The Secret to a Successful Lifestyle Niche with Iryna Fedchenko: The YouTube Power Hour Podcast 354

“Once you’re a YouTuber, you’re a YouTuber forever.”

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Iryna began her influencer career in 2016 sharing her story about moving from Ukraine to Mexico, then to Los Angeles, and the process of learning new languages and cultures. On her YouTube channel, now with over 800k subscribers and 50M total views, she shares travel vlogs, storytimes, sketches, and even documentaries about the Chernobyl tragedy. As a content creator with over 6 years of experience on social media, she learned the best ways to serve and grow an audience and create a working and effective content plan. As a coach, she helps other creators generate an impact on social media and build a full time income as a professional influencer.

I love welcoming women of all backgrounds to the podcast, and I’m especially happy to be highlighting a wonderful Ukrainian creator like Iryna. I think her story and her background is so interesting and her channel is so unique!

It’s so unique, in fact, that there’s really no word to describe her channel niche other than the umbrella of “lifestyle.” She combines elements of lifestyle and travel videos with educational content, comedy and more. She also does all of her videos in Spanish, which is pretty incredible to me. She is Ukrainian, creates spanish-speaking content on YouTube, and did the interview with me in English! Because of the variety on her channel, she has so many different “avatars” of people who subscribe to her channel and are interested in her content.

“I like what you can achieve on social media, especially on YouTube”

TikTok vs. YouTube

Short form content is all the rage these days, and I find that a lot of creators these days are finding value in creating short-form videos. Iryna and I chatted a lot about this in our interview. It’s really interesting to see how different videos achieve different results between being posted to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. For Iryna, on the one hand, she has a pretty high retention rate and she worries about lowering that, but on the other hand, shorts could help her reach a completely different audience.

My opinion is that sometimes when social media evolves, people get shiny object syndrome, and may start believing the grass is greener on the other side. Experimenting is never a bad thing. Evolving is never a bad thing. Sometimes one platform is better than another for some creators, whether that’s a matter of timing, or how certain personalities just click and vibe better with different platforms. Personally, I think there’s value in every platform, but, I’m a YouTube stan through and through. In my opinion, no platform is more valuable and better for long-term career building than YouTube. Some people don’t see success on YouTube but find it on TikTok, and vice versa. The short form content boom has really helped all creators because of how much it’s facilitated the repurposing of short-form content. 

Iryna prefers YouTube the most, and finds that from the perspective of an influencer, you can charge more for brand deals for YouTube’s long-form content, rather than what you can give on Instagram or TikTok.

Life as a Ukrainian Content Creator

With everything going on in the world, Iryna has started using her channel a lot more to inform people of the crisis facing the Ukrainian people from the perspective of a Ukrainian woman whose family and friends are still in Ukraine. As the war unfolded and Iryna experienced many emotions that so many of us couldn’t fathom, she did some Instagram lives that she then reposted on YouTube. This did unfortunately harm her channel in a way, because people didn’t want to see videos about the war, but it was important for her to share her thoughts, her feelings, and her perspective with her audience, because she’s a person first, and a creator second.

Final Thoughts

If Iryna could go back and change something about her YouTube journey, it would be to not start so slow in the beginning. She wishes she could go back and upload more, because she found that once she was uploading twice a week, she was able to experiment more and learn about what content did well on her channel. Like many creators, she struggles with procrastination and burnout, and needed to take a short hiatus from creating for a while. Iryna is adamant that while you should bring so much of who you are as a creator to your content, you as a person and you as a creator are still fundamentally different and it’s important to maintain that separation. Her advice to creators? Don’t ever be afraid to experiment and try different strategies!

“You never know when important people will see your video and how they’ll react to it.”

Mentioned in the Episode:

THE STORY OF MY FAMILY THAT LIVED IN CHERNOBYL

THE DIFFICULT LIFE OF CHERNOBYL’S DOGS 30 YEARS AFTER THE NUCLEAR DISASTER

WORKING IN A TACO TRUCK FOR A DAY 😱Teddy’s Red Tacos

Connect with Iryna

Iryna Fedchenko on YouTube

Iryna Fedchenko on Instagram

IrynaFedchenko.com

Podcast Music Credit: Boop by x50 @x50music
Music provided by Free Music for Vlogs youtu.be/o52xQkQWzyU

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