Transcripts
1. Introduction: Working With Brands, Making Money & Growing Your Channel: Hi. I'm Nadine Sykora. And I'm Kristen Sarah. We've both been full-time content creators for nearly a decade. And we're here to share our insider tips and tricks with you. So you too can earn a living traveling the world and creating content that inspires. In this class, we're going to show you how you can get paid to travel for a living. In fact, thousands of content creators are doing it right now and you can be one of them. In this class, we'll go through how to optimize videos for YouTube. Then we'll show you ways that you can expand your marketing efforts and put together successful creator collaborations. We'll dive into the most popular ways to find companies and brands to collaborate with, as well as how to work with destination marketing organizations and charge appropriately. This class is perfect for those creators already making videos and are now looking for opportunities on how to monetize your content and make money. There's also part 5 in a five-part series of classes we have on travel blogging, which you can do individually or complete as a whole. The information this course can also be applied to other genres as well but since we're both in travel, that'll be our focus. Are you ready to get started?
2. Promoting Your Videos: You've filmed, edited, and exported your video, and now you are ready to show it to the world. At the very same time, so did thousands of other creators. How do you get your video seen in a sea filled with videos being uploaded online every second? From an SEO standpoint, the title for your YouTube video and tags you use are extremely important to help break your video in Google and on YouTube. I'd say that your video title is actually the most important in the video making process. Of course, great content is essential, but if you have no one watching that great content, then well that's no fun. How do you create great titles that are appealing to viewers in order to make them want to click that play button plus get you ranked high on Google and YouTube? Here are some key tips to consider when titling your videos. Use Google Trends to explore keywords and subjects that people are searching for. You can then base your video content around those trending topics and keywords, or if you have a video already completed, you can search for those most looked up words that describe the content of your video. How twos and top five or top 10 videos are among the most highly searched type of video for example. Like any keyword research, you are looking for the sweet spot between the high search volume and low competition. This helps get your video ranked higher in Google and YouTube. Putting keywords at the beginning of the titles boost you even more. For example, budget travel tips, how to save money while traveling. Your video description is very important, especially the first 25 words because Google and YouTube can't listen to videos. They rely on your text description to determine your videos content. You'll want to include your keywords in the first 25 words and 3-4 times throughout the entire description. Make the description at least 250 words as well. Including tags on your videos can help your rank on YouTube and Google. Targeted tags not only help you rank for your target keyword, but get you to show up more often as a related video in the sidebar area of YouTube. When the video of someone watching has a similar tag as your video, you're added to the sidebar. The order of your keywords matter as well. You want to put the top keywords first. Also, don't put too many keywords, only the ones that best describe your video. You have around 100 characters you can play with for your title on YouTube videos, but when it shows up in searches, people only see the first 50 characters. Fifty characters will be seen when viewing your video results in Google universal search, 60 in regular Google search, and 55 characters in YouTube search. You'll need to work with your title until you've got something that works, but you want to show the most important and compelling piece within the first 50 characters. Always be sure to title your video to match the content of the video. For example, my naked sauna video in Finland has a lot of views. I didn't deceive my audience with the title as I did indeed get naked and experience a finished sauna for a good duration of the video. The title also makes people curious because it's called naked sauna, I want to click on the video and the content makes them stay and subscribe for more. If I were to have titled the video, Miley Cyrus goes to rehab, it's clickable, but has nothing to do with my video. This makes viewers angry as they clicked on your video because of the title. If you deceive them, you'll get a horrible bounce rate on your video and a lot of thumbs down, which is never good. Google loves backlinks and inbound links, and so does YouTube. A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another web page. Well, inbound linking is a link coming from another site to your own website if you have one. A link to your website on your YouTube video is a great example of being beneficial for you on both ends. Adding a few backlinks or inbound links to your video and your channel URL, will make a considerable difference in where your videos will rank and ultimately, how many views you'll receive. You absolutely can experiment with retailing old videos because your videos are indexed based on your videos metadata, which are the titles, descriptions, etc. This new title is what the system will use. If the keywords you use are being searched for more, there is a possibility of it being more easily discovered. Having a great looking thumbnail is one of the most important parts of marketing your video. It's one of only two things that get people to click on your video, your thumbnail and your title. If your thumbnail isn't visually appealing, why would someone want to click on your video? They will just skip it until they see a thumbnail that strikes there attention and then they'll click on that video. What makes a good thumbnail? Color. Bright, bold eye grabbing colors that make people want to click. Moments. Having an action shot or a moment of intrigue. Usually, these are those awkward facial expressions. They work for thumbnails. All you need to do is get people wondering, hey, what's going on here? Having a subject in your thumbnail it's appealing, especially if that subject is you and if your brand is you. If you're selling yourself and your personality, then you would want to be in all or most of your video thumbnails. Using text in your thumbnails is also encouraged. All you need to do is include your top keywords. You'd also want to use the text you including your thumbnails to relate to the title of your video. It doesn't have to be more than a few words. For example, if I made a video about all of the cool things I did in Fiji, I can include a best of Fiji on my thumbnail. Try to be consistent with your thumbnails. Consistency creates familiarity, meaning your subscribers will immediately recognize your thumbnail when scrolling through their subscription feed, and then click on that video. Adding annotations AKA YouTube's embedded links to your videos is a great way to direct people's attention towards more of your content, or to allow them to click natively in your video to subscribe to your channel. Your videos transcript AKA your video dialogue type to text is an essential marketing tool. By typing this up and adding it to your video, YouTube will automatically index every single word of your transcript and incorporate it into its search algorithms making it more searchable. This is like putting your video SEO on steroids. If you don't upload a transcript, YouTube is forced to determine what a video's topic is based solely on the videos headline and description, so you'll have the upper hand with a complete transcript of your entire video. Now if you don't want to transcribe your video yourself, there are plenty of other outsource websites that can do it for you. We'll leave a bunch of links in our resource package so you can check those out. In this day and age, there seems to be a new social media platform introduced to the world every single day. It can be overwhelming to feel like you need to be on all of them. But in fact, you should at least try them all out and see which ones work the best for you. Even if you don't think you'll use a certain platform, sign up in order to score your brand name on that platform. This way, if it takes off or you decide you think it may work for you eventually, you won't have to worry about if someone has already taken your brand name. The more platforms you can share your content on, the more of a chance it will be seen. Of course, it's impossible and frankly exhausting to spend your entire day trying to build up every platform that exists, so stick with the ones you enjoy the most. Make the most sense for your brand and create the largest engagement. Every time you upload a new video, share it in all of your platforms. I'd recommend including different thumbnails or teasers for each platform. Although you are advertising the same video, it looks a little bit different on each platform. Tweeting out that video every day for a week isn't such a bad idea, but posting it on Facebook every day for a week maybe a bit excessive. You can also share that same video again in a month from when you uploaded it. Find a balance that works best for you. Also be sure to include hashtags using the keywords for your video. This will help you get discovered on social media by people looking up those keywords. Creating a blog to host all of your video content is a great idea. This will double your chances of getting your content scene. This is especially true when you link your blogs URL in your YouTube description box and embed your YouTube videos into your blog with a link to that video on YouTube. You tube and Google will love you for this backlinking and in-band linking, and therefore rank you higher. If you have a blog, it's extremely important to have a sign-up widget where your audience can sign up with their email to receive updates from you. You can set it up so your subscribers will receive an update to their mailbox every time you post something new, weekly, biweekly, or even monthly. Although YouTube allows viewers to subscribe to your channel to receive updates of any new videos from you in their feed, sometimes your videos get lost in between the videos of other YouTubers that people subscribe to. When you create your own mailing list, you have access to the email addresses of those people that have signed up. If anything ever happens to any social media platform, you still have a list of all your followers email addresses. Being consistent with your content is an excellent marketing strategy. Just like how your favorite television show comes on at the same time and same date every week, so should your videos to your audience. Having a set day or time you upload videos allows your audience to know when to return to your channel to see your new videos. Finding the right day and time to upload your videos will be up to you. There's no magical secret time and day, and the best way to find out your time and day is to just pick a day and then stay consistent with that. Then once you've been uploading videos for a while, you can check your analytics. Here you'll be able to see when you get the most engagement on your videos. Maybe the day and time that you've already chosen is already best or maybe not, then you might want to change your day and time to co-relate to where the larger amount of people watching your videos is. Also, when a viewer comes to YouTube directly and straight to your channel, You Tube recognizes that they are coming to the site through you. Then the longer someone stays on YouTube, the higher YouTube will rank your video. This doesn't necessarily mean that they have to stay on your channel the entire time there watching YouTube videos, just as long as they come onto YouTube from your channel.
