From The Bachelor reality star to YouTuber with Michelle Money and Laura Armstrong of the MM&L Show: Beauty and the Vlog Podcast 24
Michelle Money and Laura Armstrongs are two best friends in the beauty industry who deicded to start a YouTube channel. The hilariously quirky and beautiful duo revealed their struggles with YouTube and some of the highs of having a YouTube channel. You might recognize Michelle Money as a former bachelor contestant and a star on Bachelor Pad 1 and Bachelor in Paradise. The MM and L show has 76k subscribers and 7.4 million video views.
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MM and L Show Notes!!
Below are my favorite moments from this episode. Please note that what has been written below has been paraphrased from the actual interview.
What inspired you to start your YouTube channel?
LA: What inspired us is someone gave us the idea, someone we had worked with and Michelle was on the Bachelor for the first time and everyone wanted to know how she curled her hair. Initially we did a video on that, not necessarily to launch a YouTube channel, we just did it for fun and one of our business partners said you two need to have a YouTube channel. You are professionals, you are licensed, you have great chemistry together, you are great on camera, you two need to do this. He was the one who gave us the idea just by us doing the video for fun on the “money curl”.
MM: I think what kept us going was getting the feedback and having people tell us how much it helped them and how much they learned. The more videos we started uploading about beauty and makeup, it’s so rewarding to hear that you are actually helping someone helping someone feel better about themselves
MM Laura is a master esthetician and she was working with a product and the marketing guy for that product was working with her on that. She came in as a professional to work on that product. The marketing guru for them was the one who sparked our interest in YouTube.
LA I did videos for that company. I freelanced for the personal microderm and helped them launch that product. Michelle and I both did things for the POMD and it was one of the partners in that company that had the interest in us.
How long have you been friends?
MM We have been friends for ten years.
Have you worked together before?
MM We are in the same industry so we both had that passion for beauty and everything so it was the perfect fit .There is nothing better. You cant beat working with your best friend. Most of the time its not work. We do what we love to do and record ourselves doing it. Laura lives four townhomes down, we work at the same salon. We are soul sisters. It’s not like work, it’s awesome.
What is your beauty background?
LA: I am still an esthetician and I had done that the whole time.
MM: I worked behind a chair doing cut and color for 12 years. I still do that.
Beauty Bonus Round
What are your three holy grail Items?
Personal Microdermabrasion Tool. Its an aggressive results driven tool. PMD.
NYX concealer
Tinkle Razor: Facial razor. We believe very strongly that women should not have facial hair. There is this crazy myth that you are going to grow back thick ,dark hair and we love shaving our face and doing it with the tinkle razor. You can progress with the gillette which I have done. The tinkle razor exfoliates your face. One of the best beauty secrets in the world. The least expensive holy grail item anyone will talk about it. Yuu can buy it on Amazon. We shave at least once a week or more.
Big Sexy Hair Volumizing Shampoo: Dry Shampoo: You can’t leave home without dry shampoo.
Eminence Skin Care
Best tip our listeners and viewers can Implement today that will help them increase their subscriber base?
It’s funny, we actually don’t know. Do you have any advice for us? Never do 30 videos in 30 days. It was really fun, it didn’t turn out the way we hoped. We thought if we were going to do quadruple the videos we thought we would get quadruple the subscribers. That didn’t happen. We lost a lot of sleep and have a couple extra fine lines from it. When we do something we go big or go home and we don’t like going home so we went big. we were like, we need to rededicate ourselves, we need to get back on track, we need to do something different, we need to think out of the box and we were like, we need to do 30 videos in 30 days. And then we did it and then we were like, remember how we shouldn’t have done that? It was fun and funny and an adventure. I actually can’t believe it happened now. All I can say is that we have been told if you are consistent, collab you will get more subscribers. If you fit into the mold of what YouTubers do and you will grow. If we were to upload at 10am every Monday and it was a video that was filmed a certain way, edited a certain way, had all the links done appropriately, annotation, there is a way. What is our problem? We are busy! We don’t have time. I think we have a lot going on. If this was our full time job it would be like we had an appointment waiting for us at this time. Maybe we were impatient. Do you know what it is? I am just going to be honest with you. We love being in front of the camera, sharing our tips and tricks. We hate the preproduction and the post production because it takes so much time and tedious works and it interferes with other things in our life that shouldn’t be interfering with it. We need to have our bread and butter. If we had a spouse or a second income to help us out that was bringing in money. It has become more of a burden because we are working so hard and taking every spare second we have to do this and at the same time we are not going to lunch with our friends, we are not going out, we are not sleeping. We just need help. Do you know anyone who could help us? We enjoy the production when we don’t have a time crunch. I actually love editing. Its fun to do all that, but we have kind of gotten to where we love doing it where we are not depending on it as our financial source of income. We enjoy it when we can do it when we have the time to do it and we want to do it and when we have the time to edit it and do it thats when they come out the best. But when we put up half assed videos we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
What do you use to edit?
We use imovie to edit. We love it, its great.
Who are your beauty vlogger inspirations:
We love Kandee Johonson. We met eleventhgorgeous, they are cute. I love daily grace, I think she’s so funny. We love CuteGIrlsHairstyles, they are so great.
What do you wish you knew when you first started?
That it was going to be really hard. That it wasn’t going to happen overnight and that it was going to require serious dedication and time.
What piece of advice who is starting their own channel
It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of dedication. Makes sure you are committed and its not as easy as it looks and you have to love it, you have to have passion behind it.
Just to end on a high note. We love what we do, we love doing it. It’s an amazing journey and it’s something that if you do get into it you will fall in love with your subscribers and the whole process. There is this amazing connection that you get from people all over the world and they look up to you and respect you. It’s really an amazing thing to have the audience through YouTube to touch peoples lives and help them learn something. Women need validation and friendship and it has been amazing to share our friendship.
