So you want to be an influencer

I’ve been in this game for nearly seven years now.

It first dawned on me to do it because of all the stress from raising an infant and taking care of my wife in a country where she was completely dependent on me for everything. She didn’t have any cultural background, didn’t speak the language, but could do fairly well on her own where the customer service catered to foreigner (i.e., all the expensive places).

I created a YouTube channel as a legitimate excuse to play video games for the sake of creating content around them. During those three years, I learned all about video production, editing, sound balance, script writing, and building an audience.

What I didn’t learn was psychology, marketing, and persuasive writing.

After posting over 250 videos and completing the vanilla version of one incredibly punishing game, I stopped. I had to anyway. With the arrival of my second child, I wasn’t exactly flush with time to play games at night anymore.

What little time I had left was geared towards writing short blurbs and thinking about what I would do once my infant son started being a bit more self-sufficient. I also reflected on my small following of around 300 subscribers, the quality of my videos, and what I was missing.

It was during this time that I realized I sucked at script writing. It took days for me to write enough to cover all the things I wanted to say, and creating one video per week was all I could manage when things were going smoothly with family life.

That’s why I pivoted to writing, and it’s lead me here. Now that I have a solid handle on writing and digging more deeply into the three disciplines that I mentioned earlier, I have a lot more confidence in how I’ll go about creating videos when I restart that process.

So without further ado, here’s my starter kit series for anyone who wants to begin their own content creation journey. I’ll share what I’ve used over the next few articles here from hardware to software to websites as well as the general workflow at the end.

Let’s tackle the hardware for this issue.

The hardware

It’s not really rocket science. You need the following:

• Solid internet connection

• Webcam

• Microphone

Internet

Depending on where you are, the first one is going to be different. One of the biggest gripes I have about this utility is that it’s not like water and gas and electricity (and I believe that it should be). People have the right to a reliable internet connection, and actively gating it for massive profits grinds my gears.

I have Spectrum, and I pay for the high speed provided through direct connection as well as wireless. Here are the results for my internet speed test:

If you’re doing wireless, the download speed is around 100 Mpbs with 10 Mbps upload. That was more than enough for streaming as well if that’s your thing. I was a Twitch streamer for a little over a year, and I didn’t have any problems during regular sessions.

The going rate right now is around $83 per month.

Shop around if you have options. If you plan on being mobile and streaming in public, Mintmobile is great in the US as it uses the T-Mobile infrastructure and is a far better deal than the contracts that you get locked into with other service providers.

Webcam

You can’t go wrong with any device from Logitech. I’ve been using them for years for all my peripheral devices. For a webcam from home, you’ll want to go for a decent resolution and HD streaming ones will fit the bill just fine. I use an HD 1080p model that’s a little dated at this point, but it’s served me well.

Microphone

Plenty to choose from here, but I prefer the Yeti from Logitech. It’s more than enough to start you on your content creation journey. Whether you want to branch out to podcasting or interviewing or ASMR, these are great as they can be adjusted for different modes to pick up sound from different angles.

Incidentally, Logitech offers a bundle for webcam and microphone now for these two items at $150 US. They didn’t when I was scrounging up the cash to get started.

Closing thoughts

I didn’t mention computer hardware because technology for desktop, laptop, and mobile phones all have more than enough capability these days. I wouldn’t recommend trying to scrap together anything that’s more than a decade old. Any hardware that can’t handle 4G or 5G is going to be challenging for quality of resolution you need for video.

If you’re doing the writing route, just a computer and decent internet connection is enough.

In the next issue of this series, I’ll share my picks for software packages for video production as well as writing.