Category: HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE

Videos, blogs and tips on how to make money online. These are business tips, YouTube monetization, facebook monetization and more.

How to Make Money on YouTube Reviewing Products

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 13 April 2021

One of the great things about YouTube, both as a source of revenue and as a creative outlet, is that there are so many ways to be successful.

There are wildly successful YouTubers in just about every niche and making just about every kind of content there is. From gaming videos that are pure gameplay—no commentary—to in-depth guides on how to make an amazing home cooked meal. If you want to get a feel for what it is like to camp out in the wilderness with nothing but a knife, there’s content for that.

Want to see someone attempt to build a real-life Iron Man suit? There’s a video out there for you.

This wealth of variety is a two-way street, of course. Not only does it mean that you can find just about any kind of content you want, it also means you can make just about any kind of content you want, and reviewing products is one such type of content that can be both creatively fulfilling and financially successful.

What Are YouTube Product Reviews?

Product reviews on YouTube can cover everything from a “Top 10 Moustache Trimmers” list video to an in-depth review of a cryptocurrency marketplace.

The format can vary significantly, also.

When you think of YouTube reviews, you tend to think of videos where the YouTuber lays out the details of the product, perhaps talks about the kind of use cases you would want it for, and maybe even compares it to similar products. In reality, review videos can be ridiculously over the top or unconventional.

They can even be subtle in the sense that it is not immediately obvious that the video is a review, but nevertheless gives the viewer all the information that a review would give.

Many YouTubers have found themselves becoming unintentional product reviewers as an organic result of their channel’s subject matter. For example, there is a strong niche around camping on YouTube, and many camping YouTubers have found themselves spending whole videos talking about the gear they use after being asked repeatedly by their viewers to do so. The same can be said for musician YouTubers and their gear, and any number of other niches where product reviews were never the main purpose of the channel.

There is a limit to this, of course. For example, the “Will it Blend?” format of days gone by, where various products were thrown into a blender to see if they would blend, doesn’t really tell the viewer much about the product’s capabilities beyond being blended (though it was an effective marketing campaign for the blender itself).

As a general rule, a product review video should tell the viewer any important information they might want to know about the product—such as specifications—give the viewers some basis of comparison so that those less informed about the type of product are not left behind, and, usually, give some kind of subjective opinion. If we were to apply these basics to a video of a new mobile phone, you might include the following key sections;

The technical specifications of the phone
How those specifications stack up next to a similarly-priced phone
Your recommendations—who is the phone good for? Is it worth the money?

As we mentioned above, the actual presentation in which you get this information across is entirely up to you, and there is a lot of scope for creativity there.

How to Make Money on YouTube Reviewing Products

So, to the crux of the post; how to make money on YouTube reviewing products. Like the content of the videos themselves, there are many ways to monetise your product reviews.

We’re going to cover the main ones, but before we do, let’s go over some ground rules that apply to all the below.

Firstly, content is king. It sounds cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason. All the tricks in the world will only get you temporary success (if any) if the underlying content isn’t up to scratch.

However you decide to approach your product review videos, you should do your best to make sure the content is the highest quality you can achieve, both in terms of the contents and the literal quality of the video.

The next universal thing you do is be honest with your viewers when making sponsored content.

This applies to YouTubers of all stripes, but even more so when we’re talking about YouTubers who review products. If you have been paid to do a particular review, regardless of whether the review is 100% honest and not flattering at all for the product, even if all the company did was send you a free product to do the review with and aren’t actually paying you, you need to tell your viewers.

It might put some people off, but not nearly as many people as it will put off if they find out you have been getting paid to review products and not been up front about it. In some situations, this can also get you in legal trouble.

Finally, as we touched on above, make sure you give the viewers the information they came for.

There is nothing wrong with making content where you throw an iPhone in a blender or drop a laptop from water tower to see if it still works after, but if you want people to come to your channel for product reviews, you need to give them the important information somehow.

A Basic Product Review Channel

With a basic review channel, you would be monetising your videos through the YouTube Partner Programme, earning revenue from the ads displayed on your videos. In terms of a pure views-to-revenue conversion, this isn’t the most effective way to monetise your content, but it is the easiest.

Your channel will need to meet certain criteria to be allowed into the YouTube Partner Programme, such as having at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours combined watch time across the whole channel over the last year, as well as some other criteria.

Relying solely on the YouTube Partner Programme will limit what you can review. For example, if you are reviewing fire arms, you probably aren’t going to be able to monetise that content using YouTube’s monetisation programme.

The same goes for things like tobacco products, adult toys, and host of other things that advertisers aren’t necessarily keen on their ads being displayed next to.

Affiliate Linking

The natural next step to monetising product reviews is affiliate linking. There is a multitude of affiliate networks out there; some may cover purely electronic goods, others may focus on healthcare products, for the purposes of this example, we are going to focus on by far the most commonly used affiliate programme; Amazon Affiliates.

Amazon Affiliates enables users to get a special link to Amazon products and pages that they can give to their viewers, and any time someone buys a product through one of those links, the affiliate gets a little cut of the profit. The price is exactly the same to the consumer, but some of the money is redirected back to the affiliate who shared the link.

This system works very well for product reviewers who are reviewing things you can buy on Amazon, since almost anything on the site can earn you affiliate revenue, and the mechanism by which you earn is quite organic. You review the product as if you would, and you casually mention that there will be links to the products in the description (while being honest about the fact that they are affiliate links, of course).

First Looks and Exclusives

This is a little more indirect, but if you can build up a good enough reputation, you can get your foot in the door for first looks and exclusive content.

You may not get paid directly for these, but having a first or exclusive look at a highly anticipated product can do wonders for your channel’s prestige, boosting your viewing figures and increasing your earning potential from the other methods of monetising your content.

If you do manage to get these kinds of exclusives, it is important that you abide by any non-disclosure agreements and other restrictions placed on your content as part of the deal.

Not only are you opening yourself up to legal problems if you don’t, you are pretty much guaranteeing you won’t get those offers again.

Final Thoughts

Product review videos are an excellent way to earn money through YouTube, in no small part because a love of the subject matter is not necessary for success (though some expertise is necessary). Honesty is perhaps more important than usual in for reviewers, however, since the risk of being caught lying is substantial. If it gets out that you are being dishonest in your reviews, you can essentially kiss goodbye to any hope of making money with product reviews on YouTube.

And, like all types of content on YouTube, the better the quality, the better your chances of success. Great quality videos aren’t guaranteed to succeed, but poor quality content is almost always guaranteed to fail eventually.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

That is why I could not live on YouTube without someone like PlaceIT. They offer custom YouTube Banners, Avatars, YouTube Video Intros and YouTube End Screen Templates that are easy to edit with simple click, upload wizard to help you make amazing professional graphics in minutes.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the StoryBlocks website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Tags passive income, product reviews, side hustle, youtube money, youtube product reviews

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE YOUTUBE

Do YouTubers Get Paid for Subscribers?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 5 April 2021

Working how YouTubers gets paid and where that money comes from is one of the more common pursuits of non-YouTubers who are considering becoming YouTubers.

In this particular case, we can answer this question very simply, but don’t worry, there’s plenty to expand on with this topic.

Do YouTubers get paid for subscribers? – No, YouTubers do not get paid for subscribers. YouTubers are paid based on how many adverts are seen and clicked on by viewers calculated by YouTube Adsense CPM, affiliate agreements, sponsorships, brand deals and/or by funneling people into external sales of services, products or merchandise.

The typical relationship between YouTube, its content creators, and its viewers involves no direct transaction of money.

Viewers do not pay to view a specific piece of content (with the exception of movie rentals of course, but you can’t subscribe to a movie rental), YouTube does not receive any payment that corresponds to a specific viewer or the content they are watching, and so there is no payment to be issued to a YouTuber when they gain new subscribers.

So, if you wanted the short, simple, and blunt answer to “do YouTubers get paid for subscribers?”, there you go.

However, if you’d like to dive a little deeper, stick around.

The Value of Subscribers

One common misconception about YouTube is that more subscribers means more money, but it’s not that simple.

It’s true that people with more subscribers tend to be making more money, but the correlation between the two is not as strong as you might expect.

Think about your own YouTube viewing habits. For the vast majority of you, we’d be willing to bed that you have dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of channels that you are subscribed to, the vast majority of which you haven’t made a conscious effort to look at for a long time.

We all do it.

It’s one of the reasons why YouTubers often take issue with YouTube’s somewhat erratic and unreliable system for notifying subscribers about new videos.

The point we’re getting here is that having a subscriber in no way guarantees that the subscriber will be watching any of your content, let alone all of it, and it is the watching of content that generates the revenue that ultimately pays YouTubers.

If you’d like an example of this in action, take a look at the YouTube goliath that is PewDiePie. The man with more subscribers than literally any other individual on the platform. At the time of writing this, PewDiePie has over 109 million subscribers, yet you have to scroll down through five months-worth of content to find a video that has cracked 10 million views.

And the vast majority of those videos between then and now fall into the 2-5 million view range.

PewDiePie is not abnormal in this respect.

There are always exceptions, of course, but as a general rule, most YouTubers see a similar ratio of subscribers to average views. In fact, the generally accepted wisdom among YouTubers is that a healthy, growing YouTube channel should aim to be getting views equal to around 14% of their subscriber base.

So, given that the vast majority of a YouTuber’s subscribers often aren’t watching their content, it makes sense that YouTubers aren’t getting paid for each subscriber they gain.

How DO YouTubers Get Paid Then?

This topic is worthy of a post of its own, so we won’t go into too much detail here, but knowing how YouTubers get paid will help you understand the lack of a connection between subscriber count and revenue.

There are several ways to get paid as a YouTuber, but, for simplicity’s sake, we are going to focus on the YouTube Partner Programme for this brief section.

Channels that are enrolled in the YouTube Partner Programme (after meeting the necessary criteria to be accepted) can choose to monetise their videos. YouTube will then start showing ads before, after, during, and beside that video, and the YouTuber receives a cut of that revenue.

Essentially, subscribers are meaningless to YouTube when it comes to revenue, and given the increasing complexity of the recommendation algorithm and how many subscribers don’t watch channels they subscribe to, they are increasingly meaningless in discerning viewing preferences as well.

YouTube subscribers are a convenience for the viewers and a metric for the YouTubers, but nothing more. YouTube is basically concerned with watch time, because the more watch time there is, the more ads can be shown. This is why a channel with 10,000 subscribers and a monthly watch time of 5,000 hours will almost certainly make more revenue than a YouTuber with 20,000 subscribers and a monthly watch time of 2,000 hours.

Subscriber-Adjacent

There is more to YouTube than subscribers, of course. In this section we’re going to look at a few aspects of the platform that, through squinting eyes, might look a bit like subscriber-related action, but are not quite the same thing.

YouTube Premium

We mentioned above that there is no direct transaction between a viewer and YouTube, and that is true when talking about a specific video.

With the exception of movie rentals—which don’t really count in this context—nobody pays YouTube a fixed amount to watch a specific video. But they can choose to pay YouTube directly.

YouTube Premium is YouTube’s way of cutting out the middle man. Rather than finding advertisers to pay for your eyeball-time so they can give you a share of that money, YouTube Premium allows users to pay YouTube directly. By all accounts, this is a better situation all around, since the user can watch their content without being interrupted by ads, and YouTube can get paid directly without having to worry about fickle advertisers and data collection regulations.

Of course, it’s not free, which is why the majority of viewers choose not to join Premium, but the option is there.

But there is no direct correlation between what the user pays and what they watch. A YouTube Premium user could watch one video all month or a thousand videos. They are paying for a service, not a product. As for the YouTuber, they get a share of the YouTube Premium pot based on how much watch time they have accumulated from Premium viewers. So, once again, if the viewer isn’t watching their content, they aren’t making that YouTuber any money, subscriber or not.

What Are YouTube Memberships?

YouTube Memberships are different from subscribers in that anyone with a YouTube account can start a channel, and anyone with a YouTube account can subscribe to a channel. Your channels needs least 1,000 subscribers, and not having lots of ineligible videos on your channel.

And to become a member, you need to pay a monthly fee.

Memberships allow members to receive certain perks that regular viewers don’t get, such as badges, custom emojis, access to exclusive content, etc.

By its very nature, YouTubers do get paid for every membership, but as we said, members and subscribers are not the same thing.

Do YouTube Subscribers Matter?

We painted a pretty bleak picture of the worth of subscribers in this post, and we wouldn’t begrudge you wondering if there’s even any point in trying to grow your subscribers.

The truth is subscribers both do and don’t matter simultaneously. On the one hand, it is watch time and viewer retention that earns you revenue as a YouTuber, and these are also the driving factors that pushes YouTube to recommend your content more.

Neither of these things are significantly affected by your subscribers—as we’ve said, only a small portion of a channel’s subscribers watch its videos on average.

On the other hand, a large subscriber count does have certain bonuses from a psychological standpoint. For one thing, it makes you feel more successful, and when you feel good about your channel, you enjoy it more.

But perhaps more importantly, it gives your channel a little more credibility with newcomers.

It’s not exactly a flattering aspect of human nature, but we are far more likely to pay attention to a video by a YouTuber with a million subscribers than one with a hundred, even if the smaller YouTuber does a better job with their content.

Ultimately, though, it’s something of a moot point. The only way to grow subscribers without cheating the system (which we do not recommend you) is to make content that people like, which you should be striving to do regardless.

Final Thoughts

YouTube subscribers aren’t quite relegated to mere metric status just yet—they do factor in a number of situations.

For example, you will find it much harder to get a brand deal or sponsored content with a small channel than you would with a channel that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

And, as we mentioned above, there is the psychological aspect of just having that big number planted at the top of your YouTube page.

But it is far from the most important aspect of a successful YouTube channel.

A channel with far fewer subscribers that is getting more views and more watch time may not get the same immediate respect that a larger channel does, but that probably won’t matter to the smaller YouTuber, who will almost certainly be making more revenue.

Tags do youtubers get paid for subscribers, subs, subscribers, youtube subs, youtube subscribers

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE YOUTUBE

Do All YouTubers Make Money?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 1 April 2021
1 Comment on Do All YouTubers Make Money?

Though it’s becoming less of a thing as YouTube and other video platforms become evermore pervasive in our lives, there is a weird psychological aspect to seeing someone on screen.

Almost certainly left over from the not-too-distant days when broadcast television was the only way to get video content and being on TV in any significant capacity almost inherently meant you were famous, we have a tendency to “celebritise” (yes, I made that word up) our favourite YouTubers.

And, if someone is a celebrity, they’re probably making plenty of money, right?

Of course, while the likes of James Charles and DanTDM are making a small fortune and can be considered to be celebrities by most reasonable standards, the truth is that the overwhelming majority of YouTubers—even the ones that make their living from YouTubing—are living considerably more modest lives than your average A list celebrity.

So, when asking the question, “do all YouTubers make money?” – we can confidently and absolutely say no, no they do not. Many YouTubers make nothing at all from their YouTubing exploits. Making money on YouTube depends on niche, consistency and the ability to monetize properly. If you can convert views into clicks and sales you can do very well.

But it is the grey area between no money and filthy rich that is the most interesting, and that’s what we’re going to take a look at today.

YouTubers Who Make No Money

Before we get to that more interesting area, let’s take a look at the people who don’t earn money from their YouTube channels.

As implied above, we are generally more savvy to the fact that literally anyone can become a content creator, and no matter how exciting and lavish something looks on YouTube, there is a good chance they are filming in a studio flat in between shifts tending bar. There’s nothing wrong with bar tending, of course, but it’s not something people who don’t need the money typically choose to do for fun.

The first thing to consider is that changes to YouTube’s monetisation policies not so long ago made it so that many YouTubers can’t monetise their channel.

