TJ Walker News and Insights for Creators

In the news, Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa front page New York Times story because of the announcement that her upcoming memoir is switching from one publisher to another publisher. Why is that of interest to creators and communicators around the world? Now, if you're not familiar with ina, she has 13, 14 very popular cookbooks. She's had her own channel, her own show on the Food Channel, and is beloved by people around the world for her cooking and her demeanor on camera. Why is this particularly relevant to creators these days? Because I think she was very much an early model of the new era, the new possibility. This was a woman who had an mba, lots of education, had serious high powered jobs in the Ford administration, the Jimmy Carter administration, and yet she transitioned to life of a creator. Now these days we, we see that a little more often, but still there's a mindset so many people have which is, well, I studied engineering, so I had to be an engineer my whole life. Or I studied medicine, I had to be a doctor my whole life. Well, no you don't. Now, it's never been easier, but Aina really paved the way of just saying to herself, I'm going to follow my passion. She quit high powered, high paid job and took over a little store that someone else had created, the Barefoot Contessa, and that grew and grew and grew into a modern empire. Now, does she have certain advantages that other people don't? A lot of connections, very influential husband, rich and powerful friends? Yes, all of that helps, but so do a lot of other people who never take a step in a new creative direction. She's been creating her entire life. I also think that she's fascinating in that it shows that what we think is really true about the modern world often isn't. We think, oh, this is the modern world of influencers who are 25 years old and beautiful and glamorous and thin. Well, Anna Garten is 76 years old and is a baby boomer. She's in my generation, I'm a younger baby boomer, but she's a baby boomer. And yet here she is. New book deals, shows, products very much relevant in popular culture. So if you think you're too old, you're not. If you think you're not thin enough, you're not. If you think your educational background is too far afield from what you now want to create, you are wrong. And Ina Garten is a perfect example of that. Now, confession. I am not a fan of her. I don't dislike her. I'm Not a fan of hers, but she is such a part of pop culture. You see her name everywhere. She populates news for decades now and, and it really, to me, is a testament to the power of someone who is creative, has a creative vision, has a passion for something and is happy to talk about it. Now, I have no idea if her cookbooks are great or not. I assume a lot of smart people like them. There's good stuff there. But I'm pretty confident in telling you if she had just decided to stay at home and sit behind a typewriter and type out cookbooks, they wouldn't have sold many. They sold because she built a community behind her. They sold because she built a fan base. She built a tribe of people who liked her, identified with her. They liked her lifestyle, they liked her personality. And that worked for her. Guess what? It can work for you. It can work for a lot of people. But you have to take the leap first. She didn't go to school studying television broadcast communication. She didn't go to a communication school and get A Master's or PhD and how to be a news anchor or how to appear on tv. She studied business. She was a government functionary for years. But she stepped up and she created and she made mistakes along the way. But here she is now. She's got a huge media empire, book deals, television deals, speaking engagements, products, you name it. She has complete creative control over her life. And I think that's something that not everyone but a huge proportion of the world would absolutely love to have. That's why I think she's a great role model. Hi, I'm TJ. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. We are live. It is Friday, February 16th, 2024 and I'm happy to see many of you have joined me today. Oh. So if you have joined live, wanting to know how to join and actually speak to me, what I often do and I didn't do, but I, I figured I would just share with you how I do it. I'm going to go. I'm broadcasting to you on multiple platforms, a platform called streamyard and that allows me to share this video with you whether on YouTube, whether you're on Facebook, whether you are on LinkedIn, Twitter X and a few other places. So what I'm going to do right now is copy that particular link and I'm going to share the stream yard right now so our friend whose name I can't see can join us. So I've just posted it in the chat the other thing, and I try to do this every day and don't always do it. I'm going to post it right in the Community tab on my YouTube channel. So if you go to YouTube and you just type in TJ Walker Success, you, you'll find my page. And at the top, near the top of the page, under my picture, you'll see home. Next to that is videos, shorts, live podcast, playlist. Community is the next tab. You click on that, you'll see the most recent thing I have posted. So I am going to go to that right now. And I was signed in on the wrong Gmail address, so I can't do it on that page. I'm going to sign in through my proper Gmail account. I go to Community, I click on that and I'm just going to say join me here now. And I hit paste, I hit post. So now if you want to join me, just go to the Community tab. Unfortunately, that link does have to change every day, but it's easy enough to find. So I hope my colleague and a friend who just signed in saw that. I don't see you. So if you want to join me, please do. I'm happy to have others involved on this show. We do a couple of things. I talk about news that relates to communication, press presentation skills as I just did with Ina Garten. I also take questions about any aspect of personal development and communication skills. Okay, it's our good friend from yesterday. Let me bring you on. And if you want to turn your camera on or your microphone on, very happy to have you participate to share with us what you're doing. So this is an interactive community. If you want to ask a question about communication skills, I'm happy to answer. If you want to share some tip you have that you think other people could benefit from as it relates to communication skills, then you can come on. If you want feedback on your YouTube channel or any social media platform where you've posted video, video of yourself speaking, I'm happy to give a critique. We can share. And if you're just happy to promote something you're doing, this is not one of these websites that say no promotion or a Facebook page. Don't you promote anything. We love it when you promote here because what I am about and what this channel is about is helping you gain comfort, expertise and confidence in, in your ability to communicate, to speak, to promote whatever project, passion, service you're trying to share with the world. I want to equip you with more tools for doing that. And TikTok, I see your name there I apologize. You told me your name yesterday and I forgot. But if you want to come on and chat with us with camera on or off is fine. Share with me your name again so I can address you by your proper name. And then if you want to turn your camera on, does that sound like a fair deal? Also today, what I am going to be doing is a couple of things. I'm going to be producing how to videos on various questions related to public speaking and you'll show that you'll sort of see how I do it. I will. You've seen me do this before. Take you behind the scenes, take you really behind the curtain of what we do when it comes to being a content creator, a YouTube creator, a social media creator, and in my case, a communication skills expert. So I don't just show you the finished polished videos on my YouTube channel and social media platforms, although I do that. I typically post three videos a day. But what I do in this live section is actually make the videos so you can see them warts and all. You can see them mistakes and all. If I stumble, I'll say oops, that was awful and I'll start at the beginning and do it again. So I share all that in part to demystify this process because so often I think people come and TikTok if you want to join us, I need you to say something or turn your camera on. Otherwise I don't know if you're here just to to listen and you're more than welcome to do that. So send me a. Oh, I see a private.

I want you to take a review.

Of the in detail and tell me our app. We have a couple of different sections. There's a comment section and a private chat. So you have posted a link. So let me go to that link. I'm going to try to do a better job of sharing it than I did the other day or yesterday. So I'm going to hit. Okay, present share screen. I'm going to put entire screen and let me hit screen two. I'm going to hit audio on. I have three screens up at the moment. I'm going to hit share now. I'm going to hit the play but I've got to move it to actual screen two. This. I've not worked out all the kinks of this yet. I'm going to turn my camera off one second and we're going to pull this up. I've got to bring it over to a different screen.

It makes me smile.

And we will turn the audio on. And Again, I very much appreciate. If you watch YouTube videos for at least one hour a week, you could be owed up to a thousand dollars a week in passive. You have no idea how closely I followed you. And I'm sitting, I'm like this guy.

What makes me smile? What is the reason that makes me smile? Whenever I help someone, whenever I do.

Something good for someone else, then I.

Feel happy, then I smile.

Whenever I help other people, I make them smile. It makes me smile.

Great. So I'm hoping that I push the right button and you could hear that, because I did like what I saw. This is one of my newer students. I believe this is only your second or third video and a couple things I really want to point out here. Again, you're just hopping right in. You're not waiting for the perfect time, the perfect camera, the perfect microphone. You're not waiting until you've gone through 10 or 20 of my courses. You just hopped right in, practice spoke. That is absolutely the way of the winner. That is how communicators make the greatest amount of progress in the least amount of time. You hop in, you. You take advantage of me and others by getting us to give you feedback. You don't sort of lurk in the shadows, which is what so many people do when they tell themselves, hey, I want to be a better communicator, I want to learn. I want to be a better public speaker. And they're nice enough to read my books and take courses and sometimes come here and watch and listen and ask questions. But that's like saying, I want to be an Olympic caliber swimmer. And all you do is watch YouTube of Michael Phelps and read books on swimming and you never get in the pool. You, sir, have gotten into the pool. This is now a couple of days in a row where you've posted a video, made a video, posted it, and taken the initiative of getting in front of me to get feedback. So I like your energy, I like the volume, I like the movement, and I like the enthusiasm you're bringing to this. It is still obvious that you're kind of getting your sea legs here. You're kind of getting comfortable with it. So you're not 100% comfortable, nor should you be. You're just at the beginning of your journey, but you are on an extraordinarily solid foundation and you're getting more and more com. I've seen progress in just the last 24 hours, so I want to applaud you for doing that and urge you to continue doing that. So thanks so much if you have any more comments, I'll come back to the screen in just a moment if I get a little feedback from you. I'm still experimenting with my lighting. If you, if you have any of these lights, and I just got these on Amazon, I can't quite figure out how to get the color to stay one color. So this button turns on and off. This changes colors. I typically stick with blue. This changes the intensity.

The curtain looks better.

Oh, you're with us. Hey, thanks so much. Sorry. Which, which color did you like best?

The curtain behind you looks better and the video looks more professional and able to focus more. And it's looking very good. Yes, this is the best.

So this is what we, this is what we're calling camera two. And this is the camera I'm doing when I'm trying to do a YouTube short, a tick tock short. Because what I found based on data from the last five months is the videos that generate a thousand percent more views are videos where I am, I'm literally on a stage speaking to people and I'm moving around like this, and I'm moving around like that. And we have crowd shots. Now I'm not on a stage, I'm just in an office and this is my studio. So we're kind of simulating that. So this camera is much lower, you know, it's a couple of feet lower than this camera and it's maybe three feet lower than this camera. So the reason we have this here and when I'm making videos here, I'm typically never looking directly at the camera. I'm looking here down, I'm looking here down. To simulate the experience of speaking to a crowd because the thinking goes, and I can't really prove it is that if someone's looking for public speaking expertise, kind of the scariest thing is when you're speaking in front of a group of people up on a stage. Therefore it's interesting to see someone actually doing it. That is my theory as to why those videos outperform, but I can't really prove it. And sir, tell me again, you muted your mic. Turn it on. If you don't mind. Tell me your name again so I pronounce it correctly.

You can call me Tick Tick if you want, there's no problem.

Okay, so if you, if you know how these lights work best, let me know.

I don't know about it.

Right, I'm going to put this one back by the way. You can see, you can see how small I am. Now this is a, it's Not a TV studio the size of NBC or a major, major TV network. But part of what I'm doing here is trying to make what I doing look bigger or more professional than just another guy in his basement hunched over a desk, which is kind of what I looked like in pre until about just a few months ago, because I had just a brick wall, plastic sheet of plastic with an image of a brick wall where I was sitting at my desk. And so the reason I have all this back there is the trend line is with major YouTube stars who have significant audiences, they're typically not using digital backdrops anymore and they have what looks like a real set. Now, I'm not suggesting I've got everything perfect yet, but at least this, this is a real room and somebody looked at it. So we've got the fancy lenses that make things blurry. So you can't really.

It looks fantastic.

You can't really tell this is me. But this is a. This is a photo of me and my wife and daughter, which now looks like it's about seven years old. It looks like my daughter's about four years old there. So I put that up there. It is a picture I do really like. So that's, that's the concept of this. And the other reason is I can really move and demonstrate things because so much of what has to do with, with public speaking and communication skills is people are nervous about their body. Tj, what do I do with my hand? Should I do this? Should I do this? Should I stand with my feet firmly placed or should I walk around? So the reason I created this set this way is so I could actually demonstrate best practices, show people what not to do. Because I've seen countless times people do an interview or stand up to speak, and their words are great, their voice is great, but if you stand like this, it looks awful. You look nervous, uncomfortable, like you have to go to the bathroom. So that's why I have this frame. Because a lot of friends, colleagues, well meaning people have given me feedback saying, well, tj, this is a weird angle. You shouldn't be showing your knees up. You should have it like this, the way most news shows are and online programs. And I agree that that is how most do it. But there is a specific reason why I want you to be able to see the full range so I can demonstrate. So, tick, tick. Tell me a little more about your immediate goals for being a presenter. And by the way, thank you for taking the initiative of not just watching, but coming on, sharing a video, giving your perspective that is so much of what's really important about building this skill. The only reason to ask you a question. Sure.

I want to ask you a question. How should we prepare a speech?

And.

How should we, I mean, prepare a speech and deliver to the camera? And after that, how must we review it properly so that we can take maximum benefits from it?

Okay, let me take both of those questions one at a time and I want to give you a long answer and a short answer and I want to benefit you, I want to help you. But so many people, I believe, really are interested in that topic. I want to do it in a way that later my editors can chop it up, cut it, reuse it, edit it, so it can be an edited video, long form and short form on this channel. So let me address that first question and I'm going to get a prop here ready. I'm going to go to camera one and I'm going to hit record. What's the best way to prepare a speech and deliver a speech if you're not speaking to a group of people face to face, but you're doing it online where you're looking at a camera? Well, the reality is it's not much different from an in person speech. The first thing you need to do is sort of step back and ask yourself, what's my agenda here? What do I really want this audience to do? Do I want them to buy from me? Hire me? Do I want them to invest in my company? Do I want them to vote for my candidate? What is it I want them to do for me? Then what you need to do is brainstorm on every possible idea, every message that might actually motivate that audience online to do the thing you want them to do. You may come up with 10, 20, 30, 50 ideas. The more the merrier at this stage. Now, here's the most important part. Before you hit record, before you go live, you need to scrutinize these messages, hold them up to the light and put them in priority. You need to figure out if you've got 100 messages, what is the hundredth most important message? What's the most important message? Put them in priority. Now look at them. Anything that didn't make the top five, scratch them off, throw them in the trash can. Put that in the category of I'll email people stuff if they want to know about that. But you need to figure out what are literally your five most important ideas. Then what you need to do is figure out an example for each idea, ideally a story for. For each idea. Something that involves a conversation you had or someone had with another person in a particular place about a particular problem, how you felt and how it was resolved, and the message that people should take away from that story. You want, ideally, at least one story for every single message point. Now, do I want you to memorize all this? No, that's hard work. Do I want you to type up the whole story word for word and put a teleprompter in front of your camera so you can read it and not mess up a word? No, that is too much work. All I really want you to do is to get a single sheet of paper, type it up, use big bold letters, make sure it's on a single sheet of paper, make sure the font is large enough that you don't have to bend down or put on glasses, and then just put it in front of your computer. Now you're in front of the camera, you can glance down, look at your first message, and just talk. Talk to the camera like you're talking to one person. So one of the things that is different about communicating to a group of people versus on a camera is you really want to give people a sense that you're talking to one person. Because when people are watching it, typically they are alone in their own home office or their own regular office, or they could be on a bus or a plane somewhere. So you definitely do not want to have this projection tone of voice when I'm glad all of you could be here today. No, no. You want it to sound intimate, like you're talking to one friend, no matter how serious the topic is, and to really take it up a notch. If you want to prepare, do a practice. You've got your script. You can hit record on your webcam or your cell phone. Look at it, ask yourself what I.

