Why Content Creation?
You might have noticed the difficult financial climate at the moment, both for business and personal lives. I can see it on my website sales, on my sales logs at shows, and I can hear it in conversations at shows - people are being careful with their money.
Businesses like mine are not essentials - although for our sanity sometimes we quilters claim they are- and spending with companies like mine is often one of the first things to go.
I understand that, and it's up to me to find ways around it, to try different income streams so that I don't have all my eggs in one basket.
Over the last couple of years I've been trying to work on my digital content. The local authority offered funded training for business, so I took a couple of courses in digital marketing, which I enjoyed immensely and I learnt a lot! I also got a grant to help me buy a camera and tripod to use when filming, which got me off to a great start.
If you've been a customer for a while, you may know that in 2022 my Facebook and Instagram accounts were hacked and for a reason unknown to me I lost admin rights and have not been able to regain them. All the following I had carefully built up was lost and I had to start all over again. I can't begin to tell you how heart breaking that was. I'm still not able to link my Shopify store to Meta because of this.
This is what prompted me to try different ideas. My nephew is a full time YouTuber and he gave me a few hints and ideas about how to get started. (Chronova Engineering)
I had a few goes at filming - they are still there on my YouTube channel - some of them I filmed in portrait when it should have been landscape, the camera was whizzing around all over the place giving people migraines - all very cringe!
I had a bit of a breakthrough with my first video when I visited Festival of Quilts. I got my video out quite early while the festival was still on, and it manged to get over 13,000 views. It's still my most viewed video to date. You can watch it here
My goal with YouTube was to get to 500 subscribers so that I could link my store -I have achieved that this year but not the 3000 watch hours within a year that I needed. SO it's a long slog.
I'm in a crowded space, there are lots of channels dealing with sewing and quilting and it's taken me a while to carve out my space but I am getting there. Most rewarding is when people seek me out at shows because they love my YouTube content!
I've got much more comfortable around talking to camera and photographing myself. I did find that hard at first. One of the things I found was that if you are a middle aged woman you're not always the most appealing person to look at compared to some of the glamourous YouTubers out there, but a large proportion of my customers are women of a similar age to me, and I took heart from that, after all, I wanted to seem relatable!
I've tried to be my authentic self on video and that has become a lot easier as I've got more relaxed.
Thinking of content has to be one of the hardest things about content creation, For the first year, it was fine as I vlogged each quilt show I attended, but after a year the whole run started again so I needed to find a different angle! I've been able to vlog a few small events at quilt groups, and those have been quite popular.
I also do tutorials about products that I sell, those are less popular, but they are there as an evergreen resource and they do steadily pick up views.
My next big event is Festival of Quilts, and it's such a big event in the quilting calendar it's always worth doing content around that. This year I'm going to do the week leading up, and my preparations in my studio, because I want to get a vlog out while the show is current, as I've found my videos always perform much better closer to the event.
Live Streams
I sometimes do a Live sale from my studio, I have found Facebook brings in the biggest return from this, and Instagram is not far behind. I've tried a couple of Lives of YouTube but that has just been a total dead loss! I think that's something that may grow in the future though.
Longform or shortform?
Actually, for me - both!
I use shortform reels on Instagram and cross post them over to Facebook. Although you can now add reels of us to three minutes, I try to keep them under a minute.
I have best results with YouTube Shorts. These do have to be under a minute, but you can link them to your longform videos and I think these have been a big factor in increasing my subscriber count.
See some of my recent shorts here
How can you help?
Subscribing to my channel is free and really helps! And obviously watching my videos, liking and commenting also helps, and it gives me an idea about what's working.
Thank you for reading and supporting me,
Ellie