The earlier posts on communicating more effectively and gaining attention with screencasting introduced tools and techniques. Here I’ll show you ways to directly monetise your experience so you can actively sell screencasts and passively earn income from your past productions.
The easiest way to make money through screencasting is to offer new tutorial screencasts to a website that specialises in this area. The following three examples have been established for years. You’ll need to be able to demonstrate that you’re able to teach using screencasts so you’ll have to have some experience with production already.
Lynda.com is the granddaddy of screencast based e-learning sites. Experts are invited to record a mix of screencasts and videos to teach topics related to web development.
Lynda are known to treat their authors well – they’ll fly you out, put you up, help you with the scripting and manage all of the recording and production. You get a set fee and a slice of the monthly income.
Brighton-based Papervision expert Seb Lee-Delisle is an author, he was flown out to the USA earlier in the year.
Net Tuts offer tutorials for web developers, they invite new authors to submit screencast or written tutorials for which they’ll pay a license fee.
Net Tuts will be easier to work with if you’re not yet known as an expert and you can do all your recording from your own home.
I co-founded ShowMeDo in 2005, it hosts a large set of screencasts which teach open-source software. Many of the authors create free screencasts, some of the experienced authors are paid to contribute to the paying-members Club.
If you’re interested in being paid to teach open source software then get in contact with the site – you’ll need to demonstrate your knowledge via some existing open source screencasts.
It is quite believeable that you’ll build a hobby site which uses screencasting that you can turn into an income generator once it becomes popular. The examples below for ScreencastsOnline and PeepCode should make this clear and the Micropreneur Academy example builds on the idea to create a niche and very profitable tutorial site augmented by screencasts.
Payment gateways like PayPal and Google Checkout make taking money easy for most of your potential buyers (i.e. those in the West who can deal in Dollars, Pounds and Euros). Products can very easily be delivered via E-junkie – you upload your product and they handle the purchase process and deliver the goods.
If you want to host a membership system then that’s a little more complicated – but only a little. WordPress has a set of membership extensions that allow you to setup paying-members sections, Drupal and the like will have similar extensions.
Private hosting for screencasts is offered through screencast.com and if you just want to treat the screencasts as files then commodity hosting like Amazon EC2 is hard to beat.
Don McAllister’s ScreencastsOnline has been teaching Macintosh skills since 2005. Don’s videos are released for free in a low resolution format with high resolution versions available to subscribing members. Don turned his hobby into a full time business several years ago.
Geoffrey Grosenbach started Peepcode in 2006 to teach Ruby and Rails programming via 30-60 minute screencasts. His business has expanded and now he produces content with a group of authors, mostly still around Ruby. Given that I was building ShowMeDo at the same time it was fascinating watching Geoffrey build his niche tutorial site into a profitable business.
If you want to replicate Geoffrey’s success then pick your domain, get recording and start selling the videos via a payment gateway like PayPal. The barriers to entry for this sort of business are terribly low – finding your audience is likely to be the hardest challenge.
Rob Walling of the Micropreneur Academy offers many tutorials to teach the art of business building. A subset of his tutorials have walk-throughs using screencasts – topics like learning to research Google AdWords are best explained visually. Rob’s tutorials run for 3 to 20 minutes each.
Rob’s use of screencasts adds a great amount to his body of tutorial content – some topics just aren’t easily taught via long documents. If you have a tutorial site in mind, do include rich screencast tutorials as they will increase the value of your site.
You can join advertising programmes or sell products through affiliate links to earn a passive income from your screencasts. You’ll need to be producing videos that are watched by a lot of people (preferably you’ll have over several thousand views per video per month). If this is the case then a passive income stream can generate a useful side income (and maybe a useful chunk of a salary too).
In 2009 YouTube started to invite creators into their AdSense advertising programme. Ironically my AdblockPlus screencast was invited into their ad programme (I declined!) due to its consistently high viewing figures.
YouTube now offer a Partners programme, anyone can join and through it you’re indicating that you’re open to receiving income from ads on your videos. Their programme now offers a rental plan too – if you’re thinking of renting access to a set of tutorials then this is something to keep your eye on.
Remember that ads in general only earn useful money if they get a lot of views – if your content is niche with a small viewership (i.e. less than a few thousand views a month) then your chance of earning any useful money from the programme is tiny. If you already have a Google AdSense account then you probably have an idea of the income that could be generated.
If you control the site that hosts your screencasts and you’re a member of an affiliate programme like Amazon Affiliates then you can add relevant products to your description. If the user has benefited from the screencast then a link to a relevant book or software package should also be useful. Affiliate sales will provide a low but consistent income if you have good viewing numbers for your screencasts.
I’m the author of The Screencasting Handbook, the 128 page PDF is packed with 4 years of my own professional experience from building ShowMeDo and ProCasts. The goal is to lay out everything you need to quickly and confidently plan, record, produce and distribute your own screencasts. The Handbook is aimed at freelancers, teachers and marketing professionals covering both quick videos and in-depth productions.
Visit the blog to find a lot of tips and links to useful software. An added bonus of the Handbook is the free Screencasting Google Group — over 130 screencasters are a member of this Group. Feel free to join and ask questions, we’re all happy to help you move forwards.
Read all three parts of the screencasting guide
