Hello Friends!
Fun fact about me: I do some professional voice acting on the side. This means that I have spent a lot of time cultivating my voice and understanding how to use vocal skills to improve my presentation abilities.
Want to know how to improve your video content that doesn’t require any money or equipment? Work on your voice.
Vlog Notes
These notes are intended to provide a high level overview. Please watch the Dtube video for the full content from this post.
Introducing Vlog Tips
I often get questions related to creating video content and so I thought I'd start a "Vlog Tips" series so that I can create a nice body of work that offers advice to fellow vloggers. One thing to note, is that this series will likely not cover a lot of the technical aspects of creating video content such as lighting, equipment, editing etc. When it comes to the technical side of things - i'm still an amateur!
If you are interested in getting tips on more of the technical side of things, i'd highly recommend you check out 
What you will see me post about, is more on the softer side of creating good video content. If there are specific topics you would like to see me cover - please let me know! I have no specific timeline for creating these videos, but will add to the series as I go.
Tip #1 - Reduce Filler Words
This one may sound a little obvious, but did you know that there are hundreds of potential filler words? It goes so much beyond just removing "Um" from our vocabulary. In this video, I talk about how to detect your personal filler words and start working them out of your vocal rotation. We often resort to filler words when we feel nervous, but by stringing sentences together with unnecessary words - it will make you look less confident and knowledgeable.
Tip #2 - Add More Dramatic Pauses
By practicing Tip #1 and reducing filler words, you will start to add more emphasis to each idea and phrase. To level up your game even more, start adding more intentional pauses. This takes practice, but can really help make your content pop.
If you are quickly jumping from one point to the next, people may get to the end of your video and not even remember what the key takeaways were. Oftentimes, it is natural for people's mind to start wondering when they are listening to a video - especially if there is little emphasis in how the information is presented.
In this video I give some before and after examples and some tips for how to practice this.
Tip #3 - Intonation and Inflection
This tip is THE most important in my opinion, because this is an area that most people can improve upon. It is easy to sound pretty monotone in a video if you have never practiced different types of intonation and inflection.
When I am in the studio recording for a client, they will often ask me to to the same sentence in multiple different ways - so they have lots of options in the post-editing process. This means that the script is usually all marked up by the time we finish!
Use this idea to your advantage! Obviously most people don't completely script out their vlogs, but by practicing (and recording) yourself saying the same sentence multiple different ways, you get your brain used to the idea of switching things up. By the time you press the record button for your next vlog, you've already built some vocal skills that will make your video sound more interesting.
For those who choose to practice these tips - I would recomend overemphasizing to start and then scale back as you find your comfort level. People often think they are doing "too much", but are surprised with how good it sounds when they hear the recording back.
I hope you guys found these tips helpful! As always, I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comment section.
Also... if there are certain aspects to creating vlogs that you are interested in seeing me talk about - be sure to let me know!
xo, Lea
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