(serene music)
- Hey, everybody, it's Roberto,
I'm here with my awesome friend, Sarah Dietschy.
- Hey, guys.
- Internet friends are like,
totally the best kind of friends to have.
So, we're gonna help you create something awesome today,
there are a lot of you who want to get started on YouTube,
a lot of you want to become YouTube vloggers
and Sarah and I are gonna talk about
how you can do that.
Alright, so Sarah, like, what would you say
to somebody who wants to start a YouTube channel
and they're thinking that they wanna be a YouTube vlogger,
they wanna do vlogs, they've watched you,
they've watched like, Casey,
they've watched Tim Schmoyer,
what would you say about somebody
that wants to start vlogging?
- I would say don't start with vlogging.
If you are starting from ground zero you have no,
you haven't posted any videos on YouTube,
I am a big believer in just starting with searchable content
and things that people are gonna discover organically.
Because no one is really gonna search like,
"Day in the park with family."
And I love vlogging because that's really
how you create a good relationship between your audience,
but I just don't think it's the best way
to start to gain an audience.
So, I would say, find a balance.
So, maybe find what you're passionate about,
and what are maybe some tools and gear that people use
within that passion.
You can do reviews, you can do unboxings,
you can do things that people are actually searching out.
And then at the end of those videos,
link to maybe your more personal stuff,
like your vlogs and things like that.
And so, I think it's really finding a balance
but I wouldn't start with vlogs
'cause I know a lot of people that get in the rut of like,
I've been posting vlogs for like, five years
and I'm still at like, 200 subscribers.
It's because you're not doing anything
to reach beyond your small audience
and just friends and family.
- Yeah, you know, a lot of people I talk to on YouTube,
they underestimate and forget that like,
YouTube's the biggest search engine.
I keep saying that and saying that and people,
like, I don't think they believe me sometimes.
But like, even you, you started out with like,
stuff that was about, you know,
your camera gear or something and
you still do videos like that every now and again,
and then you expanded into some stuff like
where you were traveling.
And you grew an audience of like, 4000
before you ever really started truly vlogging.
- Yeah. - Just off of that alone.
And like, that's not easy to do,
I think people really underestimate that.
- Yeah. And that was in the beginning
'cause I think, you know, it's an interesting story
to tell how you were from 4000 to 100,000,
but really, from zero to 4000 was really the grind,
and really, you know, what am I doing?
Going to concerts, I love music,
so I would go to a Taylor Swift concert
in Dallas Cowboys Stadium,
I would basically film the whole thing.
I would have fun, I would get turnt,
but I would also film the whole thing
and then I would post it to YouTube the next day,
"Taylor Swift, Dallas Cowboys Stadium,
full concert," and it got like, 20,000 views like that.
And you know, that honestly, that was like,
my first couple hundred of subscribers
was concert footage,
so of course, I'm sharing my personality
but those are just people and that's,
it's encouraging even if they're not coming
back a ton to the videos that you're making,
like vlogs or anything.
But just when you're starting out to have like,
a hundred subscribers, instead of zero,
it's like encouraging.
And it gets people to your channel, yeah.
- It's the hardest thing. Like, I don't remember
when or how I got my first,
everyone asks me, when did you get your first hundred,
or your first thousand, and things like,
I don't know, 'cause I was like,
obsessively neurotic about the editing,
I was just like, trying to make my audio, video
suck less, I wasn't looking at my sub cap.
I was like, in fact, I was kind of hoping
no one was watching 'cause I was so self conscious
about how bad everything was. - Yeah, yeah.
- But like, I love what you said about that
and like, just doing something interesting
and having something that people can discover
because like in real life,
if you wanna meet new friends and new people,
like we go to concerts or we go to the park
or we go to a conference, or we travel where there's like,
a ton of people, so we could find those handful of people
that we're gonna latch onto
and they're gonna latch onto us.
So, you'd say videos are the same thing?
- Yeah. Oh, for sure, for sure.
And with YouTube, something that is so unique to offer
is the community and the relationship that you develop
with your internet fans.
And a lot of that is through more casual content
like vlogs and you know, vlogs, is basically
reality TV but a much more raw, reality TV.
And so, I think,
I just say the number one thing is
what are you mad passionate about?
'Cause you're not gonna stress about
the sub count and views in the beginning
when you're just trying to create.
And you're gonna be so on fire for it.
And so, how do you take that passion
that you're so passionate about
and just create searchable content around that.
