Hey Friends!
I often get asked why I started my YouTube channel. The easy answer is: to share all the information I’ve collected through going down the rabbit hole of research. Today I’m sharing the backstory to how I became an Accidental Influencer.
I have been a stay-at-home mom since my daughter Luna was born 4 years ago. I started my content creating business just 3 months after she was born. I actually had no idea I was going to be a content creator when I started creating content. I had never watched YouTube until I was pregnant with Luna. Thats when I started searching YouTube for ideas on how to organize a nursery or what to put inside my diaper bag. I quickly realized that I had a ton of information about just doing ‘things’.
I have always been the homemaking type. I enjoyed cleaning and cooking, doing laundry and most of all, planning parties from a very young age. In fact, while most kids were watching The Simpsons after school, I was tuning in to Martha Stewart, 3 times a day. And this was when you actually had to be present to watch a show, commercials and all. I decided to take all the things that I knew how to do, and start sharing them with the world on YouTube.
I learned how to edit videos (very roughly) by creating vacation vlogs with my husband. We had backpacked all around the world together and always made a video once we got home, so I did have a good starting point. However, I now cringe at my first few videos with how terrible my editing skills really were.
Once I started posting videos, I realized that for people to watch them, I had to do some sort of promotion of them. *Insert growing my Instagram following here* I then became very serious about posting photos and stories on my Instagram account. This is how I became an ‘Accidental Influencer’. I learned that posting photos and videos about things that I had knowledge about was just the beginning. I had to get people to trust me as someone who really believed in the products I talked about in order for them to come back. When I got to around 2000 followers (which was a very big deal), everything slowed down as Instagram turned into a video sharing platform instead of a place to view beautiful photos.
After this happened, I started focusing more on my YouTube channel again. I took a couple courses on growing a YouTube business from a few bigger YouTube Moms. I won’t share who, because I don’t need the shade but I will say that neither of these courses helped me grow anything. It was around this time that I started to get small sponsorships. Some paid but most for free product.
Fast forward to 3.5 years later. I am still grinding daily to grow both of my socials. Some YouTubers blow up overnight or have a few videos that get their subscribers to grow exponentially. In my case it has definitely been more of a slow and steady growth. The main reason for this is because I never ‘niched down’, as they call it in YouTube world. My ‘niche’ is Motherhood and Homemaking which covers such a wide variety of things that its hard for YouTube to figure out who to show my videos to. My community is out there and I have no doubt that they are going to find me. I keep consistent because I believe that if you put in the hard work, there is no way that you cannot be successful. So here I am! The photo taking, video editing, blogging, homemaking mama that turned into an Accidental Influencer.
Ill catch up with you soon! Byeee!