For this week's tip, we are going
to talk with Sarah about her website,
sarahfit.com, and how she uses her website
to complement her YouTube channel,
using the two together.
That's coming up.
Hey, guys.
My name is Tim Schmoyer.
And we have a guest with us today, Sarah Dussault.
Welcome, Sarah.
Thanks for having me.
You guys should totally go check out her channel,
YouTube.com/SarahsFabChannel.
And she has been doing fitness training stuff over there
for many years.
She has her own published book now, called Get Skinny Again.
On Wednesdays, she is hosting the Google+ Hangout for The
Biggest Loser.
She hosted the YouTube Next Trainer
program, and many other things.
So she has been around YouTube a lot.
She definitely knows what she's talking about.
And one of the things that we talk about here at Video
Creators and that you guys have heard other places
is owning your audience, having a platform outside of YouTube.
And Sarah, you have a pretty active website at sarahfit.com.
Can you tell us a little bit about the strategy
you have behind that website and how
you use it to complement what you're
doing on your YouTube channel and things?
Yeah.
So I first started sarahfit.com to provide more information
for people.
So with the work outs or recipes people
wanted to be able to print it out, or to see like a one sheet
and know what the work out was without having to watch it,
in case they didn't have internet at the gym.
And then it kind of just became a place for me
to share content beyond the YouTube channel.
Maybe like I'd go to the grocery store
and I noticed this new product that I just was obsessed with
and I want to share that with them.
That eventually might make it in a video,
like in a grocery haul.
But for the time being, it's easy to just share
what I ate last night on my blog.
So when I started doing that, I found that the blog was also
a vehicle for sponsorships and a place
to really build stronger relationship with brands.
So my blog was a great place for me
to kind of start getting more sponsorships for my channel,
so that I could do this full time.
And I have been doing it full time since 2008.
But what's interesting to me is that, to be honest,
my YouTube fan base is very different from my blog fan
base.
That's what I was going to ask.
Have you found that they actually cross over a lot?
Do you find people that watch your videos then
go to your website, or is it people
from your website going to your videos, or both?
How does that work?
People from my website will watch my videos.
But many people from YouTube do not
go over to my blog, which is interesting to me.
The times that they do is when I have a recipe that they really
want or something like that.
But for the most part, YouTubers stay on YouTube.
And I think that's attributed to the demographic.
My younger demographic is obsessed with YouTube.
They're going to watch part of my video
and then click over to another one or someone else.
They're not going to go to a blog.
Whereas I think the young woman that I think is my demographic,
they are reading lots of blogs.
So you didn't start it intentionally
with that, trying to reach two different audiences.
It just kind of developed into that.
And so, knowing what you do now, would you
advise that creators today invest into their own platform
and their own website that kind of complements their channel?
Oh, of course, yeah.
Being a YouTuber is all about branding yourself.
And if you don't have a blog, you're
missing a huge opportunity.
Because I think I was able to become a full-time blogger
without having these astronomical numbers,
because I was on so many platforms
and I had a pretty good audience on each one.
So there were bloggers that had more blog readers than me,
but I had a YouTube audience that none of them had.
So I would get a lot of these deals,
because these advertisers, these brands wanted video content.
And so, kind of similarly, brands that want video,
they also like the fact that you can have a blog post.
Because I will say that some of my most successful videos
and some of my most successful blog posts are the ones
that go together.
The other reason I feel like is invaluable for me
with to have videocreators.com is
that there's some people who really, they
want to keep up with my stuff, but they're not really
active YouTube subscribers.
And they don't remember to go check their YouTube
subscriptions.
But if they're subscribed to my blog
and they're getting the RSS feed or they're
getting the weekly emails that go out from my website
and things like that, then they get my videos
delivered to them instead.
And it's kind of like a trigger, like a reminder, oh, yeah,
I want to go watch Tim's video.
So I found that it's been helpful
for me in getting people to subscribe through email and RSS
who wouldn't normally subscribe to the channel on YouTube.
So again, for me it's also two different audiences.
So any tips for someone who wants to get
started with a website, going into 2014,
that accompanies their YouTube channel?
Yeah.
Start with WordPress.
.com?
Or would you self-host?
I self-host.
But every time, everyone that I know,
I started out with Tumblr.
And Tumblr was actually awesome to start with.
But then eventually, when you get to a certain point,
you've got to go to another platform
just for searching purposes and organization.
And it would have just been a lot easier had I just
started on WordPress from the beginning.
And the other thing is, know your kind of hourly rate.
Because in the beginning, I was trying
to design my own WordPress site.
And I ended up spending so many hours on it,
and it still was kind of eh, funky.
And so I wish that I had kind of acknowledged
what my hourly rate was and realized
it would've been cheaper for me to just hire someone
to make me a kick ass website.
Or just get a free template or pay
$39 for a really good one or something.
Yeah.
And I did a template.
But don't try to do it yourself.
Get help, if you're not an expert.
So for you guys who are thinking about doing this,
I think it's important that maybe you
have, even if you don't have your own dot com,
or your own-- like Sarah said, use a Tumblr page is better.
You can post your videos there.
You can interact with people.
They can easily follow you there,
if they have a Tumblr account and things.
But don't think of it in terms of what Sarah and I are both
saying, as I'm doing it to try to get all my YouTube
audience onto my website.
It doesn't usually work that way.
Or try to think, I'm going to build this massive website
and try to get all these users to my YouTube channel,
which in the clients I work with,
that's often what they're thinking.
It's often like two different audiences
with some crossover and some cross promotion, of course.
But think about them as two different platforms
that complement each other.
Hope that helps.
I'd love to hear from you guys.
Comments below, as always, about any advice
that you have for moving onto a website or starting one
or not starting one, what have you guys learned.
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