The truth is, making great videos and becoming confident doing it takes practice. But it all starts with having a goal in mind, knowing your audience, and then developing a plan to succeed. You need a plan of how to prepare for doing a video, and a plan to deal with nerves and shyness during the video.
Know Your Goal
When you make a video, it’s imperative that you understand why you’re making it. This is true whether you are shy or not. What is the goal of making it for your audience and for you? It’s really like having two goals. The goal you have for your audience is the most important, but the goal you have for yourself and your business is a close second.
For example, you may have a goal to build your email list. A good way to do that is to offer a short video-based email course introduced by one video or two, then requiring an email address to see more. Another goal might be to solve one problem for your audience so that they want you to help them solve a bigger problem.
Know Your Audience
Before you even start making videos or offering services or products, you need to first know who your audience is. What are their problems? What keeps them up at night? What excites them? What are their life goals, values, and fears? How does what you do address their issues and solve their problems?
For example, let’s say that you’re a start-up business coach. You help stay-at-home moms find a way to earn money from home by providing services to others using the internet and their computers to do it. There are plenty of problems to address such as starting up without a lot of money, gaining confidence, or changing from an employee mindset to a business owner mindset.
Develop Talking Points
Once you have worked out the problem and a solution for your target audience and you know what the goal is for your video, it’s time to develop talking points for the video. You don’t want to write a script. If you do, you’re going to sound robotic as you deliver it. Instead, write down the basic points you want to talk about. Then simply talk about them as if you’re telling one person.
For example, if you want to talk to your audience about developing a healthy money mindset, you might write down three points you want to cover in the video, and a few words to remind yourself of the information that you’re going to cover in each point. You can turn this into a PowerPoint presentation that you voice over, either with your picture in it or not. It’s easy to do with Microsoft Office 365 and PowerPoint. You don’t even need other software now.
Keep It Short and to the Point
Shorter videos are better. It’s best to make a series of short videos rather than super-long ones. 60 seconds to no more than ten minutes is long enough. Even ten minutes is stretching it unless it’s inside a course. If you realize you don’t need to make the video super-long, it will help you stay focused and not feel as if you must give away the farm in each video.
Instead of ten points (like you might make while writing an article or blog post), think more like three points or three ways or reasons to do something so that you can narrow it down and keep it short. If you make your point, the shorter the video the better.
Drop Perfection
You’ve heard it before and you know it’s true. No one is perfect. Not that vlogger you watch on YouTube or that model you follow on Instagram. It’s okay not to appear perfect. In fact, often the people who try to project perfection are the ones who end up being torn down more than the people who aren’t afraid to be real and show their imperfections.
For example, if you trip over a word or two, don’t feel as if you need to redo the recording. You don’t. It’s perfectly fine and normal. Go watch a few speeches via Ted Talks and you will start realizing that the best speakers are the most natural and they do make mistakes, say words wrong, skip a word, must repeat themselves, and aren’t perfect. The beauty is, they move on and no one cares. And in fact, people trust them more because they know they’re real.
Be You, No One Else Can
It doesn’t matter who you are; you are uniquely you. Only you can be you. No one else can be the same person you are. Why would you want to be someone else and not you anyway? It doesn’t matter how you look, sound, or anything like that, if people can see you and hear you and get your meaning. That’s all that matters.
Someone out there will only be able to truly "get it" whatever "it" is that you do from you. They may have heard the same thing in different ways a thousand times, but they didn’t get it. It didn’t click. Not until they heard it directly from you in your special way, anyway. That’s why it’s so important to be you. Your people are out there waiting for you.
Dress the Way You Feel Comfortable
This is part of being who you are, but it needs to be said. You don’t have to project any type of persona that isn’t 100 percent you when you make a video. If you’re not a suit person, don’t wear a suit. If you’re a thrift shop and garage sale shopper, that’s fine - don’t pretend to be something else. Find clothing to wear that makes you feel confident and comfortable and don’t worry about how the others are doing it.
After all, it would be super-stressful to start making videos wearing clothing that you don’t like, can’t keep up with, and aren’t comfortable in. In fact, you wouldn't stick to making the videos because you wouldn’t want to do whatever it is you think you have to do. But if you just stick to your own style, it’ll be second nature and not take as long to get ready for recording.
Get Relaxed
Before you record your video, it’s important to warm up by going through your talking points and doing a "take" without recording just to go through the motions. You can go ahead and record (who knows, it might be just how you like it the first time) but this way you can get comfortable with the controls of your camera, test the lighting, the sound, and get used to delivering your message without any pressure.
Some people like to get a massage on recording days or do some yoga and breath work to help with relaxation. Yet others find it comfortable to take a hot shower and take their time getting ready for the recording as if it’s an event or TV show. It’s up to you. Whatever makes you relaxed and feel natural will work.
Get Your Voice Ready
A few minutes before you start your recording, drink some warm tea or warm water to help loosen up your throat. Warm water with lemon will work wonders. Say a nursery rhyme or a tongue twister a few times, blow out your lips and relax your face before you get started. This can help warm you up so that you make fewer mistakes.
You can even find warm-ups on YouTube if you do a search for vocal warm-ups for speakers. This can help tremendously with nerves too. But remember that it’s normal to feel nervous, even if you’re only making a recording and aren’t doing the video live yet. Try to think of the nerves as excitement rather than fear.
Prepare Your Environment
While your videos don’t need to be perfect, it is important to set up an environment that you’re proud of that looks good due to good lighting and sounds good due to good sound. You don’t have to spend a bunch of money on these things. A good earbud set works fine, and for lighting, you can face a window in your home to get good natural lighting.
If you do choose to buy lighting, do some research. If you wear glasses, for example, the Diva lights (the round circle lights) will shine off your glasses and make it hard for people to see you. If you’re just recording voice for an MS PowerPoint deck, then you don’t need to worry about lighting at all. And if you’re doing a live event, consider plugging in directly to the internet rather than using wireless to avoid glitches.
Practice
The best thing you can do for yourself is to create more videos so that you can practice. You can still publish the practices if you want to because you don’t want to get into a perfection mindset. Find excuses to make more videos, go live on Facebook more often, and participate with others at their events to help you overcome your nerves.
Like most things, the more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll become. Shyness doesn’t mean you can’t do these things. It just means that it might take you longer to feel comfortable. Or you may always feel super-nervous doing it, but you’re going to feel amazing for doing it anyway. Your audience will also be happy you’re doing it.
Becoming a confident video marketer just comes down to doing it, and then to keep doing it. Even if your first efforts don’t get much response (and they likely won’t), that’s okay because you’re going to get better as you keep going. And as you keep going, you’re going to grow your audience at the same time. But, you must get started if you want to experience this success.
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