OK ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome to London welcome to my home
it's January so the beginning of a new year and I'd like to kick start the new year by
sharing with you my plans for the type of content I'm going to be creating
throughout the rest of the year and sharing with you however it's morning
here in London so first things first breakfast just been to the bakers to get
some fresh bread for toasting and make a pot of coffee so let's do that first
and then I will share with you my master plan for the rest of the year
(music)
okay coffee and toast so what I'd like to do today is share with you my plans in
terms of content creation for this coming year that smells phenomenal that's good
lets try the toast if you haven't tried the
butter with sea salt crystals in it you should it's amazing right my plans for
this year I guess before I talk about the future I should talk about the
present and the past how I got here I started creating YouTube videos about four
or five years ago and the reason I began doing it up until about four or five
years ago I'm a jeweller I manufacture jewellery and
up until that point i'd been selling some of my products my own
designs via platforms like eBay Etsy and Amazon and they were amazing they still
are but I figured you couldn't build a brand within them they were the brand
the overriding brand especially a luxury good brand so I set about making my own
website and as part of that I realized that I needed a blog and social media to
promote it and for search engine optimisation search engine optimisation so I didn't
have a great deal of knowledge about it I think I simultaneously set up it would
have been Facebook YouTube Instagram Twitter Pinterest tumblr all the major
social media platforms of the day I think at the time Twitter was king it had
stolen the social media crown from Facebook and if you're a big deal on
Twitter at the time you're a big deal however it didn't really appeal to me it
wasn't a great tool for me at the time
YouTube seemed like the best bet for me I could create videos
embed them on my blog and then create a blog post around the video and that's
what I planed to do the original plan was to make it behind the scenes of the
business however hindsight is a wonderful thing that proved pretty
boring basically it wasn't very entertaining it wasn't very entertaining to make and
it wouldn't be very entertaining to watch so I started making videos about
what I was up to in my spare time here in London and they obviously did prove
popular they were fun to make so I carried on with that so I had a blog
about my life in London and then on the website a shop selling my jewellery and it
did work the blog would attract visitors to the site and as far search
engines when that was the key when I first launched until I started the blog
when you typed him Roberts London I was you couldn't you could scroll through
Google for pages and pages and you can never find me after a short while the blog was
getting so many hit today that it comes up on page one maybe even ranked very
highly coffee to wake me up so yeah I wasn't originally really too concerned
about building an audience on the platform itself it was really to drive
traffic to my website to help bring in traffic to my website so search engine
optimisation but however I did start to build an audience on YouTube and I saw
creators come and go it's a great platform still love it to this day but I saw
content creators come and go I saw platforms entire platforms come and go
things like well Twitter kind of started to lose its crown to Instagram and
snapchat came along vine came along the vine created for want of a better word internet
internet celebrities they became stars in their own right and hugely
success financially and then that imploded so I guess by the end of 2016 I
was kind of thinking about distribution and other platforms I wasn't really
interested in just YouTube for the money or the audience both are great things to
have so yeah I started looking at distribution I started so I increased
I started putting the videos on Facebook as well and then last year the opportunity to
create a show on Amazon for Amazon Prime members to watch came about so I
took that and that was very time consuming they have way higher standards
in terms of technical standards but just the kind of content you've got put on
there is has gotta be way better than that kind of average thing you can get
away with on YouTube or Facebook when you publish your video to Facebook or
YouTube as long as the bots don't find something they dislike or for legal
reasons you could pretty much publish whatever you want
Amazon is different to that I'm pretty confident team of people in each country
it is going to be published actually watch it well they do because then virtually
every one I sent originally I had to completely re edit it either for technical
reasons or just content reasons and rather than give up I just think it makes I
like it it makes me make better videos at least once a month though the kind of
thing I can put on YouTube or Facebook
Amazon want way better quality so it makes me having the show on Amazon
makes me make better videos however it's time-consuming making better quality
videos so I can't produce as many so what I plan to do this year I'm going to
make try and make at least one show for Amazon a month last year I think I
created 26 and it was so time consuming I barely had time to do anything else
so this year I'am going to do maybe 12 high quality ones and then on YouTube and
Facebook and Instagram you'll get behind the scenes of that so you'll get way more
content on social media platforms I'am including YouTube in that so like this
you'll get behind the scenes explanations of what I'm doing and while
I'm out filming the better quality ones with a better camera I will probably go live
