Hello, I’m Linda, and thank you for being here this week to join me. In the last podcast I did, I spoke about consistency and how important it is. And then I arrived this week on a podcast show I’ve committed to publishing every two weeks, and I’m just so thinking I’ve not got the time. I can’t make this deadline. Can’t I just skip till next week? And I know what the answer is. I’ve got to do it. Don’t I?
I know the secret to podcasting is batching. And I’m sure I’ll eventually get to that.
But for now, for me, each podcast is done in real lifetime around my real life life.
Complete with husband and four adult kids.
My husband is a serial entrepreneur with millions of big ideas exploding from his head and he really does push the bucket on getting them out there. So this weekend, we are hosting a party for a hundred and fifty to two hundred people on our work site. Thankfully, it’s a homecoming premier for a fan film that was filmed on the site where we’ve got this huge, big, old satellite antenna. It’s thirty meters wide and it was used as the Stormtrooper’s home base, which was under attack in the film. And even more thankfully and because of this, the film’s director really, really is doing all of the heavy lifting, so I’m so grateful to him for that. That means I don’t have to swing into full event management mode. But it means I’m really only just acknowledging and organizing all the bits that I do need to do. So in short, my friends, this might be on the short side, but here it is anyway.
I had decided I’d talk a little about tech this week because I’m forever sending people notes saying, look at this new platform or that new tool. I get excited when I see something new, figure out how to use it and then decide if it’s any good or not. At the moment, what I’m working on is launching Done-for-You brand style kits for business owner to take and apply and have a really polished look that fits with the business they want to create. In the course of this, I’ve been building brands, creating little instructional videos, and figuring out how to deliver them to clients. So I decided I’d talk today about three simple tools that are super useful in this regard.
The first is to help compress PDFs. Compressing PDF documents is really important for so many reasons. It makes them easy to download for your client or end user. It uses your platform space more efficiently for you, and it speeds everyone’s life up a lot. I answered a question about this in a forum where a lady was selling therapeutic coloring kits and her file sizes were just enormous. When I started out in design, Quark Express or Indesign would be used for any kind of document layout or design work. And these tools specialize in crunching down image size while keeping the image of decent quality.
Nowadays, platforms like Canva produce gorgeous documents, but the files size just isn’t as efficient. And if someone uses, for example, Word or Power Points to create a document, which I suspect this lady had, the file size can be super gigantic. She was trying to figure out how to break a document into a few PDFs so that she could upload it into the sales platform. I suggested to her that she use Ilovepdf.com and compress it and she did, and she was absolutely ecstatic as she’d been worried about the quality of her artwork. But IlovePDF delivered crunched down document while maintaining the quality of her artwork.
There are loads of platforms that do this, and indeed you can do it in your desktop in lots of applications. The speed, quality and price of all platforms varies quite a bit, and I love PDF is one of my favorites. It’s fast, it’s free, the quality is tops, and it is just so so easy to remember.
The second tool I want to mention is Handbrake. If you ever make video on your desktop, you want to use Handbrake. It crunches file size down to a fraction of its original size, while maintaining quality, and this is really, really important for handling and uploading files even to YouTube if you want to do anything else with your day. If you’re creating content for courses and uploading your files into your course platform, this is what they will recommend you use.
Where course platforms include video hosting in your plan, they want you to provide efficiently sized files so that it doesn’t cost them an unholy fortune storing your files and slow down their tech. And it’s worth remembering because instead of ‘cost them an unholy fortune’, I was going to say ‘doesn’t cost them the earth’, that everything you store online has a cost in electricity each time someone plays it. So reducing your file size down is literally doing duty for the planet also.
You can download handbrake at Handbrake.fr. This isn’t an online tool, but you download it to your computer and then you use it from there. There’s so many settings when you first look at it that it can be a little bit confusing. So in general, when you start just choose fast or very fast from the settings and go from there and watch to deliver it, shrunken videos back to you. I used a very fast setting yesterday and the quality was much better than I expected and usable for what I wanted it far and it reduced my file size down from 83MB to 16MB, which is an absolute game changer.
And finally, I want to give a big Canva shout out. You’re probably already familiar with Canva, but I want to give it a big shout out because it’s just making finishing off video editing and adding intros and outros that are created right there in Canva so so easy. It’s the ultimate in easy video editing, especially if you’re not technical. Just make sure to export it at high resolution. There’s a little slider there when you’re exporting that you can use to keep up the quality and then compress it right back down in Handbrake to shrink the size and keep the quality good.
So that my friends it. I hope you find these tips useful. You can find all of the links to these tools in the show notes and on my website under lindafitzpatrick.com/podcast.
I am off now to do my bit and organize a party for a 150 – 200 people! Thank you for tuning in.
LINKS:
SHOWNOTES – Visit lindafitzpatrick.com/podcast
FREEBIES – Visit freebies.lindafitzpatrick.com
EDITABLE BRAND STYLESHEET: https://freebies.lindafitzpatrick.com/stylesheet
MY FAVOURITE SYSTEMS – Visit lindafitzpatrick.com/systems
MENTIONS
Ilovepdf.com - Ilovepdf.com
Handbrake – https://handbrake.fr/
Canva* – Canva
*this is my canva affiliate link
