YouTube!

Thinking of making youtubes? Just do it. I still cannot believe how easy its been. In February 2025 a video I put up about making Four Layer Gelli Prints went haywire and the tail has been wagging the dog ever since.

About a year before that post, I had started a Facebook group about gelli printing called "Learn Gelli Plate Printing". My intention was to find people like me who were having fun with it and trying to figure it out and I really wanted to attract people because I was totally in the dark. The stroke of luck came from my brother in law who told to make the name something people would put in a search string if they wanted to learn about gelli plate printing, so I called it "Learn Gelli Plate Printing" because that's what I would put in. I made it a public group with very few parameters because I had no idea what I was doing and thought I could adjust it later. I wanted to meet people struggling to figure it out. The group grew rapidly.

What I will say up front is that I have tech knowledge. When I worked I wrote online courses, kept a class website and posted material to 'Teachers Pay Teachers', so I had the bedrock for moving forward with this once the realization that the opportunity existed came to me. So I had the 'computer literacy' to navigate the journey.

In the group I noticed that 'online people' were interested in posting - names I already knew from other online pursuits started turning up. They posted their content, and their links to their youtube content. I noticed how many views they were getting in the group. And then I started doing it. I started posting 'show and tells' on youtube and linking them to the group and very quickly (in a few weeks) hit enough views to be monetized on youtube.

Well, as you can imagine, that was it. My first payout about six weeks after that post was about $150 and I was hooked. The next payout doubled that and so on for a couple of months and then it evened out. I can do all this without doing much different than I was already doing - making art and sharing online. I hang my ipad over my work table, spend some time once every few weeks thinking of a theme or a hook, editing my footage and making a voiceover for it. Then I post and wait for the algorithm to pick it up. That's where you come in, so thank you very much! Thanks to you I'm up another 1K subscribers since I took the picture, above.

The coolest thing about all this, that seems to be so counter intuitive for business culture (although I have no business background - so am assuming) is that when I get more, you don't get less. There is no competition. This whole thing is driven not by competition but by sharing. Its fascinating! That model suits me perfectly!

Next time I'll tell you more about what I learned about making it work. OR maybe I'll make a youtube about it! Stay tuned!