag to even get to the point where I could finally hit record. And I know there’s some things we can do with our setup, for example, to make it easier for us and reduce that friction to just like get to hit that red button sooner. What are some of the things that we could do to set ourselves up in that way so that, you know, there’s less friction going in?

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, I think setting up either a permanent setup, if possible, where just the light’s always set up, the camera’s always on the tripod or SwitchPod and you try to just have a very permanent spot that you just like film all your videos in that does tend to help or maybe it’s hiring somebody to show up, you know, maybe it’s hiring like, Hey, one day a month, I have a video person coming. We’re going to do it. Like we’ve done that together. Like when you had the office space more recently, we would just have like a day a month and we would batch film four videos and we’d have to, you know, we’d have a couple ideas of like, okay, we’re definitely going to do these two.

And then we’d just be like, okay, well, we need, we need more to, to, to stay weekly. Let’s come up with some ideas right now. Let’s whiteboard it. Let’s get out some sticky notes. And that’s when we were most consistent on the channel was. When I was coming one day a month to film and batch film four at a time.

So I think batching is like a huge thing for consistent production, especially when you’re not relying on other people. I know it’s hard to batch podcast interviews, for example, cause they’re scheduling and conflicts and they’re so long and you know doing four or five hour long conversations in a day, you know, your energy might not be there by that last one.

But if you’re filming some shorter videos, you know, batch it, film it all in one day.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, batching has been huge. If you are a podcaster, you know that to be true. For video, it’s the same and maybe it might mean creating a day of the week specifically where you know that that day is just for videos and leading into that day you have a list of ideas or videos that you know you want to film I like the idea of having a person there with you like when you came over to the studio we got a lot done.

We shared ideas with each other there were things that you saw that I didn’t see and vice versa and those videos were really great. That was back when video podcasts were literally only available on Apple as video podcast. And for a while we had the number one video podcast on Apple. The sort of asterisk with that is nobody was watching video podcasts.

So our little call to action to go watch them was, was enough. And now video podcasts have taken sort of a completely different route. And for those video podcasters in the audience, or at least audio podcasters who are thinking of video, it might just be as simple as turning on the camera while you’re recording those interviews.

Even if it is remote, I know there’s a lot of people who are creating these beautiful studios and they have like Colin and Samir and they bring these people in these guests and they’re in a location like Los Angeles where a lot of these people exist. So it’s a lot easier for them. But then there’s examples like Ramit Sethi, who is doing remote interviews for his podcast, his audio podcast, but recording it on video, it is remote, but it’s very well done.

It’s the hook, it’s the setup, it’s also the little bit of editing that goes around that, from the frames to the words that pop up on the screen. So there’s a lot of things we can do, and I think it’s important to take inspiration from other video creators channels. Maybe not even in your own niche to see how you can stylize your videos in the way that you want.

But when it comes to the editing part of this, how do we make the editing part of this something that we can get consistent with and get better at? Obviously reps is important, but is there anything we can do to set ourselves up for success for consistent video editing if we are doing it on our own.

Caleb Wojcik: I think people get bogged down trying to do fancy things with video editing.

They try to do a ton of graphics or a ton of quick things or a little bit too much with audio or they’re worried a little bit too much about how loud the video is. Just like stuff on the screen all the time. And I, you’ll kind of attract the people that you want to attract with how you edit the videos.

So if you edit videos at a little bit slower pace and they’re a little bit more straightforward, like you’re going to attract people that maybe have a longer attention spans or maybe a little bit older. If you’re going towards the younger crowd, you might need to edit things a little bit more aggressively or have text on screen all the time.

Pat Flynn: And thanks, Cocomelon.

Caleb Wojcik: I think there’s like the Mr. Beastification of videos is like going over into all different niches of the text on the screen and like fast cuts and like that sort of thing.

Pat Flynn: And explosions. Boom.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like you don’t necessarily have to be that way. It can just be like a straightforward thing of you talking with straight cuts and to make it visually interesting you just you film some B roll on your own or you switch the camera angle occasionally. You do other subtle things to to keep engagement with your videos. We do like some slow zooms if we’re doing a screen recording, we make sure there’s a little bubble of you in the corner. So if something’s happening on screen, they can still see you and then we can cut back and forth between those two things.

Because if it’s just a screen recording, it’s kind of like watching a keynote presentation. It’s not as visually interesting. So I think some of those tricks will help the engagement without going over the top with the editing and keeping it pretty straightforward.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I agree. And there’s actually a trend, it seems to reduce the amount of noise on videos.

