T.J. Walker breaks down creator economy data from a Kajabi report and shows the real odds of making money online. He answers live questions about public speaking and body language, then walks through his actual workflow filming Amazon Influencer product videos.
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A new report coming out from Kajabi, the online platform and Marketplace, shows that 96% of creators, influencers, people who make video content, make less than $100,000 per year. Now, this is not any big surprise for anyone who follows this industry closely. I've certainly seen other statistics saying the vast, vast majority of people who call themselves influencers make really less than about $30 a month. So there is a huge discrepancy. What does this actually mean? Does this mean it's all hype and completely useless? Well, no. I mean, if you do a survey of every single college freshman who says I'm going to be a doctor and you find out how many of them are making money 10 years later, I bet it's less than 4% there because people don't want to do the work, people don't want to study hard enough in organic chemistry, and they decide I'm not going to apply to medical school after all. You can certainly make the case that this is exactly the same thing when it comes to being an online creator. It's glamorous, it seems fun. People see the pictures of Ferraris and private jets. But when it comes down to day in and day out of work, work, work, work hours and hours in front of a camera, editing, if you edit or you don't have an editor, that's not so glamorous. And that's what weeds people out. Hi, I'm T.J. walker. This is the T.J. walker Success Channel. On this channel, I help people like you become more successful by improving your communication skills and confidence. So that is the lens that we view the world through is your communication skills. Because certainly these days a case can be made that almost any success you want can be had if you learn how to communicate your passion, your expertise about a product or a service effectively through social media and in person. So that's what we're about right here. Oh, I'm just getting a message. Ah, there we go. I see the problem there. I've got a, I've got a slight problem with one of the things I am trying to live stream to live stream to. I want to thank you for joining me. If you are here, this is something relatively new now. I've been on YouTube since a few months after it started way back in what, 2005. But I've only been coming to you daily live streaming for really the last few days. So we have an all new set, all new microphones. We're still trying to figure this out, make it all work. So I would love Any feedback you have on the set, the sound, the production, how to make this look better, sound better. Now I also have typically two short videos and one long video posted every single day on YouTube and all the other social media platforms. So if you're not able to watch this live, then certainly I hope you can come periodically, subscribe to one of the channels and watch the videos on demand. Please like them, subscribe to them. Most important, ask questions. The way I can be more useful to you and build this channel, build this community is not me just pontificating of what comes up in my head, but really by being responsive to you, answering real life questions. My most successful videos, the ones with the most views typically have come because real people in the real world who have to give speeches, presentations, talks, briefings, have to have an uncomfortable conversation with a colleague, have to do a job interview. They've asked me questions on how they can solve a problem, how they can feel more confident, how they can feel more comfortable about it. So that's what this channel is all about. I also going to be coming to you with newsmaker interviews, interviews with wildly successful people to talk about their stories, how they told their stories to initial customers, colleagues, clients, investors. To fuel their rise, we'll be having a whole series profiling successful people and how they communicated their way to success. We'll also be talking to a lot of other experts on communication skills on this channel on a regular basis. So I'm really excited that this can be sort of the one place on the Internet that has the greatest variety of content skills, training behind the scenes. Look things helpful to you as you become more successful in life by building your communication skills. I don't think there's any other channel like it. Of course there are a lot of channels that have great content on communication skills. I'm not aware of anyone else trying to go live three hours a day and then pull from that numerous videos on demand to help people like you. So that's really what we're all about. As I mentioned at the top of the program there is this news report from Kajabi. They survey 2000 creators all over the world and what they found is only 4% make $100,000 a year and they found 48% make less than $15,000 a year. So while everyone likes to say, oh I'll be the next Mr. Beast or if he's making $100 million a year, I can certainly do 1% and that make a million a year. And it doesn't work that way. Now what I wish Kajabi had done is gone a little deeper and asked the question, how many of you making less than $15,000 a year have been spending 2, 3 hours a day for more than a year? I'm willing to bet that would have been an extremely small percentage of people. The other interesting question is, of those making $100,000 or more, how many are spending more than three, four, five hours a day and how many have been doing it for more than two years? What I have found as I look across the landscape of online creators is that the people who appear to be the overnight successes, the vast, vast majority, I'm talking 99% of the time, they toiled away in obscurity for one year, two year, three, five years. In the case of Mr. Beast, he really had essentially no audience after five years. Even the 17 year olds who have 3 million subscribers, you scratch a little, you dig a little, what you find is, yeah, they're young and they're rich now, but they've been doing it since they were 11 years old. And they experimented and did lots of different formats and they started off with Minecraft or games and then they did this and then they went to comedy. So they experimented, they failed, failed, failed for years before they stumbled across a niche that was in alignment with their own passion, their own talents and what their audience wanted. Then they went deep. So the more I look at this, the more I'm convinced there aren't any really quick, easy ways to take off. Of course, if you're already famous from something else, if you already are a movie star, if you're already in a hit television sitcom seen on primetime in a major network in your country, well, yes, it's going to be easier to skyrocket to fame in the social media world and the video influencing world. But how many of us have that? What this channel is about is a way to help average people, normal people, business people, students. Figure out, absent winning a lottery ticket, absent all these other things, how do you actually figure out a way of building a career step by step to build more audience, to communicate more effectively, to sell whatever it is you want to do. Now I don't want to spent every second of this channel selling, selling, selling, hyping, promo. In fact, I'm guilty of going too far the other extreme, A lot of times I'll do a live show for two hours, three hours and think, wow, I didn't promote my own business much at all. So let me take a moment to just do that. What I do is help people communicate more effectively, whether they're giving a speech, a presentation, a talk, preparing for a job interview or a media interview on the BBC or cnn. So if you feel like you need some training in that area, please go to the about section on this YouTube channel or whatever platform you're on. You'll find my main website, mediatrainingworldwide.com and there you can find out information about public workshops. I do private one on one workshops, corporate workshops. I also have online trainings on my workshop website. Again, it's mediatrainingworldwide.com but you don't have to write that down. You can simply go to the about section on any platform you're looking on. If you have a question today, please go ahead and post it. I see several of you are watching. This was not announced. I'm sort of working out the kinks. This is kind of a beta test model still. But I do see that some of you are watching and looks like Janet's watching. The reality is you may be experiencing keep trying for years. Not quick and easy is the truth. Thanks for going live, tj. Well, Janet, thank you so much for stopping by and participating and always liking your ideas, appreciating them and your great contributions. And you're one of the fantastic ambassadors for this channel. So appreciate that. I want to go back to this Kajabi report because I think it is illuminating in one sense because a lot of people do think, oh, get rich quick online making, you know, post a couple of videos a day, just go out to a nice lunch, go to a fancy bar, take a few pictures, a 10 second video and you're rich and famous. Not so at all. As it illustrates here in this report, 96% of people are not making six figures. Now everybody has a different standard of what being successful is to them, what wealth is to them. You may make $20,000 a year in your country and feel like you're the richest person you know and you have everything you want and you're happy. I know other people who live in New York or Los Angeles make a million dollars a year and feel poor, poor. Not saying that's a good thing or that's justified, but some people feel that way. So your wealth, your success is very much dependent on how you actually feel, your own emotional relationship to money, finances, stuff and your career. What I am convinced of though is that anyone in the world who has what one of these, a simple cell phone now has essentially been given a television license, a radio station license and a newspaper printing press. In the past, those were all ways of essentially guaranteeing wealth. Certainly in the United States, if you were at a small town or mid sized town, if someone gave you the license or you gave enough contributions to politicians and you got a license for a TV station or a radio station, it was practically a printing press. To make money now, you had to hire employees and news anchors and reporters and program directors. You couldn't just get the license and sit back and collect cash. You had to do work or you had to hire a whole lot of people to do work. But once you did, the money rolled in and it was that way for decades and decades. It's not that way anymore for TV stations, radio stations, certainly for newspapers. But it is that way, I believe, for individuals willing to do the work if they own one of these and have Internet access or can get close to a library or some other institution that does have Internet access. Because this is essentially a mini television network broadcast studio. This is a major radio broadcast studio. This is a newspaper printing press. And it sometimes seems so obvious that it doesn't seem even interesting. Well, everyone okay, yeah, I can have a blog or yeah, I could go and do Facebook Live. What does that even mean? What it means is if you can consistently create content, ideas, entertainment, information, that's either one of two things interesting to people and useful, or somehow entertaining. You only have to do one of those two things. Now, I'm not trying to be entertaining, but I do try to be useful to people, to give them information that they can use to better their own lives. That's all you have to do. Now that's not easy on a regular sustained basis for years. That's what it takes though, to turn this into a huge profit center. We've had a couple of other comments. Mr. Fiatco says keep going. Greeds from Belgium. I'm assuming you mean greetings. Not that you're extra greedy from Belgium. Not that there's anything wrong with greed. I won't go as far as Gordon Gekko from Wall street saying greed, for lack of a better word, is good. But I do think we're all human beings. We all have some level of greed. We all want stuff, we all want things. The beauty of this current world we live in is if you're willing to help other people get stuff they need and want, good stuff can come to you. And I realize that sounds trite. The well known American motivational speaker Zig Ziglar famously said, you can get anything in the world you want if you help other people get the stuff they want. It is absolutely True, yes, there are impediments, yes, there's discrimination and biases against all sorts of people, but yet still, when I look at the Internet, some of the most successful people in the world are not what you just think of as the typical white male American. You look at the top YouTubers who deal with technology, whether it's a Marcus Brownlee or Mr. Who's the Boss. These are not white American Christians. They're just, they're not. So am I saying we live in a world that's post discriminatory? No. I am saying if you have ideas and you're willing to create content on a regular basis, roll up your sleeves, work at it. There's a way to make money and everyone can be a little different. I have been successful making money through creating online courses primarily. I really don't make that much money from YouTube advertising or from sponsorships yet, but those are areas I'm exploring. There are plenty of people who make good money from sponsorships and affiliate ads don't make any money from their online courses. They failed at that. The exciting thing to me about business is it only takes one hit. You only have to do well once and it covers up a million different losses. So that's why I'm so excited about experimenting. I can't guarantee you success. What I can guarantee you is if you don't try, if you don't experiment in a lot of different ways regularly, you're very unlikely to find success. I'm convinced I'm going to make my YouTube a really successful venture for me in its own right, independent of revenues I get from online courses. Because I'm experimenting more than anyone else in the world right now and I'm committed to it. I experiment every day by posting a couple of short form videos, a long form video, and now I'm doing live video basically every day. That's the new goal for me, is to go live and every single day. And from that live stuff I'll be pulling out content. Different shorts, different longs. And because I'm live, I get to talk to you more. I get more actual feedback from people who can give me guidance on what the world wants when it comes to communication skills. So I see we have a number of people who've joined us. Thanks so much for doing that. This was not promoted. Didn't tell anyone about this because I'm still kind of working behind the scenes trying to get everything just right. I still haven't quite figured out how to get this light to not or this light over here. To not be green because I want it to be blue. So I'm figuring out all of those things. We're still trying to figure out the microphones. Trying to figure out what my getting my makeup just right. Are things looking a little weird? The other day I had what appeared to be darker here and light here. I don't know why, because I wasn't using any makeup to give myself more color. So working on those details. So I am very, very excited about all the things coming up and frankly, spending time with you and going into much more depth and detail with other communication experts. Because right now, maybe it exists, but I'm not aware of any one daily forum that opens its arms to communication experts around the world. So what I'm trying to do here is really open things up. So any expert who has a new book on public speaking on storytelling communication skills, I'm going to invite them here for an interview. And so that will also be distributed by podcasting. This show is already distributed as a podcast on YouTube. YouTube has YouTube music. So any video you do, if you want to just call it a podcast, you can do so with one click. It then goes into you to meet music. So then, excuse me, YouTube music. So then if someone's listening to other podcasts, listening to music, and they're in YouTube