Oh, the high hopes we had for 2020. We sincerely believed that the previous year was tough on us and this one would bring joy and happiness we deserved. How wrong we were. About 9 months ago, people became characters of Lemony Snicket’s novels “A Series of Unfortunate Events”. Fires, wars, protests, and of course the pandemic that forced half of humanity into their homes and resulted in the biggest recession after the great depression.
Self-distancing at home instead of having the time of your life on a vacation, a concert or simply in a bar is tough, to say the least. However, even in such a gloomy situation you can find a silver lining: vlogging. Finally, you have more time and fewer distractions to focus on creating content to connect with other people and grow your online business.
There is one problem the vlogging solution breeds: what do you vlog about in the age of confinement, travel restrictions and canceled events? This is exactly what we are going to talk about today. Whether you’re an expert vlogger with an army of followers looking for some fresh ideas or a newbie with nothing but a smartphone camera, enjoy the read.
From cave painting to digital content
Just like wolves, elephants, and lions, we, humans, are social animals. It’s in our nature to connect. And one of the most effective ways to do so has been through self-expression. Vlogging is not a revolution started by millennials. The more profound vlogging definition would be “it’s one of the ways to connect and engage with others.” Aristotle and Plato were doing it in their lectures, Kant and Nietzsche did this in their books, and thousands of people are doing it today. The only thing that has been changing is the medium evolving from papyrus and clay tablets to blogs and vlogs.
With the advancement of technology, video blogging has become one of the most engaging ways to reach out to people from all over the world in an instance. And it keeps expanding turning once shy kids with cameras into worldwide superstars with thousands of dollars of monthly income. But why do we keep coming back to our favorite creators for more content? Here are the top three characteristics that define the success of vlogging:
- Vlogging breaks borders. Before the internet, human consciousness, behavior and beliefs were mostly defined by the social circles in their environment. But the global network gives people the possibility to connect with like-minded individuals no matter where they are, expanding the horizons and developing ideas. For instance, now a small girl from Portugal can learn more about the Japanese culture than her grandma was ever able to. Furthermore, if there is some part of your life that you don’t like, with a few clicks on the mouse or a few taps on the screen you can escape reality by watching the new video of your favorite vlogger.
- Vlogging entertains and educates. Today, vloggers come in all shapes and sizes and cover a plethora of topics. Even if you have a very particular curiosity such as a comparison of the Georgian and Armenian languages, most probably there’s a vlogger that has done it. Long gone are the days when vloggers used their videos as diaries talking only about themselves. Nowadays, successful influencers focus on their viewers’ interests, be it comedy, useful skills, unique knowledge, extra motivation or simply amusement.
- Vlogging helps connect on a personal level. People want to know people. That’s why even the best make-up artist will fail as a vlogger if viewers don’t like him or her. In contrast, when we love the personality, their sense of humor, values and fights they pick, we want to continue our engagement with their videos. They don’t even have to be ideal. On the contrary, viewers love hearing about their favorite influencers’ imperfections and/or stories to which they can relate on a personal level.
Hunting for Ideas
Now that we’ve covered that vlogging is just a result of the innate need for connection, let’s move on to the next big question: how to find vlogging ideas? In order not to get lost and not to confuse your audiences, you’ll need to choose the topic of your channel. Let’s take a look at the ideas for the types of videos you can make in the comfort of your home: tutorial, personal, entertainment, and animation.
- Tutorial. If you have a skill, you must share it on your vlog. The topics can be diverse from DIYs to cooking videos, guitar lessons or even coding classes. The trick here is to focus on something you actually know how to do. You don’t have to be a renowned expert with skills beyond perfection, but it’s also important to look confident demonstrating other people what you can do. Avoid being an imposter that people smirk at after watching a video and leave for good.Also, think about what most people can relate to, or what is the common problem that your skill can solve: tiding a room, cooking a romantic dinner or reviving a dead plant. Don’t forget to monitor trends and check how you can contribute to them. Tip: a safe bet would always be making a video dedicated to a holiday.
- Personal. The concept of this vlog is as straightforward as it can get: in such videos vloggers share their lives with viewers. It sounds a lot easier than it actually is as the catch here is to find the angle and the topic that people will find compelling. It is difficult, but not impossible, as proven by numerous celebrities and vloggers from the Kardashians to Tyler Oakley.
If your choice falls on this category, these are some of the things you might talk about:- Overcoming personal struggling
- Dreams, plans, ambitions
- Your morning/evening/daily routine
- Bucket list
- An interesting or embarrassing story
- Fun facts about your life
- Q&A video
- Things that drive you crazy
These are only some topics from your personal life you can talk about. However, there are no fixed norms on what to do and what to stay away from. The life is yours and so are the rules. This means you can talk about any subject to your liking as long as it’s interesting to your viewers.
Entertainment. This type of vlogging is really popular. The main two reasons why users come to YouTube are “to relax” and “to feel entertained.” If you have a talent for making people better by entertaining them, then you’ve got a big potential. At the end of the day, this is how most of the successful vloggers gathered their audiences, including globally famous PewDiePie.
What can you do? Everything that people will find entertaining, including gaming streaming, parody, pranks, challenges, reaction videos, etc.
Animation has been winning viewers hearts for years. If you are skillful enough to create such videos, there is a range of topics you can cover: history, comedy, drama, to name a few. The best part is that you don’t need to be tech-savvy as there are numerous solutions (desktop and web) that allow users to easily create animations.
Platforms for Vloggers
Once you create the video, your next step is publishing it. In order to make sure you don’t send your videos into the void, it’s important to know which platforms to publish it on and what are the rules on each of them.
- TikTok never lacked popularity. It already had 500 million active users in July 2018. The lockdown brought the success of the app to an absolutely new level making it the most downloaded non-gaming app surpassing Facebook and WhatsApp. Its content can be described as fun and silly, just exactly what people needed when stuck home. As a result, only in the first quarter of 2020 the app witnessed 315 million installs.TikTok features a myriad of various unpretentious videos loved by users younger than 25. It is a perfect destination for publishing clips about:
- Food
- Fashion
- Pranks
- Pets
- Dance challenges
One of TikTok’s key advantages for vloggers is that you don’t need to have thousands of followers for your video to go viral. Its algorithms search for new potentially popular content to feature it on the “For You” page, where users see the most engaging videos in their region or worldwide.
- Instagram started as an app for sharing photos and as an escape destination for millennials and Gen Z from baby boomers that flooded Facebook. However, as soon as its management realized that video has taken its reign as the king of content, Instagram received major updates. Now users can also post video clips on their feed and Stories. Also, they are able to live stream and publish longer videos on IGTV.And these opportunities are worth seizing as in 2019 the number of active app users amounted to over 1 billion. During the lockdown the usage of Instagram has surged significantly as people started checking their feeds during working hours much more often because of working from home.Here are some tips on how to expand your audience on Instagram:
- It’s still a platform first created for photos, so don’t forget to publish a photo or a meme every now and then.
- Make sure you post consistently at least 4 times a week.
- If you already post videos on TikTok, don’t shy away from uploading them onto Instagram too.
- YouTube Of course, our good old friend that opened doors for vloggers. With 2 billion users, the Google-owned platform is still the largest video sharing website by far surpassing its competitors. This means two things:
- YouTube is a platform that has created the most vlogging celebrities.
- It is the most competitive platform with thousands of well-established vloggers.
But don’t get discouraged easily as the quarantine reality has offered some extra opportunities. In order to reach out to your potential audiences as well as keeping conversation with the existing ones, make sure your videos are dedicated to some trending topics during confinement:
- Home workouts
- Restaurant style
- Face masks
- Cooking and coffee brewing
- Gardening
- DIY haircuts
- Snapchat This social media app created a stir when its CEO Evan Spiegel turned down the $3 billion deal offered by Facebook. Rumor has it that after this incident Instagram Stories were designed to kill the Spiegel’s app. Nonetheless, Snapchat is still ranked as one of the most popular social apps with 229 million daily active users gaining 11 million during the 2020’s first quarter.Snapchat helps tell compelling stories by saving time and money on editing and equipment. Users don’t need expensive lighting, HD cameras and pricey software — the phone with an app is enough. Just like on any other platforms, the secret to becoming successful here is by delivering viewers value instead of turning snaps into streams of consciousness.
- CTV/OTT If millennials and Gen Z had been cutting cords before the pandemic, confinement that left them one on one with TV sets only exacerbated this trend. As of June 2020, 80% of American homes had connected TVs, and with time their popularity will only grow, hitting 50 million users by 2022.The popular misconception is that this platform is for large content owners or vendors such as Netflix, HBO or Disney. In fact, any vloggers with content and gathered audience can create their own channel for CTV platforms by partnering with VlogBox. This video monetization platform was established specifically for video creators to cut out the middlemen from the equation and thus increase their revenue by selling ads directly to advertisers.What is more, vloggers don’t need to expand their skillset and retrain for marketers, developers and system administrators. VlogBox handles app development, its hosting, maintenance and efficient ad monetization allowing creators to focus on their content and community.With YouTube changing policies that cut down the creators’ revenue, many vloggers have already established their vlogging business on this video monetization platform. Here are three examples of such channels:
- Saladeria HD is a cooking channel that explains how to make numerous dishes with various ingredients using different preparation techniques. Here users can learn how to cook salads with beans, meat, noodles and seafood. These videos have no narration, only a pair of hand demonstrating the process.
- SmartBabies TV is an educational channel for children from 4 to 6 years old. It features animation videos of two categories: ABC and ABC Universe. The first one offers fun engaging content that helps learn the alphabet. The second category focuses on themes, for instance “Birds”, where children learn how to spell and pronounce words related to different topics.
- Potential History is the collection of videos from the creators of the Potential History YouTube channel. It offers file footage from wars around the world from different times supplemented with narrative commentary. Also, the narrators speculate on various battle scenarios, assess technological advancements and military decisions and look at their impact on the final outcome of the war.
- TikTok never lacked popularity. It already had 500 million active users in July 2018. The lockdown brought the success of the app to an absolutely new level making it the most downloaded non-gaming app surpassing Facebook and WhatsApp. Its content can be described as fun and silly, just exactly what people needed when stuck home. As a result, only in the first quarter of 2020 the app witnessed 315 million installs.TikTok features a myriad of various unpretentious videos loved by users younger than 25. It is a perfect destination for publishing clips about:
Takeaways
The COVID-19 pandemic has become a hard blow for humanity. Still, it’s important to keep a positive attitude and try to benefit from those few opportunities that the pandemic and lockdown present. One of such benefits is the chance to start or develop your vlogging career. As people are forced to stay away from each other, the need to be connected increases. This provides fertile ground for vlogging platforms. Now more than ever you are equipped with tools to reach out to wider audiences offering your video content and build a successful business out of it.