Want to watch the script. Please show us the script properly. It is not visible in the camera. It is blurred.

Here's a script. Now let me try to make it as big as possible. This is a literally a script I used for a one hour presentation yesterday. Notice it only has five numbers and it's getting a little bit blurry with the autofocus. But it's just five points and then a couple of words underneath each one to remind me of what to say. So it really is that simple. So the next step is to rehearse your presentation, practice it, record it, look at it, ask yourself, would I want to watch this person speaking? If you can't say yes to that, it means you need to do it again. Maybe Tweak it, maybe come up with better examples. The number one problem is in every presentation, whether it's to a live group of people in front of you or online in front of a camera, is dumping way too much data. Too many bullet points, too many numbers, and doing it at an abstract manner that is instantly forgettable. You've got to focus on the real challenge here. The challenge is not simply putting data out in the world. The challenge is, is to get people to understand the significance of it, to remember it so they can act upon it, and to know why you think it's important that they act upon it. That is your challenge when you are giving a presentation. Let me do that last part over for the edits. That is your challenge when you're giving a presentation in person, but also online in front of a camera. Okay, note to editor that that should make for a decent long view, a long form video. So tick, tick.

I hope.

Was that helpful? I'm going to answer your other question which was helpful. Good. Oh, I'm sorry, I want to do a short version of that. Let me do that.

Please also explain.

I apologize. I want to, I want to be give you a thorough long and short answer. But before I forget, I want to create something that can be used for my channel in, in the less than 60 second version and let me just hit record. How do you prepare for a presentation where no one's in the room? You have to talk to a camera. Well, it feels different, but it's really not. You still gotta ask yourself what do I want this audience to do after listening to me? Then you've got to narrow your message down to a handful, illustrate each one with a story, then ideally rehearse. Don't worry about memorizing. You can put it on a simple cheat sheet and put it right in front of your computer. Occasionally glance down, no one will know. Okay, so that was sort of a short form version that I'm hoping will be useful to people that can be turned into a video later and then that can be distributed throughout social media. Because what does what is happening in the world these days is more and more people like to consume content in different ways. And for a lot of people, they like short form content on their phone where they can scroll, watch something 10, 20, 30 seconds and move on. Now I would love it for everyone to listen to me for three hours a day, but that's not realistic. The reality is often a by a multiple of a thousand or more people will watch a short form video that I've done in 15 seconds. Then we'll watch three hours. So I've got to figure out as a communicator, how to take any idea I have and make it helpful to people, useful to people, whether they want to give me three hours of time, half an hour of time, eight minutes of time, three minutes of time, 30 seconds of time, or sometimes as little as eight seconds. Some of my best performing short form videos have been eight seconds long. Now. I'm sorry, go ahead. You had another question.

Whenever we are standing in front of the camera, the voice gets lower and the body starts to vibrate a bit. And this is the problem we face. So what, which, what should we do? And whenever I speak, my focus goes on my hands and how I'm projecting my body and how all the stuff is going on. So please explain this.

Thank you. Okay. I'm so glad you're here today because what you are sharing, I think is so relevant to not hundreds or thousands of people, but billions of people around the globe. So let me share some thoughts on that. And if you don't mind, let me. Let me finish and stop and then ask a question. That way, when we're editing it, it will be a little easier for my team to edit it. What happens when you stand up? You're getting ready to speak, especially in front of a camera, and then you feel it happening. All of a sudden you're tightening up, your volume goes down, and you know it, but you feel like you can't really do anything. This is just the natural way. And everyone says, act natural, right? And it's natural when you're nervous to speak a little quieter. And the problem with speaking quieter with lower volume is it makes you monotone, it makes you flat, it makes you boring. And it's sending a message to people that, hey, I'm kind of nervous here. I'm not really comfortable. Maybe I'm not really credible. Maybe you shouldn't pay attention to me. Is that the message you want to send?

No.

So until you get to the point where you're speaking daily in front of a camera, you need to realize that this is a hazard that affects almost everyone. You need to prepare for it. The number one way of preparing for it is practicing on video. So if you're doing a job interview on Thursday, practice with a friend or family member on Tuesday, have them interview you. They can call you on any kind of video, zoom, anything like that. Record it, have them actually interview you, and then when you're done, watch it and listen to your volume. Chances are you're going to notice, oh, I've already gotten kind of quiet and silent. That's a little weird. That doesn't work quite right. Do it again. This time specifically, think of your voice as a volume control. If you were a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale, you want to get to at least 5. No, you don't have to go up to 11 like in the Spinal Tap movie, but you want to get at least in that middle range. So do it again, rehearse, watch the video, try to analyze, experiment exactly how you did in terms of your volume. If it's not high enough, do it again. If you're not getting the volume you want, you've got to play some tricks on your own brain. Instead of thinking about talking to one friend, perhaps your own age three feet away, think about talking in a noisy restaurant. You're at a table that seats 12 people and it's a restaurant full of people. Everyone's talking, it's noisy, and you have an elderly aunt, grandparent all the way on the other side of the table and they've asked you a question, you're not going to yell at them, but you are going to project more. You're going to be a little louder, a little more energy. You're going to articulate a little more thoroughly. That is what you want. Quite often it takes that level of energy when you're speaking on camera just to get to the point where you sound normal, where you sound relaxed, where you sound comfortable and confident. So you need to calibrate it. If you just wing it and say, well, you know, that's how it happened, you're not going to be happy with the results. If you have to write a term paper in college and you know it's coming and you do a draft and you revise it, edit it, get feedback from advisors and others, it's generally going to be a little more polished than if you just had to go in the classroom and dictate an essay right there on the spot. Right. You wouldn't expect that to be as good. It's exactly the same thing with how you look and sound on your video presentation. You need to practice it so you know exactly how the volume is to get it to the right amount of volume. Where you sound comfortable, confident, not monotone at all. Okay, so that is the sort of the long, long form answer to that question. I want to do just a quick less than 32nd one and then come back to your next question. Okay, So what do you do when you're speaking on Camera and all of a sudden you feel it. You tighten up, your volume is going down. You realize you sound a little scared and nervous. But what do you do? Well, what you need to do is practice in advance and really listen to it. If you're not comfortable with your volume, adjust it internally, try to overdo it, watch it again, keep doing that until you like how it sounds. Now you have a role model for yourself. It's not me or Anthony Robbins or anyone else. It's your own voice. Okay, so that's the short form version. By the way, I appreciate you sort of working with me here because I'm trying to be helpful to you, but you're being helpful to me by letting me sort of talk out. Different versions of these are the rough drafts of what I do because that will be taken. Both of those will be taken, edited down, graphics will be added, little special effects, music, sometimes to make it a little more polished so that when it's put out on social media, it gets a lot more views, frankly, than what our live broadcast yet. So I'm hoping that you and others stopping by see this as a real win win. If you're just joining me, I'm tj. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. And here we try to help you become more successful in your professional life and personal life by building more expertise in your communication skills and more confidence in your communication skills. So that's what we're all about. Trying to come to you live every day from roughly 9am to noon Eastern time, Monday through Friday. We are still experimenting with the formats and the time. I've been on YouTube since really a few months after they started 2005. But this new show, this new version is new. This whole set is new. Everything is new. We're still working out the kinks. You may see some lights behind me changing. I haven't figured out how to do that. By the way, I have a new light I just added today and I don't see any difference. I'll just adjust it and you can tell me if you even see any difference. So I'm going to change the light. Right now it's on a blue. Ah, now that is a little bit different there. But the question is, do we want that much color there? Because before with the blue, it doesn't really do anything that is with the red. And you know what part of the premise of what I'm trying to do on this live stream is sort of again, take you behind the scenes because so much of what intimidates people Is, you know, where do I even start on a studio? I see all these big time ali Abduls and Mr. Beast and they have all these elaborate studios and production. It's too hard to even do well. I've done this. I don't have any other staff here. Now. I do have colleagues in other countries who've spent a lot of time advising me over WhatsApp. But I'm essentially a non techie who did this by myself. As far as physically putting the things up here, I can do it. Believe me, anyone can do it. I don't know a gigabyte from a megabyte, a triggerbyte. I'm really not that technologically savvy, even though I've been using computers and bought my first computer in 1986. So let's just do a little test. I'm gonna see if I can make this light look any better or different by moving it out. Because one of the things I have heard from people is they think my. My walls are still a little too bland, essentially and a little too white. I don't know if I can project this this way. Let's see. Let's see if that. I just don't know if that makes it more interesting or more distracting. Let's see from the camera one angle, it's putting something up. I just don't know if it really adds it. I would love. If you're watching this on demand later and you have an opinion about this light or any lights, please let me know. Because I'm not a lighting expert and confession. I'm actually colorblind. So if some of these colors look weird to you, that's probably why is because it doesn't look weird to me. I am colorblind. I do remember once I built a TV studio for training purposes in my apartment in New York City. This would have been in the late 1990s and I was doing an early 2000. I was doing corporate media training, authors and a lot of the same things I do now. And I was right in midtown Manhattan where there are in fact a lot of TV studios. So I said, hey, I'm trying to keep overhead low. Rather than rent an expensive studio, I'll use my apartment. And so a training would take place. I would take all of my furniture and sort of cram it into the bathroom or the hallway. And I would have just a couple of chairs, the TV camera and a TV was mounted in the wall. And what I did was sponge, textured sponge painting, which can look on all the walls, which can look very textured and give depth can look very good in TV studios. And I've seen it, I'm sure you've seen it on TV networks. And I had a curtain that covered up the little kitchenette area. So if you walked in, okay, this could seem like a New York City TV studio. But whatever the colors were that I selected were apparently so clashing and so odd looking. People would walk in to this studio and all of a sudden they're like, oh my God, that is the worst color combination I've ever seen. You're giving me a headache. So I do not hold myself out as an expert on what color, what color lights to use or colors for the backdrop. So if you have any feedback on that, please let me know. And Tick Tick says thanks, you're a great coach. Thank you so much for being a great student. And I do want to stress it is a two way street. You can, you have the greatest coach in the world. You can have Michael Phelps swimming coach, listen to his expertise 12 hours a day. You'll still drown if you never get in the pool the first time or you've listened to him every day for 10 years and then you just hop in the deep end and you never took the time to learn fundamentals and blow bubbles in the water. Do this standing up, you'll still likely drown. So I want to commend you TikTok for doing what really it takes and that is practicing on video, speaking, reaching out, getting personalized critiques to what you are doing rather than getting general advice and general examples. What you're doing is so much better. So thanks for doing that. I very much appreciate it. Okay, later on today I'm going to be doing some product reviews as an influencer ad. Those of you who've been here in the last month or so know that I do talk about the Amazon Influencer program. I am in the Amazon Influencer program. I don't hold myself out as a world class expert on it because I've only been in it for seven weeks. I'm not selling a course on it or tutorials or anything. I'm simply sharing with you my journey as I become an Amazon influencer. And what that means is I make product reviews in video format and in pictures. And so far I've made a little more than 300 of these video ads. These videos can, they're not necessarily always placed, but they can be placed directly on, on the Amazon product page. So the significance of that is Amazon is giving you an audience with most affiliate programs, companies Organizations, brands are expecting you to go out and hustle and build a giant following for your own blog, your own YouTube channel, everything else. What is unique, what is different about the Amazon Influencer program is that sometimes you might not have much of an audience at all, but you make a great ad because you're good at speaking and you're persuasive at how you speak about a particular product. People see the video you made, then buy the product. Amazon gives you the affiliate commission. Now, I should point out there are some people who are successful at this because they're good video editors and good adding music and graphs. They, they might not speak at all. So I'm only showing one type of way of doing this ad because I happen to be an expert on presentation skills and communication skills by speaking. But certainly that's only one way. These are essentially ads. And if you look at the most successful ads in the history of Madison Avenue and Super bowl tv, a lot of them don't have any speaking. It's visual, it's action, it's graphics, it's music. So I'm only showing one of it. I do think that for most people, the easiest way to make a product review is to simply hold it up and tell people why you like it, why you've benefited from the product, and why you think other people might like it. That's going to be the easiest thing. And one of the things you'll find out about me is on the one hand, I can be hardworking. I've made 220 online courses, I think more than pretty much any personal development communication skills coach in the world. I've written six books, so I'm technically not lazy, and yet I am lazy. And that I'm always looking for the easiest, fastest, most efficient, efficient way of doing something. So I have been looking for the most efficient way, the fastest way of jump starting. And that's why I have focused on this niche of just speaking about products and doing simple videos unedited. Not suggesting that's the best way, certainly not suggesting it's the only way, but it is the fastest way. And my goal for myself is to get to the point where I have 5,000 product reviews and links, with 3,000 of those being videos, 2,000 being pictures. Right now I am less than 10% done. I think I have about 330 done. So I still have a long way to go, more than 5% of the way. But that's what I'm hoping to do in the next couple of few months by typically doing at least five, sometimes 10 products a day. But remember, it's three videos, two pictures for each one. So if you do five products, that's 25 new ads that go into the Amazon Influencer program that can then be populated on, not only on Amazon, but in other places, your storefront, Amazon Inspire, where any one of them could generate revenue for you. So that's what I'll be doing later on in today's show. Now, Tick Tick had to step out. If he comes back, There was a question he had. He had a second question and I wanted to make sure I didn't forget the first one. So I do believe he missed that or I missed that. I forgot. So if he comes back, happy to answer that question. I do remember he asked a very specific question that I thought, wow, that is so relevant to so many people around the world. I do want to make a very specific, somewhat packaged answer to that that could be shared with other people who are not with us on the live stream today. Okay, I'm going to switch over to my YouTube channel a moment and go through other questions that people have asked. Something I learned from Sean Cannell at Think Media just the other day is that you can search on your own channel for questions that people have asked in the comments. I didn't know how to do that, but I'm just going to YouTube my own channel. I'm going to my comments section. I hit comments, I hit filter. Now I'm going to go to contains questions. And it's, it's very nice the way it instantly just populates for the most part. There's some exceptions, but for the most part it now is only showing me things where people asked a specific question. And some of the questions. I, I don't really have that much to add to someone. Elizabeth Blackwell wrote, who cares to one of my videos. So I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to do to that. But here's a question. Is it really not necessary to edit videos? I do think that that is something that a lot of people struggle with because there's the thought that, you know what, I have a lot of ideas to share and I would love to talk to people more. Let me pull back my right page here so I can actually make sure I have the right camera on. Okay, so the question is, if you're going to speak on video online, do you have to edit? I do think that's an important, important question. I'm going to answer that in detail in just a moment. But first, we've had some More people join us. Matve has joined us, says hello and does have a question. And 7x a y x says hello. I don't remember having seen you pop up recently. So very happy you're here. To anyone joining Live, please feel free to post questions directly. Anyone who takes the time to show up live, you go to the front of the line now. People do email me questions all the time. They post questions in my Facebook page, my professional Facebook page, but also my group for my UDEMY students. I try to answer all those questions here as well, but certainly if you come live, you go to the front of the line. So Madhav wants to know, how do you become the best storyteller? I'm going to answer that in detail in just a moment. And seven says, I just came here from Twitch. Sorry for the weird surname. My name is Adam or Ad Ham. Very happy you're here and especially happy to see people hear from Twitch. I will confess I don't know much about Twitch and one school of thought says, tj, shame on you. You shouldn't do live streaming unless you really know that platform, unless you have people there watching to make sure a bad person doesn't get on. And there is legitimacy to some of those views. I just take the view that the more people I can reach, the better. The more people I can share ideas with on how to communicate effectively. Maybe I'm helping them at some point, if I help a hundred of them 100 times, one or two may come back and help me by hiring me as a keynote speaker, buying a book, buying some of my online courses, that in the end it all works out to everyone's benefit. So very happy that you're here from Twitch. And I do try to stream and add that channel every single day. But please leave a note and leave a comment there on Twitch. So Twitch knows to show this live feed to people more often. But also realize that if you want to come on live the easiest way and talk to me or ask a question directly, the easiest way to do that is to go to the Community tab on my YouTube channel and that is where I post the link so that you can come in, ask a question, your face can appear on screen too and we can have a real dialogue. So thanks so much for that. And Adam says, I think you're genuinely a great gentleman. Well, thank you. I appreciate the kind comment. Thanks so much for joining. Let's go to Madhav now and Matav, if you want to come on. Do you want to come on camera? I'll give you that opportunity. Otherwise, I want to give you sort of a long answer and a short answer on how to become a better storyteller. So I'll give you just a second. And Barb has joined us. Barb, our fantastic community manager for our Facebook group for Udemy students and here on YouTube. Always nice to see her and TJ. So she's saying hello to everyone and she's taking care of maintenance right now. There is a lot of maintenance issues to having a good Facebook group because if you don't really maintain it, it can become overcome with spammers, pornographers, and since my name is Walker, at one point we had a problem with street walkers thinking this was the place for them. And Barb does a fantastic job of keeping all of that straight. So thanks so much for stopping by and saying hello. Hop right into Matav's question and I'm going to record this about how do you become a better storyteller? So how do you become a better storyteller? If you want to go from being a good presenter communicator to a great one, the secret actually is to be lazy. It's hard work to write perfect stories. Staying up late at night, writing, rewriting, editing, that's hard work. The best storytellers are not necessarily creative at all. They're not spending more time writing and rewriting and rewriting. No, all they're doing is listening. They're listening to actual conversations. They have things they say to people when they're stopped in the hallway or having a drink or having a meal they share with someone and they see that person's eyes light up. Wow, that's interesting. And they make a mental snapshot of it. So when they're giving a speech, a presentation, a briefing, what they're doing is simply reliving actual stories they've already told people in real life. And sometimes they're recounting a story of a friend, a colleague, maybe a family member told them. Now you have to do it with certain screens. You don't want to just get up and tell stories to tell stories, because then people are comparing you to Will Rogers or famous storytellers or famous comedians or Jerry Seinfeld. I don't know about you, I don't want to be compared to a world class comedian. So you can't tell stories just to be funny or to be a storyteller. Your story needs to have a message that's interesting and relevant to the audience you are speaking to. Doesn't matter if it is graduate school sociology students or if it is a bunch of suppliers in the cement business. You've got to figure out what messages are important to me, interesting to the audience, useful to the audience that they need to understand, remember, so they take the actions I want. Then you need to go back and select the relevant story. But the best stories of all are ones where you're reliving it. It's so easy on your mind because you're seeing it. You're just sharing an experience. We all, all have stories all the time that we tell with family members about the worst vacation ever and it could have happened 30 years ago, but you can tell a cousin or someone younger who wasn't there the whole story because it's memorable, because you can see it. You can see where you were. You remember who you were talking to. You introduce the characters, you're talking about, exactly what you said to them, what they said back to you. You talk about what the problem was and we had no hot water for a week. Whatever it was, you explained the problem. You talk about how you feel and then we felt cold. We were freezing to death because we had no hot water. You telling people about how you felt and then you talked about the resolution, that's all easy. It doesn't require memory because you're reliving an experience. That's really the number one way to go from being an okay storyteller where you've kind of thought about it and processed it and write it, tweaked it, to a great storyteller. Great storytellers simply reuse their own life experiences, but they do it in a way where they make sure it's 100% relevant to their audience. Okay, so madam, that was the sort of the long, that was the long version of the answer to your question. I hope you found that helpful. I am going to do a short version now which I hope can be turned into a YouTube TikTok short. That can also be helpful to people because some people don't want to watch me for three hours a day here live. Some people are not going to want to watch an eight minute video or that was maybe five or six minutes, but some people will watch 20 seconds. So that's a part of my challenge as a communicator, is to figure out how can I really take expertise and think of it like an accordion of. I could share expertise. This long, it could be this long, could be this long. Great communicators figure out how to communicate in any length of time. Once you tell yourself, well, unless I have an hour I'm not going to bother. Or unless I have 10 minutes, it's not worth it. Don't take that attitude. It's not productive. Okay, before I forget my train of thought, let me go ahead and hit record and try to do that one as a short. What's the best way to go from being an okay storyteller in your presentations to a great storyteller? Well, the key is, believe it or not, be lazy. Don't stay all night long writing and rewriting your stories and memorizing no great stories. Tellers simply relive things that happen to them. They relive stories that happen in their real life. They make sure it's relevant to the audience, but they share what they're experiencing. They're not creating and copying other people's stories or memorizing. Okay, so that was kind of the short version that I'm trying to make workable for a YouTube TikTok short. We'll see. It'll be something for my editors to play with and experiment with. Sometimes it works, sometimes it was won't. What One of the things I can tell you is if you make a lot of YouTube content, social media content, no one's really good at predicting what works and what doesn't work. Now, you can get better at it, but sometimes I'll look at a video I think that's really not very good or that insightful. And it was far and away my most popular video of the week, and it got thousands and thousands and thousands of views. Other times I'll see one and I'll think, wow, I really nailed that. That's an insight that's genuinely, really helpful to people. It genuinely improves their communication skills, their confidence, the results they get. It's an insight that you don't read in other books, that you don't hear a lot. It's different, it's unique. This is going to be great. And it has the least views of the whole week. So you never really know. That's why I do believe that it's important to put a lot of content out there so you can constantly test, constantly figure out what works, what doesn't work. The Pareto principle. 80 20. The vast majority, 80% of your successes and results will come from your top 20%. I don't know if it's exactly that specific, but certainly the basic principle of most of your views are going to come from a handful of topics and a handful of videos is true. I already know that. For me, the videos that seem to really resonate with people Deal with a couple of things. Your voice, how to improve your voice, your body language, and how to avoid common mistakes. So many of my most popular videos deal with those three themes. It just so happens that I personally as a communications expert, don't really think they're that important compared to other issues. But I can't control the mindset of the rest of the world. That's not my job. My job is to help them where they are, to help them here, and then maybe they'll be receptive to other areas where I think I can help the most. So it is a give and take and that's why it is important to listen to your audience and your community and your clients and your customers. Service them, help them in ways you can, and then see if you can add on with other insights you have. Let's see, Via says a couple of things. I've had a bunch of comments coming in and thank you so much for commenting. Via says, I have a question. Why are you teaching us so valuable things here without any payment or anything? Well, madam, I appreciate it. I mean, part of it is I just, I genuinely enjoy talking about these things. But I don't want you to think I'm a complete saint and living in poverty because I do make money from this, believe it or not. I mean, people, corporations pay me from, you know, between 10 and $20,000 a day when they're hiring me to work with their executives. I do make money from people buying my online courses. That's really my, in the last few years been the primary source of revenue. I make tiny little slivers of money from YouTube ads. YouTube gives me money and it's, and it's not very significant. I make the teeniest, tiniest amount of money from Facebook, believe it or not. I think they sent me a check for A$68 yesterday. And it's not that important. I'm in the Amazon Influencer program. So while I'm sharing with you for free how I make Amazon Influencer video videos, Amazon does pay me money when someone buys it. I'm sometimes making content for courses here, whether it's for Udemy, whether it's for my own site. I sell online courses on my own site and make money. I have courses on skillshare. Skillshare sends me money every month. So sometimes someone might come here, watch this for free. But then if they're going to skillshare, it's oh, I remember that guy. They buy my course. There's something else that happens quite often is someone may stumble across this live feed see me, become familiar with me like something. And three months later they have a new job. Could be in India, could be in Europe, North America. And their corporation pays for them to have a business account on a platform like Udemy. So the corporation is paying a monthly fee for every employee. The employee doesn't pay anything. But then they type in, gosh, how do I communicate more effectively in the workplace? And they see a course of mine. Again, they're not paying for it, but they say, oh, I know that guy. I'm comfortable with him. He seems like he knows what he's talking about. And they watch the course. Well, now Udemy is paying me by the minute from that pile of money that the course corporation did. So I haven't counted specifically, but I'm on a lot of different platforms where I get paid by the course. Some platforms where I get paid by how many views for advertising. Sometimes corporations or individuals just call me and hire me to work directly with them. And so there are a lot of different revenue models for any expert, not just me. I mean, I didn't invent any of these things. There are a lot of different revenue models. And that's why I think it can be a win win Zig Ziglar. And perhaps Barb can correct me on this. I think once said, the more you give away, the more you get. And you can. It doesn't matter how rich and famous and successful someone is. Paul McCartney, who's a billionaire founder of the Beatles, would to this day, he'll go on major national TV shows to sing a song for free, promoting a new album. Well, why is he doing that? Well, it's in part because he wants people to hear his music, but it's in part because the more awareness people have of you, a certain percentage of them will buy an album or pay for a download or listen to a stream on Spotify and then you get a few cents or will then be aware of you to buy tickets to your concert and you get money that way. Last night, for example, I went to see a famous comedian, Ronnie Chang, who's been in Crazy Rich Asians. He's been on the Daily Show. I watch him for free on the Daily show clips on YouTube. Built awareness in my mind. But then when he came to town, I gladly paid for a couple of tickets. I don't know, 150 bucks. So that money goes to him. So that's, that's how these things build. And I see you've joined back. If you want to add a question to that happy to do so. And I think a few more. I think I may have missed a few other questions that come in. Tick, tick. Did you have another question or comment? If you do, let me know. You can just shout out. We're. We're fairly un. Unpretentious here. This is again, not a highly, highly scripted major broadcast like a BBC morning show or a major news network where every second is scripted. This is more of a ongoing workshop and conversation I'm having with you and people around the globe who share one common thing. We all want to be more successful in life by being better at communication and more confident in our communication. Okay, go ahead. I hear you. There you are. Now we can see. Yes.