music, they can listen to your podcast. They can listen to this as well. They don't have to watch it, although they could. So I wanted to go over other news items that I think are. And I've just accidentally deleted my browser there. Let's make sure everything is still connected. Great. And by the way, if you want to, I just realized I forgot to put the link to today's show. Let me do that right now. What I'm trying to do is make this available, accessible to everyone. So what I was supposed to have done earlier and I'll just go ahead and do it now, share with you in real time. What I'm doing is I'm posting the link to my stream yard for this event right now. That way, if you want to come on and appear on camera with me to ask a question to promote something you're doing, to share whatever it is you're doing, you can do so. And I'm going to post the link right now in my YouTube community. So if you go my YouTube community tab. So if you go to my community and I've got to sign in through a different account. So always, always a little bit complicated. And now I've got to go to a different computer to do that. So I'm bringing this over now. I'm going to my YouTube page, which is the Teacher is TJ Walker Success Channel. So I'm going to my YouTube page and now I'm going to go to my community tab. So if you would like to join me or just listen on the inside, you can do so. So I'm posting in my tab, join me now live and then I'm posting the link to Streamyard. So that's there. So if you want to come on and ask me a question, you can feel free to do so and I'm happy to have you. You can also just post your comments on YouTube and pretty much any other social media platform and it will show up in the comments section. I'm using a platform called Streamyard that pulls from a lot of different directions. Later on in the show today, I'm going to be actually taking you behind the scenes and showing you how an Amazon Influencer creates video product reviews to make money. Because I have recently joined the Amazon Influencer program. We've done that a fair amount earlier this week and last week. And I now have a couple of hundred video and photo product reviews on the Amazon Influencer program. So I'm still new at that game, but, but I'm a couple of steps ahead of someone who's never done it before and thinking about it. So that's the value add I'm trying to provide is showing my own presentation skills and then adapting it in a way that helps other people by promoting their products and helps me because I get an affiliate commission. And the reason I'm doing that is I've had so many people over the years, so many clients say, tj, I love to speak. I. I love to present, but I can't really figure out any meaningful way of doing this where I'm getting in front of people and making any money at all. That is the beauty of a lot of these new influencer programs, specifically the Amazon Influencer program, which has some unique twist. We'll talk about that later. Today I want to go over some other news items. And this is not primarily a news show. We're certainly not a political news show. But I am trying to cover top news stories that relate to people and their career and success as it relates to communication skills and communication technologies. There is a an online site called Slate, which I follow. This was really one of the original online journals. I believe it started in about 1995 or 96 by Michael Kinsley, had been one of my favorite columnists since the 1980s, they had a major story this week and it was by a freelance journalist. And the journalist was talking about how horrible their life was because they are maxing out credit cards as struggling to make any money, struggling to get any pay. And they're following the model of working for existing big name newspapers, magazines, pitching the idea for an article, getting approval, writing it, submitting an invoice and trying to get paid. And they're talking about how everyone is so depressed they can't figure out a way of making a living wage. And I'm sympathetic to this. I'm very sympathetic on the one hand. On the other hand, I have to ask, what world are you living in? This is not the 1960s or 70s or 80s or even the early 2000s. We live in a world where I happen to believe it's never been easier or a better time to be a freelance journalist than if you are using tools as they exist today. Today anyone can be a freelance journalist, but they've got to be their own business. You need your own website, you need your own blog, you need your own channel on YouTube, you need your own channel on at least the top eight social media platforms. And then you need to follow a beat, and you need to follow a beat regularly. Now, it doesn't have to be national politics or international politics. It could be trends on the concrete industry. It could be how to do macrame, something I haven't done since I was in seventh grade. You can make a good living in almost any industry. The key is you need to do it as a side hustle, an after hours gig for the first year. And then if you've got to work at a bookstore for minimum wage, or you've got to work as an investment banker, or do something else you don't really enjoy? Do that and you can create essentially a mini media empire, a multimedia empire, your own radio network, TV network, blogs, podcasts, self published books. You can have a giant media empire if you're willing to put in the work for no money for the first year or so. And so when I read a story about a freelance journalist bemoaning about how hard it is to make it again, I am sympathetic. But there's also a part of me that says, wake up to the modern world. Why do you want to freelance for someone else if you can be your own media company? Why do you want someone else to give you permission to write a story when you can just write a story? Why do you want someone else to be a gatekeeper who has the relationship with the Advertiser brand takes 99% of that for fancy offices, to give executives in New York million dollar salaries and then give you a few little crumbs. Now, I'm not suggesting you're going to quickly get your own million dollar salary, but people who are in it long enough and are smart enough do figure out a way. Yeah, look at someone like Tim Ferriss. I was doing a profile in a review of his book Four Hour Workweek just yesterday. Now, we can't all be Tim Ferriss. He wrote a book that is one of the most successful nonfiction books of all time. If he never did anything else the rest of his life, he would be fabulously wealthy just from the sales of his book. But he's someone who became famous from his book, then got a deal with a TV show, a TV network, and he found it so incredibly frustrating and difficult and annoying and so many gatekeepers and restrictions. He said, I don't want to mess with it. And then he started just as kind of a fluke, just as kind of a hobby, he started a podcast. And it grew and it grew and it grew. And he realized, what? What do I need a big TV network in Los Angeles or New York to do all this stuff? I can negotiate what I want with advertisers directly. Why do I need a program director to tell me how many episodes I'm going to do this year? Why do I need a program director to tell me I can only be live on Thursday night? I'll be my own program director? And he does his show when he wants to. So he has his own, essentially radio network, a podcast. It's been downloaded by billions. And while he doesn't officially release all of his income, you can tell he's making millions of dollars doing what he wants. Is he a freelance journalist? Yeah, in a sense. And yet he's not. He's a media mogul. We live in a world today where the line between freelance journalist and media mogul is blurry. You can start off as a freelance journalist, and there's nothing wrong with admiring a particular publication or media outlet, seeing if you can write something for them. But don't just be dependent on others. Don't just be dependent on other gatekeepers. Instead, leverage that. Build your own relationship with your audience, because if you do that, everything else can come to you. Tim Ferriss realized if he can build a relationship with his audience, which he's now done with millions of people around the globe, everything else is relatively easy. Because if you have an audience, you can get advertisers you can get brand deals, you can get sponsorships, you can sell your own workshop, seminar, your next book. So that's really what I think is most important for someone aspiring to be a freelance journalist today is think about what topic do you care about the most and what audience do you want to build a relationship with. If you do that and you put in the time, I don't do believe in virtually any subject matter, you can make a living. I'm not saying you'll make as much money as Tim Ferriss, not saying you'll become a multi, multi millionaire, but you can make a living. Now the, the downside to this, the flaw in my argument is people who want to do a great job covering the school board in their small town used to be able to work for a newspaper full time and cover the school board and cover the local city commission, uncover corruption and make a salary to live on. That no one's figured out how to do on a freelance basis or just an independent person. If it's a larger city, yeah, maybe it can be done. But if it's a small town and you're your base of a community, isn't the whole world, it's very, very difficult. So I don't have the answer to that. So that's, that's a problem increasingly for democracies around the world is how can democracies really thrive if you don't have newspapers and you don't have journalists who can really scrutinize local officials? Because if you are a reporter, if you are a journalist, it's going to be so much more interesting and lucrative to follow national politics, especially if you live in a large country like the United States or India and international politics, because you have a worldwide audience and you can get a tiny percentage of people in any one city watching your videos, listening to your podcast, reading your blog, and still be wildly successful because you're appealing to a market of 3 billion people online. If you are trying to cover the votes and actions of a school board in a town with 2,000 people, your audience is really, really, really small. And so I don't know what the solution is is to that in the long run. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. If you're just catching this live or if you're watching it on demand, this is a relatively new live show. But my channel has been here since the early, early dark days of the Internet or certainly of YouTube, I think, I think this channel was maybe started in 2006 or 7. I had other channels that were started really just a few months after YouTube started. So I haven't learned it all. I'm experimenting. We're in this together. If I can help you on your own journey of being a content creator, speaking comfortably on camera, trying to figure out this mix, then let me know what questions you have, let me know how I can help you, and I'll certainly try to help. I just realized something I'm doing wrong there. I've got to be careful about touching this table. Right now you're seeing the camera shake because I was not as gentle as I should be. By the way, I have a standing table here. It goes up and down automatic. So right now I'm standing. The reason for that is so much of what makes people nervous and uncomfortable about presentations, communicating, giving briefs, talks, a boardroom presentation, a public speech, is people see all of you, you're moving around and they're worried about, you know, what do I do with my feet, what do I do with my hands? So I have these cameras higher and elevated so I can stand and I can gesture and I can demonstrate best practices. Am I saying if you're going to do a YouTube channel, do you have to stand and move around? No. There are a lot of wildly successful YouTubers who sit in a chair and it works perfectly fine for them. One of the things I found, and I think you will too, is there's no one prescription for everyone that's going to fit. There are YouTubers who speak so quickly I can barely understand them. And they have tens of millions of subscribers and views for their videos. There are others who have accents that are hard for me to understand. People love them. There are good looking people, there are people who are not good looking. There are people of every size and shape on YouTube, on social media, who are successful not because of how they look. The reason I bring that up is so many people want to say, well, I can't do this because I'm not good looking enough, or I'm not young enough. I could use that excuse. Certainly. If you look at the most successful YouTubers, the people who have in excess of 10 million subscribers, virtually all of them are under the age of 35. When you look at people who have more than, say, 3 million subscribers, 4 million subscribers, hardly any, any of them are over the age of 60, which, you know, some people around here are that age. Does that mean you shouldn't try or bother? No. You can be successful at any age if you're consistent, if you listen to your audience and if you are providing something of value. Ideas, information, entertainment. If you provide value to people and you're consistently putting it out, your audience can grow. You may never have 10 billion viewers, but you can grow it to the point where you can either get advertising, sponsorships, affiliate deals, selling your own books that you've published yourself on Amazon, Kindle. So there are a lot of different ways of being successful in this new modern world that I'm excited about and we're going to be exploring right here. If you have a question, and I see a number of you are joining me live today, I very much appreciate you sort of hopping on impromptu. My goal is to go live five days a week, typically Monday through Friday, 9am to noon Eastern time. Now, I just realized I've got data here. We have people watching right now from Twitter, or X as it likes to be called. We have people watching from my Facebook page. We have people watching live from YouTube. And there's another platform. It's got a symbol. Not even sure what it is, but we've sort of tossed this out to a lot of different social media platforms, which you can do these days. And it, it cost nothing for extra distribution. Now, some things do cost. This camera cost a lot of money. You don't have to have a camera that cost a lot of money. But cameras, sets, those things do cost money. You don't need them to start. There are a lot of wildly successful YouTubers and influencers, more successful than I am, who do everything on their cell phone and they do it in their bedroom or in their living room, in their kitchen table, or just out in the real world. So I beg you, do not, do not use the excuse of, oh, I don't have the money. I don't have the resources to do that. Now that is absolutely not an excuse that really holds much water. Okay, More news stories. Major story in the publication Vox v o x.com, which is one of my favorite publications. And the title is Everybody's a sellout Now. So you want to be an artist? Do you have to start a TikTok? That's the sub headline. This is by an author, Rebecca Jennings, and she does cover social platforms and the creator economy. And she's profiling a woman, Rachel K. Albers, who was shopping a book around to major editors of a top five publishing company in New York. And the response was, hey, we like your book, essentially. But the marketing department says your platform form isn't big enough. You don't have a big enough audience of people who are going to pay $27 for a new book. So we don't think we're going to publish your book. Now, the author in question says that there's an online business industrial complex and she's actually writing a story about that. She's talking about the network of hucksters, in her words, buying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online. She's talking about the. And I'm reading directly from Vox.com giving them credit. She's talking about the hustle, bro. Gurus flaunting rented Lamborghinis and promoting shady passive income schemes. And she's written a book about that subject. And the irony is she can't get her book published because she hasn't immersed herself enough in that culture to really figure out how it works. So I feel