The WordPress community needs good, quality industry news to thrive, compete, and stay informed. While there are good news sources out there, many tend to have an affiliate relationship, are primarily in written form, or are sponsored by one or multiple brands.
This is why I decided to flex my Journalism degree from many ages ago and start my own YouTube channel.
Getting over Imposter Syndrome
I started creating on WordPress almost ten years ago, and while I did that, I shared a lot of content on YouTube and this blog about new things I learned while getting started. As time progressed, I started to focus more on building a business, and sharing content fell by the wayside. During that time, I became more wary of publicly sharing my voice.
This is the classic imposter syndrome I’ve heard about in many WordCamp presentations.
My first step to getting back out there was to start blogging again, and that’s what I’ve been doing on this site, albeit not as much as I’d like to because I find writing a lot harder than video production. The next step was to do something more out of my comfort zone: YouTube.
Obviously, YouTube is a lot more public. It’s literally putting your face out there for the world to see, and the comments section can be brutal. As well, I am a novice at video editing and production. I’ve always wanted to get back into creating WordPress content for YouTube, but all these reasons and more caused me to never act on that.
Trusting My Gut and Just Doing It
I’ve been changing a few things in my life lately, and one of them is to start trusting my gut more when I feel it’s right. This has felt right for a long time, and it’s finally time to stop thinking and start doing.
The first video I created was a WordPress Weekly News Roundup. I learned a lot from creating it, and the community response was quite positive.
Check out the video below:
Here’s the Tweet thread where I led with news… and then mentioned the imposter syndrome I’ve had preventing me from creating video content:
Incremental Improvements for the Win
I learned a lot from creating this first video. First off, record at 16:9 aspect ratio. The video thumbnail above is cut off because I didn’t record it correctly.
Also, I thought it would be much more entertaining to do a “talking head” introduction where I’m summarizing what’s coming up and then a brief intro.
I think the second news roundup turned out a lot better:
You can also see I played around with cut-ins and cut-outs to make the intro more interesting. I also broke up the screen sharing with cuts to me talking.
I’m using a combination of ScreenFlow, Screen Studio, and DaVinci Resolve for software to shoot, record, and edit.
In the future, I plan on adding more B-roll and more commentary. Nobody wants to watch screen shares for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s just not that entertaining.
Does Everyone Hate Their Voice?
If you Google “Hearing your own voice meme” there a tons of images that come up. I didn’t know that so many people feel the same as I do. By far, this was one of my biggest symptoms preventing me from jumping in.
The one thing I’ve had to remember is that it’s only you thinking this way. To others, your voice is among many they hear daily.
The good news is that the more I create, the more I don’t mind hearing my voice. I mean, you have to hear it a lot when you’re in the editing process.
My Plan for the Channel
I want to get more comfortable and have a decent following on my channel before hopping into the deep end and creating an entire brand. There’s a lot of transition going on with my career right now (more on that to come in a future post), and I’m not sure how things will be changing exactly now.
To prepare for, perhaps, an eventual brand built out of this, I did purchase the domain unfilteredwp.com – currently, there’s nothing on this site. But I really like the name. I thought about “whatstheword.com,” but that was a premium domain, and I wasn’t ever sold on it.
For now, I’ve got the time with the holidays and the end of the year to have fun with this. And that’s exactly what I’m doing: having fun.
So, if you’ve made it this far in this article, I invite you to subscribe to my channel to follow along.
That’s it for now! See ya 🙂