For YouTubers who have less than a thousand subscribers or fewer than four thousand hours combined watch time, or any of the other criteria, monetising their content through the YouTube Partner Programme is not an option.

They could monetise their content in other ways, of course, but a channel that doesn’t meet the criteria for the YouTube Partner Programme will often be too small to make any significant income from other means.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course; some YouTubers may make content in niches that YouTube will not allow to be monetised, but still have a big enough following to make money in other ways, such as selling merch, but for the most part, people who can’t monetise their YouTube content are probably not making any money from their channel.

Of course, there is a whole separate discussion to have over whether making money should be considered important. While life is rarely ideal, the ideal scenario would be that the YouTuber makes videos they want to make regardless of whether they are getting paid, and any revenue can then be treated as a nice bonus, and if things progress to the point where you can earn your living from the channel, event better! That being said, we know life is not ideal, and YouTube is a regular job for many people, rather than the dream career it can sometimes look like to outsiders.

How the Other Half Lives

Much like society, the very successful make up a tiny fraction of the total number of YouTubers out there.

The exact amount that any given view is worth varies quite significantly depending on the type of content and things like how long the video is, but as a rough guide, YouTubers can expect to earn between $3 and $5 per thousand views of monetised content. Using the aforementioned DanTDM as an example, Dan consistently gets 2-3 million views a day. Using these numbers and sticking to the conservative end of the scale, we can estimate that Dan makes around $6,000 per day from the YouTube Partner Programme alone. And that doesn’t factor in things like merchandise sales, sponsored videos, super chat money, and anything else he might be doing that earns revenue.

And if that makes you feel a little jealous, Dan ranked approximately 50th (at the time of writing) in terms of video views across the whole platform, meaning there at least 49 YouTubers out there probably making a lot more money!

The reason we’ve included this envy-inducing section is to illustrate just how big the numbers we are dealing with can get. Even with YouTube’s notoriously low rates of pay and unreliable nature when it comes to changing their terms of service, there are YouTubers out there who can easily break a quarter of a million dollars in one month on ad revenue alone. They are by far the minority, but when it comes to YouTubers who get millions of views a day, it’s probably harder for them to not make money.

The Grey Area

So now we come to that interesting middle ground between the people who make nothing and the people who make more money than they know what to do with.

The YouTubers we are talking about here can be a mixed bunch. We might be talking about YouTubers who have a substantial following but make the kinds of videos that YouTube refuses to monetise.

We might be talking about people whose channel has grown enough to be approved for the YouTube Partner Programme but is still relatively small and not making a great deal of revenue.

This swath of YouTube covers everything from people who spend large portions of their week making YouTube content and make very little money, to people who spend a few hours a week streaming off-the-cuff content and make thousands.

And, of course, the many YouTubers whose time-to-earnings ratio is comparable to a regular job.

Understanding Revenue and Motive

When trying to wrap your head around this topic, it is important to remember that YouTubers do what they do for a variety of reasons.

Some people have no interest in money, and only do the bare minimum of monetisation on their channel. Some people do absolutely everything they can to monetise their content and end up making a respectable income from a relatively small number of views.

It is also important to remember that revenue is far from a simple, clean system that looks the same for every YouTuber. For one thing, even the ad revenue earned through the YouTube Partner Programme can vary dramatically between YouTubers. Not only are some ads worth more than others, but the watch time can play a huge role. Consider a two-minute video; YouTube might put an ad at the start of that video, earning the YouTuber a cool $2 per thousand views. Now let’s say a different YouTuber in the same niche puts up a video that is ten minutes long, has two ad placements and gets the same amount of views; that YouTuber will be making $4 for their thousand views. Same amount of views, twice as much revenue.

Of course, this example assumes that both videos are watched all the way through and all the ads are seen, but the fact that we need to clarify that fact illustrates another way in which revenue calculation on YouTube is a messy business.

Then, of course, there are the many and varied ways that YouTube content could be monetised. Someone who seems to be getting relatively low viewing figures on their YouTube channel could be making a comfortable living from their content over on Patreon.

We tend to think of viewing figures through the YouTube revenue lens, which is to say, we assume you need at least 50,000-100,000 subscribers before you can have any hope of making decent money. The truth is you can do it with a lot less if that audience is dedicated and invested in your channel. If a YouTuber had 5,000 subscribers and 5% of those subscribers are happy to send the

YouTuber $10 a month in YouTube memberships, Patreon subscriptions, or something similar, that YouTuber could easily live off the money they make, even if they are getting viewing figures in the hundreds, rather than tens of thousands. Conversely, a YouTuber making all of their earnings through the YouTube Partner Programme would have be getting at least 800,000 views a month to make the same amount of money.

Final Thoughts

Do all YouTubers make money? Certainly not. At least, not from YouTube. But there are so many factors that go into how much money YouTubers make that it is almost impossible to make an accurate guess based only what you can see from the outside.

They could be a relatively unknown YouTuber with a dedicated following who makes plenty of money in memberships, or they could be a well-known YouTuber who gets millions of views, but their content is in a poorly-paying niche, constantly has videos demonetised, and pays agent fees.

The truth is, unless a channel has no subscribers or millions of subscribers, the only way to be sure is to ask, but you probably won’t get an answer.

Tags do all youtubers make money, money, youtube money

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

What Are Virtual Influencers?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 1 March 2021

“Influencer” should be a word familiar to anyone who is venturing into the world of social media and, by extension, YouTube (don’t worry if it’s not, we’re going to explain it in a little more detail below).

But something that could less familiar to many is the term “virtual influencer”.

What are virtual influencers? – Virtual influencers are people that use digital avatars to represent themselves online. This means they don’t have to physically show their face or in some cases even exist. They can then make money with brand deals, merchandise or even traditional marketing using this persona.

A recent influx of “virtual” characters on platforms like YouTube and Instagram have created a whole new arena for creators, and that arena is producing plenty of influencers of its own. Virtual YouTubers are a new breed of YouTuber that are essentially digital beings controlled by regular flesh-and-bone people, often in much the same way that Jim Henson’s muppets are made to act as though they are real by their puppeteers.

Virtual influencers, of course, are virtual characters that have reached influencer status.

What is an Influencer?

Let’s start with the basics. We’re assuming that most people reading this post know what an influencer is, but in the interests of providing a comprehensive answer to the question posed here, we’re going to give a brief explanation for those that don’t.

An influencer is exactly what you might think from the name; a person who influences other people. In the context of the Internet and social media, it is an almost crass term, as it relates primarily to a person’s ability to influence the purchasing decisions of a significant number of people. This, in turn, corresponds to the financial opportunities that that person can leverage. In other words, people who are influencers will have more opportunity to get paid to use their influencing power to promote things.

Influencers typically have spheres of influence. For example, immensely popular YouTuber, Zoella, has a lot of influence in the realm of beauty products. The fact that she has so much influence in that sphere means she is likely to be able to command a very high asking price for her services, but the focus of her sphere means she is unlikely to be approached to promote, say, a video game, or mechanic’s tools. The people she influences simply aren’t interested in those things.

The nature of successful advertising is one of accurate targeting. Advertisers like to be able to direct their advertisements at the most receptive audiences possible. This is why there are often diminishing returns on audience size when it comes to how much your influence is worth.

Take PewDiePie, for example. If we take a simplistic approach to audience size and just count YouTube subscribers, PewDiePie has somewhere in the region of ten times the audience size of Zoella. Of course, he makes a handsome amount of money from this audience, but you don’t tend to get an audience that size without it becoming unfocused and more diverse. While advertisers can be relatively confident that the people watching Zoella are interested in fashion and beauty products, they can’t have the same confidence with PewDiePie because his content is more varied. This is why an influencer can be someone with as little as a few tens of thousands of subscribers or followers; it is more about the market impact they can command than the raw number of subscribers or followers.

There are also side roads into influencer status, such as people who themselves may not have a big following, but appear on podcasts or YouTube channels that have a big audience.

What Are Virtual YouTubers?

So, we know what the “influencer” part means, but what about the “virtual” part? We touched on this above, but for those who are still unclear, we thought we’d best dig a little deeper. Incidentally, if you would like a more in-depth look at what virtual YouTubers are, check out this post.

Virtual YouTubers are YouTubers that run their channel from behind the guise of a digital avatar. For the vast majority of virtual YouTube channels, this digital avatar will be in the form of a Japanese anime character, though more and more alternative styles are creeping in as the channel type becomes increasingly popular.

A variety of techniques are used to bring the virtual avatar to life, but the basic premise is usually one of live motion capture where, using one of a few techniques, the YouTuber’s motions are captured and translated to the digital avatar. This allows the YouTuber to record a video as though they were recording a regular video, but the result would be of their digital avatar rather than themselves.

What are Virtual Influencers?

Being a primarily YouTube-orientated blog and channel, we have mainly focused on virtual YouTubers around here, but the premise is essentially the same whether it be on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or any other video platform. And there is often a lot of crossovers, with virtual YouTubers quite often streaming on Twitch, and almost anyone with a remotely high profile having an Instagram account.

Virtual influencers are influencers in the sense we discussed above who also happen to be virtual characters like the virtual YouTubers we described, though not limited to the YouTube platform. These influencers will usually present themselves as real beings in much the same way that any other fictional character would. To continue with the example of the Muppets mentioned above, you don’t see Kermit acknowledging that he is a felt puppet with a human controlling him; he acts as though he is a real frog. Virtual influencers do the same. They may present themselves as a self-aware computer program, a real girl who just happens to be animated, or they may not even reference the fact that they are digital at all, and present their content as though it were just like any other video. In any case, it is rare for virtual influencers to break the fourth wall, as it were.

Why Virtual?

There are many advantages to being a virtual influencer. For one thing, it can be very freeing to play a character, rather than yourself.

Many actors are notoriously shy and reserved in their everyday life but have no problem getting on a stage in front of hundreds of people; it is one of the quirks of human nature.

Another reason to go virtual is that it removes a lot of restrictions on what is possible. Your avatar is not limited to things like the laws of physics, or your location in the world. If you want them to fly around, you can do that. If you want them to present a video from the surface of the Moon, you can do that. The only limitations on what you can do with a virtual avatar are those of your own ability or resources. Which is to say, if you don’t know how to do something yourself; there will always be someone you can pay to do it for you.

What’s in it for Brands?

A natural follow-up question in this topic—especially if you are thinking about the financial future of your potential virtual influencer career—is what might be in it for brands. Specifically, does being virtual give you any kind of edge over the conventional way of doing things? Could it harm your chances of getting a lucrative brand deal?

Unfortunately, there are no real advantages from a marketing perspective. That is, none that are universal. For example, a virtual YouTuber might be an especially good fit for a particular niche, such as gaming, but that is more down to the specifics of that niche than the fact the YouTuber is virtual. Being virtual would not help them with other niches.

The good news is that there are no real disadvantages to being a virtual influencer when it comes to getting brand deals. Brands care about your audience and whether they consider your content appropriate for them. Whether or not you are virtual is unlikely to factor into this.

Brand Mascots

Though not necessarily much use to an aspiring YouTuber or general Internet influencer, some brands are starting to see the advantages of using virtual avatars rather than real people in their promotional material.

This isn’t new, of course; mascots have been around for centuries. Probably longer. But the advent of virtual avatars gives brands a much easier way to create a public face that can be easily managed and stay in rotation for as long as they need.

As a brand, you don’t need to worry about a virtual avatar having an off-day, getting older, dramatically changing their look, being convicted of a crime, or any number of other things that would be a nuisance at best or a PR nightmare at worst for a brand. They can also be managed by different people, meaning the brand is not beholden to a single actor or voice actor. If your current digital avatar’s voice actor quits, you can simply hire a new one with a similar sounding voice, and things carry on as normal.

As we said, this isn’t much use to your average Internet influencer—unless they are planning land a career as the person behind a brand’s virtual mascot—but it helps to understand the full landscape of virtual influencers when first venturing into this new facet of online influencing.

How to Become a Virtual Influencer

We’d love to say there are some unique tips for succeeding on your path to becoming a virtual influencer, but the truth is that things work almost identically to how they are for regular influencers, and if there was some secret sauce to that, everybody would be an influencer. There are certain tips you can follow that will at least keep you on the right path.

Pick Your Niche

As we mentioned above, it is much easier to become an influencer in a focused niche than it is with a broad audience, so you will increase your chances of reaching influencer status if you grow to prominence in a particular area. That way, brands whose primary audience is in that same niche will see you as a more compelling option when looking for influencers to work with.

Be Mindful of Your Own “Brand”

An influencer who is not working with brands to promote things and get paid is just someone who is popular, so we’re going to assume that if you are reading a post on influencers, you are interested in the money-making side of things. With that in mind, you will need to be careful with your own brand because it will affect what other brands will be prepared to work for you.

Of course, you can choose what kind of brand you want to be; there are plenty of different types of company out there, so you can certainly pick your lane, so to speak. The important part is to be consistent with that lane. As many celebrities, YouTubers, and influencers have found, even one “off-brand” slip up can be costly in terms of deals with other brands.

To give a fictional example, say you build yourself up as an influencer in the vegan niche. Even a single tweet about enjoying a beef burger from years ago could be enough to stop you getting brand deals with vegan companies.

Don’t Rush It

It can be tempting to take shortcuts—things like buying subscribers—but resist this temptation.

The nature of your audience will have a big impact on the future of your audience, and things like bought subscribers will dramatically reduce the quality of your audience. People (and certainly brands) will spot this kind of dishonesty, which will reduce the rate at which your influence can grow, if not stop it altogether.

Final Thoughts

Being a virtual influencer may not be much different from being a regular influencer from the influencing side of things, though the process of being virtual is a little different.

Overall, the advantages of being virtual tend to benefit the brands that adopt them more than they benefit the influencers who are them. This is not to say you shouldn’t do it if the virtual influencer life appeals to you, but make this decision on its own merits—decide if being a virtual character is right for you without the external branding side of things—since you are not likely to be much better off as a virtual influencer than you are as a regular one.

Tags influencers, make money online, money, virtual influencers, vtuber, vtubers, what are tubers, youtube money

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Do YouTubers Get Paid for Views?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 1 March 2021
1 Comment on Do YouTubers Get Paid for Views?

How YouTubers get paid is often a point of interest for people who are considering getting into the platform.

And, for that matter, many people who have no interest in becoming a YouTuber but nevertheless are curious.

There are, of course, several ways in which a YouTuber can get paid from their channel, and there is plenty of information about the different aspects of YouTuber earnings, many of which you can find on this very blog.

Do YouTubers Get Paid for Views?

So, straight to the meat of the topic. Do YouTubers get paid for views? The answer is a little mixed – YouTube channels need to be part of the YouTube Partner Program to earn money directly from the adverts displayed on their videos. Once a channel has 1000 subscribers, 4000 watch time hours and are accepted into the program they ca earn anywhere between $1-10 per thousand advert views.

There are other YouTubers that do get paid but that choose to operate in ways that don’t earn them money on a per-view basis.

Let’s back up a little.

It’s worth noting that, effectively, all YouTube earnings are based on views one way or another. Even YouTubers who earn their revenue primarily through things like brand deals and crowdfunding need to have enough interest in their content to make money, and that interest is expressed through views. Granted some methods of generating revenue require considerably fewer views to make a given amount of money than others, but it all comes to back to views one way or another.

Still, a channel getting a lucrative brand deal because they have millions of views a month is not what we typically mean when talk about getting paid for views on YouTube. So what do we mean?

The YouTube Partner Programme

We are, of course, talking about monetisation through YouTube’s Partner Programme, which is the most common way that YouTubers monetise their channels—at least in the beginning.

This programme works by displaying ads on your content and, for channels that qualify, splitting the revenue. There are certain criteria that need to be met, such as how long an ad is watched for, or whether the ad was interacted with, but for the most part, the basic rule of more view equals more revenue applies.

