Youtube video transcript
So I spend most of my day trying to build an online income working on my project. And I know that you have to invest one of two things either your time or your money, and it’s always best to invest money to save you time. So today we’re gonna be talking about the tools that I use in order to build my online empire.
So let’s jump. Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil. And welcome to my channel where I document my journey building on online income. And if you’re trying to do the same thing, we’ll stick around because you might be able to learn a few things, especially from my mistakes.
So today’s video is really inspired by a comment from Herbert GBR and he basically was asking, Hey, why don’t you do a video on the kind of tools that you are using? In your blogging and your YouTube. Now I have a little confession to make. I am notoriously cheap. I never like to spend any money on anything.
I’d much rather figure out myself, but I am learning. So if you stick around, you’re gonna find a lot of the tools that I use, which are essential to my day to day running of what I’m trying to do. These projects I’m working on every single day. A lot of them are. So you might just get one of those aha moments.
So make sure you stick around to the end of the video. So one of the tools that I use the most is a free tool called gimp 2.0. And I’ve been using this for a long time. And it’s great for so many things. I was really using it a lot for making. Thumbnails and also for my images on blogs and things like that.
And it is just really cool. So one of the things I can do is open up a file, so here we have my friend and colleague who I run another YouTube channel with the arts grind. And this is really great. So I’ve removed the background already with another tool called Canva. And here’s a little tip that I.
Picked up a better way of doing this from Emma cruises, who’s a big name in Project 24. And so all I’m gonna do is I’m gonna right click alpha to select. That’s gonna pick out the background of the mic here. Then I’m gonna just add a new layer. I’m gonna push the layer below Mike or move Mike up.
And then I’m just going to go to border. I’m gonna add a bit of a border 20 pixels. Let’s say that. And then all I do is I go to edit and I fill cover color with white. And then if I deselect and you can see. Gets that nice little outline that a lot of YouTubers are using and it’s that simple. And you can go one step further and you can actually go to light and shadow and you can add a drop shadow.
and that gives you a drop shadow. So this is something that I’ve been using for a long time. This is actually a quicker method of doing this. I did it in a roundabout way before, but gimp is absolutely free. You can do stuff like this for your thumb now. You can create the entire thumb. Now I’ve used this so much.
It’s a great tool. And I think it’s on par with Photoshop, which you have to pay for. So gimp, definitely up there for a useful tool for. Okay. So now let’s talk about a few really useful extensions that you can get for Chrome. Cuz I tend to use Chrome a lot for my browsing. So for your blogging, essentially get Gramly you can get the free option and if nothing else.
Just for a native speaker, it’s just gonna point out the typos and the big mistakes that you make. If you are a non-native you might wanna upgrade and get the paid version, and it’s gonna help you with all sorts of grammar, grammatical structures and things like that. But I use GRA Grammarly from my Chrome browser when I’m writing and it just saves you a bit of time having to go back.
Reread everything in minute detail. So that’s a really great free extension that you can get. And I use it all the time. I wish that my colleague Michael would use it. Oh, God, another thing I use all the time is capitalize my title. So instead of having to go through your YouTube titles and put a capital letter for everything, you can just type it in here.
This is my title and you can choose sentence case Upcase for everything lower. First letter, which I use a lot. And then you just copy it and put it into your YouTube or blog title. This is a great free little website. Use it all the time. Another extension that you absolutely should get for your blogging is the word count extension.
This is ideal for when you want to count your snippet to make sure it’s within the right range for the characters. I use this and I would also get my. My writers use this as well. But if you don’t want the extension, you can always use word counter.net. This is great for counting. How many words in your blog post, or how many words is someone else?
and another essential extension I use is the page analytics by Google, which will allow you to look at your webpages without picking up your IP or basically your visits. So it won’t be misleading. You won’t think you’ve got a thousand visitors this month because you’ve basically been refreshing a page cuz you’ve been checking something, another extent, another extension that I think’s really.
So I have quite a few little YouTube channels going and I love making videos. It’s actually one of the things that I enjoy the most. So in this channel I have with my friend Mike, the arts grind, he does a lot of the kind of content creation and. Producing the exercises and things for the students.
I do all the editing of the videos cuz that’s what I enjoy doing. And I use something called power director 365. I’ve had this program probably for about three or four years and I had version 15 before. And when I got a new computer, which I did this year, I actually upgraded to the 365. So this is a paid tool and it will cost you.