Now, even Mr. Beast is slowing down a little bit, trying to start. Yes, he still has explosions and giant things that like tanks and whatnot. But even he’s trying to tell a little bit more story in his videos. There’s some channels like Sam Sulek, who is a bodybuilder who literally has just himself on camera talking.

There’s no edits, no cuts, nothing. It’s just him at the gym talking about his workouts and stuff. He still is able to attract a lot of people in that regard. That being said, he’s also gigantic and captures attention initially in that way. But then you get to know him and his personality and it’s like, Oh, this guy’s like a giant teddy bear and he’s teaching this stuff.

And again, there’s no fancy edits. He’s he’s himself. And that, that personality works. There’s another channel I recently found called. It’s a terrible channel name, no offense, but it’s called Renaissance Periodization. Terrible channel name. Incredibly successful. So no, you don’t need a perfect channel name in order to succeed.

But he is a bodybuilder, fitness. I’m getting into fitness and health and stuff lately, so I’ve been watching a lot of channels. But as a YouTuber and entrepreneur, I can’t help but like, try to analyze these channels and what they’re doing really well. He just sits there and he’s literally, he literally has a PowerPoint slide with bullet points, but it’s because he knows so much information.

He’s able to insert his personality and these dad jokes. And, you know, I can’t help but laugh every once in a while, but there’s no quick cuts. He tells me exactly what I want to learn. What is creatine and do I need it? Okay. I’m going to watch this thing and he has all the information about it. Good, bad, ugly, but he’s bringing his personality and it’s literally a keynote slide next to him.

So no, you don’t need to go fancy. And I’m glad we talked about this because start simple. That’s really the thing here. Start simple. You can add more flourish and color and confetti over time, and you might not even need to, or even want to it’s the information in your personality that are going to be really important and the reps, get the reps in.

Be consistent, set up your station, get in there so you can just sit down and hit record, have a little bit of a plan going in, but sometimes you You don’t even need to script a very much. You just need to know what stories you’re going to tell and trust yourself to tell these stories. You can finesse it in the editing and go from there.

So I think that’s a great start here in this conversation. I do want to switch gears, take a little quick water break.

Next. I want to talk about videos for online courses on the courses are still a very important part of a person’s business, especially if they sell information and they have a unique way of teaching something videos are going to be an important component of that.

I have a lot of people inside of SPI who say, Hey, can I create my course without video? I understand why they’re asking that. And technically, it’s possible. Yes, you can teach courses without video, but gosh, include video for the purpose of having this seem like there’s more value having the connection with your students.

Do you feel like it’s a necessity? What are your thoughts on like, is it mandatory to have video in an online course to teach something?

Caleb Wojcik: I think that it is more engaging for people to be able to watch something and especially most things you’re teaching have some sort of visual element to them whether you have to show it or whether you know you talking about it and then showing something on screen whether it’s a diagram or a chart or even bullet points like you just talked about It’ll help with retention a bit more.

If the best way to learn was just like reading books, then they’re like, wouldn’t be school because you wouldn’t need teachers. And you would just be like, here, kids read all these books for 13 years. And then like go to college and read some more books. And like, that’s why there’s classrooms. There’s you have people teaching and presenting in a certain way and have.

You know, chalkboards and whiteboards and overhead projectors and all the things. Oh, do they even use overhead projectors anymore? I’m dating myself, I guess, with like the dry erase with like, sometimes they wind them and stuff.

Pat Flynn: I feel like they do. Yeah, but they’re they’re all electronic now. Oh, yeah.

Versus, you know, it’s like mirroring on on an iPad or something versus the what is it?

Caleb Wojcik: Mylar or something like the transparencies and stuff.

Pat Flynn: Oh man, I miss the smell of that projector. Looked like it was going to overheat the entire time.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, but going back to the value thing you said was just. The price, if you’re going to price something at a certain level, they’re going to expect, you know, some production quality, it would be very hard to sell a $200-$5000 course and it’s a PDF. I might have issue with that, even though really it’s the information, but how you deliver it also, you know, there’s some, some value there for people. So, you know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely highly produced. That’s kind of been the main type of client work I’ve done video wise is filming courses for people.

And some of them and very visually. necessary to be on video. Bunch of watercolor courses I did or knitting or calligraphy, like those things had to be on camera. Cause you had to see what they were doing and how they showed it. But I’ve done some for authors that they just talk. There’s some lower thirds when they talk the whole time.

And in theory, that could have been a book that could have been a PDF, but I don’t know if people had bought that at the price they were charging.

