Aussie YouTubers reveal the behind-the-scenes of their channels

Four successful Aussie YouTubers have revealed what it takes to make it big on the platform. We go behind the camera to see what it’s really like.

Melbourne YouTubers reveal what it’s really like being a content creator.

Nine per cent of young Aussies say their dream job is to become a YouTuber, according to a 2023 survey.

While content creation on YouTube may seem like a glamorous, easy job that can make serious money, it requires persistence, patience, passion and a thick skin.

Four Melbourne YouTubers who have a million subscribers or more reveal how they built their channels and careers.

Tegan Maccormack | Tigga Mac

1.03m YouTube subscribers | 741k Instagram followers | 1.7m TikTok followers

Victorian YouTuber Tegan Maccormack of Tigga Mac.

How did you get started on YouTube?

My business partner and best friend, Katie, and I started off as a small cake business doing cakes for local customers.

Then Covid hit and we had no customers. We had all this time because we couldn’t work during the lockdowns.

So we decided to start making videos. We first started posting them on TikTok, and then we posted on Instagram, and then we moved over to YouTube Shorts.

We don’t make very many long videos, most of our videos are a minute long, so when the Shorts option came along on YouTube, we jumped straight on to it.

We posted all the same content that we were doing on all of our other channels on to YouTube and the channel just started to grow really fast.

It’s interesting because on our other channels we have a lot of Australians watching, and the YouTube channel was different, we have a lot of Americans watching.

When lockdowns lifted and everything sort of went back to normal we were doing both content creation and cake making for customers.

But as time went on, we started to get more and more into the content creation and it started to take up more and more of our time.

So we decided to make that move into content creation full-time. It allowed us to plan our weeks around what we wanted to do content-wise, instead of what customers had ordered.

What’s a typical day for you?

Katie and I will have meetings at the start of the week where we’ll chat about the week ahead and what’s to come.

We’ll do a lot of planning, a lot of brainstorming, thinking about content and what else we could do to bring interesting things to the channel.

We obviously do a lot of filming of content, which takes up a lot of our time. Then there’s all the editing as well, voice-overing — all of that I sort of do towards the end of the day.

Then there’s meetings with my manager and there’s the posting and the interacting with the audience.

How do you maintain inspiration?

It really helps working with your best friend, because we have a lot of conversations where we just chat about our ideas.

We also get inspiration from what’s in the Zeitgeist and what’s trending. We try and look ahead and see what might be big at the time.

Recently, I did a Taylor Swift series where I did a cake for each album. I listened to all of her albums, and I’d never heard her songs, really, apart from her hits on the radio, so it was a journey for me. That was a really big moment.

Inspiration can strike while I’m scrolling on socials and I see a recipe that looks really yummy or something visually intriguing, like fashion or architecture, that makes me want to try and see if I can do something with cake.

Then I’ve got my Shopping with Tigga series, where it’s making cakes that don’t look anything like cake, but that look like a product, and trying to get the audience involved with trying to find it on the shelf.

The reason we came up with that series was to try and reach people that wouldn’t necessarily watch a cake video.

So we’ve gamified some things and it seems to have worked because we get a lot of people saying, ‘I don’t even have anything to do with cake, I don’t make cake, I don’t decorate, but I love watching your videos’.

Any challenges, lessons?

Some people tend to think that if a video comes in front of them, then it needs to be for them. It’s like they have to tell me that they don’t like the video and that they don’t agree with what I’ve said or what I’ve done.

I don’t get that, because if I don’t like something, then I just keep scrolling.

But the amount of people that stop on a video that isn’t meant for them and let us know they don’t like it – it’s strange to me.

But when you put yourself out there, as much as I hate to say it, getting those comments is part of it.

So you’ve just kind of got to accept that and not let it get to you too much. There are so many positive comments out there that you have to try and pay more attention to those than the negative comments.

You do get a lot of people that pump you up and lift you up. That’s a really cool feeling.

Advice for budding YouTubers?

I think people who want to get into content creation think they need to have all of the fancy equipment, which can almost immediately stop you.

I started with an iPhone and a duct tape roll. I just shoved my phone into a roll of duct tape and I moved it around – that was my tripod.

I also didn’t have any training in any of it. I don’t have any cake training, I taught myself. I don’t have any editing training, I taught myself that, too.

You just have to try it and with repetition you get a knack for it, and you start to see what works.

One of the things that helped us grow was posting more of myself on there.

So putting my voiceover on there, talking about what was going on and putting a bit more of my own personality into the videos.

