YouTube has become more than just a creative outlet and is now a full-blown career for many solopreneurs. With 3 in 4 teenagers considering YouTube as their desired future career choice (source: First Choice), it’s no wonder the platform is becoming a popular place to try to make some extra income. We can’t stress how much hard work and dedication is required to get to the point making money on YouTube, however, advertisement revenue isn’t always the main driver of a YouTuber’s income. We will explore the ways to get started on YouTube and the ways you can monetise yourself.
Ways To Make Money On YouTube
How To Get Started Making Money On YouTube
Find Your Niche
Before jumping in and creating your channel, it’s worth taking some quality time to think about what your channel will focus on. Your niche is basically your specialism and the overall theme of the videos you’re producing. It’s the reason people may subscribe to you because they’re also interested in those topics.
Popular niches include:
- Health & Fitness
- Gaming
- Cooking
- Finance
- Makeup & Beauty
- Music
- Comedy
- ….the list goes on!
Now, when selecting your niche there are two ways to look at it and the overall goal is to choose something you can stick to and keep creating content for in the long term. You can either choose:
- Passion: This might be a hobby or interest which you can make videos about easily and for fun. You’ll probably be super excited to make the videos and your content will likely flow out of you. However, there’s a risk your passion may not have viewers or make profits.
- Profits: Some niches will provide a higher CPM (how much you get paid per 1000 views) due to the industry the advertisers are in. For example, the finance niche is a very high CPM-producing subject because finance advertisers are willing to spend lots to get their expensive products seen by financially minded people.
If you choose a passion, make sure there are people out there also interested in the passion, and see if there are any other YouTubers doing well in the niche. Your passion may fizzle out if your channel consistently receives no views.
If you choose a high-yielding niche which you might be passionate about, you’ll soon become passionate when you start to make money on Youtube.
No matter what, we recommend doing some solid research to find out our potential niche’s CPM, audience size and the potential high-performing topics so you can gauge if you’d be interested in making the videos. A tool like Ahrefs can help you find this.
Create Your Channel
It’s really easy to start your channel in the following steps:
- Sign into YouTube
- Click ‘Create a channel’ by clicking on the top right profile icon
- Upload a profile image and channel name: This will be your brand so think about your channel name for a while to make sure it’s suitable, easy to spell, represents your niche, and maybe has some keywords in for helping with SEO. It’s useful to check if the name will be available on social media platforms and perhaps an available domain, you may want to branch out as your brand grows. Use namecheckr to find out if your name is available across other platforms.
- Create the channel and verify the account
- Add Custom Branding Banners
Learn The Basics Of Video Production
At the start, you’ll likely need to become a self-taught video editor. This can be as complicated or as simple as you make it, and you could even outsource to a professional using Fiverr or Upwork. We’d recommend getting a feel for video editing before you get started so you know how you may be spending your evenings as you balance your life and YouTube.
There are great drag-and-drop video editing software which will speed up your editing and make it simple and relatively professional looking. These include inVideo and Veed which you can try for free, you may need to pay to get the full experience later on.
Another great option which you can get for free is Davinci Resolve by Black Magic Design. This is Hollywood-grade editing software and there’s loads of teaching material online to learn the basics. You can do pretty much everything you need using the free version, but find out for yourself if you’ll need the paid version. Alternatively, Windows Movie Maker or Apple iMovie can get you good results easily and should be on your computer ready to use.
It’s important to know that video editing quality won’t necessarily make you a success, and some creators are super successful with just an unedited recording on their phone. It’s all about how much value you are giving.
Get Your Equipment Together
Okay, now you’re invested mentally, you should be prepared to invest financially. Unfortunately, video production can be expensive.. but it doesn’t have to be! Here’s your priority:
- Good Quality Microphone: We believe quality is the most important thing if you’ll be recording your own voice. You can get good results from a Logitech Blue Yeti which will cost around $100 (we grabbed an unused second-hand one for £40 so keep a look out on marketplaces).
