If you are starting to create content or have been a seasoned content creator, join me on this LiveTime and we will go through hacks and everything I use to create content.

In this edition of LiveTime with Alec

• Get the tools I use to create content
• I’ve increased my arsenal of tool since the last time I spoke of this
• Learn to have fun with it and geek out.
• It’s really easy, hit play on the video above!

Episode Transcribe

– What’s up everybody!!!! Welcome to another LiveTime with Alec, with the music. Woo! Okay this is going to be a really fun conversation day. We’re in 1080p. StreamYard’s upped the game. Really excited about that. And look at this thing. Look at that, text community. Ladies and gentlemen, starting a text community. Look, my whole goal with LiveTime, with my podcast, with everything else that I’m doing in the mortgage space is to try to further the narrative of what our local sales professionals need to be doing to stay relevant. To stay in the game. To earn influence with customers. Because the big dogs are here And they’re rolling through the industry. And they’re going to be a huge problem for the local pro that doesn’t realize there’s a whole new place to play. So if that adds value to your life, join the text community. Text that number, and we’re going to hang out together. It’s gonna be a blast. All right, One of the coolest things about a hundred videos in a hundred days. And playing in this space with podcasting and doing everything else is you learn tons of tricks. Tons of tricks. In fact, as you learn those tricks, if you’re like me and you geek out, you start to get like an arsenal. An arsenal of tools that you can use to kind of further your message, right? ‘Cause the whole point is not to show up flashy and crazy. Oh, I lost my, I’m blurred out. Hold on, see, look at this. Lights go off, lights come back on. Green screen does stuff and the cameras should focus on my face. All right, one of the coolest parts about being in this space digitally is you learn all of these tips and tricks to figure out how to better your message, right? That’s the point. By the way, if you’re joining me right now, we are alive on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. Say hi, drop a comment in. I wanna hang out with you. Let me know where you’re watching from. What’s up Blake? This is going to be really fun. So you learn, I learned tons of tips and tricks in order to help further the message that I wanted to send, right? Because we’re in a game of influence, a game of fighting for attention. And I’m gonna just share with you all of this crap I use. ‘Cause it’s awesome and they’re really fun and really easy. Ready for the hacks? Let’s dive in. First, the first hack. This one’s unbelievable, free, amazing, remove background. Remove bg. Now it’s called removed.bg to go to that website. You’re going to freak out when I show you this right now. So look I’m gonna share my screen and we’re going to talk about it right now. Chrome tab, remove background, bang! There it is, it’s right there, right there. Hi Sheila, nice to see you. Look, Photoshopping, removing backgrounds, used to be impossible. But now it’s not, check this out. I’ve got a picture of me that I’m gonna drag and drop. I’m on my desktop. Drag and drop it right here, watch this, boop. There’s a picture of Deadpool Alec. And boom, done, background’s removed. That’s it. You’re welcome. Like how incredible is that? And you can now take any photo you want and remove the background really simply. Hi John, you’re welcome, man. This is the fun stuff, right? It’s really simple you remove the background. And then download it. You can even edit it if it messed up something. And you can erase more of it. Like I want to erase my arm, you get me right? Like, oh, that was too much, undo. Download it, it’s that simple. This is incredibly cool because now you can take any picture of yourself and then instantly remove the background. And then, now you have a picture you can use for tons and tons and tons of marketing. We’re gonna explain that later. But this is a no brainer, right? You feel me on this? Fantastic one. This is even cooler, Unscreen. Now this is a sister company. And I’m gonna share that screen as well. And I’ll check this out. Unscreen is my new favorite thing. Nope, that’s this one, bang! There it is. Okay, so check this out. I’ve got a clip. I’m gonna show you right now. And then I’m going to upload it. And it’s actually gonna take the background out of a video. Now, this is unbelievably powerful for a couple of fun things. Yeah. What’s up Leslie. This is really really cool for a couple of things. Number one, you can gif yourself. That’s the coolest thing of all time, right? ‘Cause we know we all live in the gif world. Especially on Instagram stories, and text messages with friends. Now you can gif yourself by simply filming a a quick clip. Let me show you the one I wanna show ya. I’m gonna use the good old Ron Burgundy. So here’s my clip, chrome tab. There it is, check this out.- Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? I’ve just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. I need all of you to stop what you’re doing and listen.- Cannonball!- So, you’ve all seen that clip a thousand times, right? So watch this, now I’m gonna take that clip. I’m gonna share it. I’m gonna drag and drop it into Unscreen. Take my clip, drag and drop, boom, preparing to upload. Look at this, it’s removing the background from that entire clip. Is that unbelievable? Now you can save this as a gif file. Which doesn’t have any audio. Or you can upgrade to a pro membership. And you can actually do entire scenes, entire videos, whatever you want. You can film an entire video, and then just remove the background, and put yourself on the beach very easily done. This is unbelievable, free tech. This is like, how to up your content production game to spread your message, right? So this one is super fun. Next one, let’s get rid of this. Unscreen’s amazing. So if you use remove background and Unscreen, now you can play in Canva. And look, my green screen like jacked up this logo. But there it is. Canva is unbelievably easy to use and free. And I recommend you sign up for the full version because it’s like, why wouldn’t you? But I’m gonna sign in and show you guys what. I do tons and tons and tons of my editing with Canva. And it’s very, very easy. So the first thing you do is you share the screen, tu tu tu. Now you have a full editing system right here. So I’m going to scroll out a little bit for ya. But I can create a design, I can create a YouTube thumbnail. This is one of my favorites. Because as you make YouTube videos, you want a nice thumbnail on it. You can pick any of these templates. Any of them. What’s up? Nice to hang out with you guys. You can pick any of these templates. Or you can just make your own. So I wanna train this one. I want to say like, how to train your puppy with Alec. Who cares, right? Have some fun. I go to my upload section. I’ve uploaded, check this out. I’ve uploaded tons of pictures of me without a background . I can drop it right here. And then I can send it to the back. You see how cool this is? Boom, download. This is the power of Canva. It’s unbelievably easy to use. You can make YouTube thumbnails. Look at these templates for everything you got here. Get off this. Stop that templates. Instagram story, Instagram post, Facebook post, Facebook cover, Twitter post. You guys, you get this? Dude, I hope this is making sense. ‘Cause Canva’s unbelievably easy and free to use. Do not make the mistake. Just use it immediately. It’s that great. But let’s go to this one now. Oh, there’s my Canva. Yeah, we got it Alec, We got it. Okay, so those of you who are like, “Okay, I’m ready, “I’ve got my screen. “I’ve taken myself out of the background’s been removed. “I’ve got some pictures, I’ve got some stuff, “but how do I edit? “How do I add music? “How do I do that kind of stuff?” And I’m gonna show you what I use. So I can’t use Photoshop because I’m a dumb dumb and it’s too complicated for me. So I just use Movavi, this thing. It’s a basic editor. You can file import. So I’m just gonna drag and drop Ron Burgundy in there. Now I got Ron Burgundy in there. You can go ahead and add your own music very simply, by dragging and dropping any music you want on top of it. Let me show you what I mean. Let’s open up my jams folder. And I will do this music, drag and drop. And now I can pull the music over here. And now watch, I’m just gonna hit play and test it out.