Facts
Who: Kate (Storykate)
What: Digital products and memberships for early childhood educators
Format: Content & media · Australia · English
Started: July 2020
Audience: 7,150 – YouTube subscribers and Payhip visitors
Payers: 500 buyers in total since 2020
Promotion budget: $0 now – about A$100 on Promolta in 2022, and around A$1,000 last year on a Payhip rebrand and new covers
Income: side income
Status: active and growing
Channels: video platforms, your own newsletter, text social media
The short version
What worked: YouTube videos that Google and YouTube search find, with links to her products in the video descriptions and on her own site.
The result: 7,150 subscribers and 500 buyers since 2020; A$804.65 from the store over the past year.
The catch: Years of work before any money, and the searches that brought traffic two or three years ago have shifted with AI answers.
Background
It all started during Covid. I already had a pet project, smartkids, but it did not work. I was keen to share my experience in early childhood education and help people like me – CALD and EAL educators. My core audience has always been immigrant educators, teachers and career changers who need a little help navigating new systems.
I made a lot of really bad videos during the first two years, then slowly learned how to edit and got better with sound and equipment. I researched in VidIQ and watched a lot of tutorials for content creators.
Starting point
Word of mouth. I talked to my colleagues, ex-colleagues and students, started to share my videos on Facebook, and offered free products to my students and to early childhood teachers I knew. I emailed everyone I thought would like my content, talked about it with friends and students, shared links. YouTube was growing very slowly.
In 2021 I started with my first free Payhip product. I attempted a puppet course and sold a few, not a lot. Then I opened my membership and moved to bundles that are more expensive.
What worked
My main traffic to YouTube comes from Google and my direct links. Search brings a lot of traffic. The only thing I invest in now is VidIQ, where I look for keywords – it is natural organic growth based on keyword suggestions, and it does not always work. I add links to Payhip on my Storykate website and in the description of my YouTube channel.
Interview content is still popular and brings traffic. I once tried Promolta, about A$100 over 2022, and it brought 300 subscribers, which helped me meet the 1,000-subscriber requirement that year. I don’t use any promotions anymore.
Payhip, my blog and YouTube worked better than anything else I tried. Facebook has 800 followers but I don’t think it brings many sales, while the tiny blog and YouTube community posts do.
The store numbers show where the buying actually comes from. Over the past year direct traffic converted at 1% – 53 orders from 3,841 visits – while Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Bing and Yandex all sat at 0%. The people who buy are the ones who already know me from the videos and come straight to the store.
What didn't work
I tried to do too many things at once. I experimented with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. I tried Udemy and learned about Teachable. I lost a lot of time on TikTok and got shadow banned, so what’s the point.
I definitely wanted to quit. YouTube is a very time-consuming hobby and I had not seen any money for years. I tried using a professional marketer – it helped me focus on sales and it was not cheap: about A$1,000 last year, when the Payhip store was rebranded, and about $100 to a designer for new product covers. The product and strategy are clear now. What kept me going is that I love learning new skills, and this is where I feel creative and can help people at scale.
The turning point
Reaching the first 1,000 subscribers was very exciting, and so was the first $100 from YouTube partnerships. This year the big milestone is selling products I thought were too expensive for my audience – $29 bundles. I worked with a therapist to allow myself to price them that high.
Over the past year, to 21 July, the store brought in A$804.65 from 205 unique customers across 652 orders, on 36,910 views – an average order of about A$1.23. The new bundles are the top earners: the Job-Ready Bundle at A$149.94, off only 245 views, then What to Say When at A$126.17, the Pedagogical Documentation Bundle at A$79.97, and Observations from Scratch at A$74.97.
Audience
My audience is a newer Australian early childhood educator, Cert III or Diploma level, often the first in her family to work here or new to the sector, often from a non-English-speaking background – brilliant with children and unsure with the writing. She is anxious about documentation and about getting or keeping the job, and she trusts you once she has had one genuinely useful thing from you for free, before you ever asked her to buy. I also attract American and Canadian educators, EAL teachers and kindergarten teachers.
Looking ahead
I think YouTube will stay my main focus, and I hope it survives the AI slop. The newsletter is still useful because it is direct communication with my community. I don’t expect to sell through Pinterest, Facebook or cold Google – they are fine for discovery at the very top, feeding people toward a freebie.
Practical takeaways
Pick one channel and go deep. Spreading across TikTok, Instagram, Udemy and Teachable cost time and returned little, while the two places that worked steadily did the selling.
Your own circle can start it, but it can’t scale it. People you already know will buy the first thing you make; the channel that matters is the one that brings strangers who have no reason to do you a favor.
Give something useful before asking for anything. The audience that buys is the one that already got a free thing that solved a real problem.
Links
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– Alex, tinyfound