Better known as LiveStream Katya, Katya Varbanova lived and grew up in Bulgaria for the first 19 years of her life. With hopes of being a lawyer, her father had mapped out her career.
Not long before she was due to begin her studies, she left and instead studied law and business in the UK at Liverpool University. Her time there helped her to realize that she was too creative for life as a lawyer, and knew she didn’t want to pursue it as a career.
After university, she followed the money and went into banking, where she found her job dull and boring. She then discovered Periscope and instantly fell in love with it.
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She’s since quit her job and now makes a living from making live videos on Periscope, Snapchat and Facebook. Along the way she had to overcome her own confidence issues, and has now created an easy plan for creating a month of live video content, all of which, Katya has shared with us.
Becoming An Entrepreneur
Katya isn’t one of those individuals who always wanted to an entrepreneur, simply because she used to have no idea what it was. It wasn’t until she turned 23 that she realized it was actually an option.
Both her parents worked, just like the rest of her family.
But that doesn’t mean she didn’t have that drive early on. At 16, she was running her own Henna tattoo business, without even realizing what she was actually doing in the grand scheme of things. She was just working for herself, doing what she loved, and getting paid for it.
It was in her third year that a particular lecture stood out for her when the professor spoke about Marxism. She came to the conclusion that she was living the life she’d been brainwashed to live since school.
As Katya began to enjoy Periscope more and more, her mother convinced her to stay in banking, and it was an opinion shared by her mentor at the time.
Many people try to start a business when they’re broke, which can result in them selling from a place of desperation, which potential customers will pick up on.
By keeping that banking job, it enabled her to not have financial struggles whilst also having the time to build a business on the side. Her job became a blessing.
The First Broadcast
Katya had been watching Periscope broadcasts for a few weeks.
It wasn’t long that her superpower of knowing when she’s being sold to kicked in, and she noticed that those broadcasting were selling without their audiences even knowing.
That’s when she recognized that she could do the same thing, selling something of value to people who want to buy it, without being ‘salesy’.
It’s a natural way which of selling as it doesn’t seem like it’s even happening. You’re simply telling people what you have. Those who relate will buy, and the ones who don’t will ignore it.
But despite singing and dancing on stage when she was younger, she was petrified of speaking to the camera. She worried that people would judge her intellect based on what she said, and that fear was holding her back.
Her first broadcast then happened unexpectedly.
Whilst watching a broadcast she answered ‘me’ when the host asked who was next, without comprehending what she’d done.
What happened next is that all the other people in the broadcast made her feel guilty for not wanting to go live, and ended up goading her into it.
In the end, she did it and went live with 30 people watching her. And rather than judging her, they were all nice, supportive and gave her compliments.
When she turned the camera off, that’s when she realized just how much she had enjoyed it.
Get Over Your Fear
Katya has always been a confident person who knew she could achieve what she put her mind to, such as getting a first class degree at university or getting the dream job.
But she lacked confidence in her ability to show her face to the world.
Just like a lot of other people, she wanted to give Periscope a go and go live to the world, but her nerves got the better of her.
The first step she recommends in getting over that is to find a community of individuals who already do it and find it normal. By watching Periscopes and becoming a part of the community, it then became more ‘normal’ for her.
She’d been doing Periscope for around six months before she felt brave enough to go live on Facebook. That’s because, for her, it was a safer place full of people who didn’t know her. We’re generally less afraid of judgment from people we don’t know.
Facebook is full of friends from school and work colleagues, and it took those six months on Periscope to get over the fear that they might laugh at her.
Periscope is easy to use and it has an audience which is always engaged, and that made it easy to offer services and products to them.
She did her first broadcast at the end of July 2015. In September she started selling and on October 10th she handed in her notice after matching her income in just two weeks.
Live Broadcasting Equipment
When Katya started out, she had no equipment apart from a phone which was a few years old. As a result, the quality was terrible.
At the point when she quit her job, she was still recording by holding her dated phone. It was only after two or three months that she upgraded to an iPhone. The next most important thing she got was a microphone.
The quality of the sound is far more important than the quality of the video itself. And you can get good quality lapel microphones without paying a lot.
Katya’s first microphone was the Rode SmartLav microphone and cost her about £45. Now she uses an iRig Mic Lav which enables her to have two microphones plugged in for when she is interviewing someone.
To hold the phone she had a Joby GripTight tripod before going for a bigger Joby tripod.
She has a lot of equipment now, but when she started she only had a little money to invest, which was spent entirely on hosting for her WordPress website. That’s been her only investment, and since then, everything she has purchased has been reinvested from the money she’s made doing it.
The Content Hamburger Formula
At the time Katya started, she didn’t have a niche and was simply just talking with her audience. At one point she was just reading and critiquing Napoleon Hill’s The Law of Success.
Then she began focusing on inspiring and motivating people by helping her audience to be confident and positive. It was about eight months into her broadcasts when she actually started strategizing her content.
Now she uses and recommends her Content Hamburger Formula.
The buns of the hamburger are the themes you’ll want to talk about, and all the different layers inside are the actual broadcasts.
You start by writing down seven of the most common questions that you get asked about your service, products, and industry.
Then you turn each question into a video title which will attract the type of person who would ask the question. These are the buns.
To get the filling, you break that down into four smaller steps which still make up that one title, and you do that for all seven titles.
Within 15 minutes, you’ll then have 28 days of live video content.
Breaking it into those smaller steps means the videos are not too long and also gives the viewer a reason to come back the next day to watch your next broadcast.
That plan can then allow you to correlate it with your other marketing efforts, such as blog posts and emails.
In terms of finding the ideal time of the day, it is different for everyone. You’ll need to have a rough idea of when your clients are likely to be online.
But the topic and content of the broadcast are more important than perfect timing. Katya goes live at all times of the day, as there’s always someone awake in the world to watch it and the people who miss it can go back and replay it.
Consistency is the key to starting well. You want to become a habit for your audience, and being sporadic means people won’t know when to find you.
Create a schedule you know you can stick to. If you know you can’t do it every day, then go weekly at the same time every week. If that’s the case, then the Content Hamburger Formula will give you 28 weeks of content.
And Finally
You can find Katya on all the social media networks at LiveStreamKatya. To catch her live broadcasts and to keep up to date with what’s going on in her life, then you can find her videos on Periscope, Snapchat, and Facebook.
And when you check out her Live Video Planner, you’ll find out more information about Katya’s Content Hamburger Formula. You can also get a download which will help you to create enough content for a year in just three hours which will get you more leads.
Connect with Katya