3. Couch Session: YouTube Revenue & MCNs: Welcome to the marketing couch sessions. Let's get started. We're going to talk about marketing a little bit more in depth. And cover basically YouTube basics and more in-depth about money and getting your YouTube channel off the ground. Yes, and making you the- so you can do it full time. Yeah. Let's get started. First thing that you need to do. How do I even set up a YouTube channel? Yes. What is the process for that? It's actually quite simple. Yes. You head on over to the YouTube website, and you sign up for an account, and you just literally follow through the step-by-step process. It's really, really simple. They have their own tutorials on it. We will leave the link and the information in the resource package, where you need to go if you don't know how to set that all up. You can do it and so can your 75-year-old grandmother. It's very easy. What's a channel trailer? Channel trailer? Why should we you care about it? It's important. Very important actually. It's like your YouTube resume. Your online resume. Yeah. Think of it as your business card for video. How do you tell someone about your channel really quick and entice them to subscribe and watch your videos? That's what you want. You want them just to hit that subscribe button so that they continue getting videos from you. You want it to be quick, you want it to be engaging, you want it to be entertaining, descriptive, informative. Have that call to action at the end, where you force them to subscribe. We're going to leave both of our channel trailers in the resources. Yeah. You can check it out. Go watch them, other example of what to do for channel trailers and how to build your own. You should have that channel trailer accessible on all your social media. It should be front and center when you come to your channel is you see your channel trailer, because how else? It's marketing. That's a very central part of marketing your channel. It's basically setting yourself in one minute and telling people why they should subscribe to you. Yes. Now that you've set up your YouTube channel, you should be looking at the YouTube Partnership Program, and what that is? Well, it's how we make money. One way we make money. One way how we make money. So let's go into a bit more detail. So these days, the Partnership Program back in the day, actually when Nadine started, not everyone could be part of it. These days you can, anyone can be part of it. Anyone can be part of it. You can upload a video and start monetizing, which means making money from that video right away. The only criteria is that you own your own content. It means that you're not just ripping content off the Internet. You own your content and that it actually is available in your country. There's 60 countries that are a part of the Partnership Program, so you do need to make sure it is available in your country. But again, we'll leave the information on how to sign up for the Partnership Program in the resources, because they go through all of the lengths and tutorials. It's very simple. But like we said, it's basically you want to sign up for the Partnership Program right away because it's how you monetize your videos and how they do that is they place ads on the video. So I'm sure you've watched YouTube and they see the ads on various [inaudible]. You see them there on the video. Or in the video. On the side bar as well. You make money from those ads, or we make money from those ads. Yeah, and your paid subscriptions and the merchandise that you can sell through YouTube. It's how YouTube can pay you for your video so you definitely want to sign up for that. Once you do, and once you optimize that first video, every video that you upload from then on, will be monetized. You can set it up that way unless you opt out. You're going to continue making money the more videos you put out, those videos make money unless you opt out. Yep. Like we said, YouTube does a fantastic job of explaining to you all the fine details of the Partnership Program because there are far more details than we could ever go into. Really YouTube does a much better job of it. So, please, if you haven't signed up for the Partnership Program already, go to the resource page. We're giving you the links to it and watch and read everything you need to. It has frequently asked questions and YouTube will walk you through setting your account up for a partnership. How much are we going to earn? How much money is your channel going to make? The famous question, how much money? This is a very subjective question. Very subjective question. There's a variety of ways, and this is why when you ask people, how much money do you make on YouTube, how much money do you earn? It's really hard to say. It's a really awkward question. Because every single creator is different and everyone makes a different income. Legally, YouTube craters are not allowed to disclose how much money they make. Everybody, when you signed up for the Partnership Program, you will sign a waiver that says that you're actually not allowed to disclose the amount of money that you make. But we can go into a little bit of detail regarding how we make the money. How it works and how you continue to make more money. Yes. This is called a CPM. Cost per thousand it's called. Yeah, there's many terms that you're going to learn about and how you make money and why you make money. But cost per thousand is basically it's a pay YouTube and it directly relates to the people that watch your video and how they interact with your content. Basically CPM is cost per thousand and it's how much money cost per thousand [OVERLAPPING] for per 1000 views, you get a certain amount of money. Yeah, how much money you would make on your video for a 1000 views, that's your CPM. What causes your CPM to increase or decrease will depend on your demographics. Your watch time. Your content, and the gender actually watching your videos. Because that determines the ads, right? Yes, because think about it, it's the type of ads that are being sold on your videos. So certain ads are more premium and more directly related to the audience watching it so they're going to pay a higher CPM for those ads as opposed to an ad for something that if you were a viewer you don't care about, football, you see a football ad that's not going to be a very high paid ad for you if you're not our targeted football fanatic. That's the gist of CPM. Yes. When it comes to how much you're actually making per 1000 views, again, it varies based on what we just talked about on the YouTuber. But anywhere between $0.50 to $50 USD is how much you can make per 1000 views and the average is $7.60. Yeah. This is the statistical average of what you can make, but like we said, but $0.50 to $50, that's a huge difference, especially if you're getting like 5,000, 10,000, the more views you get. Obviously, you want higher CPMs. We all want higher CPMs. Everybody. Of course. So how can we get higher CPMs? That's the million-dollar question. There's several ways which we're going to talk about. Yeah. So factor number 1 that lead to higher CPMs is the types of ads like we mentioned and where those ads are being shown. For example, if someone's watching your video in Brazil and they're going to be watching Brazilian ads that are paid with Brazilian dollars that could be less. So you could be making it a less higher CPM because the currency is weaker than say if you were watching Japan and if the Japanese dollar was higher and that they could be paying higher paid ads. Currencies make a big difference. If your currency is higher and those countries are watching more of your videos, you're going to be paid the higher currency. Yes. English speaking adds pay more because they target the larger audience on YouTube. Yeah. There's a bigger audience so they're going to pay more than a very distinctive language like Finnish or something. There's only so many Finnish speakers, so they're going to pay less or more. I mean, there's so many variables, but a region, it's a big one. Factor number 2. If you're bringing viewers to YouTube, the longer you keep them on YouTube and not necessarily your channel and your videos, just YouTube in general, the more money you're going to make. I put up a video, I tweet it out. People click on it, but they don't stay on my channel the whole time. They continue to watch other channels and such. That's still good for me because I was the one that brought them to YouTube, and YouTube recognizes that. This is called watch time. It is huge in YouTube. Its worth more than views. A view on your video is counted, it's not just like if someone clicks on the video, that's a view. A view is counted by how long someone stays on your video. I don't know the average. I think it's 30 seconds they have to stay on your video. That exact number could be wrong, it changes all the time, but watch time is what you're aiming for. Watch time is the duration of time that they spend watching your videos. Say you have a three-minute video, if people watch 80 percent of that video, that's awesome. YouTube use that as like, "Wow, this is a really engaging video. Let's promote it. More people want to see this video." If your video is three minutes and people watch 20 seconds of it or 20 percent of it, YouTube recognizes that, "People aren't really watching this video. They don't like it." So your watch time is lower so they won't promote it. Like we said, if you're bringing viewers outside of YouTube to watch your video, and then they stay and they watch 20 minutes of your video and then watch more videos, and then they watch the other person's video and this video, YouTube can serve more ads. Think of it like that. YouTube is a business, it want to make money. So the more ads they can serve you, because the longer you are watching, the more higher ranked your video, because it started the chain of videos is going to be and the more YouTube is going to want to promote it, because they know that your video is getting people to watch more videos, which means that YouTube can make more money. That also reflects people who have a lot of subscribers. They have a lot of subscribers. They have a lot of people following them on social media that are clicking too to their videos. They're bringing in more people, which is how they're also making more money. That's how it works. That's why social media is good. That's why you want to promote your stuff on social media because you are driving people off that site and onto your site. Anyways you can do YouTube and YouTube loves that. Yes. Back to number 3, our quarters and time of the year. Yes, it does make a difference. What time of the year your videos are posted and how much money you're going to make out of that. We make more money at Christmas time. Christmas is huge for CPMs. Than any other time of the year. There's a reason why all those YouTubers do vlog mix and there is an explosion of videos because Christmas time is huge for marketing of products. There's lots and lots of ads being served around YouTube so there are higher CPMs. There's only so many ads for so many products for so many targeted markets so the CPMs go higher. YouTube forces the advertisers to pay more money to put their ads which is you get more money. Yeah, exactly. You're posting around Christmas times, end of quarters, holidays, things like Super Bowl are really good for higher CPMs. Yeah, because brands are paying more money for ads and also quarters. Certain times of the years these marketing and brands are putting all their money that they're using for marketing, the rest of it because they need to, they're putting it into advertising. What do you know about financial quarter? It's beginning and end to financial quarters depending on the brand. There's usually either a lot of money at the beginning or a lot of money at the end depending on the brand but quarters are a good time to be posting stuff. Yes. Factor number 4, how large a channel is and the size of it, and the amount of viewers it is also determines your CPM. Usually, those bigger channels get a higher CPM because they are more established, the content is more consistent, advertisers feel more comfortable advertising on them and they are premium spots because they have a highly targeted audiences. The bigger your channel is the higher CPM you can get. YouTube again, talking about what I was saying before because you're bringing in more people too, YouTube notices that. You have higher watch time. Your CPM gets increased. When you're just starting out, unfortunately, you're probably going to start with a lower CPM. Then as you get more established, you can get a higher CPM. The best way or the way that you can actually go and track your