Who’s ready for a super value-packed, deep and exciting episode about YouTube growth, from someone who’s seen it all for the past 6 years? I don’t think you’re ready! Fashion YouTuber, Erin Busbee aka Busbee Style is here and she was so generous with her time and with all her YouTube secrets. If you want to learn how to go from a trickle of views, to constantly over a million views a month and swimming in affiliate income, you’re in for a treat!

“If you can take more of a strategic approach, you can grow faster.”

Erin was working in TV news as a journalist, but after getting married and moving to Texas, that was a life she didn’t want to go back to. Instead of getting another job, her husband encouraged her to take that time to pursue her passion. She wasn’t sure what that was, but she knew what was on her heart was “helping women feel pretty”. That led her to start a business consulting women on their wardrobe - organizing their closets and being their personal shopper. The more it grew, the more restless she felt. She wanted to help even more women, and scale the business more and more. But scaling it by training others to do her job wasn’t giving her the satisfaction she desired. So, blogging and YouTube was born. That was in 2014, now almost 6 years later, she has almost 300k subscribers and gets over 1 million views a month helping women in their late 30s to 60s look and feel pretty!

“Keep pushing your creativity and adding freshness and excitement for your regular viewers.”

Even though her channel is at almost 300k subscribers now, a year later after her channel started, in 2015, she was at 10k subscribers and barely growing. At a rewardStyle event, she met someone who grew her channel really fast, and that gave her the inspiration that it was possible for her too. So she dove into research and brought a new level of focus and energy to her channel and it started to pay off. She doubled her subscribers in 2018 to 86k, and now, not even 2 years later, she’s shattered that record. In this episode, we’re diving deep into her process. She breaks down exactly how she coordinates her team, exactly how she uses analytics - and how you can too - to optimize her videos for people to watch from start to end, she breaks down how she creates her viral hits so predictably for a niche that isn’t very large, she breaks down how she runs her blog, YouTube, her IG, and social media seamlessly - and has all of them thriving, and so much more. Enjoy!

“Give your viewers what they want and need and you’ll perform better.”

Check out the show notes

Join the Zero to Influence Bootcamp waitlist

Download your FREE guide: 6 Tools YouTubers Use to Get Thousands of Video Views

Don't forget to join the Beauty and the Vlog Facebook group for collaborations, YouTube advice, support and more!

You can also follow me on Instagram!

Whether you’re a woman over 50, or just hungry to make it big on YouTube, you’re going to want to check this out! Lifestyle YouTuber Schellea Fowler, aka Fabulous50s, is sharing her secrets and going deep in lessons on how she grew to almost 600k subscribers in less than 3 years in a niche you really wouldn’t expect. Gain the upper hand by learning all you can in this week’s episode!

“What’s kept me going is knowing I’m helping women feel like they’ve got a lot more life left to live.”

Schellea got inspired to start on YouTube after she and her husband sold their business and retired when she was 49. They went on to travel, live it up and do all the things they dreamed of doing. But the problem was that after enjoying herself non-stop, without a new goal to chase, it became boring for her. So she started her channel, in July 2017, to have an impact at scale, taking what she does face-to-face with her clients and doing it on YouTube. She focused her niche on women over 50 and got to work. Initially, she was kind of shy and afraid to put herself out there. She wanted people to watch her videos, but she was afraid of being seen. But she pushed through and after 6 months of doing it, she felt more comfortable with boldly sharing her message, and that reflected in her channel’s growth. One video blew up to over 2 million views and her channel blew up as well. Now she has almost 600 subscribers in a little more than 2 years!

“The turning point for my YouTube success was definitely when I finally felt comfortable with myself.”

In this episode, Schellea breaks down the philosophy behind her channel and gives us her insights and lessons into not just growing SUPER fast on YouTube, but building a channel you’ll be proud of that will stand the test of time. Enjoy!

“Feeling solid within yourself helps you appreciate what you have instead of always wanting more.”

