Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners
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Enthusiastically Self-Employed: business tips, marketing tips, and LinkedIn tips for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, solopreneurs & small business owners
Hey Brenda: What Tech Do You Use? Ep 154
What type of tripod do you use and why?
Why should you keep your old cellphone, so you have two cell phones?
What type of microphone should you use and why?
What type of headset do you use?
What type of lighting do you use?
What type of webcam do you use?
What type of video editing software do you use?
What are some pro tips on how to use different types of technology?
I answer all these questions and more in this episode.
This episode comes from early 2023, but the tools are still relevant today. This is a playback of a livestream where I review the essential technology tools I use to support my business.
I demonstrate and discuss various gadgets, including tripods, smartphones, microphones, headsets, lighting, and other tech accessories.
This live walkthrough covers practical tips for making cost-effective tech investments, managing audio quality, and optimizing lighting for virtual presentations.
I also answer audience questions, share pro tips for video production, and provide insights on maintaining professional-quality streaming setups. Tune in for a comprehensive guide to enhancing your tech stack.
00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview
00:36 Starting the Tech Review: Tripods
04:09 Using Multiple Cell Phones
05:39 Microphone Troubleshooting and Recommendations
18:55 Headsets and Speakers
25:27 Lighting Solutions for Your Setup
31:41 Additional Tech Gadgets and Wrap-Up
33:45 Handy Tools for Audiobook Recording
35:18 LED Lighting Setup
36:59 Rocket Book and Home Scale
38:46 Fun Props for Video Recording
39:07 Celebrating Business Wins with a Bell
40:17 Conference Swag and Purple Cow
42:50 Pro Tips for Video and Live Streaming
48:20 Engaging with Your Audience
58:14 Q&A and Final Thoughts
Watch it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/live/Tgxmx__-0j8?si=eP5XxMawVWlPGSff
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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.
Visit mellermarketing.com
Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)
Welcome back In today's episode. This is a review of technology that I did in the beginning of 2023. And this is coming from my vault. I was looking back through some past LinkedIn Live episodes that I've done and I thought this one was really valuable and still relevant to you today, so it's a bit of a longer episode. If you're interested in watching it on YouTube to actually see the demonstrations I'm giving, I'll include the link for that YouTube video and show notes below. But for those of you just listening on the podcast, I hope you'll walk away with some great tech takeaways as it relates to technology, and that it helps to inspire you as well. Enjoy the show. Hey, good morning and welcome.
Speaker 1:Today I'm going to be talking all about my technology. I think sometimes people call it their tech stack. I always feel like that's a little bit above my level. I don't know if it's a tech stack. It's the technology that I use to support my business and I have a lot of things I'm actually going to. I was going to put it on a small card table and then I realized it's much more than I could fit on a card table. I've got some things on my side sofa over here that I'll be showing with you today card table. I've got some things on my side sofa over here that I'll be showing with you today and walking you through, and I'll be talking about where I pick these things up. I'll be talking about why I use them. You're going to see that I have a couple different versions of things as well, and I'm a thrifty marketer and a thrifty entrepreneur. So I don't like to make the big investments at first. I try to make investments as they feel right for my business and as I grow out of the technology then I upgrade to something better. So I'll be walking you through that.
Speaker 1:And I'm using a second camera today because sometimes I'm going to be actually flipping the camera to show you what I am seeing on my screen. So right now I've got my phone is on a tripod sitting on my desk. I'm going to show you this weird camera thing. But I've got a tripod with my cell phone and I invited myself as a second guest from the cell phone so you can see. And hey, let's just jump in and get started and I'll look at your comments in just a second. So I'm going to go ahead and get started here.
Speaker 1:So this is a tripod and I don't. It's not technology, meaning it doesn't take any electricity or Wi-Fi or anything, but you do need a tripod. I believe to. If you're running a business, whether you're coaching, consulting, speaking, if you're an author and you do audiobooks, if you take pictures of yourself for social media, I think it's really helpful to have a tripod. What I like about this one is it's got the extendable arms on it, and let me just extend this out. This is going to be like a hands-on today, just so you can see how tall this is. I actually want to walk you through and show you the technology. It's not just going to be me talking about it.
Speaker 1:I see a lot of people saying get a tripod, and then they move on to the next thing, and I'm like how do you use it? And what I like about this one? It's pretty lightweight, it's not like a super expensive piece of equipment, and it does have a telescopic arm on it as well. I didn't extend one of these out. Okay, there we go, and it does have a telescopic arm so I can raise it up. Now my only hesitation with this type of a tripod is this is as far up as it goes, so this is good for sitting down, but if I wanted to take pictures from a higher vantage point, I've reached the limit of what this tripod can do. But I do like it for the fact that it is pretty lightweight. It does have some legs on it and you can see, I can shorten it up to put it on my desk right, and I was even debating about getting one of those desktop tripods too and I'm like this works pretty good. I don't know how much this costs. I'll put a link at the end to my blog where I put all of these items, but I want to say this was like a $20, $25, $30 type of tripod. It wasn't super expensive.
Speaker 1:By the way, I buy my own technology. I'm not one of those influencer fancy people that gets like sent free things. I'm going to put the blog later on, but I'm not going to give shout outs to the specific technology unless it's something I really love, because this is my business and I'm promoting my business today. You get what I'm talking about, all right, so this is my tripod. It's going to be sitting on the decks next to me and then I'm going to also face it towards. I've got a bunch of tech that's sitting off to the side, and there'll be certain points in time where I'm facing it back at the camera and other points where I'll be picking up some items when I'm going out of camera.
Speaker 1:I haven't gone away entirely, so that's my tripod, and I do have a cell phone. I actually do have a second cell phone too. This is my old cell phone. The battery's like completely dead on it, but I want to share this with you as you upgrade your phones and your technology. This can still be used. Think about it. It's not like a phone anymore, but now it's more of a tablet or an internet device. So I can still use it to connect to the Wi-Fi. I can still use it to take photos. I can still use it, and since I can connect to the Wi-Fi, I can use it to join the live event, like if I wanted to do that today. Now, one thing I want to keep in mind is keeping it charged, and this one's not charged, so it's no use to me if it's not charged. After I'm done here, I'm going to probably plug it in the wall, so I have it as my backup.
Speaker 1:Now this might seem like why does she need two cell phones? I don't need two cell phones. I need one cell phone. This is like a backup, small tablet, wi-fi internet device is the way that you want to look at it, because you might be using your phone to hold it up and to do the live stream and then maybe you want to use a second device to take pictures or to do like a second vantage point. You ever seen that as a speaker? They'll have a speaker sizzle reel and one is them speaking, is it's the cameras and them on stage, and the other is it's almost like an over the shoulder vantage point, so you can see the audience right, and sometimes we do that even in selfie style videos and things like that as well. We're filming ourself here and we might see a side vantage point as well, and you can shift back and forth between those. So that's why it's sometimes helpful to have a second cell phone to use as more of an internet device. So something to think about there.
Speaker 1:All right, hey, if you were watching, yesterday I posted on LinkedIn with a tech hiccup of all the days to have my microphone go down. It's the day before I go LinkedIn live talking about my technology. I don't know what happened, but I have a Q2U microphone and I'm going to hold it up here so you can see. It's on a little tripod and it's an adjustable arm in here. It does have a USB port. Let me just show you here. I don't want to unplug it right now, but it does have a USB that plugs into the side of my laptop right there. And when I go on to Zoom calls, typically what happens is the technology will. It goes to default microphone and speakers goes to the computer Okay, and then if I want better microphone, I'll switch to this. It's a Q2U microphone. I really like this one Much better audio quality.