CPM is in the YouTube analytics. They have crazy analytics, I'll tell you. Crazy everything. Then YouTube creator app, which is the mobile app. Oh, my God. They'll tell you your CPM per region and so you can be learning how much you're making each region, each area, what time of the month, what videos, there's so much analytics. You can spend days just looking at analytics. Get that app on your phone, it will blow your mind, YouTube creator app. Having said that, CPMs are not the way that either of us make the majority of our money. We love the YouTube Partner Program, but we make money in different ways. Which we'll talk about in our branding session. You might have heard of something called MCN. It's a multi-channel network. They are basically are entities that are affiliated with multiple YouTube channels, often to offer content creators assistance in areas such as product, programming, funding, cross-promotion, part of management, digital rights management, monetization, sales and audience developments. They are not affiliated with YouTube or Google. They are their own separate companies and there are many of them and they are huge companies. There's so many of them, there's so many. Once you've established yourself a little bit as a YouTube channel, you will probably get approached by an MCN or start hearing about MCN or when to approach an MCN. We're going to talk a bit about them. Because whether or not you partner with MCN is a very important decision. Because if you do partner with them, they take a chunk of what you're making from YouTube. Yeah, think of it as an agent for your YouTube channel like an acting agent. For those services that I just listed, they're going to take a cut of your revenue, of your CPMs that you get from your YouTube channel to provide those services for you. That's why you need to evaluate, is an MCN right for you? What are they going to do for you, is what you need to ask yourself. Whether or not you decide to go with an MCN is a very important decision because you want to ask yourself, why would you go with one? How are they going to benefit you? Because really they're working for you. I know myself, I am currently with an MCN. I am not, but I have been. There's no right or wrong reason or answer to this question. You don't have to be with an MCN or you could be on your own. It's all up to the creator and you're going to find a variety of answers. Yes. Exactly. First of all, we said how does one get involved with the MCN and a lot of them reach out to you as you continue to make videos and get more subscribers and such. There's a high chance they'll reach out to you. You can also reach out to them. Yes, you can email them and you can approach them. If you go to these conferences we mentioned before, all the big MCNs will be there. You can check out other YouTube channels. You might even see in their little suggested channels, you'll see MCNs, the MCNs that they are with as well. Again, there is no right or wrong answer to this. You can approach them whenever you're ready or you can wait for them to approach you. It's your own personal choice. When is a good time to start considering joining an MCN? If that's who you want to take. Again, it's a personal preference. You have to think, why do you want to join them? What can they offer you? Those are the questions you can ask. What can you offer me? It could be music. You may have access to a wonderful library. Some of them have amazing access to [inaudible]. It could be channel optimization. It could be collaboration opportunities. We'll get into the pros and cons of joining MCNs, but that's what you need to think about. There's no right or wrong time to join an MCN. It's whenever you feel like they can provide you with something. What an MCN does provide to you is they provide managerial assistants. They can provide legal advice. They provide me with music resources. They bring me brand deals. If you are looking to get more into brand deals, MCNs can bring you brand deals. They can bring you opportunities and those are worth a lot. Those are just things, they can set up collaborations for you. They do host certain things. They can pitch shows. The large MCNs have big budgets so if you have a creative idea or series you want to fund, they can fund that for you and give you the money to do that. Those are all the benefits that you're going to get. If you have copyright claim issues, they can help sort that out. Those are some of the benefits. All great things. Now, cons. I'm not just the con person here. No. There are definitely benefits. Again, you just got to see if it's right for you. But there are cons in terms of if you're a smaller channel. Or a medium. Or a medium channel even, there are MCNs that have tens of thousands of people on their roster, and you're just going to get lost. You won't hear from them. It makes it harder to reach out, you're going to do the climb. Remember, they take a cut of your money. They do. If they have 20,000 people on their roster, they could have 10,000 of those have 1,000 subscribers, they're making still pretty good chunk of change. Speaking of percentage, cut-wise. Cut-wise, you're looking at giving up between probably 30 percent of what you're making despite the Partner Program. When you're starting. I mean, higher creators are in the 10 percent range, 20 percent range is if you've been established and you negotiate. You've negotiated. Ten percent is more for the higher creators, you just get 10 percent away. Thirty percent is probably your absolute cut-off, you do not want to be giving more of 30 percent of your channel of your money [inaudible] that you're making from your channel to an MCN. Always negotiate. Don't sign up for this contract until you're comfortable. They come to you and ask for 30 percent, ask for 20. Yeah. Remember, they're taking your money, the money that you built up. It's been working for you too. Yes. They should be working for you, they should be bringing these stuff. Really make sure you know what you're getting into, and don't sign, be careful how long your contracts are. Really read the contracts if you are for signing an MCN because there are month contracts, six month contracts, year, two year, three year, five year. I mean, no one is really five anymore but definitely. The reason why I'm currently not with one is because I don't see the benefit right now with being with one because I am able to get my own brand deals, I have access to music. At this point, I don't feel like they will benefit me. It might change in the future. I might leave my MCN in the future. You never know. As you develop and also, you might find one MCN that works for you and the other one doesn't work for you at all. Again, it's up to you to really re-evaluate, and there's no golden standard of MCNs. There was a huge list of them, there are a lot of options. There are huge, large established MCNs, and then there are smaller boutique MCNs. Again, there is no better MCN to go with, it really depends on what they could do for your channel. Really have a good talk to them, sit them down, and we'll provide a resource page, we'll provide a list of all the major MCNs, all the good MCNs. But it's not an exhaustive list because like we said, there are more smaller boutique agencies. Last piece of advice when it comes to MCNs is I would join one that has a smaller roster, they have less people on board because they're going to pay more attention to you. Also, if they are approaching you and approaches you and addresses you by your name in the first email and knows a little bit about your channel, it's not like just, "Hello, dear or hello, blank. Yeah, there are definitely some block MCN emails that you will get. Don't jump and get super excited at the first email. It could be the best offer but just really make sure you re-evaluate and go into detail. You want someone who is already looked at your channel and knows what it's about. Make sure that they're addressing you in the first original email. Because especially if you're just getting started, minimum, they are going to sign you, they'll want to sign you for at least a year. Probably two years, if you're a smaller channel, because they want to make sure that it gives you time to grow in their network and then they can provide the resources for you long term. Again, these stats are changing all the time. Do your research, ask fellow creators, but at the end of the day, it's up to you, personal choice. Other ways of getting your content, your videos noticed. Well, I mean, that is really number 1 question. It is. Getting your videos views is a huge thing. There are a lot of ways. There's no magic formula because if there was, then we'd all have millions of subscribers and millions of views. But what we do, we talked about just signing up on all social media platforms and go running that way. Remember, watch time is what you're looking for. It's not necessarily clicks onto your video, it's the minutes and hours people are spending watching your content is very, very important. You're trying to get eyeballs, you're trying to keep them engaged. That's why engagement is so, so important. Keep them engaged, tell them to subscribe. You're talking about media, getting media interviews. Other ways of getting your videos viewed is contacting media, getting interviews by news outlets or other bloggers. They might do guest spots on their blog and they'd love to interview you. Or you can do a guest posts that includes one of your videos that they'll put on their blog. Think outside of your blog and think outside of your videos is creating content for other channels and outlets is a great way to get viewed. Traditional media sources like handing out flyers, getting into your local clubs and telling about your channels. You can use traditional advertising methods to advertise your channel, there's nothing against that. Like any business, marketing involves time and it involves money, and it involves being very creative with how you market your stuff. Think outside the box. Going viral. We can't give you the formula for that because if we knew it, we would be millionaires. Very viral. Millionaires. Timing, it's like opportunities. Obviously, you want to get people to watch videos, you want to get them catch. Like we've mentioned before earlier in this course, thumbnails, descriptions, titles, so important, it's the first thing people see, it's your thumbnail and your title. Make sure it's catchy, make sure it makes people want to initially click. Then as soon as they click, make sure they want to stay there. You want to make shareable content. Shareable content, people are going to keep sharing it which is going to give you more views and a larger audience. People are going to subscribe to you. Yeah. Then at the end of the day, don't get yourself so down about it because this is your channel and it's going to go like this all the time. Our channels always go like this. The people that are overnight, they see a large increase, they got really lucky. It just happen. For myself, personally, it was a gradual incline, very gradual over years. You as well? No. Mine was like little gradual incline, was a sharp up, and then it was a little plateau, and then it dipped quite a bit because YouTube does algorithm changes. They change quite a bit. You'll notice this, you spend more and more time on the platform that things change and what works a year ago is not going to work this year. Also, if you change genres, if you change your style of videos, you're going to lose subscribers. This isn't an awful thing and you don't freak out about it, but YouTube does cleanings. One time, I lost 40,000 subscribers. I know, crazy. I mean, they were all old accounts so they weren't actual viewers, but this happens. Literally, every time most people post a video, you'll lose subscribers. If you look into the full analytics of your videos and how many people unsubscribed for that video, you'd be surprised, it'll be like, "Oh my God, I actually lost five subscribers from posting this video?" but you gained more than you lost. It happens to everybody. It happens to everybody. Don't freak out and don't get so worked up about, "Oh my God, I have to constantly be getting more of this and this because it is going to go like this." That is the way that it works, how video works, how YouTube works. Yeah. Everyone grows at their own pace. Just appreciate it. Enjoy the journey and do this for the right reasons, because you love it. You will grow if you continue to make videos and never give up, and take our advice on how to market your videos that we just shared with you. Just keep it up, and don't compare yourself to other people. Don't compare yourself to other people. Couch session done. Bam.