- Ladies and gentlemen- So, all of a sudden now, that’s too loud. I’m like, Oh, it’s too loud, I don’t like it. I’m going to pull the music down. So go over here grab the bar, slide the entire track down to 37%. Now I’m gonna test it out. Too loud, and you can play with this whole thing. You can add more clips. I can add another clip of Ron Burgundy in. You can switch the positions of ’em. You can add transitions, you can add text overlays. All of this is super, super easy. Please play, please play, Movavi basic. Yeah, green screens. You know, I was doing this shot without a green screen. And then I realized you can’t see the logos I was trying to show everybody because it has my background that blurs into everything. So I’m like, oh, eff it, pull the green screen down. But yeah, I think green screens have a place. I used to be super anti green screen. I was like, don’t do green screens. You’re killing your stuff. Because people would do it and pretend they’re in some setting. And I’m like, “Don’t do that.” I’m more okay with green screens now. Oh, we’re going to talk about this bro, Blake. We’re gonna get there bro. That’s why we’re doing this whole thing right now. So after Movavi for basic editing. This is a huge phone hack. If you are gonna film content on your phone, which I recommend. Right now I’m filming with a webcam and I got lights and a green screen. And I’ll show you all that stuff too. But if you’re gonna film on your phone and you’re outside, this is an incredible, incredible app. I use it all the time. Here’s the power of this app. It’s expensive, 150 bucks. But if you’re gonna make videos and you get it forever, do it. It only records while you talk, let’s start there. So if you’re uncomfortable speaking and doing videos, this is a great hack because you can set it up on a tripod. Put a light in your face. Read your sentence or say your sentence. Pause, take a breath, center, look out the window, say a prayer, meditate, and then speak again. And it will record that part. And do the same thing on repeat. It’s a great way to frame up your video. And then it automatically jump cuts out the dead space. It’s amazing. So all of a sudden your video will hit and be crisp and clear. You can even go back and edit and swipe up parts of the sentences that you didn’t like. And then it’ll pull them out. So you can just remove them, which is a huge hack. So you could say your sentence again, go back, slide up, flick it out. Again, It’s a great tool. The last part of it that makes it extremely fun is afterwards you can go hit the plus arrow inside the app. You can see this online. You can watch the demo. Type in a sentence and it will show you every single movie, cartoon or TV show where that sentence or word was spoken. And then you can drop in movie clips. Fricking fantastic! It’s so silly, if you go watch the last 30 to 40 of my hundred videos in a hundred days, it was all done on VlogEasy. And you can see I’ve got video clips in there. I’m dropping in all this and other stuff all the time. It makes your whole experience better. So if you’re gonna film on your phone, which I recommend, use VlogEasy, it’s incredibly fun. Now to answer Blake’s question. First, if you’re going to go live and multistream, which I recommend. ‘Cause it’s just how you get in front of people. Gerard’s like… Yeah, yeah bro, VlogEasy’s incredible. You’re gonna geek out, it’s unbelievable. Now let’s talk about going live. I think going live is a powerful way to bring your message to the community. But there’s different ways to do it, we’re going live with lots of bells and whistles right now, dude. So we’re gonna break them down. By the way you like the green screen like goes through the green . Don’t wear green in a green screen, right? But who cares? If you’re gonna go live, I recommend it. StreamYard, SteamYard’s a technology I use. It’s very easy to multistream with StreamYard. That was one of my big purposes, was I wanted to be on all of these platforms at once. And so we got StreamYard. It’s web-based, no downloads. It can leverage green screen. It’s super easy to invite guests. I’m gonna even share my screen right now. And show what this whole thing looks like. Boom, now forget the portal to death or the infinity portal there. In fact, I’ll make this bigger for you, you’re welcome. Okay, this is StreamYard. Look, I can see all your comments right here. It’s pretty amazing, I can actually share them like this. And again they show up at the bottom. I’ve got brands, banners, things I can do. Private chats for guests that are in here. I can change the brand. I can come down here and be like, “Oh, I wanna do a different overlay.” Bang! That ruined everything. Watch, so I can do this overlay. Woo, I love this stuff, I geek out on it. And if it’s fun for you, it can be fun for your audience. So this is StreamYard. This is the technology I use to go live. I have guests in here. I can see them at the bottom. I can now have up to eight guests in my livestream. Incredibly powerful, all down here. And it’s relatively inexpensive. And it also records to, I do all of these to YouTube, right? All of these stay live, stay on YouTube. Which means you can go to YouTube at any time and see all the content. See