How to make a GREAT Tutorial

i think we're living in the golden age of learning right now just 12 years ago if you wanted to learn a new skill like juggling your choices were to either find someone who could teach you or go to the library and hope to find a book that could but nowadays it's just a search away in seconds you find thousands of videos showing you step by step what to do and this is across every industry and skill from gardening to cooking and hey even 3d software how about that and because videos are visual and in real

time they are super effective which is why less and less people are actually using google to learn their skills and are instead just going straight to youtube i recently spoke with someone from youtube who said that educational content now accounts for half a billion views per day and youtube loves to promote it because tutorials are often long format which means more eyeballs per minute which means more ad dollars which means more and more people want to make tutorials and this is fantastic honestly the more free learning the more opportunities there are for those that need

them however i think that a lot of tutorials could be better they're not bad they could just be improved and i say this as someone who has made a lot of bad tutorials from long-winded intros to not explaining what i'm doing poor audio poor topics you name it but i've also been keeping track of what works and what doesn't over the last eight years i've discovered what makes a popular tutorial what keeps people engaged and what builds a loyal following so in the spirit of free information i want to reveal everything that i know to

increase the quality of tutorials online and hopefully encourage a few more people out there to start making them because a lot of people don't realize this but making tutorials is actually one of the best ways to get known in your industry i get so many job offers and freelancing work in my inbox that i've created a canned response to reply to them not only that but it creates real passive income money that you could use to buy new computer hardware games or even just pay the rent with my point is if you can make good

tutorials even slightly better than the average you open yourself up to a lot of good opportunities so it took me a long time to figure this out but i believe the formula for a good tutorial is this topic times result plus practice plus clarity plus delivery so first let's start with the topic the topic is the subject of the tutorial now this will sound obvious but you need to make sure that what you're teaching is actually something that people want to learn you'd be surprised how many tutorials are at the bottom of youtube's search engine

simply because they weren't interesting to anyone but the creator which is a shame because it takes the same amount of effort to make a tutorial on a good topic as it does to make one on a bad topic the trick to finding a good topic is to go to where the people in your community hang out and see what they're creating or what problems they face so since i make tutorials about 3d art i go to art station here i can see that the most popular artworks tend to be either characters or environments and they

fit into the genres of fantasy or sci-fi so therefore i know that if i was to make a tutorial on say a spaceship corridor then it's likely to be popular whereas if i pick my own topic like the one i did on a cracked ball i can guess that it probably won't be popular this topic research takes about five minutes to do but it can be the most useful five minutes you spend next up is the result the result is the finished image that shows people what they will achieve by following your tutorial now since

it's both the thumbnail of the video and usually the first thing that viewers will see when they play the video it's crucial that it looks good because yes a character is a great topic for a tutorial but if it looks like this it won't be this is the reason that video copilot does so well all their tutorials look like they're from the latest blockbuster so without even reading the title you already want to learn it so since the result has a multiplying effect on all your other efforts i typically spend one to three weeks just

trying to make the finished image look as best as it can and yes i really do think it's worth that amount of time because if it doesn't look any good then you might as well just stop because no one is going to watch the tutorial anyway next up is practice of all the steps this is the easiest to do because it's just remaking your finished result over and over again people are usually surprised when i tell them this but i usually practice a tutorial a minimum of five times before i actually hit record but there's

a reason for it you see the first time you make something you're just experimenting and you're problem solving and you're trying to figure it out so it's actually full of mistakes that you don't even realize are there yet so the second time you make it you have to analyze the first one which is when you notice all these problems and you fix them by the third time you start noticing steps that could be simplified or just removed entirely then by the fourth time you're perfecting the process and committing each step to memory then by the

fifth or sixth time you're rehearsing how you'll explain it in the tutorial so that when it comes time to hit record you'll know what to say so that's practice while it doesn't sound that important it is crucial to the next step clarity remember this phrase any fool can make something complicated it takes a genius to make it simple clarity is about putting yourself into the shoes of someone who doesn't know what you do it's what separates the good teachers from the bad ones a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that teaching is telling

like if i tell you that five plus five equals ten that i've taught you but obviously memorizing an answer is totally different to learning it because when you come to five plus six you won't know what to do it's like the old saying of giving a man a fish feeding him for a day versus teaching him to fish and feeding him for a lifetime if you want to make a great tutorial you need to explain the thought process behind each action so that the viewer can learn it and know when to use it in the

future so for example instead of just telling people to add a bevel modifier explain that the edges look too sharp which is unnatural to the real world so therefore if you add a bevel modifier it makes it smoother and more realistic this way the viewer has learned it and can then use this in the future when they need it if you want to take your clarity to the next level i recommend reading the book presenting to win as it goes into more depth than i have time to discuss now it's not required but i definitely

