How this YouTuber with 1.5 Million Subs Overcame Anxiety Around YouTube with Brittany Vasseur: The YouTube Power Hour Podcast 341
“By talking about it and sharing it, it helps people feel less alone”
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.
Brittany Vasseur was born and raised in San Diego, CA. She studied International Development and International Economics at George Washington University because her initial career goal was to do International Development work in Africa. After living in Africa for a year, a traumatic event changed her entire life focus, so she moved back to Washington DC and became a consultant for a firm that wrote business plans for socially responsible businesses. Her brother became ill in 2013, so she moved back to San Diego to help her family run the family business: a Skin Care & Day Spa. As she became more and more involved in beauty and skincare, her mom encouraged her to start a YouTube Channel.
For the first 1-2 years of her channel, she made beauty related videos, and was eventually offered a position at Ipsy, but she decided to go in a completely different direction and change her channel focus to home and lifestyle. The rest, as they say, is history! Brittany now has over 1.5 million subscribers on her channel.
Brittany Vasseur has always been a “type A” perfectionist and people pleaser. She has always put a lot of pressure on herself, which can be the recipe for disaster in the content creation sphere. When her husband left his high paying career to help her run her business in March 2021, she had about 1.3 million subscribers. With a subscriber count like that, you would think Brittany was at a point where she could just coast, because she had made it, right? Wrong.
Hitting Rock Bottom
The pressure of being the sole breadwinner for the family, coupled with her perfectionist personality turned out to be the perfect storm that caused Brittany to spiral. The pressure she put on herself made her believe that she was on the brink of failure on a daily basis. She would find herself spiraling into negative thought patterns and have panic attacks almost daily. She realized that the stress, anxiety, and pressure she was putting on herself was making it so she wasn’t enjoying creating content… or really her life at all. She decided to get help, and in the moment, making the choice to get that help seemed like she had failed, but it actually turned out to be the best decision she ever made.
Brittany began seeing a therapist who quickly saw that Brittany would be a good candidate for prescription medication. Brittany hesitated more because she once again thought that the need for medication meant she was a failure, but she gave it a try, and the change was almost immediate. Now, she has a completely new perspective on content creation and sees her life and everything in through a completely different lens. Instead of living in a state of constant fear and feeling like she was a failure, she now feels gratitude and joy. Brittany can now say that she truly loves what she does and she feels so much happier. And while medication isn’t for everyone, that, coupled with getting help by seeing a therapist, helped her turn her life completely around. Not only is she now feeling joy in her career, but her marriage is stronger and she is a better mother, all because she made the decision to get help.
“It’s so important that you address and deal with your mental health.”
Taking Care of Your Mental Health
On the outside, seeing a creator like Brittany with 1.5 million subscribers be successful is the goal for so many YouTube creators out there who grind day by day, week by week, for the chance to grow their channel. You may see someone like Brittany and thing, “wow, she’s made it!” but according to Brittany, there’s never actually a point where you’ve “made it” and you can relax. In fact, the bigger you are, the more pressure there is. With more success comes more potential problems, and it’s important to deal with your mental health now so that you can be prepared to handle the increasing pressure of growing and maintaining a large YouTube channel.
So how can you do this? Create a schedule that allows you to maintain that balance in your life. For Brittany and her mental health, that’s one video per week. She prefers quality over quantity, and she’s been able to figure out that she can realistically produce one video per week that she can really put her heart into while still having a healthy work-life balance. Don’t feel like you have to post three times a week! You need to ask yourself what you can produce at the quality you want it to be while still balancing the things that are important to you. Whatever that may look like for you that allows you to maintain your balance and sanity, then do it, but stick to it! Whatever schedule works for you, just be consistent.
What about breaks? Should you take them? It really depends. Brittany has only missed 3 weeks total in her 8 years on YouTube. She didn’t even take 1 day of maternity leave, and while she admits that that’s not necessarily healthy, she also knows that sometimes when a channel takes a few breaks, it may never recover. Sometimes a channel will do just fine with a break. It’s all about balance!
“Create a schedule that is really manageable for you.”
Brittany’s Weekly Schedule
Her #1 piece of advice for YouTubers? Stop letting the outside noise or the other channels you’re seeing dictate what your channel and content looks like. It’s ok to study and learn from other channels, but don’t try to
Brittany has done everything herself and has since day 1, from filming to editing, to the thumbnail. She is reluctant to outsource because she feels that every step of the creation process is so much a part of her, and by outsourcing, she fears losing that piece. By doing everything herself, she knows what she’s creating is staying true to herself and her vision and maintains the integrity of her channel.
As a mom, entrepreneur, and content creator, a schedule is crucial. She uploads a video to her channel every Thursday (though sometimes it gets posted on Friday instead). Mondays are spent researching and outlining. Tuesdays are for filming and editing the talking portions of her video. Wednesdays are B roll filming days, which is the hardest day of the week because typically, her videos can have 15-25 tips, and that requires a lot of B-roll. On Thursdays, she wakes up bright and early for the final editing and thumbnail creation and when it’s ready, she publishes it. Fridays are for planning next week’s video, and she takes weekends off.
What I find super interesting about Brittany is that she doesn’t really check the views on her video! She may look at them months after it’s published, because her videos have a tendency not to do well at first, but because so much of her content is evergreen, they get picked up by the algorithm later.
Final Thoughts
Brittany’s goal with her channel is to bring value to her audience and to have everyone learn something from her content, and she has an incredible ability to make useful content fun and entertaining. If you can do both of those things, you can make it. If you’re adding value to people’s lives, they’ll keep coming back. If you’re doing it in a way that keeps them entertained, they’ll keep watching. If you can do both, that’s a recipe for success!
“If you’re adding value to people’s lives, they’ll keep coming back. If you’re doing it in a way that keeps them entertained, they’ll keep watching.”
Mentioned in the Episode:
Organizing an Extreme Hoarder Room! *Shocking Transformation*
How to Turn Your Bedroom into a Luxury Hotel ON A BUDGET!
15 EVERYDAY THINGS YOU’RE DOING WRONG THAT WILL SHOCK YOU!
Connect with Brittany Vasseur:
Resources
Add your name to the Zero to Influence YouTube Bootcamp waitlist so you are notified when space becomes available!
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!
FACEBOOK GROUP
Podcast Music Credit: Boop by x50 @x50music
Music provided by Free Music for Vlogs youtu.be/o52xQkQWzyU
*Erika Vieira is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to www.amazon.com.
**Disclaimers: all opinions are my own, sponsors are acknowledged. Links in the description are typically affiliate links that let you help support the podcast at no extra cost.
