Ian Gray

Ian Gray: Help Entrepreneurs Level up Their Impact, Authority & Profits by Using Live Video Confidently (#251)

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Our Guest Today: Ian Gray

Ian Gray is the founder of the Confident Live Marketing Academy and is the host of the Confident Live Marketing Podcast. He helps entrepreneurs to level up their impact, authority and profits by using live video confidently. He’s founder of Seriously Social – a blog focused on live video and social media tools. He’s an international speaker, trainer, teacher and consultant. He has a passion for making the techno-babble of live video and social media marketing easy to understand. Ian is co-founder of Select Performers – a family run web agency. As well as being a geek, husband, and dad to two kids, Ian is also a professional singer and lives near Manchester in the UK.

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Media Link:

Learn more about Ian Gray: https://iag.me/

Transcript

Fei Wu 0:00
Hey, Feisworld podcast helps independent creators live their creative and financial freedom. I’m your host Fei Wu and I’ll be taking you through a series of interviews with creators from around the world who are living life on their own terms. Each episode is packed with tactics, nuggets, you can implement origin stories to make listening productive and enjoyable. We’re not only focused on the more aspirational stories, but relatable ones as well. We also have non interview based mini series releasing throughout the year to help deep dive into topics such as freelancing, marketing, even in the filmmaking that will benefit creators like you shownotes links and ways to connect with the guests are available on face world.com. Now on to the show. Hey, guys, this is a will from face world podcast. But remember, we are now called Face roll media because we have a podcast, a YouTube channel and a documentary series on Amazon Prime. We’re super excited. And we welcome you to check out all that information and stories that we have put out there. And the theme again is the same. We’re here to help creative entrepreneurs. And today on the show, I welcome Ian gray. So Ian gray helps entrepreneurs level up their impact authority and profits by using live video confidently. I mean, it couldn’t be more timely of an episode because face world media on YouTube has been releasing. Well, I have been releasing a ton of live stream multistream and simulcasting tutorials, because I’ve been doing things along the same line, how do I discover EA? And you may be wondering, actually, it wasn’t through multicasting, or even his content related to videos. I was in search of a new social media management platform. You guys probably didn’t know this. But my VA Rose and I had had been using Agora Pulse for a long time. It’s a French company. It’s very popular among more mature entrepreneurs. And well, they’re not cheap. So I was looking for a cheaper but an equivalent platform and took me oh my god such a long time. In retrospect, I mean, I wish I found in much earlier on. But as I was looking for Agora Pulse alternatives, I found this article, I believe, if I remember correctly, like seven reasons or 10 reasons not to use Agora Pulse. And this is what’s called a mega blog post instead of just long form, like to 3000 words, Ian has been historically writing these mega blog posts, which will take him you know, weeks to write each and every one. But the information is just so complete and superior. I mean, you’re literally looking at every single social media management platforms and understand the difference, their impact and the price points and how you can go about choosing them. I was so utterly impressed guys, to be quite honest. So I ended up reading everything else. I went to Ian’s about page, by the way, his website is iag.me. And I went to his about page found out that he was a professional singer or trained professional singer, who stumble upon social media, and you’re building up his website and had these viral blog posts, which I’m not surprised at all, before he began developing, you know, these live video tutorials. And so we just hit it off right away. I mean, I couldn’t be more excited. If you haven’t watched the video, I recommend that you go check it out. By the way, you can access these live stream videos, when I go live with my podcast guests. As soon as they’re available. As soon as we are live on our Facebook page, which is facebook.com for slash face world. We also go live on our YouTube channels. So to do that, you have to visit our YouTube channel by searching for face world on YouTube. And then make sure you hit the subscribe button and then the bell button to get notifications. So when we go live, you’ll get notified on your phone on your computer, which is quite convenient. Oh actually also via your email. So that will be the easiest with us said I, you know on video, Ian was also able to show me the devices the hardware he’s been using. He’s definitely ahead of the game compared to me, but I’m also learning furiously and sharing these tutorials on my own YouTube channel. But I just feel like again, there’s a lot of synergy opportunities for collaborations with Ian and his coaching and his honesty to talk about how he got started live streaming, how uncomfortable he felt. But on top of that, some of the best practices and and tips that he you know, it was able to adapt quickly and learn From a, you know, put together as guides for us to then become more professional with speaking which I’m actually staring at a little sticky note about a live stream Best Practices I’ve learned over the past and number of weeks is some of the mistakes I noticed I’m making, including not having clear beginnings or clear endings. And sometimes I get too excited, I don’t really introduce my, my guests more fully, I definitely want to do that also, because it really helps with post production, which is what I’m doing now with my producer Herman to know when the episode starts and when it finishes. Right and, and without having to kind of reintroduce my guests. At the beginning again, who knows, you know, the truth is, guys, whenever you try something new, you’re gonna make a ton of mistakes. And you you might never ever reach the perfection, and the most optimal state because you’re constantly improving. And that’s something that you and I talk about. So I find these, you know, these conversations to be incredibly helpful, and also reassuring because when you are a solopreneur, or content creator, it can feel really isolating and lonely at times. I mean, I’m very blessed with having so many supporters in my life. But not everybody has that or have that community of people they can trust and bounce ideas off of. So I use these conversations as an opportunity for me to learn, but also for me to grow. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I tend to share a bit more now at the beginning of these episodes about my own life, what I’m about to do what I have done recently so if you find these things to be less interesting where you can just fast forward usually the first five minutes and drive a jump right into these episodes. I so appreciate you Please be well take care of yourself, your family. US you at the end of the episode. If you have any recommendations, or conversations you’d like to have with me and you know, hit the record button, send me a message right on anchor.fm where we host our podcast, or find me on social media everywhere under face world Fei SWO our LD I will see you next week. Take care. Much love mwah

Hey, everyone, this is fable from face world media. And believe it or not, it’s my birthday today. So I’m celebrating with Yeah, two guests. One, Ian Anderson Gray, as you can see on my screen, I found in because I was looking for a social media management platform. So more to come on that. Most recently, I discovered as soon as I went live streaming multi streaming for my content, I realized that Ian is this authority, who has published so many, you know, courses and ebooks and so many long, long, long form articles on his website, which you can see in his nametag here. So super, super excited to have Ian here. We’re going to learn a lot today. Welcome in.

Ian Gray 8:12
Thank you and happy birthday. I didn’t realize it was your birthday. Hope you’re having a great day.