Watch Time

Of course, like most things in life, the reality is a little more complex. We’ve already hinted that the amount of time an ad is watched affects whether it earns any money, but when we are talking about revenue per view, the length of the video is also important.

YouTube doesn’t just show one ad on a video, it will cram as many in there as you let it, and the longer the video, the more ads that can be shown. Again, whether the ads get watched is a different matter, but a video that is long enough to show four advertisements has the potential to earn four times as much revenue as one that only shows one ad.

Engagement

Those of you who can read between the lines may already have made this connection, but the natural result of more ads increasing the revenue doesn’t just mean that longer videos have the potential to earn more money, it also means that engagement is important, too.

The crucial point about having that video we mentioned that is long enough to show four times as many advertisements is that those advertisements only earn revenue if they are watched. That means that if a viewer checks out before the second ad, the rest of those ads may as well have not been there for all the good they do.

How is Revenue Calculated?

For view-based revenue on YouTube, there are two central metrics for calculating how money a channel is making; CPM and RPM.

CPM—cost per mille—refers to the amount of money that a channel is making per thousand views. CPM factors all the videos that are eligible for monetisation (and only those videos), which means that you get an average spread in terms of revenue, which is to say that videos that make very little will bring your CPM down, whereas videos that make a lot will bring it up.

CPM does not account for YouTube’s share of the revenue, nor does it factor any of the many other ways which you can make money through the platform, or external to the platform for that matter.

RPM—revenue per mille—is a metric designed to give YouTubers a better sense of how much revenue their channel is making. Like CPM, it refers to the amount of money you are making per thousand views, but unlike CPM, it factors in all views. It also factors in several other sources of revenue (from within the YouTube platform) such as memberships, and super chat.

Revenue Sources YouTube Doesn’t Account For

YouTube can only factor in revenue that you make through their platform, but there are other ways to earn money from the success of your channel.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the more popular ones.

Third Party Subscription and Donations

The most direct way for your viewers to support you is by sending you money, of course.

This can be done through direct donations, such as through PayPal, but it can also be done using platforms like Patreon, which allow your viewers to set up a recurring payment to support your content.

This is essentially the same model that the YouTube Membership system is based on.

Brand Deals and Endorsements

For YouTubers who have a significant influence in a particular area—or just a heck of a lot of subscribers—brand deals and endorsements can become an option.

This is where a company comes to you directly, paying you to endorse a product or service, sponsoring a video.

These deals are typically far more lucrative than anything you would get through the YouTube Partner Programme, but are much harder to get since your channel has to be very successful to get noticed by brands. It is possible to get brand deals as a smaller channel, but you generally have to be a big player in a specific niche for that to happen.

Affiliate Marketing

For YouTubers whose content lends itself well to affiliate marketing, tying in your content to a relevant affiliate program can be a great way to increase the revenue your channel earns.

The most common example of this is YouTube channels that review or highlight products sharing Amazon Affiliate links to those products in their descriptions.

How to Increase Revenue Per Views

Though there is no one-size-fits-all solution, we can boil down the keys to success to a few significant points. Firstly, focus on watch time and engagement. The longer your videos are, and the more watch time they accumulate, the more revenue they will have the chance to generate.

There are also ways to direct your content so that it is more likely to earn more money. Generally speaking, targeting niches that have a high click through rate, or that get bid on highly by advertisers, will mean that your videos generate more money per view.

Beyond that, though it no doubt feels like a bit of a cop out, the best advice for increasing the revenue of your channel is to focus on the content and make the best videos you can. High quality content is the foundation upon which successful channels are built, and starting with a good foundation will always give you a better chance of success in the long run.

How Much is a View Worth on Average?

As we have hopefully made clear, there is no fixed amount we can give, but for a rough idea of how much a view is worth, the average ad view on YouTube will make somewhere between $0.01 and $0.03.

This is, of course, subject to any criteria regarding how long the ad is watched for. Ads that are watched for less than a given amount of time will not earn the channel any money.

If this number seems a little low, it generally is considered to be, which is why YouTube Partner Programme earnings are rarely deemed a good method to base your entire income on.

Final Thoughts

Trying to put a solid number on something like YouTube earnings is a losing battle; there are simply too many variables that can change that number.

And, while YouTubers can often calculate their earnings as a per view metric, the reality of those earnings is often considerably more complicated, with revenue coming from several different places, and at a far from consistent rate.

If you are becoming a YouTuber with revenue generation being the primary goal, it will help to shape your channel from the very beginning with that in mind; focusing on appropriate niches, making content that lends itself well to earning money.

If you are joining YouTube for the love of making content, however, just focus on that to begin with, and figure the rest out as you go along.

Tags do youtubers get paid, money, youtube money, youtuber money

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE MARKETING TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Do YouTubers Have Managers?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 17 February 2021

While many YouTubers are happy to make videos on things like how much they earn (because it is almost guaranteed to be a highly viewed video) there is much about the life of your average YouTuber that remains off-camera.

Not necessarily because there is some desire to keep it secret, but because it’s not all that interesting and people rarely think to ask.

“Do YouTubers have managers” is one of these unglamorous questions that you don’t see often answered, but it can be useful information for aspiring YouTubers who are looking to map out their road to success on the platform – Most small YouTubers under 100K subscribers do not have managers. When starting YouTubers try to manage all of the day to day tasks themselves. However, as a channel grows to around 100K subscribers is might be wise to seek additional help with organization and marketing decisions.

In this post we’re going to look at the different types of “manager” that this question could refer to (yes, there are a few) as well as what type of YouTuber might need them, and whether this might apply to you.

Let’s dig in.

What is a Manager?

There are a few different roles that the title “manager” could refer to in this context, and understanding what they are will go a long way to helping you understand if you need one.

In this section we’re going to give each type of manager a different label to distinguish them, but in reality they would probably all just be referred to as a “manager”.

Show Manager

In a more traditional television setting, this role would likely be referred to as a “Show Runner”.

A manager in this context would be responsible for taking care of the logistics of making YouTube channel content. For example, if the boys over at How Ridiculous want to drop a sail boat from the top of a tower onto an industrial-strength trampoline, someone needs to make those arrangements.

It can also cover things like handling travel arrangements if the channel is going abroad, or securing guests for the show.

This type of manager is typically only necessary for larger channels with more extravagant content.

Money Managers

This type of manager is actually often referred to as a “money manager”, largely because it is a pretty self-explanatory name.

Money managers exist in all walks of life, not just YouTube, and are responsible for managing their clients money. This can cover a lot of things from, from advising their clients on whether a particular purchase or investment is a good idea, to actively investing their client’s money for them.

Obviously, for a channel that has a few thousand subscribers and makes less than a hundred dollars a month, a money manager is wholly unnecessary.

For larger channels that are making lots of money, however, and especially when that money comes from several different sources, a money manager can be an invaluable way of freeing up time and giving you peace of mind that your money is being taken care of.

Content Network Managers

For YouTubers that become part of a larger content network, they may have a manager responsible for taking care of them within the network.

The manager would be responsible for advising them, making sure they don’t break any of the content network’s rules, and generally acting as a point of contact between the YouTuber and their network. Obviously, this type of manager only applies to YouTubers who are part of a content network.

General Managers

When people think about the idea of a YouTube manager, this is usually the type manager they are thinking of.

A general manager (not like in a business sense) takes care of a range of things, some of which may include things we have mentioned above.

They will often be responsible for handling enquiries, such as bookings and collaboration suggestions. They will probably also be handling a good deal of the more administrative tasks involved in running a YouTube channel, such as updating websites, handling descriptions, and some of the more in-depth promotion.

In this regard, most YouTubers act as their own manager, but many of the more successful YouTubers generally reach a point where they find outsourcing some of the less creative aspects of their job can free up a lot of time, which one of the most constraining parts of being a YouTuber.

This tends to be the first step towards deciding that getting a manager would be a good call.

Talent Managers

Talent managers are a bit “odd man out” in this context, as they are not really related to YouTube specifically.

Talent managers will often have several people and acts on their books, and concern themselves with looking after their clients best interests, ensuring they get good deals and only take on work that is good for them.

Talent managers (or agents) are usually more found with YouTubers who have a marketable skill outside of YouTube, such as being a musician, comedian, or actor.

Business Managers

We saved the best for last. Business managers are by far the most important of the manager types we have listed. You can think of a business manager as similar to a money manager, but the scope of their work is much broader.

If your YouTube venture begins to grow beyond the confines of yourself and your home studio, you should definitely consider getting a business manager. There comes a point in many successful YouTube channel’s life where, no matter how much it still feels like a cool creative project, it is technically a business. It is technically a business from the moment it makes its first dollar, but it is unavoidably a business when it is making thousands.

There are a lot of things to wrap your mind around when running a business, and the consequences for failing to fill out certain forms or apply for certain licenses can be quite strict. For someone starting a business, you would expect them to know everything they need to know, but for a YouTuber who just wants to make content, it is reasonable to expect that they would not know everything they need to know to run a business.

Business managers will look after the business side of a channel, leaving the YouTuber to concentrate on what they do best; making content.

Do I Need a Manager?

Much of the decision as to whether you need a manager (or any help, for that matter) will come down to your ultimate goals for the channel.

If you are looking to grow to be a large operation, perhaps extending into a brand beyond your channel, and you can comfortably afford to hire a manager, then you could probably justify it.

If, however, you have no intention of making your channel more than just you and a camera, it would be very difficult to justify a bringing a manager onboard, even if you can afford to.

YouTube Partner Managers

Currently, YouTube has a program in place called YouTube Partner Managers, and is an initiative by YouTube Creators to help YouTubers get the most from their channel.

The program involves one to one tuition, personalised plans for your channel, and invitations to workshops and other exclusive events.

Unfortunately, it is only open to channels that meet certain criteria, and it is invitation only.

Can I Do It All Myself?

In theory, there is nothing stopping you from taking care of everything yourself. There are no laws that say you have to hire a money manager once you start making a certain amount of money. There are also no laws that say you have to partner with a business manager before turning your channel into a business.

Like many things in life, however, the question is less about whether you can and more about whether you should.

The different types of manager we have mentioned above cover a very broad selection of skills and expertise. To effectively do the job that they can do, you would need to learn these skills and gain that expertise; something that is very time-consuming.

The smaller your channel, the less you need to know and the less work would be involved, but if you have ambitions of growing into a YouTube behemoth, you will probably need to consider hiring a manager at some point, if only to save your own sanity. After all, there are only so many hours in the day!

Final Thoughts

Of all the types of manager we have mentioned, only the money, business, and network managers are particularly common in the world of YouTube, and the rest sometimes go under different labels (talent agent, for example).

The first two of these—money and business—are especially important for YouTubers that need them because the consequences of getting that side of things wrong can be severe. If you manage your money poorly you can end up broke, or worse; in debt. If you don’t handle the business side of things well, you can get hit with fines, even sued.

This is especially true if you begin hiring people, who will have many rights as an employee that you must respect as their boss.

Of course, if you stick to just making videos from your home studio by yourself and declare all the money you make, you’ll be fine. Not every YouTuber dreams of being a content network.

Tags branding manager, marketing manager, youtube channel management, youtube channel manager, youtube management, youtube manager, youtube money

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

A Zero-waste YouTuber With About 125,000 Subscribers Explains How Much Money He Earned Each Month In 2020

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 8 February 2021

Levi Hildebrand is a YouTube creator who films videos on how to help preserve the planet, be a minimalist, and follow a zero-waste lifestyle.
He started his YouTube channel in 2017 and now has about 125,000 subscribers.
By monetizing his videos with ads and brand deals, he turned his YouTube channel into a full-time job.
Hildebrand spoke with website blog Insider about how much money he makes on YouTube, and why he only works with brands that align with his message.

Levi Hildebrand wants to help preserve the planet and he has turned this mission into a full-time career by sharing his message on YouTube.

Hildebrand launched his YouTube channel in 2017 and now he has 125,000 subscribers. On his YouTube channel, Hildebrand has videos about urban farms, compostable phone cases, and how to follow a zero-waste lifestyle.

His channel’s slogan is: “You don’t need to be a hero to save the planet.”

To make a career out of posting content on social media, Hildebrand has developed several revenue streams, including brand sponsorships, affiliate links, Patreon, and money earned from ads placed in his videos through YouTube’s Partner Program.

Read more: A 5-step guide to making the most money possible from YouTube video ads, with advice from top creators

To be accepted into YouTube’s Partner Program, creators must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours, and once they are in, their videos are monetized with ads filtered by Google. How much money a creator earns (called AdSense) depends on the video’s watch time, length, video type, and viewer demographics, among other factors. YouTube also keeps 45% of the ad revenue, with the creator keeping the rest.

Hildebrand’s YouTube channel is a One Percent for the Planet member – an organization where members contribute at least one percent of their annual earnings to help save the environment. And for 2021, Hildebrand said he will be donating all of the money his channel makes this year from YouTube AdSense to the organization.

But how much money does a YouTube channel about sustainability and minimalism earn?

Hildebrand broke down how much money he’s earned on YouTube by month in 2020.

January: $756
February: $967
March: $682
April: $1,008
May: $995
June: $1,181
July: $1,167
August: $1,199
September: $1,722
October: $1,444
November: $1,549
December: $1,156

YouTube ad rates fluctuate month to month, and at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, some YouTube creators saw a decline in their March earnings as advertisers pulled campaigns and lowered budgets. You can see that reflected in Hildebrand’s earnings.

A post shared by Levi Hildebrand (@levi_hildebrand)

Since Hildebrand follows a sustainable, zero-waste lifestyle, he only supports brands and companies that have similar values.

For instance, some of the brands and products that Hildebrand has promoted on his channel include the shoe brand Allbirds, a phone case company that makes compostable products, and a sunglasses brand that uses sustainable materials.

Only working with eco-friendly brands can be tricky and he rarely says yes to working with new companies, Hildebrand said.

“I never agree to a product review or a collaboration of any kind until I’ve actually held and used the product for a significant chunk of time,” Hildebrand added. “Because if your product sucks it doesn’t matter if you have the best branding and you save 1,000 whales for every purchase. I will take a better produced high-quality product over an overtly sustainable product in the same niche.”

To help him decide whether a brand is worth promoting, he created a checklist of must-haves:

The product must be high quality.
The company has to have good branding.
The brand must have some focus on sustainability or giving back to the planet.

Hildebrand’s message to the YouTube community is that he hopes to see more creators sharing tips on how to care for the environment.

“Big creators like MrBeast and Mark Rober have a voice and when they do things like the TeamTrees challenge and other things like that, they are normalizing environmental actions,” he said about the 2019 movement started by two YouTubers where for every dollar donated one tree would be planted somewhere around the world (to-date TeamTrees has raised over $22 million).

“If we see creators of any size using a reusable bottle and mentioning the fact that you shouldn’t use disposable, or creating a lifestyle that is sustainable that they are representing to their audiences, that can make a huge difference,” he said.

Tags Levi Hildebrand, money, youtube money

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How Do Virtual YouTubers Make Money?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 30 December 2020
3 Comments on How Do Virtual YouTubers Make Money?

When you first come across the world of virtual YouTubers, it can seem a little strange and exotic, and you might be forgiven for thinking that things work a little differently over in VTuber land (that’s not a real place, by the way). In particular, you may find yourself wondering how do virtual YouTubers make money?

The truth is virtual YouTubers operate in much the same way that regular YouTubers do. Granted, the process of making the content is different, but everything that happens outside of the creation process is more or less the same. We’re going to go over the ways virtual YouTubers make money—bearing in mind that these are also the ways regular YouTubers make money—but there is more to explore here, because while VTubers make their money through many of the same methods, there is a noticeable shift of focus when compared to a typical flesh and bone YouTuber.

But let’s kick things off with those money-making methods.

How Do Virtual YouTubers Make Money?

