Columbus resident Myka Stauffer takes videos of her life and shares advice — with thousands of her closest friends.
Since Stauffer began posting videos on YouTube three years ago, she’s gained over 124,000 subscribers on her main channel and 55,000 on her daily vlog channel. To date, she has posted over a thousand videos.
Stauffer started off making home movies of sorts, documenting her pregnancies and home life. Through partnering with large companies such as Target, Pampers and Swiffer for promotions and getting some kickback from YouTube ads, her salary began to surpass what she made as a nurse.
“It was becoming an actual career for me,” Stauffer says. “Not only was it fun and I was making a lot of friends, but then I was starting to make good income. I didn’t even know there was money behind YouTube when I started.”
On “The Stauffer Life” channel, she posts daily videos covering the day’s events with her husband and three young children. Stauffer’s personal channel focuses more on lifestyle tips from fitness to fashion to decor. She said she was surprised by how popular her videos on the seemingly mundane subjects of cleaning and homeschooling became.
“You don’t see homeschoolers very often on a day to day basis… when we started sharing that, we didn’t think anything of it,” Stauffer says. “There’s not very many homeschool mamas on YouTube… so it definitely makes us a little bit different, but at the same time it gives a resource for anybody looking for that.
Moving forward, Stauffer says she plans to document the family’s journey as they seek to expand their brood by adopting internationally. They’ve already put up a video following the family entering paperwork for adoption in mid-November.
“I was trying to follow someone through their adoption journey and I couldn’t find anybody,” she says. “You see a lot of adoption videos where they bring home the baby, and I think that’s awesome, but I haven’t found anyone document the process.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGR-FWQl8PQ
Stauffer says she doesn’t think of herself as a celebrity, but she does enjoy the direct contact with viewers that Youtube allows, and has made friends that she talks to offline.
“Instead of your everyday celebrity, you can engage with them every day on any social media sites or in the comments,” she says. “You can engage back and forth, you can send e-mails. Really, you’re just establishing these friendships with all kinds of people.”
Stauffer says she likes the flexibility that comes with her current career, which allows her to spend more time with her kids and gives her room for creativity. Most of the time spent on producing the videos is actually not in filming — which usually takes around an hour per video — but in the editing, which takes an additional from two up to eight hours.
She says the secret to success is finding original subjects and being genuine in the saturated YouTube market.
“I don’t know how long Youtube is going to last. I think I’m going to do it and ride that wave for as long as I can because I really enjoy it,” Stauffer says.
For more information, visit www.youtube.com/mykastauffer and www.youtube.com/thestaufferlife.
