How to become a successful vlogger: the eight golden rules

Vlogging might seem like an exclusively millennial portmanteau – but for the Sacconejoly family, it’s a bonafide breadwinning career with unlimited earning potential.

Irish couple Jonathan and Anna started uploading video blogs to YouTube in 2009 and have gradually built one of site’s most popular channels.

Their videos boast more than 600m total views and they have 1.8m loyal subscribers – clearly these are people who know a thing or two about how to be a successful YouTuber today.

What began as a challenge to document just one week of their lives alongside full-time jobs, and involved Jonathan fervently filming while taking toilet breaks in his office bathroom, soon turned into a lifetime's worth of content, which has seen the Sacconejolys film everything from the mundane to the monumental - think the births of their children.

The funny thing is, people love it; there's a huge appetite on YouTube for relatable content and that's what the Sacconejolys deliver in tenfold.

However, with rumours circulating that some YouTube stars can earn upwards of £50,000 a month, it's a highly sought-after career that's getting more competitive by the day.

So how does one become a YouTube sensation?

We spoke to Jonathan, who gave us eight key tokens of wisdom for any aspiring YouTube stars.

“Find somebody with a similar engagement and subscriber count and talk to them,” advises Sacconejoly.

However, it’s important to be realistic in who you approach, he notes.

“If you have 10 subscribers don’t go to someone with 10m subscribers and go ‘hey, let’s make a video’ because they’re not going to answer you.

“You need to talk to people on your level and then everybody grows at the same time together.”

When once YouTubers made an income purely off the ads that streaming services put before their clips, now the majority of a vlogger’s revenue comes from lucrative brand partnership deals, Sacconejoly explains.

"Now there are hundreds and millions of YouTubers, so it’s harder to get your percentage from ads," he said.

Thus, the key is to approach brands you like and pitch content ideas that would benefit you as much as them - this is where the real money is.

A lot of today's vloggers are young, Sacconejoly said, which means that you get a lot of teenagers going into intimidating meetings.

“It can be very scary when you're starting out," he added, suggesting that all YouTubers seek management asap in order to help them facilitate and prepare for important meetings with potential collaborators or brands they want to work with,

It's difficult to know how much your content is worth when you're starting out, which is why Sacconejoly suggests using an organisation like Bluebook, which values it for you based on your subscriber and viewer count.

"Otherwise you’ll end up under or over charging for your content," he said.

“After all, your product is something you’ve invented," notes Sacconejoly, who added that it's crucial to know your worth early on.

Authenticity is key, explains Sacconejoly.

“When I put out my content I don’t do dramatic things for views.

"Right now on YouTube there is a trend of drama.

"If you want to talk crap about somebody you will get more views. But if you do that a brand will not touch you, so even though you’ll get more views, you’ll never have commercial opportunity," he said.

"The brand has to be consistent in its message,” Sacconejoly advises.

“So if you want to be an actor, make content that you can act in and showcases your skills and don’t’ be led astray by the views.”

This is a tactic that has clearly worked well for the Sacconejolys, given that they've just released a children's book: The Sacconejolys and the Great Cat-Nap, which is about a family that is almost identical to theirs.

Give the viewers what they want and they will respond, he adds.

“Five years ago I said to Anna in our little one bed flat ‘I’m gonna get 100,000 subscribers in five years – and five years later we had one million," Sacceonjoly revealed.

"That plan never changed. I said ‘I’m going to make a video about my life every day and that’s exactly what I’ve done, I’ve consistently done that.”

When you become a big dog on the Tube - i.e. you have more than 100,000 subscribers - it can be all too easy to be seduced into thinking you no longer have to do any of the behind the scenes legwork.

This is a mistake, explains Sacconejoly, who edits most of his family's content himself to this day, despite having such an extensive reach.

“Every single day, I film and edit those vlogs," he said.

"If I were to let that go, I feel like the editor of a video is the story teller, the narrator. So when we gather the footage from the day, how I choose to edit that is how I choose to tell the story.

"So if someone came along, their story would differ to my story.”

He added that the majority of YouTubers he knows still edit themselves.

“At the core, people are invested in you the person, not you the brand.”