4. Networking like a Pro: Influencers. Welcome to a term that you'll be hearing a lot of if you decide to make social media and video making your job. Influencers, who are they? Well, they're you, and you and me. It's anybody. An influencer is anyone that holds power to influence other people's decisions. Whatever skill level you're at right now, one important thing to remember is that no matter how successful you may be, all people at all levels of success deserve to be treated with the same respect and appreciation. Just because someone is bigger and more famous, doesn't mean that they are better than you. Equalizing yourself with your peers will help you more comfortably accept your place among them as an influencer, and therefore, allow you to interact with other influencers much better and allowing you to succeed even more in the next several sections. Well, this is a term used by brands, companies and PR firms, which means asking influential people, i.e vloggers or people with big followings to promote brands or products or destinations, etc, on their own personal accounts. This is a huge growing market and will be one of your biggest revenue sources once you've gotten yourself into the game. It's also one of the ways that you can market yourself, which we will discuss more when we get into how to make money. As an influencer, it is your job to make connections with people you can potentially a partner with on a project. Well some brands and companies will come to you, don't wait for it to happen. You should also approach them. Where do you find the people you should be reaching out to? I'm sure you heard the phrase, 'it's not what you know, it's who you know This is something you want to remember as it is very important when you are building your own business in the online video and travel world. Some great places to network are conventions, events, parties, hostels, hotels, PR events, FAM and press trips, and introduction through a friend. Being prepared, essentials for networking. To prepare yourself for networking event, it's a good idea to bring the following. Business cards, get them made and always have them on you. The cold pitch or one-liner. Can you summarize yourself in a sentence or two? Write one up and have it memorized. You'll never know when you'll need to do a quick pitch on the fly. Pitch sheets. Create a one-page document that has a bio about yourself, examples of your work, your social networks, and contact information. This is used as a way to pitch yourself to bigger brands and projects via email. This will be invaluable, write it up and have one on file. Mints. Seriously, do not overlook your breath when you are networking because nobody wants to talk to somebody who's got stinky breath. Seriously, that I really recommend mints here. There are entire books dedicated to just this topic alone, so it would be impossible for us to cover everything. But here are some things to help you get on your networking way. Approach people and say, "Hi." It's literally the best way to introduce yourself, and yes, it is that simple. When you are at an event designed for networking, everybody else will be doing the same anyways. If you are shy, go stand by the bar, order one drink, stand there, sip on it. This is seriously the best way if you are too shy to approach strangers. There is almost always a bar at any type of networking event, and they will almost always have a line, thus creating a built-in conversation starter. Smile. Smiling creates a warm and open vibe around you and people are more likely to warm up to someone who's smiling than they are to someone with a frown. Learn names. Names are so powerful when networking. Remembering someone's name is one of the most flattering things you can do. Seriously. Listen and remember to share and not sell. Let the other person talk and get to know them. Focus the conversation on them while adding in little bits about you, what you do and your latest accomplishments. But try to focus the majority of the conversation on asking questions about the other person. They will greatly appreciate your interest. Keep light and avoid asking for advice, help, or sponsorships too soon. You need time to build up trust and really create a relationship before you jump into the deep end together. Networking is about relationships. When you build up a relationship, you'll have a much better chance of getting a favor with someone than if you are just another person they don't know asking for favors. Never make a person feel like they are being used. Get over your fear of rejection. People won't like you, they will ignore you and they won't want to talk to you. They'll also meet you and walk away. All of this comes with the art of networking, and if you are going to make it in this industry, you better get used to the no because they are going to happen far more than the yeses. No matter who you are, what you do, there will always be people that just don't like you. Now, don't get discouraged, just always remember, you are good enough. Don't be afraid to ask. After you've established a connection and built up a relationship, don't be afraid to ask for advice, for projects, for sponsorships, and for collaborations. Dream big and make the first move. The worst thing they could say is no, and you won't even know that until you ask. Also, even if someone says no the first time, don't close any doors, remain professional and follow up with them again in the future when you have even more experience and even more ideas. One of the biggest partnerships that I currently have, is with the youth travel company Contiki, whom I had originally pitched way back several years ago. My ideas, my channel, and my proposal to make videos for them. Fortunately, back then, they rejected me. I wasn't what they were looking for the time and we both moved on. Couple of years later, I get an amazing email to go on a trip together, they loved my stuff and thus the best partnership I've ever created since I was born. Just because someone says no the first time doesn't mean that's a no forever. Always follow up. One chat at a bar or an event doesn't make a relationship. Just remember, there are probably a dozen other content creators out there trying to make connections with the same people you are. Again, building any relationship takes time, and it's always important to follow up any meeting with an email or phone call, even if you're calling or writing to say, "It was wonderful just meeting you." Every opportunity to get your name on their mind helps in building and keeping that relationship. Or collabs as they are referred to on YouTube, are one of the best ways to get eyeballs onto your videos and onto your channel. They can also be superfun in a great way to meet fellow creators. Finding the right collab is better than just finding any collab. How do you find that perfect collaboration? First, you want to define what type of channel style you have and also who your viewer demographic is. This will help you find other creators with a similar style and demographic for the ideal collaboration. Also, it's good to find out about other creators who live near you or if you are traveling somewhere, find out who is a YouTube creator in that destination and reach out to them. You can also think about where you want to film your collab. Are you going to do it from home or in a studio? Will you need additional camera gear or people to help you film? If you are a travel channel whose main audience is between the age of 18 and 25, then you're going to want to reach out to another creator with that same or very similar channel theme and demographic, as they have an audience you'll definitely want to reach and vice versa. However, you don't necessarily need to collab with another channel with the exact same style and demographic per se. But then you're going to have to get a little extra creative to come up with content that fits both your channel, and theirs. For example, say you want a collab with a beauty channel. You can have that creator share their top on the go beauty tips for travelers. You're also going to want to reach out to a creator with a similar channel size to you in terms of subscribers. This creates an even playing ground and will increase your chances of that creator saying yes to the collab. Of course, you can always pitch to larger channels, but you better make it a really good pitch. Even if you can't offer them the similar amount of subscribers, you can find out something that you can offer them that will strike their interest. This can be a really unique and creative idea that'll get them so excited that they need to be part of it. Now it's time to actually do the collab. Once you have in mind the creator you want to collab with, reach out and pitch them your idea. Demonstrate, this is very important. Demonstrate that you know their videos and content by telling them your favorite video of theirs, and also why you decided to reach out and why you want to work with them. Propose a detailed video idea for your channel, and an optional one for theirs. Once you've reached out and the creators come back with the good old thumbs up, you need to decide on the type of collab you want to create. You can either create a dual channel collab, where each of you films a video on the respective creators channels, or the other option is a single-channel club where one video gets filmed for your channel or on their channel. Try and offer your channel first as proposing a single video on someone else's channel can be met with resistance. Make sure both channels' audiences will get something of value for each video. Be sure to get to know the creator you're filming with, especially if you've never met them before, before you press that Record button. You want to have fun and not rush right into filming as it may be a little awkward on either parties. Also be sure to create a call to action in each other's videos, pointing to each other's videos or channels. This is great to do both at the beginning and the end of the video. When filming the video on the other creator's channel, let them direct their own video as they'll have a better feel of what they're looking for. Once your video is filmed, edited, and uploaded, be sure you place annotations on your videos, directing viewers to the other channel and video. It's also nice to place links and credits in the description of the video. Plus you can also use YouTube's built in creator credits to link to the other creator's channel. Sharing each other's videos on your respective social media channels is also another great way to give exposure to each other. Helping others out can go a long way in helping other future collaborations see the value in working with you. When it comes to collaborating, there's really nothing bad about doing them. Just because you introduce your audience to another creator, doesn't mean that they'll unsubscribe to you and move over and watch them instead. It's just like television. You're going to have more than one favorite television show that you watch every week.
