There are lots of people who make a considerable income from video content – mostly on YouTube – they’re known as vloggers (short for video web loggers).
YouTube is a powerful platform – it’s not only the second largest search engine that people use (after Google), but when people search on YouTube, they stay on YouTube – they don’t immediately go off to another website. That means that, if your channel is set up properly, you’ve got an already engaged audience, ready for the next video you’ve got to offer.
The challenge for most people is that they don’t have a fully functional video-recording suite installed – and having professionally produced videos can run up a substantial bill.
The good news is that there are some handy ways to give even an amateur video a little polish.
- Today’s mobile phones have high quality cameras, if you choose to talk to a camera, it’s going to be good enough.
- Go for a plain background. Anything cluttered will take people’s attention off you. If you have the facility for a decent greenscreen then go for it, but a plain wall is absolutely fine.
- Record in landscape – not portrait.
- Invest in a holder for your mobile phone. I use a small tripod so I don’t have to worry about holding the phone.
- Place your phone at eye level – never look down into the camera, it looks as though you’re looking down on your viewer, which sends the wrong subliminal messages (and gives them a view of your double chin and nostrils!)
- If you don’t want to appear on camera there are plenty of ways to create videos without having to do that.
- Create a PowerPoint of your presentation and then record it with you doing the voiceover. You can subscribe to a service such as ShowMore or, if you have Zoom or a similar online meeting service, you can open a meeting and record it as a screenshare and download the recording.
- You can subscribe to a service such as Doodly, to create animated content. This creates an attractive and professional video – BUT, if all your videos use this, people can get bored, they all start to look the same after you’ve seen a couple!
- The software we use most in-house is Vidnami (formerly Content Samurai). This lets you create a script, then automatically adds scenes (images and film clips) to this script – all of which is editable. You can add a voice over – either automated or your own voice – or choose just background music from their royalty-free library. You can upload video clips and your own images too.
- Set your channel up professionally.
- Pick your core key phrase or words and name your channel with that – use SEO tools such as AnswerthePublic and UberSuggest to help you to refine this.
- Create thumbnails for your videos so the opening screen looks good. You can do this with a free graphics programme such as Canva. This is a great tool for creating your banner for the Channel too.
- Create playlists to link your videos together around each subject.
- Learn how to optimise your videos so they come up at the top end of searches for your key phrase.
This should be enough to get you started as a vlogger for your business.
