Image from BigStock Photo.

This is the 3rd part in a series on Screencasting. Check out the previous post in the series: How to plan a Screencast or start at the beginning: How to Create Professional-Quality Screencasts.

Scripting for Screencasts

Nobody wants to sound like an idiot when they make a recording. You want to sound like you know what you’re doing. It’s really easy to make mistakes and commit all manner of presentational sins when you try to make a screencast with no script.

What do I mean by scripting? Do I mean you actually write a script? Everything you’re going to say?

In some cases, yes. This depends on your presenting skills and ability and your ability to sound natural when you read out loud. Don’t believe for a moment there is any kind of “natural talent” in this. With practice, anyone can improve. Even if you’ve failed the first round of American Idol auditions.

What you don’t want to sound like:

• Unsure of yourself
• Hesitant
• Self-conscious
• Boring
• Stiff and forced, unnatural
• Mumbly
• Mouth-noisy or nose-breathy (pardon the highly technical jargon)
• Crazy or manic (laugh if you want to, but I’m halfway serious, here—people get weird ideas about how they’re “supposed” to sound)

What you do want to sound like:

• Confident
• Friendly
• Un-selfconscious
• Clear
• Engaging
• A boss

Whether you sound good or bad in a screencast has little to do with whether or not you write out an entire script and read it out loud… or simply speak as you operate while recording. You can have a fully-scripted screencast that sound stilted and false… or that sound professional and clear. You can have an “on the fly” screencast that sounds like the presenter can’t even string two cohesive ideas together… or that sounds as natural as if you were speaking with a friend in a bar.

If you write out a full script, it’s more likely you’ll say what you mean to say in the correct order, but you have a higher chance of sounding self-concious. If you “wing it,” it’s more likely you’ll sound conversational and un-selfconscious, but also that you’ll exhibit annoying nervous patterns, make mistakes, and ramble.

Neither method is better than the other: it totally depends on what works best for YOU. Try your hand at both methods and see for yourself. Both can be done well with practice.

The Blended Approach: You can also have a list of points (you should already if you planned your screencast correctly) and you can riff off of those, which will have the benefit of being guided and cohesive, but with a more natural-sounding final result than simply reading off a script word-for-word.

Elements Every Script Needs

Every script, no matter how tightly or loosely you do it, needs the same structure and elements:

• Introduction: Greet the viewer and introduce yourself by name and give your website URL. When people see your video on a third-party site such as YouTube you need to provide context.
• State the learning objective: Tell viewers what they’re going to learn and why it will be of benefit to them.
• Go through the steps of the main content: Obviously.
• Restate the objective and benefit: Something like, “Now that you’ve learned X, you can accomplish Y more easily than ever.”
• Say goodbye: Give your name and URL again at the end of the screencast and say goodbye. I will often remind viewers as well to click “Like” on the video if they enjoyed it. This only matters if your video is on YouTube.
• But we’ll meet again: You don’t want this to be the only time someone watches your content. Let the viewer know you’ll “see them next time” or that you’ll “see you again soon.”

How to Actually Write Your Script

• Use whatever word processor you like
• Use paragraph breaks to indicate pauses in speech
• Make the font big enough to read on the screen while you’re recording

Recording Audio for Screencasts

You have two choices when it comes to recording audio for screencasts:

• Use the built-in audio recording capabilities of your screen-recording software
• Use a separate program

Using a separate program gives you a couple distinct advantages:

• It’s made for recording and editing sound, whereas screencast recording software will only have rudimentary controls and features.
• You don’t have to worry about accidentally messing up the video as you try to edit the audio.

I recommend Audacity for Windows. It’s free, open source software and it works beautifully. You will want to export your projects as mp3 files, but this ability does not inherently come with Audacity. The reason why is that the mp3 file format is not open source. However there is an add-on you can use to give you this capability, which goes by the funny name of Lame.

If this sounds like it’s starting to get complicated, don’t worry. Instructions for how to set up Audacity and Lame exist online and it’s easy.

You can get Audacity for the Mac, but Macs come with Garage Band already. If you find Garage Band intimidating or to be overkill, you can get a Mac version of  Audacity. I find Audacity extremely simple to use for screencast recording—it does a lot, too, but you won’t need most of it and the interface is not very threatening.