Check out the show notes

Join the Zero to Influence Bootcamp waitlist

Download your FREE guide: 6 Tools YouTubers Use to Get Thousands of Video Views

Don't forget to join the Beauty and the Vlog Facebook group for collaborations, YouTube advice, support and more!

You can also follow me on Instagram!

Hey YouTube Power Hour Squad, I have a special BONUS episode for you today. In today's solocast, I'm going to talk about COVID-19 and what it means for content creators.

We are ALL affected by this whether it's our health, our jobs, or the economy. There are a lot of unknowns right now, and that makes people panic. It's scary. My heart and my prayers go out to anyone who is struggling right now.

There's not a lot that we can really control right now. But there are a few things you CAN control, and that's what we have to focus on.

What can you control?

1. Your mind and how you think about this

2. Your actions as a result of these changes

We WILL get through this. It might be different on the other side. But human beings are incredibly resilient, and we will come out of this with unique solutions to the problems we are facing today.

As a content creator and influencer, you are a leader in your community. Now is the time to lead. Whether you are a beauty, fashion, or fitness content creator, you can still connect, comfort, entertain, and educate. Now that people are home more, they will be consuming more content. 

You owe it to yourself, to your audience, to your goals, to your dreams to keep creating content. There is a silver lining, I promise. 

If this message resonates with you, take this as an opportunity to study, to practice, to invest in yourself, to keep going, and keep creating content. 

Let's continue the conversation on my instagram @beautyandthevlog, or in my Facebook Group! I love connecting with you and keeping the dialogue open. 

Everyone wants the scoop! This YouTuber has found a way to deliver dating advice while spilling the tea on all our favorite celebrity couples. She’s a genius! She’s going to teach you how to do the same, take what you’re great at, and mix it with something people are hungry for right now. Shallon Lester has been blowing up on YouTube for the last year and she’s sharing all her secrets on this episode!

“If you don’t know why you got the good things, you won’t be able to anticipate the bad things.”

Shallon Lester is an author of 2 books, MTV personality - she had her own reality TV show called Downtown Girls and now a dating expert on YouTube with over 300k subscribers and getting almost 5 million video views a month. She got bitten by the YouTube bug in 2012 when she was hired by Howcast to do a series on kissing, that series went onto be a hit, getting 35 million views per video. She knew she was onto something so she started her channel. But it wasn’t until she was laid off her job as deputy editor at Star Magazine that she started taking her channel seriously. When the video she did on Red Table Talk blew up, getting 100k views in 4 days, she knew she could be big and could carve out a living on YouTube. She’s been doing that full-time ever since.

“It’s always better to share advice via a story. That’s why church is effective.”

Shallon believes that if you want it bad enough, keep at it because your break is just around the corner. She was able to use her strengths being in entertainment and around celebrity gossip, and knowing psychology and dating to help her audience with their relationships. In this episode you’re going to learn how you too can make the best out of your unique circumstances and gifts, how she creates her videos from idea to execution, working with brands and staying true to yourself and so much more. Enjoy!

“I didn’t take chirping on the ice and I don’t take it now on the internet.”

Check out the show notes

Join the Zero to Influence Bootcamp waitlist

Download your FREE guide: 6 Tools YouTubers Use to Get Thousands of Video Views

Don't forget to join the Beauty and the Vlog Facebook group for collaborations, YouTube advice, support and more!

You can also follow me on Instagram!

Influencer Marketing Hub, in collaboration with CreatorIQ, runs a yearly survey and the results are out. In this solo episode, I'm reviewing the highlights of this report with you and giving you my thoughts on how the results will impact you.

4,000 brands, marketing agencies, and industry professionals were surveyed in regards to their perspective on influencer marketing. The makeup was broken down into:
- 34% were brands
- 31% work at marketing agencies that work with influencers
- 4% were PR agencies
- the rest were industry professionals

Of those surveyed, the most popular vertical represented is Fashion & Beauty (24%), followed by Travel & Lifestyle (13%), Health & Fitness (12%), Gaming (7%), Sports (5%), and Family, Parenting & Home (5%).