all these lives from the past. This is how epic this is. I think the only thing StreamYard sucks at, and I tell them this every day, is I don’t get really great analytics. Meaning at the end of the show or episode, I can’t see who watched and where and what channel. I don’t get the past, but that’s okay. I think this is still a great, easy, user-friendly livestreaming platform. No question about it, StreamYard is awesome. Now let’s go deeper. So now you’re going live, but you wanna do cool stuff. Simplecast, Simplecast can take all the audio from a LiveTime like this, a livestream or a Zoom call. And you can take the audio. You save it on your computer. And you can leverage Simplecast to now launch your podcast. I think that podcasts are another vehicle to spread your messaging. I do it, I think it’s important. And I coach people to do it. And I use Simplecast. You pay Simplecast to be your distribution hub. And then it shoots your podcast out to Spotify and Apple and everything else, really easy. You upload the audio right to the web and you publish. And it goes across all those platforms, ta da. How could you not be doing this? I joke all the time like, can you use Zoom? Now you have a podcast. You don’t need the mic. You can use the Yeti mic’s amazing. But all of a sudden, all you have to do is jump on a Zoom call, download the audio afterwards. And you have a podcast, publish that crap. Go to Fiverr, They’ll make a cool… By the way, you can even create the cover to your, like I’m just gonna show you ’cause I just have to. I have to just do it, okay? Because if I don’t do it. Let me see. Come on, come on, load up. You can even go to Canva. And create your killer modern landing you know, cover straight from Canva. And, so now you get your cool picture. You got your podcast thing and you’re ready to go. Man, this is basic guys. Simplecast, no brainer, easy, easy. Prezi, all right, so now how do you put graphics on the screen like this in a cool way? How do you make them slide around? How do you make them do the, oh! How do you make it do that? Prezi Prezi. It was and is a presentation platform. Pretty cool. right? But now you can actually use Prezi. I’m gonna share my screen again. So I’m gonna show you exactly how I’m doing this. And this is on YouTube now. So if you’re watching it live or watching it later, you’ll get my point Okay, let’s share my screen. Remove, share entire screen, share. Okay, there’s the screen. You see at the bottom where it says camera and mic? When I select that, it now allows me to select as a camera, Prezi. Right there, Prezi video, virtual camera. And I can’t see if you saw that or not. Could you see that? ‘Cause it took over my screen so I couldn’t tell. But did you see how you go to camera, mic and you select Prezi virtual camera, right there? Again, I can’t tell if you can see that or not. Hit me up with a comment if you can see that. But that’s the game right there. Now my Prezi app is open. Hold on, let me close this down. My Prezi app is open on my second monitor. And I’m just scrolling through the graphics that I’ve already uploaded, for this LiveTime. You can put any graphics you want in there. By the way, do you notice that there’s no background behind it? Guess how I did that? I removed the background and then put it up. Do you see how this is crazily connected, but now you get a chance to put something on the screen? Do you see how cool that is? Yes, Alonzo, thank you brother. I couldn’t tell if I was showing it or not. But now if you’re having a conversation or you’re doing a presentation or you’re engaging with a community, you can show stuff right here. You can slide through different things while you’re talking. This is it, dude. You can up your game gigantically. Now we’re gonna show you the last couple of pieces of the pie here. So I think I hit them all. You’ve got Canva, which is my potato right there . No, it’s snap cam, oh yeah. So snap cam can transform your filter on your face. And do a bunch of stuff. Turn you into a potato. I can’t show you snap cam right now because I’m using Prezi to push this out. But if you notice on my cam mic, I can select snap cam. And that allows me to mess with filters. It’s more for fun, goofiness. But again, let’s go through this. So, VlogEasy, If you’re filming on your phone. It jump cuts and only films when you’re talking. It’s amazing, and you can drop in video clips and make your message silly, fun, powerful. You’ve got Movavi for basic editing. I store everything on YouTube, It’s a no brainer. But you gotta have Canva to make cool YouTube bumpers, graphics. This