Speaker 1:When I got on my Zoom yesterday it wasn't even available. I'm like that's weird. So I did what you normally do, right, unplug it, plug it back in Still wasn't there. And then I exited Zoom, came back in, because sometimes they don't recognize the technology after you started. That didn't work and I went down my list of all the things I could do and then I threw my hands up and I Googled things and I couldn't find anything. I'm thinking maybe it's the driver, I don't know, but at any rate I'm like I know there's some smart people on LinkedIn, so I posted about it on LinkedIn and I got a bunch of people with suggestions and ideas. One person and I don't know who it was I to the microphone, but I'll check and it wasn't and I had to do an upgrade. It required me to log off of my computer and it did the whole like it kicked me off for the night, which was fine, right. Sometimes that's like a sign you need to stop working. So I went off my computer for the night. I came back in in the morning here and I plugged into StreamYard and guess what worked my Q2 microphone. I don't know why, I don't know what happened, but it's working again today. So thank you for all of you who suggested ideas for this.
Speaker 1:Having a high quality microphone is a really important thing for you if you are a coach, consultant, speaker, or if you're an author thinking about doing audio books. I think for the first three categories, if you're doing any sort of virtual coaching, or if you're doing team training, or if you're doing presentations or if you're doing keynotes absolutely it's going to be better audio quality. Now, I'm going to unplug this right now so you can see the difference in audio quality. When I unplug it, it should pull up sound from my laptop and I'm going to ask you if you could please. If you're listening to the message, I want you to say, yes, I can hear the difference, and it's going to be about 30 seconds from the time I unplug it to the time that you can hear the difference. So right now I'm unplugging. Okay, now I need to unmute myself. You should be able to hear me right now.
Speaker 1:Let me know if you can hear me and I'm going to go into my StreamYard just to do a quick check. I'm going to show you what I'm doing up on screen right now here On my StreamYard. Let's see, I need to close this so I can see what I'm showing you on screen. I need to angle this up a little bit, okay, so you can actually see what I'm seeing. I'm going into my settings on StreamYard and I'm going into audio to double check that the sound, like the little microphone, has the green bubbles that are lighting up when I talk, which tells me the sound is being captured from me and it's being pulled up by my webcam. So that's where it's coming from and I can also test the speaker right. A little bit of music inside there. I always like try to test out the technology, especially if it's new software that I'm using before I'm getting started in a live stream or a Zoom call or anything like that.
Speaker 1:But let me know, can you hear the difference in audio quality? If you can drop a comment in and Samina says it sounds like you're in a can, michael Lesich hey, michael, any good bacon that you've eaten lately. Michael says I can hear you. Yeah, it's a little echo sounding, isn't it? It's not as clear. So I'm going to go ahead and plug it back in now, okay, and get that plug back in. And as soon as I plug it in, I need to go back into my StreamYard settings under microphone, and now it is reading Samsung QU.
Speaker 1:So can you hear the audio quality? Isn't it amazing? And the interesting thing about this, it's not just the audio quality, it is the perception of you as a professional. I'm going to say that again, it's not just the audio quality, it's the perception of you as a professional. If you're on a Zoom and it sounds really echoey and far away, they may have no basis of comparison because they've only heard that from you. But you can tell, like, with your ears you can tell it's a lower quality sound that you're hearing it's not quite as crisp as sometimes you hear a higher quality. You're like, wow, that person sounds amazing.
Speaker 1:There's some really great microphones. I know Blue Yeti. I hear about it everywhere, the Blue Yeti. You got to get the Blue Yeti. I invested in this and I believe it was John Gay who suggested this one for me and I think it was like 50, 60 bucks pretty inexpensive. There are much more expensive microphones that you can use, and I want to show you one of my other microphones, and I'm going to just go to my side sofa. This would be like if I was on the tonight show. This is my Ed McMahon visitor's chair over here. So let me grab this real quick and since we're going to talk about all kinds of technology today right now I'm going to be talking about microphones and then I'll be going into some lighting and some other things.
Speaker 1:So this is the first one I had and it's actually it's on a. It's like floating. I don't know why it does that, but anyways it's on an extendable arm. This piece actually. There's a clip that fell off of here. Oh, let's see Where's it at. It's probably in the other wall, but it's got a jaw clip that would clip onto my desk and then I could extend the arm in and out as I was doing interviews with Bill Cause. That's another thing. As you're doing the work, you don't want the technology to be blocking you. If my microphone was sitting in front of my face you'd be like why is her microphone so obnoxiously positioned? You don't want to have your microphone blocking here. It's okay, you can see the microphone. It doesn't bother, it doesn't block the view or the presentation if I'm doing one. But this one I liked because it has an extendable arm and I could pivot it out of the way.
Speaker 1:But when I started doing audio book recording, I believe it was John Gay, we did some tests on this one, maybe it was Dave Stokes, I can't remember. At any rate, they said this isn't the best quality of microphone and I'm not super tech savvy, my friend, I'm OK-ish, I'm probably on the latter side. If you were to do an index of 0 to 100, 50 is average for technology, I'm probably above 50, but I'm not 100 by any means. My microphone wouldn't work yesterday. I couldn't figure it out. So I don't figure it out. So I don't give me maybe a 50 or 60, 60 or 70.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but at any rate, the person who was explaining this microphone. They said that the sound is being captured from all around the room with this type of a microphone, whereas this microphone it's being captured directionally one way. I think that's the way my brain interpreted this. So they said change to this if you're going to be doing an audio book and a lot of audio recordings. And I said good idea, I will do that. And that's what I did this extendable arm microphone that I use I'm just winding up the cord because it's really long. It does have a USB. I'm going to show you guys that, which is important because then it just plugs into your computer. I don't want to have one of those fancy DJ soundboard things where I have to plug it in and plug it in. So I'm like I'm not tech, super tech savvy, I'm pretty good, right, I like the USB plug and play type of a model. These work really well for me, so I'm going to set that one aside. All right so far.
Speaker 1:What have we talked about? Talked about my tripod, talked about the use of multiple cell phones to have a second device. I talked about my primary microphone, which is my Q2U, and I talked about the microphone I had before, then I also want to talk about oh, here it is right here. This is a lavalier microphone. And I'm showing you the box, not because I want to show you the product name as much, but just so you can see the tiny little device. And I do keep these inside the packages, especially these, because this is fairly expensive. I want to say $80 to $100 for this one. It might even been a little bit more than that. If you're doing a lot of virtual presentations and you're on the go with your cell phone, I think this can be really handy. And I'm going to show you here.
Speaker 1:This is a teeny, tiny little microphone. It's got like a clip, a lavalier clip, and for this particular unit it has I don't know what this is called the prong. I'm going to call it the prong because I'm not super techie. The prong versus this is I think they call this the lightning adaptant. I don't know why they call it that, because it's straight. It doesn't look zigzaggy like lightning does, but at any rate, this works really great if you're plugging it into your laptop, but if you're like me, probably most of the time you're using your cell phone, which has just the lightning adapter and it doesn't have the prong adapter, the prong little slot thing anymore. So you're going to have to think about getting and they have a lot of these little devices, this one where you plug the prong into there and then you can plug that into your lightning. Really great thing to think about using this.