How to Actually Record your Screencast Audio

• Put your script in one part of your monitor or print it out and have it in hand.
• Put your audio recording software in another part of your monitor (or if you have two monitors, one in each monitor).
• Hit “record.”
• Start talking: read your script or loosely follow your points.
• If you mess up: you don’t have to start over. Just pause your speaking (not the controls) and then pick back up again. Later you can edit out your flub.
• Record several different takes in different styles: try being faster, slower, more boisterous or more intimate. Pick the one you want to run with.
• If you feel like you’re sounding forced and stiff as you read, keep creating takes until it sounds more natural. Or until it all deconstructs into a mental cacophony of circular logic like some kind of nitrous oxide trip (I recommend stopping before this point).

Recording Tips

• You want the quietest environment possible in which to record. While it may sound funny, hiding in your closet with your laptop, microphone and tons of sound-absorbing clothing really isn’t such a bad idea! You definitely don’t want to be in a room where sound reverberates. If you have loud family members, a good solid strip of duct tape across the mouth may be necessary. If you think they might peel it off, use some on their wrists, too.
• You don’t want any surface vibration to reach the microphone. It’s best if you can put your mic on a spring-loaded articulated boom to hold it near your face. If you only have a desk stand or tripod for your mic, place it on top of a folded towel or a couple of old mouse pads to absorb vibration.
• Use a pop filter. A pop filter is a scrim or cloth that goes between your face and the microphone. The purpose of a pop filter is to prevent the little puffs of air from “popping” consonants from hitting the recording surface of the mic (like the letter “p” or “t”).  It often looks like black pantyhose stretched over a circular wire frame. You can buy these or you can improvise.  Simply draping a piece of cloth or some craft foam over your microphone will work—although it will look completely stupid.
• Make sure your chair doesn’t squeak or groan or otherwise make any noise. Especially noises that sound like bodily functions or wild animals, because the worse they sound the more likely it is your mic will pick that up. That is a fact of the universe.
• Do not rub or scratch your face or touch the microphone directly, these sounds will also be picked up (especially if you have a beard or stubble) and be very annoying to listeners.
• Keep some water on hand.
• Make sure your nasal passages are clear. You don’t want any “whistling booger sounds” to be in your audio.

Editing Your Screencast Audio

As is, your audio—though it is recorded—is not ready to be in your screencast just yet. You have to edit it. How the hell do you edit a digital audio file? What do you do? This is what Audacity or Garage Band can do for you. The audio track is presented in the form of sound waves in a time strip. You can click and drag along it and cut, copy, paste, apply effects or whatever. Here are the steps I take with mine:

• Noise removal: the background noise of fans or humidifiers or just ambient white noise needs to be edited out. To do this, you have take a sample where there is only background noise and then run the noise removal feature of your recording software. Combined with having a good microphone, this will dramatically improve the sound of your audio portion.
• Editing out vocal mishaps: It’s easy to see the spike in the sound wave on the editing timeline when you say “um” or accidentally make any sound you don’t want. In most audio editing software, it’s a simple matter to click and drag to select the offending portion and then delete it.
• Adding or removing blank space: Sometimes you speak too quickly and other times you may have paused for quite a bit in order to recover from a flub or to get your bearings. You can insert swaths of silence or remove dead spots in your audio to improve the pacing. You want to have only about one second of blank space before you begin speaking and after you are finished speaking.

That’s it, there’s really not much you have to do with the audio.

You might be wondering about intro music or whatever, but the truth is that stuff gets added in separately later (if at all) when you are editing the video in your screencasting program. That is not a part of this piece of audio.

The Next Part in This Series:

We’ll be going over Recording and Assembling Your Media Collection for a Screencast.

Any questions or comments? Leave ‘em below! Did you enjoy this? Make sure you signed up to receive updates in the form below so you don’t miss anything.

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

Why is thing so cool? Well, from my viewpoint it’s amazing, because it gives me everything I want in video embedding: fast & lazy and with very specific settings and features.