People want to know who you are and who’s behind the camera, more so than just what’s going on in the picture. It makes people connect more and want to watch your videos more because they start to know who you are.

Kallen Johnstone | Slapped Ham

3.36m YouTube subscribers | 118k Instagram followers | 320.9k TikTok followers

Melbourne YouTuber Kallen Johnstone of Slapped Ham.

How did you get started on YouTube?

I’ve got a degree in creative and professional writing and during my last semester, I was starting to think of ways to creatively monetise my degree.

A friend of mine mentioned that he had just started doing some YouTube videos, and I didn’t really know at the time that you could make a bit of money off it or start businesses off the back of it.

Basically, the next day, I went to my brother – who was also at a bit of a career crossroads – and mentioned that my friend had been doing this and suggested that we should give it a go.

I bought the cheapest microphone possible on eBay and we started tinkering and figuring out what sort of content we wanted to do.

In the beginning, we were throwing everything out to see what stuck. We were doing a bit of gaming, a bit of science, some history videos.

It wasn’t until we did the “scariest ghost photos of all time” that we actually saw our first viral video. Bit by bit, we started to think, we’re hitting our niche here.

Within a few months, we started going all in on spooky, creepy, paranormal sort of content. From there we saw some really good growth. That’s when we started to think,yeah, we could do this full-time.

We’ve actually been doing it for 10 years now, which is pretty crazy. June was our 10-year anniversary.

What have you learnt? Any challenges?

An online business is challenging, particularly in social media.

There’s physical and mental challenges working at the desk all day, as a lot of office workers know, that can be hard and takes its mental toll.

So I always try and look after my mental health, I do yoga and go to the gym and take regular walks. On the weekends, I try to turn my phone off completely, just to have that separation from work.

Particularly with a social media business like this, you need that separation, otherwise there’s too much of a blurred line. You’re answering emails, you’re responding to comments, you’re on Twitter and responding to viewers all the time.

It took me a little while to get my head around that, but you do need to separate it and get back to different aspects of life that aren’t just online.

Starting out early on, the hate comments were a bit of a hard pill to swallow. You’d wake up, have your breakfast and read the comments, and someone wishes you’re dead, or some ill thing happening to your family – it takes you aback. It’s very unusual, but you grow a thick skin over time, and I laugh at them now. It’s just such a waste of time to respond to them.

The platform itself is always changing too, so you’ve got to have your nose to the grindstone and keep up on changes. You also have to change the way you’re producing your content as well, because viewership’s changing all the time. We’re also seeing a lot of short form content with TikTok and Reels too, it’s an ever-changing landscape.

Describe a typical day

There’s a bit of a misconception that YouTubers are just kind of lurking in their mum’s basement playing video games. But no, we’re a full incorporated company.

My brother and I manage two teams of five, so a typical day is lots of research, lots of writing. I’m in the recording booth doing voiceovers three or four times a week.

There’s a lot of pipelining, as well, scheduling the content and looking ahead.

Behind the scenes there’s the technical aspects too, like the SEO stuff, metadata, branding, even just thumbnails on YouTube, there’s a whole art form to that.

We’re delving into the data and analytics seeing what’s working what’s not. In YouTube alone, there’s so many different hats that you end up having to wear and learn as you’re growing a business.

It’s absolutely a full time job, which a lot of people don’t quite recognise.

How do you maintain inspiration?

It can be a tough thing and can become a bit of a content treadmill at times.

That’s when we come back to the question of why are we doing this? Why are we running this business? Why did we start in the first place?

We get about 10 million views a month, which is a lot of regular repeat viewership, so it actually ends up being your viewers that you end up doing it for.

It sounds a little cheesy, but we often get feedback that people are watching our videos getting through some hard times or they might have had some surgery or something, and they’re watching our videos to pass the time.

When you hear stories like that, it does inspire you to keep going, because you’ve got a lot of people relying on you to keep the content flowing, keep it fresh and interesting.

Our viewers keep us motivated and inspired.

Any advice for budding YouTubers?

It sounds a bit cliche, but you can achieve a lot in this industry if you put your mind to it.

It seems impenetrable and very hard to start but it’s never too late to start.

With some hard work and persistence, you can achieve a lot of cool things.

You also have to make a lot more content than you realise. A lot of new people put three things out, they don’t go viral, they get disheartened and stop.

We’ve made over 1000 episodes now, so you just have to keep chipping away and eventually you’ll find your voice and niche, and it’ll grow from there.

You’ll also see it a lot where new YouTubers try and do everything themselves; the video editing, the voicing, the scripting, and that can lead to burnout.