graphic right here, that’s on the screen. This graphic was made by Canva. I went in here, I put Content Creation Hacks. I typed this all out, I picked the fonts. I dropped the logos in. I removed the backgrounds with remove background, so I could drop them in here on the screen. That’s a picture of me dropped in. This is it guys, It’s all done through these tools. They’re all in my favorites now. And again you learn these over time, if you like playing the game. But now, so the last piece of this stuff is the green screen, right? Check this out. I’m gonna get rid of this, boop. All right, bye green screen. Oh, it’s hung from the roof above me, right there. Look camera, oh, it can’t go up any higher. I just bought the one that you hang from the ceiling. And then I put it there, you’re done. And then you just select green screen in StreamYard. And I’m gonna turn it off now. ‘Cause it’s gonna mess up stuff, but that’s it. But look, that’s why I wanted to have the green screen. ‘Cause when I show some of this stuff, that one looks great, right? This one, kind of good. This one, you still, it’s going to get, Deadpool may mess it up. My point is, friends, this is the stuff you learn over time. And these are the hacks that are important. Now, if you’re watching this in the future or watching it now, I have something for you. I wanna send you some videos. All you have to do is type in #bypassed into the comments. Right there, I put it in the screen so you can see it. No, no, people are doing bypass. It’s my fault, I don’t enunciate enough. But if you type in #bypassed, I’m gonna send you eight videos. You’re gonna talk to my chat bot. I got nine videos to send you. If you’re on LinkedIn you can’t type in #bypassed. It’s a Facebook Messenger thing. You gotta find the link that I’m gonna drop in there. Click the link. And now you’ll be able to hit in hashtag bypassed. And talk to the messenger bot, it’s all on Facebook. But I’m gonna send you nine videos. I’m gonna send you these nine videos that’ll help you do the things I’m talking about. Learn how to play in this game because it’s easy. It’s easy, once you learn how it works, and it’s fun. I’m having more fun than ever before because now I get to goof around and showcase to you guys The stuff I wanna showcase when I want to show it. This is the power of technology to enhance your message. Again, stay authentic. Alonzo, it will not work in, my man, it will not work in LinkedIn. I’ll send you a link to it. Because it’s a messenger bot for Facebook. We get lots of my views from Facebook. But I appreciate you, dude. Yeah, this is the stuff, and it’s fun. Join my text community, I’m gonna give you more stuff. Again, my whole goal, my friends, is just to advance our industry forward. That’s it, I wanna push our sales people forward. I wanna push us into the digital space where the customer is. So that we have a chance to engage our customers the way they wanna be engaged in the place they are acting in. Where they want to show up. And this is where you need to show up. And it’s so easy with all this technology, it’s so fun. It’s all available to you. And I hope you found this conversation helpful. So I’m gonna wrap it down. But I want to give you some last pieces of advice. Don’t overdo it, man. Like just have some fun with it if it’s fun. But don’t think you have to overproduce your stuff in order for people to listen. That’s not true. That’s not true. Produce your stuff, make it fun. If it gives you life, If it’s fun for you. If you think this is crap and it’s inauthentic, then don’t make your voice match mine. Go be your own voice in the community. Michael, thank you, dude. We’ve gotta jump on another Zoom soon and just share some more collaboration, bro. That was fun that one time. You gotta, don’t overproduce your stuff. You’ll lose your authentic voice. But at the same time, if this makes you happy, like it does for me, then go all in and goof around. And have fun and turn yourself into a potato. And don’t take yourself so seriously. And you’ll watch the community respond. It’s my most important encouragement to you. But if you wanted to know how to do all the tips and tricks, now you know. Now you know and if you want to hit me up on Facebook with a #bypassed, I will send you nine video tutorials that I made just to give you guys some value. And if you wanna hang out with me and my text community. Boop! My whole goal guys is to give you value. To push the narrative forward. To drive our great salespeople into the future because I don’t want you to get bypassed. Have a wonderful day, my friend.