MBA1104 How to Quickly Create Tutorials for Your Product

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, your go To Business podcast for quick business knowledge with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to quickly create tutorials for your product. The emphasis here is on quickly. You have a product you need to sell, whether it's a software product, a physical product, a course, whatever it is. You may need to create some quick tutorials or a start guide so your customers or your users can get the most out of your product and use it properly. There are so many ways that we've covered on the show before that you can create help tutorials and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. But in today's episode we're going to focus on speed. You need to get these tutorials created quickly. You don't want to fumble around and take forever now. And I say quickly. I'm saying creating all the tutorials for your product in a day or two. I'm talking about maybe 20 to 30 tutorials. I want to give you the plan, the tools, how to implement it so you can get that product out there. A lot of us we delay launching our product because our tutorials are taking so long to create. And we want to make sure our customers have, you know, some guide, some help to get them started with your product. So we got a lot to cover, but we're going to make it quick like the tutorials. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Now, like I mentioned on the podcast, we've had lessons on all these great ways, different ways, innovative ways to create tutorials, audio and video and gifs and all this stuff, right? But we're going to put all that aside and focus on getting these tutorials out as soon as possible. Remember, you can always edit later, you can always improve, upgrade, change, but right now we need to get it out the door. So let's get started with how we can create these tutorials as fast as possible. Number one, instead of trying to create these tutorials on your website, creating pages after pages for these tutorials, I suggest you use some sort of help or support software, something like Zendesk or Intercom. These pieces of software have built in help desks or a knowledge base. This is basically a website that allows you to create tutorials and it will have a unique link or unique URL for your business. For example, we have all our tutorials of webinar ninja over@help.webinar ninja.com and you can use your own domain like we've done, and use a subdomain like help or Support and have URL.yourwebsite.com and that's easy to set up with their program. That way you don't have to worry about creating and designing pages on your website to host these tutorials. This gonna save you a ton of time. Why? Because when you design and create your own pages on your site or with your, you know, site builder or with Squarespace or whatever you do, you're gonna spend a lot of time playing around with it, finicking around with it, tweaking things. Because of course, we're all perfectionists, right? What's great about having a platform like Intercom or Zendesk and using their knowledge base pages to create your own tutorials is that it's limited, it's simple, it's minimalist, and just focus on the content, plugging in your actual tutorials. I have to say, Intercom's interface of creating these tutorials is so easy and so simple and it looks elegant. Zendesk is not too far behind them either. We've used both in the past, but we currently use Intercom So if you do want to see what it looks like, you can go to help.webinar ninja.com to see what I'm talking about. So that's step number one. Don't play around and try to build this yourself. Use a platform that's built for creating tutorials. Now, what's great about these platforms is that it speeds up the process because there's placeholders for everything, so you don't have to think about where do I put everything? So it tells you where to put the title, where to put the subtitle, where to put the text. They have tools so you can hyperlink and you can, you know, insert, you know, images, things like that. So simple. On top of that, you can also save things as draft or publish them right away. So what I do and what I recommend is creating all the tutorials at once. So you have 10 tutorials. So create all these 10 tutorials at once. Don't worry so much about them being perfect. Just save them all as draft. And then once you've created them the next day or maybe after a lunch break with fresh eyes, go and edit them. Go and try to edit them or get somebody else to edit them in your team. And then before you go live, they're all kind of proofread and ready to go. Okay, so let's talk about creating the content for these tutorials as quickly as possible. Number one, creating short tutorials is much easier than creating long tutorials. What I mean by that is that you might have a long tutorial that'll have three or four aspects in our three or four features in it. It's going to take you longer to create that tutorial than to create three separate ones. Why? Because ideas that are simple are easier to produce, easier to write. When you have to link all these ideas and make it all cohesive, that's extra effort. So break them up, break them up into smaller tutorials. That's going to make it easier for you and faster. Number two, if you're using one of these, you know, help desk platforms like Intercom, you can group tutorials into sort of sections or categories. So say, for example, you want to create a category or a section called Start Guide. Instead of creating one full tutorial to get started, you can break it up into small tutorials and put it all in that category and basically they click on it and they open up all the tutorials inside there. Next, as much as you want, drop the idea of having tutorials video based. Creating video tutorials are great and some people Love them as users. But number one, it takes a whole lot longer to script and shoot and edit video than if you went text and image. Number two, the benefit that the user gets is not so much more. Actually, a lot of people prefer text based where they can just skim through the information, look at images and and know how to do something. So again, your goal here is to get these tutorials out as soon as possible to finish them. So what I like to do is do the text first, write up how to do that aspect of your product. Just write it up like instructions, as simple as possible, simple sentences, short paragraphs, step by step. If you can use a numbering system, that'd be good like 1, 2, 3, and then finally you're done. After you've written it all up, look at where in the tutorial you can add some images. So and images are so much easier to do because you could just take pictures with a screen capturing software. If you have an online course or a software product or if it's a physical item, you could take a photo with it with your phone and you can easily crop it and just send it to your computer. Now if you're using screen capturing software, we love cloud app. Awesome app, worth its price a hundred times over. It's a great screen capturing software, but most computers have this built in if you don't want to buy and a screen capturing software. Now the reason why I recommend cloud app is because you can quickly make some annotations. You want to circle something. If you want to put an arrow somewhere that adds a little value to the image and it's quickly done with cloud app. Some computers have built in, you know, screen capturing and I know with the Mac you can also edit and modify. It's not as efficient and easy and fast as cloud app and again, that's why I love cloud app super fast. But you definitely could do it. If you don't want to purchase cloud app, screen capturing is the fastest way to do it. Download those images into one folder in your computer. I like to do that because then when I'm using something like Intercom to create my tutorials, I can just drag and drop that photo or the photos I need for each tutorial. I don't have to keep searching for them. It's in one folder. All right, so I've written my text, I sprinkled in the images that I want. I have them edited, I have them saved. Another aspect of tutorials that really make it super simple to quickly improve your tutorials after you launched it is a rating system of how this tutorial has helped the user. I know Intercom has this. They have these like three emojis. Or it's like, you know, smiley face, neutral face, sad face. What did you think of this tutorial? If you get smiley faces all the way, you know this one is good. And there's minimal editing you have to do. If you're getting sad faces or even middle faces or neutral faces, you should look into improving that tutorial. Reach out to the customers that gave you that rating and ask them what are some things that were confusing about the tutorial, maybe some suggestions on how to improve it. Again, this is built in an Intercom. And no, Intercom is not sponsoring today's episode. I'm just again sharing my experience. What we use, what works. You know, Intercom is not perfect, but they do a lot of certain things really well. Another piece of advice I would give you is making these tutorials public. Don't put them behind a membership gate. Why? Because when you make your tutorials public, they're found in search engines and they become like marketing material. People get to see inside of what your product looks like and how to use it, and also how thoughtful your tutorials are. It shows the measure or the merit of your customer service level. We found that our tutorials really, really allow people to be curious about what we offer and ask them questions.

