I’m back! After 35 days walking the Camino del Norte, I’m taking you behind the scenes of how I filmed, edited and posted a daily vlog in real time while walking up to 35km a day.
From finding the story in each day to showing real emotions, embracing lo-fi content and keeping promises to yourself, I’m sharing the lessons that helped me create videos that connected with people around the world.
If you’re a business owner or content creator who wants to show up online with more confidence, authenticity and your actual human voice, this episode is for you.
Transcript
I’m back!!! Hello, how are you?
If you’re a That Voice Podcast listener you’ll know I was away for a few weeks walking the Camine de Santiago, Del Norte.
And if you were following along on Instagram or TikTok.. you would’ve seen I shared a video every day of our 35-day walk. In real time.
And I got a lot of questions in my inbox about how I walked 20-35 kilometres a day and managed to get a video out.
And believe me, some of those days I don’t know how I did it. The walking and the video.
But it was so worth it. Not only did it connect with and inspire people all over the world. You just have the read the comments. It also gave us such a brilliant video diary of the trip. By day 20 we’d forgotten day 6, so we went back and it. We had people a few days behind us using the videos as a guide, people in front of us reminiscing about where they’d walked and it is a really great resource for anyone thinking of walking the mighty Camino del Norte. Very challenging, lots of hills – take your poles.
Now this episode is not about the itinerary, our equipment, our planning, our training, the terrain. This is not a camino podcast, it’s That Voice Podcast. If you have any camino questions of course more than happy to answer, but today we’re focusing on using your authentic voice to connect with people online. I’m taking you behind the scenes of posting 35 vlogs in 35 days while walking up to 35 kays every day.
And my 35 camino vlogs is really me practicing what I preach. Take people into you world, show real emotions and use your real voice. If you create content online, especially if you’re a business owner, and you are not showing up with your face and your voice, you’re putting yourself at such a disadvantage because at best you’re missing out on connecting with people and at worst people will just assume it’s an AI account. Because that is the reality of the scroll.
And I get it it’s not easy to put yourself out there, but it is easy to put yourself forward to learn how to. Get in touch, join Soul Speakers, because aint nobody got time to worry about how you look and sound to the point where you are not posting.
Now there’s also the technical element of posting.
I love me some lo-fi. Pop up the camera, have a chat, edit out some pauses or stumbles maybe – and POST. You do not need to get fancy.
I say this because my camino vlogs might sound kinda fancy. I’ll take you through how I was planning, filming and editing the videos.
First I got clear on the style of the videos.
I chose to start with a little hook which was video with audio, then say I’m Sal a voice coach walking the camino. Day whatever place a to place b. I put the voice coach thing in there because this is what I do, the vids were on my business account and I didn’t want anyone to jump ship because they thought I’d become a travel blogger. It was just a temporary thing.
I used the app Travel Boast, to get the graphic of me walking across the map.
And then I got clear on the spirit of the videos.
I wanted to show real emotions, the joy, the awe, the struggles, the frustrations – and I couldn’t have done that if I wasn’t posting daily in real time on the camino.
I knew I wanted to keep it light hearted.
I didn’t want it to be too travel vloggy or camino preachy.
I wanted to show my personality. Do people learn something about me from this video? Or could anyone on the camino have posted that. I sang Taylor Swift, I spoke about the Kiama blowhole, I did jaw exercises next to a donkey – I wanted to put ME into it. THIS is how we connect with people more than ever now. Show them who you are.
I wanted it to be real – I couldn’t filter what people might think of me.
For example, we didn’t do the albergue / hostel style accommodation. We stayed in pretty nice hotels and I showed that. On the days when we did choose to catch a bus or a train or a taxi, I was honest about it. Now of course there are things that didn’t get shown, but you’re always making choices when putting a day into 1-2 minutes.
And speaking of choices, in the beginning days I kind of just filmed and put it together chronologically in the edit, we did this then we did this, but I shifted more into a journalist mindset. I used to be a TV journalist. What is the story of the day? What is the theme of this video? What shots do I need, what grabs (bits of audio do I need) And of course that revealed itself throughout the day, you never knew quite what was going to happen, but you could plan a bit. I didn’t have the whole puzzle, but I knew what pieces to collect along the way. For example one day was down to a creek then climbing up a hill, then down to a creek and climbing up a hill so I did a piece to camera saying you guessed it down to a creek up to a climb because I already had an idea of what the voiceover might be.