Speaker 1:And what I like to do is, if you are doing speaking engagements and I wore a white colored shirt intentionally to have a little bit of contrast in the background today I want you to notice right now as I'm putting this on and I've got a light colored shirt. It's distracting, isn't it? Seeing that cord have lavalier microphones. The best bet is and it's a little awkward, pardon me for being awkward right now but I'm going to shove the wires down my blouse in the front and then pull it out and then plug it in. So then you've got just a little bit of that technology poking out on there. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:And if you are doing filming outside, here's a pro tip. I don't know who taught me this. This was brilliant. But if you're doing filming outside, instead of having the microphone on the outside of your attire, where the wind's going to pick it up and it's going to pick up the volume. Put the microphone on the inside of your attire and I'm even going to clip it, like down in here, and it will still be able to pick up sound. It may be just a little bit muffled, but that's better than having it picking up the outside air in the wind. Okay, so we're getting some bonus tips. This isn't just my technology, it's like my pro tips on how I use different things as well. So again, this is the smart love. It's a road microphone.
Speaker 1:I do like this one. This is the second one that I've purchased and it's very the reason it's the second one. It's very delicate and the prongs break easily and I don't want to have it get broken, so I'm going to keep it in this nice little. The prongs break easily and I don't want to have it get broken, so I'm going to keep it in this nice little. It's almost like a leathery sack and then that stores inside here. All right, so that's microphone.
Speaker 1:So far, I showed you all three. My laptop does have a microphone. And then I want to show you the last place I use microphone sometimes. Oh, my battery is dying. Oh, no, it just says undo typing. Okay, so let me switch the view so we can get this a little bit larger. There's a way in StreamYard you can switch your views there, okay, so the last microphone is actually the microphone that is on my webcam. See off to the side. There's speakers on both sides of it and I don't know where it's picking up the sound from, but it also has a sound device on there. So that is really a helpful thing to keep in mind. If you don't have great sound quality on your laptop, if you purchase an external webcam, that's probably going to be better sound quality than the built-in laptop. Now, laptops are getting better and better and obviously you might have a laptop that's really super high tech and has better camera and sound and all that, but I always feel like using an external webcam, using external sound device, using an external microphone, is going to be better quality. In my experience, that's been the case.
Speaker 1:While we're on the subject of picking up sound, we're talking about microphones. I don't know if you noticed this or not, but when I'm joining on StreamYard, on my second device, I have this plugged in, and a few weeks ago I tried doing a cover video and I noticed when I plugged in on the second device that I was getting a lot of sound and echo. So what I've actually done is I've plugged in with my headphones because let me show you what happens here, apologies for the noises. So right now I'm hearing an echo, right, and I can try to turn the volume down. I don't know if you can hear me talking about me. There's a little bit of a delay, but sometimes you get that like echoey sound thing that's happening.
Speaker 1:Or on the device, if you're joining, it's picking up. Even if I mute it it's still picking up audio that's coming up. So let me plug this in, okay. So when I plug it in, the sound is still being streamed out to my phone. But now the sound is being streamed into here and if I listen in right here I can hear myself. That's painful, hearing the sound of your own voice.
Speaker 1:So the sound it's still coming in, but I'm putting a. It's almost like when you have like water dripping and my husband's like we sometimes have water dripping from our Florida room from the ceiling. He puts a bucket underneath the catch it. This is like the bucket I'm using to catch the sound that's being dripped into my phone from joining StreamYard. So a little pro tip on the side there if you're using a second device, and sometimes you can mute the ability for you to broadcast sound out, but you can't mute the ability for sound to come in and be broadcast from the device. So you got to put a stopper in it and that's what I do on there. All right, is this helpful? Are you guys enjoying this so far? Let me know in comments, and let me know if you have any questions about the technology along the way as well, and I will drop the link to my blog a little bit later. It's literally called hey Brenda, what tech do you use? What I do try to do is, every time I purchase a new piece of technology, I add it into the blog along with. Sometimes I do a video, and I've had my son help me like set up different technology. Other times it's just a picture or a screen capture of that device in particular. So we've done sound. I think everything's sound.
Speaker 1:Let me show you a couple more things. We talked about microphones. Let's move to headsets and speakers. Let me grab a couple things here. Okay, so I just moved over to the side desk. Oops, I didn't angle it. I want to angle it, so you know when I'm going out of camera that I'm not walking away entirely, I'm not leaving you, all right. So I got a bunch of stuff here. Let me show you on my desktop here. I'm going to show the view of all of these things. At first I'm going to move the view. Isn't this kind of fun too, seeing the view of everything? So this is like my desktop pardon my messy desktop here. So these are different devices I use for headphones. There's my Apple iPods About time to get a new mousepad, brenda Mahler, it's getting a little dirty, being used a lot there.
Speaker 1:These are Panasonic headphones and a little fancier than the white. This is almost like the Evolution. I think we started here. Then we went up to here. These have the straight plug in adapter. And then this is like the telemarketer adapter, because it's got the thing that you can talk in the microphone right here, and let's see, this is still the straight plug in on here. And then these are the high end of the spectrum. I think I might have even gotten these for my son or daughter, I don't know Like sometimes we share technology in the house and these have let's see, these still have the single plug as well. So there's different types of technology there. Let me put this over here and switch the camera view and then we're going to talk about them. Okay, there we go. Isn't this fun? You never get like behind the scenes stuff from other people, right? I like to show you behind the scenes stuff.
Speaker 1:So when I move away from, I don't like. First of all, I don't like the earbuds, the wireless microphones. Let me tell you why. I've had many guests join me on my LinkedIn live. They need to be charged, right. So if you have an instance where there is no battery life left to them, I think sometimes you can still hear, but they don't broadcast your sound. Like the microphone doesn't work anymore and the person doesn't know that because they're like I can hear you just fine, and you can't hear them and I have to go through and troubleshoot this process. And sometimes they enable them with a Wi-Fi and they might not even be having them in, but the Wi-Fi is still picking those up as an audio device. So I personally don't like Wi-Fi enabled microphones, even like when I go on walks, I will use these.
Speaker 1:I don't like to have Wi-Fi. I like to have something that I know can plug in and I know these fall out of your ears, I know, but for me that's better than worrying about the battery, if that makes sense. So part of the reason I like these is because of the falling out of the ear problem, right, and these have little hooks that go over your ear One of the ear problem, right, and these have little hooks that go over your ear. One of the things I really like about these is they're darker, and right now I'm wearing a white shirt, so if I put on the white headphones my Apple ones you may maybe, depending on what you're wearing, you might be able to see them. What I like about these is because they are dark, and let me just put them on real quick here. I'll wear my hair down too. Usually, men, you have a lucky you don't know what we have to deal with. We're about hair and makeup. They're hidden on my ears, for one, because it's darker. I feel like I like this doesn't jump out as much, depending on the color of a tire that you're wearing on here, and then because it does have the plugin. It works great on the laptop.
Speaker 1:I do have a device. Let me see if I can find it. Yes, I do. I don't remember who told me to buy this, but this is another adapter. This is something I got off of. You can get off the internet, but there's the single prong in here, and if you have devices where one prong is for microphone and the other prong is for speakers, but you've only got one input on your computer, you got to get this. I think it's a splitter. Is that right? Is that the right word? But this is what you want to have handy a device like this that you can plug it in once and then have two prongs going into it. So that's another thing.
Speaker 1:So I've showed you my iPhone headphones. I've showed you my little flat Panasonic ones. The next one, up from there, is. I like to call this like the telemarketer. Thank you for calling customer service. How may we help you today and for me? I'm in a very quiet environment in my home office. Everyone's gone for the day right now. It's pretty well insulated. I do have some people out on the street doing some work right now, so if there's some background noise, you might have it coming from there. So some people like to have this, because you can keep the sound condensed to what you can hear, both with the microphone, picking it up and where you're hearing it on your headset. I don't need that for my particular show, but your show may need some headphones as well, but this one has the single plug in there as well. All right, so that's that.
