Now that you know all my production secrets, welcome to Part 6 of my series about this Dutch American who’s making the transition from being an invisible voice over and blogger to becoming a very visible on-camera content creator. Yes, I’m talking about me: Paul Holland.
I’ll level with you: after having written a new blog post every week for the past twenty plus years, I was suffering from a mild case of writer’s fatigue. I didn’t think I had much more to say. But after six months of blissful quietude, I started to feel that creative itch again. Something was tickling my imagination. There was this voice inside of me that needed to come out.
Deep down I was still that little boy who was forced to stand in the corner of the classroom with a bandaid taped over his mouth because he talked too much (true story!). A boy that wanted to be heard.
A MAN WITHOUT A PLAN
Rather than making an elaborate business plan with a clear vision of the future, I tapped into a part of me that had been dormant since I tried to assimilate into American society. My DUTCH part. It made me different from most people in the USA, and it was about time that I reconnected with these roots. Since I’m a lover of languages, I spontaneously decided that language would be the door to “Dutchness.”
The other part of me that wanted to do this, was frustrated with how little most people knew about the Netherlands and the way netherlanders speak. What if I would highlight a painter like Van Gogh, talk about his art, and teach people how to pronounce his name correctly? And so, a concept was born.
“Hi, I’m Paul and I pronounce Dutch words and names the way a Dutchman would pronounce them.”
And much to my surprise, it worked!
How do I know? Because of the response. People came out of nowhere and from every part of the planet. My initial idea was to attract a mainly American audience since that’s where I am based, but my viewers didn’t care where I lived. Don’t ask me how they found me, but it had something to do with the clever TikTok algorithm that helped me reach an international audience. If it were not for TikTok, I don’t think my content would have taken off the way it did.
So, TikTok jumpstarted it, and Instagram followed suit. Now I’m at a point where Instagram has surpassed my number of TikTok followers (which is a good thing because TikTok’s future hangs in the balance). You can also find me on the TikTok alternative Skylight, as well as on my YouTube channel which got a makeover. Of course I’m also on Facebook, but in terms of engagement and reach it is the absolute worst.
EARNING ENGAGEMENT
Here’s what I’ve learned from this experience and from decades of blogging: If you wish to be heard, you have to go where people congregate. And different audiences can be found in different places. You have to make it easy for people to find you, and once they’re in the door you have to give them a reason to keep coming back. One way to do that is to provide interesting content and to engage with your followers.
Don’t ever say: “Well, I built a website. That should be enough to attract a following.” It doesn’t work that way.
A simple way to interact with your followers is to read their comments and respond to them. TikTok gives you extra points for doing that. Another way is to take a question or a comment and use that as the basis for a new video. These things give your audience members visible proof that they are seen, heard, and appreciated.
This way you shift the dynamic from talking to a camera (a monologue), to you engaging in a dialogue.
It’s also a trap.
The more popular you become, the more comments you’ll get, and the more time you’ll spend answering these comments until it’s taking over your life. There’s a reason why celebrities hire social media managers to make you believe the celeb in question is answering you personally.
Now, I don’t wish to suggest that I became an overnight success. Things like that rarely happen.
I didn’t even set myself a goal so I could measure my success. I simply wanted to do my thing and have fun doing it.
PLEASE LIKE ME
Here’s some tough love: getting people to like you on social media is hard work! The idea is to get the ball rolling, and to turn that ball into a snowball. And the crazy thing is that you only need a couple of popular posts to create momentum. In my case it was a post about Miffy, the Dutch children’s book character (known as “Nijntje” in the Netherlands). Miffy is beloved and known all over the world, and this was my first post to go viral. At this point it has reached almost 100K views on TikTok alone.
Mind you, of the hundreds of long posts I published about voice overs over a span of twenty years, none has ever gone this viral.
Posts like the one about Miffy put me on the map as a content creator, and social media platforms started paying attention. All they needed to see, was social proof that I could create “sticky content.” That’s content that keeps visitors engaged and that encourages them to return to the platform repeatedly. More visitors means more advertising revenue. Once you’re on their radar screen, the algorithm will start promoting your content to more and more people, creating that desired snowball effect.
At the moment I’m writing this blog post, I have 12.7K followers on Instagram, 6,298 followers on TikTok, 1.01K subscribers on YouTube and 2.4K followers on Facebook. But let’s be real. These numbers are N O T H I N G compared to famous influencers with millions of fans, but (in my defense) it took me about six months to get to this point. And remember, I had no strategy, no professional help, and no clear expectations. To be honest, I still feel I’m dabbling, although the number of followers keeps growing every day.
PEOPLE ARE PESKY
If all of this is music to your ears and you want to give it a try, I must remind you of the dark underbelly of the internet. Some folks that try to engage with you, will drive you nuts. Even if you publish what you believe is uncontroversial content (like I do), people will find a reason to disagree with you in a most disagreeable way. I’m talking about armchair critics who have never posted anything of substance in their life, folks who hide behind anonymous accounts like “user2759053.” Here’s one quick example.
My “unique selling point” is that I pronounce Dutch words and names the D u t c h way. Remember that back in the day, I worked for Dutch National Radio. As a presenter, announcer, and newsreader I was expected to set the standard of generally accepted Dutch pronunciation (like RP in the UK). This is still the Dutch I speak today.
However, you know as well as I do that the “correct” pronunciation is always up for debate. So, people started challenging my pronunciation in the most vicious ways. It turns out that the way people speak is linked to their identity which is often connected to the region they grew up, their level of education, and their social status.
They told me:“Don’t tell me how to pronounce a certain word! Who do you think you are? You don’t even live in the Netherlands anymore.”
So, I changed my intro saying: “I pronounce Dutch words and names the way “A” Dutchman would pronounce them,” as opposed to “every single” Dutchman. That helped a little. Another topic of debate is the origin of words. I like to cover a bit of etymology in my videos based on my AI-assisted research. But you’d be surprised how many amateur linguists there are in the world, and they all disagree with you or wish to make a point you stupidly missed. And that’s the third thing I want to bring up.
You can never please everyone. I try to keep my segments down to three minutes max because people have no attention spans anymore. This means it’s impossible to cover every little detail, and people will definitely and publicly ding you for that:
“How could you have overlooked this essential detail, you silly man?”
Next week I’ll talk about some of the very positive things that have happened as a result of me getting in front of a camera. I’ll also cover another way in which I am growing my audience.
If you have read every single chapter of this series so far, I am impressed and eternally grateful. Also, if you have any questions about anything I have covered in this series, please leave them in the comment section. I will do my best to address them in the next chapter(s).
Click here for part 7.
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