Most people massively overcomplicate recording their course. The truth: you need a microphone, a slide deck, and one piece of software — not a studio or a film crew.
I built an eight-figure business recording my voice over PowerPoint slides. So here’s exactly how I do it, from the deck to a finished, edited lesson, using Riverside.
Your slides are the real work — and they’re your script
Here’s something most people get backwards. They obsess over the recording and rush the slides. It should be the opposite.
Building your slide deck is about 80% of the effort that goes into a course. For a hundred-slide course, expect to spend around 40 hours on the deck alone. That’s not a problem — that’s the point. Because once the slides are built, the recording is the easy part. Your deck is your script. When the slides are right, you’re not performing or memorizing anything — you’re just talking through your own outline, and it comes out naturally.
So build the deck first, and keep each slide simple. One idea per slide. Big, readable text — not dense paragraphs. Don’t get stuck perfecting an outline for two weeks; write a basic list of the topics you want to cover, then start building slides. The slides are where the real thinking happens.
And assume your student knows nothing. Hold their hand. Whatever you teach, treat it like it’s day one of the subject — that’s what makes a course feel comprehensive instead of rushed.
How to actually present (this is the part people get wrong)
Once you hit record, there’s one rule that matters more than any setting or piece of gear: don’t just read your slides.
Think back to the worst lectures you sat through in school — the professor reading the slides word for word while everyone’s eyes glazed over. Your students can read the slides themselves. Your job is to add the stuff that isn’t on the slide: the story, the example, the “here’s what actually happens in the real world” aside, the warning about the mistake you made so they don’t make it too. The slide is the skeleton. Your voice is everything that makes it worth listening to.
A few things that help:
- Talk to one person. Not “an audience.” Imagine you’re explaining this to a single colleague across the table. It instantly makes your delivery warmer and more natural.
- Keep your audio authentic and relatable. It doesn’t need to be polished or scripted. A little personality beats a perfect read every time.
- Record in short segments, not one giant take. Do a chunk of slides, stop, do the next chunk. It’s far less stressful — if you fumble, you re-do a small piece, not the whole hour. And it makes editing dramatically easier later.
- Label each recording with its slide numbers. “Slides 35–55,” and so on. This one habit saves you (or your editor) hours when it’s time to piece everything together.
Now — recording it in Riverside
Riverside is what I use. It’s a clean, cloud-based tool that records your slides and your voice in high quality, and it captures them as separate, perfectly synced tracks — which makes editing simple.
Here’s the flow:
- Open a studio. Log into Riverside and create a new studio. That’s just your recording room. Recording solo? You’re the only one in it.
- Do a quick check. Riverside shows you a preview before you record. Clean light on your face, and a microphone that isn’t picking up the fan or the dog. Audio quality matters far more than video — get the mic right.
- Load your slides. Click Share at the bottom, then Presentation, then upload your file (PowerPoint, Keynote, or PDF). Riverside drops your deck right into the studio. One thing to know: this uploads the slides themselves, not a live screen — so animations, embedded videos, and your presenter notes won’t carry over. If a slide leans on an animation to make sense, flatten it first.
- A note on plans. The built-in presentation upload sits on Riverside’s higher plans, and they’ve been shuffling plan names lately, so check current pricing before you upgrade for it. On a basic plan? No problem: just click Share, then Screen, pick your PowerPoint window, and present that way. It works on every plan, free included.
- Present and record. Start the presentation so your slides go full-screen, hit record, and advance with the arrow keys as you talk. A note on the camera: you don’t have to be on screen the whole time. Honestly, a face talking in the corner for an entire course can be more distracting than helpful — your students are looking at the slides and taking notes. I’ve recorded every one of my courses as slides and audio only. If you want your face to pop in here and there, Riverside makes that easy, but don’t feel obligated to be on camera start to finish.
- Watch your internet. Riverside records to the cloud, so a dropped connection can cost you a take. I learned this the hard way — I once lost a 60-minute recording because my internet went down 40 minutes in and I didn’t notice. Test your connection first, and don’t walk away mid-record without confirming it’s still going.
- Stop and download. When you’re done, your studio’s recordings page has your slides and audio (and video, if you used it) as synced files. Download them, ready for editing.
One more thing: don’t record straight into PowerPoint. PowerPoint will let you record slide by slide right inside the file — but it buries the audio so it’s a pain to extract and edit. Record in Riverside instead and keep your audio clean and separate.
Editing: do it yourself, or hand it off
Now you’ve got your slides and your audio. The last step is splicing them into a finished video lesson. You’ve got two paths.
Do it yourself — if you’re tech-savvy and you genuinely enjoy it. There are plenty of tools (Riverside has a built-in editor; for audio, options like Audacity are free and Adobe Audition or Reaper are more advanced). If editing is fun for you, go for it.
But here’s my honest take: I outsource it, and I’d suggest you do too. Editing isn’t income-generating work — it’s busy work. Your time is worth far more spent creating content and building your business than learning editing software and dragging clips around for hours. I personally found it tedious and not worth the hours.
Hiring an editor is cheap and easy. Head to a site like Upwork and find an audio/video editor. Hand them your labeled recordings and your slide deck (a shared Google Drive folder works great), and they’ll splice the audio to the slides and give you back clean, finished videos ready to upload to your course platform. A couple of tips that keep the quality consistent: record all your audio in the same room with the same mic, and when you export from any audio tool, export the file (e.g., to MP3) — don’t just save the raw project file, or your editor won’t be able to open it.
Then you upload the finished videos to Kajabi, Teachable, or whatever you’re using — and that module is done.
Stop overthinking the camera
That’s the whole process. Build the deck, present it like a human, record it in Riverside, hand off the editing, upload. None of it requires a studio or a film crew — it requires you actually hitting record.
Done beats perfect every single time. You can always re-record a lesson later once you see what your students respond to. But you can’t improve a course you never made.