Create a Video Three Times as Fast?

Whether you are crea­ting blog con­tent, a sales pitch, or a pro­duct, the fas­test way to create con­tent is with video — no wri­ting required!

If you want to create a fancy-​​shmancy video like Michel and Syl­vie, create a Power­Point slide and record your screen as you talk. This is my pre­fe­rred way of recor­ding video, but if I’m in a hurry, I can whip up a mind­map pre­sen­ta­tion in one-​​third of the time as a PowerPoint.

The easiest kind of video to create is screen cap­ture video. This is where a pro­gram records your desk­top and you talk into a mic­rophone. Use Camtasia if you’re wor­king in Win­dows, or ScreenFlow if you’re on a Mac.

Both come with 30-​​day trials and there is a free ver­sion called Jing which is limi­ted to five-​​minute recor­dings, so nothing is stan­ding in the way of you crea­ting screen cap­ture videos.

Size your reso­lu­tion down to the sma­llest pos­si­ble (I reduce to 640x480), start a Power­Point slide show, record the screen, and start tal­king. (If you can’t afford $79 for Mic­ro­soft Office, use OpenOffice.) That’s all there is to it.

Pre­tend you’re recor­ding live at a semi­nar in front of a crowd and explain what you have to say in one take. No one says it has to be anything near perfect.

The only pro­blem with recor­ding those pre­sen­ta­tions is it some­ti­mes takes a while to make them. For a 20-​​minute pre­sen­ta­tion, I have to make about 15 sli­des with a head­line on each slide and three bullet points. That can take a while! So when I want to whip up an inter­view quickly, I create what’s called a “mindmap.”

What’s a mind­map? It’s basi­cally a brains­torm with thought bub­bles, like you use to draw in grade school when you took notes or out­li­ned essays. You have the root “node”… or thought bub­ble, which is the title of your pre­sen­ta­tion, and other chil­dren “nodes” (thought bub­bles) under them, thought bub­bles under those, and so on.

Because it’s on a com­pu­ter, you can expand or con­tract mind­maps to only show the one sub­ject you’re tal­king about. It’s a per­fect way to quickly orga­nize your thoughts, and makes it per­fect for audio inter­views, webi­nars, or stan­da­lone videos.

Unlike a Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, you can pre­sent items in any order and skip over items if you run out of time. You can also export your mind­maps into PDF or HTML form so your atten­dees get the exact notes you used to present.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Grab a mind­map­ping tool. I pre­fer FreeMind because it’s free and works on both Win­dows and Mac. (Go to that link and find the “Down­load” area.)
2. Get an idea for your 10 to 90 minute pre­sen­ta­tion, rename the root node to the title of your presentation.
3. Right click and choose “New child” to create a child node under the root node. Use this as your sub­point and create other chil­dren under the root node for addi­tio­nal subpoints.
4. For each sub­point, create a child node under that to pro­vide details… usually a cou­ple of key­words or some VERY con­cise sentences.

It’s not roc­ket science. Once you’ve crea­ted your nodes, you can drag them above or below other nodes to rea­rrange them in the map. You can drag nodes into other nodes, and so on.

I recom­mend you move all nodes to the RIGHT side of the root so they all appear as a “list”… and limit your­self to 2 to 5 chil­dren per node to keep the map from get­ting messy. Never go more than three levels deep.

I can whip up a mind­map pre­sen­ta­tion in just a cou­ple of minu­tes this way. Using mind­maps, I use seve­ral key­board short­cuts like the Insert key to add new child nodes, the Enter key to add a bunch of “sibling” nodes at once, the F2 key to rename nodes and the arrow keys and spa­ce­bar to navi­gate bet­ween nodes.

For a well thought out but easy to create pre­sen­ta­tion for videos, webi­nars and inter­views… create a mind­map and expand on each point you’re trying to make one at a time as you pre­sent. Com­bine this with desk­top recor­ding soft­ware or built-​​in webi­nar screen cap­ture soft­ware… and you’ve got your­self an ins­tant pro­duct, blog post, or interview.

About the Author

Robert Plank is a computer programmer and Internet marketer. Even master copywriter Michel Fortin quadrupled his signups by adding Robert's simple exit pop-up email form to his blog. How many more subscribers and sales will it get you?