Now of course I have to shout out Patrick here. I don’t have someone filming content for me day to day, so it was a real luxury to have a camera man. Patrick got some excellent shots, and took direction on what I wanted.. a pan across, straight on me, close up, follow me, me coming towards you. And I filmed him too, so there was usually a person in the shot. Less interesting travel style content is the person just filming the landscape and talking, it’s always more interesting to have a person in the shot and with Patrick I had the luxury of being able to do that.
Now you might think how do you trek up a mountain, or be close to tears or dying of the heat and get it on camera? Well partly the videoing gave me motivation. I thought it’s not a great video if I just collapse and tap out here and also it just became a habit, my phone was in my pocket easy to grab. Each day I had about 10-15 minutes worth of video that I cut down to 1-3 minutes, and I knew if I was going to take you into my world, I had to capture that stuff. In one video it’s pouring rain and windy and we’re in the middle of a traffic island on a highway pulling our rain jackets on and I could not film that. But when we were sorted I could pull out the camera and give a sense of the conditions.
Let’s film it was always top of mind for me and Patrick always helped out, never complained about filming and did it. If you want to do this sort of thing your travel buddy has to be on board. They weren’t my videos they were our videos, it was a joint project. I could not have done it if Patrick wasn’t so willing to shoot it all and often he was the one saying give me your phone we gotta get this.
The next thing was scope. Generally the video was start of walk to end of walk. Sometimes hotel tours. Sometimes activities at the end point. But it was nice to have dinner and chat with people with my phone away. I was usually off the clock by about 7pm.
One video on day 32, a really hard day, long day, where my hip was screaming. I hit post at midnight. The videos took me up to 3 hours each day to put together, but it became a promise to myself. Kind of like these podcasts. When we’re in season, we’re in season. I’ve mentioned making certain activities core business not optional extras. And on camino I made the choice for the daily videos to be core business, it wasn’t a feel like it thing. Because I rarely felt like it. We’d walked all day, I was wrecked, but I’m a woman of my word. I promised myself and the best way to build confidence is to keep promises to yourself and the best way to screw your confidence is to constantly renege on promises to yourself.
So let’s get technical. I edited the vids in TikTok. I’m really comfortable with how to edit there. Video editors would be cringing, but whatever it worked for me. One of the biggest challenges, was I included video with sound and a post-edit voice over.
So I had to not only write and memorise the voice over I couldn’t hear the other audio while I was recording it. So while remembering what I wanted to say, and getting my tongue around things like Day 13 Santa Cruz de Bezana to Santillana del Mar (voice exercises really work) I also had to watch the video and judge where the sound came in and do the voiceover in between. But this is where experience really came into play.
And I got it out every day. I feel the videos improved each day. And the dm’s and the comments proved the impact they had. Reach out with any other questions you have about the videos, and I hope this has given you motivation to post story-driven and voice-powered content.
The Camino left me with so many great lessons – including that it’s a good thing to get uncomfortable – and putting videos online can feel uncomfortable. The camino showed me it’s the journey not the destination, you have to post works in progress. If you want to get to the perfect video or the perfect post, you can’t teleport there, you have to journey there. The destination at Santiago de Compostela was as emotional as it was because of the journey. The tears in the square were from the pilgrims. They weren’t from the bunch of people who flew in for a walking tour following the person with the flag. Rewards come to those get up and walk, especially on the days you do not feel like it.
The vast majority of people, even business owners, are note sharing voice and video content online. And that’s because it’s not easy. But it means that if you do, if you get up and walk when others can’t be bothered or choose not to, you will reap the rewards – greater connection with your audience, inspiring people with real non-AI slop content, and above all greater confidence and pride in yourself.
Oh I miss the camino, but gosh it’s good to back. Subscribe, like, review all the things. That Voice Podcast is officially back in season. See you next week.
