Gaining Ground on the Groundswell of Online Viewers

8 Tips on How to Vlog Confidently Like Popular YouTubers

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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For most people, vlogging is not something that comes naturally. Like any skill, it takes practice to improve. When someone is good at vlogging, they make it look easy.

When we watch the most popular YouTubers, the traits that make them successful are often invisible, because we are so consumed by their vlog. In this article, I’ll highlight 8 tips from the most accomplished vloggers on the Internet, so that you can vlog confidently and make the best YouTube videos.

1. Be Authentic

People opt to watch vlogs because they want to see something real.

Vlogging is about honesty, telling a story that is truthful and showing your personality. The most popular vloggers are likable because they don’t deceive the audience, they befriend them. Vloggers treat their audience with respect and that comes from being honest.

There will be an urge for you to mimic other vloggers, talking and acting the way they do, but savvy YouTube viewers will be able to see your faux personality pretty quickly.

Don’t focus on your image, but instead focus on your voice. What makes you different? That is how you will build a proper reputation.

2. Tell A Story

A vlog is not an assortment of footage haphazardly put together. A successful vlog must have a story: a conflict told with a beginning, middle, and end.

When you are casually telling a story to a friend, you are not thinking about the structure or the plot. You are focused on what happened and you want to communicate it as accurately as you can. While vlogging, you should approach it much the same way. Ad-libbing is fine. Stumbling is fine. Going back and repeating a part of the story is fine. By simply getting your story on camera, you now have all the pieces.

Once all the pieces of the story are captured — including your storytelling, b-roll, and other supportive footage — you must now cut out all the irrelevant or repetitive parts and edit it so it can be enjoyed as one cohesive tale.

Take a look at this example from Tiffany Alvord and notice how there are jump cuts both to skip information that can be assumed by the audience and add the tension to the story she’s telling.

3. Surprise and Delight Your Audience

There is a saying that a great ending to a story is that it is surprising, yet inevitable .

The ending needs to be justified even if there is a twist. Everything before that had worked to build up the tension and when it concludes it needs to be logical. However, the ending cannot be something that the audience can guess. Remember those mystery movies where you know who the murderer is after the first few scenes? Yeah… those aren’t satisfying. A good story ends with a surprise, and with everything prior leading up to it.

The gold standard example of a surprising, yet inevitable end is Casey Neistat’s bike lane video. Everything in the video is leading up to the end, but when you watch it the first time it’s unexpected, and that’s why it’s so good.

4. Be Inviting

A common trait of successful vloggers is that they are welcoming. They share their passion and encourage others to join in. Vlogging is about being a guide. It doesn’t matter if you are leading a tour of your home or showing your viewer an interesting new skill, it is important for you to approach the whole process with open arms.

Unlike being invited to a party, there is no obligation when it comes to YouTube. Your viewers can continue to live vicariously through you or they may be inspired by your experience and dare to try it themselves.

The opposite of inviting is rejecting, and when you are a vlogger, you don’t want to reject anyone from enjoying your videos.

5. Compose the Shot

Vlogging is a visual medium, and while the story is important, what is captured in the frame will play an impactful role in the video as well.

In a way, every vlogger needs to have a director’s eye for cinematography. I’m not saying that you need to be Wes Anderson to be an awesome vlogger, but knowing what is in the frame with you, the angle of the shot, the movement of the camera, and the quality of light will help the product look better.

The great thing about vlogging is that you will get a lot of practice framing shots, so I encourage you to learn the basics of video editing .

Check out this example from Rosanna Pansino , where she gives a tour of her bedroom.

The camera follows her fluidly throughout the video, but it is her eyes that guide both the camera moves and what she wants our attention to be directed to. Don’t hesitate to let the viewer know what you want them to see.

6. Be Prepared

While you can pick up a camera and start vlogging on the fly, being prepared enables you to produce the best video possible. Take a few minutes before you hit record simply to outline the key points you want to talk about and how the video will end, ensuring that after filming you haven’t forgotten a crucial part.