And then, so I would say for every like,
two videos that people are gonna discover organically,
maybe make a more personal one around that, you know,
and just see how that gages
and how you build audience from there.
- This course makes you think, ah, one for me, one for them?
- Yeah.
- Like, okay, that's cool.
Like, you brought up passion a little bit, you did that.
I always felt people like, create something
that you care about, something you think is awesome.
I think that something like, let me ask you something.
What like, I'm gonna pivot here,
why do you think vlogging is so popular right now?
- So, I think it really,
I mean, this is probably everyone,
it's the obvious answer, but I really think
it took off once Casey, I think,
of course so many people were vlogging
before Casey Neistat,
but I think he really changed the game in that,
he married a structure of like, almost a TV show
and it was really well made,
but then he had the perfect personality too
and it was such a good balance.
And I think people latch onto it
just like people who latch onto TV shows.
And I think people have now gotten into the rhythm
of that daily content of reoccurring characters,
just like, you know, like Sienfeld,
you don't just love Jerry, but you love Elaine
and you love everyone else and so, with Casey,
he had like, a reoccurring cast...
- You've been watching Friends, so it's like...
(both talking at once)
- Yeah, and so, you know, it's that same feeling of like,
familiarity, and he's dope and he's encouraging
and you know, encourages you to be a better person.
And so it's like, positive content that is addictive
and it's daily, the whole daily vlogging thing
is people just get into a flow.
But it doesn't work for everyone.
Just because it works for someone
doesn't mean it's gonna work for you,
so, I daily vlogged, like daily-daily vlogged,
I post only Monday, Wednesday, Friday right now.
But I daily vlogged for 50 vlogs straight.
And it took my channel to a stand still.
I was stuck at 102,000 subscribers
and I would go down like, 100 subscribers one day
and then like, up 50 the next,
so I was stuck at 102 subscribers.
Pretty much the majority of the time, I vlogged.
I mean, it's a, yeah, and so you really have to step back,
I took a step back and I said, okay,
I'm catering to the same exact audience over and over
and I'm not doing anything to reach out beyond my audience.
- Right.
- So once you have that base of maybe three K subscribers,
just the more you get, the more leverage you have,
to like build on, you know,
and so, yeah, it's not the same for everyone,
you just have to try things,
be consistent for a period of time,
and then pivot when you notice, you know,
things kind of are going the way you expect.
- So, I think we got some really interesting
takeaways out of that, I think some things that we got
that we could takeaway from what Sarah was saying was that
first of all, you gotta find what you do
that's unique and interesting,
not everybody's gonna be a Casey Neistat
or a Sarah Dietschy or Roberto Bladen.
You just, you know, you need to do you,
you need to do things that you're crazy,
stupid, excited about and you're good at.
Like, if I could spin on my head,
I'd be opening every YouTube video
with me spinning on my head,
or I'd have like, a break dance montage if that was like,
if that was my skill set, that's what I would do.
As it is, there's some stuff that I'm planning to do
that's going to actually like, have a lot more B roll
of me traveling and doing meetings
and walking and talking and doing stuff like this,
and even me doing some personal art projects and stuff.
Like, because that's the thing that I do
that's creative, that's interesting, that's different,
that I can like, put as a hey, stay tuned,
stay interested kind of thing.
Like, Casey opens with time lapses,
you open with slow mo,
everybody can do a different format.
So, on top of doing like,
the thing that you really care about,
I would say style
and format and presentation can be different,
not everybody's episode, like TV shows, aren't all the same.
And then, you gotta have a discoverability strategy,
it's like, what got you here, what got you there,
what got you to 100,000,
was it what got you to like,
you're at like, over, you're at 150, or over 150 now?
- I am like, 145.
- Okay, so like, you're gonna get like, no problem.
By the time this video's out.
But like, so you gotta have what got you here,
won't get you there, you gotta have, like you said,
you can't cater the same people,
you have to go beyond and go deeper
and have an expansion strategy.
And then you gotta do what's sustainable,
you found that daily vlogging wasn't sustainable.
- And it killed me.
It really like, I didn't know,
I wasn't in a place in my life
where it was healthy for me to do that.
And my life was very chaotic at the time.
And so, through my daily vlogging was very chaotic.
And now, with the new season of YouTube,
I'm actually trying to post something
every single day but I'm throwing in three live streams.
And so that's me again, just adjusting, saying,
okay, YouTube is pushing, you know,
if you post every single day and you do it consistently,
maybe, yeah, maybe I can get into the algorithm even more.