a little bit sorry for her. But also I do want to stress there's nothing completely new about this because so many great authors, successful authors in the past were successful because they were good promoters. You look back in the 1970s, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, wildly successful novelist. But guess what? Most people knew them because they were prominent on talk shows. They were on the dominant late night talk shows in the United States, the Tonight show, which basically a third of the country watched. They would go on political talk shows like William F. Buckley's Firing Line. So they became famous by promoting talking in the media. Now, it's true they didn't have a YouTube channel, there was no YouTube in the 1970s. But they took promotional responsibilities seriously. They went on book tours, they went around, toured the country, gave lectures. People don't realize this Mark Twain, they think, oh wow, wildly successful author. And they don't realize Mark Twain made most of his money as a speaker out entertaining. You could say he was a bit of a huckster. Now the author in the Vox article was talking about this problem of hucksters. And there are hucksters out there, the Lambos. Hey, buy my course for $5,000 and you'll be driving a Lambo in a week. Yeah, there are a lot of shady people like that. But you could accuse me of that. Now I don't flaunt a Lambo and I don't want a Lambo. Though my daughter, my 10 year old daughter for some reason has become enamored with Lambos. But I don't promise anyone that they can get rich quick. What I do say is over time, if you create content on a regular basis, especially if you package it in the format of an online course and you Systematically do smart thing, you can make money. So if that makes me an online huckster, I guess guilty as charged. But I do think there is a tendency for people to see one example of something new and say, oh, everything's changed. This is an awful trend. And the world was so much better in the past. Well, let's go back to the 1970s. One of the top self help authors was Wayne Dyer. Your Erroneous Zones. Why did your Erroneous Zones become a best seller? I do think it's a pretty good book if you haven't read it. But it became a bestseller because he went on the Johnny Carson show, the Tonight show, which at the time was the most famous late night talk show in the United States. And especially at the time that was such a vast, vast dominant part of the book buying market that a good appearance on a show like that virtually guaranteed success. That's what he did. Think about how many books became best sellers because the author appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show in the 1980s and the 1990s. Now are you saying any author who went on that you know Deepak Chopra as a charlatan or a huckster because they were promoting. You can say that if you want. My point is simply there's nothing new about people who want to write for a living. Also taking the time to learn how to promote their writings and to do it by speaking. The old way was primarily going on existing network TV shows and radio shows. The new way is you create your own talk radio show by starting your own podcast. You create your own TV show by doing a YouTube channel, by doing videos, by going live and doing things like I'm doing. And we see Yashada has joined us who goes by the name of Real Learning 1999 and says hello Yashata, thank you so much for joining us. If you feel like it, you can join us live right here. I can share the screen it. And for you, anyone else who want to join us today, all you have to do is go to my YouTube channel and hit the community tab and in there I have a link to streamyard. And if you have your cell phone video on or your your computer on, all you have to do is let the computer phone have access to your camera and you can appear right here as well. Yashita says you purchased one of my courses. You know which course have you purchased and which platform? I'm on about a hundred platforms, including ones on my own website, Media Training worldwide. So it's always helpful to know where people are Accessing a course and which course they're in because I do have 200 at last count, about 220 courses. Okay, so you purchased the course on Udemy, which is the, frankly the dominant marketplace for courses in the world today. They've sort of become what Amazon is for selling books, Udemy is for selling courses. So that is the platform where I sell the most courses and I do have about 2 million students just on the GoodMe platform. And which course did you purchase? Why did you purchase it? And what skill are you trying to improve? If you don't mind? And you can just type it in right there. You don't have to come on and show your face unless you want to. Give you just a second to do that. The 11 soft skills course. But it says your videos are not running. Now, typically what that means, and this sounds like I'm dodging blame, but Udemy has an extraordinarily powerful infrastructure, servers. I mean they're a multi billion dollar company. So typically if people say I click, I can't watch the video. What it means is something has happened with their local WI FI connection, their Internet connection, or there's something with their computer that's just not processing. So I would urge you to do a couple of things. Try a different browser for starters. That often solves the problem. If that doesn't work, try, see if you can try another computer or a cell phone. You know, Udemy is structured things so they work well on cell phones. Just with regular cellular connection. It doesn't even have to have a WI FI connection. And typically that solves the problem. I am sorry it's not working out well. And bias writes. My question is when I'm in front of the public, my mind goes blank. Please share some tips. Well, having your mind go blank is a common thing. And here's what is happening. You're in front of people and your body is sensing fear. You know what I'm going to make, I'm going to record this because I might actually use this for a, for a YouTube short. So I'm over here, I'm learning sort of the tools of how I use my own recorder. So I'm going to hit record. I'm now going to a separate camera angle. So what do you do if you stand up in front of people and all of a sudden your mind goes blank? Step back in it. Why would your mind do that? It's because your brain, your prehistoric brain is saying these people could attack you. They might be from another tribe, they could kill you. So run. Don't think anymore. Just start running. That's what your brain is telling you. Guess what? We don't live in prehistoric times. So you need to get over that. What you really got to focus on is looking at one person in that audience saying one thing interesting and useful to that person just for a thought. Then go to another person and try to help that one person ignore everyone else. Just look at one person at a time. Help them. That will calm you down. Okay, so what I just did there, I'm going to stop the recording to make it easier for my. For my editors when they're putting that together. I hope you found that helpful. That's it in a nutshell. It takes practice. One of the things that will happen is the more you speak, the harder it is to get nervous. You're getting nervous, so your brain is telling you, don't think, run, because your body senses danger. Because traditionally you. You're out in the savannah and all of a sudden you're exposed. Every lion, tiger, saber tooth, tiger can see you. You're vulnerable at that point. You don't want to be admiring the flowers and thinking about. You want to say you should be running for safety. So there's a rational reason for why you're feeling that way, but it doesn't actually help you in that moment. So I would urge you try that technique of just looking at one person at a time. Because even if you're in a room of 100 people, if you're focused on one person, you tell yourself, I'm just talking to one person. It makes it easier for you because you're used to talking to one one person at a time. Anyway, it's not particularly scary to talk to one person, so I would try that. Vias writes, share some body language to express more than we speak. Okay, so body language is. And I'm going to hit record for that, too. So how do you use your body language to really express more than what you're saying? Body language is crucial. Your body language is always going to say more than just your words. What you want is your words and your body language to come together to say more than just your words. The heel and quick note, folks. I'm occasionally making videos here that I know I want to use for YouTube shorts and long videos, too. So right there, I screwed up, and I knew it'd be better to have that smooth. I just stopped. I'm going to go back to the beginning of that sentence. Do it again. So when it's edited, it will work. I Hope, the message you take away from this is, you don't have to be perfect. Everybody screws up. I screw up. It's okay. You're better off just going back to the beginning of the sentence and starting again. You want your body language and your words to come together to be something bigger than either one alone. Now, the number one thing to remember about body language is you don't have to start acting in a very specific way and think, well, this is a power move, and I'm now going to raise my right hand. No, what you really want is to just move the way you do when you're relaxed. If you doubt me, go to a sports bar sometime, wait for there to be a touchdown or a soccer goal, and look at how people communicate. They're happy. You don't have to figure out whether their team just scored a goal or not. You see it on their face. You see it in the high fives. You see this. Human beings naturally communicate well with their body. It's only when you're nervous and you're freezing yourself. So the real key is keep practicing a presentation until you're no longer uncomfortable. So you're not thinking about, what am I going to say next? Because if you can just get in the moment of sharing, your natural hand movement will come back, your arm movement, your head will move, your body will lean in, your eyebrows will move. All of that magnifies your message in a way that makes you come across more comfortable, more confident, more authoritative, and more interesting. Okay, so I'm doing that where I'm not looking at the camera. And let me give you. Because it may seem weird. Why is he doing that? What I have found in testing a lot of different styles of videos in the last five months, where I've been posting three videos a day is for whatever reason, the Internet, the algorithm, and that's just a fancy word for you. And people like you seem to like me when I'm not just talking to the camera, but I'm talking to people in. In an audience, and I'm not looking at the camera. So the videos of mine that have done really well, it's not me looking right at the camera. So I'm experimenting. I may try this, and people think it's weird and nobody likes it. That's okay. So, Baez, I hope that was useful. And we'll be talking about body language a lot on this channel because even though it's frankly not one of my favorite things to talk about, I have noticed it really resonates with audiences all over the world. And a lot of my videos of the last six months that were the most popular do relate to body language. Especially videos that talk about what not to do and how not to look scared and stiff. So we will be covering that a lot. Austrian writes, hey, Mr. Walker, and you can call me TJ. What would you recommend doing when holding presentations in school? My number one recommendation is take every opportunity you have in school to present the whole reason I'm here today. I won't say the whole reason, but I'm not sure I would be here today if it weren't for a presentation I gave in 1975 at my elementary school graduation ceremony. I was a shy, nervous little kid. Hang on. I mean, I'm going to record this. Should you do presentation school? Absolutely, yes. I don't think I'd be here today if it weren't for a presentation I gave in School in 1975 when I was about to graduate from the sixth grade. I was a shy kid. I never said anything, but my teacher said, hey, I gotta find someone to give the opening graduation welcoming speech to parents and teachers and kids. Will you do it? I'll give you an A in handwriting if you do. And I said, okay. I wrote the speech. I stood up, kind of read it. It wasn't great, but I did it. I got through it and I got a reward. And it made it easier the next time to give a presentation. I urge you, give presentations in school anytime you can because most kids are not very good. For that matter, most teachers are not very good. So get more practice under your belt every time you speak, every time you present, it makes it a little bit easier the next time because it becomes harder to be nervous. We're always nervous doing things for the first time. The first time you hop into a swimming pool and you haven't learned how to swim yet is more nerve wracking than after you've been swimming for 10 years. The first time you get into a car and drive somewhere is a lot more nerve wracking than after you've been driving for 10 years. It's exactly the same thing with giving presentations and speeches and talks. You don't have to be great. Remember, the standards are very low in the classroom for presentations. The number one thing you can do, I believe if you're a student, is raise your hand to speak, volunteer to give presentations, talks, briefings, speeches. But here's the thing. Every time you ask a question in a classroom, that's a type of a presentation every time you speak, and more than one person can hear you. You're conditioning yourself to speak in front of people. You're conditioning yourself to be more comfortable, more confident, more relaxed, and makes it easier to for the next time. One of the reasons great comics are great is because they typically said every joke hundreds of times. They know exactly how fast to go, where to pause, where to speed up. That's what makes them good at what they do. Now, if you're giving a speech or presentation in class, you don't have to memorize stuff. But repetition builds muscle memory and will make you better presenter. So I'm experimenting right now with figuring out how to record content to be used later. Because if I just record everything it creates Yesterday it record recreated 92 files. And I know it was 3 terabytes. It was just a massive amount. It took me 10 hours to upload the video to my Google Drive so that editors in other countries can edit it. So I'm trying to figure out how to be more selective and record. So that's why you're seeing me. I'm walking over here to a mixer. I'm using an ATM Mini pro mixer and I'm hitting record and it puts everything on a sand disk and then I upload it. And all this is really tedious and boring, but it's essential. Anyone who wants to create has to know some of the tedious stuff. If you wanted to write thousands of years ago, you had to know how to take that chisel in your hammer in the granite. It was tedious. If it was the Middle Ages before Gutenberg, you had to rewrite with a quill and ink. Every single book had to be handwritten. It was tedious. Now, fortunately, things are a lot easier now than they used to be. But there's still a tedious aspect of any content creation. So I. It's a constant challenge for me to learn that. And confession. I've never learned how to edit. I've never edited a single video. So I do farm that out. But that's just laziness for me. You don't need to hire professional editors. Most really good YouTube stars and social media stars did all of their own editing for years when they some still do it. But most of them, once they get to a certain point, are so busy creating content they have a team of editors doing that. We've had some more people stop by to say hello. Let me recognize them. So Austrian. I'm not sure if I answered your question. I don't know if you're talking about if you're the teacher presenting if you're an administrator or you're talking about a large classroom. So please let me know if you have follow up questions or if I was way off the mark. And again, I would, I would say to any of you, I'm happy for you to post a text question or comment, but it's frankly even easier for you for us to have a conversation. We can do that