5. Couch Session: How to Collaborate with Other Creators: Welcome to couch sessions. For this couch session, we are going to be talking about collaborations in networking and how do you meet other YouTubers and people and to collaborate with and share ideas and create projects with. We're going to be as well just going into more detail in this video, talk a little bit more about how to reach out to YouTubers and just collaborating because it's a big part of growing your audience. This is all based on our own experience and what's worked for us. Nadine, what's worked for you in terms of reaching out? In terms of how to meet YouTubers? Yeah, exactly. Well, networking is a big thing. Events are huge. How are you supposed to meet with somebody if you never get the opportunity to physically meet with them? You can always reach out on social media, so reaching out on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Any social media network that you're on and commenting, liking their stuff. Commenting's huge. You don't think that people notice, but people really do notice. That's how I reached to you. That's true. Email. Email. Yeah. I watched her videos and I commented on her videos, reached out via email and now we're friends. There you go. Even bigger YouTubers, bigger video creators, content creators, they are watching their social media. They really are. They are seeing you leave comments and it's not just the hi, hey comments, it's leave a more thoughtful in depth comments that actually stirs something. Tell them you appreciate their work. Point out something specific maybe just so you stand out. Ask where you can, I don't know, maybe to have a further conversation with them. Also, you were talking about networking in conferences, so some conferences that you've been to? VidCon. VidCon. VidCon. Great one. I love you too great to that. Playlist live, Buffer Festival. FanFest. FanFest. Summer in the city, they are so many. So many YouTube conferences. We'll leave actually a link here. We'll leave our descriptions of all the conferences that are the biggest and more well-known ones that all of the content creators and YouTubers go to in the resource pages so you'll know all of those. All of them happen annually. There's lots of opportunities for you to go to these events and try to find ones that's close to where you live. Yeah, and they happen all throughout the year, so there's always a time that you can choose what works best for you. You can attend one of them. They're really great and you'll learn a lot as well. Yeah. Because networking is so important because how are you supposed to meet people and you can't meet them? There's only so much you can do on the Internet and we definitely encourage you to reach out to other people you want to collaborate with. But there's nothing, nothing beats face to face. We really built a relationship that way. That's what business is all about. That's what this is all about, we're building relationships and that's how you're going to grow. Definitely. That's the same thing when you come to press trips. Yes. The same idea behind press trips, the more press trips you get to go on, the more you build up that friendship group, the more you get to talk to fellow bloggers, fellow video creators, fellow people in your industry, so you can work together. Those are really, really awesome networking opportunities. Not only do you get to go to an exotic location, you get content and you get to network. Yeah. Great opportunities. Press trips can happen earlier in your career too. Great opportunities to meet other people, other creators. Also, there are YouTube studios. At this time as we're recording this, they are nine. They offer opportunities for you to go and work there, meet other YouTubers, collaborate, use the studio space. Great opportunities. They also host networking events. If you live in a somewhat larger city, there are probably at least one networking event every week or so that some tourism company or some PR firm or some video industry company is putting on. These happen all the time, PR events. If you get yourself registered in the databases and you look out for those invitations, then those are great. Great opportunity. Like Travel Massive. Yes. It's another huge networking event. Travel Massive, I believe is in about 90 cities around the world now. It happens every single month and allows you to come and attend, they are happening in different venues and different cities, by there's people that are travel bloggers, YouTube creators, industry people that you can talk with and network with and maybe work with. To get on these lists for invites like press trips and other networking events, once you get on one list, those lists usually get spread around, so you get invited more and more, the more you establish yourself. Yeah. There are opened lists and there are closed lists. Then definitely you need to work your way into different lists, but obviously the more lists, the more networks that you do. It's like you're building a tree. You need to build the different branches that are going to branch out and that becomes your network of contacts. Then once you build that tree. It'll just keep growing. Yeah, it just keeps growing. But the initial way to attend a networking event is talk to other bloggers who've been maybe around a little bit longer than yourself and ask them which ones they're going to, maybe that they can invite you. Because again, once you got one list, you see more and more happen and you get invited to more and more. How about when it comes to approaching YouTubers because there's this full thing, if someone's a bigger YouTuber, they have more subscribers, should I not approach them? Yeah, so there's three different types of YouTubers and content creators that you're going to find. You're going to find people that are at your level, approximate same numbers as you, you'll find people who are bigger than you, and you're going find find people that are smaller than you. Now, there are different ways to approach all three of those groups. Obviously, the most easiest way to approach it, it's the people that are already at your level that have the same numbers as you, that you guys are the most comfortable, it's going to be the most natural and you don't have to have this sense of you don't have to prove or try to present to them. You still have to show your worth, but it's a lot easier because you have this understanding that you are at this same level. Level, yeah. It's honestly intimidating, maybe as it would be to approach someone who's larger. Yeah. Having said that though, you absolutely can approach a larger YouTube channel. As long as you have a clear and great idea that's going to attract them and make them want to work with you. Yes. Going after people, you have to really really re-evaluate where you are. This is where the politics of networking comes into play because you have to really be honest and evaluate, well, where is my channel currently? If I reach out to this person who has a million subscribers, are they realistically going to want to collab with me? If you have like 10,000, yeah. Yeah, if you have to think of it, looking from their perspective and they look at you, how would they view you. If you were in their shoes, how would they view your channel? Why would they want to collaborate? What benefit would they get of wanting to collaborate with you? Yeah. It's not just the number benefit, there are other benefits that you can offer and that's what you need to figure out. Well, what can I offer this person that has a million subscribers. They are going to be like, yes. It doesn't matter you have a million and that person has 10, I want to work with them because they can offer me this. Yeah. Because they can teach me this. You'll need to present that, you need to find out what that is or else you're just wasting your time going up to those bigger number people, those bigger YouTubers, the people with the bigger numbers. Because it's not a collaboration, it just really isn't. Of course, it's super beneficial to you and if you can successfully approach one and they say yes, that's great. Not saying that that won't ever happen and that that can't happen, but you're trying to make it so it's an even playing field, that everybody collaborating is sharing in the benefits. Yeah. Like for you, I'm sure you've had experiences where people that have been like, "Hedin, let's collaborate," and that's it. That's it. Yeah, that's it. You're like, okay, cool. Present me with something or like, what's an idea and this happens all the time, you can't just walk up to them and go, "Hey, let's collaborate." It's not going to happen. They made even say yeah sure, but nothing will eventually happen. Present an idea, come up with an idea. It doesn't matter, don't worry about them being a bigger YouTuber and you now have a great idea, pitch it. The worst thing they can say is no, but they could say yes. But they could say yes. That being said, don't ignore people that are smaller than you, channels that are smaller than you. Again, there are more benefits than just numbers and collaborating with channels that are smaller than you. You don't know how much your audiences overlap. There could be more people that discover you from that smaller channel than a bigger channel if there are in a single genre, if the audiences who have a similar contents and you both make similar content and your audiences are like, "Wow, I really love that person's work." Definitely don't ignore the smaller channels no matter what level you are because there's a lot of benefit to collaborate with any creator as long as you have a mutual. But you're going to share a mutual skills. It's a mutual beneficial collaboration. Exactly, yes. Yeah. There you go. Another thing is a lot of people get this misconception that YouTube is just so competitive and to some degree, yes. But just because I have my audience and Nadine has her audience, I would love to share my audience with Nadine. It doesn't mean that if they know Nadine's channels they're just going to leave mine. It doesn't work that way. Just like you may have two favorite TV shows you can have two favorite YouTubers or three or four or five. Even though it is competitive it's only to a certain degree and collaborating is still great, and you're not going to lose your subscribers that way. I feel there's this weird stigma that are like, oh if I collaborate with someone who has a similar genres me that my subscribers they're going to leave me and go to them more. As you know, you probably watch multiple people in multiple genres and you enjoy multiple different types of content. As YouTube grows, audiences grow there's going to be more and more and more people and so more eyeballs in anything is great and just fostering those relationships with people is worth so much more than being like, Oh my God, I don't know my audiences to leave. I don't want to share all the hard work that I've put into building this community with this other person. It's not a great mentality to have. Yeah. Some collabs that I have done that have been really great and successful, have been with Nadine and Raya. We did a three-way, which was really cool. We each did videos on our own channels and then linked to each other. They were all three very different videos. One was educational video, one was a fun quiz video, and one was a personal story video. That's really good if you're doing collabs with multiple creators or just a single creator that each of the videos that you create are something special. They're different. You don't want to create the same video for each channel because then when your audiences leap over to the other YouTubers channel they're not going to want to watch it. It's the same. Right? But we still did videos that made sense for audience. We were all in travel and all the videos were travel-related, so it made sense. Yes. If you were collaborating with a non-travel person, like say a beauty person or a gaming person, then the gaming person and the beauty person's channel is probably should be something more relatable to theirs and yours should be something more relatable to yours. It wouldn't make sense if you were putting a gaming video on your channel. Exactly. But you got to twist a little bit, so it still makes sense for both of your channels, like how to do the best makeup when you're on the road. When you are collaborating, you're finding other collaborators to work with, definitely look outside of your genre. We don't have to stick into travel. Just because you're doing travel you don't have to stick into travel It's actually better to do that too. Yeah, because it opens you up to a whole other audience, a whole other target that don't even thought of doing and watching travel videos. You might even know people that are doing videos that are not in travel and you're like, wow, yeah, let's collaborate. Exactly. Another collaboration example I always do with Sia. He has its own channel now, but he actually originally started working with me, so we're always collaborating together. Another one is a good example is the Planet D. They are huge travel bloggers that recently came on and started doing YouTube videos as well. But they didn't put a video of myself and them on their channel, but that wasn't the agreement. I strictly wanted them to be on my channel because it was about a topic that I knew they really knew a lot about and I really wanted to share with my audience. We established that beforehand that you don't need to put a video on your channel of me. No problem. I just really want you guys. That's just the idea of thinking outside of the collaboration block. It doesn't