Speaker 1:These are. I like these. They feel a lot more. I don't know heavy duty that's the word not higher tech. I just feel like these are better quality. I think these were really made for sound and these don't have a microphone on them, they just have the sound on them. These are really great for when you're traveling, if you're a speaker or you're a coach and consultant being flying out to see your clients. These are really great for the airport, cause I was on Delta and they have the in-flight movies and they give you oh my gosh, those horrible little and they're free. So thank you, delta for giving us free, but they're like, oh, they're painful in your ears and they're really poor quality and they're like disposable, they're like worse than these. These are really good for picking up the sound quality in the plane.
Speaker 1:That's more of my enjoyment, but I think self-care is an important part of being self-employed. So I would say, yeah, that's an important piece of technology to have and I keep these at home. So if I ever do need them, if I'm getting into an interview with somebody who's I'm on their podcast or on their show and we're having some background issues with sound quality, I have a couple things I can pull together and, by the way, it's not as neatly organized right now as I normally would have, but I've got like a bin. This is where I keep my tech. You don't want to have things in too many places, because as a speaker, as a audio book author, as a coach, as a consultant, you never know when tech is going to fail and you want to have things like within almost arm distance to be able to grab things out and know exactly where they are. I don't want to keep my microphone in one place, my lighting, and I want to keep it all in my tripod. I want to keep it all in one bin so I can pull the bin down and grab things out of it. Okay, now you do want to package them neatly so that we're not damaging things and we're being careful about them, but just keeping that in mind, all right.
Speaker 1:So what else? Here's a and, by the way, these little dongle packs. They usually come in like multiple. There's two of them in here and I keep those in my desk drawer. In case I ever need a second device, I'm going to put that in there, all right? Okay, so that's microphones headsets.
Speaker 1:Talked about my tripod. What should we talk about next? Let's talk about lighting. Ooh, lighting. All right, so my latest light is a ring light. Let me show you what I have now.
Speaker 1:I just recently upgraded to this. I'm going to change my camera view so you all can see this. Give me just a second to make this adjustment. This is my ring light. Let me pull it behind so you can see the vantage point. This is what I'm seeing right now. So my ring light is about 12 inches and I'm going to show you on the camera. I'm going to pull my laptop down as I do this. It's on a tabletop stand. It does have an extension with. You can see there's a cell phone holder over here. I think you can see that, and it is telescopic. I can raise it up and down and you can see I can move it. Part of the reason I like this ring light is I don't know about all of you, but like ring lights, they can give you a little bit of a headache if you have them on for way too long. So as soon as I'm done with the interview, I can swing it out of the way and it's convenient, okay.
Speaker 1:So part of the issue, part of the reason I upgraded to the ring light it was twofold. One was I wanted something that wasn't taking as much space up in my office. Let me set this down as I'm talking right now. So I wanted something that wasn't going to take up as much space in my office, and I want to show you the other what I was using prior to this. I was using a box light, so I'm going to switch the view again. Might be making you dizzy, but you get behind the scenes with me. How fun is that?
Speaker 1:So this is my box light over here and it's fairly close to the position I would have it. Let me move it a little bit closer here. And this is set on a. It's like a turn off, turn on, switch, right. So let me do this first. I'm going to turn off my ring light, so show you the difference in lighting quality. Okay, first of all, look at the difference.
Speaker 1:Right now, this is natural light. I do have a window on this side of me and I have a lamp that's in the distance, so I do have some light coming this way, but for the most part the light that's coming to me is from daylight. So that's really not well lit it's. You can see my face, but you can see it's like ashy and it's a little bit harder to see me. Let me move the view so you can get a better closeup view of this. There you go, so you can see here it's not super, super well lit. This is with no lighting on at all, with only natural light from the outside, from the heavens right and then from the lamp that's inside my room. So previous to using my ring light, I was using a box light. Let me turn this on and then I'm going to point the camera towards us and we talk about this a little bit.
Speaker 1:So this is the box light that I'm showing you right now, and the box light is. It's good in terms of fill light and I can bring it up. You can see here it good in terms of fill light and I can bring it up. You can see here it's a little bit of a lighter tone. If I bring it closer to my face it's going to get brighter. Let me do that right now. So don't be shy. When you do get lighting kits and things like that, try different angles, try bringing them closer. Just had a stack of papers fall over, so that'll be fun to clean up later. All right, so you can see, as I bring it closer to my face, it gets a little bit more well lit. Still, it's like super great.
Speaker 1:And I do have a second box light that I can use as well. I'm not going to do that right now, but I'm going to turn this back off, okay, and then I'm going to turn my ring light back on. What I like about this ring light is look at the fill light it's on me. It's like a spotlight, but it's a smaller, it's just a circle, so I don't have it quite as large. Right, it's not taking as much space in my office, which I like.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I like and let me angle the camera down to show you this, since I'm demonstrating it is this little device right here. I'm going to make this larger so you can see this Behind the scenes with Brenda Muller. So this little lighting thing right here. I've got the on off switch button. You can make it brighter, we can make it dimmer. I like that. I can't do that with my box light. I can't make it brighter or dimmer. It's got one on off and I can go from this is I don't know, this is a warm, I can go to a cooler tone, I can go to a warmer tone or that that's, I think, natural. So let me just show you the difference on here. I'm going to switch my hands again, okay, so this is the one I normally use. This is the one that's like a cooler tone. It's like almost like a blue tint to it, and this is like an amber tone, a little bit like a warmer tan tint to it, if you will. So you can see there how the different angles change. I can't do that on my box light. I do like this one, the best of the three. So there's something to think about there different angles and different lighting, and in terms of the lighting kit itself, I do have.
Speaker 1:Let's see two other lights that I have used. Let me show you these two. This one let me angle this back so you can see the couch again here. This one is a it's got a clip. It's like a jaw clip that you use for potato chips. Clip it on your desk and then it has a ring light. This is plug in with a USB. By the way, I've got a little binder clip on here, because when I have it clipped on my desk I don't want the wires to be I'm tripping over them. So I have a little mini binder clip that I clip it to the side of my desk too, and then it's got the cell phone holder. That's inside here and I think, yeah, this is expandable so you can slide it in and out as you're getting in there. These are really great If you're doing if you've ever seen me do like a letterbox, where I build words or phrases on my letterbox and I do a time-lapse version of it.
Speaker 1:So what I do first is like pick out all the letters and then I put them on the letterbox and I mix them up, and then I set my camera up and I film myself creating the letterbox in time-lapse and then, when you get done, it's like a seven-second video of you building something. That's pretty cool, and I don't have to worry about my tripod it has a light on it as well. So it's an all-in-one option. You're doing a lot of things on social media. If you want some content, if you have a letterbox, that's a fun thing to do, so I do like that one.
Speaker 1:That's a lighting kit. And then the last one I got this recently from a. I believe this was from the Together Digital Conference. I have not used this yet. I don't know if I have. No, I don't have the battery plugged in, but my understanding is you can clip this on the back of your laptop and I don't have the batteries in right now, but you can light it up, so I keep that. It's in my backup desk drawer. Never tried it. Maybe I'll try something like that in the future.
Speaker 1:So that is lighting, and I'm just going to pop onto LinkedIn and see who's on, and I'm going to show you a couple of other things that I have in my technology list, and I'm going to pull up my blog and then I'll probably start to wrap up maybe another 10 or 15 minutes here for timing wise. So let me show you a couple other tech things that I have, tech related things that I have. Okay, so I just moved off to the side. My camera's going to die on the phone here slowly too, so I got to get everything over here. All right, I think I've got everything in front of me. I wanted to put it all on a table, but it would have been such a big table so I couldn't do that. All right, so let me show you some other things that are in my technology, my tech stack, so to speak.