- Camera Accessories: These will create a much higher quality video and includes: a tripod, lighting, external memory, and lenses (potentially). Having a stable camera in a well-illuminated area will give the best results.
- Camera: You could splash out on a DSLR camera (which is the best option, but expensive) or you could try using what you have or can borrow. A large majority of modern smartphones can now shoot video in 4K or 8K which is more than enough to get started!
Post Your First Video
This is a big step which many people never get to, if you get past this step then you’ll be miles ahead of anyone who’s considering YouTube creation. We recommend getting over the emotional barrier early and just post something. Maybe it’s an introductory video of what the channel is or maybe it’s your first subject matter, just get it filmed, edited and uploaded. It’s likely no one will even see it, but going through the whole process and uploading will feel like a great accomplishment and will let you know if your heart is in it to make more.
Create A Strategy To Build Subscribers
Some tips to start building subscribers and improve your viewer count:
- Optimise your videos for SEO and Search
- Ask your viewers to subscribe in the video (and likes / shares)
- Build a Social Media Following
- Give huge value
- Do what others are doing (but better)
- Upload regularly
- Do YouTube Shorts
- Be specific in your videos and to the point
- Improve your video quality
- Don’t take negative comments personally
YouTube Partner Programme (Ads)
To make money on YouTube, your goal at the start is to join the YouTube Partner Programme and therefore start generating AdSense revenue from your videos. To do this, you’ll need either:
- 1000 subscribers + 4000 valid public watch hours with 12 months… OR
- 1000 subscribers + 10 million valid public Shorts views within 90 days
After you reach one of these criteria, you can apply to set up an AdSense account through YouTube Studio and make money on YouTube. Your channel will then be reviewed over the course of a month to see if the channel follows all the correct policies.
You will then be able to see your channel’s CPM (how much money you make per 1000 views). CPMs range from less than $1 to $20+, so make sure you’re in the right niche if you want to make the big bucks.
Affiliate Marketing
You can become an affiliate for companies that offer affiliate programmes. You can reach out to companies to place their products in your video or video description. If people use your affiliate link or discount code to purchase a product from the company, then you will receive a percentage of the commission. Digistore24 and ClickBank are good places to start finding affiliate programmes, but most large companies will offer affiliate possibilities if you look at their website or reach out to them.
This gives you an extra stream of income after the AdSense income and will provide passive income if the products you affiliate remain relevant.
Video Sponsorship
You’ll see many creators dedicating a few minutes of a video to discuss the sponsor of the video. The creator will usually receive a one-off payment for adding this to the video and it will sometimes allow the creator to spend extra money on the video to improve it. Brands will sometimes reach out to you or you can reach out to brands who may be relevant for the video and the audience.
Membership To Your Extra Content
Patreon, Memberful, Buy Me A Coffee, Ko-fi are all examples of places you can drive your engaged audience to so they can subscribe for more exclusive content.
You can save bonus content or release your content early on these platforms and have people subscribe or donate each month to access it. We think this a no-brainer and every creator should consider monetizing this way.
Sell Your Own Products
Once you start to build your audience, you basically have the ability to drive organic traffic to advertise your products or services. Things to sell could be:
A Course
Skillshare, Udemy, and Teachable are great places to build a course for people to pay for access to. People are always looking to upskill online and you can monetize your knowledge and skills using these websites. You can make a course about pretty much anything, I’ve even seen people making courses about making courses…
Merchandise
If your brand has taken off you can try to sell some branded merchandise. You can use services like Printful which will print and fulfil orders as they come in (print on demand). This way, you don’t need to invest upfront in stock. You could link people to your Etsy page (find out how we made our first $1000 on Etsy)
Your Digital Products
Digital products are a great way to add extra income as they have very limited costs. Once you’ve created the file, simply allow people to pay to download it. No shipping, no warehouses, no fuss. The file can wait on your website to be downloaded and linked to on your YouTube video description.
Your Services
You might have a consultancy or service business you offer which you can advertise on your videos. Perhaps you could advertise your newly found video editing skills!
For more ideas on how to make or save money see our posts:
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