Bethany Mota On Meeting Her Fans: 'It Brought Everything to Life For Me'

Bethany Mota has been one of the reigning queens of YouTube for a while now, and she’s opening up about her strategies, videos and more in a new interview with Cosmopolitan.

Check out what the 19-year-old lifestyle guru had to share:

On how she runs her YouTube channel: “You can see the process of how I’ve improved. I haven’t taken one editing class. I’ve learned everything on my own. If I didn’t know how to do something, I’d Google it. That’s what I think is also inspiring for the people who watch, is that they can do this too. I built it on my own and this is something that everyone is capable of doing.”

On meeting her fans in real life: “I think meeting fans really brought everything to life for me. I was doing YouTube for a couple years before I started doing meet-and-greets and actually seeing my viewers in person. I was always reading comments and reading tweets online, so you see it, but it doesn’t feel the same as when you actually meet someone face-to-face and see how excited they are to meet you. When they tell me, ‘You’ve inspired me to make my own YouTube channel,’ or, ‘You’ve inspired me to be more confident and love myself,’ those moments are always so precious to me. I wouldn’t say that it made me feel like I had fame but it definitely was more motivating to keep doing what I do.”

On what works for her audience on her channel: “When I started making my videos, I noticed that my audience really loved to see the more candid sides of my life. In the beginning, I felt that the videos had to be very polished and very professional. Then, one time, I inserted a blooper clip where I messed up and my audience loved that. So I’m like, ‘OK, this is what they like to see, just me being myself.’ I don’t need to try to be something or be someone else for them to accept me. They really want to see who you are as a person, what you like, what you dislike, your imperfections, your mess-ups. That’s what makes you real.”‘