You love what you do. You also love the idea of not doing it one day. But it's getting harder to know the best way to move into the future towards retirement. We hear about inflation, rate hikes, the changing market, gotta get the kids through college, build an emergency fund. And then there's retirement. Here's where Fidelity comes in. Fidelity can help you find clarity in saving for the future, even as your path and priorities evolve.

How?

Well, they'll help you create a free, personalized plan that adapts as your priorities change. They'll also show you what's called timely insights, small tips on ways to save and invest to help meet your goals. And you can monitor your plan so you stay on target. The future's coming, and so's retirement. Fidelity can help you take it on your way. Learn more@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity brokerage Services member nysesipc Valentine's planning starts now. Get ahead of the game with 1-800-flowers xoxo sales and save 20% on gifts for the ones you love for 50 years. 1-800-flowers has made Valentine's special by delivering millions of high quality roses with unmatched reliability right now. Save 20% on premium bouquets, all backed by their seven day freshness guarantee. This Xoxo sale ends February 5th, so don't wait. Save 20% at 1-800-flowers.com sxm that's 1-800-flowers. Com sxm.

To wrap up today's quick lesson on how to create quick tutorials. Minimal viable. You want to make sure that you get this out there so you can launch your product. Keep it simple. Use great tools that we mentioned today that make it simple for you to create this quickly. Don't try to bootstrap it right now. These are simple, inexpensive tools you can use to speed up the process. Stick to text and images is going to give you the most bang for your buck in terms of, you know, the value you're going to give your users as well as getting those done quickly. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter MBA show. I hope that helped. Tomorrow is Q and A Wednesday where we answer your questions. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me@omar mba net. We got a ton of questions. If you've sent us a question, I've got it. Don't worry, we got it. It's lined up for a Q and A Wednesday. Tomorrow's question is from Dave and Dave asks, how do I validate an idea for a niche subscription box business? I get into Dave's question and answer it in tomorrow's episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. All right, that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. In today's business world, speed is so important. Getting to the market as fast as possible, so important. You want to make sure you're delivering a quality product. But sometimes the things that you are going to be delivering, like the tutorials, can hold you back because you're trying to be a perfectionist. There's so many ways you can deliver this. Let's stay with the minimal viable way. Let's stick to that and then improve upon it later. People really will appreciate the fact that you've given them a solution as quickly as possible and enough for them to know how to use it. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Want to buy a car your way? Of course you do. That's why CarMax offers an experience designed just for you want to start online, then visit the lot, then go back online? Sure. Want to talk to a real person or chat online? Either works. Want to take your time and compare all the makes and models? No problem. Then make up some time by filling out the paperwork at home and schedule express pickup or home delivery. Done. When it comes to how you buy, CarMax puts you in the driver's seat. Want to drive? CarMax delivery restrictions apply. Seecarmax.com for details.