recommend it if you want to make tutorials for a living the final component of a great tutorial is the delivery which is the way that you talk a lot of people find talking into a microphone nerve-racking so i'll spend a little longer on this point for great delivery just remember this acronym bomb be yourself go off topic make mistakes so be yourself unless you normally talk in a super energized shouting voice don't do it in your tutorials the reason that many successful youtubers talk like that is because that the value that they're creating is entertainment

so they need to be outrageous or funny because that's the whole point of their video but your value in a tutorial is comprehension you want viewers to understand what you're teaching them and to do that they need to feel comfortable taking your advice and being able to understand you which is why talking the way you normally do is so important so trust me be yourself and it'll be a lot better which leads me to going off topic from a beginner's perspective learning something new is actually really stressful you keep making all these mistakes you feel

like you're not getting anywhere and you've got loads of questions that you can't ask anyone so when you're watching a video where the instructor is all business and super serious and all about the topic it's actually kind of suffocating but when the teacher's more relaxed and tells you an embarrassing mistake they made while they were learning it's like a release valve it lets the viewers relax too and gives them permission to have fun and in doing so learn more efficiently now you can obviously go too far in the opposite direction like rambling for five minutes

about your plans for the weekend like what i used to do but if you do it sporadically keeping it under 10 seconds each time it can actually be a very welcome addition especially for longer format tutorials next up make mistakes if you want to know how to make an unnatural nervous sounding tutorial just give yourself no leeway to make mistakes look chances are what you're teaching has a lot of steps and usually they should be done in a sequential order and so it's ridiculous to think that a teacher won't make mistakes just accept that when

you hit record you won't remember everything and sometimes you'll click the wrong thing sometimes you'll forget what the next step is and when it happens just acknowledge it fix it and move on you could even argue that mistakes make a tutorial better because it teaches the viewers how to recover from problems when they encounter it and it can give them confidence to know that even the pros make mistakes and that's okay sometimes i do it deliberately just for this reason now if it's a big mistake that will backtrack the tutorial by a significant amount then

sure you should go back and re-record that but if it's small roll with it so that's bomb be yourself go off topic make mistakes but now i want to give you another helpful acronym for delivery fyi f your intro i learned this one way too late but viewers do not care for the two to five minutes of preamble that starts most tutorials you don't need a logo animation why because we already know who made the video because it's literally right underneath it you also usually don't need to explain what the video is about either because

again it's the title of the video so it's right there here's an example of a bad intro g'day everyone this is andrew pricey from blenderguru.com and welcome to another blender guru tutorial uh it's been about a month probably since the uh since the last tutorial i posted i've been fairly busy i'd i'd say as an excuse i've been at the blender conference see now why would anyone care about any of that it's it's pure narcissism honestly pure and simple if i bothered to look at my audience retention graph back then i would have seen that

sixty percent of the viewers bailed before we actually began the tutorial so throw out any preconceived notions of how you think a video should start because even a lot of pros get this wrong the format that works best in my opinion comes from that book presenting to win which is the opening gambit the opening gambit is something short to grab the audience's attention so this could be an interesting quote a statistic a question a joke or a metaphor that relates to your topic i usually try to keep this in under 10 seconds and i say

it while the finished result of the tutorial is shown on the screen so here's an example elon musk wants to put a man on mars by 2025 but i think we can do it in a little under two hours and that's it you just start the tutorial right after that you don't need to mess around here we've all got stuff to do the viewers want the meat so just give them the meat the final piece of advice i'll leave you with is invest in a decent mic look viewers will forgive crappy video but they won't

forgive crappy audio so that little hole on the side of your macbook unfortunately won't cut it here's three alternative mics which i recommend a budget option is the snowball mic a better option is the rode nt-usb mic and the expensive option which is what myself and other creators like joe rogan use is the shure sm7b mic but you don't need to go that far just get one of the first two and you'll be fine and if you really want to improve the quality of your audio i recommend taking your finished recording into a sound editor

like audacity and then applying a noise removal remastering compression and normalization i've put a link to a tutorial on this in the description it can mean the difference between audio that sounds like this or audio that sounds like this one of the reasons i made this video is because i actually want to find other tutorial creators in the 3d space our sister company polygon is growing and so we're looking to hire people who can make great tutorials for software like 3ds max maya cinema 4d and any of the available renderers the software that you know

actually doesn't matter as much as your ability to make a good tutorial or your willingness to learn new software so i want to find a few 3d artists who sound natural so if you're interested just fill out the form in the description so we can take a look at some of your tutorials and hopefully we can work together and finally if you just want to help other tutorial creators find this video please give it a like and that's it from me thank you for watching bye you