Here’s the thing: WordPress lets you just throw a YouTube URL into a post (right in the Visual tab, no pasting of <iframe> code necessary) and it will automagically embed the video, like so:

What you see there is the default settings, which I don’t want.

What I want is what you see in the first embedded video on this page, which is the same video except it’s taking advantage of Smart YouTube.

Once you install Smart YouTube you configure it so all your videos have the settings you want. I wanted bigger videos, I didn’t want related videos to appear afterward and I wanted the YouTube logo removed (yes, it does that).

To trigger Smart YouTube for your video URL, just sneak the letter “v” into it right after the “http” with no spaces, like this: httpv://.

See the “v” in there?

THAT’S ALL YOU HAVE TO DO.

Smart YouTube also solves a problem I was having. The way I was embedding videos before was to just paste in the <iframe> code into the HTML tab in WordPress. That was a great way to do it before WordPress upped its game, but what happens is that the video rests on top of anything else and blocks it from view. So nobody could +1 the post on Google+ because that button’s flyout menu was blocked by the video.

That could be fixed by adding ?wmode=transparent at the end of the URL string in the <iframe> code, but what a pain in the ass to have to that every time! I thought to myself there has GOT to be a WordPress plugin that solves this problem. After only a few minutes of searching around I found the Smart YouTube plugin.

I love this thing.

And by the way these are not affiliate links nor do I get anything out of this other than a better video blogging workflow—for myself and for you.

This video will show you how to install WordPress plugins into your self-hosted WordPress site. There are two ways to do this: search and install from within WordPress itself, or find a plugin out on the web and download it. I’ll show you how to do both in this video.

This may seem simple and you may even already know how to do it, but do you also know what to look for in a plugin? What are the signs of a good plugin? You may pick up some good tips from this video.

But I don’t stop there. You’ll learn how to manage plugins, too:

• Activate & deactivate plugins
• Delete plugins
• Update plugins

Yes, I know I’ve been on a bit of plugins kick lately, here, but it’s such useful stuff. I’ve found a nice little vein of content gold and I’m mining it for you.

If you enjoyed the video, please click the “Like” button that appears when it’s finished and share this post with your friends!

But because there are so many plugins, the question of which ones to use comes up for every WordPress site owner. There are often many plugins all trying to do the same thing. Some plugins cost money while most are free. The choice can be paralyzing, especially for someone who doesn’t feel terribly confident in their technical skills.

So I figured it would be helpful to you if I shared with you what plugins I was using and why I chose them over other similar plugins.

BackupBuddy

Backups for your WordPress site are a must. BackupBuddy (affiliate link) is a commercial plugin (in other words, it’s not free) and service that automates your WordPress file and database backups.

But it also does a lot more than that. For example, if you were to have your site redesigned or moved to a different web server, BackupBuddy will handle the exporting and importing of all the data and files for a smooth transition.

You can have your backups go into a DropBox folder or other online data storage service such as Amazon’s S3.

BulletProof Security

WordPress sites can be easily attacked and compromised even if you keep everything up-to-date. BulletProof Security does a number of things to protect your WordPress installation by rewriting your .htaccess file.

Fair warning: this plugin is pretty technical to set up and is not for the faint-hearted. You may want to search for something easier in the security department if you’re not up to it.

CommentLuv

CommentLuv (affiliate link) fetches a commentor’s recent blog post and creates a link to it below the comment. It’s a great way to encourage comments because it provides added incentive for people to visit your site if they’re curious about you. These links are not followed by Google (the case for all links in WordPress comments by default).

If you also use CommentLuv and you comment on another site using CommentLuv, you have your choice about which link out of your last ten posts.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is my contact form plugin. I chose this one over all the others I’ve looked at because it was the right mix of options without being too complicated to use. You create a form, add fields to it, and then the plugin generates a shortcode you can copy and paste into a page or a widget to place a contact form on the web page.

DiggDigg

The DiggDigg social sharing plugin has nothing to do with the site Digg. It creates a social media sharing bar that floats alongside your page as visitors scroll down. You can see my how to set up DiggDigg post for more information. I’ve tried many different social sharing plugins and nothing has worked as nicely or looks as nice as DiggDigg.

Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps plugin creates an XML sitemap for Google. What this means in plain English is that you can improve your site’s search engine optimization by suggesting to Google how often it should crawl your site for new URLs.

Links in Captions

Links in Captions is a gem of a plugin that lets you create hyperlinks in image captions, which currently is not possible otherwise in WordPress.

Pippity

Pippity (affiliate link) delivers an opt-in form for your email newsletter to first time visitors. What makes it different from other popup managers is that rather than trigger based on time, it triggers when the visitor reaches the bottom of the page… after the visitor has read the article.

Publish Confirmation

I am really bad at accidentally clicking the “Publish” button when I mean to click “Preview!” The Publish Confirmation plugin prevents these accidents by presenting a simple confirmation dialog box: Are you SURE you want to publish this post? This thing is a godsend: no more accidental post publishing!

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded gives your commentors the chance to receive updates to a post’s comments via email. This greatly increases commenting and participation on your site. If you’re using a third-party commenting service like Disqus or Livefyre, you won’t need this plugin because that option is built into those services.

Tweet Old Post

The Tweet Old Post plugin does exactly what its name says: it tweets out links to older posts you’ve written. I have seen a lot more traffic and comments coming in to my older posts because of this plugin. You can set parameters for what will and will not get tweeted. For example you can tell it far back in your archives to go, or exclude certain categories.

W3 Total Cache

A caching plugin speeds up your site dramatically by delivering cached versions of pages to visitors instead of forcing a zillion database queries in order to load a page. Sometimes caching plugins can cause problems due to conflicts with your theme or with other plugins, but W3 Total Cache works beautifully with Headway (affiliate link).

And there you have it: those are the plugins I use currently. I’ll be redesigning the site soon and will work in a few more. I’ll publish a new post about those when the time comes.

If you want to have a professional-quality successful screencast video, you do not simply hit the record button on your screencasting software and go.

Unless, of course, you want to look like a total idiot.

But if you want to look like a confident pro, a bit of planning is in order.

Planning a screencast is easy when you simply ask the right questions, which I’ve conveniently listed for you below. Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

Questions to Ask Before Before Creating a Screencast So You Don’t Look Like a Total Idiot

• What specific task or series of tasks do you intend to demonstrate, or what specific information do you want to communicate?
• Is this going to be a singular screencast or a series?
• How long is the video going to be (or each in a series)?
• What are the specific steps you want viewers to be able to replicate on their own after watching your video? Or, what is the specific action you want viewers to take after watching the video?
• What is the big benefit for viewers if they follow the steps in your video beyond accomplishing the task? Does it address the need viewers have that causes them to want to watch your screencast in the first place?

Let’s break these questions down so you understand why they’re important.

What specific task or series of tasks do you intend to demonstrate, or what specific information do you want to communicate?

If you’re demonstrating software, you need to break down into steps all the actions needed to accomplish the learning objective.

If you’re creating more of a slideshow speech, then what is the informational objective?

Is this going to be a singular screencast or a series?

This has implications for how you time, pace things and do stuff like titles, introductions and conclusions. In a series of videos, for example, you’ll want to remind viewers which part in the series they’re watching and what was in the previous and next parts to the series. But reminding viewers to visit your website or having a long piece of intro music would quickly get very annoying to anyone watching the series. These kind of elements belong only in the first and last videos when part of a series.

How long is the video going to be (or each in a series)?

Many folks who create a lot of video will tell you that shorter is better, and by short they mean less than 5 minutes long. I’m not gonna argue with that: if you can do it, great. But if you can’t contain it to less than 5 minutes, don’t worry about it. There are tons of screencasts that are 30 minutes long or even longer and people will still watch them.

Why?

Because they need what’s in it and they’re very committed and interested in its content.

A single stand-alone video can be much longer than videos in a series. When creating a series, you’ve got to balance out the duration of each video against the number of videos in the series. For example: 5 10-minute-long videos is probably better than 10 5-minute-long videos. Watching 10 videos sounds like way more work than watching only 5 videos regardless of individual video length.

What are the specific steps you want viewers to be able to replicate on their own after watching your video? Or, what is the specific action you want viewers to take after watching the video?

