The Journey of a YouTuber: Pros and Cons Unveiled

It seems today everyone wants to be a social media influencer, but there are some pros and cons, and some of those cons can be scary. I'll share a story with you here in this video. Having worked years on my social media content, I would 100% say it is absolutely worth it. But I want you to understand both sides of the coin. Everything in life has trade offs. For every pro there is a con. And sometimes those cons can be pretty scary. And I've had a few scary experiences myself that I'll share with you. But I don't want that to scare you away from doing YouTube and being successful because I think the pros definitely outweigh some of those cons. Pro number one, you can make a lot of money on YouTube, all right? There's no question about it that once you build a brand that things can really start going. You know, the first couple years on YouTube, I didn't really make a lot of money, but about two and a half, three years in, I started making a full time income. I basically went from about $10,000 a year to making a six figure income within the span of a year when my channel finally did take off. So there is the opportunity to make some good money on YouTube. Now the flip side of that is that it takes a lot of work to actually get there. Okay, if you are an educator like me, all right, that's what I do on this channel. I help educators, course creators use YouTube so that they could have success and make more money in the online space. It just takes time, all right? It's not going to happen instantly. This is not an overnight success story. So, yes, eventually you can make some good money, but it does take a long time to get there. And a lot of YouTubers quit far too soon before they see any type of success. Another pro about YouTube is it can create a lot of flexibility in your time and your schedule. All right? So right now, this weekend, I am spending the entire weekend, right, recording content. I'm batch recording content for the next month, all right? So after today, I'm not going to record any other content for the next month, all right? Kind of frees up my time and I can do whatever I want with all my other time. Now the downside of this is that YouTube is not a truly passive income source. I think a lot of people get this confused with YouTube. They're like, oh, it's passive income. There's some things that are passive. So for example, yeah, I'm recording all the content and, and there's some other things I'm going to have to do. These videos are going to have to get edited. I'm going to have to approve them. We're going to have to make thumbnails and all this other stuff. So the work isn't done, but it does free up a lot of my time. But the downside with YouTube or any content creation site is you have to keep making more content or the channel will slowly phase out and die. All right, if YouTube's going to. YouTube's going to notice when you are not uploading content and it's going to say, what's up with Lauren? She's like not giving us any love anymore. Well, if Lauren's not giving us any love, we're not going to give her love anymore. And while, yes, you could probably let the channel glide and you'd make some passive income, but slowly, over time, that's going to decline. So once you get to be successful on YouTube, understand that it's not truly passive. You're always going to have to make deposits into the system to keep things running. Another pro is that you can create an amazing community of clients who will be your super fans, who will buy your products and support you no matter what you do. I have an amazing community of guitar students. We had an event over the summer and people fly in from all over the world, Germany, Australia, all over the US to come and play guitar and have fun and meet other people around guitar. That's crazy, right? But they're really awesome people and I've gotten to know some of them really, really well. And it's like a family now. So that's super awesome. Especially if you want to create community around whatever you're doing for your business, and I highly recommend that you do. Now, the down of that is that there can be some crazies. And I've had some. I've had some crazies and probably the scariest one, some guy got a hold of my cell phone number and started calling. I mean, he was calling like non stop. He left me maybe like six or seven messages that were about two or three minutes long, I think. Finally it stopped because he couldn't leave any voicemails anymore. And the voicemails he was leaving me were really, really creepy. Really crazy stuff. I felt a little bit concerned. You can see from my hat. I'm not too concerned if someone shows up at my house. But I was a little concerned. I'm like, okay, is this, Is this person crazy enough that they're going to show up at my house. And I know some content creators, I know some YouTubers who've had people show up at their house. It's pretty easy to look up someone's phone number. It's pretty easy to find someone's home address online. It really is. So you always have to keep that in mind when you're doing social media and your brand starts to grow. Fortunately, the majority of people, 99%, are super awesome. But just always keep that in the back of your mind as you get bigger and as your brand grows, you always want to keep the safety of you and your family first. An amazing pro of being an online educator here on YouTube is that you get to help a lot of people achieve their dreams. I actually got an email the other day from a guy, his last name was Bateman. He's from Bath, England. And he actually emailed me and he said, we use your songs, the songs that you do on YouTube. We're a geriatric band. The average age of the band is 78. So it was awesome. And they sent me this picture of them. I said, do you have a photo that you can share with me? And it's the four of them, and they've all got, like, matching shirts and pants. The name of the band was called now and Then, he said, because that's how often we're in tune together. And I thought that was great. I mean, here's people, I'm in Boston, Massachusetts, and here's people in Bath, England, and I'm having a positive influence on their life. And not only that, they're using the skills I'm teaching them. They're going into elderly homes and nursing homes and they're performing music. So by me helping them, they are further helping another community of people that I never thought I would reach. So it's really cool. You never know who you're going to help. I've had people write to me telling me, you know, that I've saved their lives or got them out of depression. You just never know. That is probably one of the most rewarding things about being a content creator and an educator here on YouTube. The downside is, listen, you're always going to have haters. I had someone reach out to me the other day and he asked me, lauren, when you get a thumbs down on your video, does it, like, make you sad or upset? And I said, listen, his name was James. I said, james, listen, you're not going to make everyone happy on YouTube, all right? Even if you were selling ice cream, people are like, the only way to get People to like you is if you give them ice cream. But there's people who are lactose intolerant that aren't going to like the ice cream. All right? There's some people who don't like ice cream. Ice cream is not particularly my favorite thing to eat eat. But no matter what you do in life, you're going to have haters. And as you grow, you are going to have more of them, and you're going to have some that are going to be more vocal. And my recommendation on YouTube is if you've got someone who's really getting under your skin, just hide them from your channel. Just block them for your channel. Don't let them take up that mental space, all right? Because you really want to focus on the people you're helping. You want to focus on all the people who gave you a thumbs up. All right? Everyone's like, I got 500 thumbs up, but I got one thumbs down. It's like, who cares? It's one thumbs down. Like, tell that person to go screw themselves. They're probably miserable anyway. And that's why they gave you a thumbs down. They're miserable. No matter what you did, they were never going to give you a thumbs up. So focus on the people who give you a thumbs up. Another pro about YouTube is that you get to build a business and make money around your passion. I'm truly passionate about guitar. I love helping people make their dream of playing guitar come true, especially older adults, because I think people forget about them and think like they're washed up and they can't do anything. And they're my favorite group of people to work with, and I love helping them make their dreams come true. That's really passionate for me. The downside is for a lot of people, they start getting into the content creation process and their passion starts feeling like a job. All right, because that's, again, we're building a business. This technically is my job. This is not. Again, it's not a passive income stream. It is a job. And for a lot of people, it starts becoming overwhelming because they've got to do the content creation, they've got to do the editing, they got to answer emails, they got to respond to comments. You know, they got to do all the social media marketing and promotion, and it becomes a lot. And they start getting overwhelmed and they stop loving their passion. And it happens to a lot of creators. They just get overwhelmed. And my recommendation to kind of solve this problem is to outsource as much as possible, especially the editing. I find most people hate the editing process. Especially if you're not very tech savvy, editing can really suck your soul. I really liked editing, but for a lot of people, I would say 90% of the YouTube creators that I've actually worked with and coached, they hate the editing process. So that's the first thing I recommend. As soon as you can get the editing process out of your hands, it's going to make your life a lot better. It's going to make you be able to focus on the stuff that you like to do, which is creating the content around your passion and helping others. The YouTube journey is full of ups and downs, and if you want to see how I went from 0 subscribers to 100,000 subscribers, going to share that journey right there in that video, go click on that. I'll see you soon.