A Mennonite YouTuber? The Life of an Ultra Conservative Christian on YouTube with Megan Fox: The YouTube Power Hour Podcast 332
“People come for the content and they stay for the personality. Either you click with a creator or you don’t.”
Be sure to check out my Free 2022 YouTube Goals Workbook! Inside you’ll find you’ll find an exercise that I do with my clients and in my Bootcamp that will help you stick with and achieve your goals on YouTube. The journaling and reflection exercises in the workbook have three different components that we’re going to focus on: money, lifestyle, and mindset, and will help align your life goals with your YouTube goals to help create the 2022 that YOU want.
Megan Fox (no, not THAT Megan Fox) is a mennonite millennial mom from Lancaster County, PA. Her channel includes DIYs, cooking, decorating, modest outfit ideas, DITL, travel vlogs, and informative lifestyle videos. By creating content on her YouTube channel, Megan hopes to encourage, inspire, and inform her viewers on topics related to life as a young mom, while spreading positivity and productivity. I love having female creators of all kinds on the podcast, and I’m thrilled to welcome Megan, my very first mennonite guest!
Megan is a former school teacher and now a stay-at-home mom, and she is a Mennonite, which means she looks and dresses a little differently than most people, but her content is exactly what you may expect from a lifestyle vlogger and stay-at-home mom. And yes, she is often confused with Megan Fox the actress, both online and in person, but it probably worked in her favor by generating more interest to her channel.
So what is a Mennonite? Mennonites are Christians who have a very distinct lifestyle and value system, and one of the most obvious hallmarks of this is their modest dress, which includes skirts or dresses and head coverings for women and girls. They don’t wear jewelry of any kind, and they uphold tenants of simple living in many ways. Unlike the Amish, a closely related group, they do use technology, not things like the horse and buggies you might associate with the Amish. Many people might confuse Mennonites for Amish, but they are different. The Mennonites are not a cult, and people join and leave as they please.
Megan started her channel in 2018. She had always thought that YouTube was just for funny videos of cats or grainy reruns of TV shows, but she discovered this entirely different world of YouTube content creation and has been hooked ever since. She didn’t see any other Mennonites on YouTube, and at the time, there were a lot of popular reality TV shows about the Amish and Mennonites. Obviously, reality TV isn’t actually reality, but she found that when she would go out in public, she would get asked the same questions about a lot of the misconceptions generated by these shows. So, she decided that she wanted to set some things straight about these misconceptions. She was a new mom and she didn’t want to return to her teaching career, but she still felt like she needed something to do… not so much for an income, but just like a project to occupy her time. Since YouTube started out as a hobby for Megan, she had no expectations, which ended up being a good thing. She didn’t take herself too seriously and was about to laugh off her mistakes. Her husband has been incredibly supportive of her endeavor from the beginning. Megan’s first video was posted in August of 2018, and she’s posted every Thursday since. She started off filming with her phone, but quickly upgraded to a camera.
“That’s what people like about YouTube: the real life, the raw, the unedited.”
Megan’s Channel Takes Off
Megan did a lot of research about YouTube and watched tons of YouTube gurus, googled everything she needed to know, and soaked it all in like a sponge before uploading her first video, and she has continued to learn as she goes. Megan had not found any other Mennonites on Youtube, but there was one: Lynette Yoder, and she found Megan before Megan could find her. Lynette had about 20k subscribers at the time and she gave Megan a shoutout on her channel to her audience. Looking back, Megan didn’t think she was quite ready for that yet, since she only had a few videos under her bonnet, but she instantly jumped to 1,000 subscribers, and the more she uploaded, the more videos she was getting on her videos.
After 6 months, she applied for AdSense, and 6 months after that, she did her first sponsorship and she got picked up for YouTube Creator on the Rise, which catapulted her channel once again. Her view count tends to be much higher than her subscriber count, because a lot of people are genuinely curious about her lifestyle. Since then, her channel has kind of ebbed and flowed, but she presently has nearly 140k subscribers.
Being a Mennonite YouTuber
Because of her Mennonite lifestyle, which values men being the primary breadwinners of the family (which is not to say that women can’t or aren’t allowed to work, it just means that they aren’t expected to), the money that Megan was earning from her channel was put into a bank account, hopefully to be used one day to send her kids to a private Christian school, which can be pricey in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. As her channel grew, Megan started getting recognized when she would go on vacations or out in public in the area. Being recognized and meeting her subscribers put faces and a sense of reality to the abstract subscriber count number.