Just shy of a hundred dollars. I reckon maybe the 70 to 80 range. I actually got it during a discount time and it’s a subscription service, but it’s really good. I’m so glad that I upgraded. It’s just. if I just show you a few little features. So again, we’ve got Mike here getting a little bit of free exposure.
He’s getting his face plastered all over town. He will only get that reference. So here it is really good. You’ve got lots of, you can put it on different tracks. You can have audio and your picture. And one of the things this really saved me so much time is when you. Your video, maybe you filmed on your camera and then you have your audio, which you might have filmed on your audio recorder here.
You can actually press sync by audio and it matches it up. This saved me so much time when a friend of ours told us about this because I used to match it up manually. So this is really great. The other thing I love about power. If you have all your different texts and it can be animated.
So you can select all manner of things here. You have your transitions. So I tend to use a nice little blur, but you’ve got lots of other ones that you can use here. You’ve also got effects. For example, you put this over your video and it will look like a damaged TV, whatever you. The thing I’ve been using quite a lot recently is what is called video overlay.
So picture and picture objects. And I’ve been using a lot of these kinds of sketch ones where it’s arrows or circling things. That’s what I use in my updates to highlight numbers. and it also has what are called particles. So you can lay things over. There’s so much. And the great thing about this subscription is they keep adding to it.
So that’s really useful, but there’s one more thing that I absolutely love about power directors and it’s actually this. It’s the screen recorder. So I’m actually recording my screen at the moment. And this comes as part of the package of power director. So a lot of the videos that you’ve seen on here, I’ve been using this program to record the screen.
It’s just really good. And I think the learning curve is not too big on this one. It’s quite simple. If you want to cut something, you just press the split timeline. You can move it around. You can, if you wanna move all of this, move it along, insert and we can go back and you can cut it all back again.
Just remove it, it goes back again. It’s really simple to use. I love this program. If you want to know a bit more about it, there is a link in the description. I’m not even sure if it’s an affiliate link. There might be one, I might add one later, but it’s a great program. If you wanna spend a little bit of money.
I’ve not regretted the money at all. It’s a great investment. So another tool that’s really useful and connected to the power director is called OBS. And if you are interested in capturing your screen, this is a really good one. So basically, it’s a free open source software. Doesn’t cost you a penny and you can set it up to pro you know, capture your screen so you can.
Record what’s happening on your screen? It looks a bit weird here because there’s nothing really happening. But if I were to minimize the screen, it would capture the actual screen of the. On the desktop you can also set it up for streaming so you can stream to YouTube and things like that.
That’s really great. And there’s also another program similar to this, which is called stream labs and it’s based on the same thing. O BS. These are great free tools for yeah. For recording what you are doing on your screen. If you wanna make videos like that for YouTube or for your blog even. And for streaming to YouTube, it’s something I’m using more and more, cause I’m going down this gaming niche.
So this is a really great free tool. So by far, one of the most useful tools that I’ve got at the moment, and it is a paid tool, is called Canva. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. You can actually use many of the features for free, but I upgraded to the pro version, which was only about a hundred, $120 and it is money so well spent.
It’s really great. So the way it works is you can create a design. For example, if you want to do a thumb now, YouTube thumb now, and it gives you exactly the right dimensions and it gives you all these different templates that you can use. And in addition to that, you’ve got photos that you can use.
So you can search for a photo. If you wanted to do one of a little doggy here. And you can resize it and it, the great thing is it gives you these it’s not showing it now. Yeah. But you can see it gives you these lines. I’m pointing at the screen here. It can give you these lines to tell you exactly where it is.
You can put in text and it has all these different templates. So you can move it around. And this is a dog. Okay. I might have to work on the actual design of that there, but you’ve got all this thing. You can also change the style for the text and things like that. There’s music that you can get access to.
And there’s also these elements that you can use you can search through and you maybe have a. Clicky thing there. I dunno if you want to use a animated thing you can have backgrounds which are really cool and there’s also videos. So you can actually use these videos. I use a lot of these videos.
In my actual YouTube videos, but the thing that I love the most about this, and I’m gonna show you that. Okay. So this is a picture of me in TA in Taiwan with monkeys. They just walk in around there. And what you can do is you click on your photo here and you go to effects and you go to background remover.
And in a few seconds, depending how fast your internet connection is, stay. It removes the background, just like that. Do you know how long it used to take me to do this with GIM? I used to cut around the actual picture and remove it myself. It removes the background from me and the monkey. How amazing is that?