Pat Flynn: And in many of those cases, I know, because you and I have chatted, those were books yet people wanted the online course version with the video. In fact, this happened with Will It Fly.

Will it fly? It was a book. It was supposed to just answer all the questions yet. People still were like, Pat, I need, like, can you show me, show me this? Yeah.

Caleb Wojcik: Companion courses in a book. And then they want to watch the video version. It’s the same thing. Like people would rather watch a movie than read a book.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, sadly.

Caleb Wojcik: It’s a little more condensed. I can sit on my couch and relax. You know, I guess you could read a book on the couch too, but it’s just like, it’s a different kind of style. It’s a different kind of format and people prefer different formats.

Pat Flynn: And we talk about this in our course, heroic online courses, but we’ll give you a little preview, obviously, or if you’re in pro or in the All Access Pass you have access to this, but let’s talk about it a little bit.

So let’s say we have a course idea. We know what transformation we want to offer our audience. It’s the most important thing when it comes to a course. What specific transformation are we offering them. Get specific. It’s a solution to a specific problem, not just here’s a course for my entire audience space.

It’s going to be for likely a particular segment of your audience space. But once we nail the where they’re at and where we want them to go, what prep work can we do before we get into the filming and production stage of an online course?

Caleb Wojcik: I always have. All the videos titled and in order and grouped together and sometimes some notes about them before I dive into film because I, I want to batch the like thinking of like what is this course and like what are all the things I need to help people with?

Sometimes I survey my audience beforehand or I talk to other people and when we do courses together, I don’t know how many we’ve done now SPi. 6, 8, some reshoots, probably 10 at this point. We have a Google Sheet that has all of the video titles in the different sections and all those titles end up going into the course platform to be like this is the name of this video and so we know all of that going in and we you and I have calls about it sometimes we talk with your team about what those videos are going to be and then you can prepare for them so that when you’re filming them, you’re not like, shoot, I need that one image, or I need that one, what’s the name of that website example I want to use, so like, all that stuff is in this spreadsheet, you got all the videos all planned out, so that when you go to batch film, you can do them back to back to back to back, and we do a lot of them in a day, sometimes, we do, you know, a lot of your courses are 50, 75 videos, and we’ll knock all all those out in like two or three days.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Caleb Wojcik: They’re long days, but then it’s done. And then you move down to the editing. You batch the editing. I don’t just like go to your house, film the video, drive home, edit it.

Pat Flynn: If you’re going to do online course videos, batch them. It is the best way to do it. You’re wearing the same clothes as you were in the previous video.

Your hair is the same. Your energy is the same. All that stuff mentally. Preparing yourself for a day or two of filming to just get it all done is, is wonderful. And it requires you having that outline, but also a detailed outline of each individual video. And this is great too, because it forces you, it’s a force function.

It forces you to just know what content is going to be in there. I can’t tell you how many times. And I just like, maybe it’s because we’re seasoned at this now, but like when people are creating online courses, sometimes I just see them kind of like creating it on the go and that is the most ridiculous thing in the world.

Spend some time to plan, plan to plan day on the calendar where it’s just like, I’m going to nail this out. What are the videos that I’m going to film a week or two from now or a month from now, even when I have my video person come in or when I turn on the camera here in my studio, whatever it might be, it just makes it so much easier.

And we also don’t always record in chronological order as a person might go through the course, right? Because in the courses we do, we like to have an intro to each section and an outro to each module, a module being a group of lessons about a particular thing. Our videos, you know, you heard 60 videos inside of a course.

Mind you, many of them are one to two to five minutes in length. They’re not all like 20 minute videos. Some of them are because some of the lessons require us to go into, you know, a podcast host and show how to set things up. He’s a software or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that’s like just screen recording.

But having that outline is great. And then we’ll often record batch, record all the intros for each module. So I can just go welcome to module one in this module. You’re going to learn blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then, okay, next one. Welcome to module two. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And it’s like, okay, now we have a file that we connect to the name of that video in that spreadsheet that we had.

And this spreadsheet is available. We do share it for those of you who are inside of Heroic Online Courses to help you prep. And we have an example in there. You can actually see Power Up Podcasting, our most successful course that you and I have filmed together as an outline and how we did it ourselves.

The prep work goes such a long way when building an online course, it will save you. Please, please, please do that. And then let’s move on to now. Okay. You got the prep work done. You got that outline and that in the spreadsheets, some of the lessons perhaps might have a script. Actually, let’s talk about that.

