The Basic Do's and Dont's of Making Successful Videos
A story of failure and success. A story of Rich's past that could be a story of your future.
"If you find something that works, well, you need to repeat it over and over again."
Rich currently has 47000 followers on Tiktok & 1000 subscribers on Youtube. He started last July 2020. Being an influencer in the travel nurse world was not his first attempt at being an influencer. He started streaming games on Facebook, learned how to edit videos, and made lots of content about gaming. He placed it on Youtube and Tiktok thinking it would be great -which ultimately didn't happen. He tried to make educational gaming content, funny and clever videos. People were watching but were not following. He keeps going back to his drawing board.
HE STUDIED TIKTOK. Watch time is key. "The most successful tiktokers - make their video into loop" (a video where it is perfectly cut, the viewer not being able to tell where the beginning is). This increases engagement - having tiktok push it to a lot more people. He tried this method which did increase his number of views but did not translate into followers. He spent lots of time and energy into something with minimal results. Until one day a break came for him - he was streaming and got paired with a famous content creator. He created lots of content from this stream. Until people were just no longer interested in it.
"If you find something that works, well, you need to repeat it over and over again." He felt like it was the end of his gaming streams. One day, while on a travel assignment, he reviewed the stream he had with the famous content creator, where he was asked what he does for a living, to which he responded Travel Nursing. While scrolling through the comments, he figured that a lot of people don't know anything about travel nursing itself. That's when he realized why not make some videos to see if anyone is interested in travel nursing content. Everything about travel nursing seemed kind of mysterious.
So there seemed to be a need for getting content out there to kind of make travel nursing less confusing.
He posted simple videos - no tricks and loops. He ended up getting a decent number of views for these videos. Which also brought tons of followers. Within two weeks, he had more followers than the entire 9 months he spent on his gaming channel. He made the executive decision to prioritize his time - completely quitting the gaming and streaming stuff altogether to focus on making tiktoks for travel nursing. He ended up passing 10,000 followers - and if over a a certain age, would be eligible for the TikTok Creator Fund.
He also started receiving brand deals. For most of them, he ended up saying "no". He felt like, in order to promote somebody, they need to have an idea, or a product that can really benefit his audience. 90% of those views are going to come from the For You Page (FYP)- from people who are not following you at all. Don't just start with one, you want to learn a few of them. (recommends TikTok & Instagram) Know that they operate differently and don't have the same algorithm.