At some point in your career, you’ve got to learn to outsource and hire people that are trained in certain areas to lighten the load a bit.

Ultimately, that ups the production value and you can start putting out better quality content.

Daen Lia | Daen’s Kitchen

1.57m YouTube subscribers | 792k Instagram followers | 2.7m TikTok followers

Victorian YouTuber Daen Lia of Daen's Kitchen.

How did you get started on YouTube?

YouTube wasn’t something that I always wanted to do.

I have a background in art history and the curatorial side of things, so my first role out of uni was a marketing job in the arts in Cambodia.

I was deeply fascinated with modern, contemporary Cambodian art, and I wanted to go there and write my thesis on it. So after cold emailing galleries there I got a job as a marketing manager for an arts and architecture festival.

I ended up staying there for almost two years, and when I came back to Australia I followed that trajectory of arts, marketing and communication roles, which is where I developed all these social media skills that have followed through to Daen’s Kitchen.

But the new role I’d taken on back in Australia made me horribly unhappy and so unfulfilled. Luckily, I had negotiated a work from home day in the contract, so on those work from home days, I just started cooking.

My mum, my brother and I, we all love to cook so much, so I started cooking and taking photos and sending them to my mum and brother.

Then I realised, oh, I actually really love doing this, so I started an Instagram page, and it was private at first, because I was so embarrassed to tell people and show them these photos.

But then I started to realise how much I loved it, and it wasn’t just the cooking part that I loved, I was loving going to the market and talking to the vendors and styling the photos and learning how to use a professional camera for the first time.

It just developed from there and I thought, I actually want to make this a career, and I worked really hard. And here we are.

I think it’s four and a half years later now and I do it as my full-time job.

Describe a typical day

I have myself in the kitchen, I have my assistant, Alana, set up across from me on my dining room table, and then in my living room is where my mum and my baby are.

I wouldn’t be able to do it without Alana, because there is so much going on behind the scenes that people aren’t aware of. There’s prepping food, checking the cameras are in focus, checking microphones are on. She schedules in content for me too, which is another huge time consuming project

A typical day is me cooking one recipe without my mum and then I’ll do one recipe with her – I’ve brought her into my content now because she’s a huge inspiration of my cooking.

Then we’ve got Alana photographing, and when she’s photographing, I’m sitting down writing up the recipe, because I want it fresh in my mind. Then I send it off to my copy writer who writes all my blog posts for me and does SEO for it.

Once we’re done filming, we’re in the kitchen cleaning for an hour or two, because that’s a huge part of my day as well. Then I clock off.

The only time I get to edit is at night when my two daughters are asleep.

If it’s more of an intricate recipe with lots of steps, it can take me a fair bit of time to edit. When it’s a quick, very simple one pot pasta dish for example, I can edit those really quickly. But that’s just because I’ve got so much experience doing that now.

How do you maintain inspiration?

I can’t stop, even if I wanted to, because I just love what I do so much.

I have so many ideas every day. I have more ideas than time.

My biggest struggle is picking what I want to do and having to accept that I can’t do everything. I keep my momentum, because it’s my passion.

What are some challenges, lessons?

There are some days where I’m feeling vulnerable, and if I’m getting all these mean comments it can really affect me where I start to doubt myself.

But it comes in waves. Some weeks, I’m like, oh my God, the people are loving me this week!, and I’m getting nothing but good comments with one bad comment here and there. Then there’ll be another week where everyone is commenting the same negative thing and it’s starting to really get me down.

I was actually so scared to show myself on camera while I was pregnant because I was bloated, I had a massive belly, and I could just predict what the negative comments were going to be.

Because I make quite indulgent food, the comments were, of course, you look the way you do because you’ve been eating too much of your own food’ and other really nasty things about my body.

I find it really hard to overcome the ones when it’s about me as a person, or what I look like, especially when my body is changing in huge ways and I’m not even comfortable with how I look.

At the end of the day though, I just think, these people have nothing better to do with their time than to make these nasty comments. Imagine taking the time out of your day to write that instead of just scrolling on – it’s more a representation of who they are, as opposed to who you are.

But then there are positives that come out of constructive negative comments.

When I first started, I used to get all these comments about talking really slow and having a vocal fry in my voice. So I took that on board and started talking a little bit faster and at the top of my throat where it’s not as grainy and husky. I’ve trained myself to sound a little nicer to the ears.

Any advice for budding YouTubers?

You just have to start.

I look back at where I was when I started Daen’s Kitchen and my photos are horrible, but I had to start at that point to get to where I am now.