Fei Wu 8:16
Thank you. Thank you. I haven’t announced that for like 20 years. I don’t know like you know, it’s so weird as an adult. But

Ian Gray 8:23
I’ll why not? We’re all we’re will. We will little children inside I think

Fei Wu 8:28
very much. So I think just by reading your website, your business and your your background, I was thinking wow, like, I’m so thrilled to have met people all over the internet all over the world, and to talk about the things that we you know, both love and share and to be able to build a lifestyle business. So where are you currently located?

Ian Gray 8:50
So I’m based just south of Manchester in the UK. And I’ve been living in this kind of area, probably Yeah, most of my life. I did live in Scotland for a couple of years. My parents are from Scotland. And I’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve spoken in different countries around the world. But yeah, home is near Manchester in the UK

Fei Wu 9:10
is awesome. We have at least two more guests from that area, the Atherton twins from Cirque du Soleil, and I’ve interviewed them like three times and put them in the documentary. So there’s a bit of a connection there. So Ian, could you you know, I want to dive right in because there’s so many questions I have right now, as you know, we doesn’t matter where we are on the planet on this planet. We’re all under some sort of, you know, quarantine or you know, stay at home or limited access to the outside world and all of a sudden, you captivated this, this genre this this skill, which is to help people get feel more confident on camera, understand how they can use a live stream as a service as a way of growing their business. Could you tell me Bit more bit more about that how you got into why do you think it’s important?

Ian Gray 10:05
Well, if you want the short story of the long story, I mean, we It depends on how far back you want to go. But I mean, certainly I’ve, I’ve been doing live streaming, I’ve been embracing live streaming since 2016. And a little bit before that. And I initially saw live streaming i. So this is when Facebook Live came out in 2016. And it seemed that every, every one of my friends had access to it, but I didn’t, probably being in the UK and also had been an Android user at the time, I didn’t have access to it. And then OBS Studio, I discovered this software called OBS Studio that allowed me to go live to Facebook, from my computer. And it was really cool. But the problem was, it was really complicated. And so I found a way to make it really easy for people to use OBS Studio I launched a course. And then I realized that the the my background actually is I trained as a professional singer I’ve been I’ve been teaching and that’s combined my my that my love of teaching my love of performing, combined with my love of technology being a bit of a gig. That live live video is a bit of a no just this kind of sweet spot between all of those things. And so I’ve been teaching that ever since. And I think the the reason I really love live video is although I still find it a little bit scary to get in front of the camera, I still need to push myself, it’s a way for us all to be I hate to use the word because it’s overused, it’s a way for us to be authentic, to be real to to show our flaws. And for people to get to know the real you. And that is why I love it. And it’s also because it’s so easy to create content. You mentioned my blog posts, my goodness, the some of those blog posts have taken me weeks and months to produce the amount of effort that goes into them. And they’ve been amazing. But with live video content, once you’ve you’ve done your quick planning, you press your live broadcast button. And then you’ve got a piece of amazing content that you can repurpose into blog posts and to podcasts and all this kind of stuff. Oh my goodness, that’s changed so much for me over the past year and a bit since I’ve launched my show and podcast. I can’t tell you well,

Fei Wu 12:20
so I didn’t this is such good information. I didn’t even realize that you your podcast, when you launch the year ago was already live streaming you never had you basically you never like pre produced or edited. You know? Or how do you manage that process? Which is curious as most of us are, you know, recording planning, editing, editing, publish live marketing, right?

Ian Gray 12:43
Yeah, so I call this the five P’s process when it comes to the whole live video thing. And so the first thing that you need to do is obviously plan no matter what you do. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to ask the question, Well, where are they going to go live? So you need to think about the platform’s you need to think about, well, why am I doing it? When am I doing it? What What am I going to be talking about, you need to plan all those things. And I put a document together which answers all those questions I put in there, who my audiences, I need to know why I’m doing it and who I’m talking to, when that’s the kind of standard thing that we all need to do. And then I then go into the pre promotion stage. So I always schedule my my live broadcasts to Facebook and YouTube and on the other channels. So I make sure I pre promote, I let people know what I’m doing. When I’m next going to be going live. Then we’re getting on to the production side of things. So I’ve developed this over time, but this is when it comes to actually going live and the preparation into going live. So I currently I’m using ECAM live and restream to go live. And I I’ve set it up, I go live, I also record the audio, I use Adobe Audition for that. And I structure my live shows in a way that makes sense for the podcast. So I have, the way I do it is I have a three or four minute segment right at the beginning, as I welcome my live viewers to the show. It’s a bit of if I have a guest on and it’s a bit of an informal chat. It’s me just you know, welcoming people. And then I will get on with the main show. So I’ll have segments or videos, a video segment video intro, and it’s at that point when I start recording from my podcast and and then that record right to the end. So I’ll come on to that a little bit more about the podcast in a bit. But then the next stage once I press the End broadcast button, we then go into the post promotion side of things. So this is the fourth P very similar to the pre promotion. But we’ve now created a piece of evergreen content. So we want to make sure that people we come back and watch the replay and people and and that kind of thing. And then the final P which is the bit that so many people forget and the bit that I’m really excited about is the repurposing Have the content. So I can then take that audio. And I can edit it. I can I can, I’ll edit out the bits that don’t make sense for the for the podcast, I will turn it into a blog, Elton and social media posts. And there’s so much you can do with that. So yeah, that’s that’s my process very, very quickly through so it’s all

Fei Wu 15:20
Yeah, absolutely the five Ps I need to read on that the reason why I was clapping, you know, not very loudly because we’re alive on repurposing is that recently, I put together a course as well, I didn’t even plan on talking about it. But it’s a course to help train virtual assistants for podcasts. And one of the area’s I can’t wait to I’m going to, if you could help me take a look and get some feedback that will be amazing after this session. And what I have learned is just the repurposing piece is something that I’ve been highlighting quite yet. It’s something a lot of people haven’t realized. So in marketing, we talk about selling something that people don’t quite desire or don’t really see as an opportunity is kind of hard. But just like you said, for years, we have repurpose quotes from our guests the things that they say, and then we’ll put on interesting backgrounds or white backgrounds. We’ve been using headliner for audio grams, to get the sound bites out, and then people like that, and maybe they will listen to part of the episodes. And like you said, blog posts are so incredible, like I neglected that for the longest time just because it takes a while to write. So number one, I get the transcript. So people have reached out to me people with certain disabilities will say that, how do we access your content? So we get the transcripts? And, and then obviously, that’s not really sufficient or enough of we’re just like baby steps to kind of get our content out there to be exposed to more people at the right place at the right time. And brilliant. I love that.