Virtual YouTubers just like standard YouTubers and influencers make money through the YouTube Partner Program, affiliate marketing, merchandise sales, crowd funding sites like Patreon and brand deals. The only difference between Virtual YouTubers (VTubers) and human influencers is their chosen public persona, avatar or face.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of VTuber monetisation, we’ll give you a brief overview of the most common methods available to a typical YouTuber. For a more in-depth breakdown, check this post out.

The YouTube Partner Programme

The OG, as it were. This method of monetising YouTube content has been around in some form or another since the earliest days of YouTube monetisation. For eligible YouTubers, you simply opt your channel into monetisation, and YouTube will begin displaying ads beside, over, and during your videos. The revenue generated from these ads is then shared with the YouTuber.

In terms of the amount of money you make, the YouTube Partner Programme is hardly at the top of most YouTuber’s list. You generally have to have a lot of views to make any real money, and even then it is an incredibly unreliable method due to the volatility of the advertising market and YouTube’s own constant tinkering with their terms and algorithms. It is also incredibly inconsistent between YouTubers. Due to the nature of online advertising—which is essentially auction-based—one YouTuber could make many times more than another YouTuber, even if the other YouTuber has the same or more views.

Memberships

For YouTubers with loyal audiences who are either invested in the content that is being produced or invested in the YouTuber themselves, memberships offer a great way to cut out the volatility of the advertising space that we mentioned above.

Unlike advertising, memberships involve your members supporting you directly in exchange for perks that aren’t available to regular viewers. This method is more consistent than advertising. Granted, members will drift away from time to time, but if your content is consistently compelling, new members will replace them, and you are unlikely to see a sudden drop in your earnings—well unless you do something to alienate your members.

This also cuts out many of the issues that have been typified by the “Adpocalypses” that YouTube has brought down upon us. As your members are choosing to support you directly, there is no question of whether the content is suitable, so you don’t need to worry about your revenue taking a sudden nosedive because advertisers have suddenly decided they don’t want their brand associated with your kind of content.

Super Chat

Super Chat is a method that streamers can use to monetise their live streams. Essentially, the live audience can donate a little sum of money (or a large sum, it’s up to them) to get their message pinned to the top of chat for a period. In most cases, the message will also pop up in the video, but that is entirely down to the YouTuber.

Like Memberships, Super Chat has the advantage of not being beholden to changing YouTube monetisation policies and the shifting whims of advertisers. The only real downside is that there is no way for a YouTuber who doesn’t stream to take advantage of it.

Brand Deals, Sponsored Content, and Endorsements

For YouTubers who command enough of an influence in a given area, the prospect of brands coming to you directly (or through an agency) may be on the table. This is where a brand pays you to promote them on your videos, cutting out YouTube in the process.

Though each deal is unique, brand deals are typically more lucrative than the equivalent revenue you would get from YouTube. And, in many cases, you can still monetise your sponsored content through the YouTube Partner Programme, essentially letting you double dip.

Unlike advertising revenue, brand deals are not necessarily predicated on the size of your audience. Of course, the bigger your audience, the more likely you are to get offered this kind of arrangement, but the ultimate value of your content is determined by the conversions generated for the brands that sponsor you. If your videos typically generate a higher-than-average level of interest from your viewers, brands will be willing to pay your more to get their products or services promoted by you, even if you have a relatively small audience.

Affiliate Sales

For YouTubers whose content revolves around products and services—such as YouTubers who review things—affiliate sales are a way to earn revenue from your recommendations.

By signing up for the relevant affiliate programs and linking to the products or services you are discussing in your videos, you earn a commission for every viewer who buys a product or signs up to a service through your links.

You also provide your viewers with a quick and easy way to get to things you are talking about.

Merchandise

For those lucky YouTubers who are able to cultivate an audience that is invested in them, merchandise is another monetisation option.

You could do this through a third-party merch retailer or through YouTube’s own merch shelf. Of course, the success of this is determined by your audience’s willingness to buy your merch.

There is a world of difference between dropping a couple of dollars in Super Chat and buying a twenty dollar shirt from your merch store.

Patreon and Similar Services

In essence, this option is the same as YouTube Memberships, though YouTube has certain restrictions in place—such as requiring your to have at least 30,000 subscribers—before you can make use of that option. Third-party alternatives such as Patreon do not have such restrictions, meaning you can offer your subscribers a way to support you directly much sooner than you would be able to through YouTube itself.

Like Memberships, the basic principle is that your Patreons want to support you directly, but you would generally offer them some incentives, such as exclusive content.

What’s Different for Virtual YouTubers?

The most significant difference between a regular YouTuber and virtual YouTuber is, of course, their appearance (in the videos, of course). People don’t typically want to buy merchandise with a human face on it; we tend to prefer designs and artwork. For virtual YouTubers, their digital avatar is the artwork. With the majority of virtual YouTubers being Japanese anime characters, they have artwork ready to go by just taking a screenshot of their digital avatar.

The next area of difference is how YouTube perceives them. YouTube has been cracking down on videos intended for consumption by children. This is due to stricter regulations on what data can be collected on underage viewers, which in turn leads to advertisers being less willing to show their ads on children’s YouTube videos because they can’t be as accurate with their targeting.

This can present a problem for virtual YouTubers because most of them are cartoon characters, and even though their content may not be intended for children, YouTube doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to separating out videos that should be demonetised from videos that look a bit like videos that should be demonetised.

The final main difference we’re going to highlight is the fact that many of the top virtual YouTubers are run by agencies like Hololive, essentially creating a team of popular mascots to generate revenue. This doesn’t necessarily affect new entries into the virtual YouTube space—the barrier to entry for creating virtual avatars and content is relatively low—but it is an interesting aspect of this space that is worth noting.

Virtual YouTube Expansion?

For the moment, the majority of virtual YouTube is sitting comfortably around its place of origin; Japan. Most of the YouTubers in this space are creating Japanese-language content and seemingly have little interest in expanding beyond that sphere.

That being said, the few virtual YouTubers that have ventured into the world of English-speaking content are doing very well, and there is a strong interest in Japanese anime culture in the west.

These things would suggest that there is a potential explosion of interest in this scene on the horizon, as more people see the potential of English-language virtual YouTube content.

The Creation of Virtual YouTubers

There are several programmes and mobile apps out there that can be used to create digital avatars for use in virtual YouTube content. And, if the above prediction of a boom in interest holds true, it would be reasonable to expect the number of applications available to grow, also.

These pieces of software range from applications for making a digital avatar to applications for animating those digital avatars, with a few options straddling this line and offering both functions in one package. The most useful part of these applications, however, is the ability to animate the digital avatars using things like VR controllers, or webcam-based motion-tracking. Without these techniques, it would be expensive indeed to create the videos, as animating by hand is a lengthy process that requires a lot of skill.

Any financial benefit there is to running a virtual YouTube channel would quickly be erased if the YouTuber were forced to animate their avatar by hand. With motion-tracking technology, the YouTuber can mostly just film themselves as though they were making a regular video, while the software takes care of translating the YouTuber’s movements to the digital avatar.

Should You Become a Virtual YouTuber?

All this talk of a potential explosion of interest may have you wondering if virtual YouTubing is something you could try yourself.

The good news is that there is a very low barrier to entry technologically speaking—you can purchase software that will enable you to animate a digital avatar with a nothing more than a webcam for as little as $15, or even free in some cases. There is also no real restriction on what kind of content you can make. The existing popular virtual YouTubers cover quite a broad spectrum of video types, showing that it is more of a fandom-driven thing than a content-driven thing.

In other words, viewers are coming for the virtual YouTuber more than they are coming for the specific content in the video.

To that end, you should ensure you have something to hang your channel’s hat on. This could be informative or interesting content, or it could be an entertaining personality—ideally, it would be both. As long as you have something to draw viewers interest, you will be fine. Of course, this part at least is true for regular YouTubers, as well.

There are plenty of reasons why you might be interested in taking on a virtual persona rather than getting in front of a camera yourself—camera shyness, privacy, a need to express yourself in different ways—but ultimately that part of the equation isn’t important; you could just do it because you think it’s cool.

Final Thoughts

For the most part, virtual YouTubers make their money the same way as non-virtual YouTubers. The primary differences in that respect are where the focus lays, with virtual YouTubers making more of their money from different areas to regular YouTube. More merch and less Patreon. More Super Chat and less YouTube Partner Programme.

It should be noted, however, that while the top twenty or thirty virtual YouTubers generate a very hefty amount of revenue from their content, there is a very steep drop off after those top channels. There were around 30,000 virtual YouTubers at the start of 2020, and most of them weren’t making much—if any—money at all.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Tags how to make money online, make money online without showing your face, tubers, virtual influencers, virtual tubers, vtube, vtubers

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

What is YouTube RPM?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 11 December 2020
1 Comment on What is YouTube RPM?

YouTube provides many ways for you to track the success of your YouTube channel.

After all, your success is their success, so it is in their best interests to make sure you have everything you need. Among the things YouTube provides you with—indeed, probably the most important thing that YouTube provides you with in this regard—is a raft of metrics for keeping track of how your channel is doing in a range of different areas.

You can track things like what regions of the world are viewing your videos, what demographics those viewers fit into. You can even track what devices they are viewing your videos on. But, most importantly for this post, you can check how your channel is doing in terms of revenue.

The most common metric, and typically the best gauge of how well you are doing financially, is the CPM.

CPM stands for cost per mille and is a metric of how much money you are making per thousand views. It is an industry-standard metric from the larger advertising world and, as such, it is not quite perfect for determining how your channel is doing.

YouTube is an increasingly complex platform with a growing number of ways for you to generate revenue from your channel, whereas CPM is very advertising-focussed.

In fact if you want to know more about CPM I deep dive into what is CPM in my blog.

But now its time to understand the new comer, Enter RPM.

What is YouTube RPM?

RPM—revenue per mille—is a new metric that YouTube has introduced in an effort to give you a much more comprehensive snapshot of how your channel is performing financially. It represents the amount of revenue your channel has generated per thousand streams, but the revenue counted comes from multiple sources, not just advertisements.

Those revenue sources are;

Ads
Channel Memberships
YouTube Premium
Super Chat
Super Stickers
YouTube BrandConnect

There are generally a lot of questions regarding RPM, so we’re going to attempt to answer them all here.

What is the Difference Between CPM and RPM?

The differences between CPM and RPM can be whittled down to three main aspects:

CPM only factors in ad views when totalling up revenue
CPM does not factor in views on videos that aren’t monetised
CPM does not factor in YouTube’s share of your revenue

Overall, RPM is intended to be a much more creator-focused metric than CPM, which is very much intended for advertiser use by its nature. It may take a little adjustment, but RPM should be considerably more useful for YouTubers going forward.

Why is my RPM so Much Lower Than my CPM?

It is important to remember that CPM and RPM are units of measurement and, like any unit of measurement, there are two variables to factor in. For CPM and RPM, those variables are views and revenue, and that makes it a very fluid metric since both variables can change.

CPM only factors in the views from monetised videos, which for most channels means fewer views, since many channels will invariably have some not-monetised content on their channel. CPM also only factors in revenue from ads, which for some channels, means less revenue, as there are other sources of revenue available to you, such as memberships and super chat.

The exact numbers will depend on your channel, but it is entirely possible that you could see your RPM being much lower than your CPM. If your channel does not make use of non-ad-based revenue streams and has a good amount of not-monetised content, the CPM will be higher because your RPM will be factoring in additional views without any additional revenue.

On the other hand, if you make a lot of revenue from things like memberships and super chat and have hardly any views on not-monetised videos, your RPM will be higher than your CPM because the views are roughly the same, but a lot of additional revenue is being factored in.

Finally, RPM factors in YouTube’s cut of your revenue, which is a pretty hefty 45%. This aspect alone will probably be enough to make your RPM lower than your CPM in most cases. The important thing to remember is that RPM is a different way of looking at the existing metrics of your channel.

It does not change your earnings in any way; it just presents a more representative snapshot of what they are.

Is RPM Important?

We believe it is very important because of the clear direction that YouTube is going. YouTubers have long since accepted that YouTube’s built-in monetisation is not a reliable—or even a good—way to make money from your channel. As a result, they have cast their nets wide and found membership platforms, brand deals, affiliate marketing, and more. The key thing here being that none of these things are through YouTube, meaning YouTube are not getting a share of those profits.

As much as some YouTubers believe that YouTube hates them, the truth is YouTube is a business, and everything they do is an attempt to ensure they make money. Being primarily advertisement-based has posed its problems for YouTube, as every adpocalypse has shown. Demonetising thousands of channels doesn’t just hurt the YouTubers; it takes money out of YouTube’s pocket as well.

The solution is pretty obvious, of course. YouTubers have found ways to monetise their content away from the YouTube platform, and in ways that are not beholden to advertisers. It makes total sense that YouTube would look to incorporate those methods into their own platform, where they can take a cut of the profits.

Memberships, YouTube Premium views, Super Chat, Super Stickers—these are all ways in which a YouTuber—and YouTube themselves—can earn revenue in ways that do not involve advertisers. It is essentially a direct transaction between the viewer and the YouTuber (facilitated by YouTube for a small fee, of course) and as such, there are no external forces involved that might want that revenue removed.

The external forces are, of course, advertisers. In an increasingly volatile and reactionary world, advertisers are increasingly picky about the kinds of content they will allow their ads to be shown on. For example, content that includes political commentary, any kind of violence, weapons, things of a sexual nature—all of these things are essentially monetisation suicide because advertisers don’t want their brand associated with that kind of content. Despite this, there are many channels that make the kinds of content that are deemed not suitable for monetisation that are, nonetheless, very popular.

YouTube wants those channels to be able to generate revenue, but they can’t tell advertisers to take it or leave because, frankly, they will probably leave it. So they are introducing other ways for the channels to monetise so that YouTube can still earn revenue from them. And it is entirely reasonable to believe that they will continue adding ways for YouTubers to monetise their channels through the platform itself as new viable ways emerge.

The more alternative monetisation methods to advertising that become available, the more important RPM will be as a metric. It is unlikely that advertising will stop being the primary source of revenue for YouTube as a whole any time soon, but the more you take advantages of non-advertising-based revenue sources, the more RPM will matter to you.

How to Increase YouTube RPM?

To bring your RPM up, you need to adjust the ratio of revenue-to-views. Make sure that as many eligible videos as possible have monetisation turned on, and enable all types of eligible advertisements on those videos.

Next up, make use of the other monetisation methods on offer where you can. Granted, things like super chat and super stickers are not the kind of thing that every channel can make use of, but if you can, use them. The more money your channel is generating for the same views, the higher your RPM will be.

Another thing that will significantly affect your RPM is watch time, and it is a thing that most YouTube experts will tell you is one of the most important aspects to focus on. More watch time does not only mean more opportunity to show ads—though that is undoubtedly a big part of it—it also says very good things about your channel to the YouTube algorithm.

Channel’s that get a lot of watch time are given higher priority in the YouTube recommendation algorithm, which means there will be a greater chance that your content will be recommended to new people. Granted, adding new viewers is a slower way to improve your RPM, but remember the ultimate goal; revenue. Low RPM is not necessarily a bad thing.

A YouTuber with an RPM of $5 and 200,000 views per month is making around $1,000, whereas a YouTuber with an RPM of $2 and 1,000,000 views per month will be making around twice as much. Manipulating your RPM without improving your overall revenue is a pointless endeavour.

My YouTube RPM is Going Down, Should I Worry?

The answer to this question is “it depends”. RPM provides a good snapshot of how your channel is doing, but it is still only a single datapoint. Without taking other factors into account, you cannot make an accurate judgement on the state of your channel. As the example above illustrates, it is entirely possible for a YouTuber to have less than half of the RPM of another YouTuber, and yet still make more than twice as much revenue.

