Last Updated on November 27, 2022 by Best Vlogging Camera
If you’re here, you have given serious thought to starting your vlog, describing your daily life to a loyal audience using the best vlogging camera. You also know that you can simultaneously earn a lot of money from vlogging. But you still aren’t taking that initial step. Why? Maybe you don’t have access to the best vlogging camera, perhaps it’ll take a lot of time and resources to start a vlogging channel or maybe it’s just the fear of talking. Whatever it is we promise that by the end of this page, you’ll be motivated with all rationality why your initial gut feeling of starting your vlog was right after all.
1. It’s a piece of cake
If you look at the number of vloggers in a community, the number is increasing exponentially. Are these people cinematography experts? Do these people have the most sophisticated equipment for vlogging? The answer is a big, bold NO. In today’s world, anyone can do it.
Shoot a video with a vlogging camera, if you don’t have access to specific equipment then use your phone and post the video on YouTube. Yes to be a successful vlogger characteristic like good video quality, good storytelling ability, and consistent content is very important, but you’d be surprised how much you can do with just the basics in video editing, equipment, and story.
Consistency is key and consistency doesn’t require advanced skills or high-end equipment.
It’s surprising how many vloggers and most famous content creators started with very limited camera gear, editing skills, and plot lines and how being consistent led them to establish an audience of millions for their vlogs.
So we have aligned a few simple steps you can follow to start your vlogging channel today.
First, make a list of all the interesting stories and events that have happened to you and would engage your friends, make a schedule of when to share each story as a vlog while keeping space for anything new that happens to you. Once you’ve listed the stories and the order and schedule you’re gonna tell them in, make a story plot for each story. Nearly half of your work is already done without even picking up the camera.
Now before you shoot your video, take a few tutorials on engaging cinematography, video editing, and marketing your video. Keep in mind that if you create a vlog that could compete with Christopher Nolan’s movies, you will never make an engaging audience if the marketing isn’t done right. Go through your favorite vloggers and see the evolution of their vlogs in all aspects from start to finish.
It’s time to pick up the camera, shoot the video, edit it, post it on YouTube and market it! Congratulations, you’ve now joined the vlogger community in 2022.
2. Easily available vlogging material
It’s a misconception that you require thousands of dollars worth of the best vlogging cameras to vlogging. You can start with your phone. That small device in your hand has more computing power than the rockets that took us to the moon. But let’s say you insist on getting some vlogging equipment, the most essential few tools will cover over 90 percent of your needs in vlogging different situations and are extremely affordable.
Starting with a video shooting device, you can either choose a small camcorder, a mirrorless camera, a beginner-level DSLR, or even a GoPro. It all depends on what type of vlogs you want to create and the content present in them.
Now to support your camera you’ll need a tripod. Most vlogs will contain many moments of the present in a closed room for which a sturdy and strong tripod like the Magnus VT 4000 will do.
You do not need continuous lighting with hundreds of watts of electricity to run through them. The main goal of lighting is to make either yourself or the subject of the frame the focus of the viewer’s attention. The ambient lighting provided by Impact Soft Natural Kit will do for most cases. However, if you’re using a green screen, you may need different lighting, but will you start your first vlog with such complexity?
Now comes a microphone. One of the biggest turnoffs for a viewer is bad audio. Subpar video quality and bad lighting are forgivable, but bad audio is a deal breaker, so it’s better if your first investment is an external microphone. In most cases, an attachable shotgun microphone like the RODE VideoMic Pro does the trick.
And that’s about it. The best vlogging cameras you can afford, are a good shotgun microphone, lighting equipment, and a sturdy tripod. Yes, good editing software comes in handy post-processing will cover a large chunk of your time. It helps if the environment you’re editing your vlog is user-friendly.
3. Money
A good portion of YouTube’s revenue is directed to paying vloggers. It’s insane how many vloggers just make a living by vlogging and financial opportunity is one of the main reasons behind the popularity of vlogging in the current times. Yes, it takes a lot of hard work to create an audience for your vlogs that can generate revenue for you but it’s worth it. All this only goes to prove that vlogging is a great way to make money online.
Some of the main ways vloggers make money are sponsorships from brands, ads run by YouTube on their videos. Vloggers often sell their merchandise once their reach a certain level of popularity. This also accounts for much of their revenue. Having a Patreon page is one of the most effective ways to make money via vlogging, these are more effective than YouTube ads and generate relatively more revenue.
You’ll also see many vloggers in the community doing affiliate marketing and selling educational resources, and services in their area of expertise. Essentially, there’s no formula through which you can generate a set income from vlogging, it’s trial and runs which makes it scary for most.
4. Increasing audience online
To prove how big the community has become let’s just see two numbers. Do you know the total audience of YouTube in 2015, 1.2 Billion people? Yes, that’s a billion with a B. But wait, there’s more. Do you know the number of people on YouTube just 5 years later? 2 Billion. In just 5 years YouTube has doubled the size of its already insanely large community. And what’s doubled isn’t hundreds or thousands, it’s billions! This number is an opportunity for you.
With such a large audience comes two things, the increasing probability that you will find a group of people whose interests align with your vlogs and content. The second advantage is the chance for you to create big and powerful communities. We’ve talked about the potential monetary benefits of such a large audience just a few paragraphs above.
Let’s skip to the downside, with such a large audience comes increasing noise, so you’ll need to have very specific and effective marketing tactics to make sure that you find the audience that is attracted to the content that you create and to make sure that you keep that audience, that they don’t get lost in all the millions of hours of content posted alongside you. It’s brutal out there but the rewards are just as enormous.
5. It’s the most effective way of communicating online
Pick up any cognitive studies by scientists and you’ll get the same response when they all have conclusively agreed that processing print wasn’t something the brain was designed for. It’s also seen that the human brain can recall a staggering sixty-five percent of information given that it was present with a visual aid.
So let’s say that you are marketing a product, given that you show your audience a video of your product there is a sixty-five percent chance they will remember your product. A study has shown that nearly 80 percent of the viewers remember a video they had seen last month.
There is also a concept called social proof, the more views a video has the more likely you are to watch it, and when you have a total audience of 2 billion on a single platform where all the vlogs go; as Chandler would say, “Could it BE any better?”
6. Relatable content
Two things come in sync here. Our thought on the inability to find content and something unique that our content will create will make it stand out. For a beginner, you may face the dilemma of how to vlog a certain specific content, but when you have that thought, we want you to remember this. Every minute of every day, millions of hours of content are posted on YouTube and this trend has been going on for years so it’s very much likely that you will find something relatable to what you want to create that already exists out there. That also means that you will have to do extensive research before you post something of your own. Remember that there is a lot of noise out there and that marketing and engaging content go hand in hand. If your content is not engaging, it won’t matter if you’re spending thousands on marketing your video, you’ll still suffer a gruesome defeat. So before you post your content online, do thorough research on what exists out there and how you can use that pre-existing content to your advantage in the best possible way.
Conclusion
And here we are again. Now you’re prepared and hopefully motivated enough to create your first-ever vlog. Remember, it’s a piece of cake, it’s a great way to engage a potentially enormous audience, vlogging is a great way to earn money with multiple streams dependent solely on your creativity and you can find all the material you need from the best and affordable vlogging camera, lighting, external mics, and tripods easily online!