Last year I did some experiments with making videos. Video is a medium I had done nothing with at all up until then, and I just found the whole idea daunting.
I’d previously had the same thought about sharing my photo online – on my website, landing pages and social media – and these days you see me sharing selfies and brand shoot photos all the time, thanks to two coaches I worked with a few years ago who gradually got me to be more comfortable with the idea.
The video experiment was a bit of an accident really. I hadn’t intended to do it.
One day in March last year I was about to go out to a networking meeting when I watched a video on LinkedIn made by someone who’s also a member of the Doing It For The Kids community, Al Booth (who is a presenter and podcast producer). I watched his video, and then left to go to the meeting. And a strange thing happened while I was in the car. A thought came into my head that I needed to send Al a message and ask him to help me do something with video. I do sometimes have random thoughts like that, and often I just write them down or forget them, but this one felt important, so I sent him a rambling message. And he didn’t seem to be scared by my craziness (at that point at least!) and offered to help me.
The first steps
Al was very kind and we had a chat and he gave me some tips. I created a few videos, experimenting with doing them on my laptop and my phone, and got a bit more comfortable with that. I shared one of the videos on social media at that point, which felt very scary!
It also gave me the confidence to appear in an online chat in the Doing It For The Kids group, talking to Frankie and Steve about the challenges I was having with marketing myself, because I do lots of things. It was live streamed for members only, so it felt a bit less scary than being live on the whole internet. (If you’re a member it’s in the Replays area and you can still watch it.)
After that I decided that I’d like to try being interviewed about my freelance story, to see what emerged. So I went back to Al and asked if I could pay him to interview me, and that I’d record the conversation for my own use. It was such a useful experience, as it made me realise that conversations were a much more natural way for me to get across my story and my messages than just recording a video by myself.
Alongside that I was also creating short videos every now and then where I talked about a creative topic that was on my mind. Some of those are still on YouTube, some were just shared on social media and were for that moment.
The final part of the experiment
Al and I also recorded another session in a slightly different way, which I’d intended to create short videos from. It was just before the summer holidays, so the timing wasn’t brilliant anyway, and then there was an unexpected funeral in my husband’s family, plus a summer holiday, and so it took me a while to get my head back to the video footage and what I wanted to do with it. And in the end I never actually used that footage, because I moved onto recording conversations with other people about creativity.
But the end result of all of this is that I now feel quite comfortable recording videos and being recorded at events. I haven’t recorded many videos recently because I haven’t felt the need to communicate in this way. But every now and then I do, and will continue to do so.
And it has given me the confidence to do live chats on Instagram and other places with other business owners – and I’m sure it contributed to me wanting to get out and do more talks at networking events. (I was never scared of those as I’d done many presentations in my corporate life – strangely, video and live video chats in front of a webcam or camera seemed far more scary than standing at the front of a room of people!)
I think it was another very useful experiment and another important step in my marketing journey, and I now encourage others to try video and not be scared of it.
Anyway, you can view some of my videos here if you would like to see what I did.
What’s next?
Maybe I’ll do some live chats on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube or Substack next. Maybe I’ll use the interviewing format for a course or workshop, as a collaboration. Maybe I’ll come back to my own content and figure out how I can get some footage to share of me chatting to someone else about my favourite topics. Or maybe I’ll just help other people figure out how to use video in their marketing*, and send them to an expert for the tips and technical bits. Who knows, let’s see what emerges.
*Actually I did once help a client do a project to set up a YouTube channel to share her knowledge on a specific topic. So if you’d like help with something similar, you can get in touch here.