Do we script out these videos because they’re more educational because we want to nail every word and do we use a teleprompter to help us. What are your thoughts on that?

Caleb Wojcik: I go both ways on that. I, I’ve done both for myself. I’ve done both for clients. It kind of depends on, depends on the content. If you are repurposing something or you have it written already, or it’s extremely technical and you want to say the right things, teleprompter is great.

And if you just prefer teleprompter, then, then go with it. I do think teleprompted videos tend to be tighter, which means they’re, they’re shorter, they’re more concise. Yes. But they take more prep work, so it kind of depends on your preference. They’re also it makes filming go faster typically, you get in the groove of, you know, reading the teleprompter, being natural with the teleprompter.

And so the filming goes faster and the editing goes quicker too because there’s less mistakes. There’s less go backs. There’s less. Oh, let me like try to say that again. So I tend to script things when it’s a sales video or it’s something very specific I want to say. Like it’s really technical. I don’t want to like say the wrong thing.

So that’s when I tend to teleprompt. But I will also sometimes use a teleprompter with an outline just so that it’s kind of in front of me and like I’m looking through a teleprompter right now to see you. And that way I can still like stay on track with what I’m trying to say, but I’m not necessarily reading it word for word.

So I do think it’s a great tool to have in your arsenal, but you’re not going to use it every time using a teleprompter while you’re trying to demo something or do some software thing is really hard, very hard because you’re going to like keep checking at it, like keep looking at it, worried about like the speed changing and like that sort of thing.

So it tends to work best with a teleprompter when you have someone I think controlling it. And that’s what I would do when I would use a teleprompter to film other people is I’d always make sure someone on set was controlling it sometimes me sometimes somebody else so that if they kind of went on a tangent for a minute you could pause it and then come back to it you could do that on your own with pedals that you use.

With your feet to control teleprompters. I know some people do that. Already we’re getting into the weeds about like the technical aspect of it. I think bullet point and go, if you know something well enough to do a course on it, you probably don’t need to fully script it. You just need to like, have the preparation to like, okay, I want to hit these five things and, you know, maybe there’s a couple of specific sentences you want to say or things you want to hit, but you know, you have a whiteboard table right in front of you right now that you, when you did your office like 10 years ago, you put that there and that’s where a lot of course videos got outlined, you know, you just look down, you write them down and right there are like a bunch of sticky notes and they’re like next to the camera and not wing it, but you know, be a little bit more loose, be a little bit more relaxed with it.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, we’ve done both. I think in the beginning, I can’t remember what our very first course was. It might have been Smart From Scratch. I think that was teleprompted and I had scripted every single thing out. And I remember because we, I think we filmed that, did we not film that in Minnesota at a hotel?

Yeah, I think it was for a converted conference. Yeah, yeah, it was a lead pages conference that no longer exists, but we were at this really nice hotel and it kind of, we just filmed it there. The teleprompter thing is hard to learn. I will say it takes a little bit of practice to get right because if you don’t do it right, yes, we all know how to read, but reading on video and not making it look like you are reading a screen and having your eyes dart back and forth is pretty difficult. There’s a lot of training that needs to happen, so I’m kind of 50 50 on it as well. It’s something worth experimenting with. I will say when we have teleprompted, there’s so much more prep work that needs to be done.

However, the video filming and the editing goes a lot faster. That being said, oftentimes those videos feel a little bit more robotic or generic, even though I wrote those things myself because I’m reading them, they don’t come across as not genuine, but rather just conversational.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, they become more presenter like, less conversational.

Pat Flynn: Right. And then over time, we’ve ditched the teleprompter because I just know these topics so well now that I can off the cuff tell the right stories and teach on the go. And I’ve done it live before, I’ve done it in person, one on one, so I can do it on video when we’re, when recording. And so some lessons you could transcribe and, or you can, you can teleprompt and other ones maybe not.

How do you know? Well, go to your outline and figure it out. The outline is going to be absolutely key. The outline becomes pretty much your production workflow. And it feels so good to check off those boxes as we go down the list. And it’s just like, it’s so great. And then the editing happens and whether it’s somebody else editing it or you, you want to take those in chunks as well.

You’re going to need to set aside time. In the beginning, how long might it take a person to edit? Not a YouTube video, but an informational video that was filmed with, you know, I hit record. I’m doing a five minute lesson. There might be something on the screens that I’m sharing or another angle where I’m showing something in my hands.

