Make money with your tutorial videos - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Contents

- Web Design and Development month

- The latest tutorial videos

- Top rated packages with tutorial videos

- Paying the rent producing tutorial videos

- Users can make money with tutorials about other authors' packages



- Web Design and Development month

Before getting to the subject of this post, I would like to let you know that February is the month of Web Design and Development at O'Reilly.

http://www.oreilly.com/go/webdev

This means that as a member of the PHPClasses site users group, you are entitled to purchase O'Reilly books at a discounted rate during February. If you are interested to benefit from the discounts use the code DSUG when your make book purchases on their site.


- The latest tutorial videos

As you may be aware, since last month it is possible to present tutorial videos about the packages published in the PHPClasses site. In the last post, I also explained how you can produce good tutorial videos without much resources using screencasting programs.

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/62-A-video-is-worth-a-mi ...

Meanwhile, a new page was added to the site to let every user interested about the tutorial videos that are made available. You can find that page going to the Latest Entries page:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/latest/videos.html

You may also keep track of the latest videos using your favorite RSS feed reader. The latest tutorial videos feed is available in RSS 1.0 and 2.0 formats:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/latest/videos.xml

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/latest/videos.rss


- Top rated packages with tutorial videos

Good tutorial videos help the users to understand and become interested about the respective packages. But it is up to the users to decide how is each tutorial video.

So, from now on, there is a new parameter in the package ratings that lets the users express their satisfaction about the tutorial videos provided for each package.

The tutorial videos rating parameter has its own weight in the calculation of the overall ratings of each package. Packages that do not provide any tutorial videos loose the chance to achieve higher rating scores and get more exposure in the top rated package charts.


- Paying the rent producing tutorial videos

Producing good tutorials is not a trivial task. It takes some time and dedication to elaborate the tutorial materials and create useful screencasted presentations. Fortunately, there are now several alternatives to monetize the videos that you produce.

Recently, Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube commented in the World Economic Forum of Davos, that he intends to share advertising revenue with producers of videos published in YouTube.

But YouTube will not be the first to share revenue with producers. As you may read for instance in this TechCrunch article, there are already other video publishing sites that already do it for a while, like Revver and Metacafe.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/29/youtube-delivers-knock- ...

Now PHPClasses authors can submit tutorial videos hosted not only by Google Video, but also YouTube and Revver. Despite Revver is not as popular as YouTube, it has already a revenue sharing program in place. This is why Revver got my priority.

As time goes by I will also add support to present tutorial videos hosted in other services. For now, if you are interested, you may want to start taking a look at Revver revenue sharing program:

http://one.revver.com/site/share_help

How much it will make you, it may be too soon to tell. It depends on how much you can expose your videos.

The PHPClasses site is visited between 10,000 and 16,000 times a day. That means it can help maximizing your videos exposure, but I recommend that you also post your videos in as many sites as you can, like your blog or other people blogs.


- Users can make money with tutorials about other authors' packages

Video revenue sharing programs usually benefit the video producers. Anybody can produce a tutorial video about any class package. It does not have to be necessarily the author of the package to produce all the tutorial videos.

For instance, you can produce tutorial videos of your favorite class packages. You can also produce a translated version of existing videos, adding sub-titles, translating the audio to your mother language, or recreating a new version of an existing tutorial video translating the original slides and examples. That is OK as long as the original video license is respected.

It is recommended that you do that in cooperation with the authors of the packages. You can ask the authors to share the original slide presentation and examples, and also ask the author to add your video to the list of tutorial videos of the respective packages in the PHPClasses site.

There may be other ways to reward producers of good tutorial videos. Feel free to follow up and comment this post if you have more ideas you would like to share.