If your RPM is dropping, but your revenue is staying the same—or even increasing—that is indicative of a surge in viewers. This could happen because of a video going viral, or a mention on a much larger YouTube channel. In this case, there’s nothing to worry about. If your RPM settles at this new lower level, you might want to look into ways to more effectively monetise your new views, but there is nothing to be concerned about from the RPM dropping.

On the other hand, if your RPM starts to go up, but your revenue isn’t increasing, that could be a sign that you are losing viewers, but not viewers that generate much in the way of revenue.

Is There Any Revenue RPM Doesn’t Factor?

First of all, it’s important to remember that any YouTube metric can only tell you what is going on through the platform itself. If you are earning money through a service like Patreon, Amazon Affiliates, or even if you are booking live shows or speaking gigs directly off of the back of your YouTube channel, this should all be counted as part of your revenue, but YouTube cannot factor these variables in.

YouTube also cannot factor in brand deals and sponsorships unless they are through YouTube’s BrandConnect service. Finally, RPM does not include revenue made from merchandise sales through the merch shelf service that YouTube provides. Given the direction that YouTube seems to be heading in this area, it would be reasonable to expect that this revenue will someday be incorporated into RPM, but that is not the case yet.

Final Thoughts

When judging any aspect of your channel, it is essential not to get too hung up on any single metric. RPM provides an excellent snapshot of your channel’s financial health, but it is essentially meaningless on its own due to the fact that changes in the number of views you are getting or revenue you are earning overall will change the RPM without it being inherently obvious why.

As a lone metric with no other input, your RPM is a good measure of how efficiently your revenue is being generated. The higher it is, the more value you are getting per view (or, more accurately, thousand views). Without knowing how many views you are getting, or how much revenue you are making, that is about as much as RPM can tell you.

However, in conjunction with the revenue and views metrics, RPM is a powerful datapoint that can tell you a lot about your channel.

Ultimately, the foundation of your approach should be to make the best possible content you can, with additional strategies being considered improvements upon that solid base. You could make use of every strategy known to YouTube and still fail if you don’t have good content, so start there, and your RPM should stay healthy.

Tags best way to make money on youtube, earn money online, make money on youtube, make money online, money, passive income, what is rpm, YouTube CPM, youtube income, youtube money, youtube rpm

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE YOUTUBE

What is YouTube CPM?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 7 December 2020
2 Comments on What is YouTube CPM?

If you are new to the wide, wonderful and, let’s be honest, a little complex world of online marketing, you may have been scratching your head at the barrage of acronyms and unfamiliar terms being thrown your way. Fortunately, things aren’t nearly as scary as they can first look.

As you begin your YouTube career and start looking into the possibilities of earning money through the platform, you will no doubt hear the term CPM a lot.

It should be noted that there are many important factors to succeeding financially on YouTube, but CPM is the closest thing you’ll get to a single metric of success since it is possible to have millions of subscribers and still barely make any money because your CPM is poor.

Similarly, someone can make enough money to pay the bills on as little as tens of thousands of subscribers because their CPM is excellent. The new metric RPM may tell you exactly how much you will make but it doesn’t tell you the whole story like CPM.

But what is CPM? And how does it work?

What is CPM?

CPM is an acronym for “Cost Per Mille”, with mille being the Latin word for “thousand”. In simple terms, it is a unit for measuring how much money a thousand views are worth. As an example, a YouTube video with an average CPM of $2 and a total of 10,000 views would earn its creator $20.

You might be understandably underwhelmed by this figure, but $2 is a relatively common average for online CPM. This is also why many YouTubers look to other means of monetising their content.

One common misunderstanding about CPM is the belief that it is a set unit in the way you might think of currency. The CPM of a video is not something that is determined in advance, but rather something that is calculated after the fact based on how the video performed (or is performing).

What Determines the Value of CPM?

So, with that in mind, what are the factors that go into calculating the CPM of a video? At its most basic level, there are only two significant factors; the value of your video to advertisers, and the engagement factor of your audience.

The first of those factors—the value of your video to advertisers—is largely determined by how lucrative your niche is. Advertisers want to put their ads in front of people who are likely to be interested, so they’re not going to pay to put their ad for solar powered garden lights on your video about vintage cars. Sure, there might be some people who are interested, but the advertiser can’t be sure of that, whereas a video about garden landscaping is a much safer bet.

The more competitive your niche, the more your video is worth to advertisers since the very demand for advertising space in that niche drives the value of the ad up. It is essentially a bidding war, with the advertisers who are willing to pay the most being the ones that get their ads on the video. For niche’s with not much competition, the advertisers can get that space for considerably less, which means less money for the creator.

The other factor—the engagement of your viewers—is probably one of the most underappreciated aspects of monetising YouTube content. It is not enough to simply get a lot of eyeballs on your videos; those eyeballs have to engage with the advertising for you to make money. That is how some YouTubers can be financially successful with a relatively small subscriber-base while other YouTubers with enormous followings barely get by.

Other Factors

Those may be the two most significant factors contributing to how large your CPM is, but there are other things to take into consideration that are also important, such as watch time.

There is a limit to how many advertisements you can cram into a finite space of time, and YouTube is well aware of this limitation. You can bet that the calculations regarding getting the largest amount of ads possible into a video while putting off the least possible viewers is constantly being revised.

Still, regardless of how much time there is between ads, we can take one general rule as a given—the longer someone is watching, the more ads they are likely to see.

YouTube presently has a ten-minute floor on mid-roll ads, meaning your videos need to be at least ten minutes long to have ads sprinkled through the content, rather than just at the start and end of it. This means that, if you can do it without reducing the quality of your content, striving for videos that are at least ten-minutes long is a good way to increase your CPM. But again, remember, having the ads there only benefits you if viewers are watching the ads.

If you needlessly extend your content without adding anything of value, it is highly likely that your viewers will switch off before ever seeing the extra ads you have gained.

It is also worth noting that having longer videos might be better for your CPM on individual videos but not necessarily the best option for your channel as a whole. It may be that your content is better suited to being broken up into smaller chunks, rather than lumped into one almighty video. If this is the case for you, don’t be afraid to do so. Having four ads in a ten-minute video will likely lead to a lower CPM compared to twelve ads in an hour-long video, but all of your content will still get watched, and you may find that you get more views overall when it is delivered in more digestible shorter videos.

The next factor to consider is the content itself. Despite YouTube’s sometimes carpet-bomb approach to categorising content as monetisable, there is still nuance to the system, and advertisers can choose to opt-out of certain types of content. If your content leans into the controversial—such as political or religious—you may find your CPM being much lower—even non-existent—due to advertisers shying away from marketing their brand around those topics.

And, as we have established, the fewer advertisers there are fighting for spots on your content, the less your content is worth.

How to Boost Your CPM

The most obvious way to boost your CPM on YouTube is to take heed of the things we mentioned above. Try to make your videos at least ten-minutes in length without sacrificing the quality of your content! Overall, you want to be aiming for more watch time across the entirety of your videos, and you can’t achieve that by just making them longer without maintaining the quality of the videos.

I you want a deep dive guide into how I boosted my YouTube CPM by 500% in 3 months I have a blog where I step you through my strategy.

Also, try to drill down into your niche as much as possible. The more your content is directed towards a specific market, the more valuable it will be to advertisers in that market. Again, we are talking minor tweaks to your existing content. If you have to change your channel significantly to achieve this, you should put serious thought into whether the pay off is worth the effort.

There are other ways to boost your effective CPM, however. We have been focusing on the YouTube Partner Programme and the money you can earn through YouTube directly. This is typically what people mean when they talk about YouTube CPM, but, if you adopt a looser definition of what makes up your CPM, you can employ other means to get that number up.

For example, if you strike a sponsorship or brand deal, the money earned from those deals can be directly divided by the views you got on the associated videos and added to your CPM total. Another example of how you can boost your CPM from outside of YouTube is through affiliate programs—where you can do it organically, of course. Affiliate programs allow you to leverage related products and services, essentially earning a commission on sales generated through your platform.

There are also options like subscription platforms such as Patreon, and any other way in which you earn revenue as a direct result of your channel’s success. Your effective CPM is the total revenue you make from your YouTube channel through all avenues divided by thousands of views those videos received during that time.

Does YouTube Take a Cut of my CPM?

Going back to the pure YouTube CPM, you might be wondering if YouTube takes a slice of that pie.

The answer is, of course, yes; YouTube has to make money somehow. YouTube’s share (45%, if you were wondering) is not factored in before your CPM figure is calculated.

So, if you were making a CPM of around $10 (which would be quite high, by the way), you would actually be receiving around $5.5 of that $10. This is obviously not an ideal metric, but if you want a more accurate snapshot of your channels earning, you’ll want to take a look at RPM.

What Viewer Behaviours Generate More Revenue?

Other than the differing values of ads in different niches, there are also different types of ads that YouTube display and the way your viewers interact (or don’t) with them will change how much you earn. For example, there are short unskippable ads that the viewer has no choice in watching if they want to watch the content. For these ads, you are paid per thousand views. For the longer skippable ads, the viewer will need to watch at least thirty seconds of the ad to count as an engagement.

There are also overlay ads, which are small banner ads that are displayed at the bottom of your video. These ads only earn you revenue when your viewers click them.

Finally, there are display ads which show up beside your video and can earn revenue per click or per thousand views depending on what the advertiser decides when they set their advertising campaign up.

It is very important to bear this in mind when thinking about your potential revenue because your audience’s interest in products and services that might be advertised on your channel will significantly affect your CPM. If you are making videos on a specific type of product and people are coming to your channel before making purchasing decisions, there is a much higher chance they will be enticed by the ads displayed on your content.

Niches Matter

Following on from that last point, if you are starting a YouTube channel with the primary goal of making money, you should put serious thought into the niche you go into. As a general rule, the more general and broad your audience is, the less valuable it is in terms of advertising revenue.

To expand on the above example, consider a channel that makes videos reviewing the latest phones. People who come to that channel are likely interested in buying the phones that are being reviewed, and so the advertisements displaying on your content will be more likely to offer products and services around those phones. This is an example of a good niche as far as CPM potential goes since the advertisers can be relatively confident that the audience they are advertising to will be interested in their products.

On the other end of the scale, consider a channel that makes funny videos and has a large and diverse audience. They are undoubtedly successful as a YouTuber, but there is no common theme across their audience from a consumer purchasing perspective. Everyone is there to see amusing videos, and there is no reason to believe they would be interested in a specific product or service just because they are watching this channel.

This is not to say that channels like this can’t be very financially successful, of course, but a channel with a clear niche will often pull off a considerably higher CPM than a channel with general appeal.

Final Thoughts

While a high CPM is probably the most accurate single metric of success on YouTube, it is important to remember that it is not the only metric, and you should not focus on CPM at the expense of all other aspects of your YouTube channel.

Tags advertising cpm, cpm, video cpm, what is cpm, YouTube CPM

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Top 5 Ways to Monetise Your YouTube Channel in 2021

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 4 December 2020
10 Comments on Top 5 Ways to Monetise Your YouTube Channel in 2021

“There are more ways than one to skin a cat.”

It’s a horrible old saying that dates to 1840, but there is another part to the saying that you don’t hear too often —

“so are there more ways than one of digging for money.”

This advice applies to YouTube monetisation too.

There are plenty of ways to make money from your YouTube channel apart from the obvious one of shared ad revenue from the YouTube Partner Program.

This post covers the latest rules for the YouTube Partner Program and offers a high-level overview of some alternative ways you can monetize a YouTube channel in 2021.

Here we go.

How Do I Make Money With the YouTube Partner Program?

The best way to approach making money on YouTube is to create a number of income streams. That way, if one bites the dust you still have others to fall back on.

But one method you should always aim to qualify for is the YouTube Partner Program itself. The YouTube Partner Program is where you earn a share of the advertising revenue YouTube makes from showing the short ads before, during, and at the end of videos.

There are five criteria to qualify, you must ―

Have over 1000 channel subscribers.
Have over 4000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months.
Have registered for a Google AdSense account.
Be in compliance with the content rules that YouTube sets.
Be over 18 years of age (ideally).

Having 1000 channel subscribers is self-explanatory. It perhaps seems like a tough ask when you start, but once you begin to regularly put out good content, your sub-numbers can soon stack up.

4000 hours of watchtime relates to the videos that you’ve uploaded to your channel and had watched by others. Say you upload a 10-minute video and 100 people watch all of it, then you have 1000 minutes of watchtime. Don’t delete any of your videos when you start ― any video you remove also erases it’s watchtime from your account.

To register for a Google AdSense account you have to be at least 18 years old. Though if you are under 18 it may be technically possible to link the AdSense account of a parent to your YouTube channel.

Once you’ve met the criteria for the YouTube Partner Program, you still need to apply as It’s not something that happens automatically. Once you’ve applied you may need to wait as much as 30 days for a response as your account has to undergo a human review.

How much can you expect to earn?

According to Intuit, YouTubers, on average, earn $4 per 1000 video views. So to make $100 a day, you’d need to get around 25,000 video views a day.

YouTube doesn’t have to grant you monetisation, though, even if you meet all the criteria. It’s their platform and their rules. So if you do get rejected, or the YouTube Partner Program isn’t available in your country, there are still plenty of ways you can make money from the platform.

Let’s take a look at a few.

How Do I Make Money on YouTube With Endorsements?

Influencing is not a new thing. Businesses have paid prominent people money to promote their products for over a hundred years.

Once you’ve built up an audience for your channel in a niche that lends itself to promoting a product, you can register with an agency like Upfluence. Upfluence matches businesses with content creators to create influencing opportunities.

You don’t have to have a massive following to take advantage of influencing opportunities. But the amount you’re paid will depend on the size of your audience.

YouTube has launched an influencer hub too, called BrandConnect. Eligibility is restricted at the moment to creators located in the USA with over 25,000 channel subscribers.

It’s a fairly new venture for YouTube, so they may roll it out to new locations and relax entry conditions as time moves on.

Of course, you’re free to set up your own influencing opportunities by proactively approaching businesses yourself. Just make sure you have a large enough audience in a niche that plays well with your target company.

How much can you expect to earn?

Top earners can make thousands of dollars per video. But the cash you earn will depend on the size of your audience and the market niche you serve.

Starting with a small channel will likely mean that you only receive a free sample of the product you are endorsing, like a protein shake or an eyeliner for example.

How Do I Make Money on YouTube with Patreon?

You can make money with crowdfunding on YouTube, where you ask people to send you money directly. This is a method best left for those raising money for a good cause. And it could lead to a fraud claim if you aren’t transparent with what the requested money will be used for.

Much better, and a step away from crowdfunding, is using a service like Patreon.

Patreon allows you to create a page where you can distribute additional content not uploaded to your YouTube channel. You tap your fans for a small recurring monthly payment in exchange for access to exclusive content.

You can set several levels of subscription, and save you juiciest content for your top-level subscribers.

Patreon is like having your own pay-TV channel, and you have full control over the content and the schedule.

If you don’t want to commit to the extra workload that running a Patreon account brings on top of an already busy filming calendar for YouTube, consider using the Patreon pay per content model instead.

This lets you charge people to see bonus content as and when you make it.

How much can you expect to earn?

Patreon subscription prices charged by people are usually around the $4-$5 per month mark. This price is small enough for many people not to have to think too deeply about signing up.

And the recurring monthly payments are likely to continue, at least for a while, as many are too lazy to cancel them!

If you can get 1000 patrons paying you an average of $4 per month, then you have an income that most could live on.

Here’s an example from a small YouTuber with an associate Patreon account. Nate Maingard is a singer-songwriter with a little over 5K subscribers. Nate’s Patreon has three levels of subscription priced from around $5 up to about $100 for his biggest fans.

If you look at his Patreon page it says that he has 151 patrons, at the time of writing. You can’t see how that breaks down across the various levels, but he is making a minimum of $500 per month.

How Do I Make Money on YouTube with Merchandise?