You may have a learning objective: How to do X. But in order to accomplish X, you have to have a series of steps and possibly some preparation work. Think about how the information in recipes is organized:

• Ingredients you need and in what amount.
• Tools you need.
• Preparation, if any.
• Steps to create the dish.
• Steps to serving the dish, if any.

You have to figure out the “recipe” for your screencast: write down the preparation and the steps and number them. That way, in your narration and/or your title you can say: The Six Steps to a Perfect X, Every Time or some such thing.

There’s no need to over-think this, but try not to let your existing knowledge and assumptions get in the way of what beginners have no clue about (this phenomenon is called the curse of knowledge).

If you’re giving what is essentially a speech via PowerPoint, you may not be instructing anyone step-by-step. However, you still want the viewer to take some kind of action after watching the video: you have an objective. What is it? Write it down. You’ll be telling viewers this in your video.

What is the big benefit for viewers if they follow the steps in your video beyond accomplishing the task? Does it address the need viewers have that causes them to want to watch your screencast in the first place?

Don’t assume everyone will want to watch your screencast, even if they’ve already bought your course (if you’re selling one, that is). Each video has to sell itself all over again to remind buyers why they bought your course and what they’re continually getting out of it.

If you’re not selling anything, well, there’s only 500 squiddelymillion other free videos out there competing for attention. Why should anyone watch yours?

This benefit I’m talking about is not accomplishing the learning objective. It’s not “learning X,” it’s what learning X will do for viewers. You need to know this so you can get people to even watch your video, and you’ll want to repeat it within your video at the beginning and the end (sort of a “here’s why you’re watching this,” and “here’s why you watched this” kind of a thing).

Now That You Have Your Questions Answered…

In the next post, we’ll take a look at  Scripting and Recording Screencast Audio,  in which I will teach you steps the pros take that the amateurs don’t. Such as writing a script and recording audio separately from the video. That way, you can sound confident and cause the viewer to have confidence in you as you lead them along, rather than sound like a hesitant, blathering idiot (which, sadly, a lot of people do in their screencasts).

Pinterest is exploding right now. Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board or pin board. You create boards, give them names, and then create “pins” which are mostly pictures you find on the web of stuff you like.

Then, you share your boards and pins with friends and everybody has a good time.

It has a reputation as being a site for women, but more guys are starting to use it.

The marketing potential for Pinterest is huge.

Check out the short video I made if you want to see a little of what Pinterest is about.

Here are the results…

Have you canceled any social media accounts?

How many social media accounts would you say you actively use (at least once every 3 days)

Which social network are you MOST active in?

Which social network are you LEAST active in?

Most active and least active social networks combined

What this means

I can’t tell you what this means to you. You’ll have to run your own poll for that. But I can tell you what this means for me: It means if I want to engage with my readers more fully, I need to spend more time on Facebook. If I hadn’t included StumbleUpon, Facebook would’ve been my own least-used social network. But according to this poll, most of you use Facebook almost as much as you use Twitter. This is something I have suspected but now I have some numbers to back it up.

Have you polled your own readers and customers about their social media usage? The results will be confirming or surprising and either result is good because it will give you confidence you’re spending your time and energy in the right places.

It could be a coincidence or it could be a trend. One way to find out is to conduct a poll and see what you say, and that’s exactly what I’m doing here.

The more people who take the poll, the better the results, so please share this post and encourage people to participate!

That’s why I went looking… just for you.

You might find something in this list you didn’t know you needed until you see it.

Please note that I haven’t tested these, and always back up your blog before installing something new on it and messing around.

PressTrends

PressTrends looks to be a pretty slick statistics plugin. What makes it different from other analytics plugins is that it doesn’t measure the usual stuff in the usual way. It specifically tracks metrics important to blogs: things like post-to-comment ratio and comparisons to averages for items such as number of posts and comments.

Check out PressTrends.

Google Referrer Checker

This one, called Google Referrer Checker, really caught my attention. In SEO, backlinks are very important. But how do you know that Google has indexed the pages out there which link to yours? Because without that, a backlink is pretty worthless. There is no authority to pass along the link if the referring page is not even in Google’s search index.