Yes. Sir, I have a question to you.

Like.

Yes, when you speak, your hands look very good. Like in body language, you use your hand very well. But whenever I speak, my half focus goes on my hands and I could not focus on the camera. So what should I do? Where should I focus Directly on the camera or on my body as well? How should I do that?

Mm, great. Stay with me. I'm gonna take you off screen a minute, but I want to answer that question in a long form, short form, because you're asking fantastic questions because I got to tell you, they really, really resonate with so many clients I have all over the world. So I'm going to take you off for a moment, but stay with us. I'm going to hit mute as well, but I do want your feedback when I'm through because I want to know, did I actually answer your question? And. And I just want to make sure I wasn't rude to anyone else. Let's just do a quick glance at the comments before I go into this next section. Seven says, I was searching for YouTube and saw that you have a video from eight years ago. I'm proud to be a part of your community and will definitely join you again on Twitch and YouTube. Well, I'm glad you found it. I. I've got some videos going back, I think about 17 years now. I have an earlier YouTube channel that, unfortunately, for reasons I won't go into, was deleted. I think this current channel says it was founded in 2008, maybe, but I've been making videos since 1975 when I was 12 years old. So I'm. I'm no stranger to making videos. One of the beauties of sharing expertise is, you know, some things can become dated, but a lot of things art. If your passion is cooking and you show people great ways of making an omelet maybe that helps you sell a book 15 years from now because that video is still there and that brings someone into your world. So, excuse me, My pocket square is standing up a little bit. Funny. I'm going to give a very dated reference here. I doubt anyone under 60 not living in the US will remember this, but there was a show called Dallas, late 70s, early 80s, and there was a character, sort of a buffoon named Cliff Barnes, and he always had his pocket square just comically out this far. So I'm a little bit sensitive to having the pocket square out too far. It just made me think of that. So sorry I just had to share that with you. Okay, I want to just go through a few other comments, make sure I didn't miss anything. Seven says thanks and got a lot of great value from the storytelling explanation. Mata says one of our great students and is thanking. Okay, so, Dick, let me go back to you now and talk specifically about the hand motion thing, because I do think it's so relevant. I'm going to take you off for now, but I'm not getting rid of you. I just want to take you off the screen, if that's okay. All right, so I'm going to go to camera one. What do you do with these when you're speaking? You may have seen other people and thought to yourself, wow, I really like the way he uses his hands. I really like the way she's using her hands when speaking. But then you do a practice. You record yourself on video and you look at your hands and you think, oh, my God, it looks stupid. I look like Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights. It looks ridiculous. What do I do? Do I hold them? Here is what I've observed. So since we're editing these, I'm going to redo that line. Here's what I've observed in working with tens of thousands of people around the globe. It's universal. People like it when they see other people moving their hands. It conveys confidence and authority. But when people watch a video of themselves moving their hands, all of a sudden it looks weird. They think, oh, my God, I look like a fool. I look like an idiot. I sure am glad I watched a video of myself. Now I know I don't move my hands right. I need to hold my hands down, get them controlled so I don't look foolish. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In general, it's great to watch yourself and analyze what you like and don't like, but I have found that humans universally are poor judges of their own hand gestures. When you watch video of yourself moving your hands, even if everyone else thinks you look comfortable, confident, relaxed, authoritative, there's something about watching your own hands move that makes people think that looks ridiculous. Can you look? Can you believe this fool here? I feel sorry for this person. There's just something about seeing yourself do it. You're going to have to learn to disregard it. I do recommend that you try to get feedback from other people because quite often you think your hand gestures were awful, distracting, weird. You talk to five other people in the room and ask them what you think of the presentation. They may tell you specific things they liked about your style, your comfort and your messages. Most important. And then if you ask them, what were my hands distracting? They might say, I didn't notice anything about it. That has been my experience working with tens of thousands of people, people around the globe. Other people will think your hands were perfectly fine when you were moving, even if you think they are weird. So the main thing is you don't want to constrain your hands. You don't want to be thinking about, well, now I'm raising my right hand to seem authoritative. And now I'm going to do this and I'm going to put my three fingers up to denote three. Now it shouldn't seem like there is a puppet master controlling you. And these things are going up and down. What you want is natural hand movement. All of us are programmed from birth to move our hands when we're speaking or even crying. So you don't have to learn how to move your hands when you speak. What you have to learn is how to not to freeze your hands when you're uncomfortable. That's the difference. Okay, so that was sort of, sort of the long version of that answer. Let me do a short version that could be used. Oh no, my pocket square. I'm not going to be able to use that video. Oh yeah, I shouldn't have told that story. I jinxed myself. Let me put this pocket square back so that it's not completely dominant anymore. I wish I hadn't done that and pulled it out. Anyway, I'm going to try to straighten up so that when we are using this video for the short version, at least it will in fact be usable. But first, let me take a little drink. Those of you saw me, you know, a day or two ago I did talk about what I'm actually drinking. I am drinking sparkling water that I make myself using a soda stream carbonator of water. That way I don't have to go to the store and buy Perrier. And constantly going back to the store, filling up landfill with plastic bottles. This is a reusable plastic bottle. Bottle. And so this is a. This is an example of the type of product I do ads for on Amazon Influencer. Now, I'm not linking to this today, so I don't have to put a little ad at the top of the video. You are supposed to disclose anytime you're advertising. And I certainly try to do that, but we're not doing that in this one. Okay, TikTok has joined me again, but let me just do the short version, that last topic with the hands. So let me go ahead and do a short and hit record. What do you do if you see other speakers moving their hands and think, wow, that looks great, looks confident. But then you look at a video of yourself and think, wow, I look crazy. Relax, it's not you. Everyone does that. There's something about seeing video of yourself moving your hands that looks strange to most people. That looks weird. Get over it. You got to just keep practicing. You want your hands to move. It will start to look more comfortable to you and it will look real and relaxed the more you see yourself. So don't try to overreact and all of a sudden freeze your hands or keep them down here. Okay, so that's that topic. All right, let's bring in TikTok again, because it seems like you had a part B to that question that I perhaps did not answer. If you want to come on camera, have. By the way, anyone else wants to join us, this is not just the TJ and TikTok hour. You're welcome to come on, too. I try to answer everyone's questions, whether they've posted questions on YouTube or Facebook group or TikTok or anyplace else. Certainly people who email me questions, I try to answer those. I sometimes answer questions generated by chat GPT, but I always prefer real questions from real people. But I give the most preference to people who take the time to actually show up, show their face and speak. Speak to me if you want to do that. It's very easy. Just join me on Streamyard. What I try to do every day. Sometimes I forgot, but I know it's there today because I did it at the beginning of the show. If you go to my YouTube channel and click on the Community tab, the most recent post says, you want to talk to me? Join here. And it's a stream yard URL. You click on it, you can come right on and show up on screen Just as TikTok has done. If he turns his camera on and turns his mic on. Okay, Tic, do you want to join us again? Yes. Great. Now, you had a part B to that question that I've already forgotten. Do you want to bring that up again?