And how long would a lesson that probably would maybe be a five minute lesson take just so we can get a perspective on how long this whole process might take for a person overall.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, I think somewhere between like two to four times as long as the video is, is usually what I estimate. If it’s a more straightforward video, something with, it needs a lot of sound effects and B roll and text and like that could be like 10 times the amount of length of the video.

So if it’s a, you know, a six minute video, it might take an hour to do it. If it’s more, involved in that, but if it’s a straightforward video where, you know, it’s, it’s mostly talking and teaching, there might be like switching angles between a screen or slides or, you know, like a top down camera or something, you know, you can get through that in maybe twice to four times the length of the video and kind of move on to the next one.

Pat Flynn: Now, before we finish up here, we talked about YouTube a little bit and being consistent on YouTube. The other thing I’ll say with YouTube, just to kind of go back and call back to that a little bit, is there’s a lot of feedback that you can get from the videos that you create. However, a lot of that affects our minds, oftentimes in a very negative way.

When you publish a video on YouTube, it will literally tell you, especially if you do a few videos, you’ll start to see that your videos will rank amongst each other. This video ranks seven out of the last 10 in terms of how it’s performing out of the gate. And that stuff plays on your mind. It makes you feel good some days and other days you’re just in a bad mood because the last video that you spent so much time on and you think is amazing is getting a 10 out of 10.

It’s the 10 worst performing video of the last 10 videos you’ve done. And that’s hard. How do you as you create videos and as you start to get this feedback, how do you continue on despite that?

Caleb Wojcik: You kind of have to choose which, which metrics you’re gonna let guide your decisions, if any. You need to decide, Okay, am I just going to try to make videos to get the most views?

And if that’s the case, then you repeat ideas that have done well, or, you know, blog posts you have that are popular or podcast episodes that are popular, or you look at other people’s videos and you make the videos that they made, but your spin on them. I would try to ignore that one out of 10 10 out of 10 thing that you see when you log into your Creator Studio on YouTube.

I can’t imagine that that would be a good way to decide what to make videos about all the time. So think about what, what do you care about? Do you care about views only? Do you care about comments? Like what videos get the most comments? Like that’s a unique metric that you could use. Like, okay, people are interacting.

They’re resonating with this enough to leave a comment. I want to make more videos like this. And you also need to think about, okay, why am I making these videos? Am I making them for fun? Am I making them to get AdSense money on YouTube? You know, the AdSense money on YouTube that needs views. If you’re making them so you can get more courses, more course sales or clients or something, you might not need as many views as you think.

You just need to make the right videos that will attract the people that then will buy your courses or hire you to do something. So that’s where it really comes down to for me where it’s like I have sporadically made videos over the years. I have had periods of not releasing videos at all, but my businesses have been fine because I’ve done enough with my YouTube channel to prove that I know what I’m doing with video to have people hire me to do video or to get connections with brands to work with them on sponsored videos or to make connections with other YouTubers so that when SwitchPod came out I knew who they were and I could send them a SwitchPod and they could help us launch it. So it’s like, I only needed to make as many videos to get to a certain point. And now if I want to go do more things, I might need to keep making videos and get more subscribers, but you don’t need a million or even a hundred thousand subscribers to have a YouTube channel making a significant impact on your business.

You can do it in the thousands.

Pat Flynn: Absolutely. That’s a perfect way to segue to the end here in the sort of conclusion of all of this, which is like, think about why we’re doing these videos and what the ultimate goal would be. I know a lot of us get caught up in the views and wanting to rank really high and you know, those things can help and those things, you know, make us feel good, but in the end, for most of us listening, it might just be we just want to get more clients for our business and it can just take one video to really make things happen, but to get to that one video, you’re going to need to likely go through several iterations and several experiments, if you will, and don’t get so bogged down on the details of what is happening.

Just keep creating and yes, over time, try to improve your videos and over time, you’ll understand how to make better thumbnails and titles and, you know, get a higher click through rate and hold people longer in the videos. But, you know, not every channel is the same. So the last thing I’ll say is it’s very easy to get caught up in the, Oh, their channel’s blowing up.

Why not mine? Or this video is so much worse than the video that I have. I have a lot more value to share it yet. It’s ranking higher and it’s getting millions of views. And I’m not. You have to compare yourself to yourself last week, to yourself last month. And as if you’re not consistent, it’s going to be easy for you to see why you haven’t hit those results yet.

Stay consistent and keep going. Improving 1 percent every single time compounds over time exponentially. And it’s amazing what can happen if you stay with it. Any final words of advice for those getting into video, whether for YouTube and or for course, just to kind of keep their heads up as, as they go and trudge into these new waters.