Ian Gray 16:53
Yes, it’s cool. I wouldn’t be without I mean, yes, I still believe in long form blog content. I wouldn’t be here today with if I hadn’t invested that time. But it’s live video so much time and at the end of the day, not this. I know this all sounds shocking. It’s not really but you know, not everyone likes live video, you know, you know. So we all have different ways that we have an audience, Rob, people who’d like different ways of consuming content. So some people absolutely love live video hopping on and commenting and getting involved. There’ll be some people that prefer to listen to podcasts, there’ll be some people that prefer to read, and there’ll be some people like me, who likes a bit of all of that. And so we I think creating content that is going to cater for everybody. And of course, you mentioned know people who have special needs people who have trouble reading or trouble listening, you know, so actually having different types of content is so important. Absolutely.

Fei Wu 17:50
And, wow, you said something right up front, I think it’s one of the the first or the second P the planning phase, I found myself planning and then just something that I immediately reminded me of while I need a structure. And because such as today, I mean to your being two people as opposed to one all of a sudden, I need to make sure that my restream captions title descriptions are up to date, that I’m still broadcasting to the right channels that I’m introducing my guests correctly. And, and one thing is I noticed like people don’t really read a whole lot of description when they’re watching the video, but they do need an idea or a quick hit to say, Why am I listening? So I kind of want to want to be coached by you for a second. So I took a different approach. Originally, my title would say face world media or face world podcast, faily interviewing Ian gray. And now I change our title today. Maybe you’re not seeing it right now. But it says you know how to grow your business with live stream and multi stream. So kind of that becomes the title or weigh in and then in the description and talk a bit more about you and me. What have you learned? or what have you seen as maybe? Oh, that what’s the right approach? Or what’s a more optimized approach?

Ian Gray 19:07
Yeah. So I think that’s that’s a really smart approach. Because at the end of the day, you know, people are busy, you know, and there’s so much competition out there. And so, you need to give people a reason for actually listening to this. And yes, your, your dedicated, your core audience may know who well, they will know who you are, and they will know they want to listen to you or watch you. But how about the other people out there and so you need to give people a really kind of solid reason why they should be watching you and giving up their time. So actually putting that in the title is really good. I mean, I’m gonna be totally honest with you. I don’t think this is something that I’m continually working on and trying to optimize things and over the last year, so what I’ve done is I’ve I’ve so my VA has been helping me with this because she’s a massive Asana fan, so she’s got me on to Asana, and we’ve developed this process and we’ve been tweaking little bits of optimizing bits. And this is the title of the description is the bit that I still quite haven’t got perfect. But that’s the thing is never going to be perfect. We’ve got to constantly tweak things and optimize things over time. So and so there are other questions like, well, when when’s the best time to go live? How long should I go live to? There is actually no, there’s, there’s actually not like, like a definitive answer for that you have to play around, because it’s going to depend on your audience, depend on where you’re located and the platform that you’re broadcasting on. So I would continually tweak those things and see what happens, see what works for you. And one thing that you can do with with restream. So I know you’re using restream, is they’ve got a they’ve got an analytics section, so you can actually see how many people are watching live or when maybe when people dipped off. And so maybe at that point, you think, Okay, well, maybe that wasn’t the right thing, that the right direction to go. And maybe I’ll change the direction next time. Or maybe I’ll change the time, and you can tweak things, you know, over time and work out what’s best for you.

Fei Wu 21:02
That’s such a good point as a content creator, as part of the channel, and people were watching this, and especially on YouTube, a lot of people became content creators since the pandemic, and they didn’t realize that they were creating content before but now it just war in a format where they feel like they’re doing a lot more through livestream. They’re uncomfortable, which we’ll get to in a second. But I think one thing I want to remind just everyone who had you know, people who haven’t been podcasting, producing YouTube videos, and all that is, you really don’t have like you said, you don’t have a solid answer to all of these questions. There are great questions. But you just have to keep practicing, experimenting, trusting the process. And I run a small mastermind and one of the gentlemen Warner mentioned that when he releases a podcast, say on LinkedIn, it’s not that everybody’s gonna just drop everything they’re doing or listening to him. Right? Most people won’t even listen. But in a professional network, people are like, You know what, somebody’s still in the game, somebody’s doing something interesting. And it triggers something where he has gone client, because new clients during the pandemic, because people are seeing him actively doing something. It’s scanning the title. So that’s something people don’t really think about, because I don’t know how you feel about those ENI when you? Yeah,

Ian Gray 22:21
I I’m really glad you brought that up. because not a lot of people talk about that. And they kind of almost afraid to admit that that’s it, you know, when you first go live, even like the first dozen shows you do that you may not have that many people watching you live, you may not even have any. But don’t give up, you know, yes, there’s things you can do to pre promote it and let people know about it. But the fact that you are going live the fact that you know, people will be notified, they’ll see it, they might see you and they might not have time to look to to watch your live video, they may not have time to to watch the replay. But the fact is, they see that you are turning up that you are being consistent. And and so that’s that’s really important. And so they may then eventually come and watch you and and watch like two minutes, and then they may be hooked and come back and spend spend more time with you. But yeah, you can. In fact, I’ve had business from people who I’ve haven’t actually watched, like a whole show of mine, but they’ve they’ve they’ve seen me go live regularly. And they know that I’m turning up that I’m a professional that I know what I’m talking about. And so they’ve hired me because of that. So it would be great if, if if all our audience was watchers, all the way through every single week, but you know, welcome to the real world. It’s not gonna happen.

Fei Wu 23:41
It’s not gonna happen. And then I think it’s really okay. I don’t know, something really profound happening. And I’m glad that’s happening to me that took years of overcoming that fear, I think to be honest, like, as a as a woman of color, as someone whose first language really isn’t English. I grew up in Beijing. And people who know me really well know exactly when I make mistakes, that type of you know, grammar or whatever that is, you know, accents, they can spot that very quickly. But the rest of the world won’t, and they don’t really care. But there’s always that, you know, you feel really polarized somehow to put yourself out there because when I started the podcast, my own pockets in 2014 There wasn’t really like a household activity. Now, you know, people feel like everybody has a show today. That’s even what people said back then. You know, there’s some people reacted to be Oh my God, what an idiot like she’s starting a podcast. I really, you know, it took a lot to kind of overcome that. But I am so glad that you and I took that leap and just published regardless.

