About the instructor

- Before we explore YouTube, I'd like to take just a brief moment to introduce myself. I've been creating web content for many years. In fact, I put my first video up online back in 1996. So I've been at this for awhile with encoding video. I've managed websites for many years, including those on photography and music and I've always relied upon different ways of sharing audio and video content to really distribute to the masses. Now, YouTube is a big part of that strategy and I'll share with you some of the lessons I've learned through the years.

I've also authored about 40 books for things about photography, video, and business. So many of these have been official texts for Adobe and Apple and a lot of content on web video. In fact, I wrote the first book on video podcasting, which is a precursor to a lot of things that have happened now and migrated over to YouTube. I'm very familiar with the concept of creating content for the web specifically, and distributing it out to folks to consume on a regular basis. I've recorded more than 150 online classes, so making online content is something I'm very familiar with.

And I regularly publish two websites. A personal blog and a daily blog about photography that's been published with multiple authors coming up on 20 years now. I also serve as the program manager for the National Association of Broadcasters for their post-production world conference. This is a conference that has been around for almost two decades and it helps people learn and master new skills about video editing, production, post-production, and distributing content to the world. I also keep myself busy as an owner of a video production company.

And we're frequently called upon to make content for YouTube and to help people with things like live streaming and live events. Creating content for the web is something that I've had the pleasure of doing a lot of. As such, I've made a lot of mistakes through the years and have had a lot of opportunities to learn best practices. We've been able to put this into practice for many different companies and brands you might recognize. A partial client roster includes the fact that we've done work for companies like Apple, Adobe, Canon, Cisco, Drobo, Google, KelbyOne, Lynda.com, Microsoft, and Skylum Software.

As you can see we've been around the block. And as such I have pretty strong opinions about what works and what doesn't work. To be perfectly honest there's things about YouTube that drive me crazy. And there are things about the terms of service that I want to make sure you are keenly aware of. In this course, while we're going to explore a lot of technical things, I'm also going to share with you practical advice when it comes to having a strategy, as well as some business considerations you need to keep in mind if YouTube is going to be a part of your platform. Through the years we've also produced a lot of different types of content.

We've produced videos on a wide range of topics from technology and photography to graphic design and fashion. We've worked with a lot of clients who are producing content for health and parenting. As well as even the college admissions process, education, fundraising, fitness, and many other areas. Now, a lot of you know me as an on-camera trainer producing courses like this one that you watch. But we spend far more time at my company helping other people produce content for the web. So I'm usually actually behind a camera and that's going to be some of the lessons I share with you today.

What have I learned producing content for YouTube as well as how to put the channels together. We've had the benefit of managing some YouTube channels for a few different brands through the years and we've learned a lot about how to make the platform give us good results.