Speaker 1:First thing is I have a brick right. You want to have one of these ready to go with you whenever you leave the house. If you know what I'm talking about, you're traveling to a client appointment. Your cell phone maybe wasn't fully charged. Having one of these is really handy, and I always try to keep it plugged in. I put my name on it, just like at school when the kids lose their hats and scarves, because if it does go missing, people will know who it needs to be returned to. Also, this is an investment I made in the past year.
Speaker 1:This is a hotspot. I don't know if I can turn it on right now. Yeah, so this is a hotspot. I go through Verizon for my cell phone. I've had pretty good experience with them. I've been on and off with Verizon. I don't know how much I paid for this 80 bucks and then I think it's $5 a month for the subscription, something like that. It wasn't super expensive.
Speaker 1:Why do I have a hotspot? Sometimes I am working offsite in a space where there's not really good Wi-Fi coverage. In the summer I work at a community pool and I'm a volunteer working at the front desk my daughter's swimming. Usually I can bring my laptop, I can do some work, but I don't have really great Wi-Fi. So I bring my hotspot and I can use that. This has come in handy, too, when I'm in airports, when I'm traveling, when I'm offsite at client locations and the wifi password isn't working and I need to jump on my email right. So having one of these is really handy. I try to keep this charge all the time, throw it in my purse when I'm leaving the door, because you never know when you're going to be sitting in the doctor's office and instead of five minutes of a wait, you're going to be there for 45 minutes and they don't have good wifi. So that, to me, helps me to run my business, it helps me to stay self-employed, it helps me to have the freedom and flexibility to go anywhere I want and to still have Wi-Fi on my phone, and there's so many things that you can do running your business from your phone. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1:A couple other things that I do use when you are, if you're doing an audio book, if you're converting a printed book to an audio book, this little thing is super, super handy. Let me just show you. It's got like a little thumb clip. Can you hear that it's? Actually? This is a dog training tool. My dog doesn't know what this is, so she's not responding to her now, but it's supposed to be like you're either encouraging or rewarding behavior by clicking, like when you want dogs to do something. I found this as a as it was like on one of the sites where you're working on audio books and they said get a clicker tool, because if you're reading an audio book and you make a mistake when you do that, this creates like a sound spike. So it makes it a lot easier, as you're going back through and editing, to identify where you made a mistake, where you made a mistake, so you can clip it out. So this is really handy if you're doing. I use it for audio book, but I could see this working really well if you work for podcasts, because it makes it a little bit easier to find those or any type of technology where you're maybe not doing a live broadcast like where we are, but you're going to be doing recording of sound and then editing later. Having this handy can help with editing, so that's something handy. I like to keep that in my desk drawer. I used it when I recorded the audio book version of my book Where's that at over here? Social Media Pie? Available on Amazon. You can autograph copy on my website. Audiobook available wherever audio books are sold, by the way. But I really liked having that. It really did help me out with editing. Okay, so that's that A couple of final things that I have in my tech stack.
Speaker 1:This is my LED lighting. Let me show you what I have going on here. So in my office, let me make this a larger view so you can see. I like the ambient lighting that's happening in the background, and I bought this one. I don't know how much this was. I think I bought two to three rolls of it because it's only like 10 or 12 feet and I needed a little bit more, but it does have a lot of different colors options on here. Right now. This is blue and let me change it to orange. It's not super orangey. When you change the colors out. You can see it up on screen here. I can change it to green. I can change it to purple let's see there we go and pink.
Speaker 1:A lot of the teenagers these days have these in their rooms. Did you notice that you ever drive around a neighborhood at night? Pay attention the next time you're driving around your neighborhood. If you've never noticed this. A lot of the teens have these LED lights in their room and you can identify houses that have teenagers in them. Now it's not working anymore. I think I've got to be a little bit closer, so it's stuck on purple. At any rate. This provides a little bit of mood lighting in the background.
Speaker 1:What I may do eventually is in the bookshelves behind me. I did purchase these. They were super cheap from Five Below they were super cheap, so you know what that means. They don't really work that well. You're supposed to be able to click on them and they light up, and I had these where they were affixed to the bottom of my shelves and they had some lighting. They didn't work for very long, so eventually I might get some lighting in there as well. I always love to see people that have lighting and really great backgrounds. Alex Minor is one, by the way. Tag Alex in comments right now so he knows that I'm talking about him, but eventually I'm going to get probably the LED lights on my bookshelf behind me. I don't have them just yet, but that's an example of another form of technology that I'm using. Let's see two more pieces of tech, and then I'm going to show you some non-tech things I do as well.
Speaker 1:I, my website, is hosted on Kajabi, and when you reach different revenue achievements through Kajabi, they call the I think it's the Kajabi heroes. They send you gifts, and this was a gift that I got from them. I don't remember what revenue level it was, but it was a little packet of cool stuff. I think I got some socks. This time, too, it's called a rocket book, and the way that this works is it's there's a special pen that they give you right, and the pen actually has an eraser on the end of it and you can take notes on things. And then, if you write like a hashtag like I did on the end of it and you can take notes on things, and then, if you write like a hashtag, like I did on the top of it hashtag, hashtag to do Tuesday and you scan it with there's like a QR code in the bottom. You can email it to yourself and then I can erase the page and reuse it. So there's probably I don't know 10 pages in the whole book.
Speaker 1:But I don't ever need another notebook ever again. So it's almost like having a whiteboard version of a notepad, and I don't think they're super expensive. I don't think they're inexpensive either. They're much more expensive than a notebook, I'm sure, but I like it because now I can have something where I don't have pads of paper sitting around and I can email notes to myself, right. So that's something I use. And if you don't have a home scale already, I use these for when I'm shipping out packages of my books that I can weigh these.
Speaker 1:This is a part I don't want to call it technology. It's kind of technology related. So I wanted to show you that that's helpful to have for home shipments. By the way, I use pirate ship for shipping. Shout out to Amy Holachak If Amy go ahead and tag her in the comments. She recommended that to me. It was much more efficient and easier to use than going through the USPS or any other shipping service. I love Pirate Ship. That's where I ship my books from.
Speaker 1:Okay, if you do a lot of videos, this might be something fun. I pick one of these up, the clicker. Oh shoot, it's not clicking right now. I think the nail got a little bit moved. Oh, there it goes. Action and cut. It's fun when you're filming videos. If you're working with other people, it's just for fun. It's like a stage prop on there. I like using that.
Speaker 1:And then my two final items. This is a bell, just like when you go to the deli counter or like a hotel and you're checking in. It's a bell and I love it because it's got ladybugs which remind me of my mom. Whenever I get a new client, when I get a verbal agreement, I ring the bell one time and if I get money coming in, either through online payment or a check in the mail, I click two bells and my household knows my husband and my kids know that when the bell rings I got a new client and they'll even say new client. So this is important. This might seem like a small thing, but this is important to me because it signals to me business growth. It signals to me new clients coming in, success, and it's like I don't know, it's just, it's like applause, right. When you ring the bell you're like, yay, I got a new client, I got a new thing coming in, so I think that's helpful for me. And, like when I get a new client, I ring the bell and it's and nobody's else is even home to hear the bell. My dog probably hears it and what's that bell ringing for? But I think it's fun. Drop your comments and questions in. Right now we're going to do some Q&A as we wrap up.
Speaker 1:I was just at a conference for Germania Insurance speaking. I was speaking about LinkedIn and after I was done speaking, I walked around their vendor show place and this organization Hawksoft is the name of the organization. I'll tag them in comments. They had a booth and they had a giant purple cow and I always like to go to them. I like to walk around to the vendor tables and I this it's a good thing to do to walk around and say hi to people, ask them what their business is all about. As somebody who is self-employed, doesn't work in the insurance industry, it's probably not as relevant for me, but it may be something that I can learn about and I can refer business to them. What drew me to their table, they had a giant inflatable purple cow.