while I'am at events or if I just if there's just something cool or that I think is
cool that's just not gonna make the cut of the shows for Amazon Prime I'll
probably publish them on YouTube and the thing with the shows is the complaint
I've got about the Amazon shows is from people on social media and I didn't really promote it
because I wasn't sure if it was gonna work was that they'd have
to pay for it but the thing is yes you do that I'm getting a whole new audience
on Amazon that probably don't watch YouTube or watch videos on Facebook
they're watching they're paying for Amazon they're watching that and
Netflix they're just watching movies and TV shows that kind of thing it's a
completely different audience but I don't have a sole distribution deal with
them I can they publish my videos but then I'm also free to publish them on
other platforms and the original idea was that I would
publish to prime and they would premiere the videos first and then later on
within days a week they would then go on social media for everyone else to watch
for free however I have to jump through so many hoops to publish the video on prime
it normally ends up airing on there the last yeah the plan is to premiere on
Amazon and then for them for everyone to be able to watch them for
free on other platforms however if last year's anything to go by
Amazon Prime members would be the last people to see that so hopefully that
clears up my plans for this year at least one high quality video which
will go multi channel for Prime members as well
and then you'll get a lot of behind-the-scenes things like this I
think the next thing I've got to doing my hat and coat I wore in every video
last year's got go for this season I want a new look so I've ordered some new
clothes I'll give you a look at that behind-the-scenes of the Wardrobe the
for live I've ordered a new phone I was using a very old phone I didn't
realise that I'd be doing so much live video but I did quite a lot last year
so I've ordered a new phone for that I'll make a video about that so yeah some equipment
behind the sense and what I might do as well always do a video about all the
equipment I use because I'm basically making a TV show or a ridiculously small
shoestring budget which I think might be interesting to not just my viewers but
anyone thinking of doing it I've pretty much gone from YouTube to a TV show we're
using equipment that most professional professional youtubers would consider
basic I was using an iPhone 5s for a while in 2017 which is a 2013 phone and
yeah Canon consumer Canon cameras most of stuff I bought from Amazon so
its good for Amazon I bought the gear off them maybe I could publish that to Amazon because
then people can while they're watching the video they've been don't need to
leave the site to go shopping for it all but anyway I hope that it gives you some
insight into what I'll be doing for the rest of the year
I don't click bait the titles so if you see something that's not of interest to
you carry on watching other videos and come back when something does because if the
behind-the-scenes doesn't interest you there'll be plenty of videos out about
in London which hopefully would be events that interest you and so until
next time toodles! I'am going to enjoy my toast
okay I guess what should also do is explain what type of videos I plan to
make now they're not going to fit one particular genre there are some amazing
channels dedicated to London on the Internet especially on YouTube one
popular genre are tour guides and although there will be elements of guide
within my videos I'm not going to focus entirely on that although I'm aware some
people that watch my videos are planing or will be planning a trip so there will
be elements of guide to the areas I find myself in but that's not what I'am focused on
would probably be more successful if I did focus on that another hugely popular
type of video especially on YouTube is almost like the version of Google
street view where people literally walk down the streets or markets or London
locations with a camera and film the street view and they're very popular
there's no story line no context no voice over it is just Street view and
making those type of videos doesn't interest me again I'd probably financially
far better off if I did those type of channels get lots of views lots of
subscribers that doesn't interest me but there will be elements of that obviously
when I'm out about there will be street scenes so they'll be elements of the guide
elements of the street scenes and I'm aware that people watch my videos they
want to sense of location so there will be lots of in London in the videos
and that obviously leads on obviously a lot of people that watch they do not
want to see my face or hear my voice or my ego but I can assure you despite
the complaints there will be plenty more of that in the in the videos my
face my voice and my ego and I guess when I'm making the videos the kind of
person I've got in mind is the armchair traveller I think social media at its heart
is about sharing and getting involved in the popularity
and the money can overshadow that I guess what I really want to do is just
share a little slice of London in my videos whether it's for 10 minutes 20 minutes
or for half an hour so some times there up to an hour long yeah so people sat wherever
they are in different parts of the country or all over the world can just
watch for entertainment sake and get a little slice of life here in London and if
they're visiting the city hopefully they'll find places that they'd like to
visit or maybe places they'd like to avoid and just a sense of location so
yeah there will be varied content but at its heart it's just about hopefully sharing
a slice of life here in town and hopefully its a little entertaining so until next
time Toodles!