Ian Gray 24:46
It’s a huge issue. And you know, I’m gonna be totally honest with you the first time I went, I launched my show a year ago and I’m so proud of myself that I’ve gone I’ve I haven’t necessarily gone live every single week. But I’ve done I’ve produced a podcast every single week consistently. And that for me, it was a big thing because I’m, I’m a, I like to call myself I’m a recovering perfectionist, I’ve always wanted to get things perfect. And it was a huge problem. When I first tried to launch my show, it was probably it was a year ago, but it should have been two or three years ago, I procrastinated like nothing. And part of that was my my issue. My one of my big flaws. And I think this is the flaw that pretty much most people have is that I want to be liked. I don’t I’m worried about being judged. I’m worried about people, like seeing, like seeing me and not liking the way I look or the way I sound or thinking I’m a fraud, you know, the whole imposter syndrome thing. So I really struggled with all of those things. And at the end of the day, I just, I got fed up with myself. And I thought, you know, enough’s enough. I’ve actually, it actually took somebody saying to me, you know, and you’re actually being selfish, you’re trying to, you’re trying to get everything perfect. Whereas actually your audience are just, they’re, they’re wanting to hear from you. flaws, and all in fact, they actually like your flaws. And you just need to get out there and go live. And, and you will learn through the process. And yeah, the first few videos, if I go back now and watch my first three or four live videos, yeah. It’s not like great, but I learned through that process. So you’ve got it, you’ve got to do it. And yes, you will. You know, you’ll get some people like who won’t like what you do, and may say some bad things, but they’re never going to be your clients. They’re never going to be your audience. So you just got to kind of like, let them pass and keep, keep kind of becoming more you being authentic. I know, it’s an overused word. But the your, your, your, your dream clients, your dream audience will love those bits about you. So so just shine, shine through all of that.

Fei Wu 27:06
Exactly. This is so different than being like a keynote speaker. And even then, I love watching. This is why I interview you know, the Atherton’s from Cirque du Soleil and 18 other circus actors and actresses, because I want to know what they do in their daily lives. I want to know how they raise children when they have to come home at one in the morning, right for some of them party throughout the night, but their schedule are totally different. And, you know, I don’t know what people I want to get to how you educate and teach people to be more confident to feel more like themselves on camera, because I was thinking, okay, right before this call is like, what are some of the things that people may be afraid of going live? Like? What if you have to go use the the restaurant? Well, you can remedy that by remembering to go beforehand. But what did you start coughing? Like? What is one time I got so excited, just start coughing like non stop, and then as like, water won’t fix like something when my throw something my eye? But those are such human moments that?

Ian Gray 28:07
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so when those things happen to you, you’ve just got to be able to kind of laugh at yourself, I think, you know, don’t take yourself so seriously and, and make make fun of it and say I’m like, I’m so sorry. Oh, my goodness, you know, I don’t know where that cough came from, you know, actually, you can joke because people will empathize with that. And there’s, there’s, there’s things like there’s technical issues, you know, people will forgive technical issues. But you’ve obviously having a checklist is really going to help there. So make sure you have a checklist so that things things that you could avoid going wrong, won’t go wrong. But you know, in the last few months, there was I had somebody on my show a guest on my show, the first time we tried to get her on, there was a power cut. There wasn’t much I could do about it, you know, and then there’s sick so we got her on a week later. And the internet went down. In fact, the internet went down for my ISP across the whole of the UK. So again, there wasn’t much I could do about that you’ve got to but we have fun about it. In fact, one thing that I did is at the beginning of my podcast I do I do come up with a theme song so I actually sing a different theme song for all my guests which I know sounds completely mad. But I actually sang a song about how you know how frustrating it was that we had a power cut and and and the Internet going down halfway through so you know have have fun with it joke joke about it. But then there’s other things you know you I think actually making sure that before you go live that you you acknowledge the fear that you might have, you know, I I still have those butterflies in my in my stomach. I have that that nervous energy. But what I’ve found really helpful is to turn or to think about it Thinking about it as fear and being scared. Think about it as being excited, because the emotions of excitement and feeling scared are actually very, very similar. So that’s really helpful. And then the other thing that people can do is to warm up their body and warm up their voice before they go live. So actually, you know, the kind of warmup exercises you would do before going to the gym, you can do before you you, you go live. So stretching exercises, relaxing your upper body, getting rid of any tension that you may have, making sure that your your voice is working, but you’re doing low and high a bits in your voice. So you don’t sound like a robot and smiling, do some, there’s actually some facial exercises you can do just to to make sure that you’re smiling, because that makes a massive difference to. And then the other thing is, it is it is scary, doing a live video on your own. So bringing in a guest or bringing your co host is really good. But the other thing is tilt, get some of your friends, particularly at the beginning to come on and watch your live videos. I know that sounds silly, but actually get some people to watch. And so it’s a lot easier if you know, you’ve got some friendly faces who are in the audience, and listening to what you’re saying. So and then of course, the other things that you can do, even before you think about going live, there are some other things you can do, such as Instagram stories are a great preparation to go in life because they first of all, it’s getting used to being in front of the camera, that only 15 seconds of video, you can be consistent, you can say, well, I’m going to do two Instagram stories every day for the next month. And I think that’s something that we you can manage. And what’s the worst that’s going to happen because they get deleted after a day. So that’s a great way of getting getting prepared. Once you get to the next stage, go live on your Facebook profile and change the privacy settings to only me, so you can so no one’s going to watch you but you’re just testing out playing with it. And then the next stage is to maybe go live in a private group with your small and caught audience before you then go live to the whole world, which is a bit more scary.

Fei Wu 32:11
Yeah. These are such practical advice and tips that people can practice. And some people might say, oh, you know, I have a busy schedule. I have kids and I have so many other things. I’m not getting done. But I think one one area people, at least in the US, I’m sure in the western world talk about investment. A lot. Yeah, well, you know, you put in a lot of effort and people want to know, what is the return? What am I benefiting? What how is this thing going to benefit me so that I know it’s worth my time? Well, I think a lot of people don’t think about this, but just by going to work, you know, at least in corporate America, you go to work, you can spend the entire day without saying much at all. And get by that especially if you’re not in a senior leadership position that you’re not giving speeches, you’re sitting there typing email. And it’s incredible how people lose touch with not just the outside world, but also with themselves. They actually don’t know what the their voices or their authentic voice even sound like anymore, or I have worked with a lot of people, women in particular to say, you know, by the time they reach their mid 40s, or you know, empty nesters in their 50s. They don’t know what they actually like they don’t, they don’t really know what to go after. And it’s really sad, because I think somehow that by practicing live streaming and get yourself out there not only you’re communicating with yourself getting better at just communications in general, but you’re voicing yourself to other people so that others around you can maybe help you I can’t tell you how many times I’m just sharing the message and everybody’s like, Oh, how about this? You know, you’re developing the course. You know, Jonathan, my friend Jonathan said, hey, check out this Reddit forum. You know, there’s a lot of helpful information. I’m just like, Oh, my God, I’m so glad I I said something.