Speaker 1:Drop a comment right now if you know what's coming to mind, because if you are in the marketing world, you probably have heard of Seth Godin, who wrote the book Purple Cow. Right, this was years ago, probably 10 or 15 years ago. By the way, I was one of the first. He started an influencer program I think it was through BuzzAgent or I don't remember exactly, but a bunch of us were helping to create viral marketing for him and promoting I don't know if it was his book or probably this was like back in the day before influencer marketing was a thing and there was, I think, a hundred of us and he gave us a shout out in his book. I'm not sure if it's in the Purple Cow book or the one that came after. I got to find it and I'll make a note in show notes later but at any rate, I was like Purple Cow, seth Godin how cool is that.
Speaker 1:And so he had some promo items at his table, and people always feel guilty when they go up to vendor tables at events and they're like they don't want to take them. They don't want to take them and I always, like when I worked at vendor tables. I was like, feel free to take anything off the table and I would jokingly say, the more that you take, the less I have to take home. So if you want the sunglasses and the lip balm and the tchotchkes and the pens, feel free to take one of everything. Like for me as a parent, when I would go to events, I would take things I could take home to my kids and somebody to my husband, but they would sit around the house and they would gain familiarity for me over time and I remember the name of the company. This was one of the really cool things they were giving out.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Hawk and it's all branded Ready for this. Isn't that fun? I don't know. My dog hears it and she's like what the heck is that? I just think that's a fun little thing. So I don't know what I'm going to use this for. Maybe it's for firing a PETA client. I'm talking about pain in the bleep client. When you no longer work with the client, you can. I don't know. I'm going to use that for something positive. I think my bell is for new client wins.
Speaker 1:I need to figure out what I'm going to use this for. Maybe I bring this with me to presentations too. I don't know, but that's a fun thing. So I think that covers all of the technology that I use. I am going to drop the blog into the comments. It's called hey Brenda, what tech do you use? And you can visit this blog, read all about the technology. After I'm done with the video here today, I'm probably going to go into my blog just to double check that I have listed everything that I've talked about inside here, because I know there's probably a few items that I have not and when I do a once over on here.
Speaker 1:Oh, my webcam. I didn't tell you guys about my webcam. I showed you this earlier. This is what I use for my webcam, and I do have it on a telescopic arm as well. I'm going to turn this other camera off because I think we're done with the show and tell version of everything. It's a Logitech camera. I bought it pre-pandemic, I think. At the time it was like under $100. During the pandemic the prices went up because of supply and demand, and now it's down to $66. So I think demand has flattened out a little bit on that. I love having an external webcam. I'm touching it right now and I'll do this a lot when I'm on Zoom calls.
Speaker 1:Look at the camera as much as you can and this is like another side pro tip. If you are a coach, consultant, speaker, or if you're an author doing audiobooks or podcasts or things like that, if you have a camera, try to make eye contact with the camera as much as you can. When you make eye contact with the camera, you're actually making eye contact with your audience. Whenever I do a LinkedIn Live before my show, I always remind my guests of a few things, one of which is look at the camera as much as possible. Now, when we're doing Q&A, we both look down on screen, right, but we break eye contact with you. Try to do that as much as possible. That's an additional pro tip. But also, when you think about your technology, I recommend that you use an external webcam instead of something that's built into your laptop. You're going to get better audio video quality.
Speaker 1:Let me just show you what this looks like with my regular webcam instead of the external webcam. Give me just a second. I'm going to swap this out. Here is my regular computer webcam. Let's give it a second here and you can already see something happened. Right, I changed view. It's a fun vantage point too, but I changed view.
Speaker 1:Now my camera. If I were to put like my arm straight across, it's just slightly above my arm level, so it's lower than my chin. And what happens? Look at this, my microphone is huge. It's like more in my face than from above. The other thing is that you have this weird view. It's almost like it's looking up your nose right, as opposed to if you use an external webcam. I want you to pay attention to the quality. It's just, it's a. I just like the angle better. It's slightly higher. It's if I were to draw a line straight across at my eye. It's slightly higher than my eye level, so it's looking down on me as opposed to looking up my nose, which isn't as flattering of a view. And I can move the camera around as well and even like when I came in the room today I was like, oh, that's a little bit off to the side. Oh, I gotta angle it. I gotta make sure I get the books in there. By the way, shout out to Joey Himmelfarb on his book Don't Paint your Kitchen. Tag, joey, in comments below. If you want Having an external webcam, I can move it around my laptop, like having that external webcam in there.
Speaker 1:That was one thing I mentioned in the blog that I didn't talk about today, and I do have a telescopic arm with that as well. I don't want to have it clipped to my desk because I like to be able to move it around on there. I think I've covered everything else that I'm looking through my blog right now to see Did I cover everything else? Video editing I use Camtasia by TechSmith. It's really good for capturing video, adding slide-ins and things like that. I do use Zoom for video capture as well, but I do prefer Camtasia. It's got some additional bells and whistles on there, and I think that's it. So now I'm going to go to your questions and comments and then I am going to get started with the rest of my day, and I want to thank you all so much for watching here.
Speaker 1:Someone asked earlier do I have a model for Q2U? You're looking for it online and there are different models. If you go to my blog, hey, brenda, what tech do you use? I'm going to put this up on screen for you right now. You'll see the particular model that I use. Again, I am not an influencer. I do not get paid for mentioning of these products. Maybe I should Do. You know how to do that? People in connections and industries that do that tell me I don't know. At any rate, I buy these things myself. I do expense them to my business because it is an expense for Mellor Marketing, but I'm not being gifted these items, nor am I being paid to talk about them. So I will only talk about technology that I stand behind. So this particular model is Samsung S-O-N, not S-U-N, samsung Q2U. That's the version of it. Let's see what other questions you guys have on here. It is on the blog.
Speaker 1:When you lean in towards the new mic, it's even better. Now someone told me this is a trick. So if you do your hand like you're hanging 10, I think that is you want to put this on your chin and this on your microphone. That's how far you want to be away from your microphone. I tend to get a little closer Sometimes. I'm pretty enthusiastic. I move around sometimes too, but this is about the distance you should be. It shouldn't be too far away on there. So hopefully that helps you. Hey, liam, thanks for seeing. I think you sent me a video message over the holidays. We were traveling. I didn't reply back, but nice to see you. I'm so glad that you were able to find us. Somebody dropped the blog link in earlier. I appreciate it, david.
Speaker 1:It is a little bit challenging to talk to the camera as if you're talking to a person. It's really hard to talk to a circle is really what you're doing. And I remember when I first started doing LinkedIn lives back in early 2020, like when the pandemic hit I was like live every day. I remember it was like very weird looking at a piece of plastic day after day and some people look like beyond the plastic or they put like a little picture, a note that says smile. You really do have to look inside the circle for it to be looking like the best form of eye contact. But it is hard, david. But I try to imagine like I'm looking at a person that I'm really friendly with, that really enjoys listening to me, and they're like laughing at my jokes along the way. But even right now, I don't hear any feedback at all. There's nobody in the house with me to laugh at my jokes or to grumble when they don't think they're funny or to say there's too much. Sound out Like none of that is happening, so I'm getting zero feedback from any of you, with the exception of chat. So that's why chat is so important, which, by the way, is another pro tip.