if you join me right here on the live stream. I posted a link to it in my Community tab. If you go to my YouTube channel and that's just YouTube.com TJ WalkerSuccess or @tj WalkerSuccess and if you just type in TJ Walker, you'll find me on YouTube as well. Hit the Community tab and the first thing is a link to the Streamyard. We're using the Streamyard platform today and that is how you can actually show up on screen. And we can talk to each other if you want to, but you don't have to. Okay, Arri Access is sending some emojis and it looks like. It looks like Pac man and a hand. I don't really know what that means, but I was at the Silverball Arcade Museum last night in downtown Delray, where I happened to live. So I actually played Pac man last night for the first time in a long time. In fact, my wrist is still a little sore from the Galaga, which was my favorite game from college. I'm ashamed to say I did not break a hundred thousand, which I typically have in the past, but it was still a lot of fun. So I don't know what those emojis mean. I'm assuming they're fairly positive. Ari also writes true. I'm not sure what I said that was true, although I hope most things I say are true, or at least not demonstrably false. And she says, always enjoyed your content. Well, thanks. And if you don't mind letting me know where did you ever come across my content the first time? And what content? Because I've written half a dozen books over the last 25 years. I've done podcasts, I've done a lot of different shows. I've got a couple hundred courses. If you don't mind just letting me know where you've enjoyed my content, it would be interesting to me and perhaps helpful as well. Matthew writes, Good morning, tj. Well, good morning to you, Matthew. Thanks for stopping by. Vayas writes, you are my inspiration, sir. I learned lots of things from your videos. Thank you so much. How can we take pause while delivering an Important point. Well, vaias, I'm glad you get value from that. Let me talk about that for just a moment. You want to make an important point. You want to emphasize it. How do you do it? The most powerful way is to be lazy. What do I mean by that? I mean do nothing, literally. Pause. When you're standing in front of people, especially a larger group, and you say something and you don't look scared or nervous, and you keep eye contact and you say nothing for a moment, it draws people in. The pause itself is a form of punctuation. It's like writing where you've gone to a new paragraph break or a period or a comma. The pause signals to the audience, hey, listen up. This is important. Don't overthink it. All a pause is is doing nothing. So what I just did there. Hope you don't mind, but I wanted to create that in a way that I thought might be useful to others in a short form, content. But I do think that that's really what it's all about. It's pausing. Now let me go a little deeper into the substance of how you can do that. You can't really do it unless you're really comfortable with the material. Because if you're like a typical executive in a lot of companies, you spent time writing and rewriting and rewriting bullet points for a PowerPoint slide, and now you're up and you're kind of ignoring the audience and you're looking at the slide deck. Next point is next point. It's like a conveyor belt. So it's really hard to figure out where to pause there because you're kind of just going through the road, looking at each data point, trying not to miss it. The pausing comes because you've already internalized the content. I don't mean memorize. I am not a fan at all of memorizing content. It's hard to do. It's difficult. It's easy to trip up on stuff and seem like you're a bad actor. So I'm not recommending that you memorize stuff. I do want you to be familiar with it, comfortable with it, to have said it before out loud. So the easiest way to pause is to be comfortable enough with the material to know this is important, and you need a couple seconds to think about it. Now, there are a couple of different types of pauses in the world, and I'm just going to hit record on this. Not all pauses are alike. You make a really important point and you stop and you look confident. People will think about it. You'll come across well. But if you finish a point, you look down and there's a look of panic on your face like oh, what am I supposed to say next? That's not a good pause that makes you look scared and unprepared. So I do want you to realize, you know, not all pauses are created equally. So I hope that's helpful and let me know by Please give me some feedback. Again, I appreciate people writing questions, but sometimes it's just the nature of text. You lose a lot of the context. I could be missing nuances of what you're really after. So two things. Please leave a comment on whether that was helpful or you want to you think I missed something or you want me to go deeper. That's a part of it. Also, realize if you want to just come on live and talk to me. As I mentioned, all you have to do is hit the button on Streamyard that I've posted in my community tab on my YouTube channel. So please feel free to do that. Matthew says how do you organize and schedule your content since you create it so quickly? So there's content I have for my online courses and there's content for for doing this, a live YouTube stream. And then there's content for short form videos where I'm doing it in the past, I wasn't doing it live. I would just have my camera on and I would have a list sometimes of topics or a list of questions or sometimes I would just think of them off the top of my head thinking about okay, what? What did people ask me in the workshop I did last week? So for me, the short form content is relatively easy because I'm not really being creative. I'm simply reliving conversations I've had with people in the real world. That's the easiest thing for me to do. It's frankly the easiest thing for most people to do. Now I have been very successful. Apologies if that seems bragging, but I've been very successful on platforms like Udemy. Not because I am the world's greatest storyteller, even though I have the number one best selling storytelling course. Or at least last time I checked it was number one. But I've been successful because I have more content than anyone else in my niche of public speaking communications skills. The reason I have more content is I do structure things in my brain and I'm doing it in more of an impromptu nature. Now, it doesn't mean I'm just making stuff up willy nilly, but it means I'm Thinking about, what is it I've actually said to people in the real world in the past that was useful to them? And then I think of one item at a time. I try to focus on one point at a time. I turn the camera on, I talk, and sometimes it's 20 seconds long, sometimes it's eight minutes long. I don't worry about the length, I just worry about, can I make one idea really come alive, interesting to people, understandable to people and memorable to people. And I just try to go with the flow and make it an interesting conversation, even though there's no one else in the room. That's what I've done with making content that has worked well for me. It works better for certain topics than others. If you're dealing with a highly, highly technical subject of how do you do Python programming, you're going to have to really show people very specific things of how you're doing it. So it doesn't necessarily work the same for everyone. Now, Matthew, if you're asking about content for a YouTube channel, for example, quite often it's not that structured. It is. I'm getting questions from you, and I'm comfortable enough knowing that if you ask me something and I don't know, I'm not going to be, oh, I'm nervous, this is awful. I'm not going to panic. I might say, I don't know, but I will do it in a way that does not suggest I'm upset or insecure or anything like that. And because I've done this for so long, when I hear you ask a question, I can be in the moment, listen to you, or in this case, read the question, and then I can think and talk in real time. Now, all of us can do that. Everyone can do that. Because if you've ever had a conversation with a friend over a cup of coffee or a beverage of your choice, that's what you're doing. Your friend doesn't say, hey, what do you want to. Or, what did you do last night for fun? You don't say, hmm, let me think about this for five minutes and give you a polished answer. No, you just say, oh, last night I was going to go to a comedy club, but I got the date wrong. It was the wrong place. And my friend and I, we went to this pinball machine. You just talk. Now, what's hard for people to do is when you're in front of a live audience and you feel that tension, or you're in front of a video cam and you're thinking, oh, I don't want to screw up. It's harder to do that until you've done it a lot. Now, I have spent thousands and thousands of hours talking to a video camera. So for me, it's a relaxing thing. It doesn't elevate tension levels. But it's not because I was born doing that. I wish I had footage from some of my early. I did for many years. I was doing political commentary for my student TV station at Duke University in the early 1980s. And I mean, I had great hair back then, but I was like, stiff and frozen and I was like, I had memorized it or I was reading Cue Car. It was awful. So I don't have any natural, boring gifts that anyone else doesn't have. I just have more time doing it. So that's the way I do it. Just the more you talk on camera over time, you get to the point where you can think and talk at the same time. What messes up most people is they don't get to that comfort level because they don't do it often enough or frequently enough. So the second the camera's on there, I haven't memorized anything yet. What do I say? So there's that awkwardness. And when things do come out, it kind of feels like they are trying to read a teleprompter in their brain. And when I'm talking to you right now, I don't think it's coming across that way. Am I perfect? No. Do I occasionally make a mistake or a funny face or have an even. Sure, I make mistakes, but I don't sound like I'm reading a teleprompter off my brain, so I hope that was helpful. My wife Joanne has just walked in and she's been nice enough to help me in a segment we're doing on a daily basis here, which is making Amazon influencer videos to show people exactly one way of doing it. It's not the only way of doing it, but I'm taking you behind the scenes and I love doing this with my cameras now. I'm basically taking you behind the curtains now. I feel like the wizard of Oz coming out from behind the curtain to show you how to make Amazon influencer videos quickly get a lot of different people do it different ways. Let's say hello to a few more people. Matthew, I hope that answered your question. Ari's giving some more of these things that look like Pac man says, ha ha. It's random waving. It says nice haha. And real learning says, would you mind to reply of my question. I thought that I did. Let me go back and see if I missed a question from. I see your question about having problems with. Oh, you purchased the course on Udemy. You've tried on a cell phone and a laptop. I don't know what the issue is. Now I. I do know in certain countries, if you're in China, for example, they kind of throttle your ability to watch any video. So it may be you're in a country that is actually limiting the video. I apologize. I'm afraid I just don't know anything more beyond that. And I would recommend that you go to Udemy Customer support. They typically are very good. They have a huge staff and they know a lot more about these technology problems than I do. And they would typically get back to you within 24 hours. Okay. So real learning. I hope that was helpful. Ari says, I came across your content on Udemy. I'm glad. And says you've been following casually since then. Great. Would you like to suggest some important books for soft skills? Okay. Oh, that. Maybe that was the question you were referring to. You know, one book that I do recommend and in fact I just did an ad for it. I'm not asking you to click on that for affiliate fee, but is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It has been a phenomenal bestseller for the last seven years and it helps you have good habits that will help you with every soft skill. So if you were going to read just one book, I would read that. If you want to go the classic route, it sounds a little cheesy to people and dated, but Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People still has a lot of good advice in it, even though it's often mocked and ridiculed and people sort of satirize it by saying you've got to mention someone's name 10 times in every sentence. That's a very small part of it. And Ari says, good point about the pausing. I'm glad you like that. Austrian says, I'm a student. I really love presenting and public speaking. But as I get more experienced and implement more techniques which subconsciously take up my mind, I'm not stiff, I gesture a lot, I speak fluently, I keep variation in my tone of speaking and stress my main points, but my body tenses up extremely, like in an adrenaline rush. Okay. I'm very happy that you're practicing a lot and that you're doing a lot. I've just heard my voice again because my wife, I think, accidentally hit a video. I'm glad I'M very happy to see you're watching videos of mine on your. In your spare time. So what do you do if you're already doing a lot and you're practicing a lot? I'm glad that you're doing that. Let me, let me address that, and I'm going to hit a record on that as well. What do you do if you already speak a lot and you're practicing and you're doing the right things and you've got your stories straight and you feel good about it, but you get into the presentation and you still feel like you're tensing up? The key is you've got to practice more on video. You've got to get to the point before you ever give a speech in real life where you've seen a video of yourself and you like the way your hands are moving, you like the way you're stepping forward, you like that your eyebrows are going up. That is when you know you're ready. If you've already seen a role model of yourself looking relaxed, comfortable and confident, when you're in front of the real audience, you actually will come across more relaxed, comfortable and confident. You might still feel, feel tension, but you won't show it. So I'm hoping those tips were helpful. I do do think that is the key. You need to rehearse more on video. And the beauty of video is you can now sort of step back and analyze the body language. If you're just practicing and you never video record it, you can't do two things at once. You can't be thinking about what you're saying and analyzing the body language. If you're doing a rehearsal video recording it, you can actually turn the volume off and just look at the video and say, does this person look comfortable? Because here's what. I'm going to record this part, too. The real key to coming across comfortable and relaxed and not tense is you've got to practice on video. When you're practicing on video, you can turn the volume off and then really look at your body language and get to the point where you say, oh, I like the way I'm gesturing. I like the way I'm smiling. Get to that point. You now have a role model for yourself. Your role model isn't me. Your role model is not Anthony Robbins. Your role model is yourself. So if you've seen yourself give a speech and you like the fact that you look relaxed, you don't look tense. Then when you're actually in the room doing it, you can follow your own Role model yourself. Now, you might still feel a little tense, but you'll be more relaxed because you'll know in advance that you can look completely comfortable and confident for your audience. So I do think that that is the key. Practicing watching without any audio on and really figuring out what you like. In a moment, we're going to shift gears here and I'm going to sort of take you behind the scenes and actually make ads for Amazon Influencer. We're going to be doing that in just a moment. Sergio, sir. Do you come live every day on YouTube? That's the plan. I've been working for the last month building this studio because this is not a virtual. This is not a green screen. This is real depth here. You can see I'm getting smaller. This