Yes. My question was, when we're recording a video, so where should we focus on the camera or our own selves, Our own body or somewhere else? Where should we focus?

Sure.

Whom should we make the eye contact with?

Okay, great. So let me give you an answer to that and that one I'll do here. Because this is sort of more relevant to how most people are talking to a camera. Most people are not this far away and most people are not at this angle. So. So I'm going to try to do that in a way that's most relevant to you. So let me hit record. I'm going to take you off the screen, but you're just an absolute font of great questions. So I'm going to take you off. Stay with me, though. Okay. And I'm going to hit record. So where should you look when you are making a video and speaking to a camera? How do you make sure that the people feel like you're really connecting with them? Well, for starters, don't do what I'm doing right now. I'm looking at the screen and other people don't look at a script over here. And you're talking points thinking, oh, I'll get it just right. You want to look at the camera because if you're not looking at the camera, your audience is going to feel like this person is ignoring me. If you're looking at them, maybe you're looking at them in the eyes, they're going to feel like you're ignoring them, which means they are going to be motivated to ignore you by checking email, checking text, checking sports course checking, oh, I've got a WhatsApp mess. They're going to ignore you. You don't want to give people an opportunity to ignore you. You don't want them to feel left out. So even though the person who's talking to you or the audience is going to be on a screen, maybe down here, over here, you want to look at the camera like you're talking to one person. Now, here's the challenge for most people. If you're not used to looking at a camera, the natural thing to do, and everyone says act natural, the natural thing to do is to do this. Well, I'm glad all of you are here today. In today's session, I'm going to be talking about. You see what I just did there? My head froze. When your head freezes, your vocal cords will freeze. You'll actually become monotone. You will look scared, stiff, nervous, uncomfortable, and it's not going to come across well. So you have to actually practice moving your head and moving your body. You want your hands to move a little. And so often, if people are not that comfortable, let's say it's a job interview, or let's say it's a webinar and you're talking to a hundred important clients, the tendency is to think, oh, I want to be professional and not do anything distracting and squirm in my chair. So you freeze your body, you freeze your hands, you freeze your face. And now you look like you're a part of a hostage video. So you don't want to do that. So instead, you've got to practice moving your head a little. When you're looking at the camera. And you want to move your body a little, you want to move your hands a little. Now here's an advanced tip. You'll come across even better if you look at the lens. Now, I happen to have a big lens. It's about that big. You may have a tiny pinhole of a webcam. I want you to think of your camera as almost like a face where there's like three inches around it, I guess the three inches across and. And have your eyes go back and forth just a little bit. Because if you're looking in one spot, right in the absolute middle, sometimes it gives your eyes a glassy look, a frozen look. Whereas if your eyes are going back and forth just a couple of inches, it doesn't make you look as frozen or as stiff now. But what you don't want to do is quick eye movement. My next point is. And glancing down or. I'm glad you asked that. If I'm looking up quickly, it looks like, oh, I don't know what I'm talking about. Let me just make up something. It's okay to glance down occasionally. I like to keep some notes for a longer presentation right in front of me. But I'm not going to be looking at the camera directly. I'm not going to do that. So I'm going to finish a thought and think. So why? Where do we go from here? And then I just looked at message point four, and I can go on. So I want it to be natural with my head movement occasionally, like I'm thinking, reflecting. And now I just looked at message point five. That's much More effective than the quick eye darts. Now, the worst of all is people who think, oh, I'm going to be cute and clever. I'm going to have my script right next to the lens. No one will notice. Here's the problem. If you're glancing at a script just occasionally, not reading the whole thing. But if you think, let me put all my bullet points right next to the camera, taping it on the wall, taping it on your laptop screen, you'll never notice. Even if you have a video up in front of you of how you appear, you'll never see your eyes move. Because right now I can do this and think, oh wow, I'm telling you all the correct points of how to look good on camera. I don't see my eyes moving at all because by the time my eyes have moved to look at the image on the screen, I'm no longer moving them anymore. So for me it looks fine. But to you, I look shifty eyed. Literally shifty eyed. What's the one thing people are taught in every culture in the world? Don't trust shifty eyed people. So you do not want your eyes shifting back and forth to a script, whether it's here or above the camera or down here. Again, the exception is if you have just simple bullet points to occasionally glance down in conjunction with head movement pausing, no one will notice. They won't even know or think that you're having notes. It will seem natural. So that is the most effective way to use your eyes and to look at a camera when speaking to people on camera. Okay, so that is that segment Tic. Did that make sense? Let's bring tic back on and see if it had any comments of that and any suggestions for how I can improve, frankly, because I do want to do a short version of that in just a moment that can be relevant to people. And Dick, you want to come back on and join us.

If I want to become a public speaker.

Hey, I apologize. We go to the next question though. Was that helpful what I said about the eye contact?

Yes, that was quite interesting.

Is there anything else you want to know about eye contact before? Because I want to do a short version of that before we go to the next question. Is that fair?

But I want to ask you, when we are looking into the camera, then we don't notice how we are looking in the video. So how will we know how, how our body is looking? Because our focus is on the camera.

Fantastic question. Time out on that. Let me answer the first one in a short form format. The previous question so I can capture it. Because again, the questions you're asking are really highly relevant to a billion people across the globe because there's what, three and a half billion people on the Internet these days? Everyone has an opportunity to communicate on video for the most part because webcams are built in to almost every device these days. So let me answer that. And so I'm going to do this as a short form video. I'm going to take you off and then we'll come back to the question you just asked. But, but I'm good at thinking about one thing at a time and going into depth on that rather than. Okay, here's a five part question. So again, the previous question, so make sure I didn't forget the previous question is about where to look on camera. Or did it was that two questions ago? Maybe I'm getting tied up. Go ahead and put your mic on. What was, what was the long video I just did a moment ago?

I think it was about where to look when you are making a video. And you said you should look into the camera directly.

Yeah. All right, so let me do that a short form right now. And typically for the shorts I do that other camera angle, but for that one I am going to do it right here. So let me do that a short form right now, but I'll just leave you on. Okay. All right, So where do you look when you're giving a presentation on camera? Should you look at the person on the screen so you can tell what they're saying? Should you look at the script next to the camera? No, you want to look right at the camera. If you look anyplace else, people will feel like you're ignoring them, that they're somehow boring you and they are going to ignore you by staring at their cell phone or doing something else. So when you are talking online, look right in the camera. Okay, now let's go to your next question. Tick and we'll, we'll go ahead and bring you back on screen. And if you want to go ahead and unmute yourself.

My next question was when you are looking directly into the camera, then how will you focus on your body? How will we know our body is performing well or not or we are perfectly using our body language and all things so.

Okay, so let me do, let me answer that one. I'm going to take you off. Thank you for muting. You've heard experts like me say look at the camera when you're speaking to people online. But the question then is how do you Know what you look like? How do you know your tie's not crooked or you're way out of frame? The answer is you check yourself out before the call started. Look at it when there's no one else looking to you to learn from you. Figure out, is my head where I want it, almost touching? Am I more or less in the center of the screen? Is the light the right way I want? Am I more or less straight? Is the camera crooked or straight? You want to do that in advance. So. So once you've started your online presentation, your online video call, your zoom, you don't have to look at yourself. Instead you can focus on the camera when you are speaking. That's the most effective way to come across your best. Okay, so that one I'm only going to do as a short. I don't, I guess I don't have enough ending to do with that as a traditional long form 8 minute YouTube video, but I think that one was probably under 60 seconds. So we'll use that as a short. Great. So tick, did you have a and quick program note? In a little while, half an hour or so, I will be giving a demonstration on how to make Amazon influencer videos. So I won't be talking about it, it won't be theory. You'll actually see me making the videos, soup to nuts, selecting a product, figuring out what to say, scripting it in my own mind, recording it, uploading it, tagging it, titling it, submitting it. It's not that complicated. But there are a lot of little steps and unfortunately a lot of people let any one of those steps be a roadblock and it keeps them from ever joining in the first place. So part of why I'm doing this is I want to show you how relatively easy it is to do. And for the parts that aren't easy, I want to demystify almost anything. And this is not an original insight on my part, but almost anything in life is fairly easy to do and simple if you really break it down one step at a time and focus on one thing at a time and then you go to the next step and you do it one step at a time. Almost anything is simple and making videos can be that way as well. So get ready for that if you have questions about being an influencer. I am not the world's greatest influencer. I make most of my money by doing traditional in person training, live trainings, live speeches, and selling online video based courses. So I'm relatively new into this game of being an influencer and Making money from brands, either directly or indirectly through affiliate advertising. The reason I'm into this now is, is for so many years people have come to me and said, tj, I love speaking, but I don't like the gatekeepers of having to knock on doors begging to speak to the Rotary Club or the Textile Convention and get in front of people. They also say, I don't like starting a YouTube channel from scratch with no audience and trying to bang on doors to get advertisers to give me some little piece of money. So what's fascinating about the Amazon Influencer program is it essentially eliminates both sets of gatekeepers. Now, you first have to get in, so there's a little bit of a gate there, but it's pretty easy to get in to the Amazon Influencer Program once you're in. They are now giving you an audience. They put your videos. It's not guaranteed, but they put your videos on, on the product page when people go to Amazon. So they see it that way. You're not having to build your own audience. The other thing is you can decide to associate yourself with any product sold on Amazon. So you don't have to call the manufacturer, beg for a meeting, send them demo tapes, bombard them with phone calls just to get a meeting to be associated with them. No, you just one click, you're associated with any company that is a part of the Amazon Influencer program on Amazon. From my experience, most people who sell their products on Amazon, and these days that's pretty much every major manufacturer in the world, has said, okay, we're happy to let Amazon Influencer videos appear on our product page. Now, they do have the right to say, nope, we don't want that. We're only going to show videos that we have made internally. As a corporation, I do not have the data on how many are doing that. But from what I've seen, for the most part, the vast majority of corporations take the attitude of, hey, if. If people who actually bought our product and use it want to tell people in their own own words, that's fantastic. That's the best advertising of all. That's really authentic. So it eliminates that gatekeeper. And that's why I'm so excited about it and want to share this opportunity with others. Because there are a lot of people who would be very comfortable sharing for 15 seconds, 30 seconds a minute about why they like a product, why it helped them enhance their life, and why other people might like it, who just don't ever want to make a 1 hour, 5 hour, 30 hour online course. I get it. Not everyone wants to blab on and on like I do. That's fine. And that's why I think it is exciting, this opportunity for Amazon and then that can open the door to influencing for Walmart and TikTok and all these other places. Okay. My dick says my Internet pack has over. I don't know if that's overcharged or overused. Anyway, we're so happy you could join us. Regardless, thank you for those fantastic questions. I think I've now answered all your questions. If I missed one, feel free that my pocket square is popping back. I'm trying to keep that down in place. A little housekeeping mattered, I think it was. Madam was nice enough to say, gosh, great that you share all this stuff without charging us for free. Kind of. Why do you do it again? I think there should be a win win here for everyone. Gary Vaynerchuk has the expression of, you know, jab, jab, jab, hook something to the extent of you're giving people a whole lot of value 10 times and then, you know, one out of 10 times you ask them for something, whether he wants people to buy his book or recommend something or like something. And I try to do the same thing the vast majority of the time I'm speaking. If you've been nice enough to come here, I want you to feel like you're really learning and getting a benefit. But every once in a while I will ask you to do something. I might ask you to like this video, to share this video to sign up for notifications to hit subscribe. I would prefer you subscribe on YouTube and then any other channel if you're on coming from Twitch or from LinkedIn or any place like that. Follow me. I would very much prefer that, but I have other things that I have an interest in. You may have heard me talk about my app, Ultimize. Please go to any app store and download Ultimize 2, which is the newest version of my habits building app, which can help you not only with communication skills, but habits that will help you in every other aspect of your life. Adam has joined us. How are you today? Thanks for leaving comments earlier, but thank you now for actually joining us live. If you want to turn your camera on, you can, but you don't have to. You could just speak and use the audio part. What's on your mind today?

Hello. How you doing?

Great.

So I was the 7x on Twitch.

Yes, yes, thank you so much for identifying you were coming in on Twitch I believe, yes.

I'm not gonna take much of your time, but I just want to say I was in your stream, I think for like 20 minutes, got great value.

Thank you.

Absolutely. So. And I sub to your YouTube, by the way, followed on Twitch as well. We'll definitely check other socials and yeah, I think by following you more, I think I can get more value. Another thing that I want to ask.

Is, I apologize, I want to answer any question you have in detail, but I want to have a conversation so we can each learn here. And I want to sort of practice what I preach because one of the things I do preach to people about all the time is anytime you speak, whether it's an in person presentation online, someone might come up and say, hey, I got value out of that. It was great, it was wonderful. Most of the time we just say, oh, thanks, thanks a lot. It's a lost opportunity. The best thing to do is to then follow up and say, thank you. Can you tell me what specifically resonated? What would you tell someone here who wanted to come and couldn't come that they missed out? What message, story example resonated? So let me do that with you because this lets me know, am I really doing anything right? Because if you just tell me, oh, it was great, but you can't tell me anything, that doesn't mean you failed. It means I failed. So if you don't mind, what, if anything, did I say that was valuable to you in the last 20 minutes?

