ASLU 062: Creative Canadian Women - Lisa Le & Getting Started with YouTube

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This week’s episode features Hamilton based YouTuber and blogger, Lisa Le. Lisa is the creator behind The Viet Vegan, a vegan and ethical lifestyle food blog and YouTube channel where she always aims to advocate for veganism with an intersectional approach: creating vegan content with an environmentally-conscious, LGBTQ+ inclusive, self-critical and feminist lens.

In this episode we talk with Lisa about how she went from pursuing a career as a translator to becoming a successful full-time blogger and YouTuber and how YouTube helped her diversify her revenue and grow her core audience. She also shares some of her best tips to help you get started on YouTube so you can grow your audience and customer base while avoiding some of the pitfalls and dealing with some of the less than helpful commentary the platform sometimes brings.

As a child Lisa excelled at math and sciences but her mom also made sure she had access to as many creative activities as possible. From music and art classes to dance to ceramics, she loved to indulge her creative side. But it was writing and journaling that really stuck with her through childhood and continues to be a big part of who she is today. Her love of writing and her determination to master some of the subjects that challenged her the most in school led to her studying to be an English/French/Spanish translator in university.

In 2011, like many successful bloggers, Lisa started her food blog while in the middle of working on her degree (seriously, this is how so many bloggers start!) as a creative outlet away from academia. But after graduation she wasn’t sure what her next step would be. She pondered the idea of becoming a video game translator but eventually went back to school to work on her master’s degree. All through this blogging was always there in the background.

After graduation, she stumbled into a marketing job that came about through her blog (which started out as a baking blog, transitioned to a vegetarian baking blog and then to a vegan baking blog and then to more of a journal with recipes). Like all bloggers, she had learned how to market herself, how to use social media, how to do some coding to keep her website going - all skills that translated very well to the early days of digital marketing in the food world.

The marketing job gig clicked. She loved it and realized that the translation skills she had been honing for years, were about communication and so was marketing. It was a perfect fit - she was communicating with people from all over and creating content that resonated with those people!

Along the way she started on a journey that took her to vegetarianism (to help with some health issues) and then transitioned to veganism for ethical reasons as she learned more about where her food was coming from and became more concerned with sustainability. As she started experimenting with vegan recipes on her blog, those recipes exploded as more and more people were looking for meat-free meals and it grew her blog traffic exponentially.

Lisa was drawn to start a YouTube channel because she enjoyed the platform as a user and she enjoyed the process of film-making. (she actually had a channel in high school!). Her now partner, Eddie, had gone to broadcast and film school and suggested that she start another YouTube channel for her blog so showcase her sense of humour, which the blog didn’t always give her the opportunity to show. She also found it so much easier to explain some of the recipes and cooking techniques she was using on video than in a written blog - especially in a way that was simple and approachable.

As she noticed her channel was driving more traffic to her blog, she realized YouTube could actually be a powerful marketing tool for the blog itself and started to focus more time on it. While her blog (and not her YouTube channel) is still her main revenue source, YouTube plays a critical role in helping her diversify her revenue streams, connect with a wider audience and drive traffic to her main website.

If you just want the links to the resources mentioned in this episode, scroll down to the bottom.

Listen To the Episode

Here’s a direct link to Episode 62 . You can also listen via the player below or on your favourite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Stitcher, and more). Just search for And She Looked Up!

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people buy connection

give them a reason to feel that connection with you.

tips for getting started on Youtube from this episode

In this episode we talk about YouTube a lot. Here are some of Lisa’s tips, cautions and gear suggestions:

  • don’t expect YouTube to become your main, sustainable revenue source - to do that you need to be seeing 100K-1M monthly views and that takes a very long time and requires you to create content that resonated with a very large audience

  • getting comfortable on camera takes practice. Start out filming yourself on your phone over and over again until your comfort level rises

  • practicing editing is another great way to get comfortable with seeing yourself on screen and learning to disassociate yourself from that person (all that practice also improves your video production quality!)

  • you can create YouTube content without appearing on camera

  • watch other YouTubers that you enjoy and who make the kind of content you want to make and analyze their content:

    • is it scripted or free flow?

    • Structured content or more casual and chatty

    • is the person on camera or do you never see them

    • do they talk or is it silent or filmed to music

    • where is the camera? Are they holding it or is it on a tripod? Or a mix of both?

  • start to reverse engineer what you’re watching - doing this can help break down a video and show you that it’s really a series of small steps strung together and that can make it much less intimidating

  • a lot of YouTubers are shy introverts! It may sounds odd but many find it easier to talk to a camera than to a person so if you’re an introvert or shy, you can do this.

  • YouTube is a very powerful way to show how to do things in a way that’s very approachable for visual learners - this makes it a great platform for makers, creators and artists

  • you don’t need as much gear as you think you do when you start out: you need light, a camera and good sound

    • if you want to up your lighting you can have a key light, a fill light and a hair light. Lisa just uses a key light and a fill light

    • if you’re not sure this is something you want to do, don’t buy studio light until you’re sure. You can start with natural light

    • the production value doesn’t have to be amazing as long as people can hear you so you can invest in a lav mic that connects to your phone or camera or a shotgun mic that sits on top of your DSLR. If you’re not talking, you don’t need a mic - you can add music during editing.

    • your phone can work just fine when you’re starting out

  • make content that you’re excited about and that interests you - not what’s “popular”. People can tell when you’re not being authentic on video

  • don’t be afraid to set boundaries around your channel with how much you share. And be cognizant of oversharing content about people who are close to you. Are their stories your stories to tell? And are they comfortable being a part of your channel - even if they don’t appear on camera?

  • negative feedback can be crippling but it’s important to know that it’s the minority of feedback. YouTube also has tools that allow you to block comments that contain certain language or words.

  • YouTube is a great place to form a connection with your audience for creators - people who buy or hire creatives like to have a connection to them . Your production doesn’t have to be amazing - the secret is letting people find a connection to you. You can:

    • show your process

    • talk about your work

    • give a studio tour

    • let people see a work in progress

  • YouTube can drive people to your Esty shop or online shop or website. It can help you grow a Patreon platform and build your email list. It can show people how to use your product and encourage them to buy. It can help you grow that community of 1000 true fans who will buy from you consistently.

  • Your YouTube content can be repurposed in so many other locations - Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, your website, your Etsy listings.

Mentioned In This Episode

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Podcast Episode, Inspiring WomenMelissa HartfielY2S2, creative enterpreneurshp, youtubeComment