Ep. 254: How I Organize My Training Videos

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 254, how I organize My Training Videos so I get this email recently from one of my newsletter subscribers and they asked how I organize my personal training video library and so she says, I love your emails. I'm extremely grateful for what you've created with online jobs. I hired a wonderful person a little over a year ago through your site and it has helped me tremendously. I don't know how I would have continued to do all the things I needed to do without her. I read your newsletter every day, which is also very helpful, and was hoping you might be able to talk a little about how you organize your library of Snagit training videos for your VAs. Snagit works great, but I'm wondering if there's an easier way to organize the videos as you make them besides just naming and dating them and dropping them in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder. Maybe you could write a daily post about this. Okay, so this is going to be questionable, but my OFS wrote a whole big long response about organizing and blah blah blah, and I deleted the whole thing because it's not how I do it. She had like spreadsheets and columns and dates, and I just don't do that because it doesn't work for my personality. I don't want to spend a bunch of time organizing things and keeping things in like their proper place and whatever. So I'm going to give you exactly what I do. It's stupid simple, it's less organized than you'd think, but it's very permanent. So when I create training or feedback or updates or guidance or anything, it doesn't matter what it is. I use Snagit to create it. I capture images, I capture videos with it, I talk through it. And that's it. That's the key is Snagit. You can use Loom or Tiny Take or Screencast O Matic or whatever. There's a whole bunch of things that do this. But Tiny Take has a magic piece for me, which is number two, how I do this. Number two is I set Snagit to upload to my own hosting account. So and this is just like a basic host monster hosting account, and you could use literally any hosting account you want. I've had this hosting account for probably 15 years, maybe longer than that, maybe 20 years. And so I do not use their automatic upload service, which is like screencast.com or something like that. I don't know what it is, but I don't upload to their default thing. I don't upload to Google Drive. I don't upload to those places ever. So what I want to have happen when I create a video is I never want that video to disappear. And any of these other services, like if you upload to Loom, I think after a certain amount of time, it disappears unless you pay for hosting or whatever, or with like Snagit's default upload to their servers, it disappears after six months. I do not want that to ever happen to one of these things that I create. When I create. When I create training or feedback or whatever, I want that to be there in six years from now when we reference this, because it got forgotten about. Now we're coming back to it and I want to see exactly what it was. And I've had this happen lots of times over the years. So I want it to never, ever be deleted. And that is really critical to me. And part of the reason for it's critical is because I don't want to worry about something being deleted. I don't want to have to worry about, oh, is this older than six months? Oh, do I have to put this one over here or do I have to put it over there? There. It's just not worth it to me. So for me, you have to upload to somewhere where it's never going to be deleted. Which brings me to number three. After I've uploaded it through Snagit to my own hosting account, I then add that URL of the video that I created, the training that I created, the feedback that I created to either an email or a Basecamp project. We use Basecamp for our project management. And so I'm now adding that link to something that it's attached to. So everything that we do is done through either email or through Basecamp. Mostly through Basecamp. And so when there's training, we create either a message in there or a document in there, or a to do list in there. Something that is going to live in Basecamp. And Basecamp doesn't delete stuff. And so it's just there permanently. So whenever we want it, we can go back and find it. Even if we've archived it or whatever. Super, super simple. It goes to whoever it's assigned to. If I need someone else to see it, I just assign someone else to it. And then if that thing gets archived, it's super easy to find it again. And then that link is still There, the video is still on my hosting account. It never goes away. Then here's the other side of this. If that becomes irrelevant, which, you know, it's feedback for a daily thing, or if it's training that goes out of style because the Internet changes, it naturally just goes away because we'll never go back and look at that task or that message or that, that document, whatever it is, we'll never go back and look at it. So it just kind of naturally disappears. Yes, it's still on my hosting account. It'll never go away from there. Although I could delete it, but I just won't do that. Why do that when I have basically unlimited storage on this hosting account? And it's, it's, you know, I don't know, it's like $10 a month or something like that. So just to reiterate, then I don't organize my trainings other than I put them into places where we can find them again and they're logically added into projects or emails or conversations with the right people so that those things come up again. And if they don't come up again, well, good. That means they've disappeared and gone away because they're