So what this thing does is figure out which backlinks to your site are indexed by Google or not, and if they’re not it displays a link to them in widget in your sidebar, which you can give a “As seen on” title or something to that effect.

Because this link is on your blog and your blog is being indexed by Google, then there is a good chance (not a certainty) that Google will crawl and index those pages.

Once those pages are in Google’s index, those links drop from the widget.

Chekc out Google Referrer Checker.

Pinterest RSS Widget

Pinterest is hot right now.

And while it may eventually be seen as something other than a site for women, right now it’s still mostly a site for women and I make sure all my female clients know about it.  Wouldn’t it be cool if you could display your latest pins on your blog?

Well, looky here: Pinterest RSS Widget.

Bonus: Might as well throw this one in here, too: a Pinterest plugin that puts a “pin” button on your posts so others can pin your content to their boards.

A/B Test for WordPress

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’re not split testing, you’re leaving money on the table. But nobody’s going to do it unless it becomes easy. Or at least… easier.

Check out the A/B Test for WordPress plugin.

WordPress Social Login

I recently learned that sites which allow users to log in using one of their social networks have higher interactivity and visit times.

The WordPress Social Login plugin lets other’s comment or log in to your site with one of their existing social media profiles.

Happy… Pluginning?

If you use any of these or try any of them and want to relate your experience with it, feel free to leave a comment. If you have any suggestions for plugins you think I should mention in a future post, let me know!

Image by BigStock

Video rules.

There’s no denying that.

Videos show up prominently in search results and YouTube is the second largest search after Google itself. It has been proven that video advertising online is more effective than other ad media. I don’t believe that it’s a stretch to extend that dominance to content marketing and blogging. There are YouTube channels that have subscriber counts competitive with some of the biggest blogs out there.

You may have considered creating videos, but you also may have reservations:

• Is the equipment and software expensive?
• Why would anyone want to see your mug in a video?
• Is it technically challenging?
• Does it take a long time?
• Is it worth it?

In this (highly opinionated) multi-part series, I’m going to address everything you need to know to create screencast videos (this is only one type of video, as I explain below).

What is Screencasting?

Screencasting is when you make a video recording what’s taking place on your monitor. It’s distinct from what we often call “talking head” videos, where you point a camera at yourself and simply speak to it as if it were a person or videos where you are recording people in a setting such as a speech.

Screencasting usually involves one of two things:

• Demonstrating how to use software.
• A slide show which you speak over.

Talking head videos are by far the easiest and cheapest to create, but often they’re also redundant to text and the audience would be better served with text content. Screencasts can be highly effective content because showing how to do something often works better than describing how to do something via the written word.

Is the Equipment and Software for Screencasting Expensive?

Yes and no. This is highly subjective—what’s expensive to one person is trivial to another, so bear that in mind. In order to screencast you need a computer powerful enough to handle it because recording and processing video eats up a lot of processor power, memory and hard drive space. These requirements will be directly related to the software you use to create screencasts, however, so there’s no best answer I can give you.

Screencasting Software

Two popular screencasting programs are TechSmith Camtasia Studio Version 7 (affiliate link) for the PC and Screenflow for the Mac. As a PC guy I’ve been using Camtasia for years. If you’re a Mac user you’ll definitely want to use Screenflow. All my Mac buddies say it’s awesome. Considering the amount of screencasting I do for Headway Themes and for my own products, the investment in Camtasia was a no-brainer.

What about free software for screencasting? Is there anything? There is. However, I’ve used a few of them in an early attempt to be cheap and I have to say that none of the free ones were worth a damn–not even Jing, which is from the same company that created Camtasia. Some of the free programs will record your screen but most of them do not give you capability to edit or annotate your video, forcing you to use a different program for that.

For recording audio as a separate file from the video portion of your final video, I recommend Audacity for the PC (get the beta version) and if you’re on a Mac you have Garage Band.

Hardware

The only real pieces of hardware you need are a good microphone and headphones. The audio quality has a huge effect on the overall perception of quality in your videos, so it’s worth it to get a decent mic. There are a few good mics out there now that will plug into your system via USB port. I use a Blue Microphones Snowball USB Microphone (White) (affiliate link) and the sound quality is really good compared to, say, a typical (or even good) headset microphone.