have to be a two-way collaboration to be mutually beneficial. You were using their skills as bloggers. If you were coming from the blogging world, I'm sure you know other bloggers and you can utilize them and do a collaboration in video form on your channel using their skills and knowledge as a blogger and then say on their blog if they don't share video, on their social they share it or in their blog they write about you or your videos. There's so many different ways to collaborate. So many different ways. Really get those wheels turning and try and think outside of the box of ways to collaborate. I've definitely done one ways collaborations as well the same way I've done with other bloggers. But you've also have the part that it wasn't established that it was going to be one way, which you also have to look out for. You've had that situation? Yes. I definitely had that situation happen. There are good collabs and there are bad collabs. These are the "collab horror stories" you could say. Yeah. When you are collaborating with other content creators, you really need to establish what the collaboration is, whose channel or networks it's going on, if there's going to be two collaborations and or if it's going to be one way because I've definitely been in situations where I thought we were doing a mutually beneficial collaboration, a two-part collaboration and then suddenly it was like, no, it's going on your channel. I've been in awkward situations where I felt used and I wasn't a great positive vibe that you want to get. It didn't end up being a mutually beneficial collaboration, which is never the case. You as a creator as you move up you never want to feel like you're getting taken advantage of or your skills. You never want to be in that awkward position where you're putting effort into things or you're putting your time or your money into things and to other people and they're not reciprocating that or they say they will and then they don't. Really establish who's channel is going on? Are we doing two videos? What are the videos that we're going to do? Make sure that you have a system in place so that you know that you're going to cross promote each other, you know that you are each going to be sharing. It's a beautiful thing when collabs work out great. It really is but you have to make sure. You establish that from the beginning. Yeah, definitely. Don't wait till later because it gets awkward. It gets really awkward. Some other good collabs that you've done? I did a collab with Alli Speed. He's a wonderful YouTuber. One of our interviewees too. Yes. One of our interviewees. You got to go check out that interview if you haven't watched it yet. It's really good. I had a few thousand subscribers, she had hundreds of thousands and it still made sense for us to work together and we went all went to Fiji, Nadine as well and another YouTuber. We were in each other's videos and she promoted me because she believed in my channel and what I was doing and it was really wonderful. I always talk highly about her and always recommend her for other projects as well. Yeah, I've had some really great collaboration experiences as well so like High on Life boys, awesome boys. We've been friends for a while now and how our collaborations work is usually they'll present you with an idea that they want me to collaborate with them and they'll produce a video and it's great and it's been on their channel. Then sometimes down the road I presented them with an ideas and I've asked them to be on my channel. The co-collaboration doesn't always have to happen at the same time. Only one channel has an idea at that time and you know that if you're friends with them you could do a collaboration on the other person's channel later on down the line or if you're just establishing a friendship, you might want to take the initiative and invite them onto your channel. Then once you've established more and they get to know you more then they might be willing to invite you on to their channel. There's multiple ways that you can do collaborations. Yeah. It works great. Just because you do it once doesn't mean you're not going to continue collaborating with this person, like become your friends and you're building relationships. You do end up doing multiple collaborations with them. Our video projects like this one. Exactly because collaboration shouldn't be forced either. At the end of the day you want to create a great product. You want everybody involved to be really happy with what you create. You want it to be fun too. You definitely want to be fun. If you don't know of an idea right off the bat, if you can think of something that's why it says, oh, you don't have to do a co-collaboration right off the bat. You could do one later on down the line when you do come up with an idea. The great thing about being a travel blogger is we get to travel and when it comes to collaborations you can meet YouTubers who are located all around the world and collab a location just randomly. Yeah, like just being in other people's daily logs or being in their travel videos if you're doing like daily travel videos. All those are beneficial. Those are considered collaborations and then using social like we mentioned before. Using social, great way to collaborate. There are so many ways to collaborate, so really think outside of the box and think outside of the travel spirit to collaborate. Think outside of your country. Think outside of your country If you know a YouTuber in Brazil, start looking at Brazilian YouTubers and reach out to them. Exactly. There are YouTubers all over the world. It's travel vloggers. That's awesome. One of the benefits. So a happy collabing.
6. Working With Brands & Expanding Beyond YouTube: How to make money. Yes, you can make money making travel videos. It just shouldn't be your goal at the beginning of your travel video-making process. It's going to cost you a lot more money to get started, and it's going to take time to make it back. But like any business endeavor, this is the way it goes, but we do promise you this. If you put the work in and persevere, the results will be well worth it. It is important that you are passionate about both travel and video making. This is especially important when the going gets tough, and it will, you will struggle. There will be times when you may not know when your next paycheck comes in. But because you are absolutely passionate about what you're doing, it's that passion that will drive you forward and continue your journey in this world of travel video making. As you know if you've gone through the course sequentially, you are starting to get an idea of the amount of work it requires. There are many things you need to know and to learn, and that's not even to mention virtual travel part. We're not even covering the process of travel. Your first goal should be to create great and consistent content. This is not a sprint, this is a marathon. Once you've been making travel videos for a while and have a pretty comfortable video style. Once you've established yourself as someone capable of creating great content, then you can start thinking about money. You don't even need to have thousands of subscribers to get free trips or to make money. You could start getting both without having more than a dozen subscribers on your YouTube channel. For those of you who skipped ahead of the course and just came to this video, you have to go back, and you have to complete the whole course and then come back here, and then we'll start talking money. But for those of you that have gone through the rest of the course, let's talk about how to make money. There are several different ways to make money in this business. We don't have one stream of income. We are in multiple. Here are some of the ways that we have made our money. Video production. Licensing of footage. Branded content deals. Sponsored videos. Written articles and blog posts. Sponsored social posts. Use of image and brand. The first and the easiest way is to register for YouTube's partner program, which is where YouTube places ads on the sidebar and on pre-rolls at the beginning or at the bottom of your videos. You'll then earn a percentage of the ad revenue income. This will probably be your first source of income, as you can sign up almost right away and start making money. How much you earn is determined by a few factors, but the main one is the amount of views your videos get. Which things like networking and clubs can help you improve on like any job in most industries you don't expect to start out making the CEO's wage, you have to start out at the bottom doing the grunt work. This is the same for travel videos. It takes time to get to the point of being established. It takes time to determine the amount of money you can make. What you need before you make money is to start establishing your portfolio of work and to build your audience and distribution platforms. Nobody is going to give you anything for free unless they get something in return. Certainly, nobody is going to pay you unless they get something for that money. What can that something be? A produced video. Never underestimate the power of a well-produced video. This is an end product that the client, i.e, the brand company or tourism board, etc, can use for their own promotional purposes. If you spend some time looking at production cost, you could see that a basic video crew of five people for 10 days filming on location can cost anywhere between 30,000 to $100,000. For corporate companies, production crews can charge around $800 per edited minute. If you can produce professional videos that look comparable to what the film crews can produce, then you can charge a nice penny for your videos. On top of producing excellent content and showcasing it to an audience of people. The client also benefits by working with you because they only need to fly in a production crew of one or two. The client is getting a better price, and you are making money. Licensed clips. Don't overlook previous content you have shot. Licensing clips is a way to repurpose stock footage from the various destinations that you will go to. Yet another reason to focus on perfecting your filmmaking and video skills first. If you are just getting started, although nobody is paying you for your footage now, they could come back and pay to license your footage later on down the road. Once you're more established and more recognizable. Promotion, your subscriber and follower numbers, and the amount of use your video gets, are worth money. As you have a built-in audience that normally companies if they want to reach the same amount of people, would have to pay for. Instead of paying an ad agency or the platform distribution directly, they can pay you instead to access your audience. Weight, when you are an influencer, what you do and say has weight, and people can trust that weight. This can be measured in engagement and how strongly influenced your audience is. There is more value in a creator with 5,000 subscribers that can get 3,000 people to buy a product or engage in a brand with than a creator with 500,000 subscribers that can only get a thousand people to buy or engage in a product. This is why it's important to focus on your niche and building trust with your audience. What determines your price? That is right, you can charge extra if you have a special gear such as a 4K camera, or underwater rigs, drones, etc. Obviously, you're going to need to invest in this gear beforehand, which will cost you money upfront, but that is why you can charge extra for it. This is where your social media following and your numbers do come into play. This is how many eyeballs your content can reach. This has a massive value to any brand or company as it increases awareness to their product, which means more money in sales for them. The larger your numbers, the more you can charge. There is no set amount or industry standard, but we've included a great resource in the resource package we've included in this course to give you a ballpark estimate to what you should be charging. Of course, in the end, it comes down to what you think you are worth. That is right, how nice you are in your market is also a determining price factor. The more established presence you are around a specific niche, the more you can charge. This is because you are looked at as an expert in that particular field. That brand is getting great value of being associated with you to sell their product to an audience they know will want it. This is a matter of time, as experience comes with time. Like in any profession, the more experienced you are, the more you can charge. Brands want to work with you because you are either an influencer or an expert in your field and they have a product that you would be the best at selling. As an influencer it's your responsibility to choose the right partnerships that represent your own brand the best. As a travel blogger, you might want to pass an opportunity to promote a new video game that has nothing to do with travel. Why? The majority of your audience most likely won't be interested in this area and that brand deal doesn't compliment your brand. It just isn't the best fit. It's also pretty obvious that this is a brand deal since it isn't something that fits into your normal content, which can leave your audience confused or angry. When you do find a brand that fits your channel and you can easily include that brand deal into your regular content, this is a good partnership. But this doesn't mean that you should say yes to every product or brand partnership that has to do with travel. You could also promote products you enjoy or personally use, but only if you truly