Great. So on the part of how to be a better storyteller, I really looked at both your long explanation and the short one for your YouTube shorts. And the short one really stood out to me because, yes, there are people out there who write and, you know, just work so much hard on their storyteller, whether they're making a YouTube script or whatever, they're really working hard and putting effort in it. But there are other people who are much, far influential and the only thing they do is that they simply analyze themselves. So correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's what you said.

Well, it. For the most part, yes. It's not just analyze themselves. They're simply shooting, sharing and reliving an experience they had. And that's really the easiest way to tell stories. Well, I appreciate your feedback. Thanks so much. Now, I wanted to. Oh, and I do have one question for you, but it's your turn first. Go ahead and ask your question.

Yeah, I was just going to ask, how long have you been in this, like, communication expert Few.

I did my first news broadcast in September of 1975.

Oh, wow.

Which all that really means is I'm very old now. That's a slight exaggeration.

Not really. I think. I think you're barely 50.

Well, I am 61. I'll be 62 in December. But when I was 12 years old, I won a contest at school and I got to do the newscast the next day for my junior high school when I was in seventh grade. So that, that literally was in 1975. So we're coming up on half of a century. I did my first sort of media training for a congressional candidate I worked for in 1984. So it has been 40 years. So it's. It's been quite a while. The fascinating thing is the world constantly changes. Obviously we didn't have social media or Twitch or YouTube 40 years ago, but so many things are exactly the same if you are frozen and stiff and trying to memorize or read to people. It was horrible 40 years ago and didn't work. It's also horrible and doesn't work today. So there are some things that are exactly the same, but other things are very different. Like I didn't have to train people on how to give a great virtual keynote speaker speech 30 years ago. No one was doing that.

I think communication is a great skill that will not be like some jobs, like by time it will be expired or no one will like replace it. Because if you know how to communicate with people, you can literally use words to put certain, like, I don't know how to describe it, but you can literally get. Give any sort of message you can. Like, you can do anything with words.

Sure.

I don't know if I described this well, but yeah, like, communication is one of the most important things, I think. And so you choosing that field in the age of 12 is fascinating.

Well, it's definitely something that is helpful in any field because when you look at the leader of any organization, it doesn't matter if you're a political leader, the head of a country, it doesn't matter if you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the founder of a startup. What do all those people have in common? It's that they actually spend 90% of their day communicating by speaking. They're not spending their time the CEO of a huge company. Other people are doing the accounting, other people are editing ads, other people are doing the software development. You're having to speak all day long to investors, the biggest customers, stakeholders, the media. You're having to speak all the time vendors. If you're a founder, if you're a startup founder, you're having to spend all your time speaking to people you're recruiting, speaking to prospective clients, speaking to investors, angel investors, VCs. So the head of any organization has to spend most of their time speaking. So that's why I think you're absolutely right. It's an important skill for anyone who is ambitious. Now, it doesn't mean you couldn't say, well, I'm going to be the world's greatest painter and never speak to anyone. Okay. But even in a world like painting, you think of, you know, some of the most famous painters of the last hundred years. People like Salvador Dali, who was famous. He had a lot of great artwork. I'm a fan of his art. But he also became famous because he was speaking on talk shows. Same with writers. A lot of writers say, I just want to be left alone and. Right. But many of the most famous writers, they're going to spend two months of every year on a book tour, going on every talk show and taking every speaking engagement they can touch to bring in a community of people who will know about them to buy their books. So I would argue in virtually any and every field, any career, you simply gain more options and gain more opportunity the more you are good at communicating. Where are you from today? How did you find, how did you find this channel and where are you based?

I'm from Egypt and I accidentally found this, this stream by like looking at Twitch talks and podcast section and can you tell me very accident.

Can you tell me and some of our audience, maybe most people know more than I do, tell us what Twitch is all about. I've heard it's for gamers a lot. I personally have spent almost no time on Twitch. I take the attitude of, you know, the more eyeballs I can reach and ears to help people. Why not? So when I set this broadcast up today, I just hit one click that has a little icon with my face and twitch on it and then I know it's going there, but I don't really know where it is. If someone's left a comment, I don't see it. So I'm not. I know I'm not following best practices. And Twitch, if I'm not wrong, is more about live experiences. Correct? Live streaming, yes. Now, are there videos on demand on Twitch as well? Or is it mostly just for live?

Well, do you want to understand like the overall idea of Twitch or like.

Yes.

Are you talking specifically about. Okay, so Twitch, as you said, is for gamers, people make a living out of it by simply, let's say you're live streaming, regardless of the topic. There are many topics, but it's like, importantly or famously for gamers. Someone can donate within the stream. Someone can give you, like, a sub that I think is, like, worth money. Yeah, it's. It's one of the biggest streaming platforms on earth, I think, and you can reach many people just like you reach me.

And are you on it primarily because you like to do video games or watch other people playing games?

Not really. I'm trying. I'm a creator as well, so I was trying to like, start streaming on Twitch as well, but I accidentally was like, let's browse. Let's see what. What streams are going on. And I accidentally found yours.

Okay. And what topic is where? What do you stream on?

I'm not streaming at the moment I want to, but I. I'm not.

Or what do you create? What is your niche for creation?

So I'm a freelancer, technically a video editor. And my main platform, I think, is Instagram and YouTube. Yes, Instagram and YouTube.

Okay.

I have something called an esports team that is also specialized in video games. I'm not the one playing, but I have, like a team of people who, like, play very competitively because nowadays it's something that people would watch like a sport like football or American football or basketball. People can watch this like people playing video games. And so I took full advantage of that and.

Yeah, great. Well, we. We use a whole team of editors, so feel free to put your name in the mix. I have my contact information on. On all media platform, so send me an email. I. I want to. I want to pick your brain a minute since you are a video editor and test a theory. So let me share my screen a moment because. Because I have a theory, but it's. It's just a theory. When I look at my most popular videos, I want to make sure I don't accidentally hit us into infinity again, which I did the other day. Okay. That is the right one. And I don't even need to share the sound, so I'm going to share this screen. I'm going to turn my camera off for a moment.

Okay.

Okay. So forgive me. I'm going to need to. I'm going to need to share it back. I have a new configuration with my studio here where I'm used to looking at three screens all in front of me. Now I have one right in front of me, but the other two are sort of sideways so let me figure out how to. Let me figure out how to do this a little bit better. I want to share screen, but I think I want to just do a different tab. I think that's what I want to do. Okay. All right. Are you seeing my channel now?

Yes.

Yep. All right, so I want your professional opinion as an editor. I have, I've been putting out, just for five months now, new forms of shorts, short form videos. Do you see this one on the right where it says doing this? That is a video from a speech that's about 15, maybe even 17 years old where I am. I'll play it. Not because I want you to hear it, but it's just. It's old. CEOs and other clients give a presentation and they start. But I'm clearly on a stage. I'm demonstrating, I'm looking down. You see a bit of a. A logo. That's the ama. You see a little bit of a curtain. That video had 7,000 views, whereas the other videos that week, 201 had 2,800. 300, but just so much better than all the others. Here's another one. I mean, all the others are new ones that I've made in the last few months. Do you see the one here? This is the power of storytelling.

Yes.

So that had 2,000 views, and that's about the worst I've done. Here's the one. Be yourself, 2300 views. Whereas the one the same day had 300. And so basically all of my best performing videos here, you see two of them right here. So I'm wearing a suit and tie. This one has 4,500 views. Again, you see me moving and I don't even think we show a crowd shot we occasionally do, but it does. I'm not looking at the camera at all. Okay, I am, but the camera is lower than I am. I do appear to be on a stage. The sound is a little bit. So my theory was, you know, one possibility is simply I'm not as old and ugly there as I am now. And I do have more hair, younger looking, because I'm maybe 45 there. So that's one theory. Another theory I have is that because it is about public speaking, then people like the idea of seeing someone who seems like they're doing the hardest type of public speaking, which is up on stage, and they like the idea of it sort of being a real world scenario and not just yet another guy talking at his desk in his basement or something.

Okay.

So I tried to figure, how can I duplicate that. So this here's a video. Are you seeing the video in the middle now? It says how to avoid biggest mistake. So that video is done very intentionally, trying to mimic what has been successful for me for the last five months and to copy the elements of that of the most successful types of videos, which have been me appearing to be on stage number one. Number two, not looking at the camera, but appearing to be talking to people on stage number three, the camera lower than I am, where I'm sort of elevated and given stature. Four, where there's a curtain behind me, where it does not look like I'm in an office or a studio, but at a regular convention type thing. Five, where I'm wearing a suit and tie and looking professional and not just, again, a guy in a shorts and T shirt pontificating from a home office. So I tried to do that. This is the first one we've done and it has 5,000 views, whereas all the other videos that week only had less than 500. So we're talking about, you know, more than a thousand percent better in person. Let me just play this video because again, this is just me in a room right now where I am now. There's some editing, some clips, but I'm trying to put in more movement. And I'm not looking at the camera, I'm looking down intentionally. So what I don't know yet is have I. Have I figured out the right mix?

I think you sort of do.

Is it. Or is it simply too small a database? And then, you know, the next 10 I do will have 200 views because I don't, I can't go ahead. I can't make myself look like I'm 17 years younger. And if I try to, I'll probably make myself look 20 years older. So I can't do that. But. So that's why I've created this particular angle. And now I see the camera is actually. Oh, I moved the curtain. That's what I did. So that is why I have camera two angle this way. So I'm specifically trying to come up with a question. I'm looking here, which I'm just looking at my bookcase. I'm looking here, which is a potted plant. But camera is lower than I am. And when I'm doing this, I'm intentionally doing short form videos where I'm Speaking less than 60 seconds like this, because I'm trying to capture that same magic that's happened in my short form videos that are all edited from that speech from 17 years ago. Yes, Clearly I don't want to keep mining old footage of me from 17 years ago.

So may I give my opinion?

Now, I want your professional analysis of. Well, the big question is why did those videos do well? And what's, what do I need to be doing now?

Okay, great.

To do it, you know, get at least 5,000 views. And because, I mean, all things being equal, I'd be more comfortable in a T shirt. But if, if I get 10 times more views wearing a suit and tie, okay, I'll wear a suit and tie. So that's why I've been wearing a suit and tie for the last month or so now. Now let me be quiet and listen to you.

Thank you. So here's the thing. For the videos of you from. I think it's. It's been a long time, right? For the videos that 17. Yeah. So the reason this has gone viral is that when people see, oh, that's an old footage, that's something that, you know, it's, it, the way that it looks, it's not some random old guy saying something. No, the guy is on stage and it's, it seems like something people nowadays would want to hear something from 17 years ago or 20 years ago. Right. So. So I think, and also the idea that you're standing on a stage is, is important. Like, people will definitely prefer that you, when you stand on a stage than just talking straight to the camera. But preferably when people see, does this.

Seem like I am? Or can people see this is just a frustration fraud.

No, it seems like you're on a stage. Okay, so people nowadays, when they see something old from 17 years old, 20 years old, they're like, oh, that's interesting. So they stop. And nowadays the attention spam span is, is very, very low that people scroll within half a, half a second. And so when people see videos and they're like, ah, some old guy talking nowadays, let's scroll, you know. But when they see something from 20 years ago, regardless of what's the topic, they stop, they hear at least for three seconds. And that's when you get their attention.

So that's interesting, but that doesn't help me at all create new content. The question is, my goal now is to create. How do I create new content that gets the same audience the same number of views or more than that old stuff? Because it, you know, I would put in that old stuff like one out of every 15 videos the previous four months. And every time audience way up for the old stuff way down the next day. And what I'D like to figure out is how can I keep it up regularly? Because I've run out. I've run out of the old stuff footage. So I can't just magically create more old stuff.

I know. So here's. How can I help you? I've been into video editing for about almost three years, and I don't know if I can share my screen here. Hopefully I can.

Yeah, I think so. You should be able to.

If you give me one second.

It may ask me to give permission, but I'm happy to do so.

Thank you. Okay, so share screen. Yep. Okay, so I'm going to just select a tab. Give me a sec. All right.

While you're doing that, I'm going to make some preparations, getting ready for the Amazon Influencer segment that we're going to do relatively soon.

I just. Here you go. Right.

I'm not seeing anything. Okay, now I'm seeing it, so I have to add it. And now. Okay, so now we're seeing.

This is me. Let me show you a video, for example. This is my portfolio. This is my level of editing. This is music. But I don't think.

Well, unless you hit the two different tabs, it won't share the audio.

Okay.

And I'm gonna hit enlarge on my side so I can see it. Now, if you want to share audio, you just need to stop sharing and then go back and then there's two little tabs you have to put at the bottom where we could, we could hear the audio.

So can you hear the audio right now?

No, you would have to stop the share and start the process again. And there's a little tab at the bottom you're going to have to hit, I believe, twice in order to share the audio. So if you want to start over again, you'll just need to hit stop share. Okay, I'm happy to do that. We have the time. This is important stuff.

Okay, well, I don't think this is like my first time on streamyard. So until I figure this, this out, let me just stop sharing for a moment.

Yes.

Okay. So overall, I have the skills necessary. So regardless of. You're sitting on an office, you're. You're in a. You're in a stage. I have the skills necessary. A good editor, regardless of me or like anyone else, a good editor has the ability to catch the attention of audience and make sure that your important topic, which, what you're doing, like your videos are absolutely, absolutely has value. And so my job as an editor is to just improve the way this value is getting transferred to the people. I hope I said this well. My English is not that good.

No, your English is excellent. So I'm going to respectfully disagree with your. Your English is excellent. I understand you perfectly. Your vocabulary is great. Energy, voice, volume, speed is all excellent. So you have fine communication skills.

Thank you.

Because I don't know much about editing, but I do know about communication. Here's my challenge for you. And again, I hope I've given you some value today. I'm happy to answer other questions, but I would like your feedback because here's been my central challenge since I Since I started making videos on YouTube, I would look at people I considered competitors of sorts. The Dale Carnegie Organization, well known public speaking coach from 100 years ago and they're in 70 countries and their YouTube channel typically has almost no views. Toastmasters International, been around for hundred years. Hundreds of thousands of members all over the world getting together to learn how to improve public speaking. I go to their social media platforms, YouTube, Facebook, their view, their videos have almost no views. Other media trainers I know who are successful and make a lot of money and charge a lot and have fancy corporate clients when I've gone to their YouTube channel and places like that, no views. My own content for years, with a few exceptions, really not many views. So I was under the perception that this was a niche that simply was not interesting to people very much. That's kind of like dental flossing. Yeah, everyone knows that you need to floss your teeth, but no one wants to hear again and again and again about more ways of flossing your teeth. So I kind of psyched myself out and convinced myself that, you know what, I'll put up a video, an old video once a week just for SEO. But I'm not really going to spend any time or energy trying to build an audience. And then last summer I started doing some research and lo and behold, I found people who had huge, huge audiences. Now they're very rare, but there's one person in particular, and I'm saying this in total respect, I really have respect for this guy. But it changed. It completely changed my whole. It blew my mind away. It changed my whole perception and made me realize I was just an old guy looking at old people. And there's a whole new wave of people who are making content in a compelling, compelling way. So let me share with you a screen because I want your analysis of a particular person. And you know, I'm very happy if anyone tells him I'm doing this because it's out of absolute respect that he is far, far and away more successful than anyone else in the communication space. His name is Ben J. And familiar with them.

