Beauty Gossip with the Polarizing Sanders Kennedy: Beauty and the Vlog Podcast 75
Brooklyn native Sanders Kennedy started his popular YouTube gossip channel in 2013. In his videos, he spills the tea on YouTubers such as Jeffree Star, Nicole Guerriero, Jaclyn Hill and many more. Sanders currently has 161,000 subscribers and 18.5 million video views.
In this podcast, Sanders chats about the calculated risk of doing YouTube full-time, the difficulty of having friendships with influencers, and his superpower of being outspoken even when it offends.
Key Interview Takeaways
Before you pursue YouTube full-time, be sure you can sustain yourself. After four months of getting 100,000 views per video, Sanders felt safe working on his channel full-time.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Sanders Kennedy realizes that he can be polarizing, but his willingness to give his honest opinion about influencers with huge followings is the reason why his videos get as many views as YouTubers with twice his subscriber count.
Speak out about the things that matter to you. Sanders’ intention is to give voice to those who don’t have their own. “Once you let people silence you, they win.”
Don’t be afraid to discuss the big issues like race and politics. Sanders is disappointed in the fact that the beauty community rarely speaks to social issues, so he works to fill that void by covering topics like HIV and donating the money he makes from those videos to philanthropic organizations.
Find your niche by throwing out everything you really love to see what catches on. In the beginning, Sanders’ channel focused on makeup videos that included some gossip. When the gossip aspect caught on, he was smart enough to make that the focus of his channel.
“Be exactly who you are.” Though Sanders struggles with the want to one up himself with each new video, he realizes that it is more important to be authentic. If the video you make that day blows up, great. If not, there is at least one person who can relate to you and will gravitate to you.
Keep the dialogue going with consistency. Sanders recommends posting the same day(s) at a certain time and responding to the people who reach out to you. His channel receives nearly 1,000 comments per video!
Get noticed with a great thumbnail and a great title. While Sanders cautions against click bait (your title shouldn’t be a lie), he recommends coming up with something engaging to get people interested. People won’t click on “Sanders Kennedy Q & A,” but they will click on a title like “Why Me and StyleHaul Don’t Get Along and How Jeffree Star Got Me Fired.”
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