enjoy and personally use them. This will not only make it easier for you to share and promote, but it will be much more genuine, which is something you want to maintain in this business. Just make sure that every time you work with a brand or are being paid to promote a product or destination that you disclose that both verbally and in written form. Each country has their own rules and guidelines on sponsored content that you must legally follow. Make sure you do your research to what rules pertain to your country. If you don't disclose, you could risk having your video taken down or find. Plus, it's important to be honest with your audience. In order for you to keep making content, you need to make money and your audience should understand and support you for this. We've put together some sample disclosures which is included in our resource pages. Hello everybody, my name is Hey Nadine we are continuing our road tripping with best Western hotels. This is our next destination, beautiful Vancouver, Canada, and take a look at the view from my room. I've teamed up with British Airways and today I'm going to be taking you through the British Airways flying experience, aka show you guys some of the awesome services they offer, and giving you a preview of what it's like to fly with them. Welcome to the amazing, incredible city of Edinburgh, Scotland. The one that you're probably very excited to hear about, how to get free and paid travel. First and foremost, there is no such thing as free travel. There isn't, it's not free. You are exchanging one of your services in return for the free travel received. In other words, you are still going to need to put in work. This is most likely going to be your first venture into the free travel sphere. Fam, short for familiarization trips, are free travel trips hosted by a brand, destination or client put on for members of the media, journalists, bloggers, vloggers. The point of them is to make you familiarize with the client's product and then share it with your audience so that they can be familiarized too. These are very common and happen quite often. Literally hundreds of these trips happen every single year. Brands and destinations do this for exposure, not just because they feel like giving trips way for free. Remember this, if you do find yourself on a fam or a press trip, there will be expectations for you to promote and produce content for them. They're also going to be set itineraries so you can't just go to the destination and do as you wish. But fam trips are still a wonderful opportunity to build relationships with clients. They're also a great way to build up your portfolio and your networking with fellow media members and bloggers. Register with PR agencies to get into their databases. You can do this by searching for a PR agencies on Google. You can also contact the destination directly. Find the media or PR contact from the destination who you're interested in taking a trip to, and then ask them to send over the list for the press trips for that year and also ask if there are any spots open currently. Keeping good relationships with PR companies and tourism boards is an absolute must. If you do a good job and they love the work you've done, they may ask you to come on some other trips or even hire you for future paid work. Once you're established brands, PR companies, fam trips and destinations will come to you. But before then and when you are just getting started, you'll have to learn how to pitch to them. To this day, both Christine and I are constantly pitching products and ideas. We don't expect other people to hand us our dreams and you shouldn't either. You are going to have to go out and put in a lot of legwork and pitch to those companies. It first starts out with building up your one sheet, as we discussed in marketing, as well as building your media kit. A media kit is like your resume. It's a visual presentation of your best work awards and press coverage you've received along the way, along with a bio of yourself and your social media numbers. You can add all this information into a PDF and then include images and graphics to make it visually appealing. Try not to have your media kit longer than five pages as it gets to be a little too much. Focus on only showcasing your best work and your biggest accomplishments. This is the time to really brag about who you are, what you've done, and what you can do. When you are pitching to a potential client, you can include your media kit in an email once you've already asked him if it is okay to send it over to them, this will most likely be the first thing that a client will ask upon your first discussion of working together. State your purpose. Don't beat around the bush, get to the reason why you are emailing that client in the first few lines. Chances are who you are emailing, receive dozens of emails a day, and if they don't see what the purpose of the email is, after a few lines, they'll just ignore or delete it. Establish your value. Never make it about what you want, but more of what you can provide for that client. You want to put ideas into their head of why they should work with you by pitching and creating unique ideas. Form ideas. You've got to present the potential client with ideas. You can't assume that the person you are contacting knows anything about your line of work or what kind of project ideas you have. Outline your story ideas and what you want to film, and how you want to film them. Ask them what they need. Does your potential client need exposure? What messages are they trying to convey? What can you provide to them to assist them in reaching their means? Are they looking for travel videos? If not, what are they looking for? Keep your first email short. Nobody wants to receive a three-page email full of attachments. Keep your initial email short and to the point, and then ask for further contact or discussion. Build a relationship, try and continue the conversation. Even if they say no, this time ask to be kept on the roster and contacted if anything else should come up. Pitching takes time to get right, but will be one of the best ways to secure free and paid gigs. Start perfecting. The best way to get great is to just start. You can't get great unless you start.
7. Couch Session: About Working With Brands: Couch session. Branding and money making. Branding? Brands. We're talking about brand. Brands. We're talking about brands in this video. We're talking about how we make most of our money. Which is a very important video to watch. Yes. Let's do it. Let's get into it. Question number 1, how do we find brands to work with? Well, you can reach out to brands that you really love, maybe clothing brands that you wear or travel brands, like something that you bring on your travels. Yeah, you reach out to them. You find their media contact, their PR contact and you reach them directly or they come to you. Once you build up repertoire that's when they'll probably start coming to you. But remember what we talked about in the whole networking and collaboration set, PR companies have great way to find brands to work with registering with those, registering with, how would you call them? YouTube database companies like [inaudible] or stuff like that. Those are really good because they have a database of YouTubers and they can find you that way. They have brand contacts. Yeah. They just match the brands with the YouTubers. In terms of maybe using PRs, so a lot of brands have PR agencies that basically connect them with influencers. Especially the bigger ones. Then that's why it's so important to network and to get yourself to these networking events to get yourself to the bigger YouTube events. Build relationships. Build those relationships because that's how brands fine you and getting your name out there. That's just publicity and getting your face out there as much as you can and they'll approach you. Also adverts. Once you do work with one brand, let's say, you want to promote that on your blog or wherever on social media because other brands will see and they'll want to work with you and you just keep building and building. Yeah, you shouldn't be ashamed of working with brands because as long as long as the concept that you're making makes sense to you and fits on your channel. It's a brand that you really believe in and maybe you've already used before, something that you want to promote to people. They're trusting you. If you were looking, if you're like, I really want to work with travel YouTubers and you start googling people or you're a PR firm or you're a company looking to work with them, if I see on your About page that you've worked with all these other companies, suddenly you're in this professional sphere of like, wow, that person is a real professional. They know what they're doing. I know that if I pick this person I can expect a great product because they work with all these other brands. It establishes that consistency and that reliability in you as a creator. Your audience will not mind that you're working with brands as long as you are genuine and it is a brand that you are proud to promote because your audience is trusting you and what you're saying. If you don't believe in your brand or you haven't used the brand then that's not a good partnership. Yeah, finding the right brand is important than just finding any brand. At what rough point should you consider working with a brand? I personally think if it's a good fit, if they come to you at any point in your career like if it's a good fit, of course, you're going to say yes. If you can create great content for it, then yes. Yeah. I mean, there's no right or wrong answer. You might want to wait too. I would say just don't jump at the first thing that come. You really be like, okay. It doesn't make sense. Let me evaluate what this is and make sure it actually is a good fit for your channel and actually does work and you think that your audience will like it and that you as a creator will like it. Yeah. Don't jump at the first brand opportunity if it does not make sense. Yeah. It has to make sense be be in your audience. Yeah, exactly because your audience is so important you never want to lose their trust because do your audience members care if you are going on paid trips? Yes or no. It all depends on how you present it. If you're honest, if you're open, if you're on there for genuine reasons, if it's something that the audience, your audience watching you. If you do luxury travel or if you do backpack travel, you wouldn't do like a backpacking video. If you're a luxury traveler you wont do a luxury video with your backpack. It just doesn't make sense. Your audience wouldn't get value from that so really make sure that you are speaking to them and that everybody in that situation is happy and then they won't care that you're getting paid. There'd be like, yeah, that's awesome. As long as you stick to your voice too. You want to be honest and still continue that trust with your audience. Even if you are working with brands or tourism boards, you want to be you on camera and you want to share your experience no matter if someone's paying you or not. Yeah. You want to be real. Yes. What are some creative ways to approach brands? Again approaching brands that you all ready love. Yeah, like pitching emails and really just stating your case and really give them a reason why they want to work with you and why you're so passionate about them. Get some ideas; what ideas do you have of how you guys can work together that are unique? You want to include that in your first e-mail. You want to make sure the email is not too long as well. No. But you don't want them to have to do work if you want to work with them you should be putting in the work. You should be doing the laboring and make it easy as possible. You just want them to say yes. That's all they should have to do. It's just say yes or no. You give them the ideas. Yeah, exactly. Do you send out emails? Yes. You can you can find contacts for the brands you want to work with right on the websites for these brands. Usually it's their media, PR, marketing. Yeah, you're just going to find the contact tab. You can find something there. If you can't find it, whenever contact details they have there just ask for their media department or someone that you can talk to. Those would be the people you're looking for and always ask, "Are you the person that I should be talking to?" You want to find the right person, address them by their name not just be general too. So really inquire with them. A lot of these, the bigger companies they know influencer marketing, they know bloggers, they know video people, they know YouTubers, so just ask for the person that's dealt with them or ask them if they've even dealt with any influencer marketing before. It's up to you to present your case and to make it as easy as possible and why they should work with you and to find the right person at all it's so much the right person. That's why networking events are really important because you can usually try and find the right contact and actually the general contact. Yeah. In terms of what to include in your email, we've included that on the reference page as well, like a nice pitching template that will get you started. What are some of the things that you should think about when deciding if a brand is right for you? Do you have experience with that brand? Have you used them before? Is it something that you want to promote to your audience? Is it something your audience would like? Yeah, is it something your audience is going to like? You're not going to sell, I don't know, mascara to a bunch of hippy backpackers that aren't going to wear it. Yeah, is