7 Tips for Looking Good for Webcam/Google Hangouts [Creator's Tip #83]

For this week's Creator's Tip, we are going to get you guys looking good on your webcams for your Google + hangouts, video interviews, and lots more. That's coming up.

Hey, guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of Creator's Tip where every week, we here at ReelSEO do our best to help you guys make content that will perform the best that it possibly can on the web, and one of the types of content that you might be creating is doing stuff with Google + hangouts. Maybe you're doing Google + hangouts on air where you're doing live Q&A, interacting with your audience, your live streaming stuff. Maybe you're either conducting video interviews using Mic Skype or maybe other people are interviewing you and you’re being recorded. How can you best use that tiny little webcam on your computer to make you look and sound as good as possible? I'm going to give you guys seven tips that I have learned over the year.

The first thing that I've learned is one, you really need to have a ton of light because those senors are so small. Only a tiny little bit of light gets through so if you want a really good, crisp-looking image regardless of what webcam you're using, you're going to need to have lots of light. Number two, use a decent mic most like Max and a lot of webcams that you can get that plug into your PCs. They have microphones built in but they don't always perform the best. Maybe you can even use something as simple like if you have an iPhone or those earbuds that has the little microphone built right in, that thing even works better than what you would normally get just off of your computer. It just hangs right here by your head. You don't really need an expensive, high-end mic, just something that you can get close to your mouth and one that hopefully blacks out surrounding ambient noise in the room and stuff.

Along with that, number three is use headphones. I like to use these because they're really small and kind of out of the way. You don't really notice them unless you're wearing a black sweatshirt, but I'm usually wearing a white shirt, and I'll explain why in a second. So this wire actually blends in quite nicely, and the reason why you want to wear headphones is to eliminate any sort of echo that your microphone might pick up from people speaking that's coming through your computer and then getting resent right back to them. That just creates all sorts of havoc for everyone, so just do everyone a favor and just use headphones.

Number four, look at the camera. I know it's really easy when you have other people talking to you right there on your computer screen to look down at your screen to look at them, but don't – try to look directly in that camera as much as possible. That's especially true if the interview is being recorded. Then people feel like you're actually looking at them, making eye contact with them rather than always staring down like this. How would you like it if I just looked at you guys like this the whole time? It just wouldn't feel very nice.

Number five, if you wear glasses, I would recommend that you wear contacts because a lot of times, the glare from your computer monitor will reflect back into your glasses. It'll be really hard to see your eyes, and that's really – people really connect with you if they can see your eyes, so try to avoid that glare. Also, the same thing is true even if your computer monitor isn't reflecting into your glasses but the lights that you've set up are just kind of passing glare.

Number six, avoid wearing crazy colored patterned shirts and clothing because your webcam probably isn't that crisp to show all the little details, so it just might look like you’re wearing a big mess. I try to stick to plain colored shirts, and I usually go with white because if I wear black, it actually causes the aperture on my camera to automatically adjust and compensate for all the light in the room, which means that it's going to let in a lot more ambient light from the rest of the room but if I wear a white colored shirt or something very bright and have the rest of the lights in the room kind of turned down, then it forces that webcam to adjust accordingly so I'm not way overexposed and in so doing, it really darkens the rest of the room and eliminates a lot of the distraction and makes it much easier for people to focus just on you and in those few B-roll clips you just saw, I promise the lighting in both of those was exactly the same. The only thing I changed was my shirt.

Number seven, make sure you center yourself well in the frame. You don't want a ton of headroom where it's like just your neck and you have all this space up here, but you don't want to be out of it, either, so center yourself well. Get close enough to the camera where people can see your shoulders and your face and not so far back that they can't really see your eyes and all the detail there because of your webcam's quality probably being not that great.

So take that into consideration and for the rest of you guys, I would love to hear your tips, and ideas, and suggestions for how to look good in your webcam for video interviews and Google + hangouts. I actually really love doing Google + hangouts on air and in fact, I do one every month over on the Video Creators channel. I have a blast every month just bringing in people who are way smarter than I am about YouTube into a conversation. We love doing live Q&A, we love reviewing channels of the people who are in the audience, and we just love doing YouTube training and just giving all sorts of advice, and it's all live, totally interactive. If you want to see what that's like, check out the channel at YouTube.com/VideoCreators. Go to our live YouTube training playlist and you can see exactly when our next one is coming up.

You should also subscribe to this channel here at ReelSEO because hopefully sometime in the future, we'll be doing more hangouts with you guys so all these tips we'll get to put into use for you and hopefully you guys would get to put them in use as you talk to us in those hangouts, as well. So subscribe. If this is your first time hanging out, make sure you also check us out at ReelSEO.com for other tips and other ideas and suggestions. We're posting for you guys all throughout the week, and I will see you guys next week for another Creator's Tip video. See you then. Bye.