I’m a big believer and having at least basic skills in all of the areas I cover in the tools section of this site. That said, you don’t want to get stuck working in the business when you should be working on the business. You’re going to want to take advantage of off-the-shelf resources and outsourcing to make that happen.
As far as outsourcing goes, some key resources include:
- Fiverr (for finding freelancers in a wide range of areas)
- 99Designs (for logo, landing page, and general graphical design needs)
- Upwork (for outsourcing pretty much anything)
- CrowdSpring (for logo and Web/graphic design)
- Scripted (for finding writers for your blog)
- Rev (for transcription, captioning, and translation)
See also:
Places to find audio and visual resources that you can use in your products include:
- iStockPhoto: Photos, images, and video clips with licenses starting at few dollars per image.
- 123RF: A good alternative to iStockPhoto, now that the formers prices have gotten much higher
- Flickr Creative Commons: Photos and images made available by users of the popular Flickr photo sharing service.
- Stock.XCHNG: Stock.XCHNG is a free stock photography site (though it was recently acquired by Getty Images, so we’ll see how long it remains free).
- WikiMedia Commons: A database of more than 15 million freely usable media files.
- Music Bakery: A wide range of royalty free music that can be licensed.
- Audio Jungle: Another great place to license royalty free music and other audio starting from $1 per track.
- FreeSound: A site with a large collection of sound effects that you can use in your learning content.
- Voice 123: A great place to get professional voiceover for your courses, podcast intros, etc.
- eLearning Coach – A great list of stock music and sound effects
For audio, you might also want to have a look at SoundBytes as a way to manage clips that you use in your podcasts and other audio.
If you have questions, or want to share your own experiences with any of these tools, please comment below.