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- 🔴 1 shoot, 30-50 videos, 10.8 million views
🔴 1 shoot, 30-50 videos, 10.8 million views
Building a multi-media audience ft. Glennda Baker
Francis Zierer
August 02, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.
Today’s guest is Glennda Baker, a real estate agent from Atlanta whose star has risen on social media over the last four years. It took a few tries, but she now has an audience of over 1 million, and 30% of her real estate business comes to her through her content.
In this issue:
🪣 Clearly defined content buckets make for better content
💵 What it takes to consistently produce viral content
📚️ How Glennda generates and frames her stories
— Francis Zierer, Editor
Two false starts and a home run
“Anything that's gone wrong, whether it's my divorces, or drinking, or real estate, or family, anything that's gone wrong, it was an amazing opportunity to learn.
You don't learn nearly as much from your success as you learn from your failure. And I honestly, truly believe that.”
In 2016, Glennda Baker paid a producer to shoot and edit six videos for her YouTube channel, priced at $450 each. She’d created the channel two years earlier to post home tour video slideshows for her real estate business, but this was her first time earnestly pursuing content marketing qua content marketing.
The videos were a failure. Eight years later, none of the six have cracked 1,000 views. At the time of writing, the six videos have a combined viewcount of 2,985. It was not an effective investment, but it might’ve been a necessary failure.
In 2019, Glennda tried again with “Posts from the Porsche,” this time with no producer involved — she just set up her phone camera and spoke in her parked car for a few minutes. She’d publish 11 episodes over the next few months, this time for a combined 1,868 views to date.
Watching the videos now, this second series is better. She’s comfortable. Her stories flow freely; it’s like you’re FaceTiming. Still, the series didn’t take off. There was a problem. But it wasn’t Glennda.
In October 2020, she started posting to TikTok; three months later, her account had 100k followers and 30% of her real estate income was coming from clients who said they’d found her through her videos.
Real estate is theater, and content is too
What changed in 2020? Glennda had a clear, differentiated vision that she’d lacked four years earlier.
“The difference between 2016 and 2020 was in those four years, number one, I learned how to consume [content], but number two, I also figured out, what was my voice? Where was I most effective? What were the people that followed me looking for?
People constantly come to me because I'm, like, Aunt Glitter. I'm your aunt. I'm everybody's mom's best friend. And so, you can ask me the questions. There's no judgment.”
I see three things aligning for Glennda’s rise at the end of 2020:
Desire — Glennda wanted a stage and had the charisma to fill it — this had long been the case.
Timing — Short-form video is her medium; 2016 was too early. Longform YouTube videos and the platform’s nascent algorithm weren’t ready for her. By late 2020, TikTok was flying; distribution was easy.
The right collaborators — In 2016, she got burnt; in 2020, she found a collaborator who fully understood how to set the stage.
To execute her vision, Glennda found Atlanta-local producer Denver Bailey, whose services would end up running Glennda $5,000 to $7,500 per month, at least twice as much as her previous producer’s $2,700 for a six-video package, but with a much better ROI. Today, across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, Glennda says her content, on average, receives 350,000 views per day — 10.8 million views per month.
In the YouTube experiments, Glennda’s “role” was unclear, as was the contour of her audience. Today, Glennda keenly understands that audience and how to speak to them. She has three content style buckets:
What would you tell your best friend?
What would you tell your best client?
What would you tell your therapist?
Each piece of content she puts out falls into one of these buckets.
At first, Denver had Glennda speak directly into the camera. It didn’t work; she needed an avatar, so now she speaks to him. He’s off-camera, silent and invisible, smiling and nodding, playing five roles — producer, director, friend, client, and therapist.
A podcast, a newsletter, a media network … television?
Entering January 2021, 90 days after creating a TikTok account, Glennda had 100,000 followers; at the time of writing (three-and-a-half years later), that number stands at 874.8k, with 287k on Instagram.
In July 2022, Glennda started a podcast, Glitter and Gay, with Tyler Whitman of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York. Last year, she joined Estate Media, a modern media company producing podcasts, newsletters, and shows with a roster of popular luxury real estate personalities — her star has well and truly risen.
After joining Estate, Glennda launched a second podcast, Glennda’s Guru, and a newsletter, The Glennda Gazette. Her online presence has only multiplied and diversified since 2020.
People kept asking Glennda if she had a newsletter — eventually, someone offered to help her produce one. The first issue shipped in April 2023. Today, nearly 5,000 people receive it each week, with a reported 50% open rate and 7–10% click rate.
