If you’ve got the personality and passion to pull it off, YouTube can be an invaluable tool for building or growing a business and raking in cash with little overhead. You just have to be good at something. Sydney, Australia’s Ann Reardon is good at making desserts. On her YouTube channel, How To Cook That, she’s demonstrated how to make hundreds of sugary dishes that have somehow amassed her an army of fans—and a heaping helping of income.
How To Cook That launched on YouTube in 2011 as an outgrowth of Reardon’s website of the same name—a recipe hub and an online shop. “When we had our third son, I started the website How To Cook That to give me something to do during the mind-numbing night feeds,” Reardon told Forbes. “I wrote a recipe post every week and made some videos to complement the website. The videos were too big to upload to my website so I uploaded them to YouTube and started embedding them onto my site.”
Some of the most popular videos on the site include recipes for a 5 lb. Snickers bars, chocolate mousse served in a chocolate teacup and cakes that look like iPads or the Instagram logo. The Instagram cake (see video below) attracted so much attention that it vaulted How To Cook That to a another level of popularity. Today the channel has 770,000 subscribers and, in the past 30 days, attracted 5.3 million video views.
Reardon’s income is derived from several streams. Like most YouTube entrepreneurs she utilizes the platforms ad agreement, which allows her to receive compensation when users experience advertisements on her channel. “Most YouTube videos have a short advert that plays beforehand and the video creator gets a tiny amount of money each time,” she says. “If people skip the ad immediately then you get nothing. To be honest, you really need millions of views to make it worthwhile financially but if you can build a large, loyal audience then you can make a good living.”
Additionally, Reardon has created an app – the Surprise Cakes Apps – a simple photo program that adds animations to pictures. She also integrates brands into some of her videos.
Prior to delving into the world of online recipes and social media, Reardon had worked as a food scientist and dietitian, and later as a social worker focused on youth a rough area in Western Australia. “We would invite a lot of the young people over to our house for dinner and some of the teenage girls started asking me to show them how to cook,” Reardon remembers. “It gave me the idea that one day it would be nice if some of the recipes were online so that they could be shared around but I didn’t get the time to do it until several years later.”
Reardon’s tips for YouTube success? Originality. “Many people start a YouTube channel and try to copy what has already been done but the horse has already bolted. For every single breath you take, there is 8 hours of new video footage uploaded to YouTube, so I have to give viewers a good reason to come back and watch my channel.”
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