YouTuber Sonia Garg Spends 16 Hours a Day on her Channel Doing This!: The YouTube Power Hour Podcast 280
“Keep making videos and people will find you. Your content is great already, it’s just that people haven’t clicked on it yet.”
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Sonia Garg is an Indian YouTuber with over 339,000 subscribers. Her channel is about fashion, styling, beauty, and more! Before she became a YouTuber, Sonia was a fashion blogger for 3-4 years, but once she discovered YouTube, she realized how much she enjoyed making videos. Since Sonia is based in India, it was 5am for her when we did this interview, and she had just been filming for her channel! 2020 was a huge year for her, when she went from around 25K subscribers to 148K just by being consistent and posting regularly.
Sonia was a student in fashion college when she was blogging, and like many bloggers, she started her YouTube channel as a way to help her blog, but she realized she really loved making videos. At first, she didn’t have a ton of time to devote to her channel because she was busy with fashion school, but what she was creating was getting a lot of positive comments and gaining subscribers. When she was at the market with her mother and someone recognized her from her channel, she realized she should do YouTube full time, so she dropped out of fashion school to pursue a full-time YouTube career. At first, she did all different kinds of content: fashion, lifestyle, beauty, fitness, you name it. But she decided to try something different. She made a video about photography, and at first it didn’t get a lot of attention, but all of the sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, her video started gaining traction and blowing up. Even though her video wasn’t even remotely about photography, this video to this day remains one of her highest viewed videos.
“Youtube isn’t about restricting yourself. You can literally explore so many things and people are going to love it. That’s the beauty about it.”
Sonia is SUPER dedicated to her channel. She uploads a video every other day, and spends upwards of 16 hours a day working on her channel. For her, it’s a constant cycle of filming, editing, and responding to her comments. How does she think of so many ideas? She asks herself “what would I want to watch on YouTube?” “What kind of video would make me excited to click on?” Her audience is mostly people in their teens and early twenties, the majority of whom are located in India, but she has subscribers from all over the world. Her affordable fashion and styling videos tend to be the ones that do the best. Sonia’s channel is truly a lifestyle. In 2020 when she made the jump to full-time YouTuber, she learned consistency, patience, discipline, how to stay motivated and how to create lasting habits. She’s learned to take care of her mental health, because by putting yourself in front of other people so much, you tend to neglect yourself. Sonia calls this “online cardio.” To combat this, she takes breaks when she needs to and tries not to feel guilty if she misses an upload. She routinely replies to her comments and values the importance of interacting with her subscribers. She noted that people tend to be more transparent on YouTube and more honest with their opinions. She has some haters, but she’s learned to take them in stride. Sonia continues to be motivated by her growth and wants to do YouTue for the rest of her life, but she also wants to take her channel to a place where she can explore other things and have multiple streams of income.
“It’s not just about the video, it’s about what you’re doing behind the scenes, how you’re planning your life behind the scenes.”
3 Key Interview Takeaways
Three Key Takeaways:
- It’s a lifestyle. Sonia commits to uploading every other day, on top of interacting with her subscribers and maintaining her instagram account. She spends upwards of 16 hours a day filming, editing, and working on her channel. Her commitment and hard work has paid off! You have to make a commitment to your channel, even if that means making a lifestyle change. The more you put yourself out there, the more likely people are to find you.
- Mental health is key. It’s easy to get burned out or stressed. It’s easy to be afraid of putting yourself out there. It’s easy to feel discouraged by negative comments. Try not to engage with the negativity and make sure to give yourself a break when you need it. If you’re not ok mentally, you can’t be 100% for your subscribers.
- Do it with passion or not at all. If you’re just in it for the money, you won’t stick with it. Because she is based in India, Sonia doesn’t actually make a lot of money on adsense, even though she churns out 3-4 videos every week. You have to truly love creating content and being on youTube. You have to love putting in the work. You have to be ok with putting yourself out there, otherwise you will not succeed.
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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!
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