You have to be very vulnerable when you’re developing who you are online, it’s unfortunately very public so there’s no way around that. You just have to put yourself out there and become exposed to the comments, good or bad.

But like I said, some of the good and bad comments can be constructive, so you take on that feedback and you change what you’re doing.

If someone has really enjoyed this part of what I’m doing, I’ll follow that through to the next video, and I’ll drop that part that someone else didn’t like, and then we’ll see how that works, and the more you start to play around with different styles and with cameras and editing systems, the better you get at it.

Natasha Swingler | Effective Spaces

1.24m YouTube subscribers | 5.9m Instagram followers | 4.5m TikTok followers

Victorian YouTuber Natasha Swingler of Effective Spaces.

How did you get started on YouTube?

I started an organising business about three months before Covid hit.

Previously, I had always worked in the corporate environment but then I had two very young babies and decided to do a business on my own before Covid hit.

So I had this amazing business that grew so quickly but I had to stop because we couldn’t go into people’s homes.

I’d never been on Instagram – I think I had 200 followers on my personal page – had never been on Tiktok, and I was a very relaxed viewer of YouTube, I went on it sometimes when I needed help doing something.

Instagram was the one that I was more familiar with so that’s where I originally started posting.

I returned to working part time, had my little ones at home and was posting on Instagram.

It took off quite instantly and I hadn’t transitioned to YouTube at that stage.

When I first started, I had a newborn and I was filming most of my content at two, three in the morning because he was awake and I had the time to do it.

YouTube, for me, really has only been in the past two years. One of the reasons is for that is, with two young kids, I need to make a living, and YouTube is really good for monetising with views, whereas when it comes to TikTok, you can’t.

Additionally, lot of my a lot of my Instagram followers are actually from countries that can’t access TikTok so they watch my YouTube.

Describe a typical day

In a typical day I’ll get my eldest, who’s five, to school, and then the youngest goes to kinder three days, and the other two days I have him.

I’ll get home after that at about nine, and I normally work a nine to three, so then it’s into whatever I’ve got on that day.

Every day is a little bit different, because it could be I’ve got an interview, or I’m replying to the emails or comments, because everything that you see on social media, that’s me responding, I don’t have a team that looks after that.

I could be planning content. I could be writing a script for an upcoming campaign. It could be a day where I’m filming four videos in a day, I could be spending six hours editing a video.

I try and plan everything on Sundays, because I know what I’ve got on during the week.

My social media is my income and is just like a part time job.

I pack my lunch like I’m going to work because otherwise I wouldn’t eat, I’d just get distracted doing stuff.

How do you maintain inspiration?

I think one of the reasons I have grown across all platforms is because my whole account is based on people’s requests, and I try to help people through the videos that provide.

One of the challenges with that is I can’t keep up with requests.

That is literally the main challenge I’ve got, because every time I reply or respond with a video, my requests just keep on growing and growing and growing, and there’s only one of me.

What are some challenges, lessons?

You can’t please everybody, and that’s OK. I don’t try to please everybody. The people that are for you, they will find you on the platforms.

You wouldn’t go far to see comments on my posts that say, ‘you’ve got cracks in your paint work’ and if comments like that hold merit to you, then it’s going to hurt. But people like that, and comments like that, don’t hold merit in my life.

There’s so many more people that will have your back and support you, and they far outweigh those negative comments.

Something else I’ve learnt is that you have to make sure that you’re doing something that you love because if you don’t, then it will get a little bit stale. I love helping people, I always have. It’s a privilege to help and be allowed into people’s homes.

You also can’t compare yourself to others.

For example, you see all these beautiful homes on social media, and if I had a nanny or a gardener or all of the above, then maybe I’d be in the same situation.

But I have two young kids, and we don’t live in a show home, and I don’t want them to, because I don’t think it’s realistic, and I think that’s why people relate to me a lot more.

Any advice for budding YouTubers?

Don’t overthink it, just post.

If I can get 10 million views on me folding jeans, then whatever you’re interested in can go places.

A lot of social media mentors talk about posting consistently. Although I do agree with that, I have taken like, a month off once, and I’m very sporadic. I tend to find it keeps people on their toes, so they’re always coming back to my page to see if I’ve posted anything.

I don’t know if that’s advice for everybody, but I don’t conform to what somebody tells me to do because I’ve got two young kids. Sometimes I physically can’t film on that day because one of the kids is off sick and they’re my priority.

I’d also say treat it more like a community than focusing on the number of subscribers and followers.

Originally published as Aussie YouTubers reveal the behind-the-scenes of their channels