Glennda does not write the newsletter, but she does dictate it; she says it’s like therapy. At first, a few people were working on it, which made it more work for her. These days, once every week, she gets on the phone with the writer, Jen, for up to an hour, and Jen turns that call into a newsletter. It’s the same core ideas as her podcast and short-form videos, just in written form: personal stories and real estate opinions.
It’s simple: control the narrative, sell real estate
From her early YouTube experiments to today’s multimedia portfolio, Glennda’s goal has always been to sell more real estate. And it’s working! Today, as has been the case for three years now, some 30% of her real estate business comes from social media. When she asks people how they heard of her, they say, “I saw you on TikTok!”
It’s a highly effective marketing strategy. In October 2018, Glennda says, she was paying the same amount she now spends monthly on videos to market her real estate business through Zillow. The business she brought in through Zillow equaled just over a third of what she draws through content.
She wants, of course, to sell yet more real estate. I asked if she’d considered doing television. The answer was a hard no. It boils down to one thing: on social media, she controls the narrative; if she worked with network producers, they would control her narrative.
“It would be way too easy for somebody to edit me for their own agenda.
And that is what I love about short form content. The only person editing it for an agenda is me. I have Denver and trust in that relationship that he's going to edit me true to me. That is really critical. So, being on television, to me, doesn't give me an advantage. It doesn't give me more exposure.”
Does Glennda want more views and exposure? Yes, of course; that would help sell more real estate. But, again, she says, “I have more views on my videos than the majority of reality television has per week. The key is, it is not about the exposure. It's about the ability to control the narrative.”
Attention is a force that must be controlled; you have to wield it, direct it. To borrow a Glenndaism, “It is not about vanity and virality, it is about value and visibility.”
Find Glennda on Instagram or TikTok.
Read and subscribe to The Glennda Gazette.
🎙️ In Glennda’s episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast:
🎬️ We go behind the scenes on Glennda’s full production process
📢 Glennda has no issue sharing details of her life online — but!
🏘️ A few secrets to Glennda’s success in real estate
Content in any medium that isn’t time sensitive is batchable
There’s a new video on Glennda’s socials every day, but they’re all recorded at once, in a four-hour session at her producer Denver Bailey’s studio each month.
Over the last two years, Glennda and Tyler Whitman have recorded five seasons of their podcast, Glitter and Gay, totaling 65 episodes. They don’t record weekly; they get together for a weekend once every quarter and record a whole season.
The only piece of Glennda’s media operation that isn’t batched is her newsletter. She’s a realtor first; the content creation has to serve those business needs, not stand in their way. Her content is not time-sensitive, not based on ephemeral trends — it’s built for batching.
An efficient way to capture ideas in the moment
To efficiently batch content, you need to enter production well-prepared. You need ideas; you need developed stories.
Early on, Glennda kept track of her ideas in the Notes app on her iPhone. It was messy. But two years ago, Glennda’s intern at the time had an idea:
“He goes, ‘Hey, why don't we create you a Google form that I can put on your phone. That way, when you have an idea, you could just put it in the form. And then when you sit down to record, you can pull up your sheet.’”
Now, on her iPhone’s home screen, Glennda has a Google Form pinned like an app; when it’s time to record, all her ideas are accessible, organized, and easy to run through on-set. There’s a column for the concept itself, the thing that inspired it, and the caption once it goes to socials.
On shoot days, she and the team just open the spreadsheet on a laptop and run through the latest list; it's easy.
The right collaborators maximize your potential
It’s a pet topic of this newsletter — working with other people is good. When she started TikTok, Glennda knew precisely what she wanted to produce. She had stories to tell and a proven format she wanted to tell them in, and she found a producer who got it; who understood the vision and exactly how to execute it.
Compare that with her first outing on YouTube in 2016; neither she nor the producer she hired had clarity of vision.
Fill the gap between your vision and your ability to execute with hand-picked collaborators.
Two pieces of content we’re thinking about this week.
We launched a new podcast this week! Tasteland is co-hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto. Come for considered takes on digital culture, creators, and the media business; stay for the banter.
Logo by Kyle Knapp
If you enjoyed this issue, you’ll enjoy this one from a couple of months ago about Caitlin Murray, who similarly found fame through short-form video and is working to parlay views into a sustainable income.
Thank you for reading. For more, check out Glennda’s episode of our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
Next week’s guest is Ambreen Ali, a journalist currently editing a newsletter called Central Desi, catering to the South Asian diaspora of New Jersey. It’s a grant-funded newsletter carrying the torch for serious journalism and, in the process, teaching young writers how to cover a beat.
And if you missed last week’s issue, featuring veteran indie newsletterist Ernie Smith and lessons on newsletter syndication and building a trusting audience, read it here.
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