What you need to start off with your YouTube channel is a video that looks professional and people can hear what you're saying. Here we are going to talk about the minimum viable setup.

1. WebCam

Here we are going to talk about the minimum viable setup. Which is, even if you have a laptop and it has a built-in camera, it’s probably not high quality enough, and I would strongly recommend the first purchase be a WebCam. We’re using a Logitech WebCam, And I will include the specific model in the description. You don’t have to go overboard. A simple WebCam in the 30 to 50 dollar range works perfectly fine, and you can connect it to your USB.

2. Lavalier mic

My second recommendation is a lavalier mic, which is like this one. It can also plug to your USB or the headphone jack. What it does is it improves the quality of the voice in your videos, so your audience will really thank you. Many people say that 60 to 70% of the video viewing experiences is sound, so if you don’t have high quality sound it’s going to be problematic. And the lavalier mic helps isolate your voice, so it doesn’t pick up a lot of ambient sound, it doesn’t pick up the noises from outside. So overall, it makes it much easier for your editors as well to produce a high-quality video.

3. Background – A backdrop or Your office setup

The third piece of equipment which you can see actually in the background, it’s a fake background. It’s a backdrop. So you can buy a cheap stand, cheap backdrop, just to make sure that your background is professional enough. And you can buy an automatic one, you can buy a gray one or a black one or a white one, whatever works best with your skin tone and color of clothes. Or you can buy something with the pattern, to break it up a little bit, make it more exciting.

That works great if you don’t have an office setup. If you have a nice office setup, it’s actually recommended to use what you have, because it will look more authentic. But if you don’t, if you’re at home, or if your office doesn’t look great or if it’s messy, if there are other people in the background, you may want to isolate yourself with the backdrop.

4. Lighting – Ring light or Natural light

And finally, I would say a ring light. Which I’m not using. If you have a lot of natural light coming from the front of you, then that’s probably more than enough, especially with a WebCam. You will find out that they receive a lot more light. If however you don’t have good light, if you’re in an area where you don’t have windows, you may want to buy a ring light because it puts the light right on your face in the right way, so you won’t have any weird shadows.

So if you had a light in your office that’s to your left, you might have a lot of shadow on the right. With a ring light you can have a very close. It illuminates your face very well, so that can be a great purchase as well. And other than that, I don’t think you need anything else to get started. The minimum viable equipment setup is all you need to get started, and you can keep improving from there.

Conclusion

Sure, there can be high-quality cameras, high-quality equipment, other equipment you can add to make your videos look fancier, but you really don’t need that. What you need is something that looks professional, looks good enough, people can hear what you’re saying, and that will be a great start for your video content marketing. So just get started, don’t get bogged down by the equipment. This is the only list you need. And from what you want to keep it really simple, just get a lavalier mic, or WebCam, or both. Don’t be a great start, you’ll need a backdrop, you don’t need a ring light. Don’t use the equipment as an excuse to stay away from video content marketing. Just get started right away with anything you have, And keep improving as you go.