is about 15ft away from the camera. So it takes. I do this because I'm hoping it looks better, it looks more substantial. It is real. We've spent a lot of time with the lights and the floating bookshelves and all of this to make a better experience for you. So we're still in the testing phase, but this is now the third day in a row I've gone live. I'm hoping to do it live every single day. Hoping you will come back regularly. In part, it depends on you. I want to see who comes, who wants to be a part of a community here. And Diaz also writes. Please create a long video on Body Language. Now, I will be doing a lot more videos on Body Language if you go to my YouTube channel. I actually have, I believe, a playlist on Body Language, so you can check that out. And there are a lot of videos already on. You can just hit the search button for Body Language and you'll see a lot on that, too. Via says thank you so much for your live. Well, thanks a lot. So now what we're going to do is switch gears and I am going to do some Amazon Influencer videos. Product reviews. I make the product review. I upload it to Amazon. If somebody watches the video right before buying the product, Amazon gives me a commission. This is something I've only been doing for, oh, I guess about six weeks. It's still early, but it is kind of an exciting new program. It's an. It's. It's exciting for a lot of people who want to get in the influencing game and get ads and sponsors but don't have some huge following. Now I have 2 million online students, but I don't have 2 million people coming to my YouTube channel every day. So the amount of Money I get just from regular advertising is not significant at all. So this is a different revenue stream because Amazon puts your video in front of an audience of people who go to a page to buy something. Okay, Joanne, if you don't mind popping up, we're going to put the. See the microphone in. So we have a. This isn't the clip. We're going to. Bear with me just a moment. We're going to do the technical aspects of this. We're getting the microphone we put in to the camera and I'm looking for it now. See if it's over there. So this is a microphone I use where I clip it on and then we put in a receiver. It goes right into the bottom of a cell phone. Now, you don't have to do that, but it gives a little better quality. Ah, here it is right here. Okay, did you find the microphone? Okay, if you could bring that over. I have found the receiver. So this clicks right into the cell phone. By the way, this is one of the products that I did an ad for on Amazon. And if you're interested in. Put that in your. If you're interested, then you can go to my storefront. So it's Amazon.comshoptj walkersuccess. I've also linked to the store in the about section of my YouTube. So when you go to someone's YouTube page, they've recently changed. Used to be there was a separate tab for it. Now it's just right at the top. It says who someone is. And then you click more links. Then it has an about us section. And at the very bottom of it, it has my Amazon store affiliate. So I'm. It says affiliate and it links to it. So I'm going to put this. Oh, I have to remember to turn on. The microphone. I see the green light, which means it has in fact connected with the receiver. I'm going to put it here, which should be close enough. And now I'm going to kill two birds with one stone. I'm going to continue talking to you, but show you what I'm doing here. And let's just pick out. Okay, here's a product that I brought. This is. Yeah. Okay, so this is. This is tape. Now, I'm not going to go into detail on how I use this because it's a bit of a controversy. I use this tape for something called mouth taping. For sleep. You tape your mouth at night. That forces you to breathe through your nose. So there's a major medical school of thought that says when you Breathe through your nose, you purify the air and it's healthier for you than breathing through your mouth. I also like it because I don't wake up in the middle of the night with a dry mouth and needed to drink water. Because I'm not drinking more water, I don't have to get up in the middle of the night. But there is some controversy about that and that's sort of getting into the realm of medical advice. Amazon does not want non medical doctors giving medical advice. So I'm going to just focus on other aspects of this medical tape. Okay, Joanne, let's. We're going to. We always start off with taking and if you don't mind, let me move this. Because your arm is covering the camera that people are watching with live. So the first thing we do is we take a vertical, vertical picture of the tape and then we take a horizontal picture of the tape. Now we're going to do a short form vertical video of it. I love this 3M transport tape because I can put it on my skin and it stays on, but if I pull it off, it never tears my skin. It's just the exact amount. Right. Stickiness that does the job. So in that one, I don't even think my grammar was great or made sense. But I'm sort of in a game now where I'm doing volume. I'm. I want to get to a thousand product reviews as quickly as possible. I just went over 200 and I think it was good enough. So now I'm going to do a vertical one. My wife has shifted the camera from this way to, excuse me, horizontal. This one will be a little bit longer. This 3M transport tape really does the job. I can put it on my skin, even sensitive areas around here, and it stays stuck as long as I want it. But I can peel it off, it doesn't tear my skin the way other medical tapes have done in the past. So it's just the right amount of stickiness. I use it every single day. Regardless of how often you need to use medical tape, this is a very high quality product. Now we're going to do a longer one where I sort of feel free to expound more and give people more depth if I want to. This 3M transport tape is really subtle and effective. I can peel it off, it's easy to tear, which I like. And any part of your body you can put it on stays. It's pretty steady. But if I peel it off, it does not tear my skin. I've had a problem in the past with other medical tape where, yeah, it was effective and sticky, but it would then literally pull some of the skin off, especially in the lip area and the nose area. I use medical tape every single day for certain health practices. You may have different needs. All I can tell you is this tape is the most effective I've ever used because it's the right amount of stickiness and yet also doesn't seem to irritate or pull off any of my skin. Okay, so we've now done five ads. So let's. If you don't mind handing me the phone, I'm now going to sort of show you step by step, the boring, tedious parts. Because again, as I mentioned earlier today, everything to do with creating content, creating anything of value, frankly, there's typically the fun part, the romantic. Oh, getting in front of the bright lights and talking can seem fun, but there's a tedious part as well. Now, the one thing I forgot to do today is to do a quick check. Typically we like to do that for just three seconds of the first video and make sure is everything working. Did I make the audio? And Joanne was nice enough to tell me she did check. Okay. And what I try to do is, let's say you're taking pictures. I want to have a horizontal picture and a vertical picture. One horizon, one short vertical video that can be used for Amazon's version of TikTok. And then a longer horizontal video that can go on the product page and then a slightly longer one where I more expansive. What I try to do to save time is to the second I see something I don't like, delete it. If we take three pictures, delete one. So we only have two. If we made four videos, delete the one where I made a mistake because I occasionally make mistakes and that way we don't have to look at it again or accidentally upload and then have to delete it or get something, you know, a note from Amazon saying, why did you upload that video where you stopped mid sentence? So that's why we're doing that, to make the whole process go faster and faster. Vias writes, we get a lot of knowledge from you. Thank you very much. Austrian says, thanks for the expertise. So I'm going to demonstrate these again. I'm not holding myself out as the world's greatest video producer or ad creator or marketer. I'm simply showing you one technique of doing this quickly, easily, to get a lot of things up on Amazon so that you can try to make some money and we're not supposed to share the exact amounts. I can tell you I've not gotten rich off of Amazon, but I am making money on some product sales almost every day now. So that's always fun. And to me, it's more about a gateway of entire new revenue streams that also feed into what I'm trying to do with YouTube and podcasting and creating videos on all social media accounts. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my Amazon storefront right on this cell phone. I happen to be on my wife's cell phone, but we share the same Amazon account, so there's no conflict there. And I should have this already as a saved tab, but I'm having to type it in and now it pops up. So I go to my page on Amazon, I hit create content, I hit post video, I hit photo library. I'm going. And I see exactly what we just did. So I see that there are five. The first five images. I'm wearing this purple tie and suit, so I know everything is exactly where I need it to be. And I'm just going to tap the first one. It's right at 59 seconds, which I think is a pretty good length for one of the longer ones. I hit choose for that one. Amazon is now compressing the video and uploading it right to the Amazon servers. And they're usually pretty quick. I'm now going to tag the product, so I'm going to your orders. This is again, this is tape I use every day. I buy it constantly. So I didn't just cynically think, oh, this is a hot product. I'm going to make a bunch of money. I'm actually talking about things that I've used and I know so typically I'm going to dictate what it is, but I think I found the right one. Okay, it's 3M transport surgical tape. It has four and a half reviews. I feel a lot if I really love a product and think it's great and worked for me, even if it has less than a 4.5 rating, I will still do a review. But it does give me a little comfort to know that I'm not a big outlier and I'm not recommending something that a lot of people will think is is junk. So I've tagged the product. I hit done. Now it's asking me to title it. This 3M transport tape is strong and sensitive. Okay, there's a problem there. I did dictate. Gotta turn the dictation off. I do have to check this because Transport is a brand name, but the dictation turned it into Transport. So I just have to do a quick spell check there. And then I hit done and then I hit submit. That's it. Now, this video will have to go through an approval process with Amazon and that typically takes five hours. And then it seems like it's, you know, a day or two before it filters out onto pages, but then you start seeing how many views you get for a particular video and that then ultimately you see how much money you're making from the video. And there's certainly videos I've done never made any money. I'm very much in an experimental phase where I'm. I'm trying to cover not everything I've ever bought from Amazon that would, that would probably take years, but a lot of products that I bought from Amazon that I have around my studio, my office or home that I really do like and enjoy and already recommend to people. So now I'm going to go to the next one. I hit create, I hit post, I go to photo, I go to the one right next to it. I try to do these all at once. That way I don't have to struggle to remember which one did I do or not. Because if you're doing it all at once, it makes it a lot easier. It's compressing the video, it's uploading it right now. I'm going to tag it. I'm 3M tape. That didn't do it. So where I try to get efficient is figuring out exactly what the name is. Unfortunately, if I say transportation, the dictation doesn't work. So this is the 3M transport 1 inch tape. So it is there. It's in my orders that I've actually purchased. So I'm tagging the product. I hit done. I go to title great medical tape that sticks and does not pull your skin off. So are these the best marketing headlines necessarily? No. I could use ChatGPT to write, rewrite, get them just right. I'm not spending the time on that. I'm trying to get a large database of products out there to kind of see what works. And then if I figure out, okay, here's the top 10% of products that I've done that are making money, then for the next round, the next batch of a thousand products, I may spend a lot more time really trying to figure out the exact best way of doing it. So I'm going to post Video library. And now to the third and final video Choose. It's compressing, it's uploading. I'm tagging it 3M transport 1 inch tape. So it still wouldn't dictate. Typically I can dictate the product and save even more time. So. But I've tagged it, now I'm going to title it. This tape sticks nicely but also comes off easily. Again, these are not the best headlines or provocative, but what I have found is if someone's on the page already, they've not yet decided if they want to buy it. They, they're going to perhaps, if they like videos, will click on the video. So I think it's more about the ideas I'm conveying in the video than the headline or the thumbnail, which is different from YouTube where there your headline, your title and your thumbnail are absolutely critical. Okay, we're going to create content again. Hit video photo. Now I'm going to go to the pictures. I hit choose, I go to your order and I'm just going to type it because it just can't seem to get the dictation right. Or maybe I'm even pronouncing it incorrectly. Okay, so now I pulled it, I've tagged it. I hit done. I write a caption. The caption for the photo is a little different than the title for the video. They give you more space if you want it. This is my favorite medical tape. And I hit submit post. I go to the storefront, I hit create content. I go to post. I hit photo library. I go to the last photo, I hit choose. And folks, I realize this is not riveting TV. This is not going to be YouTube that gets 10 billion views. But I'm doing this to demystify this process, to let you see exactly how it can be done and really relatively how fast and easy it can be done. So I'm going to your orders. I'm now typing in. And now it's coming up a little faster. I tag the product. I do done. I go to the caption. This tape sticks when you want it to and comes off easily when you want it to. Quick spell check. Because it initially it said type instead of tape, but it worked. And there. So that's, I mean, I was talking a little more than usual than if I were just doing this on my own. But between the time I took the pictures and the videos, did all these steps of labeling it, uploading all, I mean, it really only took about 10 minutes, maybe even less. Joanne, we're ready for the next one. So what I'm hoping you see is that you don't have to spend hours and hours and days and weeks thinking about the perfect ad. I wouldn't recommend that you do that because for whatever reason, Amazon might not put your video up on a page. In which case, if you've done a lot of work, it's for nothing. I typically try not to spend more than, you know, really, what. We just did two minutes for any one ad because then if it never makes any money, I've only lost two minutes. That's a pretty small investment. And so we'll do another one. Matthew says, I created a dedicated YouTube channel for all my Amazon videos. That way I can drive off site traffic as well. Well, Matthew, that's something I've been exploring because I've. I think my team has created a playlist on my regular channel. And then we're just making it private with the idea that we would create a channel later for the. For the videos. But I would love to talk to you about that because I have questions on whether you're reusing those videos for the Walmart affiliate program or the, the influencer program or the Target program. Are you then taking that video that you've done for a product? I'm putting it on Twitter, sharing that with the brand manufacturer with hoping of hopes of selling that. So if you're all available, I would love to talk to you right now or maybe tomorrow. I posted a link to my