Nine years ago, there wasn't really anyone creating content focused on giving actionable tips for people coming to visit [London]. Even our tourism board wasn't really doing anything on YouTube at the time. 

As a result, our first few videos about London all performed really well in Google search, because those videos were fulfilling something that people were Googling. 

Even now, a lot of our YouTube videos - especially a lot of the older ones - still get quite a bit of traffic from Google search specifically. 

We get a lot of traffic from Search on our website too, because we have articles like “10 boutique hotels to book in London” or “Top 10 foodie tours to do in London”.

Our #1 traffic source is still Browse…when people get onto our videos, if they watch 1-2 of them, it seems like they get served a lot of them, and we have so many people that are like “We binge watched all your videos before we came!”

Short-form is basically just video discovery… It's harder to convert those people, but we are always trying to get them onto the email list. For the majority of our short-form videos, the call to action at the end is to sign up to one of our lead magnets. 

I needed to be able to turn someone who's a one time passive viewer into a potential customer. I figured if I could email them:  “Look, we have another video,” then I could maybe try to shift them into someone who's watching more and more. 

It's a whole ecosystem, with many different touch points and journeys that they can go through. 

GoDaddy is sometimes the bane of my existence…It sometimes goes down, and they sometimes can help, they sometimes can't. 

I'm pretty sure the reason I went with ConvertKit is because I saw a free YouTube series from Pat Flynn about how to set up and start building your email list. 

SendOwl is fine if you're selling one thing, but the cart function isn't very good when you have more. 

At the end of our Instagram videos, we say, “If you want our free London 101 guide, just comment “Free guide” and we'll send you a DM. Then we get their information through the DMs, and that connects to our email list. That's actually grown our email list quite a lot. 

Our short-form videos were reaching millions of people every month, but we weren’t converting people into our email list and getting them to buy…so being able to bridge that gap on Instagram has helped us fix the problem of moving these passive viewers down the funnel. 

We use NordPass, where we can share login details only with specific people on our team, and then we can pull them out as quickly as possible. We can make changes, and it also just keeps everything in one place. 

I prefer direct-to-brand over any of the aggregators because I like to see the data and going direct, you can see really good data. I love to pull that and see what's working, what's not. I can see which articles are driving the most sales, things like that.

My producer gets everything uploaded into Dropbox and then we go in and tag things so my editors who need B-roll can easily search for a shot of, say, London Bridge and then they can find that tag and find that footage. 

Everybody has to get on board with Asana, no matter what they're doing with us - it is a must and they have to learn it quickly because we do everything there. 

I wanted somebody that could help with negotiating bigger contracts for us. I also just really needed somebody to help with time, because I just didn't have the time to hop on calls with every brand that came in and to find out what they were looking for.

Everyone's been contracted up until actually today. My first full time employee is about to sign her contract!

I love that I don't know this, because it means I have actually properly pulled out of it, which was the intention.