it something that you would actually use? I mean, that's a big one. You are becoming a spokesperson for the model and five years from now are you going to be happy that you promoted that product? Yes, that's something you really want to ask yourself. You should go look into yourself to figure out if that's right for you because each brand is right for different people. If you think you can create content that would benefit everybody in the situation so that the creator, so you, your audience, people watching, and the brand itself. If all three of those are happy and satisfied then that's everybody's happy and satisfied. Who doesn't want that? Yes. If everyone's happy and satisfied the brand will come back and to work with you again, which is something we all want. Yeah. You want to establish a long-term relationship. Definitely. There's two ways to go about this. One, don't be afraid to ask for money, and two, don't always assume you have to take money. I mean, even nowadays, we'll get more into the money aspect of it, but there are a lot of reasons why you take free trips and if you are approaching it, especially if you've not worked with many brands before, free is what you're going to get. You'd be happy to get free or discounted. But it builds that relationship. It builds that trust of working with brands. That's what you have to do when you first get started because then those brands they come back to you. They really do if they like the work that you produce. If you show them that you are reliable, if you produce great content. They're going to want to work with you again. If you're super engaged, they want to work because it's much easier to just contact you again than to find a whole another influencer or another travel person. Once you've established that you worked with several brands before and I would definitely say your first several brands you work with are most likely going to be free. You're going to do some free gigs and there's nothing wrong with that. Not free per se because you're giving them like content. Don't underestimate the brands promotional power too. I think it's really important to build up your resume, to build your experience, to build up your trust, build up your name industry and don't underestimate the value of one being attached to that brand if they're really well-established brand like saying, "Hey, I did work for this company. Its really good for your resume even if it's just for free." Also don't be afraid of knowing even though they do pitch, oh, well I'll promote you on my social networks. If you're small, you're just getting out there that's really helpful. That's goals. Now once you pass that boy, money. How much do you charge for branded content? Is the famous question. There is a reason why you don't see a flat number, a flat rate is because there are so many factors involved. I don't have a personal flat rate, because I evaluate each project as it comes. Each situation has it comes. It's always changing too. It's always changing. I'm not going to charge a large company that has a great big-budget that can afford to pay this money to a small company that I might be passionate about or just starting up, but I'm like, wow, this is really cool project, I really want to film that. You want to be part of it. Yeah, I want to be part of it. Regardless if they do have a big budget or not. I customize per project and how long is it going to take? There are many factors. These are some of the factors to consider we talked about early in this video. But again, here are some of the factors that are all involved with how much you can price. How much you can charge. The quality of your product and the type of gear you own, because you're investing into the gear. Gear cost a lot of money as you've learned in this course. I mean, having so much different types of gear is a service that you can offer your client. If you're using maybe just a little point and shoot and that's what you're using, that's it. Or maybe you're someone who has multiple cameras and drones, like steady cams and such, you can charge more for that, because equality is also going to increase. Let's say you reach the views that I can get, that's a no-brainer. That's well lot of people look at that. Like how many views, how many eyeballs, but it's not all about views and eyeballs. There's also your brand. Your brand, your influence that you have already and how you've established. How targeted you are for the audience. If it's a travel product and you are a travel vlogger, perfect fit. There you go. Easy. The majority of you guys are probably going to be travel vloggers. A travel brand is going to want to work with you compared to a beauty group guru. You can actually charge more, because that target audience that you have is very valuable to that brand. Also just your brand and how established you are as a creator and the product that you produce and that mix remember, it's a two-way street. You are associating yourself with that company, but that company is also associating them-self with you and that has value. Definitely has value. Experience and creativity and that's all part of the brand. How creative is this video content that you are coming up with? Like that's a huge thing, if you're coming with this super creative idea, that involves more money. Even increase multiple locations or it maybe it's just in your room, right affects the rate. Work involved, if the project is going to take a month to do versus a day, you should probably be charging a bit more. Absolutely. Then how integrated, my gosh. Is the brand into your videos. You can do a feature video where the video is all about that brand partnership or it can be a mention, where you're just mentioning that brand in your video. That also affects the rate. Now, again, this is all over the place. Rates can go for videos for different types of YouTubers. It can literally be from 0-$100,000. You can charge depending on all of this factors that we've just talked about. Really, in this industry, this is a new industry so prices are always changing. Our prices are always changing. But what we've found and what we've used. Is probably the best risk. It is the best resource out there. For you guys. It's called Social Bluebook and we will include that link in the resource package as well. Yes, this is what we've calculated using our own numbers and found him to be I think is pretty accurate description if you're looking for a ballpark, if you've absolutely no idea of ballpark idea of what to charge. Go to Social Bluebook, link up your accounts, including your social accounts, take the money amount that's going to give you, because Social Bluebook basically goes through all your analytics and your demos and your numbers. Then it gives you an approximate amount of how much you should charge. Then including all your social, so for one social posts, for a dedicated video in Social Bluebook, you take that bottom number and you times it by 2-4 and that's the approximate rate that we are currently charging. Obviously our Social Bluebook numbers are different, but that's a good rate to start with, that you should be charging per video, including one social post to promote that video. We've talked with other creators as well who've used this technique and it's also pretty accurate. I mean, as accurate, it can be. It's so all over the place, but this is a good starting place. It really is. Your Social Bluebook number, including social for one video. Times by 2-4. Depending on the quality of your video and you really have to evaluate this. We cannot tell you how good your videos are. You have to really heavily evaluate and be honest with yourself and like, how good are my videos? Not just the quality, just everything that we've just talked about that affects how much you're going to charge. Even if you don't have the small numbers you're like, well, how good is my videos? Am I producing just these amazing travel videos that I'm worth four times my social public members. The Social Bluebook more calculates your reach and your demos and that technical aspect, but it doesn't evaluate the quality of the video so that's why we have the times factor. How you'll determine whether that Social Bluebook number is 2, 3 or 4 times more what you're going to charge is everything we just covered, all the factors that affect your rate. That's the quality, that's your influence, that's whether your target audience is perfect for that brand. Everything that we just covered will affect whether you are more towards the two or the four. Definitely, again, project-based and you are producing one video, two videos, three videos. What we'd like to do is package content. If you're going to be traveling for like a week, two weeks, you're going to be producing more than one video. If you're selling those videos to a brand, you maybe go, I'm going to produce three videos. Normally what I personally do is I will discount a larger video, but the total amount to be higher. You just give it per video, it'll be a lower amount, because they're buying more videos so that's a way to draw up things and to add more socialing. The more social you add, the more you can charge. Brands love multimedia packages. One more thing we also have to add is we've considered the fact that we have a blog so we include blog posts and social media exposure that go along with that video and that is also included in that price when we times it. Rates are so hard to judge. The best thing is to ask people, ask your fellow creators to see what approximate they're charging that are in the same number as you. You're not going to be charging people that have different numbers than you, it doesn't make sense. Then it's whatever you're comfortable with. It's like you determine your price, you really do. If a brand approaches you and it's like, hey, quote me, you can literally quote them the moon, it doesn't mean they're going to agree to it. The goal is to get them to agree to it and they'll agree to it when they value your worth and they agree that you're worth that. You want to make sure you're comfortable with the rate you sign on to. You have to determine your worth as well and what is worth your time and your effort as well. To produce it. Don't underestimate your blogs exposure. If you are coming from the blog world into the video world, you can definitely package that in as well. But like videos, there's so much variety. It ranges, it can be free. You can get nothing to produce a video. You can get five bucks, you can get a couple, you can get $100, couple 100, couple 1,000, you can get $10,000. There's all sorts of budgets, but you have to prove that worth and you really have to have the body of work to show that you can prove that worth whatever that worth is. Then it's up to you to determine when you're ready to charge and what you're ready to charge when you get there. Once you've established working with brands, they'll start coming to you and a lot will quote you a number. You'll start to get an idea of what the brands think that you're worth, what companies think that you are worth, and then you can play around with that number. Another way when you're talking with a brand about how you can work together is to them what their budget is, because maybe they have a lower budget than what you want to make, but you can offer them maybe not a video, but social media exposure instead or maybe their budget is larger than what you would have asked for and you might be making more than what you thought. If they come to you, it never hurts to ask what their budget is or what they're willing to pay for your services. Then you can come to agreement, okay, well, they want to pay me this x amount of money well I can provide them with this amount. That helps you determine your costs if you're like I don't know what to charge, I don't know where I'm going. Always ask them their rate or their budget and see what they come back with. But like I said, it's an experience thing. We're learning still, we're always learning. Everyone's always learning, because rates are changing, money is changing and the industry is changing. You just got to keep up with it. Once you've done several of them, you'll get the hang of it and you'll know what it's worth and how much money you make. But yeah, the Social Bluebook, like we said, great a grate resource 2-4 times and that'll give you a base point to start off with. Be sure to go and check that out. There are other ways to make money in this industry and that is by producing products. There's all types of products you can do. Merchandise. Selling your photography, like books, being in movies, television, lots of YouTubers are doing that. Expanding beyond the webs, the inter-webs. But also affiliate marketing, it's a big one. Touring. Touring, go to tours, do presentations. The world is your oyster. There's so much things that you can do. More and more ideas keep popping up. Everyday. Like ways to make money in this industry. It's really exiting Because as the market grows, as the industry grows, there's more and more opportunities. There's more and more room for opportunities, more room for people to do this full time and that's why we are doing this course and why we're telling you about it, because it's pretty awesome. There are a lot of people doing this full time including ourselves and you can as well if you put the hard work and the dedication into it and you keep it up and keep loving it. Because for me, this is the dream job. I really feel that way. You should be creative. You got to be creative and you got to be hardworking. That's what we are doing, there is money to make. That's really good advice, it will work. Couch session done.