Streamyard link on my YouTube channel, the community tab. If you push that, you can come join me right on screen. We could have a conversation if it's not convenient. Today you're at work or doing other things. I understand completely, but please let me know. Okay, let's just do another one now. Let's see here we've got. Here's a hat. Now, I've already done one of the. I think this was maybe the first one I ever did. I've got to do a check a minute because this was before I even realized there was a difference between the vertical and the horizontal. I think I did a. Just a vertical ad for this. And supposedly on the product pages, Amazon really prefers the horizontal one. So I'm going to go back and I'm just taking a second. I would show this to you, but you're not apparently supposed to show people in public forums the insides of your Amazon influencer page. So I'm not going to show you that page, even though I would like to. What I'm doing is I'm just going through to look at the ad I did for this hat, because I don't want to repeat the same thing, but I want to make sure I'm. I'm covering the basis of doing all five things. So we're going to do this. And so now, okay, so I have. It looks like one vertical that's a minute and eight seconds long for the mission cooling hat. So I think we'll go ahead and do this from scratch because that's too long for a vertical. Okay, so let's go ahead and do this really as if we were doing it for the time first. The first time, because I. I believe it or not, I have made some sales, at least one from this. And I mean, I think I made. Well, I don't know if you're supposed to say, but a very small amount of money. So the first thing we'll do is we'll. We'll take a picture. And I guess since it's a hat, I should wear it, which may look stupid wearing a baseball cap with a suit and tie, but I'm not going to take the time to do a product change. And yeah, let's do a horizontal one, too. Okay, so we've taken the picture. Now we're going to do a short. We're going to do a short vertical, typically 15 seconds or less, because this is what they put on Amazon Inspire, which is kind of like their version of TikTok, but it's just for shopping. This mission cap is the lightest cap I've ever felt. It sucks the sweat right off of you, and you will feel cool even on a hot day. Okay. All right. And so I make mistakes occasionally. And occasionally the wrong button is pushed on the phone. So we're just going to do that one over. And my wife is nice enough to give a countdown. The reason she's doing that is we don't want to even take the time to edit the beginning off or the end off. So we're doing these 100% zero editing. Is that the only way of doing it? No. Is it even the best way of doing it? No, but it's the way I do it to create the greatest amount of volume to get it up out there. Okay, so we're going to do the short form again. This mission cooling hat is so light, you'll feel like you're not even wearing a hat. It's cool. It really takes your sweat off and uses it to chill you. It feels great. So that was the short form vertical. Now we're doing a horizontal. I've worn a lot of caps in my life. I've never had anything this cool and light. When I put other hats on now, it feels like I'm putting on a football helmet in comparison. This is light. It is cool. It wicks the sweat right off your head and uses it to chill you. If you play sports like I do, I play pickleball frequently. This makes me feel good. And I don't have this desire to take the hat off because it's too hot. It's cool. Okay, now we'll do a slightly longer one. This mission cooling hat is far and away the best hat I've ever had. I own about five of these. I wear them every single day because I live in South Florida where there's a of lot, lot of sunshine beating down on me. I love to play pickleball almost daily and I can't expose this to the hot Florida sun. So I'm wearing this. And what I like about it is it's not hot. What always frustrated me in the past with so many hats is, yeah, it protects your head, but it's just so hot, it's uncomfortable. This has technology in it that wicks the sweat right off your head, uses it to cool you down. So I never feel uncomfortable. I love these hats. I'm going to keep buying them and keep using them for years to come. Okay, now you can make the case that that last point wasn't really a good point. I keep buying. It does raise the question, why do you keep buying them if they're so good? Are they breaking or they're wearing out? I wear them every day. So if I've got one really sweaty, I'm going to toss it in the washing machine or, you know, certainly let it dry out. And just a little variety, different colors. You wash them off enough, like anything, it will fade. You occasionally lose one. So my family members will steal one from time to time. So that's why I get a bunch of them. But I didn't feel like I really had to wanted to elaborate that much in a simple video. Okay. Matthew says he's at work, tuning in, but exploring, trying to put it up on other socials. Unfortunately, some people download other Amazon videos and put on YouTube. It's a safe way to protect your video. Okay, so let's address that. What I think Matthew is saying is if you've made a video for Amazon and you then put that same video on YouTube, YouTube is going to now credit that as your video. So if, if anyone else steals that video instantly, you'll get an alert, oh, someone's stealing your Content and they will not be able to monetize it because it's going to hit an algorithm on YouTube that it's stolen content. I hadn't really thought about that. I will be honest. I spend less time worrying about theft than in piracy than most people because I view it as if someone wants to take my stuff and put it out there, they're just putting out my face more places, my voice. I chalk that up to pr. And that's why I don't get particularly upset if some small time online learning platform steals my course. Because I think if they're stealing the course, they don't have enough wherewithal to actually make any money anyway. And people are going to see my face more places and it's helping to build my brand. So I don't spend a lot of time, you know, suing places saying take my content down. But other people can have different schools of thought. There's no, not one way of doing it. And Mohammad Ektiari, I don't know if is that my friend jm, if that is hello to you or perhaps you're a relative to the other Muhammad Ektiari that I know. But either way, thank you so much for joining us. Now let me walk through the process again and I realize it's not that interesting or exciting, but I do want you to see really step by step. So I hit create content. I hit post. I hit photo library. I hit the video. I hit choose. It's compressing the video. It's now asking me to tag it. Mission hat. I see the hat at that time. The dictation works. I see even the same color because that is the one I just bought. I'm tagging the product. I hit done. Title. Lightest comma coolest hat ever. Exclamation point. It put in an extra comma that I didn't really like, but it only took a second to get rid of it. I hit submit. Publish. It's done. Now let's go to the next one. Create content. Post photo. Second video. Choose. It is compressing and uploading. And now it's asking me to tag it. Mission Cooling Hat. Tag product. Hit done. Title. This is light comma, cool comma and washable. Submit. Go to storefront. Create content. Post photo. Wait, was that the second one or third one? Did I do. Did I post two or did I post three? So I think I did two. This is why I think it is. You know, I'm multitasking here because I'm trying to share with you and be helpful to you. But it is another reason why I feel like it's just a good idea to do them all at once. Because if you're doing these in bulk, it can be. Yeah. So I have not done this one because this is the vertical one. So it looks very different than the last two. So I'm hitting choose tags it your order. 3M cooling hat. Oh, it's not 3M was the last product. It's the Mission Cooling hat. Mission cooling hat. I see it. I tag. Done. Title. You will look and feel cool wearing this hat. Done. Submit. Matthew says that's true free publicity. When someone shares your content on site, commissions are for better than off site. It really comes down to if it's worth your time. Great. Behind the scenes. Well, Matthew, thank you so much. And certainly if there are days when you're not at work or you have free time, I'd love to join you. Have you join us right here and talk more about it. Because the one thing I'm certain of is if you've been doing Amazon Influencer, there's some things you know how to do a lot better than I do. And between the two of us, we can help people even more. Okay, go to Storefront. Now. I'm going to post the the photos. Create content. Post video photo library. There's the photo. And I do. I don't think I'm being mean or to myself. I do look kind of stupid wearing a hat with a business suit. But you know what? Tough if it helps someone else and it gives them an idea. What do I really have to lose? Is my career going to be ruined if someone sees me wearing a baseball cap and a suit? I don't think so. Mission Cooling hat. Mission cooling. That time when I dictated, I said it too quickly and it turned it into a different word. So I was trying to get ahead of myself. This hat is super cool and light. Submit. Go to store. And now the last one. Photo library. The last picture. Choose order search mission cooling hat. Tag. Done. Caption. Protect your head and keep yourself cool at the same time. Done. Submit Go to storefront. So now we have another five ads. Any one of them could make me money, could provide extra value to someone who's not quite sure whether to get it. And again, I want to stress to you it's not that you have to be a lifelong, committed evangelist for a product and be so in love with it that you're willing to die for it. But I do think. Joanne, let me give you this phone back. I do think this is all so much easier if you just focus on products you actually like. I really do like this hat. I really do recommend it to people. I really do think it's much, much cooler. And every once in a while I will have misplaced several and I'll do an old hat. And it just feels like I'm putting a giant burlap bag on my head compared to these mission hats. Okay, here's another product I did the very first day when I was making ads, and I didn't really realize you even could do photos. And I didn't realize there was a difference between the verticals versus the horizontals. So now I just need to see what I did for this shirt because this shirt is similar in that it has this cooling technology. So I'm going to pull up to see what I actually did, because, let's see, it's in a curation, I believe. So I'm in my store, and here's a good problem to have. My store now has so many products. It's asking me to go on numerous pages, pages. I knew I did this the very first time. So it's going to be one of the original products. Okay, now I see it. So it looks like I did one. Same as before with the hat. I did one vertical video of 1 minute and 10 seconds long, which is really too long for a vertical one. So we're going to do all. We're going to do all five for this. So let's go ahead and do that now, Joanne. Okay. And you know, actually this was interesting in that the first time I did this, I called it the wrong name, so we had to delete it. Let me make sure I'm getting this absolutely 100% correct, because I think I had called this a mission shirt. I was confusing it in my own mind with the. Let's see, I believe it's the Arctic cool shirt. Yes, it's the Arctic cool. And in that one, I'm wearing it. You certainly could make the case, as with a baseball cap, I should be wearing this. But I'm just, I'm not going to take the time to take off my suit and tie for doing this ad because then instead of doing the whole thing in two minutes, that would become a ten minute process. Okay, so same thing we're going to do right now. Joanne is taking a version vertical picture of the arctic cool shirt. Now she's taking a horizontal picture. Was there a problem there? Okay. And yeah, sometimes you take a picture and you know, there's a finger in front of it. You Just hit delete. And what I think speeds up the process is really looking at the pictures as soon as you're done, as well as the video. And if you see anything you don't like, just delete it right there. Because then when you're in your sort of assembly line of putting it all up there, you're not having to remember, oh, is this the one I liked? Is that the one? I made a mistake. You've already narrowed it down to the content that you know you like. Okay. Oh, hey, she, she mentioned that I closed my eye. Let me just get a sip of water. And I should point out, you don't have to have your face in the picture, you don't have to have your face in the videos. Believe it or not, you don't even have to have your voice in these videos. You can simply demonstrate the product. There are people who do that where they, they use their bed, their video editing skills. And some of the videos on Amazon pages by Amazon Influencers are very well done and well crafted and well produced. I take my hat off to people doing it. I'm not going to spend the time doing that. But for other people, it can work. There are people in the world who, for whatever reason, don't want to show their face on video. Maybe they feel like it's a conflict with their employer or their status in the community because of something else they do. That's fine. And there are even people who don't want to have their voice on. And again, they may use music, special effects. There's no one way of doing it. I'm doing what's the easiest for me to, because I talk for a living and it's just easy to talk. So now let me do the short. Going to try to make this under 15 second vertical video. I love this shirt because it's so cool. It has cooling technology. You make it wet, you pop it and it starts to freeze. It's great on a hot day. Did that one work? Okay, we're doing a quick check, make sure the audio is okay. And again, if you have any comments, feel free. And I see a handful of you are with me today. I very much appreciate your time, your attention. This is really kind of a workshop. This is not a slickly produced show designed to attract millions. But if you are interested in learning how to use your communication skills in different ways to make money, that's what this Amazon influencer thing is all about. And again, I'm not, I'm not selling a course on this because I'm Not a true expert on making money on Amazon Influencer yet. I hope to be. Maybe I'll never make a course, but I'm hoping to get good enough for myself that I can benefit, my family can benefit, and that I can build relationships with brands who can then be migrated over to be sponsors for this YouTube channel and this channel on X and this channel on LinkedIn and this channel on Facebook and Instagram. So that's kind of my ulterior but transparent motive. Okay. Okay, so we're going to redo that one. And again, I make mistakes all the time. Do you know what happened on that one? It was a photo. Okay, so I've done that many times. Instead of hitting the video record, we hit the photo. So. So we'll redo that. So this is the first horizontal video. Assume the first vertical video. She's holding the phone up and down. So this is the one I want to do in 15 seconds or less. Less. I love this Arctic cool shirt. You get it wet, you pop it, and it starts to freeze, you will feel cool even on a hot day. Now, is that exactly the same as I did before? No, I'm not trying to follow a script. I'm just thinking, okay, in a short amount of time, what do I like about this shirt that might make someone else want to try it? That's all I'm doing. So you could elaborately script these things, or you could just share the positive feelings you have about a particular product. That's what I'm doing. I live in South Florida, where it is hot about 11 months of the year, and I love to play pickleball. That's why I only wear these Arctic cooling shirts. You get it wet, you pop it, it chops, chills you down. Any other shirt, certainly a cotton shirt seems like a winter coat compared to this Arctic cooling shirt. If you want to stay cool on a hot day, I recommend this shirt. I've got a lot of them. Okay, now we'll go for a slightly longer one. 3, 2, 1. Do you want to stay cool? This Arctic cooling shirt does the job. You get it wet, you pop it, and it starts to chill. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel, and I try to help people stay active and fit. That's so important when it comes to personal development. Well, you're a lot more likely to exercise if you're not feeling overly hot and like you're going to have heat stroke or something. That's why I only wear these Arctic cooling shirts. I've got Them in every kind of color. And I wear them when I'm outside playing pickleball, going for walks, going to the beach. It really is an important part of my wardrobe. Okay, so what I did there is I try to sort of build my brand. You see a little plug there for the TJ Walker channel. Now, there's no set rules on exactly how Amazon enforces that. They say you're not supposed to be self promotional. I don't think that crossed the line. I've done that on maybe one out of 20 videos and not a single one of them has been. Has been flagged or rejected. Can I try to follow the rules? It's Amazon's platform. They get to decide. But I am trying to put things in a larger context. That really is why I'm here talking about this. So much of my mission is helping people with their personal development. And I do think exercise is an important part of it. Having something like this literally does make it more likely for me to exercise because. Because it's not as unpleasant when I'm out on a hot summer day. So again, I'm trying to be authentic. I'm trying to be real. But I am trying to benefit myself and other people too. I'm trying to create a win win, and I'm trying to create multiple ways of winning. So if someone watches that video and doesn't buy the shirt, but, but thought, well, that guy seems a little bit interesting. Maybe I will check out his YouTube channel. Well, I benefited in that regard. Okay, so Joanne is doing a quick review of the videos and the photos, and then I'm going to again walk you through step by step of how we put these things up. By the way, if you're watching this, thank you, number one. Number two, please like the video and like it once it goes as a. It goes from a live stream, which we're doing now, to an on demand video. Please subscribe to the TJ Walker Success Channel on whatever platform you're on. If you are watching this on LinkedIn or Twitter, any of the others. I'm a little reluctant to say this, but I do want to ask you nicely, come on over to the YouTube channel and subscribe there as well, because that really is the best channel these days for creators, for. For getting long term growth and long term revenue possibilities. So I certainly am going to be posting on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all those, but the YouTube channel is first among equals. Okay, so we're going to go to the Amazon page. I'm going to hit Create Content. I'm going to hit post. I'm going to hit photo library. I'm going to hit the. Okay, so Joanne, now I'm confused because I see three photos. Which one do we not want to use? I do. See, I can't tell from this. Which is. So, yeah, I wanted to use one horizontal and one video. This is a perfect learning moment because right there I'm in a state of confusion. I see three photos. I know I want one vertical and one horizontal. And maybe there's an easy way of telling, but if I'm looking at just the thumbnails from my photo library as it's listing, I can't tell one from the other because they're all perfect squares. So that's why it's. If you're, if you're trying to be as efficient and as quick as possible, which is my goal and still do a good job, I think you're better off instantly deleting a photo you know you're not going to use in the same way you're better off instantly deleting a video you know you're not going to use. Okay, thank you, Joanne. And I'm. So I'm going to go back to my Amazon page. Post Video photo library. I see the long form video. I hit choose. It's compressing the video. It's uploading it. It's putting it into Amazon. Still compressing. That's a slightly longer one. I go to your orders. I'm searching order Arctic Cooling shirt that pops up and wow, now that is sad. It says currently unavailable. You can do products that are unavailable, but chances are you're not going to make a lot of money from it. Let me just see. Sometimes I do it and they have a slightly different version that is available but. And it looks essentially the same. In which case I will, I will do that. I'm not 100%. Let me see if there's a different one available. Because you do. So I'm going to discard that draft. Let me do a general search. Arctic Cooling shirt for men. And it may be that they've come up with just a slightly different version that has this wicking technology. Because again, I really am enthusiastic about that brand and I have at this point, would you say, Joanne, about half a dozen of those shirts. So they've got a lot of business for me. So there's a part of me that just can't even imagine that they're no longer selling them. But Arctic Cool is a long sleeve shirt. Here's another. Ah, you know, this may be, you know, Amazon sometimes sees a particular type of clothing and they say, oh, we'll do it and we'll just do it under our own brand and put the other guys out of business. I'm not saying that's what's happened here, but there have been well documented cases with, you know, diapers and a number of other commodities where Amazon has flexed its muscle and all. I see Under Armour shirts. Okay, here's the Arctic cool. But it's a long sleeve shirt. I can't imagine that they wouldn't also have a says you may like. It's giving me nothing but long sleeve shirts. So what I may and it may be they're unavailable because they sold out and maybe they're all going to be back later. So that's a little bit depressing because again, I really like the shirt and I'm probably going to want to buy some more soon. So I truly hope they've not gone out of business. Let me. Well, we'll just have to make do the best we can. So let me go back to my page. Now the other thing Amazon does do is they will sometimes show your video on a page for another product if the if the product is similar enough. So in theory they could show this video on a product for another shirt that also positions itself as a cooling using cooling technology, this wicking technology. And if I'm not mistaken, I actually do have a sale for this shirt but I could be confusing that with the hat. So I'm going to just go ahead and muscle through this. Create content photo photo library. I'm hitting the video. I'm hitting choose. It's compressing the video. It is uploading it. I'm now going to go to your orders Arctic Cool. And just want to check one more time. It does have because my wife has bought a bunch of these shirts as well. So you know the family, we maybe bought 10 of these shirts. So I see the women's shirt showing up as well as the men, all of them unavailable and they have more than 3,000 reviews. It usually it's pretty rare to see a product with 3,000 reviews no longer available, but I'm just going to go ahead and tag it and hope that they bring it back at some point. So I've tagged the product. These shirts really help you keep your cool. Is that great copy? No. It gets to the point though, it's me being authentic about why I like this shirt. So create content. That one's already uploaded. We're going to hit post in Another one. I'm choosing it. It's compressing it. So there are strengths and minuses, pluses and minuses to every way of going about creating this. I mean, the strength of my method is everything's done so fast that if I don't make any money on any one or any handful of videos for a product, there's not much of a loss. The downside is occasionally I may waste my time making ads for a product that is no longer available. But I had to. I have to think this product is coming back. Arctic cooling shirt. I'm tagging it. I'm done. I'm now going to search. Arctic. Oh, I've already searched. I'm doing the title. This shirt is your best friend on a hot day. Day. Submit. Go to storefront. Create content. Post photo library. Now I'm doing the vertical short. Choose your order. Arctic cooling shirt. Tag done. Title. You won't mind sweating in this shirt. So there was a problem. I used a contraction and Amazon doesn't want any contractions in there. Title. I said won't. I needed to change that to will not. And I realize there's another mistake there. An I went in. You will not mind sweating in this shirt. Okay, again, not the most beautifully written copy, but direct and to the point. Go to the storefront. Create content. Now we're going to post photo library. Now the first picture. Choose Tag your product, your order. Arctic cooling shirt. Tag product done. Caption. I feel 10 degrees cooler wearing this shirt. Submit Go to storefront. Create photo. Last photo. Choose Post your order. Arctic cooling shirt. Tag product done. Caption dictate. This shirt will keep you the coolest on the hottest of days. Submit. Okay, so what have we done? We've created 15 new ads. Now, it took a little. We had a couple of little snags today, but I still feel pretty good. Maybe it was more than 15 minutes, but we've got 15, 15 new ads that are not live yet on my storefront. But I have every bit of confidence that they will be available by tomorrow and then can start making money. Ideally, I won't say forever. Fashions change, things change, but certainly for weeks, months. Some of these products I would think would be around for years. Certainly people who make baseball caps can make something similar for decades. And I think people are going to want to wear hats, especially when it's hot and sunny for a long time. Now, they may discontinue that particular brand, but in general, what I like about this is you can use your expertise for speaking and communicating and essentially Start a business and your business has worldwide distribution and you have no problem of sourcing. I don't have to source the hat. I don't have to get a big warehouse to store the hat. I don't have to ship that. I don't have to find a box and postage to mail it to someone. So all. All. I don't have to maintain a store and hire employees. So with so many traditional businesses, there are massive headaches. You can only sell to people in your neighborhood. You know, so many restaurants, all their customers have to come within a mile and a half or they just don't get any other customers. What I like about this as a business is it's digital. My part is even if though they're selling real, you know, real things, it's digital, it's scalable, it's worldwide. I have no inventory cost. I have no cost at all. I don't have any stocking cost. I have no shipping cost. I mean, when you really add it up, it is a phenomenal, phenomenal opportunity that I'm frankly surprised more people don't avail themselves to. But the reason is I believe most people are too insecure to put their face on camera. There's like, not yet or let me get a haircut or let me lose weight. There's a million and one excuses. And it comes from insecurity. And I get it. Everybody has some insecurity. If I'm in a restaurant with 500 people and someone hands me a microphone and says, all right, tj, you now sing the national anthem. Okay, I would be insecure. I'm not secure enough about my singing voice. I've never been trained as a singer. I don't think I'm a good singer. My own family members I won't mention who say I sound like a moocow. So I'm not going to sing in front of people. So if other people don't want to talk in front of other people, who am I to judge them? We all have insecurities about certain things. So that's why I think it's a great opportunity is so many people exclude themselves. So I want to thank my wife for stopping by to doing this sequence. I'm going to show you something that I just figured out earlier today of how to streamline this process even more. So get ready for that. So, Joanne, let me hand you back your phone and thank you very much for your time. So I do like to see. No, yeah, thank you very much. I do like to. You know, it's nice to work with my wife, and I appreciate her being a part of this, and I am a little bit faster. But I want to show you something I figured out just today. I realized that I had purchased this tripod a while back, and at the bottom of it, I completely forgot it had a remote control. So I'm going to attempt to do something right now, a little experiment, and we'll just see together if it actually works. I'm going to attempt to do an Amazon influencer video by myself. And the key is I don't want to have to do it all awkward like this, because when you're making a video or taking a picture and it's the selfie thing, you've eliminated your entire half of your body from normal body language and movement. I don't like that. It just tends to be an awkward angle. It's not the most complementary. So that's why I don't really like that. So what I'm going to attempt to do is I have a tripod here, so I'm going to set it up and see if I can actually do that. So my wife is giving me back the receiver, which does not work on my phone, but that's okay. And I'm taking off my microphone, since we don't need that. All right, so now I'm going to pick a product. Oops. Well, that. That's how you live and learn. Whoa. Whoa. So now my phone thinks I just fell and killed myself. So it is calling emergency services. So if a 911 crew comes in here, I'll have to apologize for them because that was certainly not the purpose. I've never had that happen before where. But what I have had happen is if I fall on the pickleball court or tennis court, my watch will say, have you fallen? Can we. Should we call 911? And I just say, no, or I didn't fall. Sometimes it does that even when I don't fall fall. But that's the first time the phone has ever just fallen over. I'm going to see if I can weight this a little better so that it's. It's more proportional. And maybe it's better to have this curtain as a backdrop. Okay. So that looks a little more like a studio. Although it's. It is showing some of the bags and things I have. So let me find another product that I would like to do to share with you. And here's a very simple one that I only started recently using because I typically, those of you who know me from the past know I typically wear eyeglasses. I've only started wearing contacts again as I've been doing videos every day because I don't like all the glare and reflection. But I actually see much better with light with glasses. So I use these when I'm playing pickleball, which I like to do on a daily basis. So let me figure out exactly what this is called. And so we're just going to do a test to see can I be as quick and as efficient doing it all myself with a stand versus having my wife or a colleague or someone else doing it. So the first thing I need to know exactly is what do I call these things? I mean, it's, I could say, you know, glass holder, but that might confuse people. So I'm, I'm just going to do a second here. Let me switch cameras. I'm going to just do a second here to see what shows up. Okay. Black glasses, strips, sports sunglass and eyeglass holder straps. That's a mouthful. I guess I'm just going to refer to these as glasses strap. Okay, you know what, maybe I'll do this angle. Although the blue the accent lights I have, which I'm hoping look pretty good to you, they look a little weird in the photos. So let me switch angles here and get back to my stream yard. So, so I'm going to angle this down and I'll take a picture of it this way. So just so you know, I have this remote control so I have my camera set on photo but I want to stand far enough away, I don't want it to look like, like a selfie. So I'm going to stand a little further away and I'm going to hold it like this and I'm going to have my remote just out of frame. It may have timed out. I'm going to. Or I may have turned it off before. Let me try it now. So I did test this earlier today. And it may be that I have to do the settings again on the Bluetooth to sit up. So let me just take a moment and again you're seeing this in real time. Every second of our show is not going to be played pre planned, pre produced and be as smooth as the Today show. So. And Barb is saying hello. Now you're talking tripods and remote controls for the win. Okay. And Matthew, let me just switch cameras here. I'm considering trying to learn Ecom Live to expedite my, my video making process, but iPhone is definitely one of the corporate quicker ways to create. So it looks like I Missed several comments. So thank you so and and Barb, good to see you. I know you. I take a lot of your time and you're. You're so active and helpful in so many communities with live streaming. Very much appreciate you popping in. So I'm going to go to my settings. I'm going to go to my Bluetooth and okay, it is connected now. So this is something called an AB shutter 3. I did test it this morning. I'm going to put the camera on. I'm putting it in this contraption. There's. There's a scientific word for you contraption and have it. So now I'm going to try again holding this up and I'm going to attempt to take a picture. That time it worked. It flashed. So that's great. Now I hope this works. I'm just going to spin. Hasn't fallen over and no one from 911 emergency services has shown up yet. So let's hope that that call was aborted. So I'm going to hold up these again. It took another picture. I'm going to spin it around now. I'm going to hit video now. I don't have my microphone yet for the I actually just ordered a microphone plug in for this camera because this is and I forgot whether you call what. What you call this form of attachment. This worked for the old iPhones up to iPhone I guess 14. The iPhone 15 I have now has something that takes the bigger plug. So that's why I'm having to. To get another microphone. And what worked on my wife's phone doesn't work on mine. Okay. So now I'm framing it the right way. I'll be holding it up again. In theory I should have glasses but I just don't want to take the time to do it. And I really do like these because it is made it so much easier for me to play pickleball without my glasses falling off with sweat. So again, let me get the exact, exact. And Muhammad says hi TJ my teacher. Good to see you, Muhammad. And let me again get the name of this. Just black glasses, a glasses strap. So it doesn't really have a name that resonates. These black glasses strap will keep your glasses on when playing sports. You can adjust it so it gets as tight or as loose as you want. Now you can play sports and not worry about your glasses falling off. Okay. I think that worked because now I can see on my screen the second it's recording, as soon as I stop talking, I hit it. Now I Am noticing that my makeup looks a little weird and I'm getting a little shiny. So that is one of the advantages of if you're doing your own looking right at the camera. So I'm just going to take a moment. I realize my audio is getting worse when I'm further away from you. So we don't have a big full time makeup crew here, believe me. I just have a simple brush, and I use a mosaic powder. And that's just a fancy word for powder. That is a bunch of different colors because I do not want to change the color of my skin. I do not want to give myself something that looks like an artificial tan. So. But I just noticing it seems like I'm a lot lighter up here. Now, that may be because I'm wearing my mission baseball cap a lot and I actually am lighter up there. There. But the powder. I'll show you this. This powder is a whole bunch of different colors. And that's what you want with the mosaic is you want a different colors depending on your skin color. What. What you want to do is take the shine off so as to be less distracting. Now, if I had really dark skin, I would not want to do this because it would. It would make it look all powdery and fake looking. So you have to have something that doesn't really change the color of your skin. That's. That's really what you're after. Okay, so I'm going to put this back down, Take my remote control again. Okay, so we did the first vertical. Now I am changing the camera to make it a horizontal. And I've now got to bend it up a little bit. And I'm going to remember where the camera is too. Yeah. So I have to look to the left. That's always just a little bit confusing when you go the horizontal route with your cell phone. Okay, so. Get my remote in one hand. I got to remember to look to the left. And now I want to go typically about 30 seconds or a little over 30 seconds. So I get the credit if someone watches the whole thing. And then the next one will be slightly longer. Nothing's worse than playing sports. You're out on the tennis court, the pickleball court, and your glasses slide off. That's why I love these straps. They slide right on any glass, and then they adjust. I can get it as tight as I want on the back of my head. So no matter how hot the day is, my glasses stay on. They don't slide off, and it makes it easier to see. And I'm not stopping to clean off my glasses every five minutes. Okay, that's basically what I wanted to say. Now I want to do. I don't know if that was 30 seconds or not, but I not going to obsess over that because as I understand it, and Barb is with us, maybe she can clarify. As I understand it, if your video is less than 30 seconds, but people watch all of it and that's the last thing they saw on Amazon before they purchase it, you still get credit. So now let me do a slightly longer one, and here's one where I'll try to sort of build in a little branding and that sort of thing in a subtle way so as to continue following all the rules of Amazon. These straps are why I can play pickleball in the hot Florida sun and not worry about my glasses falling off. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel, and I love exercise and I love being active, but it's tough if you wear glasses and you're in the hot Florida sun. That's why I always use these straps, because they just fits right on each side of your glass. It slips on. Then I can tighten this so that it's right up against the back of my head. So if I'm shaking things, I'm on the pickleball court, I'm running around, My glasses are not bouncing around. I don't have to worry about them falling off because this has happened to me before. I've been playing pickleball. Ball comes at me, I jerk out of the way. My glasses have fallen down and been badly scratched. I don't have to worry about that anymore. I don't have to worry about running and almost diving and the glasses just flying off. With these straps, I feel secure that my glasses are right where I want them to be, and I can focus on what I'm really after, which is the exercise, the sport, and having a good time. Okay, so that's it again. That's the first time. That's the first time I've done that. So, again, part of the premise of this channel and what we're doing on this social media platform, whether you're watching this on LinkedIn or Twitter anyplace else, is I'm not just coming to you with, here's the finished product. Here's a finished produced piece. This is a Mr. Beast video where you've had 10,000 hours of editing. What I'm doing here is more in the Gary Vaynerchuk model as I'm documenting the process I'm just sharing with you, you my process of what I'm trying to do. And they're going to be mistakes. As you saw the. This whole tripod fell down and my phone did a face plant a few minutes ago. Not editing that out. So you're going to see it. So now let's go through again and just go through the process. So the first thing I'm going to do is go to my Amazon influencer page. So I just pull up Safari and I should probably have this on an app, but I haven't really done that yet. So I'm going to Amazon. And again, I'm on a different phone now than what I was on earlier because I was using my wife's phone. So now I'm typing it in shop and it should pop up. Yeah, pops right up. I hit create content, I hit post, I hit photo library and I'm hitting the first video. I'm hitting done. Oh, that's right. I remember this yesterday. The interface is different. I don't know if it's my phone or if it's just because it's an iPhone 15 Pro Max, but the interface is different. So now I've hit click. Oh, it's uploading it now. And this one was a slightly longer video. It's a 1 minute 12 second video. So typically when you got a newer product and you're on the same WI fi, the newer one would do things faster for whatever reason. And those of you who are with me yesterday may remember it was much slower uploading videos from my newer phone for some reason. So it's about halfway done. We'll have to give that a few more, I hope not minutes, but a few more seconds breathing room. And by the way, let me just take a moment to thank you for joining me live if you're watching this on demand. Thank you. Please come back tomorrow whenever your tomorrow is, if it's a Monday through Friday, because we're typically going to be coming to you live every day nine to five to. Excuse me, not nine to five. That would, that would really be too much. TJ 9:00am to noon, three hours a day or Eastern time in the US coming to you live to talk about communication skills, how to be more successful in life through more effective communication and more confident communication. It includes everything from how to prepare for a job interview to how to get a speech in front of 10,000 people to talking about sensitive subjects with family members. It could cover all of those things. And as we're talking about right now, it includes things like how to make an Amazon influencer product review video. Okay, so now it's asking me to tag the product and let's see, it was glass. I forgot what we searched the glasses. Okay, here we go. Black glasses, strap tag product. Done. It's odd. It is still uploading it, but it's allowing me to tag it and it's allowing me to title it. But I don't think I can actually save it until it's fully uploaded. Now the other thing, I don't know if we have it on a different setting. Maybe the issue. Barb, you may know if you're there. Maybe the issue is I'm recording the video on a higher quality setting and therefore it's a much larger file. But I don't know why it would take so much longer to upload using a newer phone rather than a year old phone. Your glasses will stay put with this strap. So doing that. Okay, now it's finished. Uploading now I've hit submit. That should be the longest one because that was the biggest video. Now I go to the storefront. I hit content post video. I hit photo library. I go to the second video. I hit done. It is now uploading then. Okay, so Barb points out tomorrow is devoted to our Udemy student support community. We've set times for streaming in the community Facebook as well here on YouTube. Do you want me to cancel them? So we're definitely going to keep our time straight for our Udemy students are. Udemy students are our favorite group. We love them and we don't want to in any way give them a short shrift and I don't know what else. Not sure I understand the question. Barbieu and I may have to talk off camera about that. It could be the video quality settings on the new phone, the higher quality, the space, the most space it takes on your phone. So that, that was my guess. That was my assumption. So let's see. So I believe it's up. Looks like you. Okay. Your order Glass str. Eyeglass strap tag product. Done. Gain confidence. You won't lose your glasses. And I used a. I used a contraction again and Amazon does not like contraction contractions in its titles. So I'm going to change that to you will not lose your glasses. Done. Submit post. And I just got a message. Something the vect about the emergency call thinking I fell. So I'm really hoping I don't inconvenience police or emergency medical people. Those of you missed it. The tripod went over and my phone went down hard and it interpreted it as me falling, which I'm not quite sure why. Go to Storefront. Create. And now photo. And now I, I think I've done two. I hope I'm not doing a duplicate. So I'm doing the third one. This is the vertical video. It's uploading it. Yeah, I believe I did too. So we will have done a total of 20 different Amazon review. What do you call it? An ad where you call it a product review. It's essentially a form of an advertisement where I'm saying something positive about a product and there's a link right there or they're already on a page where they can buy it. So I have essentially created 20 ads while talking to you live and trying to kill several birds with the same stone. So that's where about your order. Glasses strap. Tag. Product Done. Title dictate. Your glasses will thank you for securing them properly. Submit Storefront. Create content Post photo. Now I am doing one of the photos where I'm holding it up again. In retrospect, it would have been better if I'd taken the time to actually put these on glasses. Maybe doing a side shot where you can see it connected. So I do not hold myself out as a world class photographer. And whether you want to chalk that up to laziness or just trying to be as as focused as possible on getting volume up so we can do a better test, I'll leave that up to you. But I am doing this trying to get as many products up as possible, as many reviews as possible. So I have a larger database, a larger sample, a larger sample size to really kind of figure out what works and what doesn't work. Glasses case. It's not a glasses case, it's glasses strap. Strap. A seat belt for your glasses. Done. Submit Post. Go to Storefront. Create content. Photo. Photo library. The last picture. Done. Your orders. Search order. Microphone. Glasses strap Search tag Done. Caption dictate. Never worry about your glasses falling off again. Done. Submit storefront. Okay, so what have we done today? So I hope you got some value actually seeing somebody do this in real life, in real time. What I'm hoping to do a couple of things. I'm hoping to demystify this process to motivate you to want to do your own Amazon influencer ads. And if you're not eligible for the program, you can do exactly the same thing for Walmart. They have an influencer program which I believe is really open to pretty much any anyone you might want to start off being an Amazon associate and my colleague Barb knows a lot about that. They're no longer just anyone can sign up willy nilly. But it's not impossible to get into the Amazon Associate Program. TikTok has a program. Facebook has a program. Pretty much every major social media platform has an affiliate program where you can make videos talking about products. Every major store has one. Amazon's essentially a store. Target, Walmart, every platform like ebay has one. So this isn't going away. All the trend lines are people and come in people and advertisers are shifting away from mainstream media and traditional stores and they're flowing right into influencers. So that's really the trend. I'm hoping to be a part of that. I'm hoping to maybe be just one or two steps ahead of some of you so I can ease the path for you, make it easier for you to motivate you to try it rather than just reading more, watching more. There's an analysis paralysis that happens to all of us from time to time. And sometimes the nothing beats just hopping in and doing it. I've made mistakes. I've done ads for products that aren't even available. We did some of that today. But if you create enough, you only need a small percentage of wins to cover up for all the mistakes. That is my philosophy in so much of content creation. Oh, so Barb, you're saying we've got a video today? Oh, in the announcement. Okay, so we've got a little bit of a scheduling conflict. What I'm going to try to do tomorrow is go live with everyone here and elsewhere from 9 to 10, from 10 to 10:30, switch over to just my Udemy students. And if you're not a Udemy student, you may want to become one. Great courses and they're very inexpensive. And then what I'm going to try to do is at 10:45, go back to this platform where we're sharing with everyone. So I'm sorry if that newsletter went out and gave out erroneous information. I hope that clears things up, Barb. So we've now are 29 seconds away from hitting right at three hours, which is what I'm going to try to do on a regular basis. I want to thank all of you for joining me today and if you have questions, feel free to post them in this video. At this point, you may want to wait till it's turned converted into a video on demand because then I'll, I'll see it and we can respond to it in for the next live session or another video on demand. So, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. I'm hoping you have tremendous success in all of your communication in life to help you achieve all of your dreams. Thanks so much. See you next time.
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