Today’s blog post has a companion YouTube video where I show you an updated tour of the office space where I film my videos! Check it out here!
Let me start this by saying that I’m not against paying for quality products and resources. Many great pieces are available by amazingly talented artists, and supporting them with your purchase is a good thing to do. Let me just tell you where I’m coming from.
YouTube and Blogging are not my full-time job. I have one of those, and a family with a toddler, but I do this in the early morning and late-night because I love it, and because I believe it could grow to something self-sustaining someday.
But I’m small time, I only just got my 1,000 subscribers on YouTube and monetized my channel. The ads that you see before each one now are slowly accruing on my account. I hope to get a check in January, and every cent that comes in after that will go back into what I’m doing here. Until then, I couldn’t risk spending our family’s money on a blog!
There are plenty of free resources available for amateur content. Your personal blog where you never intend to sell anything. But I’m taking this endeavor seriously, so I need to be future proof, and not compromise the history of my website over some pixels I’m not licensed to use. There are also a lot of great royalty-free resources out there, which means you can make money using them, and not owe the creator anything. I definitely intend to kick a donation towards these creators once I have the income for it, but in the meantime, I’m not out of pocket, but I’m building a nice-looking brand by myself.
The only money I have spent on my blog is the $99 I paid for 3 years of hosting. Here’s everything else:
For Creating YouTube Videos
Music
If you watch YouTube videos ever I guarantee you’ve heard Kevin MacLeod’s work. It’s so ubiquitous that you’ve probably even heard the same piece of music being used my multiple channels. That’s just the risk you take. But this stuff is legit, and completely free to use for anything. At incompetech.com
Editing
There’s always Windows Movie Maker, but if you’re looking for, uh, features, you’ll have to download software to edit your videos. HitFilm Express is the only 100% free video editing software with all the features you need. It does have a steep learning curve, and lots of features that you won’t need unless your project is an actual film, but it does have those features, and lots of them are free. There is also a pro version, as well as a la carte features for purchase, but I’ve never needed any of those.
Image Editing
I’m not paying Adobe prices to make video thumbnails. Fortunately there’s an opensource freeware option: GIMP! This program has pretty much exactly the same features as PhotoShop, just in a different spot on your screen. This might be an adjustment if you’re used to PhotoShop, or if, like me, you have no idea what you’re doing, but it’s free and it’s great, so why pay for the alternative?
For Creating a Blog or Website
Site Builder
I build my site on WordPress. It’s not the most user-friendly experience, but it gets the job done. Maybe someday I’ll get a SquareSpace site when they start sponsoring my videos, but until then, the WordPress site builder is free with my Bluehost domain, and it’s working.
Theme
The site theme I’m using is called Bizberg and it has all the features I needed. You can use any theme that you like the look of.
Do remember to trim the fat of plugins you’re not using, as this bloat was making my site lag a LOT.
Assets
I made my logo in Gimp with images from rawpixel and a royalty-free font from 1001fonts.com called raustila.
Many of my blog’s featured images come from Pexels, which is a royalty-free stock photo collection, and a great find.
Images and fonts are where you have to be very careful to limit your search to “royalty-free” or “free for commercial use” only. As I mentioned before, there are all kinds of resources for free for your personal projects. Use them for your wedding invitations or party favors, but when you’re building something that might make you money, be careful to remember what you owe everyone.
For My Instagram Workflow
I’ve been batching my Instagram photos lately. I take my photos for the week and upload them all at once.
First, I use the Google Photos app on my phone to edit them. There’s a button to crop your image square, and then I use the same filter on every photo to give them a “look” and then play with the sliders until I like it. I’m not a professional photographer or a photography connaisseur, so it works for me.
Then I upload the photos to an app called Later, and use their website, Later.com to schedule them all for automatic upload. The free version of this service allows 30 scheduled posts per month, so someday I will need to upload one or two manually to stay under that limit, but mostly it works for my once-daily posting schedule, and allows me to have a presence on Instagram even when I’m not feeling motivated to open the app.
And that’s everything! I hope this list of free resources was useful and offered you some inspiration to go out and start your own Social Media “brand”. The ability to do so many of these things for free with a little learning curve makes it accessible to anyone!
Next, don’t forget to check out my companion studio tour on YouTube to see where I put all this together!
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this brilliant blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to fresh updates and will talk about this site with my Facebook group. Talk soon!|
That’s very sweet of you. If you are interested, I do have a Patreon page.