Yes.

So to his credit, he's funny. He's been, he's been a comedian, he has showmanship. He's a pro. He's been a professional magician. So there's. He's young, he's got a great head of hair. He's only in his 30s, but not. But. And he's wildly successful. Now you look at his Data, he's had 7 million views in the last month, and that's down 50% of what he was doing. When I look at his data over the last six months. Again, this is all public information. I'm not violating anyone's reality. Yes, when you look at the data. Well, now it's not showing it, but it, it was like a hundred million views he had over six months. I mean, so he was getting like six months ago, eight months. He was getting like 30 million views more a month just on YouTube. Interestingly, he's violating every single rule. All the YouTube experts say say so. For example, his, his YouTube videos, I mean, the, the, the dominant experts on YouTube say, well, your YouTube video needs to be at least eight minutes long. It, of course it has to be horizontal. Well, here's one. It's. And this is fairly typical. It's only a minute and 27 seconds long. It's vertical. It's got 11,000 views. It's wildly successful.

If I may ask. Sorry for interrupting. If I may ask, who was the YouTube expert that kind of gave you the advice?

I mean, I go to all of them. I mean, you can, I mean, I mean, I've paid for the program from Think Media, Sean Cannell. But Ali Abdaal, I mean, I've been signing Letter Doozy. I've been to a million of their websites and they all kind of say, if you want a successful YouTube channel and you're doing your. You can have a strategy for shorts, you can have a strategy for longs. Your long videos need to be at least eight minutes. Trigger the algorithm. And YouTube likes people on longer. You need it longer for. To be attractive to advertising. And if it's going to be a long video, you're much better off with it being horizontal. Vertical is good for shorts. But here, here we have his most popular videos and they're just reused videos from Instagram from as far as I can. Again, this is not meant to be a criticism to him. I have tremendous professional respect for him. And he does give good advice. So here's one. It's a minute and 17 seconds, 2.2 million views. Here's another one. 743, 000 views. It's a vertical. Here's another one. Now, interestingly, his shorts are much more successful than his longs because when you look at his most popular short videos, he has 47 million on that one. That's a bit of an aberration, but 15 million, 10 million, 8 million he has. Last time I counted, he has like more than two dozen videos that are shorts that all have more than a million views. The other interesting, fascinating thing about him.

Is.

This isn't even one of his most successful social media platforms. If you look at him on Instagram and Tick Tock and Facebook, he has even more subscribers there.

Yeah.

So on, on Instagram, 3.4 million followers, just, you know, insane numbers of viewership. So he's easily reaching more than a million people a day. TikTok, he's killing it. He's at 1.8 million followers on TikTok. So this is what, frankly, what opened my eyes and changed my whole perspective because I began to think that, you know, again, no disrespect to him, but my thinking is like, if this Guy can reach 30 million people a month, which certainly appears to be doing shame on me if I can't reach a million people a month.

You can reach more.

You can reach more. Generally, you can, you can reach more.

So that's when I decided, you know, let me really focus on this YouTube thing and social media thing. So, so beginning of September, September 5th is when I really kind of relaunched and went from just doing throwing up one old video that an assistant would pull out from an old YouTube Udemy course and throwing it up once a week, not even paying attention to actually producing new content. We started off doing one short form video per day, one long video per week. And after about a month, we escalated that to two shorts a day, one long a day. Then we escalated to going live once a month. Excuse me, once a week. And then we escalated to doing live once a day as of the last couple of weeks now we're still working out the kinks, still trying to figure out the lighting. And like even now I see I did something where my lights are turning off in the middle of things. So I'm turning the lights back on.

It's, it's very good. The lighting is very good. I, I wanted to comment on that and say that like, there are people who are reaching millions, but that have the same setup as you. So. So you can generally reach more people. You just need content strategy and good editing.

Yeah.

And I think I can help you with that.

Great. I would love to hear from you. I mean, feel. You can see my emails are right there on all the. On, well, easiest one. You'll see it right there on the. The about section on my YouTube page. So send it to me. We have to switch gears because my videographer, who's also my wife, has just walked in. We're going to do live product demonstrations of creating Amazon influencer ads right now while I have her and she's nice enough to help out. But please give me your assessment because I know I have a lot to learn. I also know that I do have a deep reservoir of expertise that people around the world want and need and appreciate. And I already have 2 million online students on just one platform of udemy. And I have millions and millions and millions of minutes of people watching my content on that platform. I've got to somehow figure out how to make it work on this platform of YouTube and other social media platforms. But I know it can be done. I just haven't figured it out yet. So any thoughts you have would be very much appreciated. Faye, thanks so much. We got to switch gears now.

Yes, I understand.

Absolutely. But thanks. I'll be looking for your email and let me just add tick for any final comments you have. And then we're going to switch over to making these Amazon influencers videos.

I will definitely contact you through email and Instagram if you like.

You know, I'll never see it on Instagram. I just haven't mastered it. The best way is going to be through email.

No worries. I think you and I can reach more people than the guy that you showed me. I. I'm not familiar with the name, can't say it, but the guy that you showed, I think we can reach far more people.

Okay.

You just need a plan and you need someone who can help you execute the plan. And I think I can. I can very much help you.

Okay, well, thanks. So I'll definitely look carefully. Hey, I've got to go now, so thanks so much. Appreciate it. Feel free to stay in and watch that. We'd love to have you. Okay. And Tick, did you have any final comments before? I see you're talking about the thumbnails. I'm. I'm the least graphically int insightful person in the world. Plus, I'm colorblind. I do have a team that makes thumbnails. I certainly know that they could be better. I've got to think about how to do that. If you have any suggestions or specifics, I'm open to it. Did you have any. You should take a TED Talk video and break. Break down in your video with everything like body language and all other sorts in your YouTube channel. It's something I've done before and I think you can. If you search my long form videos, you'll see that one of the fact. Let's just take a look at that for one moment and Joanne, Will, we're going to start this in a moment because that is something I did and I got to tell you, I wasn't particularly happy with the viewership, frankly, because I put a lot of time into it. I'm still thinking of doing a regular feature, if not daily, at least weekly on analyzing a top TED Talk speech, doing exactly what you've talked about. But let me just pull up from my channel and ask you to look at it. This was maybe three months ago where I did something the effect of Top Secrets of big time, you know, YouTube stars. And it got. And that was back when we were doing just one video a week. So we spent extra time promoting it, newsletters, things like that. I. I've got to go back a few months and because I would love to get your assessment of it. I believe it. Here we go. Perfect TED speech. Perfect TED speech Start. Brene Brown's secrets on how to start a speech got fewer than a thousand views. And I gotta tell you, a lot of time and effort was spent editing it, shooting it, producing it. So I would ask you to take a look at that and tell me what you think. Okay, we got to switch gears now. I appreciate everyone joining us and you're more than welcome to stay in, but right now we are going to make some Amazon influencer video. Oh, careful not to step on that. There's things inside there. On the screen. It's so divine. Okay. My wife is giving me suggestions on changing the curtain that you want more of the plain. Yeah, one more plane. Because I want this to clear the angle. Just. You know what? That's. You can easily. Right here. Yeah. Okay. All right. We're just changing the background. And again, appreciate those of you who are with us live. We do try to come live every single day. We're still working out the. The general schedule and working on the set. It's a work in progress. And rather than wait until everything is perfect, we decided to go ahead and just show you as it is to help you learn as we go. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and set up the, the microphone system again for Amazon Influencer. We do everything right on a cell phone. It's just much easier to quickly upload it and get it into the system with Amazon. So I'm plugging in a microphone that does boost the quality. It's not the microphone you hear me on now, but it's still a big improvement over just the built in microphone. So I put the receiver in the phone. This is the microphone that goes with it. I hit the button on and want to see a green light. That means it's working. And then I just plug it right on. Okay. I'm going to give the camera to my wife and why don't we do the shoes? I'm going to take one of my shoes off. Okay, so we'll go ahead and. And yes, believe it or not, I am wearing a pickleball athletic shoe while wearing a suit. I wouldn't wear this out in public, but this is what I'm wearing today in the studio. Right. Okay. And I realize I'm not quite framed for you, but I can't use camera one because my wife is standing with a camera right in front of it. So the first thing we're doing is taking a vertical picture and she's just standing in front of me taking the picture of the product. You know, one thing I think if they, if we have less of, I can even turn that light off. It's too glary with the blue because I have noticed in some of the photos it does seem a little bit weird that there's this, these lights floating up. So now we've taken a horizontal picture. Now the first thing we'll do is take a 15 second vertical video of this testimonial product review that can be used for Amazon, Amazon Inspire. It could go in a lot of other places. Oh, you didn't take the horizontal yet. Okay, we're taking. Now. We try to do these quickly, but we don't want pictures that are so awful. Like when my eyes close and unfortunately I blink more than the average person does. So we have to sort of delete those and take others. But, but so what we're after now is just two photos. So we just see it in line, boom, boom, boom, upload it. We don't have to use any extra discretion. I'm not using any editing features for these pictures. Is that necessarily the best practice? No, it is what I'm doing. Same with the video. We're not doing any editing on the videos, we're shooting it once uploading it. My goal is less little different from others. I saw on a Reddit thread just the other day. People were saying they spent on average between two hours and two days making a video for Amazon. I'm trying to do 15 in an hour. So it's a different strategy. Not saying it's better or worse. Okay, we're ready for the video.

3, 2, 1.

If you want comfort and stability and support in a pickleball shoe, this is the shoe for you. I bought numerous pairs and I'll always buy this pair. So that's the short 15 second I want to be at.15 seconds or less is what I found. Works really well on Amazon and gives them a lot of flexibility.

3, 2, 1.

I try to play pickleball every single day. It's great exercise, it's a lot of fun. And this is the shoe, the K Swiss pickleball shoe. It gives me support, it's comfortable, it's durable, and it really, I think, helps my game. Certainly makes me feel better. And it's a very reliable shoe. Again, is that the best perfect marketing? Would someone script it like that? No, I'm simply sharing what I like about a product. Now we're going to do a longer one and this one I am going to ask you to go down and see the other one. Okay.

Three, two, one.

I really got into pickleball a couple of years ago and my tennis shoes just weren't going to cut it. So I googled what's the most comfortable pickleball shoe and one that gives you the most support. And this is what came up, the K Swiss pickleball shoe. And I used it, loved it. But I'm not really a shoe guy, so I forgot about the brand. The shoe wore out, and I thought, what do I do? And I googled what's the most comfortable, most supportive pickleball shoe? Again, it popped up. So now this is the only one I buy. I try to put it on every day when I play pickleball, but here's a secret. Look what I'm wearing right now. I have to stand on my feet all day long as the host of the TJ Walker Success show on YouTube. And these are simply much more comfortable than dress shoes. So I like to use these for casual wear and I wouldn't go out to a black tie event in them, but if no one else can see, see, I wear them even when I'm wearing a suit. But you're going to want to use these and wear These anytime you're on a pickleball court. Okay. So I try to weave in a little more personal. I got to put this shoe back on now. Weave in a little personality, put in a little bit of flair for a longer one for variety. And I'm going to sit down and attach, put my shoe on again. And some of you have heard me see and. And you've seen me talk about I wear Crocs. I do. Careful, got wires there. I mean, I do typically wear Crocs during the day, but sometimes I do in fact wear these shoes. And yeah, they really are comfortable. So let me go ahead and tie this a minute here. Time to shoot. We'll get ready with the next product. So if you're keeping count, that's five ads we've just made. Three videos, two pictures, one product. What. What I've come up with, sort of for my own natural rhythm is I found it's kind of easy to just quickly do five products in one batch. Then I upload them all and I'll. I'll walk you through how I do that. And it's just. To me, it's an easy. It's not so intimidating, like saying, I got to do 100 products today. But it's also accomplishes so much more than if I just did one for the day and then the next day did one. I don't think that would create the. The bulk volume I'm really after. Okay, next product. It. Wait, I'm sorry, did you take both pictures? Okay, sorry. My family and I love these beach towels. They're so light. We live at the beach, we go to the beach, but the last thing we want are big, heavy towels that weigh everything down. This is so light. It dries quickly. How long was that? I'm trying to get under 15 for the short. Was that long or how many seconds was that? 14 seconds? 14 seconds. Not perfect all the time. But that time I was. Now let's do. We didn't actually do an audio check. What I try to do each day is the first time we make a video, play it back to make sure the mic was on and connecting properly. Let's just do a quick. Okay, so the audio is fine. Now we're going to go to the second video. This will be the horizontal video, which is. We're trying to get to at least 30 seconds.

Three, two, one.

This beach town is so light. It still gets me dry, but sorry.

Yeah, it was a press the.

Okay. So I make the mistakes most of the time, in which case we just Hit delete and go over. But that time, same mistake I've made before, too, which is you think you're hitting the video record button and it was on photo. We only lost two seconds, so it doesn't matter. So we'll do it again. My family and I love these beach towels. It's so light now. It still drives me. It's great coming out of the ocean, coming out of the pool. But what's nice about it being this light is it dries so quickly. There's nothing worse than having the typical beach towel that's so heavy, it's burdensome even bringing it home. And it takes three days to dry. These towels are so light, you can throw three of them, four of them in a beach bag and it's easy to carry home. You spread them out and it dries easily and quickly after the fact that that's why we have not one, but half a dozen of these beach towels. Okay. Yeah. How many seconds was that one? 37. 37 seconds. So that's kind of a length I like for the horizontal videos. Now we're going to do a more expansive one where I say, really anything and everything. Again, I don't know which video, if any, will get on product page. That is typically where you're likely to make more money if people can see it. If they can't see it, you don't make any money. So now we'll do a longer one. My family and I love these beach towels. It's light and yet it's still huge. We live at the beach in Florida. We go to the beach frequently. We go to the pool frequently. And yeah, we need beach towels, but what we don't want is them to be so heavy that, you know, stranger back, just walking home with a beach bag. These are light and what we really like is that they dry so quickly. They're thin, so you just throw them over a rail on the steps and it's dry within a few hours. It's not the typical beach towel that's so heavy. Three days later, they're still wet. So it's versatile. They last really a long time. We have not one, two or three, but we have half a dozen of these. They're really flexible, light and useful. If you're looking for a beach towel that is not going to weigh you down that dries quickly, this is the one for you. So again, if you're joining me for the first time, I haven't written these in advance. I'm not using a teleprompter. These Aren't scripted. It's just me sharing how I feel about something. I genuinely. Everything I'm saying. I do believe the. I do like these beach house. My wife likes these beach towels. That's why we're sharing them. Okay. That was the second or third product we've got. Sometimes it's easy to lose count. Was that the second one, John?

Yeah, the second one.

