Finding your Niche on YouTube with Shruti Anand: Beauty and the Vlog Podcast 22
Shruti Anand is an Indian beauty guru based out of India who started her channel demonstrating how to do Henna tattoos. She was surprised as how many people outside of India were very interested in her work. She used that niche as a way to expand and grow her channel and she now has 130k subscribers and almost 24 million video views. Her channel consists of makeup, skincare and henna tutorials.
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Shruti Anand Show Notes:
Below are some of my favorite quotes from the interview as well as the answers to the Beauty Bonus Round.
I always loved arts ever since I was a child. When I visited US for the first time, it was like a candy store for me when I first visited a department store. In India we don’t have that much makeup and I was always interested in makeup. I got such an overwhelming response to my Henna tutorials. I never thought people would like it. Here in India, everyone does it.
Maybe if I am on YouTube, I could be friends with other YouTubers. Some of my best friends are on YouTube. I am so happy I made this decision. It has not only given me friends but also lovely viewers who appreciate my work. It just makes my day even more awesome after reading so many beautiful comments on my videos.
Because of our culture we are not that open. Not everything is allowed for girls. If we put makeup on, people ask, why are you putting makeup on? But, it’s just like an art and it makes you feel good about yourself. Over here people believe makeup is being fake.
People are not aware of YouTube over here in India. Internet is not available in every household. Not everyone can afford it. That’s why most of the people are not even aware of the internet. 50% of my viewers are from india, 30% are from US and the rest from the middle east. If you don’t have that passion for learning new things, you can’t do YouTube. You need a lot of passion to do YouTube.
The best part of YouTube is that it gives you hope that you can do what you actually love and you can be your own boss. You just have to be creative and people appreciate that.
We are trying to educate Indians on what YouTube actually is.
People are not aware of YouTube at all in India.
Over here, money matters a lot. Everything is very expensive. If I am asking someone to do a favor, it doesn’t happen. I have to pay them.
Beauty Bonus Round
What are your three Holy Grail items?
1.) Clarisonic
2.) Urban Decay Perversion Liner
3.) Estee Lauder Double Wear Mascara
What are your two top tech must haves?
1.) Canon 70D DSLR
2.) I love imovie, I use it every single day to edit my videos.
Who is your biggest beauty vlogger inspiration?
Marlena from Makeup Geek
What is your best tip for increasing subscribers and video views?
Tags. Tags play a very vital role in your videos. Videos should be short, to the point, thumbnails should be good and putting all the descriptions in the description box.
If I am uploading a skincare video and my title of the video is, “My skincare routine” in tags I am going to put the full name of the products I am using so that if someone is looking for a review of that product, my video comes on top. Tags should be related to your content
What is the best piece of advice you can give someone who is just starting their YouTube channel?
Be creative and keep your mind open to new things. YouTube is all about learning. You are going to learn lessons every single day. Lighting, camera, set-up, everything. Everything is extremely complicated especially if you are shooting videos by yourself. You have to keep your mind open.
There are going to be people who are not going to like your work. Make videos for those people who like your work.
