We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Erin Lockwood. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Erin below.
Erin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?
I’m the matriarch of a (budding) YouTube family. We hope to make our channel our main source of income within the next 2 years. But making progress hasn’t been easy—and we still have a long road ahead.
In a way, I’ve been a creative my entire life. First, and starting at age 17 months, I spent my days training as world-class figure skater. In college, I traded performance art/sport for journalism and writing. And that’s what drove me to write 6 novels in my thirties. Each of these phases brought with it a certain type of compensation, but none of them ever carried an expectation of financial rewards—they simply served as creative outlets.
It wasn’t until my husband and I started a video podcast for his company 3 years ago that I got an itch to start a family YouTube channel. At the time, we were splitting our time between 2 homes (Denver and Coronado), 2 careers, and individual schools and modeling careers for our 3 children. With COVID just swinging into high gear and us being locked down on the island, I started posting random videos of our hectic, interesting lives.
Within a few months, and with our kids all enrolled in virtual learning by then, we started traveling the world constantly and found a new theme for our channel. Our videos became focused on those incredible travels: socially-distanced villas and estates in Costa Rica, Caribbean islands, and Mexico at first but then all around the US and, as the pandemic eased, throughout Europe. We were documenting our incredible lodging, our amazing food experiences, our sometimes risky excursions and, most importantly, the unbeatable cultural connections our family was making in the process.
We loved our new lifestyle so much that we decided to make it permanent. We redesigned our household around the concept of being semi-nomadic, with remote work, remote learning, and travel memberships that allowed us to live on the road every other week. And we decided to make the craft of documenting that lifestyle on YouTube a more important part of our income by monetizing our content and having my husband spend less time working in his marketing agency.
But the first step was to reach certain milestones required by YouTube. Not only did we need to reach 1,000 subscribers, but we had to have 4,000 watch hours within a 12-month period. Some creators make quick work of these requirements, but we struggled to find the right niche, the right style, and the right audience.
We worked 7 days a week most weeks, including nights and weekends. We watched similar channels to stay inspired. We spent unbelievable amounts of money on equipment, training courses, and the travel itself, of course. And we carried cameras, drones, and other gear wherever we went so that we could capture it all—and all because we were 100% committed to making this work.
Almost exactly 12 months after starting, we qualified for YouTube monetization. We were ecstatic and couldn’t wait for those ad revenue deposits to start rolling in. Which they soon did. The first one was $50. But it might as well have been $500k because that’s how hard we worked for it and that’s how much it meant to us. We knew that we were on our way.
Those deposits grew almost every month. And they still do. In fact, just since this past New Year, we’ve tripled every metric on our channel: views, watch hours, and revenue. We now have businesses offering free trips, experiences, and products in exchange for featuring them in our episodes (those are typically worth $300-$5,000 each). And because this growth is accelerating, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a warm, comforting light that hits our faces every morning when we get up and keeps us motivated as we force our way through the day’s challenges and dream of what’s yet to come.
There is no better rule in business than to attach yourself to a path that you’d take even if you didn’t get paid for it. Because when you feel enough passion for anything, it will eventually provide you with the opportunities necessary to support your livelihood. For us, our YouTube channel has provided an incredibly rewarding vehicle for creative outlet—and revenue.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Two years ago, my husband decided to abandon the in-person, 5-day workweek at his Denver ad agency. So they eliminated their office and typical work hours, allowing our family of five to start traveling almost constantly. We now work, school, and explore in a different place almost every other week—from our own mountain and beach homes to exotic villas, resorts, and yachts around the world. As we experience and support diverse cultures—while documenting it all on our Always Be Changing YouTube channel and other social channels—we hope that we can inspire more families to design a life of freedom and adventure.
Because we believe there’s a new American Dream. It’s one without templated expectations, templated career paths, templated education, templated families, templated homes, and templated lives. Freedom is no longer an American tagline—it’s just the new, global way of life.
Every day that someone spends doing something that doesn’t fulfill them to their core, they’re living their life on pause and deferring genuine family time with no guarantee that there will be a tomorrow or a someday. Some people follow that mentality their entire lives. We’ve chosen to never live that way again.
: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
“Travel. Because money returns; time doesn’t.” -Unknown
I think COVID recalibrated the collective mindset of the working class. For decades, we’ve been taught that you need to work hard in school so you can get into a good college, that you need to get the right job in the right field so that you can earn a great living, and that you need to work hard and save hard so that you can retire when you’re 65. Turns out, no matter what any of us did, a microscopic organism threw everything off-track by disrupting jobs, incomes, investments, and lifestyles—almost overnight. People figured out that they didn’t have to commute through traffic in an expensive city, just to spend all day in a cubicle while sending kids and pets off to expensive day care just so that they could afford some quality time together on nights and weekends. Most of us have been trading time for money when it should be the other way around.
Our plan is to build a career around our life instead of building our life around our careers. Within the next 2 years, we plan to achieve a profitable level of income from documenting our travels, giving us even more freedom to become a family of the world.
How did you build your audience on social media?
We’ve found that building an audience on social media is a lot easier when you have a narrow focus to your audience and a different approach to your content. It’s been a longer road for us than for many because we started out with no focus at all and we continue to search for the right theme without disrupting the progress we’re making. It’s been said that once you’re famous, people will watch you do anything in your content, but when you’re getting started, you need to be specific. We’ve found that to be very true. So find that one aspect of a niche that you’re most passionate about and ensure that the content you’re delivering is educational, entertaining, or—ideally—both. No matter how poorly you do at first, you’ll see progress over the months and years if you practice as much as you can.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://followabc.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alwaysbechanging/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alwaysbechanging
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Makeitdayone
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlwaysBeChanging?sub_confirmation=1