Ian Gray 34:03
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s so many advantages in, in going live is, is yes, there’s the standard stuff like it’s a way to grow your audience. It’s a way to create content. It’s also a great way to, to learn more about yourself to, to work on your mindset, to have amazing guests on your show and to learn stuff from them and to so much so much about it. And I didn’t necessarily know all those things when I first launched my show, but it’s been amazing to I’ve just had so many amazing guests on my show. I’ve had psychologists and marketers and tech people, and I’ve grown so much and I’ve grown in my confidence. So, you know, if you’re asked the question, what’s the best way of getting more confident? Well, I stand by all the things that I’ve said. But the best way to get more confident is to press the also then go live. And yes, you will make mistakes. And it all, you’ll probably have some times when you feel like a complete idiot. But you know what? Keep doing it, and you’ll get more and more confident you’ll never get perfect. So the graph will never get to that perfect state. But I think at that point, if you ever get to perfect, it’s probably time to give up because it will be boring. And we don’t want that.

Fei Wu 35:21
Yeah, exactly. It will be very boring. So speaking of which, you and I, I’m really impressed by the fact that, you know, there’s so much content out there and the fact that when people search for, you know, social media platforms, when you search for live streaming, multi streaming, your name would come up. And I was really surprised and but at the same time felt indebted to you. Because, you know, when you just you, me, or anybody searching for content on YouTube or Google, we really want to get to the bottom of it, we want to get to the answer the information that helps us lead the way and you were the one. So I would love for you to share a bit about your journey, because I read your about page that you did not expect the your blog to take off through just a couple of articles. And a lot of people don’t think that this is true that they need to write need to you need to read a lot. But it really takes sometimes one or two blog posts for me it took one YouTube video to really kind of take off. So could you talk about that? Yeah,

Ian Gray 36:23
absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, I, I’m not, in some ways, I’m not a prolific blogger. Now I don’t write, I do well, with the live show that they’ve got, I’m now able to produce a weekly, a weekly blog post. But before that, I certainly wasn’t. So I think as I said, Before, I trained as a professional singer, I was teaching, I had a web agency with my dad, which I still run. But it was back in 2011 2012. I always wanted to write a blog. And so I thought, I’m just gonna create a blog and social media marketing is still in its infancy, I just thought it’s a really interesting area I and so I will start blogging about that. And so I launched my blog, late 2011. And I was playing around with a with a tool called HootSuite, which I’m sure many, many of your viewers and listeners will have heard of. And at the time, it was really one of the only social media management tools out there. But I was just a little bit frustrated when I saw a lot of blog posts out there that were singing its praises and saying it was amazing. And yes, there were lots of good things about it. But I wanted to write an article that, yes, looked at the positive stuff, but also helped people understand what the bits about it that were missing. And maybe in the back of my mind, I thought, Well, maybe you know, I don’t know whether HootSuite is probably never going to read this, but maybe they will. And you know, they can add some extra bits. So I wrote this article that ended up being seven reasons not to use HootSuite. And it was, in a sense, quite a provocative or controversial title. But I went into loads and loads of detail, because I think I get frustrated by fluff articles that just are surface deep. I want to I want to know the detail. So I wrote, you know, the seven reasons why I thought HootSuite could be better. And I read that article. And after a couple of weeks, it just started to go viral. I didn’t know this at the time. And and, you know, when I launched my blog, I had no thoughts for monetization, I probably didn’t even know what the word monetization meant. And I was just doing it as a bit of fun on the side. And yeah, after a year that went that went viral. And I wrote more articles. And the articles that went in depth did really, really well. And then it was in 2015. I, I went to Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, which was a massive deal for me, because it’s a long way to go. And it’s expensive to fly there and all that kind of stuff. But the following year in 2016, I was asked to speak at that conference. And that is as a result of those blog posts that I wrote. And then it was that year that Facebook Live became a thing and then I pivoted into the world of live video and I’ve written certain, I suppose I call them mega blog posts since about that that have done really well too. In fact, the one on Facebook Live and OBS is the one that kind of broke by broke my blog and broke my website because it’s had about 4.6 million page views since I wrote it, which is I mean, it’s still I find that mind boggling boggling. I don’t I don’t quite understand how that happened. But I’m not going to complain.

Fei Wu 39:36
Exactly how many years ago was the OBS article Facebook Live?

Ian Gray 39:39
And that was 2016. Yeah, so four or four years ago,

Fei Wu 39:43
and you keep updating your article to write to make it more relevant to how often do you do that?

Ian Gray 39:48
So it’s probably I mean three or four times a year I will do that. And I’ve got some other articles now that I’m trying to point people towards. So I’ve done another article on the The top live streaming tools because I think although OBS studio so that article was mainly on OBS Studio, although it’s still a good option for some people, that, you know, the everything’s moved on so quickly, and there were so many, in my view better tools or better solutions for people. So I’m now trying to kind of get people towards those. That’s a great, you know, people will come into the article, and then I can direct them to, to my new articles too. And that works really well.

Fei Wu 40:25
That’s wonderful. And since then, would you say that it’s around that same time? 2016, you started to oh, actually 2015 You started blogging, and you start building a business around that. And what we mean by business is people reaching out to you for consulting. And obviously, you can increase your rates as you go along. Supply Demand. Yeah. And then you start producing these courses as well. And they’re very reasonably priced. So would you say that’s kind of a general flow of how you’re able to scale your business over time?

Ian Gray 40:55
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t certainly wouldn’t follow what I did. Because it took me such a long time, I’ve learned so many things. And then my biggest obstacle was my mindset. And my, I kept doubting myself. And so back in 2016, when I launched this course, I thought, nobody’s gonna buy it. But then people did. And I was going to be honest with you, I kept on thinking, I was waiting for the first email that would say, your course is really bad, I want a refund, and it never came. Now, I kind of looked back on that time, and I think what a complete idiot I was, you know, I just I think I you have to, you have to work a lot on your mindset. But yes, it was once I got my confidence what it was, it was the courses. And, and then the other. The other thing was from then it was then consultancy, and coaching, which I absolutely love I adore. So that’s, that is something that then came from that. And then the other thing I do is I work with companies. So as a brand ambassador. So once I got I got a name for myself, and I was seen as being an expert in the world of live video. So that’s my area I was then I’ve been able to be paid by companies, top companies in particular, to work with them to get their name out there. One of the things that’s really important to me though, of course, is objectivity. I want to be seen as somebody who can recommend different tools to different situations. But that that was when the all of the blogs that I wrote on the live videos that I produce, enables me to get to that point. So that’s, that’s been my journey.