Speaker 1:When you're doing live videos, engage your audience. It's not just about me and what I share, but I also want to make sure it's landing on you, and that's part of the reason in the beginning, I ask you to drop comments in and I always joke on my LinkedIn live. It's like a mic tap, tap. Is this thing on? Can you hear me in the back? And the people in the back like, go, we can hear you. Or, yes, we can hear they do the thumbs up. Yes, we can hear you. Getting an audience engagement is a version of that. It lets me know that the live stream is working. It makes you feel like you're part of the presentation too, david, doesn't it? And I like to give shout outs of names, as if I'm sitting across the table from you and, granted, I'm probably in my stage voice and stage presence. Right now I'm on.
Speaker 1:When I'm done, I'm not at the same high energy level. I'll need to quiet down and have some coffee for a little bit, but it's a skill that you learn over time, david, and for anyone else who's watching. Was I always this comfortable and confident on camera? Absolutely not. I'm an introverted heart. It was painful for me to think about, but I got more and more comfortable. The more you do, the more comfortable you'll get. You learn different techniques. You watch and you learn from others. I try to give shout outs to people as often as I can when there's a technique that I learned from them. But I did find and this is through my Toastmasters training, by the way, shout out to Toastmasters years ago that I learned that the audience is going to enjoy themselves if you are enjoying yourself. So if I came on camera today and I seemed like I wasn't happy about this, or if I was nervous nervousness sometimes comes across as disinterest, right, if I didn't have this high level of enthusiasm, you probably would have stopped listening by now, david.
Speaker 1:So I've learned techniques and it's one of the most painful things like hearing my own voice. I hate hearing my own voice, but watching yourself on video, that's. It just makes me cringe. I can't stand watching myself. I'm like, oh my gosh, she's so cheesy. But the more you watch yourself, the less you make it about. What do I look like on camera to more of a technical how well lit am I? How's my audio quality? How's my sound? How is my pacing? I tend to talk fast. Have you noticed that? So even when I'm watching my playbacks, I start to realize, oh, at that point she got control. I got control of my tone, my pacing, I even varied it up a little. It makes me think about how I can continue to improve myself over time. So it is challenging, but it's not a challenge that you can't overcome with practice.
Speaker 1:Samina says the ring light is much better, but for us with glasses, we tend to get circles reflected in our glasses. Oh my gosh. I have heard a couple of techniques that you can try with glasses. One is if you try to angle your glasses up or down a little bit on there and I hear you with the ring lights being a little bit more challenging. Have you tried box lights, samina? Let me know if that's been a good workaround for you, or if anyone else watching this has glasses and they use a ring light. What tips do you have for your audience on getting rid of that glare? I know sometimes you're going to have it and I've seen other people. Sometimes I don't even mind it because I'm like, oh, it's cool, I can see the ring light in the reflection in their glasses, so sometimes it's not too problem. Roz says the same thing. Ring lights reflect off of glasses, so hopefully I can get some comments on this video, with people sharing tips about adjusting, like Samina says, raising your glasses up and then let's see webcam.
Speaker 1:Ring light set you just mentioned is currently unavailable. Is that the one I'm using? Did you check my blog? I just purchased it, and when I purchased it I actually I searched for ring light. I wanted something that was going to not be super huge and not have a floor stand, something I could have on my desk, something I can move around. I like that. It's flat because I can slide my laptop actually right all the way up against it. I like the cell phone version. I like the clicker light, the different tones, the up and down. There's a lot of things I like. But then there were some user reviews of it as well. What I may end up doing is actually clipping out a portion of this video and uploading it to Amazon. Now the other two people that had reviews they were paid reviewers.
Speaker 1:I don't know how I get into that program, but I like to share feedback to help other people, because when I'm shopping around, I want to see does it work for real people? Not for the models, right, because that's an overly produced video. I want to see how it works for real people. So if that particular model is unavailable on Amazon, there are other places you can buy these things too. You don't have to just go on Amazon. You can search for the vendor and manufacturer and do a search online and find it in other places.
Speaker 1:By the way, I've got a bone to pick with Amazon. They used to, or they have currently have a program called Smile Amazon where you can set up for donations to charities based on purchases that you've made. I have all of my money, my charitable donations, going to my daughter's school right now. They announced that they are canceling their Smile program, so they're no longer doing charitable donations based on your purchases. Now I don't know about all of you pro or con on Amazon. One of the things I liked about Amazon is my purchases helped my daughter's school. Now that I don't have that, I'm going to shop around. I might go to Target, I might go to OfficeMax or local retailers. I might go to Target, I might go to OfficeMax or local retailers. I might go to direct websites instead of going to Amazon. I don't know. I feel like Amazon. You make a lot of money you can still give to charity. So it irritates me that's not happening anymore. But at any rate, if you can find your products on Amazon, you can shop around on those.
Speaker 1:Book titles on your shelf are not appearing in reverse. How do you make that happen? Book titles on your shelf are not appearing in reverse. How do you make that happen? Magic? No, not really. I wish it was magic. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Roz, this is like a good technical question. How did I make that happen? I don't know. It has something to do with the webcam. And think about this. Even from your cell phone, you can video yourself facing. Let me see if I can turn this back on. I think my camera is still working right now. If I video myself facing myself, let's see if the books are right side up in here or where these are going. I'm going to put this in the primary view here. Videos myself facing myself. This is you can see profit first. You can see the words on there. Let's try to zoom in a little bit. You can see the words facing the right way. Now, if I were to change this to flip camera view, I don't know if it'll. Let me even do this in here. Settings, camera front. Okay. So this in right here it says front camera. So if I change it to back camera, I don't know if that would make a difference. Flipping it around the other way, I don't know. Or there's mirror my camera. Let me do that. I'm going to do mirror my camera and front camera, okay. So now, no, it's still in right side up. I don't know. I don't know how I did that. I do know with some devices it's slightly different, though At any rate, I don't know. Good question, I know there's a way, depending on your camera, that you can see, and it's usually what I like to do on that. Roz is making sure that you check it out before you go live. Or if you're doing a selfie style of video, do a test clip of it first, and if you realize that the book titles are backwards, then you might need to flip your camera around. There's a little camera, the arrows thing on there. You can flip it to the other direction. That's how I do that.
Speaker 1:By the way, did you guys notice. I have a mirror up on my wall over here. That's another like pro tip I have for my home office. I'm going to take this off of here. But if you don't have a lot of great, great lighting in the office, you're not. I only have one window. I have a mirror facing the window which reflects the light and brightens up the room, so it adds more lighting in the room even without the use of technology. So a little pro tip on the side on there. Let's see. Yeah, it's something to do with mirror.
Speaker 1:This is again above my pay grade, roz, I don't know. Nicole's got some great tips on there. How do I get to display settings, roz? I'm not sure what you're asking there. If display settings, roz, I'm not sure what you're asking there. If you could clarify in comments or message me later.
Speaker 1:What do you call that click thing they use for movies? Take two, I think it's called a clapboard. I'm going to add this to my blog too, and part of the reason it's not working for me is there's a little screw hole right here. You see this screw hole. There's a pin in this one. This one fell out. So now when I'm raising it up, it's like moving the whole thing around, but I think it's just called like a clipboard. You could like, if you were to Google search it, action cut board or action clapper or something like that.
Speaker 1:Now, what I like about this one is it is a whiteboard, so you can write on it and then erase it. By the way, I want to show you a quick, quick pro tip. If you ever have this issue happening with whiteboards, you see how there's a lot of like ink that's still on here. These dry erase markers actually have a little bit of oil in them. Did you know that? So if you have ink that is residual on here from before, what you want to do is write on it with your dry erase marker and then erase it with your dry erase marker and then you can see. I don't know if you can see that little space in there. Let me do a wider area on here, but this will take off the ink that is sitting on there. So you can see here there's the red. Let me see if I can erase it and keep it in place and can you tell it's a little bit cleaner now from that area. So there's a little pro tip for you. You have a whiteboard, you just write on it again and then erase it and it will remove more of that ink on there. Meryl, thank you for watching Nice to see you.