irrelevant anymore. I don't want to see them anymore. I don't have to manage a training library. I don't have to go back and say, oh, is this still relevant? No, it doesn't. It doesn't really matter because it'll be obvious to us. So if you're watching this on YouTube, I hope that you will now get a video of me showing you how I set this up, because this is really important. Hey, guys. So I'm going to show you how I use Snagit here. And there's some really important stuff here. So number one, I record something super simple, which I'm recording with Snagit right now. And here's the real magic. So when I am done, I click FTP and it uploads whatever that thing is to a server and it gives me a URL. And you can see that I'm composing this email that you're reading right now. But I'll paste that URL into a clipboard. And here is what's going on. This is my domain. This is where I put the thing on my. On my domain and the URL of that thing. So now that video is online and I just talked about whatever it is that I was talking about. I don't know, you just saw inside part of my business here. So here's the real magic of what Snagit does and how it is. So if I click this share thing and preferences, you can see that in my preferences I only have one sharing destination. It is FTP, which is to my web hosting account. I bought a domain for this specifically because, I don't know, 10 years ago I was like, oh yeah, I'm tired of just using random domains. I just want it all on the same domain every single time. And then on my web hosting account it goes to the www folder/the domain folder slash daily which why I go to daily, I don't know, it just does, doesn't really matter. My username, my password doesn't matter. Custom clipboard code, this is really the key. So when I click FTP it's going to up, it's going to connect to my server, to my hosting account which is like super duper simple. It's like an, I don't know, an $8 a month hosting account, maybe it's $15 a month, I don't, I don't know what it is. It's pretty cheap. And then it's going to put it into the correct location and it's going to put this URL into my clipboard so I can just click paste. So and that URL is my domain. Slash the file or slash the location on the server which is slash daily. So this, I mean it's this file folder right here. And then they give you these options for things that you want to put in. So this will get replaced each time with the actual name of the file. Now you don't have to use a hosting account. If I click this, I don't think you're able to see everything. But Snagit gives you all kinds of options here. Like you could use Dropbox or you could use Google Drive. I use FTP because I've been using it for years and years and years and you can't see all of these. But there's YouTube and there's Screencast which is their normal option, or Slack or Microsoft PowerPoint or whatever. So this is the real magic of how I organize all of my training. So I make the training video, I click upload, it goes to that server, which is my web hosting account server, and it puts this URL quick videolearning.com daily, whatever the, whatever the URL or whatever the file name is so that I can just click paste into an email and, or into a project management system. The reason for this is because that hosting account is my control where Screencasts, which is their snagit's hosting screencast is not in my control. And they, I don't know, they delete files or something like every six months or something. Every year they're like removing your files. And if I put this into a basecamp training task, then in three years when I have someone new that I bring on and this is still relevant for, I just want to point them to that training task. I don't want to have to go make new videos. And if that video disappears, well, then it's like, oh, I don't know what that video was about. I don't know if it's still relevant. I have no idea. Now I have to go back and create all of my training again. So for me, I don't ever want something that I recorded like this to disappear. I want people to be able to find it. I want, I want my team to find it in the future when I send them to that specific thing. Or maybe we have a task that's been going on for a couple years because it's a really long term thing and maybe we'll have a couple months where there's like, oh, I kind of forget what's going on here, but we need to revisit this and it's really important. I can go back and always look at what were the previous things that I said about this, what were the screenshots I took, what were the videos I made, what were the instructions I gave. They're all still there because it's on my hosting account, I don't delete them. So inside of Snagit you can set your own upload setup. And I set it to upload to FTP and I put in the FTP information of my hosting account. I don't have to do this once. And then I set it to have to give me a custom URL from my hosting account, which I bought a domain that is set to my hosting account just for training videos. That's all that happens with it is every training video that I upload or feedback video or image or whatever, it gets put onto this domain on my hosting account. Super duper simple. It automatically happens through Snagit and then it just gives me the URL of that domain in my clipboard, I just have to paste it into, into the basecamp task or into the email or whatever. So for me, that setup of create a custom upload location, set it to FTP, put in your web hosting details, put in the URL that it's going to give you in the clipboard, and I'LL explain this in this video. It's too hard to explain through audio. That's really what makes the magic of organizing my training videos for long term.