Fei Wu 42:29
Thank you for sharing your journey. I think you opened up this little Pandora’s box a bit. We we’re broadcasting on a restream studio, we talked about that you’re using it. Great. I wanted to kind of you know, like lay the ground. But what are some of your, you know, top three, five, I would say separately, trying to what will be your top three to five like multi streaming applications for people who are here in multi stream simulcast for the first time is basically when you can go live in, you know, on multiple platforms that could be you know, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all at once. And you know, Facebook, even pages groups, your personal pages all at once. So you do need a third party integration. So natively. Yeah, what are some of your top choices?

Ian Gray 43:18
Well, it’s interesting, because a lot of the tools don’t have the multicasting multi streaming facility built in. So like, when I started with OBS Studio, you know, it doesn’t have that facility. So you have to use a second service. So for me, that would still be restream. There are other ones there’s actually forgotten the name of the other one. It’s a switch, switchboard. switchboard live, that’s the one switchboard live. So that would be so so you could use. So there are. So there are different, it’s probably important to talk about the different types of multi streaming first. So there is like a, you can use a tool with a multi streaming service like restream, to use stream to restream. And then restream, then streams out to all your different platforms, or different destinations. So there’s that type of tool, then there’s a tool like Wirecast, which I’ve been using quite for many years, why casters are more like higher end professional tool, it starts around six or $700. So it’s not not particularly cheap. But with that you can and if you have a really powerful computer, and really good amount of bandwidth, you can actually broadcast to all the channels for directly from your computer. So you’re sending a stream to Facebook and a stream to YouTube at the same time. But you do need to have a really decent computer for that. Then there are some web apps out there. So you mentioned stream yard stream yard as the works in the browser works on PCs and Macs and that allows you to broadcast to, to multicast to those different destinations. And then recently restream has launched studio. And so this is again, this works in the browser so you don’t have to you is a third party tool like OBS Studio or you can, you can just use, you just go on to the restream studio and it broadcasts directly to through all those different channels for years. So this is really cool. You can you can invite guests on. And you can multi stream to all those different ones, or Yeah, yeah, which is awesome. And then of course the other thing that you can do it, you can still use a third party tool like Ecamm ECAM. Live is probably one of my favorite tools out there. It’s Mac only, unfortunately. But this integrates fully with restream. So this allows you to use all the different you can like use pre recorded video, and you can really snazzy stuff.

Fei Wu 45:40
All right, ready for en.

Ian Gray 45:43
So yeah, you can so you can add this overlay. But you can do this in restream studio to your point, but I can do things like I can change my camera, I can add overlays like that I can go back to there, I suppose on camera, actually, let’s go to there, I can add my theme music for the ending of my show as well. So I can go switch to this.

Unknown Speaker 46:06
Thanks for listening to the confident live marketing podcast with Ian Anderson gray.

Ian Gray 46:11
And I can switch back. So I’m using I’m using a stream deck, which is this box that I connect to my computer with these keys and I can just I program them all. So I can just change my camera angle, I can change to a different you know, different video, if I’ve got a guest on this. This will look really strange, but I can have so I had Yan Zajac on there. So he would appear on the right box. This is a grid basically for podcast listeners. So there’s a grid there. So you can’t see that. But and then I can have I don’t know whether this is going to work? No, that’s probably not going to work. But yeah, I’ve got different buttons that I can I can change around. So that’s really good. You can add overlays, you can add widgets. And probably the the thing I really love is that it integrates so ECAM integrates with the restream comments API, which sounds a bit complicated. But basically what that means is that whenever anyone leaves a comment on LinkedIn or Facebook, on YouTube on Periscope, I can see that on ECAM live, and I can highlight that on the screen for everyone to see, including that avatar as well. And that people love. People love to see that. I mean, I don’t know there was a bunch of is full of narcissists. Maybe I’m joking. But people love to see themselves, don’t they? On the screen. And and so actually, that’s a really great feature as well.

Fei Wu 47:35
Well, so you mentioned there’s like a nice switchboard, there’s a there’s a board where you can press different buttons with presets, what is it called? What does it look like?

Ian Gray 47:44
So let’s see if I can hold it up to the camera I’ve got I’ve got actually got two. So this is one of them. So this is what so so I can I can actually switch my lights on and off. And I’ve got different different settings on there. So that’s pretty cool. And then I’ve got so that is the cheaper one. And then I’m not sure I can necessarily lift this up, I might be able to this is the big one. Oh, it’s called the stream deck. Stream deck. Yes, the stream deck. So this is the stream deck XL. And you can see on that I don’t know if you can see. But I’ve gotten tails. Yeah, yeah, I’ve got different different scenes in Ecamm. So I can just press there. So I’ve got I’ve structured my show. So I’ve got for example, I’ve got my pre video scene, the pre show scene, I’ve got my theme music, which I showed you. I’ve got the guest intro, I’ve got split names. So it’s similar to what your your you’ve got on your show. I’ve got just my guests on their own. I’ve got the ending, I’ve got screenshare. And then I’ve also got my sponsor videos as well. So when I’m talking about my sponsor, I have a background video, because I’ll also use a green screen for some of those. And so it’s just really, really easy for me to when I’m going live, I don’t want to be fiddling around with the technology. I just want to press a button and it work.

Fei Wu 49:05
How do you program this? I’m going to download the eBook. But how is stream deck? And then what is it just well,

Ian Gray 49:11
so. So no, no, it’s just the stream deck is made by a company called Elgato. And it’s you don’t actually necessarily need to use it with live live video software, you can do it you can program it for you can use it with pretty much anything you like. And as I said it works with switching lights on and off and things like that. So so that’s pretty cool. I mean, if I put my lights off, yeah, I can do that. So let’s hope they go back on again. There we go. So you can do things like that. But yeah, it comes with software, the so the stream deck software, and it’s so easy to easy to use. So you basically just choose which button you want to program and Ecamm for example there Have a plugin. So you can just drag in the change scene button to there and you can change the scene that way. It works with OBS Studio works with Wirecast. It doesn’t yet work with restream studio or other stuff, but I’m pretty sure they’ll they’ll be adding that. I mean, they’re adding loads and stuff over time. So yeah, it’s really cool, very, very easy to use. It might sound complicated, but when you download the software, it’s really easy. There are three, like we think there are three stream decks. And there’s also actually there’s an iPhone and Android app as well. So you can actually turn your phone into, into into a into a stream that night, it doesn’t have that same tactile feel. So one of the great things about this is when you press the button, it feels like you’re actually pressing a button. Yeah. So so that feels good. So yeah, just looking at Amazon, looking at Amazon at the moment they so this is rough price, the the mini one, which I wouldn’t recommend because it’s only got six buttons, it’s at $3. The, the one I’d probably go for is the it’s just called the stream deck. That’s $150. So it’s it’s not cheap. But definitely, but if your budget can stretch through this, yeah. And it is amazing. And is the XL version. And that is only fifth. Well, it’s about 50 $60 more. So it’s about $208 at the moment. But yeah, I mean, this is something that you don’t need to don’t use this as an excuse not to go live. Don’t say, I need to get one of these before I press the Go Live button. Don’t do that. But it certainly enhances things. If you use software like Wirecast OBS or ECAM live. Definitely does.

Fei Wu 51:47
I love that.

Unknown Speaker 51:48
I love the fact that you’ve pointed that out. It’s it’s so fun to chat with you. I

Fei Wu 51:53
I know that you know, blocked 45 minutes and we’re approaching an hour mark. Man, it’s been, you know, such a pleasure in what are some of the things that you would like to you know, you usually share with people but some of the questions I haven’t asked and that are important to live streaming, multi streaming.

Ian Gray 52:14
Oh, my goodness, there’s so much. There’s so much to talk about. I mean, I’ve I think I can’t, I can’t highlight the importance of preparation enough. So I definitely recommend gratings doesn’t need to be a sauna, but some kind of process management tool, even if you’re just listing everything that you need to do before you go live, including the first things that you are going to say, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but I’ve certainly had this is you press the Go Live button, and then your mind goes blank your brain goes. And so actually, I, I treat myself like a complete idiot. And I actually will write down the first few things that I’m going to say, including my name, not that I’m going to forget my name, but you never know. So I will. So the first thing I will say to people, I will say thank you so much for watching the and then whatever the name of the show is, I’ll introduce myself, but I’ll also say hello to my first viewers on the show. And my first viewers are actually from the future, then my replay viewers because the likelihood is my live viewers won’t have had time to see to see it yet. So I’ll say thank you so much for watching the replay of this show. And and then I’ll say in today’s show, I’m going to be talking about this, this, this and this. And the other thing that you can also do is you can have a bit of a teaser, so you can say at the end of the show, I’m going to be showing something really exciting. So please make sure that you stay to the end, I’m gonna be showing this new tip or this new tool with you. And that’s that’s that’s trying to get people to to go to the end to listen view to the end. At that point. Hopefully, you’ve got some live viewers so you can start to introduce to say hello to them, highlight them on on the screen as well. Other things you can can do this. So this is not necessarily right from the start. But on Facebook, you can use tools like many chats for, for bots. So you can there’s a really cool feature that I haven’t played around with that much but it’s one of the things I want to be doing over the next few months is you can actually ask people to leave a particular comments. And the many chat will actually send them a message on Facebook Messenger to say for example, if you have a free download on something you can say if you want to have this new download or this new ebook that I’ve created, just put ebook in the comments. And if they type the word ebook, many chat will then send them the ebook by Facebook Messenger which is pretty cool. So so many things. I mean, we could probably talk for another two or three podcast episodes. But those are some ideas but yeah, do structure the show structure In a way that makes sense for your live viewers, so do make sure that you’re answering questions, you’re engaging with them. I’ve seen lots of live shows where they’re totally ignoring the live viewers. That’s not good. But you also want to make sure that you’re not ignoring your replay audience. Because if you spend too much time with your, your live viewers, and you go, Hi, Hi, I can see you know, then there’s gonna be really boring for your replay viewers. So there’s, there’s a balance between those two things.

Fei Wu 55:27
Yeah. Oh, this is amazing. I can already see how the show notes of this episode is gonna go. And since I’m pivoting and shifting my youtube channel to talk a lot more about multi streaming I, I really can see how I want to repurpose this and you know, 510 minute piece segments where I can reintroduce our conversation in an even more meaningful way. So do you have maybe time for just like two more questions? I was just wondering,

Ian Gray 55:53
oh, no, of course. Yeah. Yeah, please, please go ahead. I’ve actually thought of a few other things about multi casting that that might help as well.

Fei Wu 56:01
So I, you know, a lot of people’s like, okay, live stream multi streaming. And I guess this is a more general question that live streaming has existed on different platforms for a while Periscope and Twitter, Facebook Live Now Instagram Live, versus multi streaming from a third party tool, OBS or restream. Do you think there is a penalty people say even like a penalty, because when you don’t go live on the native platform, sometimes your stream isn’t as favored. Or you see where I’m going with this? Just like sometimes I? I? Yeah, yeah. So

Ian Gray 56:35
yeah.

Fei Wu 56:37
Going live in all places all at once, because it’s so convenient for content creators. But is it hurting them in some ways? Or?

Ian Gray 56:44
Well, so is your question, because this is kind of almost two ways we could go with this. There’s there’s the question that just using a third party tool, some people would say, using a third party tool, somehow, like Facebook and other other platforms will, like demote you, because they want you to use their platform, they want to use it go live from that from the from the mobile app, for example. And and of course, I’ve there’s the thing that won’t go away, which is using like a scheduling tool like Hootsuite to regrow a pulse, like somehow using that will demote your content, and that won’t go away or so. So I think the answer to that is, no, Facebook doesn’t invokes your contents. And there’s been lots and lots of research that goes into that, whether it’s a live live video tool, or whether it’s a scheduling tool. But I think, and this brings me on to the multicasting. So I will get onto this. But I think this is really important. Because if you use a third party scheduling tool, or if you multicast using a third party tool, it can make you more lazy. And when you create lazy content, it’s not going to be as engaging and so your your view your views, your your reach is gonna go down. And so that’s the danger with multi casting. It’s a powerful, powerful tool, a powerful way to go live. But it’s also a can a cat full, if you’re a lazy marketer, it can then just say, Well, I’m gonna go live everywhere. And I’m going to treat my audience all the same. And that’s, that’s not good. And that’s, that’s, that’s create, that’s lazy content. And I think that’s going to potentially mean that your reach will go down. It’s not because Facebook is actually demoting it. So that just means that this is not to say that multi casting is bad. It absolutely isn’t. I’m a big advocate of it. But it just means that you need to be smart with it. And you need to make sure that you are talking to your different audiences on all the different platforms in a different way and you’re approaching the promotion in a different way and they post and the post promotion as well and the repurposing in a different way for each audience.