Okay. Just got these. Now, this is a category. This is a slightly different category. I seriously doubt I'll make any money from this. Who needs to really watch a video describing batteries? But what I'm trying to do is sort of set a precedent in my own family as just a standard operating procedure is if I buy something, I'm already spending money on it. I like it, it works well, I might as well do a video sharing my experience, even if I don't expect a big payday. So these are batteries, Duracell batteries. I don't know if it's. I'm not going to say it's better than all the other batteries. I'm not going to make any unsubstantiated changes. But we do typically buy Duracell batteries. They do work well. I did just buy them. I'm using them now. And so it just. Nothing else. It gives me more practice talking about how to market something. So that's why I'm doing it. But it's a little different than some. Like these shoes, I'm really pretty passionate about. I'm not as passionate about the batteries, but I'm not going to act like I am. The pictures just took the vertical. Now we're taking the horizontal. Oh, hang on. I think the thing is slid back. It's covering. There wasn't all the way. Okay. By the way, I have the new iPhone 15 Pro Max. The lenses pop out more, so the case that protects it has a sliding shield to cover that. So it's a little bit different. Okay. Sometimes you want absolute reliability for your power source. That's why my family and I like the Duracell batteries. We buy them entire packets at a time because we have so many lights and other gadgets that require batteries. Okay, again, is that the most insightful, brilliant testimonial? No, but it's just sort of straightforward. Kind of a plain vanilla ad, I would say. Now we're going to do the horizontal.

3, 2, 1.

Like anyone else, I like a bargain and go for other brands from time to time that I've never heard of. But when it comes to batteries things, I need to really work where I need the power. I like to stick with something reliable. Duracell is a brand I trust. We buy packets of batteries in bulk, so we always have the power we need. That one was less than 30 seconds. But again, I'm not expecting some big payday. I'll do one more that's a little bit longer. I trust Duracell batteries. I buy packets at a time. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel, and I broadcast all day long. And some of these lights here require batteries, and I want to make sure they're reliable and they work. Remote controls need batteries. I'm always needing them. And I want to use a battery source I really trust. And that's why I use these Duracell batteries, whether it's for aaa, aa, or other sizes. All right, so again, that's. That's not one of the more exciting ones. Not really expecting some huge payday from that. Okay. But again, I'm sort of taking the attitude if I buy a product, it works and I like it, why not tell other people about it? It. Okay, this is a. This is a relatively new product, and because I've just started projecting it up here, but it's simple, it's very inexpensive. This is the sunset lamp. Oh. And it does have different colors, so I'm going to demonstrate this. But, Joanne, I do want to keep it plugged in, so can you get closer to me? And I'm going to demonstrate different colors for the longer ones, so I'll go ahead and straighten it, I guess. All right. It's a sunset lamp. This sunset lamp really does the job of blue. Got to do it already. It didn't do it fast enough. We got. So that's one I don't typically. No, it's not. Okay. So I don't typically try to actually use the product when I'm giving these because of that very reason. It slows things down. But let me just go ahead and. Maybe I'm too close to it or just not. Well, I guess I won't change the color. It's flickering. You know, this remote is communicating interestingly with the other lights I have. It's not changing the color, but it's flickering them. So we're just not gonna. We're not gonna try to change colors. So doing the first one. Right. The 15 second vertical, this sunset lamp is very versatile. I use it in my TV set right here. It gives me blue, red, green. Simple and efficient. That's all I want for that. Okay, now we'll do a longer One.

3, 2, 1.

This sunset lamp is very versatile. Comes with a great handy remote. I can easily turn it from blue to red to green to white. It's useful for your home, for your office. I use it for my TV set to give a little more depth. You're gonna like this if you want a simple way of creating a little extra light in any room. Now the longer one. This sunset lamp is very versatile. Comes with a handy remote. I can change from blue to red to green very easily. Hi, I'm T.J. with the T.J. walker Success Channel. Every single day, I broadcast around the world on social media from my set right here. And I need a lot of different layers lights. This is one of the lights I use and trust. I can turn the color to blue, red, green, white. It's versatile, it's simple, it's reliable. If you're looking for a light that can accent a room, give it a little more color, give it a little more personality, this is the light for you. All right, now let me see if I can see. I had this on red. I think that it worked a little better. Put this back down. I think I had it. Something like that. Okay. All right. So that's four products. Correct. And I have a whole bunch of video camera boxes and lenses. Those are. Oh, let's do this in the fifth one. Okay. Bubble bath take to start with the picture. Just did the vertical. Now the horizontal.

Okay.

Your kids are going to love this bubble bath. I know my daughter loves it. Nothing. Let's do that one over. Sorry. So again, I. Everybody makes mistakes. Don't feel like you have to do everything great in one take. I think that's the first time I've had to redo today. But what did I lose? A couple of seconds? Let's start over. Queen V or Queen the fifth? The creamy. Yeah.

Three, two, one.

If you like bubble baths, your kid, anyone in your family, this is a great little product. My daughter loves it, my wife loves it. I even love it. Short, simple, and again, it's true.

3, 2, 1.