Having said that, if you’re squeamish about spending $60 – $100 for a microphone, consider getting a really good headset. You’ll want a pair of ear-covering headphones in order to listen to playback so you can hear all the little sounds that get washed out when played over loudspeakers (and for privacy and family sanity preservation).

Although definitely not as good as my Snowball, the mic in my Logitech G35 7.1-Channel Surround Sound Headset (affiliate link) is excellent for a headset mic. Best headset I’ve ever owned. And no… it’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than a good mic and a good pair of headphones bought separately.

If there’s anywhere you can skimp, here, it would be the headphones as long as you have a good microphone.

Why would anyone want to see your mug in a video?

Well, that’s the beauty of screencasting! Your face does not have make an appearance. You don’t have to worry about your fidgety hands or constantly getting your bangs out of your eyes ruining the video. One element you will need to control is your voice: no “um…” or “y’know” or other verbal bad habits belong in a good quality video. But we’ll talk later about to how handle that like a boss.

Is Screencasting Technically Challenging?

Not gonna sugar-coat it: at first, screencasting may be technically challenging.

At first.

But you see, once you do it even just a couple times, you start to internalize the workflow and it all becomes second nature quickly. There is a process to these things, and all you have to do is follow the process (and these posts will help with that).

Most of the technical stuff has to do with settings. You will have settings for recording the action on the screen and settings for producing the final product. Outside of that, actually using, say, Camtasia, is no big deal. Creating a YouTube channel and uploading your videos is simple. Putting your videos in a blog post is also easy.

Does Screencasting Take a Long Time?

The higher the quality of the finished video, the longer it will take to create. There are basically two ways to go about producing screencast videos:

• You can have some idea of what you want to do, hit “record” and wing it. You can use little or no editing and just throw it out there fast and dirty. This will usually create poor-quality screencasts. However, it isn’t always a bad idea: the more accomplished you are at both the software your’re using and at presenting, the better you’ll be at creating screencasts this way. Also, this kind of video will feel more lively because it’s not scripted.
• You can plan it out in advance and record all your media components separately. Then you bring it all together in your video production program (Camtasia, Screenflow or whatever) to edit and produce your video. This takes the most time but gives you the most polished product. The danger for this kind of video it’s easy for it to feel stiff and unnatural, but there are ways to prevent that.

Anybody can hit “record” and blather away as they go through the steps of something on the screen. it’s what most people do, so if you take the second approach, your videos will stand out and shine compared to others in your niche.

Is Screencasting Worth It?

If you have a subject that’s computer or software-related which you can demonstrate or teach people, screencasting is definitely worth it: you’ll be able to create killer content for your blog or for training products which you can sell online. If you like to speak and want something other than a “talking head” video, screencasting a slide show (a non-boring slide show, I should say) is a great path to take.

The Rest of This Series

This is a big subject, so I’ve decided to break it up into a series. Here are the rest of the topics we’ll be covering:

1. Planning a Screencast will help you ensure your screencast people will really want to watch. You’ll learn how to create learning objectives and break down the teaching steps.
2. Scripting and Recording Screencast Audio will teach you steps the pros take that the amateurs don’t, like writing a script and recording audio separately from the video. Sound confident and cause the viewer to have confidence in you as you lead them along, rather than sound like a hesitant, blathering idiot (which, sadly, a lot of people do in their screencasts).
3. Recording and Assembling Your Media Collection for a Screencast will cover how to create the visual portion of your screencast and get it ready for editing.
4. Editing, Pacing and Effects in Your Screencast will help you put it all together to create a compelling screencast that captures the viewer’s attention and holds it until the end.
5. Producing Your Screencast will go over the technical nitty-gritty so when you create your final video, it will look clear and polished.
6. Uploading and Sharing Your Screencast will show you what steps to take when you want to share and promote your screencast with the world. I’ll focus mainly on YouTube but will also cover how to put videos behind a membership wall on your WordPress site.

I’m excited about this series. I’ve wanted to do it for a while, and finally the itch just had to be scratched. I hope you enjoy it and will benefit from it.