You can sell products branded with your logo or channel identity and sell them on YouTube via a merch shelf.

YouTube says ‘The merch shelf allows eligible creators to showcase their official branded merchandise on YouTube. The shelf appears on the video page of eligible channels, but may not be shown on all video pages.’

To access the YouTube merch program, your channel needs 10,000 subscribers and not make content primarily aimed at kids. Your merch should also be visually appealing and desirable enough for your fans to want to buy it.

Some of the items that are best for branding and selling are everyday items that people are likely to make use of. Baseball caps, reusable water bottles, and mugs are all popular choices and cheap enough for an impulse buy.

Make sure that your designs are of good quality, so hire a designer from Fiverr or Upwork if need be.

You don’t need to buy and stock your merch products. You can sign up with a print-on-demand service that can sync with your YouTube merch shelf. When you get an order, it’s automatically sent to the print-on-demand provider who makes the product and ships it directly to the customer.

If you’re in the UK then Printful has a good service. For those elsewhere, YouTube has a page of recommended retailers.

How much can I expect to earn?

This is difficult to approximate. It all depends on your fans, the design, and how much you promote them in your videos. This Sellfy calculator tries to give you a rough idea. Sellfy reckons that 10,000 monthly video views could earn you between $340 and $1,740 from merch sales.

How Do I Make Money on YouTube with Affiliate Sales?

An excellent way to earn extra money from your YouTube channel is by seeking out affiliate sales.

This is where you act as a middle-man between a product seller and buyer. Basically, you are saying to your audience; ‘hey, I think [this product] is really good, you should go buy it’.

When someone buys a product that you recommended, and they followed a special link that identifies you as the referrer, then you earn a percentage commission on the deal.

The great thing about affiliate sales is that earnings are open-ended ― the sky’s the limit.

You can earn a few dollars when someone buys a cheap item on your recommendation. But you can earn hundreds of dollars per sale for more expensive things like premium training courses.

The easiest way to start making affiliate income on YouTube is by signing up with the Amazon Associate program.

You can pick a few products and highlight them in a video. Then, you link to the item using your affiliate link in the video details section underneath.

When a viewer follows the link and buys it you earn a commission. You also earn a commission if they buy something else too ―all sales are attributed to your referral link for that one shopping cart.

I include links to various products that I genuinely recommend in the video description for each one I upload.

How much can I expect to earn?

It’s impossible to say. How long is a piece of string? But you can easily make a living from affiliate sales only on YouTube, as long as you have enough video views.

Conclusion

Like the poor skinned cat I mentioned at the top of this post ― there are many ways to make money on YouTube.

But, your first focus should always be on growing your subscriber count and adding to your video stockpile. Like many things in life, there is a natural order to things on YouTube. One study from 2018 showed that 3% of YouTube channels had 90% of the total views.

To become a money-making powerhouse on YouTube, aim to be a 3-percenter. After that, you have as many ways as you want to earn money from YouTube in 2021 and beyond.

Tags make money on youtube, make money online, monetisation, money, YouTube Monetization, youtube money

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Can You Make Money on YouTube if You Are Under 18?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 2 December 2020
1 Comment on Can You Make Money on YouTube if You Are Under 18?

With YouTube becoming more and more of a legitimate career path, and with the barrier to entry being so low that anyone can get started from the comfort of their own home or even bedroom, it makes sense that many young people would be eyeing YouTube success before they have even left school.

At the same time, increasing concern over the safety of children online has led to ever more restrictive guidelines regarding what you can monetise on YouTube, which complicates the matter for children looking to make money on the platform.

The only real restriction on children making content on YouTube is the minimum age of thirteen. You have to be at least that age to have a YouTube channel. There are ways to work around this that we’ll touch on later in the post, but that is the only real hard limit, but it is a limit on creation, not on monetisation.

When it comes to earning money on your channel, the content you produce is more relevant than the person making it. You could be fifty years old, but if your content is designed for children, it will be subject to the additional restrictions that apply there.

Similarly, if you are fifteen years old but making content that is primarily watched by adults, you would not be subject to those restrictions.

This may all sound a bit vague, but don’t worry, all will be explained. So, can you make money on YouTube if you are under 18? Let’s find out.

Videos With Underage Audiences

Thanks to COPPA regulations, there are now considerably stricter limitations on the information that can be collected from underage watchers. While this in and of itself is not an issue regarding monetising your content, it has an indirect effect that is an issue.

The fact that YouTube is not allowed to collect as much data on their underage viewers is a significant deterrent for advertisers since one of the most compelling factors of online advertising is the ability to target your ads at increasingly narrow demographics.

If YouTube isn’t allowed to collect the information that will allow them to identify what kind of demographic is watching, advertisers can’t be sure their ads are being shown to the right kind of viewer.

It is not just videos that are marked as “for children” that fall afoul of monetisation denial, however. YouTube’s can determine if a video is primarily made for children—if for no other reason than the audience will be predominately children.

Even if you do not mark your content as intended for children—even if you do not intend for your videos to be watched by children—YouTube will mark it as such if the audience turns out to be mostly youngsters.

Making Videos As An Underaged YouTuber

There are two ways to consider the term “underage” when talking about YouTube. The first is in the legal sense of you not being able to make certain decisions for yourself due to your age. Some kinds of decisions have different age limits (drinking alcohol vs living on your own, for example) and all of them differ from region to region.

The good news is YouTube does not make much distinction here. If you are over the age of the thirteen, you are free to make content and earn money on the platform.

If you are under thirteen, however, you are not allowed to have a YouTube channel under YouTube’s terms of service. That is not necessarily the end of the road as far as your YouTube dreams go, and we’re not just talking about waiting until you are old enough. You’re just going to need a little help.

Officially speaking, your channel won’t be your own, but you can enlist the help of an adult (typically a parent) who will be in charge of the channel, while you make the content. This is perfectly allowed under the terms of service, and many very successful channels have risen to prominence in this manner, both before and after YouTube clamped down on videos by and for underage people.

Being Responsible

Now, it is important to note that we are not trying to give you advice on how to circumvent YouTube’s terms of service here. There can be debate over whether YouTube’s approach is the best way, but few people would disagree with the intent behind it. The Internet can be a dangerous place for children, in both an emotional and physical wellbeing sense.

We are not advocating you get your parents to sign up for a YouTube account and just hand you the login details and leave you to it. And if you’re a parent, we strongly advise against doing this. The adult who officially runs the account should be overseeing the content that goes on it, even if it is just to cast a watchful eye over the final edit before it goes live. They should be moderating any contact the child has with people online, and they should be ensuring the child does not get taken advantage of.

There are always exceptions to the rule, but, for the most part, children need protection, so while we are giving you advice on how to make money on YouTube if you are under 18, it shouldn’t be taken as an encouragement to break YouTube terms of service.

How to Earn Money With an Underage Audience

As we mentioned above, there are restrictions on videos with underage audiences that all but rule out the conventional route of monetising your YouTube content through the YouTube Partner Programme, but that does not mean that you cannot monetise your videos at all.

Here are some ways you can make money with your videos even when your audience puts your channel below YouTube’s threshold for an underage audience.

Patreon

Patreon (and similar platforms) may be something a long shot if your audience is primarily underage since underage viewers are less likely to have money of their own to give. But, sites like Patreon have their own restrictions for who can use it. Patreon, for instance, has a minimum age restriction of thirteen years old to sign up, and eighteen years old before you can sign up as a creator or support another creator. They also allow under eighteens to be a creator or support one with written permission from a parent or guardian.

This means that if you have an audience that is prepared to support you through Patreon, you don’t need to worry about their age because Patreon’s terms of service will have ensured they are old enough or have permissions to do so. And, if you are too young to become a creator on Patreon, assuming you are over thirteen, you can get written consent from a parent or guardian and get started!

Promote Other Ventures

YouTubers with a young audience often build their content on top of something that appeals to that audience, such as video games. If you are able to, there may be a way to translate that appeal into a monetisable thing.

To take one popular example, Roblox—a video game where anyone can create their own mini-games for others to play—is especially popular among young gamers. It also provides the ability for people who create content for it to earn money through in-game transactions. If you have built an audience around such a thing, you could promote the games you create and potentially earn money that way. Another example would be an arts and crafts channel which also promotes an Etsy store where your own arts and crafts can be purchased.

If you go down this route, it is important to remember that the thing you are promoting needs to be relevant to your audience. There is no sense in building a channel around Marvel comic book-related content and then trying to promote a SquareSpace affiliate code. Of course, this is true of any age of audience, but it is especially true of younger audiences.

Target Older Viewers

Not everyone can shift their content in such a way that it changes the average ages of their audience—at least, not without drastic changes to the channel—but for some, it is definitely possible, and it may be the answer to your monetisation problems.

By shifting your content in a more mature direction and ensuring that your videos are not marked as made for children, you should be able to qualify for the YouTube Partner Programme—assuming you have met all the other criteria.

Of course, if you are making content aimed at very young children—seven to ten-year-olds, for example—this kind of shift will not be a practical solution. But, if your audience is a little older—fourteen to seventeen, for example—it may be worth looking into.

Tips for Being an Under-18 YouTuber

Firstly, if you are a parent or guardian reading this, we would recommend familiarising yourself with YouTube’s child safety page as a bare minimum. If you are the child YouTuber, it won’t hurt to read through that page either.

For the success part of YouTubing as a minor, we have some tips.

Don’t Take Things to Heart

There are mean people on the Internet, and they often don’t have much to say in the way of being constructive. YouTube disables comments on videos that are intended for a young audience for this very reason, but if you find yourself in the comments of yours or another YouTuber’s video and people are being mean to you, do not let it affect you.

There is a way of delivering constructive criticism that you may take some time to learn recognise. As a rough example, someone telling you that your videos are too quiet is useful feedback that you should take on board. On the other hand, someone telling you that you are ugly is not useful, since being ugly is a subjective comment and even if it were true, you can’t change how you look.

Learning to separate the useful criticism from the just plain insulting is a skill that will take a lot of practice, but in the meantime, do not let any mean comments you might encounter ruin your day.

Hone Your Craft

If you have dreams of becoming a professional YouTuber, take this opportunity to get as good as you can at making content. There are two important factors for young people here;

Their developing brains learn things more readily than when they are older
You will likely not have as much free time later in life as you do as a child.

You may be currently trying to balance homework, a social life, and any extracurricular activities you have with YouTube and wondering how that second point could be true. But trust us, while there are always exceptions, most people will have far less free time when they get older, start working full time, have a family, etc. Take advantage of all the spare time you have now to improve your video-making abilities.

If In Doubt, Don’t!

If you are in any doubt that something you are planning might be a bad idea, don’t do it. Or at least get a more experienced opinion before deciding. This can include things sharing personal stories online, expressing controversial viewpoints, and more.

Many people who did not grow up with the Internet (and some who did) have said and done things online that have had a significant and negative impact on their lives. Don’t risk saying something you might regret for the rest of your life this early on.

Privacy Privacy Privacy

We can’t stress this enough, but privacy is crucial, especially for under-18 YouTubers. If for no other reason than the YouTuber will almost certainly be living with their parents or guardians at that age and any privacy violations will affect the people you live with as well.

Don’t share personal information in your videos, and make sure there is nothing in the video that someone might be able to use to work out your home address or phone number, or anything of that nature.

Final Thoughts

YouTubing when you are under-18 is something that can be a fun hobby or a solid foundation for a future career, but you have to be careful. And, if you are a parent, remember that there is a reason you are responsible for your children.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare

I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.

Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.

I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.

5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

Tags how to make videos without showing your face, make money on youtube, make money online, make money without showing your face, passive income, without showing your face, youtube, youtube money

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How to Make Money on YouTube Without Showing Your Face

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 1 December 2020
4 Comments on How to Make Money on YouTube Without Showing Your Face

There is a fairly pervasive stereotype regarding YouTubers, and it evokes images of fresh-faced young people eagerly greeting the camera with an over the top introduction that would, eventually, be bookended with a gleeful plea to like and subscribe at the end of the video.

There is, of course, a reason that this has become a stereotype—YouTubers certainly did seem to be made up mostly of this breed for a long time—but that is far from all there is on the platform these days. Indeed, many YouTubers have found success on the platform without even showing their faces in their videos.

In this post, we are going to look at some of the ways you can succeed financially on YouTube without showing your face.

In the interests of balance, we’ll also talk about why showing your face is often considered a good thing when making YouTube videos – and if you prefer NOT to show your face I have a list of channel ideas for faceless channels on my blog.

How to Make Money on YouTube Without Showing Your Face

We’re going to split this topic into two main sections—how to make videos without showing your face and how to make money on YouTube.

The reason for this is there is nothing significantly different about how you go about making money on YouTube with faceless videos than with videos featuring your face.

So, that information is relevant regardless of which style of video you are making.

Content is Key

It sounds corny and cliché at this point, but it is a cliché for a reason. Regardless of how you dress your videos up—face or no face, effects or not—the content you produce is what will determine your success as a YouTuber.

There are many different ideas of what successful content looks like, but as long as you are delivering what your audience wants to see, you are on the right path. It is important to find the core of what that is and ensure that it is always there. For example, if the root of your content lies in videos about retro technology, there is a lot of wiggle room for what the videos can be about and how you can format them, but you will need to make sure that that root of retro-tech is always present. Similarly, if you are running a food channel and your viewers come for recipe ideas, it would not be advisable to move away from recipe ideas. At least, not abruptly.

Even if your root content is your own personality—if your viewers come to see what you have to say or what you are doing—the rule is the same. Videos where you are not present or where you are acting differently will put your regular viewers off.

This leads us nicely onto…

Personality

Even if you aren’t putting your face on camera, you need to inject some personality into your videos. There is an audience for just about everything, but it is essential to remember that there are a lot of other YouTubers out there, and more than a few of them will be making similar content to you.

In short, the chances of you coming up with a niche that is completely unique are very slim, but that is okay because you do not need an entirely unique niche to succeed. By putting plenty of yourself into the videos—in your humour, opinions, and the way you speak—you give viewers a reason to come to you rather than someone else who is delivering the same kind of content.

Granted, you will invariably give some viewers a reason not to come to you over other people because they do not like your unique take on things, but you can’t please everybody, and you need to stand out to succeed.

YouTube Ideas That Don’t Involve Showing Your Face

Now that we’ve covered some generalised aspects of making videos without showing your face let’s look at some specific ideas for how you would go about making those videos.

The Hands-On Approach—If your video is of a tactile nature, such as product reviews, or cooking videos, you could always opt for the hands-only approach. In this kind of video, you would have the camera directed at the subject of the video, and the only part of you that would be on camera is your hands as they do whatever it is you are doing. You might be surprised at how expressive you can be with your hands, and you can inject plenty of personality into your video purely through the way you talk, and what you talk about.
Voice Over Content—Voice over content can cover a lot of ground. You might make a “Top 10 Sci-Fi Video Games” video where clips of the games you are talking about are on screen as you talk. It could be a pop culture video where the subject matters you are talking about is onscreen. There are even some successful YouTubers whose content is entirely audio-based, and the visuals they display has nothing to do with the actual content. If you have an existing platform, such as a popular podcast, or even a new podcast with little or no audience, you could just have a still image on your video. That being said, if you’re going to put a podcast on YouTube, it helps to give your listeners a reason to come to YouTube rather than some other audio-only platform.
Software Tutorials—There is an almost endless supply of niches within the software world, from simple office productivity to video game development, to music production. If you have expertise in a particular kind of software, you can make tutorials on that software without having to show your face on camera. Not only do you not need your face onscreen, but the software itself will be the focus anyway, and you could find your reluctant mug obscuring parts of the screen that your viewers need to see.

Meditation and Mindfulness Videos

Some people love to tune out of the world and take a moment with their own thoughts. The practice of mindfulness and meditation has been embraced widely over the last few years as a why to help people sleep, study or relax.