I got this bubble bath for my daughter. She loves it. It turns any bath into a fun time. My wife enjoys it. And here's a little secret. I enjoy a bubble bath from time to time. It's just much more relaxing. This product is very simple. You pour it in, the water's on, and all of a sudden you're transported into a land of bubbles. And now the long gun. Nothing like bubble bath. This Queen V bubble bath is a big hit in my household. My 10 year old daughter loves it, my wife loves it, and you know what? Even I love it. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel. Part of what I really stress, too, my community is you got to work hard, but you've got to relax more, too. And there's just something about a nice, warm bubble bath. I don't care who you are. It is a more relaxing experience. If you want a simple way of doing it, the Queen V bubble bath will work for you. So again, I'm. This isn't scripted. I'm not saying that's perfect, but it is true. It is real. It is how I share it. Okay, so we started, I believe, at about 10 after 11. Joanne, it's 11:53. So really, we're right about 40 minutes. I'm now going to share with you the rest of the process of uploading it, tagging it, labeling it cat captions. It's a little bit tedious. It's not must see TV. It's not Mr. Beast, but it's a part of the process, and I want to be transparent with you on the process. So I want to say thank you to Joanne for helping out today. Sometimes I do this just myself. You can do it yourself, too. It takes me more time when I have to do it myself. So it is handy to have a family member, friend, colleague holding the camera doing it. But there have been times, and some of you have seen it, where I just put it right here on a tripod and switch the angle like that, and it can be done, too. So if you are a single person living at home, don't feel like, oh, I can't do it. I don't have a team or a staff or a videographer. You don't need that. Okay. All right, so I'm going to lower my desk so I can actually sit down for this part. This is one of those rising desks. We're going to say goodbye to Joanne. Thank you very much. And I'm going to spend a little time with you now, just going through this process and sharing with you exactly how I do it. Not because I think that you couldn't figure it out, but part of why I'm doing this is, is I want you to really see the process all the way through. Because I know, you know, sometimes I'm excited about doing something, but I tell myself I'm not quite sure I know how this works. Is this too hard to do? Well, it's not. If someone shows you step by step by step, exactly what's going on first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take the receiver out of my phone. I don't have to, but in case I forget to charge my mic, I'm going to turn it off now so that I've saved as much battery as possible for tomorrow or in this case, Monday, the next time I do that. Okay, so let's go through this process. First thing I do, let me just get comfortable here with you. It is Friday afternoon. I am wearing a suit and I am in Florida, so it's perhaps arguably overdressed. If you have any questions about this, let me put back to the comment section. We have both private chat and comment section and I see maddav and others have written and some of you have had to tune out, but very much appreciate you being with us today. So again, I'm going to just walk you through, step by step, exactly the process. So the first step was I had to pick a product. I didn't do market research. There are people who really systematically look at all the trends and what's a great product, what's selling the most, the sales velocity of sales. So there can be a real science to that. What I'm doing at this stage of my Amazon Influencer journey is I'm simply picking products that I bought, that I own, that I use, that I like. That's my criteria. That's not necessarily the perfect criteria for maximizing profits, but it's how I've decided to start this journey. Then we took pictures, then we took videos. Now I got to get it onto Amazon. How do I actually do that? So I go to my phone, I pull up the Safari browser. You can use any browser, obviously. I'm going to go to Amazon and I'm going to go to my specific storefront. If you're in the Amazon Influencer program, they give you your own storefront. So I go there, I hit a button to sit, and I would show you, but it's against Amazon's rules to show people the inside of your page if it's not a public page. I don't want to run amiss of their rules because it's their platform, it's their baby. They can kick anyone out anytime they want, really, for any reason. And I want to be respectful of that, not get kicked out for some reason, violating their principles. So I hit Create content. I hit post video, I hit photo library. I now see the first video, which is the last one we just did for that bubble bath. I hit select, I hit done. And this is what takes a few seconds. And each time we do this, I remind myself I need to check my settings to see if I can do a lower quality video because it's. It takes a little bit too long to upload the videos compared to when we did it on the iPhone 14. And the video quality certainly seemed to be the same to my eye. So I'm assuming they've just somehow upped the quality and the storage cost or not cost. The storage usage on the Amazon 15 Pro Max and Tic has joined us. I'll let you join, but I. But I am going to have to get through this process otherwise I'll forget what ads I've done and they'll never go up. So I'm going to go to your orders. Oops, wrong page. And now I'm going to hit the microphone bubble bath. So. Now that's odd because I know I just bought that bubble bath. Let me pull it up on Amazon. This is a relatively new product and I don't know why it didn't show up. So I'm going to put Queen V in it. That's the actual name and tick. If you have a question that is about the Amazon Influencer program, be happy to talk about it, but otherwise I'm going to respectfully ask you to hold the question or to post it on. The best thing frankly would be to post it on the community tab and that way I can get me in the habit of going to that community tab. All right, so I'm going to hit Queen V. Now. It showed up, so I'm tagging the product, hitting done. Now I am doing the title. Bubble Bath for kids and the whole family. Hit. Done. Submit post. So it's being submitted and typically with very few exceptions, it'll be live for anyone in the world to see on my storefront within a few hours and then in a day or two it's often, not always often on the actual product page. Say now we do it again. Content, video, photo library. The video done. It's processing the video. It's now uploading the video. I do want to thank a lot of you have stayed with me the entire time today. I really appreciate that because we're about to go over the three hour mark. My goal is to do roughly three hours a day with you as we go on this journey. Learn from each other and ideally help each other's business and careers. Your order, Queen. So I'm doing now as I'm dictating Queen and then I'm hitting V. If I say Queen B. It translates it into Queen B and it doesn't work work. So the translation mostly saves time, but not always when you're doing things that aren't commonly said in the English language. Now I'm going to dictate the title. Trying to do it without using any contractions because that messes up in the system. In Amazon they don't want you using contractions in your title. But you can forget content descriptions for photos. Big bubbles for a big bubble bath. Fun. So that one I dictated, but then I realized it doesn't quite make sense with that extra A in there. So I went and deleted the A. Go to storefront. So that one's done. I hit video photo library. I go to the third and final video for that product. I hit done. It is processing the video. It is uploading the video and tick. I know you were there and now you're gone. If you do have a question, feel free to share it, especially if it's about the Amazon influencer program. Get your order Queen. Queen. I was too quick in hitting the search so T tag button. Done. Title. Fun with bubbles for the whole family. Again, I have to remind you and myself the way I'm title titling, these is not necessarily best practices you could use. This is the perfect thing if you. If you wanted to use ChatGPT other artificial intelligence to find the absolute maximum converting title. I'm doing this because I am under the belief that for right now, the titles and the captions don't matter as much. For Amazon influencer videos, it's better to have just more videos and ads up there. People are deciding they're looking at videos. They're like the. To. To hop. To tap it. But so I'm just saying the first thing that comes out of my head that relates to this, it's not necessarily best practices for these captions. So now we're going to the pictures. It's unclear to me how often and where the photos are posted and how you gain this. I also frankly don't think that anyone really wants to see bubble bath with a man wearing a suit. It would be more appropriate to see someone, you know, discreetly covered but in an actual bathtub with bubble bath. But I just wasn't going to take that much time for this product, not knowing if I would ever make any sales. Your orders Search Queen. Tag product Done Caption which is different from title bubble bath. That creates a great experience for you and your family. Now, I typically don't second get. I typically don't second guess my Captions. But after looking at that, I'm thinking, does this sound like I'm advocating you take a bubble bath with your entire family? That could strike someone as a little weird. So I believe that's the first time I have. I have edited something that way. So I'm just going to bubble bath. That creates a great experience for you. Done. Go storefront. Create content. Video photo library. Now the horizontal, or excuse me, the vertical. Picture your orders. Clean. Done. Oops. I hit done. But I didn't hit the tag. I have to do that part over. Sometimes I get a little hasty, and that can slow you down rather than speeding you up. Clean, Typed in the V. Hit tag product. Now I hit done. It's there. I'm writing the caption. Turn your bath into a bubbly adventure. Exclamation point. Is that a little silly? Maybe. But I'm not promising a health benefit. I don't really think I'm doing anything that's wildly misrepresentative. So we're going to live with that. Okay. Talking a lot to drink some water. By the way, if you're watching this and you're getting any value out of any of this, thank you for watching number one. Number two, please like the video. Number three, Please leave a comment. Number four, Please subscribe. Number five, Please sign up for notifications. Number six, Please share Share the video. Number seven, Please don't get annoyed with me for asking you to do seven things. Okay, let's go to the next one before I forget. Zach says, can't believe that only one person watching the stream and that person is me. I'm gonna make the change because you deserve millions. Well, thanks a lot by the way you're watching on YouTube. I'm seeing what looks like half a dozen people are watching on different platforms because some people can watch on Twitch, some people can watch on LinkedIn, some people can watch on a couple of my Facebook pages. And we've had a lot of people come in and out for the last three hours, so I'm frankly not really worried about how many are watching anyone's stream. Plus, people can watch this on demand later. Plus, we pull clips of this that are then edited into more polished short form and long form videos. So again, I don't have Mr. Beast numbers, but if you look at all the people who watch me across all the platforms in a typical month, we're not that far away from half a million total views. So I am very encouraged by that. Oh, and. And Adam says he's done all. All. All of those things. So very much appreciate that. Oh, you sent the email. Great. And you say you've done all and I just asked people to do seven things, so thanks a lot for that. All right, let me put this away. So I know that I finished with the bubble bath promotion now then hit post video photo library. Going to the next product. This is the an ad for that light I'm hitting. Done. It's processing the video. It is uploading it. Woodpecker says I posted a comment on your community. Well, Woodpecker, haven't read the comment yet, but thank you so much for posting. I certainly love praise and anything you got to value, but frankly, even negative comments help a channel grow. Certainly not encouraging people to leave nasty comments, but really, any engagement is a good sign and is better than no comments. So thank you very much for doing that. And Woodpecker, if it's not too much work, if you want to share it again here too, that way I can see it and perhaps respond to anything you said. So this is. I'm not supposed to share show you this. Not that it's. I don't mind you seeing it, but Amazon doesn't want you seeing their inside processes for, I guess, competitive reasons. Because they don't. I'm assuming maybe they don't want Walmart to know. So now I am tagging the product. This is the sunset. Sunset lamp. Sunset lamp. Sure enough, it pops up. I'm tagging the product, hitting done. Title dictation. Add color to any wall or room. It was not allowing me to hit submit post. So what happened here? It's a little different. Sometimes it goes to the next page, allows you to title something, but it hasn't finished uploading the video. Now it's uploaded and it's allowing me to submit post. So I'm hitting submit go to storefront. Create content photo OTO library second video. This is the second horizontal video I hit. Done. It's processing the video, it's uploading the video. And as you've no doubt noticed, this is not the most exciting thing in the world. Guess what? Every great job I've ever heard of, there are tedious parts to it. Probably the most tedious job of all is being a movie star. Because you're just sitting around all the time and you're saying the same one sentence for a day or two. Sometimes it's just raise your left eyebrow or raise your right eyebrow and you're doing that over and over again for two days. So a lot of jobs that seem glamorous and you know, being an influencer these days, being a YouTuber, a content creator, is considered to to many to be one of the most glamorous fields out there, and I certainly enjoy it. But there are a lot of tedious cutting and pasting and typing things going on that you have to do. Sunset Lamp so tag Done Title this little lamp will cast a big light in your room or office. Done Submit Go to Storefront Create content Post video Now I go to the short form vertical. This is only 10 seconds. It's processing it, it's uploading the video. It's going to send me to the page in a minute, but that will allow me to text. By the way, if you do have any questions about the Amazon Influencer program, I'll share with you what I know from the perspective of someone who's been in it now about eight weeks. I'm not someone who can say, Well, I make $10 million a month and do everything my way and buy my clothes. That's not me. Maybe one day it will be. But that's not what I am purporting. That's not the expert I'm purporting to have for you today. I'm simply sharing with you my journey as someone who's eight weeks into this process. Sunset Lamp. Tag Done Title Project color onto your walls and room easily. I want to do a quick look to make sure there's no spelling errors or something that didn't get translated the right way. I hit submit Go to storefront Create content Post Post Library photo library and and now I'm going to go to the pictures. I take the picture, Order Sunset lamp. Select Tag Done Caption. Change your room to any color. Well, that doesn't happen very frequently, but I think my voice just croaked. I do recommend when you're giving a speech, even if it's a short one, have some water nearby when you're speaking, even if it's close to one camera, to one person, you're blowing air out your vocal cords dries them out and you could really choke. You could go hoarse. Your voice can crack. Keep your voice lubricated and your vocal cords lubricated. Also, throughout the day, drinking green tea, which you may have seen me do a product advertisement for. Just perhaps it was yesterday, but in the last couple of days I am not drinking coffee and caffeine products and milk or sugar products all day. I try to limit to just water, sparkling water, plain water, which I have another cup for, and green tea is what I try to drink throughout the day. So create content, photo, photo library. And I think I didn't do the final photo for that one. So, yeah, that one doesn't look familiar. So your order. Sunset lamp, Tag product. Done. Caption. A small little lamp that cast a big color throughout your room. Done. I corrected the caption didn't seem quite right. So I just did a quick correction on that. Go to storefront. Okay, so we've now finished the second product, which means we've done a total of 10 ads. This is today. For whatever reason, maybe it's Friday. It's going a little slower than it has in the past. But I do have to share with you, as I talked about maybe an hour ago, I was on a recent Reddit forum devoted to Amazon influencers, and people said they spent on average of 22 hours to 2 days making a single video. We're now just a little more than an hour into this. We've completely done Soup to Nuts 10 ads and we've shot everything for 25. And we're going to try to finish that, I hope, in the next 10 minutes or so. So we create content, video and photo library. Now I'm going to the next product. These are the batteries, and it's processing the video. It is uploading the video. In just a moment, it will ask me to tag it. That should be a pretty easy one. These are Duracell AAA batteries. And again, I want to point out, you might go to a forum of someone who's a really experienced Amazon influencer. Insert. Say, you know, I saw this guy doing a review of batteries. What do you think they might say? That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard of. No one needs to watch a product review about batteries. And they may have a good point. I'm doing this again as just sort of a new practice, a standard operating procedure. And frankly, I'm trying to do something that Jeff Bezos has done at a much larger scale, obviously, where he tries to turn expenses Amazon had into profit centers. If I'm already buying this, it's an expense. If there's a chance I get a couple of sales in, maybe I turned it into a profit center. Your orders. Duracell aaa B. Tag product. Done. Title. Reliable batteries you can count on. So when my voice cracked there, it put in an extra comma. So I had to take a second tap it. And I'm not very good typing and tapping with my fingers on a phone. Just a little confess to you. Okay, so that was the first one. Now we go back to the storefront Post video photo library. 2nd De Roselle video I hit. Done. It's processing, it's uploading and I see some of you have had to leave. I really want to thank you for spending time with us today and it's been a fun week. We've spent a lot of time together and really hoping to do this in a mutually beneficial way next week and the week after and the week after. I'm trying to come to you live any day where I'm not traveling, where it's not a weekend or holiday, and I'm not already booked doing a training or giving a speech. So that's how we're trying to schedule this. Now. Your orders. Duracell battery that time. Because I didn't say aaa. It messed it up. Okay. Duracell AAA batteries that time. I got it. I'm tagging the product. I'm hitting. Done. I'm going to the title. These are the batteries I. Submit post and I see a couple of folks joined me join our live stream and wanted to say thanks for stopping by and welcome. We're going through sort of the tedious part of being an Amazon influencer of how you actually upload, label, tag your products. So that's what we're doing here. Storefront. Okay, now. And now I forgot whether that was the second video or third. I think that was the second video. So I'm now creating content. Hitting photo photo library. And now I believe I'm going to the short form. Vertical video hitting. Done. Try to get these around 15 seconds or less. That one was right there. Let me just make sure I didn't miss anyone else's comments. Want to definitely thank so many people from Stuff for stopping by today and leaving comments, asking questions. It's just some fantastic questions today that I think will be useful to people for a long time. Okay, your order Search Order Duracell AAA batteries. Search tag. Done. Title. My reliable power source. Submit. Go to Storefront. Create content photo photo library. Now I'm going to tag the photos I did for that one. Hit the first photo. Done. Your orders Search Dictate Duracell AAA B select tag Done. Caption. This is the brand I trust. Submit. Go to Storefront. Create content photo photo library. Final photo. Done. Uploading your orders Search Dictate Duracell AAA batteries. Did something wrong there. So sometimes you get a little too cute and a little too fast. Duracell AAA batteries. Now I popped up tag Done. Caption. The batteries and power I rely on. Done. Submit Post goes to our front. Okay. So we finished the third product and again, I hope you see that this isn't that complicated. It's not that hard. And when you really break it down step by step, none of this is that complicated. Again, I can't. We're not supposed to get into the specifics. I could certainly tell you, I don't think anyone's going to be offended. I'm not making millions of dollars from this, but it is giving me entree into a whole new revenue stream, essentially a new business. But it's building upon exposure, existing skills and existing parts of my business of presenting, teaching people to present, demonstrating presentations. Because this is a particular type of a sales presentation that I'm doing. And that's what has got me interested in this in the first place. So I'm hitting post photo library now. I'm scrolling through the all the videos and pictures I just took. Now I'm going to the next product, which is the beach towel. And these really are nice beach towels. My wife found that. I should have given her more credit for it. But we have a lot of these old traditional beach towels and they're so big and bulky. Yeah, it does feel luxurious. If you're drying off and you're a little bit cool, but they just take up so much space and they take up whole dryer and you put them over a rail at home, they take forever. These beach towels are so thin, it's thick enough to dry yourself off, but then they. They really dry out quickly and they're just not heavy. So that video is uploading. I'm going to take this as an opportunity to get a little more water, Move my remote so that I can put my bottle here and try not to spill water on my mixer as I did the other day. So it's uploading the video I just shot. Those of you just joining us may think, well, what is this guy doing? We're doing a demonstration today where I'm actually making Amazon influencer videos. So we've shot the videos earlier and the pictures. Now we're doing the somewhat tedious process of uploading it, tagging it, putting the captions, putting the titles and submitting it. So now I'm going to your order beach towel. And make sure I'm getting the right one. I believe this is it. Yes, I see that. Oh, it's a set of six. That's what it is. I wonder we have six at home. That makes perfect sense. Done. Title dictation. These light beach towels dry quickly. Done. The video is still uploading, so I cannot yet hit submit post. But I will the second that happens. If you have any questions about Amazon Influencer, I will share with you my limited knowledge. Right now there are a lot of people who know a hundred times more than I do about Amazon Influencer because they've been in the program for years and are making five, six figures a month or a year. I know 100 times more than a lot of people who've never been in the program before never made their first video. So that's when I'm trying to share my level of expertise. I hit submit post, go to storefront, create content, post video, photo library. And now I'm going to the the second video. This one 38 seconds long, which is kind of the length I'm looking for. I want more than 30 seconds and yet not too long. So it's processing the video, it is uploading the video. This again, for whatever reason, is just taking a little bit longer with my newer, more powerful phone. I'm not quite sure why it should be doing that. And perhaps one of you has more tech savvy than I do and can let me know why it's doing that. Okay, so it's uploading in just a moment. It's going to send me to the page that allows me to tag it and caption it. By the way, I hope you're having a great Friday. I I do like to work hard all week, but I like to enjoy my weekends and try to get away from making videos. Putting on makeup. I don't put on ties on the weekend beach towel. Tag product Done. Title. This towel dries quickly. Towel dries me off and dries itself quickly. That one when I dictated it, it made it a mess. It was not pretty at all. And so I had to quickly change it and I didn't want to talk about it because I still have the dictation thing on. That's why I wasn't saying anything. Let's go to the storefront now. We're going to create. This is why I generally try to do this or I recommend to people do this without doing anything else because I'm essentially trying to multitask talking to you. So I may have forgotten which video that was. I think that was the second one. I'm going to do the third one. If I duplicate it, it's fairly easy for me to hit delete. But I don't want to forget doing that and I don't want Amazon to think I'm spamming. So that's why it's good. I think to really focus and just do that. So in this case, I don't think I am completely demonstrating best practices because I'm multitasking here and I don't recommend you doing that. I see a few folks have just joined us. We are at the tail end of our three and a half hour live stream today where we've been talking about communication skills. And today now what I'm at the very end of doing is uploading tagging videos that are part of the Amazon Instance Influencer program. So I'm going to. Your orders. Beach towels. Tagging. Done. Title. Light towels that get the job done and won't weigh you down. Now I see I put a contraction. Still dictating. I put in a contraction. I knew that was a problem, so I'm going to delete it. But if I get rid of the contraction then it'll be too many digits. Lightweight. Exclamation point. So I'm just re emphasizing that is really so much part of the appeal of these towels is they're just much lighter than any other beach towel I've ever encountered. Create content Post photo library. Now we're gonna go to the photos first photo. Done. Your order beach towels. Tag Done. Caption beach towels that look great and are extremely lightweight. Done. Submit post Go to storefront. Create content Video photo library. Tap the picture. Done. Your order Search Microphone beach towels Tag Done. Caption Lightweight beach towels that are incredibly light and dry quickly. Maybe a little redundant, but that is the choice selling point. So I'm not worried by that. Go to storefront. Okay, we're four products down, 20 total ads down. One product left. Five things more to upload can if you have comments here or if you're watching this on demand, you can always leave comments on the video on demand. I try to monitor those, especially anything with a question and then answer them in our next live session. Video photo library. Now we're going to the pickleball shoes. This was a slightly longer video, a 1 minute 6 second video, so it may take a moment or two for that to upload and process. Appreciate you spending time with me today, now and this week. For those of you just joining us, please check out some of our produced videos because we're at the tail end of sort of a marathon live session here. So if you have any particular questions or interest in communication skills, public speaking, presentation skills, media training, please go to. My YouTube channel is really going to be the best place that has every video. Go to the search bar and type in anything topic. There's a Good chance that out of the 3,000 plus videos there's something. No matter how arcane or obscure your question is, a video will pop up to answer your exact question. And if not, I'll make a new video. Okay, so that video is still uploading. It's going to take that. And that's our longest one left. So this should be the longest one. Almost there. We're getting close to the end. This will also be the end of our broadcast for this week. It's been a fun filled week where we've done, I know, at least 10 hours of live streaming. I mean it's been more than three today. Not quite 15. 15 because we weren't able to do three hours every day. But not that far away from it. Okay. K Swiss. Well, that didn't pop up. And I know I bought a lot of these shoes. Pickleball shoes. I hit the wrong button there. Pickleball shoes. Now it pops up. Tag product. Done. Super comfortable and supportive. Pickleball shoes. Done it. The video is still uploading, so I can't hit the final button for submit post. But this should be the slowest one because it is just a little over a minute. Amazon will give you up to 60 minutes if you want to make a video that long. But I haven't. Haven't done that. Go storefront. Create content post. Go to a library. Now I'm going to the second video, which is much shorter. I try to make these a little over 30 seconds. This one was only 23 seconds. My understanding is if someone watches all of your video, even if it's less than 30 seconds and then makes the purchase, you do get credited with the affiliate commission sale. So that's how that works. Otherwise, typically you don't get credit unless someone watched 30 seconds of your video, which is less than 30 seconds. That's obviously a little bit of a challenge, but if they watch all of it, then it still counts. Okay, your order. Pickleball shoes. Tag product. Done. Title. I wear these pickleball shoes. Comma. You should too. I don't know. That's the greatest title. Seems a little dogmatic almost. But you know what? I'm going with it. Go to the storefront. Create content. Photo. Photo library. Now I'm going to select the third and final video. This is the short form video and wouldn't you know it, my eyes are closed in the image it's selected. But I just don't know that that really matters that much for this. And I'm not putting thumbnail. I would never. These days. Put up a video on YouTube without a thumbnail. But I'm not putting out a thumbnail on my Amazon influencer videos because I haven't seen any evidence that it makes a big difference yet. Pickleball Shoes Tag Product Done Title these pickleball shoes feel good and look good. Done Submit Post Go to Storefront Create Content photo photo library and now I'm selecting the photo Horizontal photo Done. Your orders Search Dictate Pickleball shoes. Tag Done Caption Comfortable comma confidence.

I.

Almost called a shoe confident. That makes absolutely no sense. Comfortable, comfortable and durable pickleball shoes that will last for match after match. Submit Go to Storefront Create Post photo library and now I'm going to post the I'm going to link to the final picture of the day. Done. Your orders Search Dictate Pickleball shoes. Tag done caption. Pickleball shoes that will give you the support and comfort you deserve. Thought it had a misspelling because it had a space between pickle and bulb, but it then corrected it. Okay, we're done. So that did take a little longer. I think if I'm really honest, that was about 90 minutes from the time we picked up the first product and Joanne started taking the first picture until the time we finished. So I wish I could say I did it all in 60 minutes, but all in all, getting 25 digital products, that's essentially what it is. It's an advertisement, it's evergreen, it's digital. I don't know that Amazon is showing these worldwide versus just in the United States and Canada and a few markets, but it's relatively digital and scalable. It's completely digital, it's scalable and at least seen in a lot of places around the world. So what I like about it is it's essentially creating a new business where I have no inventory, no stocking cost, no transportation cost, no shipping costs, no design cost cost. So it's such a low risk business and I'm able to utilize my own skills of presentation and communication. I hope you got some value out of this. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. If you have questions between now and Monday, post them on any of my social media platforms and I'll try to give you a live answer right here next week. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend.