Anyone can easily create a YouTube channel to make and publish their own videos. Some of the biggest channels have millions of subscribers and make millions of dollars every year just by creating video content. Even though it is very unlikely for someone to make millions on YouTube, it’s quite common to be able to earn a few hundred or even a few thousand each month.
Beginners often have a tough time getting started since it can be hard to attract your first video viewers. This tutorial guide will teach you tips and strategies to help you build your subscribers and video views faster as a complete newbie. This allows you to start making money as quickly as possible from this side hustle.
Create a YouTube Channel
If you enjoy creating entertaining or educational videos, you may be able to make money with a YouTube channel. While this side hustle does offer the potential to make a lot of money, the average person will make nothing at all.
The main problem with creating your own YouTube channel is that you don’t get to make money instantly. You have to build your channel to a certain level of popularity first before you’ll be able to qualify to share revenue with YouTube. A lot of beginners will simply give up and quit out of frustration before they reach that point. However, if you can follow the tactics in this article to grow your audience quicker to start making some extra cash each month, it can be a huge motivator to keep working to grow your business even larger.
Try to select a niche for your channel. All of your videos should relate to each other in some way to get the best results. It’s hard to attract followers when you have videos have random subjects. For example, someone with thousands of videos all about cars will have a clearly defined audience – anyone that likes cars may follow their content. If someone has thousands of videos about all different subjects, it will be much harder. When someone watches a cat video and subscribes to the creator, they’re likely to unsubscribe in the future if you publish a cooking video next.
Video Publishing Tips
Besides making sure your channel has a niche focus, there are a number of other strategies you should utilize when publishing your videos to increase your odds of success. The title of each video is key to gaining traffic from both YouTube and search engines. Make sure you name your videos appropriately and use descriptive keyword phrases that people will likely search for to find your video. Google’s Keyword Tool can be used to find keyword phrases with a lot of search traffic to target.
Also make sure you utilize other YouTube features when setting up your video. The text you provide for the description can also be a place to use keywords that will lead people to your video. Also be sure to use descriptive keywords to tag your video. This can help with additional search traffic, but it can also help YouTube’s related videos section to promote your video more often.
Ad Share Qualifications
Earnings from YouTube actually come directly from YouTube itself as a share of their advertising revenue compared with the amount of video views or minutes watched for each channel. The YouTube Partner Program is what you want to qualify to use. You’ll need to have at least 1,000 subscribers on your channel and at least 4,000 hours of video watch time in the last 12 months.
It’s not that difficult to reach 1,000 subscribers, but reaching their video activity mark can be much more difficult. Let’s say you create 5 minute entertaining videos on your channel. You’d need 12 people to watch the entire video to get an hour of watch time.
Multiply that times 4k and you get 48,000 video views in a year. The real number is higher since not everyone will watch your full video. To do this side hustle, you need to be prepared to work for 6-12 months on it without making a penny. Once you qualify to sign up with YouTube for an advertising revenue share, you’ll get paid monthly for your video views. In general, expect to make about $4 per 1,000 videos views.
Increasing Video Views
Like many other social networks, YouTube works best when you BYOA – Bring Your Own Audience. If you can build a following on other social media sites or even an email newsletter from your own website, you can drive additional traffic to your videos as soon as you publish them.
This can be a key ingredient to growing your channel faster. If you simply wait for YouTube and search engines to send you viewers, you could wait months or even years. However, if you can send your own viewers, you’ll increase the engagement levels on your videos and make it much more likely for YouTube to send you extra traffic.
YouTube doesn’t solely focus on video views when their algorithm decides which videos to display in search results or as a related video. They look at keywords in the title and description, and they look at engagement on the video. Engagement can be likes, dislikes, shares, or comments. Even negative engagement still tells YouTube that your video is worthwhile because it invokes a reaction from viewers. This is the kind of content they want to see on their site, so they’re more likely to cross-promote it when they find it. By sending your own traffic to a new video, you’ll drastically increase views and engagement levels to give it a better chance at receiving traffic elsewhere.
Other Monetization Options
Sharing advertising revenue with YouTube is not the only way that you can make money from a channel, although it is often the easiest way. Once you have thousands of subscribers, you could consider other options to monetize to increase your annual revenue.
Affiliate marketing is one of these options. You can promote physical or digital products being sold by other companies in your videos. When you drive sales on those products, you earn a percentage of the transaction amount as a commission for your efforts. It’s often best to do this from your own website though, since YouTube won’t like affiliate links directly on their site and it may even be against the rules of the affiliate program. However, by setting up a page on your site to advertise and link to the product for sale, you can simply send you video viewers to visit the page on your site instead.
You could also utilize a website of your own to sell your own products. This could be e-commerce goods that you ship to the customer or digital products, such as video and e-book training courses. If you decide to try these other monetization options for your channel, make sure that you promote relational products. For example, a channel about cats could promote cat related products as an affiliate on Amazon, but trying to sell TVs to that audience would be much less effective.