Then all I have to do is I go and I download this and of course I can change the file name and everything. I download that. I put transparent background and then I can use that on my thumbnail. This is so cool. But you only get that with the pro version as far as I know. So it is well worth the money because if you are producing a thumbnail once or twice a week, this is so good.
And so I can download that. I go into GIM, I put a white background around it, a drop shadow. Import it back into Canver and put it onto my thumbnail. It’s such a great tool and it saves so much time. So again, if you are interested in Canver and you’ve found this a useful little video, why not check out the link in the description?
That is an affiliate link, but it does help me out. Maybe you wanna do that. So Herbert also asked me about the equipment that I’m using. The thing, the most valuable thing that I have is probably this hash cam it’s the DX zero five. If I remember correctly and yeah, Dr. Zero five X, sorry.
And you basically, you can put a mic directly into this and you can record yourself. And the thing I found is separating. The video audio and having a mic. It’s just made the quality of the audio for my video so much better. If you go back and look at what I had a year ago the quality was just terrible.
And I think even though it’s not perfect right now, cuz this only costs $60. It’s not that expensive. It’s just so much better. And I can use that feature in power director to sync up the audio. And with that, I’ve also got these Boyer mics which I went for this series because it has two transmitters and the one receiver.
And that’s what I needed with my other channel, the arts grind, but you can buy these kind of Lael, mics or lapel mics. Laier Lao mics. That’s what they called. You can buy these in lots of different ways. I would say get one, whatever version is I use, this one is pretty good. The only thing I don’t like about these mics is that it takes batteries.
Double a batteries. But I’ve got this charger with batteries that I can recycle power up again. So we’ve got this kind of system of, we swap ’em either from time to time and it seems to work fine. The other thing I’ve got is I’ve got this cannon M 50 and this is something I invested in.
It’s a pretty good camera. My only gripe with it is that I wanted it for 4k and it doesn’t do very good auto focus and 4k, but we use kind of four HD. And it seems much better quality than the original camera that I had, which was this kind of just base generic kind of video camera. The only benefit of this over the camera I’m using now is I only found this out recently.
So this video camera will record continuously until there’s no more space on the SD card. Or it runs out of battery, but the cannon, because it is not a video camera, it’s actually a camera they’re limited to the 29 minutes and 59 seconds. And it won’t start recording a second track as far as I know.
And the reason for this tax, literally in Europe, they put a tax on video cameras and the limit was 29 minutes. 29 minutes and 59 seconds. So all these kind of these camera video cameras, they’re limited to that because of tax, how ridiculous is. So you may have noticed that this far in the video, I haven’t actually spoken about any keyword search tools because frankly I don’t use them.
The one that I have used is Uber suggest and I don’t use it in the traditional keyword search tool way. I just use it for inspiration. If I’m at a roadblock, I don’t can’t really think of any queries that I might want. Write about, I use this to try and, jog the memory, get it going.
What I don’t do is I don’t rely on the actual numbers because they’re not that reliable. There’s even in my small sort of experience I have found. Keywords that do bring in traffic that these tools say they don’t bring in traffic. So things like Uber suggest or the other keyword search tools that are out there great for inspiration, but don’t pay money for them.
I haven’t found any of the features that I want to use at the moment I’m sure in the future I may do, but for the size of my websites, just using the free features are good enough for me at the. So if you’ve been watching this channel for a while, that I live in Taiwan. So I’m way out of my target market, which is the United States.
So one of the tools that I actually paid for was surf shark, which is a VPN service. And it’s really good. The price I paid for, it was pretty good. I think it was only about a hundred dollars or something like that at the time might have been. and it’s, it works really well. I think I get a much better view of what an American is searching for compared to what a, a Taiwanese person is searching for.
So having a VPN, if you don’t live in the United States might be something quite useful for you. This is just one of many, again, there’s a link in the description. If you want to go check this particular service out. Now, if you do live in the states, perhaps all you need. Another web browser. So I mainly use Chrome.
I dunno why I just like it a little bit better. But I also have Firefox, I have Microsoft edge and I have a few other sort of internet browsers here and there, which I never log into. This is to give me a cleaner search record when I’m doing my search a. If you’re in the United States or even if you are using a VPN, cause I can use the VPN on Firefox here as well the surf shark.
So it’s always a good idea to have a second browser that you don’t use for your kind of personal searching, because then you’re gonna get a much better idea of what generally what people are searching and the search results that are coming up. One of the other paid tools that I do pay for, but I don’t pay a lot for it is called manage WP.
And this is really good for backing up your websites. You pay like a dollar a month and it will back up your websites on a regular basis. And yeah, I’ve just had no real problems with it at all. And it just gives you peace of mind, really that if something does go wrong, you can roll back your site.