Fei Wu 58:59
Yeah, this is great. And I thought about that too. Now we’re going live on YouTube and Facebook and for right now that audience overlaps for me quite a bit creative, creative, unfitness, entrepreneurs, but sometimes over time, that audience may change or just shift a bit. And not to mention that I’m also going live on my personal page which mostly family and friends and that’s something I would like to ask you as well when it comes to the family and friends part. I like to show people what I’m doing it’s totally up to them whether they want to watch it or not. Some people do some people don’t. Right and you know, I know that this doesn’t fall under the baby and puppy pictures on Facebook which is the most popular content out there. But it has benefit a lot of my family so I do you think you know I get this question all the time by my mastermind folks be like maybe they don’t maybe family friends don’t care. Should I go live there at all?

Ian Gray 59:54
Yeah, so I think it just goes sorry, kind of depends. So like on my on my Facebook profile, so I, I, personally, for my business stuff, I will mainly go live on my page. Mainly the reason for that is because I can I can do utilize Facebook ads, and I can use medi chatter and things like that. But some, but I have gone live my profile I’ve done really quite well, because I’m connected with a lot of my business colleagues and friends on there as well. I’m probably going to be doing my friends heads in the those who who don’t understand what I do, and you know, but I mean, they don’t have to watch it. So I think it really depends. But, you know, there’s a kind of a another question in there, which I know you didn’t ask, which is how much of our personal life do we put into our, into our content into our business. And this has got to be totally up to you. But I do involve my family a little bit in my contents. So for example, when I did my first broadcast, so actually, we had a party, and I got my kids and we had cake. And we had we had some fun. And so yeah, that went out on my personal profile. Because my friends wanted to celebrate with me, it was a business achievement, but it was also a bit of fun too. So there’s sometimes there’s a bit of a hybrid approach. And a friend of mine, Jeff see, who does a lot of live stream he works for a Social Media Examiner as well as was does a lot of live streaming for quite a few people, businesses out there. And he does a lot of business stuff. But he also goes live the live streams on his personal profile. And he does carving you just wood carving every night. And they’re just so that is not a business thing. But they do occasionally talk about business things and the fact that he’s actually being seen to go live. Actually, he actually does get work from that, although it’s not actually directly a Business Business Show.

Fei Wu 1:01:52
Yeah, that’s fascinating. This is great. I think in short, give your family and friends a shot. And maybe they if they want to tune in great. If not, that’s okay, too. Yeah, there are also people they may, most of them may be now your audience and that’s okay, so last question, I promise. And if you were to add more, the one thing I struggle with, including this conversation is I, I know where I need to look, as a YouTuber, I know where I need to look, which is the camera like, I should be talking to you in this way. Like this is the most engaging one, right? Because this is not we’re not gonna let live on Zoom, I can really shrink this window to a tiny little box and put it really close to my webcam. It’s actually on a webpage, I found it. I was very desperate and eager to actually look at you on my screen, which means my my eyesight, it’s, it’s lower. So I guess the right way is this fully aware, like how do people combat that? And like, oh, tweak it?

Ian Gray 1:02:48
Great, Greg, great question. And I’ve been I actually noticed myself, just last week, I don’t know what happened. But I was I was looking. So I was actually looking like this. So it looks like I’m looking away from the camera. Because I actually on my camera, I’ve got the LCD screen. So I ended up looking at myself. But if I actually was to look at you now, this is I’m actually looking at you now. So you’re quite far down. So I actually have to look away from you. And this is it’s, it’s a very human thing, isn’t it to look at somebody else, whether it’s yourself, because if you’re doing a live show, you know, you’ll it’ll only be you and it’s not that we’re being a narcissist and we want to look at ourselves, it’s just, that’s the way we’re wired, we’re wired to, to look at another human being. And so it takes time and practice to do this. And it probably took me about a couple of months to train myself out of this, I think some people will be able to do much quicker than I and the way I did it was very, very low tech. And so what I did is I actually just printed out but it just got a piece of paper, but a big hole in it but for our red arrows pointing to the middle and I put that behind my webcam and I know that sounds silly but it really really works if you want to be a little bit I don’t know this is probably another thing I would probably recommend now is get a printout of your best friend of yours or your your perfect clients or somebody somebody and actually just put that behind the camera just a picture off their head and you can look at it that way. But you see what’s really important is that you don’t just a lot of people say you need to look at the camera. I actually would say you need to look through the camera. So I’m actually looking through and I’m imagining that you’re behind through that camera. And so the only way really is to keep practicing and you will find yourself moving away like I did a couple of weeks ago I ended up kind of looking at myself and I thought I looked back at my videos and what I’m what are you doing in you know what on earth do you do? So what’s your what’s your videos back and make sure that you hear you test what you’re doing?

Fei Wu 1:04:57
Yeah. Oh, that’s a that’s another really good tip and Uh, absolutely, when I do when I do YouTube videos on my own, I have no issues, I know exactly where to look, I feel extremely comfortable now six months, and it’s just when I have another person on screen, and the person who I’m actually engaging with and talking to, sometimes just by watching your facial expression and all that it really helps me so. So it’s much more interesting and helpful to me, but I’m going to learn, you know how to not look at you or, or even move you out of the screen, move the browser out of the screen, so I can actually look at my, my camera webcam i Yeah,

Ian Gray 1:05:33
yeah, well, I mean, so there are there are ways I mean, I, my, my setup isn’t perfect for them, I think what I want to do is to have another monitor, where that’s actually going to be a little bit further away very close to the camera. And so you could probably buy very inexpensive HDMI monitors or whatever, and just have and so you can, you could duplicate the screen and just have it very, very close to the camera. That might be one way. But I still my issue with that is I still would probably find myself looking down and it wouldn’t it would unless you so I have actually thought about whether I could like hack a teleprompter to actually somehow show the videos. So but I mean, yeah, that’s probably taking things to the extreme.

Fei Wu 1:06:18
Yeah, there’s so many things to tweak. But oh my god, this is so helpful. And it’s been such a special conversation. So thank you so much for taking the time all the way appreciate. This episode of the face world podcast is brought to you by face world LLC, our marketing service agency created for independent creators and businesses. We offer website development, video production, marketing mentorship to people who want to tell better stories level up and create a profitable brand face where a podcast team or chief editor and producer her mom say VyOS associate producer Adam Leffert Social Media and Content Manager Rose de Leon, transcript editor Alina off me Dova and lastly, myself, the creator and host of faiths world. Thank you so much for listening

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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