Megan started her channel wanting to be helpful so that her viewers could get something from it, but she started adding more personality to her videos. A lot of the mom community comes to her channel for companionship and a helpful tip or two, especially those who live in remote areas and who may not have other moms their age in their community. And helping dispel the common misconceptions about her Mennonite community is an added bonus.
“I feel like a whole other world has opened up to me because of YouTube.”
Managing it All
Megan has 3 kids under the age of 5, maintains her household, and runs her channel. How does she do it? Well, she is a mom first. Being present for her kids comes first, and YouTube just kind of fills in the cracks in between. She treats her office hours seriously just like at any “real” job, usually when her kids are taking their naps. Her husband helps when he can, and her sister comes over every now and then to help with housework or babysitting. She did have an editor for a while, and she does have a management team who helps her with her brand sponsorships. She sticks with one video a week, and that’s about all she can muster!
Final Thoughts
Megan’s hope is that her audience will grow with her. While she would love to keep growing her channel, she only would want to grow her subscribers in a way that wasn’t real or authentic to who she is. Megan is also planning on diversifying, because the reality is that none of us own YouTube and we don’t control the algorithm. She has her own brand that sells curated products made by mostly Mennonite and stay-at-home moms, and she’d like to keep expanding her brand.
Megan’s #1 piece of advice is to not worry about what other people think about you. You don’t answer to others. Live your life. If you want to start a channel, but you’re holding back because you’re afraid about what people will think about you, just go for it! Learn along with your audience. Be honest and humble.
She has found a lot of joy in the community she has created on YouTube. Her superpower? Her strong work ethic, but that is the norm for the Mennonite community. Megan is a go-getter, who is not comfortable being comfortable. She is proof that you can have it all, as long as you plan ahead!
“People ask me all the time for advice, and honestly, you just have to do the next step, and then do the next step, and don’t plan too far ahead and just see where it goes.”
Mentioned in the Episode:
How to Sew a Dress with Just Two Seams and a Hem | Mennonite Dress Tutorial
Answering Your Assumptions about Mennonites
How to Easily Carry Your Baby on Your Back
Connect with Megan:
Megan Fox Unlocked on Instagram
Resources
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Watch my replay of my FREE Zero to 100k Subscribers Masterclass
FREE GUIDES:
Creating Content During Crisis: How to Create Impactful Content During COVID-19 Pandemic
Getting Started on YouTube: YouTube Niche Workbook
How to get onto PR lists and receive a TON of free product even if you have a small following: PR List
YOUTUBE OPTIMIZATION PLUG-IN I RECOMMEND
TubeBuddy [Use the code ErikasBuddy to get 20% off]
MY FAVORITE BUSINESS TOOLS
Course Creation: Looking to create a course? Kajabi is the BEST platform hands down. I use this for my course after extensive research on all the other platforms.
Live Calls and Interviews: I use Ecamm for my podcast interviews, both audio and for YouTube that you see here on YouTube. It makes it super easy to share my screen and create the split-screen with my guest. I’m not super techie and this software is really easy to use!
Webinars and Live calls: I use Zoom.us for my group coaching calls in my private membership group for female YouTube creators. It’s also the software I use to record my Road to 100k YouTube Subscribers Masterclass!
THE BEST YOUTUBE/PODCASTING EQUIPMENT
After interviewing HUNDREDS of successful YouTube creators, these are the pieces of equipment that hands down get mentioned time and time again. You can’t go wrong with anything on this list!
- 4k Camera: Great for starting out and vlogging
- Lens: This lens is recommended highly by many of my podcast guests, it gives the blurry “YouTuber” background look.
- Audio: If you want to upgrade your set-up, audio should be one of the first investments (after a good camera). This microphone is unanimously the favorite amongst my podcast guests.
- Podcast/Voiceover Microphone: If you are looking for a great microphone for a podcast or video voiceover, this is it! This is the one that you see in all of my videos and the one I’ve recorded my podcast on for years.
- Webcam: For my interviews, that you see in my videos, this is the webcam that I use. Super inexpensive and easy to set up!
- Inexpensive Lighting Kit: Need to pick up some lights but don’t want to spend a ton? This is a great set that will get you started and help improve the look of your videos.
- Ring light: Looking for that beauty look? Invest in a ring light! This is an inexpensive light that does that trick!
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