Starting out as an affiliate marketer can leave you feeling as if you don’t have a whole lot of personal interaction with the customers you are cultivating. In a lot of ways, you may seem to be a ‘middle-man’ who makes a sales commission by making connections between a product creator and their customers. Creating your own authority in a niche and establishing yourself as an expert without having your own product may seem like a struggle, but you can make it easier on yourself by using video.
These days, creating a video is easy. You can use a video camera, or even your phone to capture it and save for later or you can do a live video. Uploading is just as simple with the use of a free YouTube or Facebook account and typically, you won’t even need to do any fancy editing or formatting.
Over time, you may want to learn more professional video production techniques, but if you’re just getting started, don’t let the fact that all you’ve got is your trusty iPhone camera at your disposal. You can still put out a great quality video with minimal experience and equipment. Here are some tips to help you do that:
Choose a setting where you have good lighting. People will want to see your face and feel as if you are having a friendly conversation with them. Natural sunlight is perfect, so if you have a room in your house where the sun shines in, that room may be ideal.
Avoid filming in areas where there is a lot of background noise. Natural lighting is great and shooting outdoors is a wonderful idea, but if you can hear a lot of traffic, neighbors or other distractions in the background, it may keep your viewers from hearing what you have to say or affect their ability to pay attention.
Avoid using a monotone voice. This is a voice that doesn’t rise and fall with natural emotion, but sounds dull and drab and, well, boring. Fake enthusiasm is just as annoying, so try to just be natural and talk the way you would to a friend.
Stick to your topic and don’t go off on tangents. You don’t need to work off a script, but you do need to have your thoughts organized. Some people make the mistake of reading their product reviews while filming. This makes you look more like a newscaster than a marketer, so unless that is the persona you are going for, you should avoid it.
If you are having a hard time remembering where you are, you can always use a few bullet points. This way, if you lose focus, you don’t have to sit in silence for a minute or so trying to figure it out.
Avoid using fillers such as ‘Ahh”, ‘Umm”, and “Like”. Simply pausing to collect your thoughts for a second will be much more effective when trying to get a point across than using words that have no meaning. Practicing what you are going to say out loud is a great way to avoid using these types of non-words in your video.
Look directly into the camera as if you are speaking right to the viewer. Again, you want them to feel as if you are having a natural, friendly conversation with them. Consumers need to feel as if you have their best interests at heart and have a product that is being chosen especially for them.
As with anything else, the more videos you create, the better at them you’ll be. So, don’t sell yourself short by not producing videos, but go ahead out there and get your face in front of potential customers.