Additionally, knowing what to say makes you a better host for your vlog. Watch your favorite vlogger, I bet when they are speaking on camera, their speech is not littered with umms and ahhs…

Good preparation includes having all your gear ready for filming when you need it. There is nothing worse than being set to shoot and running out of battery or memory.

Take a look at Ashley Nichole in this vlog and notice that although she sounds spontaneous, it is also evident that she knows what she is going to talk about next.

7. Be Expressive

Remember those teachers that drone on and on, without adding any expression or passion to what they are lecturing? While they might have been perfectly suitable as teachers, they wouldn’t make good vloggers.

If you speak on camera in a monotone voice, you are not being expressive. Your facial and body language will match your lackluster performance. Even if you are talking about something you are excited about, if your demeanor doesn’t match that, then the video is going to be lifeless. Vlogging is a presentation, a performance. There needs to be energy.

Consider your audience: they are coming home from school or work, where there were classes and meetings, and the last thing they want to watch is a video of your speaking without energy.

Want to see a vlogger that is awesome at being expressive on camera? Check out Emma Chamberlain , if you haven’t already. Every word she says in her video is layered with emotion. We know exactly how she feels.

8. Stay Organized

The same way you should prepare before filming, it’s also important to be organized comes the editing phase. Editing is arguably the most time-consuming part of the vlogging process, so have a system for categorizing and finding your footages.

This is especially important when you have multiple video and audio files and if you are capturing footage over a number of days or in different locations.

Additionally, while filming your vlog, you are going to mess up. It’s also helpful to add a cue after you messed up, this can be a sound cue that causes the levels to spike (clapping or snapping your fingers work) or a video cue such as a dramatic gesture to the camera. When skipping through your footage to find the part where you messed up, later on, it’s easier to have a mark to help you locate it.

Vlogging is hard, so don’t make more work for yourself. Learn little tricks to make life easier for yourself at every step.

The more organized you are the more attention you can put into the creative aspect of vlogging, and less time finding a video file or syncing audio to video.

There you have it, 8 tips to help you vlog like the pros. Anyone can vlog. But only until you point a camera at yourself in public for the first time, do you realize how uncomfortable vlogging can be.

Even filming yourself in your room with the door closed — and nobody is in the house with you — can be a challenge for beginning vloggers. If you find watching your first few videos to be cringy, don’t be discouraged. There are fears of vlogging, but you can overcome them .

Take a look at some of the first videos from popular YouTubers and you can see that everyone had a starting point.

Do you have any vlogging tricks of your own? Leave a comment below.

If you want to find a video editing solution that empowers your imagination and creativity yet takes less effort, please try this robust and user-friendly video editing software Wondershare Filmora, which will definitely enhance your productivity and helps you to make money by making videos much easier.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

For Social Media Savants: Distinguishing Between IGTV & YouTube

IGTV VS YouTube: Should Video Content Creators Use One Platform or The Other?

Shanoon Cox

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

IGTV receives quite a lot of attention from marketers and content creators alike. Some even go so far to compare IGTV to YouTube, currently, the largest video sharing platform in the world that hosts 300 minutes of video each minute. IGTV may have fewer users than YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to use it effectively for a wide array of different purposes. So, in this article, we are going to take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each platform in order to help you discover how you can utilize each of these social networks to broaden the audience for the content you share online.

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IGTV VS YouTube: What’s the difference

Comparison between IGTV and YouTube is somewhat unfair towards the former since IGTV is a much younger platform that still needs time to develop. YouTube, on the other hand, has a reputation as one of the most reliable video sharing platforms ever created that enables people from all walks of life to upload and share music, movies, gaming videos and virtually any other type of moving images. Even so, let’s take a look at major differences and similarities between IGTV and YouTube.

Have a Quick Glance of the Differences

01 Interface Differences

02 The Upload Process

03 Discovering New Content

03 Monetization

03 Analytics and Insights

1. Interface Differences

Despite the fact that you can access IGTV from a web browser, this platform is predominantly dedicated to videos that are going to be watched on mobile devices. This also means that the thumbnails of the videos you uploaded to your IGTV channel are going to be displayed differently than those on your YouTube channel. The interfaces of these two social networks are entirely different, but if you are a newcomer to each of these platforms you won’t have much trouble getting used to them.

2. The Upload Process

The fact that you can only upload vertically oriented videos to IGTV somewhat limits your options because you either have to record a video for IGTV specifically or you must edit a horizontally oriented video and change its aspect ratio to 9:16. You can upload videos to YouTube and IGTV directly from your computer or you can use iPhone and Android-based apps to capture videos with your phone and upload them to either of these platforms. The maximum duration of an IGTV video can’t exceed sixty minutes, while the default duration of all videos on YouTube is set to 15 minutes. Nonetheless, if you own a verified YouTube account, you can upload videos that have 128GB and last up to 12 hours.

At the moment the videos you want to upload to your IGTV channel have to be saved in the MP4 file format because the platform still doesn’t offer support for any other video file format. YouTube grants much more freedom in this respect as it allows you to upload videos saved in AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4 and other commonly used file formats.

3. Discovering New Content

IGTV is more than a decade younger than YouTube, so you shouldn’t be surprised if you’re having trouble discovering new content. Moreover, IGTV’s search engine is still relatively new and it is much less powerful than the one used by YouTube. This is the reason why the videos you upload to your YouTube channel are going to be much easier to find via a simple Google search than those you shared on IGTV. Besides, YouTube offers much more new content on a daily basis than IGTV, and it is clear that the Instagram’s new brainchild still has ways to go before it reaches the point when it can challenge the largest video sharing platform in the world in terms of diversity of the content that it delivers to its users.

4. Monetization

At the moment, views and likes can’t be monetized on IGTV, so most influencers rely on sponsorships from brands. Things may change as the platform grows, but for the time being IGTV doesn’t provide the content creators with any compensation for the work they are putting in. YouTube allows content creators to monetize their videos through Google Adsense for years, and some of its most prominent users like PewDiePie or Logan Paul have earned hundreds of millions of dollars by posting new content on their YouTube channels. Keep in mind that you are going to need at least a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewing time before you can enable YouTube’s Monetize feature.

5. Analytics and Insights

Knowing how many people watched the entire video or how many likes and comments certain types of videos get can help you produce content that attracts a larger audience on all social networks. The metrics such as engagement or view-through rates can be essential during online marketing campaigns as they can suggest how many people are watching your videos and for how long. The analytics tools YouTube provides are much more diverse than those offered by IGTV that only lets you see the audience retention graph and the number of views and comments a video currently has. YouTube is an obviously a much better option for anyone who wants to conduct an in-depth analysis of their content’s performance, although the tools on IGTV are still powerful enough to indicate which type of content your audience likes the most.

Why Shouldn’t You Use YouTube and IGTV For the Same Purposes?

You shouldn’t assume that you can post the same type of videos on your YouTube and IGTV channels, just because they are both video sharing platforms. The content you create for your IGTV channel needs to be dynamic and entertaining in order to captivate the audience’s attention. Posting tutorials or hour-long gaming videos on IGTV won’t attract as many viewers as on YouTube, which is why businesses who want to use IGTV to promote their products and services need to choose the content carefully. Furthermore, the videos that last between two and five minutes are still by far the most popular on IGTV, so even though technically you can upload a video that lasts one hour to your IGTV channel, the chances are that such long videos won’t get a lot of views.

IGTV is probably best used as a tool that can help improve the engagement with your followers on Instagram, but if you want to become an established video content creator, then running a YouTube channel is simply a much better option. It still remains to be seen how will IGTV evolve in the years to come, but at the present moment this platform doesn’t really have any chance of challenging YouTube’s position as the world’s leading video sharing platform.

However, no matter which video platform you choose, you need to ensure the videos you create are of high quality. A good video editing software like Filmora can help you acheive this goal.

Useful Features of Filmora

• Cokor Matching: Apply color correction setting to multiple clips on one-click.
• Effects: Create blockbuster videos with preset effects.
• Motion Tracking: Track moving items and add elements to it at ease.
• And more waiting for you to discover.

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox