TJ Walker answers a viewer question about how to become a professional vlogger by describing his own path as a public-speaking/media trainer who uses frequent video/audio blogs as part of his business and marketing. Key advice: pick a subject you know and care about, become an expert or an excellent reporter, form opinions, and—crucially—start creating immediately (avoid overplanning). Practical tips include: don’t use a script, use your cell phone to capture and post video today, publish regularly, solicit audience engagement, convert video to audio for iTunes, and integrate vlogging into your overall business to monetize via clients, speaking, training, or advertising.
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The hip horticulturalist asked, how do you become a professional vlogger? Well, I want to give some tips here to share my own experience. First of all, there's very few job listings for professional vlogger. You can't go to hot jobs and just say, let me look for the professional vlogger. That sounds interesting. Let me apply to those jobs. They really don't exist. Specifically, the first challenge you have is you need to become an expert on something and really have a passion for it. You need to pick a subject, if you haven't already. Something you like, you care about, you know the ins and outs, you're following it, you're already reading news stories on it, you're already talking to people in the industry about it. You're a part of the industry. So take for example, me. I'm a public speaking expert and media trainer. First, people hire me for the day to teach them how to speak more effectively to the media in front of cameras. I also am a vlogger. I do video and audio blogs daily, sometimes half a dozen a day. I've done as many as a hundred a day. Am I a professional vlogger in the sense that I work for a big corporation and I just show up and make videos and get a paycheck? No. But I am a professional vlogger in the sense that I do make money for it. It's a part of my business. It's a part of my marketing apparatus, my branding, my advertising. It's a part of my service that I give to clients, prospects, and customers. It's very much integrated into everything that I do. So how do you get started as a vlogger? After you've developed some expertise, you've got to form opinions about what's going on or become an excellent reporter on your subject. And then here's the hard part for everyone. You have to just start doing it. And I know I sound like some sort of cheesy motivational speaker or a Nike commercial, but I've seen countless people waste time thinking, planning, forecasting about their vlog, their video blog, spend six months looking for the best camera, another six months building a studio, and they never do the first one. Or they want to waste time writing and rewriting and rewriting a script. Number one tip, don't use a script. It will slow you down so much and will make it just an impossible task to get started with. So my recommendation, you want to get started? Just pull up your cell phone and capture video of yourself. Post it on YouTube today, not in six weeks. After you've planned and built a new website and put out a just do it today. See if you can get some audience. Ask people to post their questions and their comments and their thoughts and disagreements. Start putting content out there now and do it regularly, as often as possible. Build a reputation. Why am I answering Hannah's question? Did she write to me directly? No, she posted this on a site. Help a reporter that's open to the whole world to answer questions. Because I vlog and do video and audio blogs every single day. People who knew me knew that I do that. Forward me her email. I'm now sending her this video by email and I don't know if she's going to star me in her article. She's writing an article on this subject, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be perhaps the only person to respond to her with an actual video blog. And for those of you listening on itunes, I do. Everything I do is is in audio and video. So I'm recording this in video now. I then convert the MP4 into an MP3 audio file and put it on itunes. But this is primarily or not primarily, it's done first as a video and that's how you build a reputation. Just getting out there again and again and again. I know nothing about horticulture and I don't know it's really going to help my business to be mentioned in the hip horticulturalist. But what I do know is the more you put out, the more you put out consistently, the more you put out. That's consistent with your expertise. What you know about, what you care about, more people in the world will know about you, more people will talk about you. Then it comes back to you in the form of clients, prospects, training, gigs, speaking gigs, ultimately advertising, although that's not a revenue model I'm particularly pushing now. But if you develop a following of people who like you and respect you in your videos, there's many, many ways of monetizing it. And that if that's your definition of professional, that is the way to do it. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success. Please don't forget to rate this show on itunes and on YouTube.
