Although YouTube is primarily a great source of entertainment, it can be much more than that. All of us have certain hobbies that we love talking about.
With the constantly growing online community, it is possible to make money from the comfort of your home. This can be a good way of making some pocket-money, but sometimes, it can even become your primary source of income.
I would say that the easiest way to do that is by creating content for YouTube.
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Why YouTube?
First of all, YouTube is one of the top five websites in the world with more than one billion unique users a month. Unlike blogging, you do not have domain and hosting costs.
If you have a mobile phone with a solid camera, then you do not need to make any investments! All you need to do is to log into YouTube using your Google account and you can start uploading content.
YouTube has a great system of categorizing videos, so there is something for everyone. Furthermore, it supports all video formats, which means that you do not have to convert the videos.
How to make money?
Google AdSense
This is probably the easiest way of making money on YouTube. Firstly, you would need to join the Partner Program which already has one million members!
All you need is to verify your channel and enable monetization. In order to complete this procedure, you would need an account on AdSense, but that is not a problem.
Also, take note of the fact that for every 1000 views you would get 2–4$. However, this should only be your first step towards making money since YouTube keeps around 45% of ad revenue.
The only problem with this kind of generating profit is the recent change of YouTube’s policy. In the past, you only needed 10,000 views to join the Partner Program. However, nowadays, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time in the previous year, which represents a big difference.
Sponsors
This type of funding represents a great source of income once you have established your channel. Moreover, sponsors would require of you to mention them at some part of your videos.
If this seems to be complicated, you can reach out to Famebit and Grapevine which can help you at the beginning of this journey. Also, do not forget to research the company that you are looking to promote, especially if you do not want to draw some negative backlash.
In addition, this is an excellent way of making money since you do not need to share any of the revenue with YouTube!
Affiliate marketing
With this type of marketing, you are able to earn a lot of money in a short period of time. In order to dumb it down, this means selling someone else’s products for a commission.
Furthermore, this type of marketing is becoming popular, so it might not be a bad idea to board the hype train. For example, you can review a product of some company and then leave an affiliate link in the description box of that same product.
Also, it is important to stay true to yourself and only endorse products that you really believe in and that you find to be of good quality.
Merchandise
When you manage to gain enough subscribers and want to expand your brand, selling merchandise might be a perfect idea.
There are many possibilities for this type of earning money. You can sell things like t-shirts, mugs or even posters. Also, it would help if you have some kind of catchphrase, which is popular with your viewers.
One of the ways to do this is through Shopify, or you can strike a deal with Oberlo or DFTBA (Don’t Forget to Be Awesome).
Fan support
If you are not comfortable with “putting in a good word” for someone else, maybe you should just continue with what you started. You have managed to gather a lot of subscribers and viewers, which means that they like what are you doing.
This is a good way of making money if you are trying to make a short movie, or start your own company. In addition, Kickstarter is an amazing website for funding independent creative projects.
However, you can simply ask your viewers for money. This has proven to be a popular way of generating revenue on YouTube. Consequently, this would allow you to invest even more time into creating quality content which would only do good for your subscribers.
Patreon is a website that allows viewers to donate to the channels that they support on a monthly basis. Also, there is YouTube’s Fan Funding, which gives greater freedom to viewers since they can contribute whenever they like.
How to improve?
It is important from the very start to keep track of the audience that watches your videos. You should pay attention to the age, gender and to the amount of time that they spend viewing the content. This would allow you to attract better sponsors or affiliate companies.
One of the things that would enable you to keep your subscribers is to produce content regularly. You should pick a day of the week when you post your videos and try to maintain that schedule.
Moreover, you cannot forget that you have a lot of competition and that it is easy to lose viewers.
Also, do not forget to optimize your videos. Try to keep the tags and the description of your videos in order so that users can find them without much effort.
Conclusion:
Do not forget about your viewers. They are the ones that allow you to make money. Also, you should always respect them and not simply look at them as ways of generating profit.
If we stop having fun while making these videos, this will become a tiresome job like any other. YouTube offers us an opportunity to talk about things that we are passionate about, and we should not forget about that.
So keep making quality content, study your metrics, care about your viewers and you will be bound for success!