Caleb Wojcik: Yeah, I would echo what you just said about you’re in a race with yourself. And so it’s not Mario Kart where like you’re going to get blue shelled by someone else you’re doing the, you know, the time trial you’re in a ghost. You’re, you’re racing your own ghost. Like, can you do better than yourself last time?

It’s not about. Princess Peach or Bowser or whatever. It’s like, you know, you’re Mario. You’re going around the ghost do better than last time and race your own race. And I do think if you’re nervous about doing video on specifically YouTube and it seems too daunting. Just experiment with Shorts on YouTube or Reels on Instagram or TikTok or Instagram stories or anything where you put your face on it is going to help you get those reps in being comfortable talking to the camera, being comfortable editing, shorter videos.

If that’s less daunting to you, then just start there. And then if one of those videos pops off or it’s more views than the other ones, then maybe that topic is what you make a YouTube video about. Use that as your kind of your playground. And you know, your sandbox to try things out.

Pat Flynn: So well said, you know, I had a friend of mine reach out.

He just started a YouTube channel and he’s got 10 videos up. His first eight videos, getting 20, 30 views per video. One of them hit over a hundred and he was stoked about that. But then the next two videos had less than 10 within the same amount of time. And he was like, what’s going on? Is my channel blocked?

Like, am I shadow banned? I’m like, what? Just keep creating videos. Don’t even worry about the numbers, get those reps in. And now he’s enjoying a little bit more views and just like, it’s, more fulfilling to not even worry about those. The numbers become a bonus. They become signals of where, where things are headed.

But every individual video, oftentimes we have no idea what’s going to happen until you publish it.

Caleb Wojcik: And think about yourself too.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I like to think about it. Like it’s fishing. It’s like, you could be in the perfect spot on the lake. You could have the perfect bait and the perfect conditions. You can cast it right in front of a fish.

And it doesn’t mean it’s going to bite all the time, but at least you’ve given yourself the best chance to do that. So I’m going to cat, what am I going to do? Like pack up and go home or am I going to cast again and keep trying new spots? And sometimes I’ll cast into a spot that doesn’t look like it would ever have any fish.

It’s not next to any reeds or any rocks or anything. And that’s where I get the lunker. So. You know, you never know until you cast. So keep casting. I love the Mario Kart and fishing analogies today. You kind of tell what we do in our free time. Yeah, exactly. I appreciate you, Caleb, for coming on. Welcome again to SPI as a official Expert in Residence.

Now you can see Caleb inside of Pro you check out SPIPro.com. But also I know you have a lot of stuff going on on your end. Like you said, you’re working with potentially some clients as well. Where can people go to figure out more about what you got going on on your end and maybe even how to, you know, work with you in the future.

Caleb Wojcik: I mean, first thing, definitely SwitchPod is a perfect overlap for this audience. Anyone that’s making video, we made a product because we were frustrated by the Gorilla Pods always falling over and we made SwitchPod a few years ago. So I run, I’ll run that with you. And then MakeBetterVideos.com is my main place to work with me directly if you want help with getting your videos made, getting your videos edited and produced. I’m Caleb Wojcik on socials and they’re on YouTube and other places.

Pat Flynn: Awesome. Caleb, thank you so much, my man. Appreciate you. I’ll see you in Pro and, you know, hopefully in the neighborhood soon.

Caleb Wojcik: All right. Thanks, man.

Pat Flynn: Cheers, man.

Alright. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Caleb. Always a fun and refreshing convo. We always nerd out a little bit. We always add in our little SwitchPod plugs. You can check that out. SwitchPod.co, by the way. More importantly, check out SPI Pro because that’s where you can get access to Caleb and all of our other EIRs.

Many more coming during the year here. Experts who you can get access to to help you in these little specialized needs that that you might have in your business right now. So again, SPIPro.com. And of course with SPI pro, you also get access to our All Access Pass, which gives you access to all of our courses, including the two mentioned today, Heroic Online Courses and YouTube From Scratch, which Caleb and I developed together, and that’s all in there for you.

So anyway, thank you so much. And MakeBetterVideos.com is where you can check out Caleb and his stuff as well. So thank you for listening in. Good luck on your videos. One at a time, get them good enough, hit publish and keep going, get those reps in. And of course, if you’re creating an online course, definitely, definitely make some time to plan this thing out, create the outline, have that become your production schedule, batch process, and more.

So thank you so much. I appreciate you. Check us out on the next episode. Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!