Speaker 1:Joey asks what do you wish you could do in these events and the current technology that it doesn't allow you to do? I don't know For me. I don't know, joey. If there's anything I would change differently, differently with this. There's a delay in StreamYard to LinkedIn. I wish there wasn't as much of a delay. That would be helpful. The other thing is, I'm continuing to grow my business. It would probably be great to have a co-pilot on with me to help with technology, to help to load up links, to help to tag in people, that kind of thing too. But yeah, I don't really have any issues with that.
Speaker 1:Michael asked about the Logitech camera. He said is that the Logitech? And I don't know what number you have on there, michael. The one I have is called, let's see, logitech C920. You are correct, sir Ding ding. If there was prizes, you would win a prize for today. Let's see. Yes, my microphone is working. For those that were watching me yesterday I had some mic issues and my good is fixed. All Anna, thank you so much for watching Nice to see you.
Speaker 1:A person asks is this live session available after you're finished? In a link. I arrived a few minutes late, plus, my notes are messy. Yes, there's a couple of ways that you can do this. Now my LinkedIn live. I go live on LinkedIn on Brenda Muller. It's starting in 2023. They're all on Brenda Muller. I go live on my YouTube channel, which I actually have a playlist, so you can watch all the playbacks of all of these sessions on there. I sometimes find that watching it on YouTube as a playback is better than watching it on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn it pushes you to a page where you have to watch the comments one at a time. The workaround on that is go to the person's activity feed and then you can see all the comments at once. But, yes, you can watch the playback.
Speaker 1:My hack for this is, if there's a topic I'm interested in and, let's say, one of my friends, like Kenneth Lang, invites me to his event, I'm not going to be able to make it live because I have an appointment. What I will do is I will reach out to. I'm going to stop my stream here. By the way, over here, I will add it to my camera. Whoops, I don't want to end my broadcast yet. I got to keep this plugin and I'll add it to my calendar, rather, and then it sits in my calendar and later on in the day I can click on that link and it'll take me to the playback. So there's a little pro tip for you If there's an event you're interested in, you can attend the full thing. If you click on the RSVP like you're going to attend, it will go in. You have the option to add it to your calendar and then later on you can click on that link to watch the playback.
Speaker 1:Now for mine, I typically would say you can watch it on LinkedIn. Obviously, this is my network, linkedin but if you go to YouTube, you can watch the whole thing and you can watch it in a YouTube player, as opposed to LinkedIn player, which isn't, I don't think is as nice. Sorry, linkedin, I think YouTube is a little bit better. Let's see here. Yeah, someone else was talking about the Amazon smile and I've given to other organizations too. This person donates to their animal rescue for kids, no kill shelter. I know Amazon's got some revenue issues, but we all hear about how much money they're making in Amazon and we all put a lot of our money to Amazon too.
Speaker 1:Susan. Hey Susan, how are you? Susan says I do online training and need to reference the slides on my laptop while trying to maintain eye contact on the laptop webcam Suggestions. Susan, what I do is exactly what I'm doing right now. I'm telling you what I'm doing Because when I'm telling you what I'm doing, it's not quite as distracting as doing it, if that makes sense. So I say I'm going to look down at my screen right now and I'm going to pull up my other camera and then I'm going to switch camera views and then I'm going to look back at the camera right. So when I'm telling you what I'm doing, I'm going to remove that again.
Speaker 1:When I'm telling you what I'm doing, you're watching me navigate as I'm doing it. So sometimes, like just telling people what you're doing as you're breaking eye contact is the same thing as keeping eye contact all along. Does that make sense? So I'm telling you I'm going to share my slides right now. So I'm looking down as I'm doing that, and that's a way of resolving the issue. There's some of these awkward things that happen.
Speaker 1:The other thing you could do, susan, is you could have an intern or a VA or another team member doing the slide navigation for you and you tell them OK, let's go ahead and get those slides loaded, and then you do a quick look down, make sure that they're there and then you can maintain your eye contact with the camera. I don't think it's possible to maintain eye contact a hundred percent all the way through your video. I don't think that's a human being thing. We're not robots, right? And this shows that we're real, live, human beings. When we do break eye contact, when we step out of the view for a second or bring things into camera view, I think it's fine to let your audience know. I'm going to look down as I'm loading it up and then it looks like we're all set. Okay, let's get going into the presentation. So that's what I like to do. It's almost like what I'm doing today, susan. I'm giving everybody a behind the scenes view of my technology. Not a lot of people would do something like this, right, and it's not overly produced. Right, and it's more, it's human, right. So you're being human and I think that's a really great way of connecting with your audience by being human.
Speaker 1:While doing so, this person says what size is your clipboard? I'm going to open up my desk drawer right now, because I keep a lot of things in my desk drawer. I've got like literally a hundred not quite, but almost a hundred of these dry erase markers. I've got post-it notepads in here. I've got scissors, because everybody always walks away with scissors and I never find them. Oh, look at this. Somebody said do you have your owner's manual? It's in my drawer for the microphone. Yeah, I do still have the owner's manual on here. But somebody said what size is your clipboard? I've got a ruler on here. But somebody said what size is your clipboard? I've got a ruler. By the way, shout out to Pika Marketing Group. This is a promo giveaway. They are local to Metro Detroit. I can see their phone number. I believe Paul Zaffirana, Am I remembering you correctly? Tag Paul in comments and tag Pika Marketing Group. If you're watching this. I keep this in my drawer.
Speaker 1:This is a really. It's a metal ruler and it's got like a hole in it so you could actually hang it from the wall too. I'm going to measure my clapboard. I'm going to show you guys as I'm doing this right now. So, clapboard from top to bottom.
Speaker 1:This is tricky to do. That is about what Six inches tall by. Let's see here if I can do this, trying to get this angle right here. And this is the width. This is about what? Five and a half inches wide, and it's only. I don't know if it's not even quite. It's not quite an inch wide on here. I do need to get that screw replaced on here, but yeah, it's fairly small. Eight by six. Is that what I said? I've got a short term memory issue sometimes. I think I said eight by six on there, so it's a smaller one. You certainly can get a bigger one.
Speaker 1:I like this one because it has a whiteboard. It's fairly small. It's something I can throw in my tech bin and grab it quickly and I often have it like we're doing a video or a testimonial and somebody will be like take two and I'll pull it out and I'll be like take two and it just makes them laugh and smile. So it's a nice, fun, inexpensive tool, really inexpensive to use on there. So hopefully that helps you out. Yeah, it is a clapperboard clapperboard. Yeah, that's the name of it. Hollywood, we're in Hollywood.
Speaker 1:Yes, christopher Johnson would be a great co-pilot. And, by the way, shout out to Christopher Johnson of Calm Clear Communications. He is a virtual event producer excellent voice, great style in terms of his communication, his manner. I'm not quite at the point in my business where I can hire Christopher full-time. I'd love to, but I'm not quite at that point in the business. But yes, he would definitely be a great co-pilot on there. And yeah, logi Capture, they do have some software that you can use for video recording. I personally like Camtasia, michael, because it does allow me to bring in animations, sound effects, transitions, different things. But there are a million different types of video recording software out there. If you are aware of others that you'd like to add into comments, feel free to do so. All right, so I think that's it. Have a wonderful day and I look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn. Take care everyone. Bye, bye.
