We recently had the opportunity to interview Brooke & Stephen Jackson of Just the Jacksons. They are currently attempting The 30 Days of Dollywood challenge, a challenge in which they attempt to visit Dollywood or Splash country for 30 days in a row.
Read on to learn more about their channel. Be sure to click the subscribe button and share with your friends that love Dollywood and the Smoky Mountains.
Please give us a brief background on yourself and tell us about your YouTube channel.
Our names are Brooke & Stephen Jackson. We met in college and got engaged at Disney World! (Our favorite place on earth) Our channel is actually 3 years old. We wanted to vlog about Orlando theme parks at that time but it’s 10 hours away and a small fortune to get all of the annual passes. Due to Covid-19, I was furloughed from work and I had time to really focus on starting up this channel again with serious dedication! We are doing the 30 days of Dollywood challenge now, in the future, we will be showing you all much much more!
When & why did you start making YouTube videos?
We started about 3 years ago. Just making small videos for our channel that I’ve since taken down just because they weren’t very good lol. We just enjoy making them because we have the opportunity to entertain people, during times like these some people are staying in due to being high risk. They need something to do! When we were doing the quarantine, YouTube kept us entertained and helped us get through it. I just want to contribute back. If I can just entertain 1 person during these strange times, it would be worth it. I never anticipated that we would have a lot of subscribers but so far we have been growing pretty quick!
How did you get started with vlogging?
We really started 3 years ago, we did some Disney vacation vlogs and some traveling vlogs. We just used some of our favorite YouTubers as inspiration such as TimTracker. We decided we wanted to be a theme park and Travel vlog channel. Then it’s as easy as holding the camera in your face and learning how to get comfortable talking to your audience, even though it’s not gonna be seen by them for 8-10 hours.
What was your first vlog about?
Our first vlog together was about our last-minute spring break Disney/Beach vacation. We are going to re-upload it soon for comedic purposes.
How has your vlogging changed since you got started?
I think now we are more confident while vlogging because we have a loyal group of subscribers that we interact with daily. We also learned from the mistakes of our bad videos.
What advice would you give to a YouTuber just getting started?
Don’t get discouraged, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t get caught up watching your subscriber and view numbers just focus on making good content. Also communicate with your audience, interaction is a great thing! Most of my challenge ideas came from subscribers.
What advice can you give to people who feel they are too shy to start making their own YouTube videos?
I was a little shy at first too, you just gotta take that leap of faith and start attempting to put out videos. Decide what your channel is going to be about and start planning your videos out. You aren’t gonna be the best youtuber ever overnight. It’s gonna take time and a lot of work, but you got this! Make it happen if you truly want to do it, 20 days ago we had a dead channel that had no traffic or views. Now we have 208 subscribers and 8,800 views in 20 days.
What are your plans/goals for the next 6 months?
We want to continue our adventures after the 30 days of Dollywood challenge. We are going to start going to other theme parks and even do 48-hour challenges where we goto a random city for 48 hours and vlog our journey. We also plan to do hotel reviews in the area around Dollywood. We have tons of ideas! I would like to hit 1,000 subscribers by Christmas. I think we can do it!
Anything else you’d like readers to know?
We are so thankful to those of you that have watched us. It’s humbling that we have the active group of followers that we do! We hope that if you haven’t watched us that you will give us a shot!
