Video Creator to Traditional Media Star: The Zach King Story

Want to know how a well-known creator and book author got his start on YouTube?

Interested in how he grew his business on social media platforms?

To explore how making YouTube tutorials ultimately led to a book and movie deal, I interview Zach King.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Zach King, a filmmaker and YouTube personality who's known for creating digital magic. More than 20 million people follow him on Instagram. He just released a brand-new children's book called Zach King: My Magical Life, and has a movie option with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.

Zach explains how trying new social platforms like Vine helped him develop his signature style, sponsorships, and audience.

You'll discover how Zach's responsiveness to his audience led him to try new ideas every step of the way.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Video Creator to Traditional Media Star
How Zach Became Known

The first time Zach applied to film school, he didn't get in. He decided to keep making movies by creating a YouTube channel. While he was figuring out what content to create, his parents encouraged him to do what was comfortable. For Zach, that was teaching people how to create visual effects using Final Cut Pro software.

Around early 2008, Zach began teaching Final Cut Pro on YouTube by recording his screen. He slowly gained a following, and at around 30,000 followers, Zach started getting comments from his audience, complimenting his special effects and asking what would happen if he added a story to them. In response to this feedback, Zach created one of his first viral videos, Jedi Kittens. The video, which came out in 2011, is about two cats dueling with light sabers.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtgtMQwr3Ko

At that point, Zach had been teaching for several years. It was great because even though around 40,000 YouTube subscribers wasn't a ton, it was great for business. He posted hundreds of free tutorials and eventually paid off school by upselling 8-hour training courses. Zach started doing this when he was 19 or 20, and he's almost 28 now.

I ask what it was like to have a hit like Jedi Kittens. Zach says he felt this rush of adrenaline, as well as a desire to replicate that success. For a young creator, a million views was awesome (and a lot of views compared to now). However, he realized 10-15 million views were needed to really call a video "viral." He couldn't picture what that looked like but continued to experiment with what did or didn't work, and grew his audience by accident.

Around November 2013, Zach got into Vine and was kicking himself for being 9 months late to the platform. Whenever a new social media platform came up, he'd wait for his friends to get into it before creating content for it because doing so is time-consuming. His housemates logged onto the Vine app several times every day. Zach realized Vine had a special effects category that fit with the tutorials he was creating on YouTube.

On Vine, Zach started by posting a few of his tricks and these posts developed into his magic theme. He had about 300,000 followers in the first 2 or 3 months, which was similar to the following on his YouTube channel. As his Vine following quickly surpassed his YouTube following, Zach began to see Vine as a primary way to support his business.

Through short videos, Zach developed what he calls his "magic style": a visual effect with a magic twist at the end. The effects are as visual and physically interesting as possible because that approach works well on a small mobile screen where most of his viewers watch.