Make videos that people can unwind to, feel comfortable with or can meditate to like on the Meditation Mindfulness channel.

How to Make Money From Your Video Ideas

Fortunately, this section of the post is more or less universal, so you should find it useful even if you are happy to put your face on camera. We’ll go over some different ways to monetise your videos, but first, let’s cover some more fundamental truths about earning an income from your YouTube channel.

One crucial point to grasp when monetising your content is that numbers are rarely the be-all and end-all of success. More often than not, the quality of your audience outweighs the quantity, which is why some YouTuber’s with relatively small audiences are able to make a comfortable living from their channel while other YouTubers with enormous followings barely get by.

This is also the reason why “cheating” by buying subscribers and views rarely pays off since those numbers do not represent engaged viewers who are interested in your content, and so do not translate to financial success. The reason it doesn’t pay off is because the advertisers who pay to promote their products and services are doing so because your audience has been marked as consisting of the kind of people who would be interested in those products and services. If you have stuffed your subscriber-base with viewers who aren’t interested, it will not translate to ad engagement.

But what about the different ways you can make money from a YouTube channel? There are a few common methods (and even more less common methods) that can be used to monetise your channel, and many of them can be used simultaneously. It should be noted that, unless you are coming to YouTube with a following in place already, none of these methods are likely to yield immediate success. You will need to be patient.

YouTube Partner Programme

The most common way to earn money from your YouTube channel is through the YouTube Partner Programme, which is the built-in system that YouTube offers for YouTubers who have met specific criteria. The bullet points of those criteria are;

Not be in breach of any YouTube monetisation policies
Live in a country where the YouTube Partner Programme operates
Have at least 4,000 valid public watch hours over the last twelve months
Have at least 1,000 subscribers
Have a linked AdSense account.

If you meet these criteria and are accepted into the program, you will have the option to monetise eligible videos. YouTube will then show ads on those videos, and you will earn a cut of the revenue generated from those ads. You have quite a lot of control over when and what style of ads are shown on your videos, though you cannot control what ads are shown. In many cases, you can run YouTube ads alongside other means of monetising your content, though it is not always the case.

It’s worth bearing in mind that YouTube regularly changes their monetisation policies in ways that reduce—or even remove entirely—many YouTubers’ earnings.

Brand Deals and Sponsored Content

Essentially this is cutting out the YouTube middleman. Instead of relying on YouTube to serve ads, you deal with the advertiser directly and deliver the promotional content in your videos. For larger YouTubers, this type of monetisation represents a significant portion of their income. There is also a potential bonus in that brands are smart enough to know that numbers are not everything. While they will obviously want to reach a large audience, marketing reps today understand that a quality audience—one that is already interested in what you have to offer—is more valuable than a large audience. This means you may be able to strike a lucrative brand deal much sooner in your YouTube career than you would be able to make an equivalent amount of money through the YouTube Partner Programme.

Crowd Funding and Subscription Models

One of the most popular ways for YouTubers to monetise their work is through sites like Patreon, which allow viewers to opt into giving their favourite creators a regular payment in order to support them. This is popular with YouTubers because it tends to be far more reliable than ad-click-based revenue, and is not subject to the whims of YouTube policy change. It also shows real engagement from an audience, since they have gone out of their way to support you directly.

Affiliate Marketing

If your videos often involve products or services that are associated with affiliate programs, you could supplement your revenue—even form the bulk of your revenue—with affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing, you would have a link to a product or service and, should your viewers buy said product or service; you would get a cut.

A popular version of this for review channels involves using the Amazon Affiliates program to link out to products that have been reviewed in the video.

Need help in getting started with affiliate marketing? I have a deep dive article on my blog all about affiliate marketing for beginners and how to really make it work for you in the future.

Why Avoid Showing Your Face?

The concept of starting a YouTube video and not wanting to show your face may seem strange to some, but there are a few reasons someone might want to do this.

Shyness—The most obvious reason is shyness. Someone people simply don’t want their face on camera, but that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed on YouTube.
Safety—Though it still sometimes struggles with a certain stigma of being a weird thing people do on the Internet, YouTubers can get as famous as any conventional celebrity, and there are inherent safety risks with that fame. For some, those risks may be too much to risk putting their face on screen.
Freedom—The world of late has been less than kind to controversial figures online, with more than a few people losing their jobs because of things they might have said on social media or in YouTube videos. If you are planning to make videos on controversial topics, you may want to keep your face out of the video to protect your livelihood, should you upset a large enough group of people.
Aesthetic—Sometimes, there doesn’t need to be a significant underlying reason for this decision. Perhaps the YouTuber just prefers to craft their videos in a way that doesn’t involve their face being onscreen. There is no objectively right or wrong way to format a YouTube video, and any reason that makes the creator more comfortable with their work should be considered a good thing. Even if the reason they are more comfortable is just that they prefer the look of the video.

Tags make money on youtube, make money online, make money without showing your face, without showing your face, without your face, youtube money

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 30 November 2020
1 Comment on How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money?

In a little over a decade, YouTube has gone from an interesting online video platform that is fun but ultimately frivolous, to a legitimate career path that surprisingly attainable for almost everyone.

This may feel a bit “icky” to some—YouTube was originally this fun young thing that some people were lucky enough to succeed financially at, but now it’s a mature, grown-up platform with people of all ages eeking out a living, often making content that is far from exciting or creative.

That, unfortunately, is the reality of any career. And, with any career choice, there are a lot of mundane questions to answer. Things like “what is your earning potential”, “how reliable is this career”, and, as the title of this post asks, “how do YouTubers receive their money?”

The how of getting paid on YouTube is one of those small questions that may seem insignificant at first but can be quite important for reasons we’ll get into shortly. The quick and straightforward answer to “how do YouTubers receive their money” is through Google Adsense, who pay either directly into your bank by deposit or via a cheque in the mail.

However, as with most simplified answers, this doesn’t paint the full picture. For example, there are multiple common ways for YouTubers to get paid besides AdSense and a variety of different ways to get paid by those other methods.

Don’t worry; we’re going to go over the most common ways that YouTuber’s get paid for their content; all you need to do is keep reading!

How Do YouTubers Make Their Money?

Before you can understand how the money is received, it is important to understand where the money is coming from.

On the Internet in this day and age, there is a seemingly limitless selection of ways to leverage an audience into financial gain, both directly and indirectly.

That being said, the many years of YouTube success across thousands and thousands of YouTubers have allowed a few different methods to rise to the top of the pile in terms of convenience, effectiveness, and popularity.

YouTube Partner Programme/Google AdSense

Let’s start with the obvious. When we gave our simplified answer to the question of “how do YouTubers receiver their money” above, this was the method we were talking about. This is the built-in monetisation option that you can choose to enable when your channel has met the necessary criteria. That criteria include;

Have at least 1,000 subscribers
Have at least 4,000 hours of watch time over the last twelve months
Meet YouTube’s various policies for spam and community guidelines
Have an AdSense account

When you are part of the YouTube Partner Programme—and on eligible videos—YouTube will show advertisements that can earn you money. The exact amount earned per video depends on how many ads are served and what your viewer’s behaviour is in relation to those ads. For example, do they watch the whole ad, or do they skip it as soon as they get a chance?

These ads are actually served by Google’s AdSense platform, and any payments are handled through there. That is why you need to have a Google AdSense account before you can join the YouTube Partner Programme. Adsense supports a few different payment methods including;

Cheques
Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT)
Rapida
Bank Transfer

You might have noticed the conspicuous absence of PayPal in that list. PayPal may be the largest and most popular online payment processor, but it is not an option for Google’s AdSense.

Membership Platforms

Membership platforms allow your subscribers to commit to a small monthly sum to support your content. The incentive usually being that having a more reliable source of revenue compared to YouTube’s standard monetisation system will allow you to put more time into your channel, and thus create better or more content. Of course, there doesn’t always have to be an incentive—sometimes people just want to support their favourite creators.

YouTube offer their own membership option for channels with 30,000 subscribers or more, but the payment is handled the same way as their ad-based revenue. However, another option is to look outside of YouTube for a third party membership platform.

The most popular example of this is Patreon, a platform that allows you to set different tiers of supporters and offer unique perks to each of those tiers. Unlike AdSense, who do not support PayPal as a payment method, Patreon allows PayPal as well as fellow online payment processors, Payoneer and Stripe. Another example of this kind of service is Ko-Fi, which allows you to get paid through either PayPal or Stripe.

Merchandise

Another way to get paid from your YouTube channel is through the sale of merchandise. There are a plethora of services around that can facilitate this, including YouTube’s own inhouse solution for channels with 10,000 subscribers or more. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of alternatives, however. As a general rule, you can expect to find PayPal and cheque payments as an option for getting your money.

Direct Donations

It is also possible to receive direct donations from your viewers. How you receive this will depend entirely on your own preferences regarding the services you use. For example, PayPal allows you to set up a donation page for this very reason. Ko-Fi is essentially designed for small, one-off payments (the platform is built around the idea of your audience buying you a cup of coffee).

We strongly advise against just giving your bank details out, of course.

Brand Deals and Promoted Content

This monetisation option involves directly dealing with an advertiser. In this case, we can’t offer much insight into what would be involved since every deal will be different. Indeed, you could even request a particular method of payment as part of your deal.

Why is the Way YouTubers Receive Their Money Important?

If you are just YouTubing for fun and you are not concerned with earning money from it, it doesn’t really matter how YouTubers get paid. But for people who are interested in the earnings they could be receiving, and certainly for YouTubers who are looking to make their YouTube journey a career move, it is essential information.

For one thing, the part of the world you are in could determine whether or not you can earn money from YouTube directly. At the time of writing, AdSense is not available to people in the following countries;

Crimea
Cuba
Iran
North Korea
Sudan
Syria

It is also not available to individuals or businesses that are restricted by trade sanctions or export compliance laws. Granted, there probably aren’t a huge number of people who meet any of the above criteria that are looking to start a YouTube career, but it pays to know these things. The regions that AdSense is not available in are not set in stone, for example. Shifting political situations could see countries being removed from that list, or added to it.

The same reasoning applies to payment processors. For example, if you were unable or unwilling to use PayPal or Stripe, you would not be able to get your money out of Ko-Fi.

These are all things to factor in if you intend to make YouTube into a career move, but not necessarily something you should be concerned about when you are first starting out. After all, if you make it big on YouTube, but circumstances conspire to keep you from getting paid, you could always migrate to another platform. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be doable. And there are always other ways to monetise your channel.

Monetising Your Channel: Diversity is Key

YouTube goes to great lengths to make their platform financially viable. And, even though it doesn’t always feel like it, part of that viability is making YouTubers money, since YouTubers who are earning a decent amount of money for their efforts are more likely to continue putting that effort into the platform. Even when YouTube makes significant changes that seem to harm YouTuber earning potential, it is because they are trying to make the platform as appealing as possible advertisers.

Whether the changes they make are always effective or worth the grievances they cause is a different issue, but the motive behind them is clear enough.

Unfortunately, the ever-changing landscape of YouTube monetisation, combined with the whims of advertisers and shifting trends, makes the YouTube Partner Programme a somewhat unreliable source of income. In fact, not only is it unreliable, it is typically not a great earner for many types of video. YouTube revenue is mostly measured in CPM, which is essentially an amount you earn per thousand views you get. The actual figure is all over the place due to how large a factor viewer engagement plays—a video with a lot of views but where most viewers skipped their ads might earn less than a channel with a fraction of the views, but most viewers watched the ads—but as a rough average, you can expect around $1.50 to $2 per one thousand views.

Assuming you are making $2 for every thousand views you get, you would have to be getting an average of over seventeen thousand views a day to earn enough money to be considered above the poverty line in the United States. That’s a lot of views. It’s not an unachievable goal, of course, but it’s no small feat to reach an average number of views a day that is measured in tens of thousands. It’s also worth mentioning that most people don’t strive to be just above the poverty line. To bring your YouTube revenue up to something more in line with the average income in the United States, you would be looking at around forty thousand views a day.

Other Options

If you can build up a dedicated enough audience, direct contributions such as PayPal donations, or memberships such as through Patreon or YouTube’s own membership option are a great way to build a solid, reliable revenue stream from your YouTube channel.

Merchandise is also an option but should be considered a secondary option rather than your primary source of revenue. While you can realistically build a large base of people willing to contribute a few dollars here and there to support you, it is far less likely that you will be able to sell T-shirts or mugs with the same consistency, and in large enough numbers. Unless you are a fashion company, merchandise should be considered a side gig.

Brand deals are a little trickier as they typically require a brand to come to you. Pitching ideas to companies is not unheard of, but it is far more common for the company to go to the YouTuber. Sponsored videos and brand deals are by far the most lucrative of the many ways to get paid for your YouTube channel, though the exact amount you can earn will depend on your channel’s content and following.

Final Thought: Tax

There is a multitude of ways to earn money from your YouTube channel, but not quite as many ways to receive that money. The one absolute factor is that you will need a bank account. Whether you receive your money directly from Google AdSense, via a payment processor, or even via a physical cheque mailed to your home, you will need a bank account for the money to go into. The upshot of this fact is that your earnings will always be traceable, and as such, entirely discoverable by any governmental agency that might want to look into your finances.

Neither YouTube, Google, nor any of the payment processors mentioned handle taxes; that is all on you. Of course, tax law is different from region to region, and country to country. If you are not familiar with the law on taxes where you are, you should do some research to avoid getting a nasty surprise when tax collectors start knocking on your door.

In truth, the amount of money received by most YouTuber’s will not be enough to even register on a government’s tax-collecting radar, but that is not a risk we recommend taking. If you should be paying tax on your YouTube earnings, it’s better just to pay them and stay out of trouble!

Tags make money on youtube, make money online, making money, youtube, youtube money

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Does YouTube Have an Affiliate Program?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 10 November 2020
3 Comments on Does YouTube Have an Affiliate Program?

Affiliate programs are one of the most popular ways of earning money online; whether it is as a nice side-hustle for a little extra cash or the backbone of a five-figure a month income, they provide a way to earn revenue while doing the things you are already doing.

They can invisibly add additional revenue streams that, in some cases, can even add value for your viewers.

With all of this in mind, it is natural to wonder; does YouTube have an affiliate program of their own.

After all, being profitable is a serious concern for the platform, not to mention the added incentive it would give to content creators.

Does YouTube have an affiliate program? – No, YouTube does not have an affiliate program, but you can monetize your channel with the Partnership Program if/when you meet the 1K subscribers and 4K hours of watch time requirements. However you can still use external affiliate programs to make money on YouTube with click through traffic.

Through using YouTube marketing for your channel, you can grow awareness and drive traffic to your affiliate account.

We’re about to take an in-depth look at affiliate programs and how you can use them on YouTube, so let’s get comfortable.

What is an Affiliate Program?

If you’ve made it this far into the post without knowing what an affiliate program is, don’t worry; we’ve got your back. An affiliate program is a system whereby you can earn a fee in exchange for actions taken by your viewers. With the most popular forms of affiliate programs, this fee often comes in the form a commission of a product or service sale. In some cases, it can be a fixed fee in exchange for a user signing up to something.

By far, the most popular affiliate program for individual YouTubers—and many other content creators—is the Amazon Affiliate program, which allows you to generate a unique link for any product on the Amazon marketplace. If one of your viewers clicks through your link and buys something, you earn a small percentage of the sale.

The other way in which affiliate programs are typically run is when a service that is looking for members will reward people who refer new users to them. Fiverr is an excellent example of this with its affiliate program explicitly designed to reward people for driving traffic to their service.

If you want a hugely in-depth deep dive into how to get started with affiliate marketing, best ways to leverage affiliate marketing and my 10+ years of experience in generating income with affiliate marketing – check out my Affiliate Marketing for Beginners blog post.

