Episode 265: Loom for sharing video
In today's episode, Fiona shares a helpful tool for sharing information through video. If you are a business owner, you can use it to share tutorial videos, courses, and so much more. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 265 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you are listening to this in real-time, it is Tuesday the 20th of December. Only a few days left until one of the most full-on days of the year. For many people, regardless of whether you celebrate it or not, it could be such a day full of all sorts of emotions, excitement, grief, happiness, sadness, sorrow, anger, resentment, and betrayal it's like a soap opera. It doesn't really matter where you find yourself in the world. This is a day that can bring up all sorts of emotions and it's happening in five more sleep. Is it five more sleep, four more sleeps well around then? I hope you're looking forward to it. I hope you're not too stressed out if you are in the retail business, keep going.
There is an end insight, but today you are listening to a quick tip episode and that's really where I share a tip tool or tactic that you can implement immediately in your small business. And today it is a tool and it's one that I think I kind of resisted using for many years and I kind of wish I hadn't. I'll get into that in a second. Of course, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful lands in which I record this podcast. And that is the Wurundjeri and Wurrung people of the east Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledged that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
As I said, this is a tool, a quick tip episode. They come out every Tuesday and it's a tip tool or tactic. Today it is a tool and it's something I've avoided using. I don't know why. Sometimes you just have this wall up about certain things and this product is one of those. It's Loom, it is not a new product. I know people may be like I've been using that for years. Well, good or new, you did not have your wall up. I did. Loom is a tool that enables you to record your screen but also chooses to either capture just the screen or to also capture the camera. It's really good for teaching people things. It's great to use in place of meetings.
If you are in the service-based industry, you've probably been inundated with people offering you SEO services. Quite often they will use a tool like Loom to go through your website and tell you all the things that you could be doing better. Sometimes those videos actually do work. I know they sometimes work on us when I'm like, we get sent a lot of them. But Loom is a tool that allows you to do things like pitching. It allows you to like I said, in place of meetings. What I use it for is predominantly for tutorials for the people that work with me or for, I do a lot of website audits for people where I do like a half-hour overview of their site, what I would change, what I think they're doing well, how they might increase conversion through various tactics.
If you're interested in one of those, just sign a note, and email us anytime at hello@mydailybusiness coach.com. But what I used to use was QuickTime. QuickTime is a free tool that comes with max and I had been using it for years, although it does not allow you to record your camera and screen simultaneously. It is just a screen recording or an audio recording. I have used that to build pretty much all of my courses. Whenever I was not facing directly to face to the camera, I would be recording my screen and then using that screen recording as the module videos in my courses. And many people have told me about Loom over the years. I have been in business coaching groups myself, where the facilitator used Loom to describe things. My good friend in Amsterdam, Marre, shout out Smit Club uses Loom.
I think Boris, one of my clients, Boris from Metcon Creative, came on recently and talked about how much he uses Loom and I've probably read about it in at least 15 other kinds of blogs or heard about it on podcasts. I think what I really like sticking to was the feeling that I had around using Screencastify years ago. I got onto Screencastify from one of my friends, Natasha, and she loves that program, but I was using this and this is back in 2016. The technology was not as good as it is today. When I use Screencastify, which back then I think it was like $50 a month or something, it seemed really expensive. And it allowed you to do screen recording, but it took hours to sync to Google Drive or to sync to any kind of Dropbox or anything like that, back then when I was using Screencastify, I just didn't find it user-friendly.
It just took so long for anything to upload. I had put Loom in the same bucket as Screencastify circa 2016. I'm sure Screencastify works really well now that I have not used it, so I cannot say, but I had not had a great experience with that. When I started using QuickTime, it was free. It was an application on my computer, I didn't need the internet to be connected to use it. And whilst it did take a while to upload it to or to sync to like Dropbox, I just found it the easiest one to use. I initially was very reluctant to use Loom, but I have started using it and I'm on the paid version. I have to say there is a free version, but you can only record I think 25 minutes of five-minute videos max.
My website audits are about 20 to 40 minutes. And the tutorials that I record for staff may be anything from 30 seconds to five minutes. I wanted to go on the paid version of Loom because you have unlimited video times you could, I could be recording for like three hours. But the other reason that I really wanted to go into Loom is that I use Dropbox and Google Drive for storing files. I'm just finding that a lot of these tutorials are starting to do more and more website audits, website audits are always something we have offered to clients since I started this business and we're doing more of them. And all of those video files take up a huge amount of space. Even if you are using something like Google Drive or Dropbox and Dropbox is syncing to your computer, I'll do it in a whole other episode on my move from Dropbox to just Google Drive totally and getting rid of Dropbox.
But the reason that I wanted to use Loom is that it's all stored on the internet. You don't have to be kind of downloading, uploading, or doing anything like that. It's just there and you give access to particular videos to people that you want to be able to see them. I just thought today that I'd mention Loom, it is a great product. Like everything that I mention on the podcast, I don't get paid for any of this. I get no affiliate links or anything else like that. What I'm offering, what I'm saying, any of these tools, tips, or tactics are just things that I genuinely use or have worked with clients on and I think they're really good. Loom is one of those products so far I'm about a month and a half into using it properly instead of QuickTime.
I have to say there were a few hiccups, things like I don't know why, but it defaulted to have the microphone off. I actually ended up doing a whole website audit for about 35 minutes and then watching it and it was completely mute because the microphone button had been defaulted to be off. Just making sure that your camera, if you want to be recording yourself and your microphone are not in a default off, and that they are switched on before you record is great. Also, I think by flipping between screens, you have to get used to doing that on Loom because in some instances you have to give permission each time you open a different tab for it to be recording that tab. But overall I'm pretty happy with it. And on the paid version, you can also put your own branding and other such things in there if this is something that you are selling to your clients or you're using it in a really professional environment.
That is it for today's quick tip episode. Just a tool Loom for sharing a whole bunch of information through video and also for recording things like courses or like short tutorial videos for your staff. I'd love to know what you use for recording things like that. Are you old school and you are using something like QuickTime? I think Canva actually does this now as well. I mean so many videos are everywhere and absolutely not even the future is the current right now. if you're not using video to do explainer videos or to help your staff really understand how to do things, maybe have a look into things like Zoom, it just makes it really easy. We are all used to consuming videos. Instead of a thick PDF or document for somebody coming into your business to learn how to do something, perhaps think about recording a video next time you're doing that same thing and just it makes it so much easier for them to actually see what they need to do, but also for you because you're saving time if you are doing that action, whether it's setting up an invoice or adding inventory to a website behind the scenes, you can just record yourself at the same time and you kind of killed two burns with one stone as they say.
If you found this useful, I would love it so much if you might share it with another business friend, it just helps all this good information get out there. If you want links to anything that we have talked about today, you'll find the full show notes for this episode over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/265. Thanks so much for listening. Keep going if you're in retail, only a few days left, not really because all the sales come after that. But keep going. There is light at the end of the tunnel and for everyone else, I hope you are enjoying the end of a full-on year. Let's hope 2023 is just a little calmer worldwide. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinescoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailbusiness coach.