Even if something happens to your hosting. And of course, as a blogger, one of the major things that I need to pay for is web hosting. So I’ve been with blue hosts for a number of years, and I think they’re really good for when you are starting off your website. I really like the C panel layout that they have and how you can access all your data is really simple to use.
I did use iage for the first year when I was getting into blog in and websites. And it was a little bit sort of 1990s. This is very much updated. And blue host is pretty cheap if you make sure when you buy blue host, go for like the three year, as long as you can get it, cuz you will use it. But when they renew it, don’t be surprised if the price doesn’t jump up.
So it. From three to $5 for me per month to about $20. But by the time you are paying that, you’ve probably got enough money, but if you’ve got a little bit more traffic, you probably wanna move over to a slightly faster hosting service. Blue host is great for most websites, especially at the beginning, but WPX is really good.
I moved over to them about two months ago. And with the ads that I put onto my websites the speed did it leveled out. It went up as well. And I have to say that the service is amazing. They migrated my three of my sites over no problems at all. And the support staff are really great.
It’s 24 hours a day. I have had an issue, not with WP X, but actually with the integration with my ads. And these guys have been working with me and Excellent service really worth it. So if you are at the stage where you are renewing something like blue host after two or three years price wise going with WPX probably makes a lot of sense at that stage because your site probably is getting a bit more traffic.
So these are really great hosting services. So you can find blue host and WPX the information in the description. If you want to check it out through those links. So another tool that I am technically paying for now isEzoic. So this is the ad network. Now, if you are a member of Project 24 and you haven’t got it,Ezoic on it.
Go do it because it’s really simple for us to get through. And to put it onto our websites. Now we don’t have any minimum thresholds. I think the only thing now is they want you to go through a little training session to help you use it a little bit better. It’s not something that I had to do when I joined up, but I think it’s really useful.
So the reason why this is a great tool, not only for the ads the revenue that you get, but it’s actually for the analytic features now. Using something like Uber suggest is great because it might give you some inspiration, but using the analytics in Zurich is even better. Because if you come down to content and landing page, you can look and it will actually give you an EP MV earnings per milli views of that page.
And you can see, okay, this page is earning me the most money per. So why don’t I write more content like that. This is a great tool and it’s something that I’m gonna be using a lot more because now I’m getting back into the blogging. I’m trying to get past the roadblocks that I’ve had.
So this is really great. So as I said, if you can get into it, if you in Project 24, it’s really worth it. So if you’re not part of Project 24, to be honest, it might just be an investment. Even if you pay for membership, just to get into a Zo. Probably you’re gonna earn enough money over the next couple of months to year to pay back, that investment to Project 24 and this information might pay for itself.
You can think of it in those terms. So the other thing, the reason why I’m paying for a Zo is that I did actually sign up for the premium option to see if it’s worth the money. So I’m just at the $44 a month kind of T. And it’s not showing any money at the moment, but it’s because it’s the, I’m filming this on the first of the month.
But yeah, within the first sort of I put it on 19th, it started making money on the 20th January, and, in 10 days it had made 25 to $30. So I had paid. Pretty much paid for the monthly subscription there. So I think premium will make more money than the actual, monthly subscription.
So I think it is gonna be worth it. More news on this when I have a bit more news about it. And of course, I think the greatest tool that I’ve got is actually the course that I’ve been following this whole topic of this YouTube channel Project 24. It’s something that I invested in over a year ago.
I paid for this subscription for the second year, and it just is something that keeps giving actually this morning I woke. To another course being launched. It’s a revamped version of the YouTube course, that Project 24 did because they found out newer information. They found a slightly better way of approaching it.
And instead of keeping that information to themselves, they decided to invest and actually make another course. So I was actually watching that before filming this video. So this is a great tool again, great investment. I don’t regret it at all. If you want to push. Blogging or YouTube journey to the next level.
I really would recommend investing in this course. And you can find information about that below in the description. So as you can see, there’s lots of little tools and websites and extensions and things that are used. A lot of them are free, so you don’t have to pay for a lot of things, but. At every single turn, if you can find a tool or a way that will save you time, even if it means investing money, I found that it’s so useful because the one thing that you can’t get back is your time.
And the one thing that will make you money is the time you can put into making better content. So if you’ve enjoyed this video, don’t forget. Give me a and if you’ve watched this far and you’re not a subscriber I’ll leave that one up to you. I’ll see you in the next video very soon.