If you’ve been following my posts over the last few months, you might have noticed that I’ve been talking about some of the ways you can get out of your comfort zone when it comes to getting your message across, and these have included speaking at a networking event and being interviewed for a podcast.

Some of you might even have noticed that I made myself accountable in my last blog post and said that I would record myself talking on video, so here I am in all my glory!

Yikes!

This is a big ‘eek’ moment for me. It’s one thing getting up in front of people to speak if you can’t actually see yourself, but it’s quite another thing seeing yourself on the screen as the webcam records you speaking.

By the way, this is the easiest way to get started if you want to try and video yourself. We do have a family handheld camcorder, but I imagine you probably need a tripod for this, unless you fancy trying some sort of wobbly video selfie!

I’ve watched quite a lot of videos on people’s blogs and websites recently, and I think they can be a great way to get your personality across. It’s easy to become a bit faceless in business, particularly if you’re largely web-based and might not necessarily meet your clients face to face, and I think the most important thing to remember is that you don’t actually need to look picture perfect. In fact, it’s probably better if you look as normal as possible, as you’re then more likely to come across as a real person, if that makes sense, rather than one of the candidates on The Apprentice.

Hands up if you feel intimidated by highly polished videos with high production values and perfectly groomed business people – I know I do! Okay, so you might not want to appear on video in your pyjamas, for example, and I know that the lighting isn’t going to be perfect on my video and it might be slightly grainy in appearance, but you have to start somewhere.

At this point I’m going to tell you that I will be transcribing my video and putting the text of the content underneath for you to read, so this will give you an idea of how intelligent transcription can add value to your content, especially when it takes out the ums, ers and hesitations of when you’re speaking!

In this very simple example, you can choose either to watch the video OR to read the transcript (or you can do both, of course!). If you’re recording your own videos, you get them transcribed and you want to go back at some point in the future and, for example, turn a series of video posts and blog posts into an e-book, the written content will be there for you to use.

So that’s it for my first video attempt! I hope you enjoyed it, and I will talk to you soon. ‘Bye!

So, what do you think?

I’d love to hear what you think about video versus blog and how you can use a combination of the two as part of your content marketing strategy, so please either leave me a comment, contact me via my Facebook page or drop me a tweet.