How to use Taylor Swift, vacays, and pop culture to rock it like Youtube’s Bilingirl

Chika Yoshida talks about the business of Youtube at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2016. Photo credit: Tech in Asia / Michael Holmes.

When Chika Yoshida moved back to Japan after 16 years in the United States, her English language skills made her the natural go-to person for friends seeking help with CV submissions, or grammar.

That was the start of her Youtube channel Bilingirl, which started off in 2011 as a simple selfie-video where Chika taught people the difference between the use of “a” and “the,” and other basic grammar.

“About a year and a half into Youtube I started getting jobs from big companies to collaborate, so that’s when I decided to take the risk and do it full time,” Chika says, speaking at the Tech in Asia Tokyo 2016 conference.

Today, Bilingirl’s Youtube channel has 651,477 subscribers, and Chika has worked with big firms like Austrian Airlines and Kao Corp, Japan’s largest bath products maker as she teaches a non-English speaking audience how to use common phrases, including how to “hysterically rant,” visit McDonalds’s, or enjoy a cheesecake – in English.

“There are two parts to increasing your fan base,” says Chika.

“One is getting viewers to click on your content, and two, turning those viewers into subscribers.”

The business of Youtube

Chika was quick to latch on to the analytics of her website, making improvements and changes early on. In the initial days, her search results would only show keywords related to her name, she says.

Everyone was searching for her name, so while she did branding right, only people who knew of her were looking her up. “So I decided to make my content more searchable, making videos that followed trends and other frequently-searched words,” Chika says,” Chika says.

That’s when she started experimenting with skits – dressing up like Taylor Swift [to explain the lyrics of her songs], speaking about Hawaii [a popular vacation spot for the Japanese], or teaching people how to ride a cab in the United States. About 80 percent of Bilingirl’s subscribers are Japanese and use her videos as life hacks.

The big collaborations have started getting bigger, and Chika has now started her second edutainment channel Japanagos where she talks about the Japanese language and culture for her non Japanese audience.

Don’t depend on viral

Chika wants to stick to Youtube doing what she is doing right now [no TV plans, thank you very much], and her advice to up and coming Youtubers is simple: it is great to have viral content, but determining what can go viral is super difficult. Don’t lean too much on that.