Growth

The Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $9.7B in 2020.
This means that the growth in influencer marketing over the current year, 2019 to 2020, has seen the estimated market size increase from $6.6 billion in 2019 to $9.7 billion in 2020. We are fast approaching a market size of $10 billion. 

More than 380 new influencer marketing-focused agencies and platforms were established in 2019.
These were created in response to making this process easier - so more apps and companies have come on board to help with this partnership and relationship.

Regulation

Only 14% of influencer posts sampled were fully compliant with FTC guidelines.
If influencers don't improve their performance soon, there is a real danger that the FTC and CMA will start prosecuting rather than just warning and educating. However, it is an improvement on last year’s results, with only an 11% compliance rate.

Platforms and Engagement

Tik Tok is the MOST downloaded app in the apple store at 33 million downloads.

Micro and nano influencers have better engagement rates than influencers with 100k followers.
This is particularly evident on Instagram, where nano-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers have seven times the engagement rate than mega-influencers with greater than 100,000 followers (7.2% vs. 1.1%). This pattern shows at every follower-number level in between these extremes.

300% more micro-influencers were utilized by large firms than in 2016

Almost 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram as part of the marketing mix.

Here are some excerpts from the report on the topic of engagement:

The shift from "celebrities" to influencers

The ratio of mega-influencers (with 1 million+ followers) to micro-influencers (with fewer than 100,000 followers) rose from 1:3 in 2016 to 1:10 in 2019. In other words, there are now 10 micro-influencers for every mega-influencer, compared with 3 micro-influencers per celebrity in 2016.

Working with Influencers

84% of respondents said that they upped their content.
That means they are hiring more and more influencers to create that content.

91% of our survey respondents believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing.

2/3 of respondents are looking to INCREASE their spend on influencer marketing in 2020.
This is further proof that influencer marketing remains successful and shows no sign of slowing down. After a few years of robust growth in influencer marketing, you might have anticipated the movement of marketing budgets to "the next big thing." However, that hasn't happened yet – brands and marketers can still see the effectiveness of influencer marketing and are not yet searching for something new. 

65% of our respondents measure the ROI from their influencer campaigns.
The most common measure of influencer marketing success is now conversions/sales.

Influencer fraud is of increasing concern to respondents.
More than 2/3 of respondents have experienced influencer fraud

Finding the Right Influencers

Finding influencers is the greatest challenge for those who run campaigns in-house.

Audience relationship is the most important factor when looking at influencers: 53% said that audience relationship is #1, the second most important factor is content production at 27%.

When evaluating influencers to use in campaigns, 41% of the survey respondents rated engagement or clicks as being their most important criterion compared with 26% who opted for content type/category or 25% who consider views/reach/impressions to be the most important.

More than half of survey respondents have worked with 10 or fewer influencers and a further 27% had worked with 10-50 influencers and 12% with 50-100 influencers.

Survey respondents spend more on micro-influencers today than they do on celebrities Respondents spent 47% of their influencer budget on micro-influencers (compared to just 23% for celebrity influencers).

What does this mean for you?

Bottom Line: This is an exciting study, and as an influencer you are in the right spot. These statistics should further encourage you in pursuing your career as a content creator. The marketing world is taking notice and is spending much more time, resources and money on influencer marketing. What does that mean? There are more and more opportunities for YOU, the influencer.

How do you take advantage of this? Continue to create good content, be clear on who you are serving and bring your best self to camera (if on YouTube).

Check out the show notes

Join the Zero to Influence Bootcamp waitlist

Download your FREE guide: 6 Tools YouTubers Use to Get Thousands of Video Views

Don't forget to join the Beauty and the Vlog Facebook group for collaborations, YouTube advice, support and more!

You can also follow me on Instagram!