How I made a "professional" explainer video for my product for under $100

A few potential customers have been confused about how the sharing part of my email signature tool works. So I've had it on my to do list for awhile that I need to make a video to explain the steps.

I knew I couldn't dump hundreds of dollars into it, and I didn't have much time to dump into it either. But I was happy with the result and it removed some of the verbose text from the landing page of my site.

These visual kinds of videos are nice for users, and I figured I would just share how I did it.

1. SCRIPT: I started out writing my script. I tried to keep it short and sweet. Right now it clocked in at 280 words, which ended up taking about 1:45 seconds. Honestly it probably should have been even shorter. I had my wife read it over and give me some vocab and grammar checks just to make it a bit better.

2. VOICEOVER: ($55) I found a voiceover artist on Fiverr.com in the Voiceover channel. She did a really nice job and turned it around in just a day or two. She made it sound so much more professional than I ever could have. Totally worth the money. https://www.fiverr.com/categories/music-audio/voice-overs

3. TITLE SCREENS: I put together some simple designs for the title screens. I used Photoshop but you could use Canva which is an online design creation tool. If you choose "Presentation" for the template, you have a bunch of options that are the same size required for a video. It depends on how many photos are used in the template you choose, but downloading each title screen would cost you a few bucks. https://www.canva.com/

4. PHOTOS: ($19) I also used a few photos from iStock. I needed to represent 6+ people, so I looked for a photo that had a number of portraits all combined, so I only had to purchase 1 image. Canva also has stock photography along with a million other sites out there. It's nice to break up the screen recording with something different, as long as it doesn't look too "stocky". ;) . https://istockphoto.com

5. MUSIC: ($20) Some background music also adds a more professional element to a video. I chose something from Audio Jungle that had a nice, upbeat, positive vibe to it. I just wanted it to be background to the voiceover, so it could just be kind repetitive and a little more quiet. This cost me https://audiojungle.net/

6. SCREEN RECORDING: Then I tackled the screen recording part. Man, you would think it would be easy, but it was a lot harder than I thought it would be! I wrote out a list from my script of what features and elements of my application I needed to cover. I would then go do small sections where I would record myself using the tool. I ended up recording each of these many times over, as I would either make mistakes, or I would just take too long to "accomplish" a task. I was being cheap, so I used Quicktime to record the screen on my Mac for free, but I have also heard good things about ScreenFlow ($129) https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/

7. VIDEO EDITING: Finally I put all of the pieces together. I have an Adobe Creative Cloud membership so I used Adobe Premiere, but there are also some great free video editors out there. Obviously Mac has iMovie, and Windows has Movie Maker. I have also heard good things about Hitfilm Express: https://fxhome.com/hitfilm-express

So yeah, it was a nice weekend project and I feel like my landing page is better for it. You should try it out too!

Feel free to let me know in the comments if you would recommend other resources for making videos, or if you have feedback on the video itself: