Hi Everyone, It’s Becka here, you may have known me from Becka’s Beauty Blog, Love Becka or more recently - the In Real Life channel! I’ve been ever so kindly allowed to guest post over here to spread the word about my new venture and YouTube channel and let everyone know a little more about it!
One thing that I feel YouTube is still sorely lacking is a community. Unless you’re up there with the big guns such as Tanya, Zoe or Alfie, there’s just not the same sense of togetherness that you get with blogging. How to rectify this? People have tried and failed at twitter chats and they almost always come back round to blogging, you can support each other until you’re blue in the face but it’s never quite the same as looking down the #bbloggers hashtag to see oodles of new blog posts. I then looked to try and join Mums Eye View, ha, fat chance! Maybe Channel Mum? No, they weren’t interested in me either. Then I had a Eureka moment, why not create something similar myself?!
I certainly didn’t want to create a carbon copy of the pre-existing YouTube communities made for Mum’s as even my own channel doesn’t focus solely on being a parent. I wanted to create an inclusive channel that features YouTubers from any and every genre, who are free to post about whatever it is they like. I wanted to create somewhere where any blogger in the blogosphere could subscribe and find something that was relevant and interesting to them, no matter what point they were at in their lives or what they were interested in.
From there, the In Real Life channel was born. It didn’t take too long to decide on a name as I’d already decided that I wanted it to be relatable and real, I love watching the big YouTubers but often their advice just isn’t something I can bring to my everyday life as we’re worlds apart. Pretty much overnight I set up an email and twitter account and started spreading the word. The next morning I sourced hosting and a domain to create our website and to my surprise the interest came rolling in!
I set up a giveaway (which has now closed, sorry!) to get our name out there and I was thrilled that within three weeks I had over 40 bloggers and YouTubers genuinely interested in joining my channel! Of course not everyone got back to me but in the end we started with 24 of us. One male and the rest of us female, all a mixture of parenting, beauty, fashion, lifestyle, travel, weddings and so much more. We have a calendar full of video ideas right up until November and our December calendar is full to the brim of fantastic Christmas Videos!
There is now 22 of us who are uploading regularly, filming collaboration videos and chatting almost all day on twitter. I’m so lucky to be working with some real gems who are always helping me out by taking over the Twitter or tweaking bits of our website or newsletter that are beyond my capabilities! It’s certainly fulfilled it’s duty to me, I feel like part of a fantastic community, nay, family of YouTubers and I really wish everyone within it the success they deserve.
For August we are uploading every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8pm and then every Sunday at 11am. We host the #IRLChat every Friday night at 8pm on our Twitter account and our uploads will increase to six days per week come September. Once we hit 500 subscribers on our YouTube channel we’ll be doing another giveaway to thank everyone for their support so far and I’m afraid the rest of our plans are a secret for now.
I know many people say this but I honestly appreciate every single person that follows us on Twitter, watches our videos or subscribes to our YouTube Channel. I’ve said that this will be my last furore into the blogging and YouTube world and to see that it has a real chance of being a success is so heartwarming, every time our subscriber count climbs by just one person it makes my heart swell with pride. The people involved in this channel deserve so much more than I could ever give them as they are all genuinely lovely people so more than anything I want to make this channel great for them!
Thank you so much to Laura, for letting me guest post today. It was lovely to “get my blog on” again and spread the word about something I’m super passionate about!
Until next time,
Love, Becka xo