And so, I'm just trying it a different way
because having a six hour edit to do every single night
just was not happening.
- You would go, like, I think you'd go
1.5 to 2.5 over my monthly growth rate
when you went daily because the thing is,
you have the, the Picci fam is super engaged
and like, is very supportive of what you do.
And then you have stuff that is much more unifying
because of what your base content is.
Like, my channel, it has a very interesting flaw,
but it was intentional,
but not as intentional as the flaw in the Death Star,
thank god.
- Star Wars, woo! Yeah. - Big nerd. Love it.
But like, I have a super diverse audience,
and so getting stuff people from one video
to another video day to day,
very challenging to get even a fraction of them to that.
And I already knew that going in,
I actually have a new strategy around that too,
that like, I couldn't say that before.
But what you did that's so smart and that
everyone can learn from is that
you got your core audience super engaged,
you got your super fans like, tight,
and then you added to your content something that
would be easy for them to carry over to.
It's not like some big jump where it's like,
oh, I'm not interested in that.
- Yeah.
- So, that was super smart, that's a great strategy,
so you can do all the things that you love
but you have to really think about
are you doing it in a way that your audience
can easily move from all the content you've done
up until now into this new thing that you're doing?
If you're now throwing a new show on the table,
it's gotta be able to reach the same kinda people
that might also watch that show.
So, if you were gonna go back in time
and say something to like, a slightly younger Sarah
who's starting out this journey like,
what advice would you give yourself and like,
you know, we can learn from that.
- Yeah. I would say something that my mom, Jeanie,
tells me all the time,
is the world is not going to end if you miss an upload.
Or the world is not going to end
if you make one or two mistakes,
I'm all about that hustle life,
and I preach the hustle life and you know,
the only way to get to point A to point B
is to just put in the work.
But at the same time,
when you get so wrapped into it,
you get very sucked into where like,
a lot of your worth is based into hitting those deadlines,
and you should have deadlines,
and that's how you push yourself.
But the world is not going to end
if you miss an upload, and that's something I forget
every day to tell myself.
- You know what, that's very real for a lot of people.
I think it's like even just the world's not gonna end
if you miss an upload.
I think that's also the world doesn't begin and end
with like, your YouTube stuff and your YouTube channel.
I think a lot of people, they, in the same way that people
traditionally have like, made their identity their job
or however much money they make,
I think they make it their social media,
their YouTube channel, their followers,
their counts, their stats, or oh, my days of Snapchat,
or I'm a Viner, I'm a YouTuber, it's like,
I know that your identity is a filmmaker,
I know that mine is like, creative entrepreneur,
like, I know that there's something beyond
what you have going on in your YouTube,
you're a person beyond your vlog
and I would say that, you know,
like, the thing that I love about
watching your vlogs is how much of it
I understand you are actually still living your life.
And that it doesn't revolve around like, that, so...
- And yeah, that's another thing to keep in mind
with vlogging is it really is, depending on how long it is,
only 10 minutes of your day.
And the more you do it,
the better the groove you're gonna get into,
and so now I'm at the point where I'll film
what I need to film in order to make a 10 minute video,
a 10 or 12 minute video.
And so, you know, it's hard in the beginning
because it's a lot when you just film everything.
And that's terrible when you have to go and edit
'cause that's just more footage to go through,
so the more you do it, the more you practice at it,
you're gonna get better at capturing
what you need to capture in order to make that
10 minute video at the end of the day.
- Yep. Alright, so that's some awesome advice.
Sarah, thank you so much for being on the show.
- Thanks for having me, Roberto!
- And I love that, you know, we got to do this
and that we got to hang out.
And why don't you go ahead and as if people
in this community didn't already know,
now why don't you tell them where they can find you.
- Yes, you can find me at my YouTube channel,
youtube.com/sarahdietschy,
it's a terrible name, not a terrible name,
it's an awesome name, but very hard to spell.
And so, it's kind of my slogan
Sarah Dietschy rhymes with peachy,
so you can look up all of those things,
rhymes with peachy, say peachy.
- Everything will be linked up.
That's awesome, I love having you close that
with your videos on top of everything like that.
So, guys, thanks so much for tuning in,
make sure you're checking out Sarah's channel,
again, every thing is linked up,
we're gonna do some more cool stuff
that you'll definitely wanna check out on her channel
and all of the social medias.
So, guys, go out there and create something awesome today.