In today’s world, it’s not unusual for travel and social media to go hand in hand. Thousands of people are making a living and supporting their travels through YouTube or some other social media platform. But what if you’re worried you don’t have the looks, body or youth of a “typical” content creator? Does that mean you’re unlikely to be as successful as your beautiful competitor? Mark Wolters is the host of Wolters World. His channel has almost a million subscribers, despite the fact that he is a middle-aged man with a ‘dad-bod’. He shares his advice for those who have doubts about whether or not they fit the typical content creator stereotype.
By Mark Wolters
“Give up now. You don’t have a chance against those pretty, skinny people in bikinis and board shorts. You can’t compete against that.” Those were the words of some of my best friends when I was a few years into my YouTube journey. We had just hit 50,000 subscribers, and the views were starting to come in, but a few of my friends still didn’t think that a visual platform like YouTube would allow a middle-aged, overweight dad to succeed. Boy, were they wrong!
220,000,000 views and almost a million subscribers on YouTube later, this overweight middle-aged dad is thriving on YouTube and helping people all around the world to have their best vacations possible. My keys to success were to be honest to a fault and offer true value to people - give them information that will help them enjoy the places they want to visit. I focused on giving honest travel advice that I would want to know before I traveled, not just fluff pieces that make every destination sound amazing. I dug deep into the culture, the people, the food, and what really made destinations unique. My dedication to finding out as much as possible about the cities we visited and the cultures we explored helped me find a unique take on travel that people truly enjoy and trust.
Being able to focus on delivering the best travel information that I could discover and share with my fellow travelers overcame anyone’s negative perception of my weight or age. They saw that I was truly trying to help them get the most out of their travels. And I did it destination after destination so they knew they could trust my travel advice, regardless of where they were traveling to.
Over the years, I have seen how YouTube has become a great equalizer for people of size or different age groups. It truly allows anyone to succeed. You don’t have to be a supermodel to get eyeballs on your videos, you just need to make it worth people’s while to watch your videos, and that comes down to a few things: do you add value to their lives? Do you entertain them? Do you educate them? And do they feel that you did not waste their time? Each of these points is vital for success on YouTube, regardless of your age or weight. Let’s look at each of these points in more detail.
Do you add value to their lives?
People have an abundance of ways to spend their time. You need to ask yourself, “do the videos I create add some value to the people who watch them?” The thing is, “value” can mean a lot of things. People value knowing how to put together a piece of furniture they bought at IKEA, so a video showing them the right way to put it together adds value. A review of a restaurant they are not sure about visiting can add value. It is not just a monetary “value” idea but an improvement in people’s state of being.
Do you entertain them?
In the end, people want to be entertained. It doesn’t matter if it’s a comedy sketch or a lawn-mowing video, they want to feel interested, engaged and involved in some way. So you need to make sure your videos are just that. Whether that is with humor, facts, or visual arts, there are so many ways people can be entertained on YouTube, and if your content is entertaining, it is going to be watched. A lot of creators get upset, saying that the algorithm is not helping them and that YouTube is holding them back when in reality, it is the fact that their videos are boring and not entertaining. So, you need to think about the audience you are making your videos for and try to entertain them.
Do you educate them?
This is the area where I feel physical looks do not matter. When people want to learn something, they want to learn from someone who can teach them. It does not matter if they are 25 years old with biceps as big as cantaloupes or stomachs the size of watermelons. Helping people learn makes people blind to looks. That is why I feel I have done so well on YouTube despite my large gut and triple chins. I offer excellent educational materials on travel, and people appreciate it. It probably helps that I am also a university lecturer in my day job, so I genuinely love to teach.
Don’t waste their time.
YouTube viewers have millions of videos to choose from when they want to be entertained. They will not hesitate to skip to the next video in the queue. The same goes for Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media platform. So, it is important that you don’t waste viewers’ time.
Do you really need to go through your 45-second intro in every video?
No, they get the idea already. Get to the point. The longer you wait to get to the main meat of the video, the more viewers drop off. So just get to the point. Do you like wasting your time watching videos on YouTube? Of course not, so don’t waste other people’s time. Get to the point and make sure you are delivering that valuable content to them early and often in your video. That is why a good edit can really save a video. If you ask yourself, do you really need that 35-second scene in your video, you already know the answer, so cut it out to make your video leaner.
It doesn’t take a model’s body or a young person’s energy to succeed on YouTube. If you make sure that you are entertaining, educating, and adding value to viewers’ lives, you are on the right track to YouTube success.
About the author
Multi-award-winning PhD professor of marketing, the OG of YouTube travel content and self-confessed hodophile, Mark Wolters shares his worldly experiences with over three million loyal Wolter’s World followers every month. With his mischievous sense of fun and bold truths, Mark has made it his mission to share wholesome, honest travel and cultural advice with all who need to hear it. Mark's witticism has led him to create over 2,000 compelling YouTube episodes since 2009, including Five Things That You Should Never Put In Your Checked Luggage and Six Unwritten Rules of European Train Travel. Seamlessly combining his academic sensibilities with his playful rhetoric for global public speaking engagements, Mark was named a top 50 undergraduate business professor by Poets and Quants in 2020.
Find him on YouTube as Wolters World.
