One of my most asked questions is, Shannon, what's your process for videos? I have to preface this with saying that this has changed over time because if I would've told you to do all these things now, I'd have been so overwhelmed. You know me. My whole goal is to make things less overwhelming, simple, and easy for you to do. I do that with my strategy clients, and I also do that with my coaching clients.
So in the beginning, you just want to take things simple, and so I'm going to go through this process that I do every month or two months for videos and I'll kind of say, "This is something I ended up editing in, yada, yada, yada." All right? So the first thing I do is brainstorm my topics. I will sit down and I will brainstorm 12 topics at once, and I will basically make a series of videos because it's a step process.
In the beginning, I didn't have topics, so I just started asking people what they wanted to know. So always be asking, what do you need help with? How can I help you? How can I serve you? The second thing that I added in after a few months was batch recording. So once or once every other month, I will record four to eight videos. I'll block out my calendar. I will pick out the clothes. I will do with the makeup. In the beginning, I just held the phone up and did them every Tuesday, but I decided that the easier way to do this is, instead of stressing out every Tuesday about what I was in record, was to set aside an hour and take those topics that we talked about earlier and make an outline, which leads me to the next one.
Write down notes. This is a three-purpose process for me. There are three reasons why I do this. I post these notes to my phone to remind me to look at the camera. It keeps me on track, and it also helps me when it's caption writing time. I use a tripod, lighting, and a mic and my phone. I don't use anything else to record my stuff. What is new? The tripod is definitely something I added a year ago. The lighting is something that I added just recently. I was using a light off of my window, which is right here, but I found that I needed more light. I also found that you could hear me better if I had a mic on, so I bought a $20 mic, I think it was. I don't use anything fancy except my phone. Will I eventually go to a fancy-dancy videographer? Maybe. I don't know, but for now I am just doing these myself in my office.
The next thing I do is I will record them and I will edit on my phone. So I will edit them down on my phone, and then I will airdrop them to my computer where I save them in two places in case I lose them. All right, so I'll airdrop them to my computer. I'll save a copy to my desktop and I'll save a copy to my Google drive, so I always have it. Something that I did start doing last winter was editing them in Wave.video. This is definitely something, once you're in the weeds of doing this, something to add on. All right?
Then the next thing I do is, after I edit them in Wave, is I scheduled them out on social media, and I actually batch that as well. So every Friday, I batch out my social media scheduling for the next week. I go to my handy-dandy videos, video thing on my computer. I look at them in Wave, and then I have a process for all the social networks