Why YouTube Doesn’t Have an Affiliate Program

Once you understand how affiliate programs work, it should be easy to understand why YouTube doesn’t have one.

First of all, they don’t sell any products, so they can’t offer a commission on the sale of those products. But secondly, there is no paid service to subsidise a traffic-driving affiliate program like the one Fiverr has. Granted, there is YouTube Premium, but that is a very narrowly focussed product that would not have much re-use value for any given YouTuber.

With a platform like Fiverr, there are dozens and dozens of different services available, so one person could theoretically want to keep going back, which in turn means there are far more ways in which an affiliate link can be worked into the content that is being created.

As for the non-YouTube Premium content, it doesn’t make much sense for YouTube to incentivise people to drive traffic to their platform, given the sheer number of people who are on that platform attempting to drive to traffic to their own videos already.

YouTube is all about retention—once a new person lands on their site, they aim to keep them there as long as possible, and they’ve gotten very good at that over the years.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a popular YouTube who drives millions of unique views a day to the site, or an unknown YouTuber who is just starting out who might bring three new sets of eyeballs to the platform, YouTube will work to keep those people on the site viewing videos, and that retention just as valuable—if not more so—than bringing in new viewers who might not be so interested in sticking around.

Tips for Using Affiliate Marketing with your YouTube Channel

So, YouTube doesn’t have an affiliate marketing program, that much we’ve made clear.

But what we also made clear was the fact that this doesn’t stop you from running affiliate marketing programs through your YouTube channel in order to increase your revenue, so let’s talk about that.

The strength of affiliate marketing lies in invisibility—when you can provide a link to a service or product that fits seamlessly into your content and provides your viewers with something of value to them, you are on to a winner.

To help you achieve affiliate success, we’ve put together some of our top tips for using affiliate programs in your videos and on your channel.

Full Disclosure

We live in a cynical age, borne of many web services and content creators taking advantage of their audience, more and more people assume that anytime something is hidden from them, it is for negative reasons.

To that end, you should always be upfront about any affiliate links you use, even if all you do is put “(PAID)” next to the link in your description. YouTube viewers are generally accepting of the fact that their content creators need to make money somehow, and will not go out of their way to stop that from happening.

But including affiliate links without disclosing this fact can breed bad blood with your audience—especially if you are reviewing a product or service that you are linking out to through an affiliate program.

Keep it in Context

Google puts a lot of time and effort into figuring out the best ads to show a particular individual at any given time.

This is because merely showing the ad is only part of the battle—if nobody ever clicked those ads, advertisers would stop paying for them.

The same approach should be taken for affiliate links. There is no sense in making a video about guitar building and then including an affiliate link to an eBook on making money online.

Sure, some of the viewers of that video might be interested in the eBook, but it is such a shot in the dark, it would hardly be worth the effort of typing the link.

While we’re not saying there is never a good time for an out of context affiliate link, the best use of these links is within the context of your video. If you are doing a video on the top five sports cameras, have affiliate links to each of the cameras on Amazon in your description. The people watching that video are far more likely to be in the market for a new sports camera than viewers on other videos, and your video might just be the thing that pushes them to pull the trigger.

By including a link to the product, you are saving them the effort of going off and searching for it themselves.

And, as affiliate programmes are almost never more expensive—if anything you can often get a better deal through affiliate links—you are not inconveniencing your viewers in any way.

As an additional note, being in context doesn’t necessarily mean the product or service relates to the subject matter of the video directly. A

s an example, a channel whose content is primarily about how to make better YouTube videos might list off the equipment they use in the description, along with affiliate links to where that gear can be bought. This is useful to that channel’s viewers since “what equipment do you use” is one of the most commonly asked questions that successful YouTubers get asked.

Pick Something you Believe In

I am a huge fan of services like Rev – They help me add captions and foreign language subtitles to my youtube videos at a time fee per minute. I use them personally so I know they are good and that is why I promote them using an affiliate program. It is this personal edge that helps my audience understand that if I use it, its a god product and not just a huge list of products you could grab from Amazon in a blind blog post.

Not every channel creates videos of the top ten latest gadgets that can be easily linked to on Amazon, but that doesn’t mean those channels should miss out on the affiliate marketing train.

Firstly, remember that Amazon—and direct product sales in general—are not the only options when it comes to affiliate marketing. Many digital products and services have affiliate marketing options attached to them. Indeed, services like Clickbank specialise in finding digital products that can be marketed through affiliate linking. There are also services, such as Fiverr, as we mentioned earlier.

Ultimately, if there are no affiliate products or services that you can tie into your content directly, you could go on the hunt for a product or service that you truly believe will be beneficial for your viewers, and promote that instead. For example, for a programming channel, you could promote an ergonomic desk chair. For a yoga channel, you could promote a particular type of yoga mat.

It’s a little like being sponsored by that product, only the people behind the product are not involved. And on that note, you should be careful not imply that you are sponsored, as that can cause problems with the company behind the product or service.

The important thing here is that the product or service you are promoting has some usefulness to your audience, even if it doesn’t directly relate to the content of your video. Again, you might find some people in the audience of a fishing channel who are interested in a mechanical keyboard, but it would be blind luck, and that’s no way to run a business.

Don’t go Overboard

Regardless of the exact method of incorporating affiliate links into your content you choose, it is a universal truth across all mediums that overdoing it will have negative results.

This can be because your affiliate content is overwhelming your actual content, or simply because your audience feels it’s a bit crass.

But, whatever the reason, if you stack your description full of affiliate links and hand out promo codes every two minutes in your video, you’ll almost certainly turn large portions of your audience off.

And affiliate programmes only work when you have an audience to click those links.

Will Affiliate Links Harm my Video?

To answer this question, we first need to understand a few things about the way YouTube works.

Firstly, affiliate links are very much allowed by YouTube, which is one of the main concerns YouTubers tend to have when first venturing into the world of affiliate marketing.

However, merely being allowed to do something does not mean it can’t have negative effects on your channel.

As we touched on above, YouTube is very concerned with viewer retention. Now, we’re not saying they have no interest in bringing new eyeballs to the platform, but they are more concerned with keeping those eyeballs on YouTube once they are there. This is why average watch time is one of the most crucial metrics of a video’s success in the eyes of YouTube because more watch time means that people are spending longer on the site because of that video.

With that in mind, there is no direct association that YouTube will admit to between external links—affiliate or not—and the YouTube algorithm deciding to recommend a video less often. But there may be an indirect association.

YouTube wants people to stay on the site as long as possible. The longer a viewer is on YouTube, the more chance there is to serve them ads, and the more money YouTube can make. But if a lot of users are coming to your video and then leaving the platform altogether and not coming back, that will reflect negatively in the eyes of the algorithm.

It’s something of a catch 22—you need plenty of viewers for your affiliate links to be useful, but if your affiliate links are too effective, YouTube might see that as users coming to your video and then leaving YouTube, which may lead them to recommend your video less, which means fewer viewers to click your affiliate links. Unfortunately, there is no way around this problem, and YouTube is typically quiet about the exact way that they handle things like this.

That being said, affiliate marketing is a game of percentages—you bank on a large enough percentage of your viewers clicking your affiliate links to make it worthwhile while accepting that the overwhelming majority of them won’t.

Many YouTubers have had a great deal of success through affiliate marketing on YouTube, so there’s no reason that you can’t, too. Just remember not to overdo it, and keep the subject of your affiliates in line with the content of your videos.

Tags affiliate marketing, make money on youtube, money, passive income, youtube affiliate, youtube affiliate marketing, youtube affiliate program, youtube income, youtube money, youtube partner program

DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 6 November 2020
1 Comment on Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly?

YouTube can be—and often is—a labour of love.

Many people harbour a dream of paying the bills with the success of their channel, but only a small proportion of those people succeed in achieving that dream.

Still, success on YouTube—particularly modest success—is a very attainable goal, which has led to YouTube being seen as a legitimate career choice by many.

With any career choice comes a lot of, frankly, boring questions of a logistical nature. If you are just starting out and have no real financial goals, or, on the other end of the spectrum, if you are an enormously successful YouTuber who makes money faster than you can spend it, you don’t need to think about things like how often you get paid from your YouTubing ventures.

The reality of earning a living through YouTube is a little more grounded, however. There are far more people earning their living through YouTube who are just getting by or perhaps using YouTube to supplement other revenue sources. These people are rarely wealthy, and for them, YouTube is as much a job as any traditional employment you might care to reference.

Still, making an average salary through YouTube is often preferable to a lot of jobs out there.

Do YouTubers get paid monthly? – YouTubers who are eligible for the YouTube Partner Program will accrue income which is paid out a month in arrears. However, you must reach a total of £60 ($100) in the AdSense account to be paid for that month. YouTubers might also have external affiliate arrangements that pay on other terms.

In this post, we’re going to be looking at how often YouTubers get paid, which is a messy, sprawling topic that we can’t give a straightforward answer to since there isn’t one.

Keep reading, and we’ll go over all the ways a YouTuber typically gets paid, along with how often those payments come, and how much flexibility there is in this area. We’ll even through in a little financial advice for anyone just getting started.

How Do YouTubers Get Paid?

To properly understand the messy and complex nature of YouTuber payment schedules, it helps to first understand how they get paid. It is not, as many people seem to think, a single revenue source coming directly from YouTube.

YouTube does offer a monetisation system for which they pay you directly, but the money earned through this method is not typically enough to quit the day job over. In fact, you would have to be getting tens of thousands of views a day to make anywhere near a decent living from this method alone.

That being said, there is more than one way to convert the success of a YouTube channel into earnings… which is also why the topic of how often YouTubers get paid is messy and complicated. Here are some of the most common ways YouTubers earn money;

YouTube Partner Programme
Memberships
Direct Donations
Brand Deals and Sponsorships
Merchandise Sales

YouTube has created opportunities to leverage memberships and merchandise directly through the platform for channels that meet certain criteria—10,000 subs for merch, 30,000 subs for memberships—but the main way that YouTube pays you is through their Partner Programme.

Outside of YouTube, sites like Patreon can provide you with a way to offer membership style functionality to your viewers, while there are more merchandise platforms than you can shake a branded stick at!

And, speaking of branding, brand deals and sponsorships are possibly the most lucrative option but are only a feasible option for channels with a significant audience.

How Often Do YouTubers Get Paid

Now that you have seen just a sample of the many different ways a YouTuber can get paid, you should be able to appreciate how difficult this question is to answer.

Fortunately, we do have a common theme among the most popular earning methods, so let’s take a look at that theme;

Google’s Adsense—the vehicle through which YouTube pays you—and Patreon, both utilise a monthly payout system whereby you can choose to be automatically paid every month.

There is a caveat, however. Both platforms have a minimum threshold you must reach before you can be paid. This amount comes to $100 in the United States, and a rough equivalent in other countries. If you work on the average CPM of a YouTube video, that means you would need to hit 50,000 views a month to reach the AdSense payment threshold every month.

Patreon is a different animal. The threshold for getting a payout there is a much more modest $10, and your earnings are not directly tied to your views or audience size. In both cases, you can opt to hold your payments until a later date. In the case of Patreon, this allows you to set payouts to manual and take care of the exact payout times yourself.

AdSense is less flexible, their system allows you to hold your payments for up to a year, but you are stuck with their monthly payouts and payment thresholds if you want to get your money out of your Patreon account and into your bank account.

It is worth noting that many merchandise companies work on a similar system to Patreon—where you have to reach a certain payment threshold, but you can withdraw your money anytime once you have reached that threshold.

Payment Processors

Things are a little different for money that finds its way into your payment processor.

This could happen because you are accepting direct donations from your subscribers, but more likely it will be because you have opted to have your membership or merchandise platforms pay into a payment processer (like PayPal) rather than send you a physical cheque.

With payment processors, there are usually no restrictions on when you can withdraw your money and how small an amount you can withdraw, but there may be charges associated with withdrawing your money.

This is especially the case if you reside in a different country to the company who sent the money. For example, at the time of writing, Patreon can payout in USD ($), GBP (£), and Euro (€).

If you live in a country—or, more accurately, your bank resides in a country—that does not use one of these currencies, there will likely be a conversion fee from your payment processor in order to get that money into your bank account.

Financial Advice

If you are asking questions like do YouTubers get paid monthly, you are probably looking at YouTube as a potential career move or at least one piece of your financial puzzle.

After all, there is no law that says you have to make your entire income from YouTube or not at all.

But if you are looking at YouTube as a potentially serious income source, it’s important to plan carefully and be smart.

We could fill an entire post with an in-depth look at this topic, but for now, here’s a quick rundown of the key points.

Build Up a Buffer

YouTube is not the most reliable source of income, particularly if the bulk or entirety of your YouTube revenue is coming directly from the YouTube Partner Programme.

If you choose to make YouTube a significant part of your financial situation, be prepared for the lows that come with those highs.

Never let yourself be in a situation where you are relying on a particular amount from YouTube to pay the bills or meet any other financial obligations you have. YouTube is notoriously unreliable when it comes to making a consistent income, and if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck with YouTube revenue, you could find yourself in serious trouble the next time an adpocalypse hits, or during a month when revenue drops for reasons beyond your control, such as seasonal behaviour.

You can’t necessarily avoid these things, but if you have a reserve of cash, you are at least protected from the immediate damage they can cause.

At the very least, you should have a few months worth of money stored up in the event your earnings dry up, though conventional wisdom states this figure should be closer to six months, if not a year.

Having this cash gives you a bit of breathing room should something happen to severely impact your earnings, and will allow you to figure things out without the axe of defaulted bills hanging over your head.

Diversify Your Income – How To Make More Money on YouTube

Another way to protect yourself against the unreliable nature of YouTube revenue is to not have all of your eggs in one basket.

If the entirety of your income is coming from the YouTube Partner Programme, you are completely at the mercy of the next significant changes YouTube make to their platform, and YouTube rarely make changes that boost everyone’s earning potential.

Making use of things like membership platforms, direct donations, merchandise sales, and any other ways of bringing the money in will protect you against your income being wiped out by one company making changes to their policy.

If at all possible, try to diversify further so that your income sources are not directly tied to your YouTube channel. For example, a Patreon page for your YouTube channel is a good way to diversify your income, but it is still built upon your channel. If your channel were to be taken down for some reason, your Patreon earnings would soon follow.

If, on the other hand, you had a blog running alongside your YouTube channel, earning revenue in its own right, you are further protected from the adverse effects of YouTube changes. Other examples include selling online teaching courses or running sponsored podcasts.

The critical factor being that, even though they may be linked to your YouTube channel by content or branding, these other ventures would be able to exist on their own, should anything happen to your channel.

Plan Plan Plan

We can’t understate the importance of proper planning when you first start out. The first year or being financially independent with YouTube as one of—or the main—income sources is especially critical.

We would recommend setting up a spreadsheet and putting in everything you have going out on a monthly basis.

We mean everything.

Make sure the entirety of your financial obligations are covered so that you can clearly see whether you are making enough money.

Hopefully, you will have taken our advice about having a buffer in place, so you’ll have a bit of a safety net to right the ship if you are not pulling in enough money, but you don’t want to get three months into your new career and find you’ve been losing money and didn’t know about it.

One particularly important aspect of this process is to account for everything. It sounds over the top, but it works. If you spend a dollar buying candy, make a note of it. If you buy a video game on sale for only a few bucks, make a note of it.

Small purchases can be the undoing of a move to become financially independent—they add up in the background while we mentally dismiss them as insignificant.

Don’t Rush Into It

The final piece of advice we’re going to impart here is to take your time with the decision to “go pro”.

Too many YouTubers rush to quit their day jobs when they have a good month or two, only to find those month’s earnings were a bit of an exceptional spike, and then they struggle to pay rent the following months.

When you first hit that magical moment where you are making enough money from your online activities to pay all the bills, wait. At least give it a few months.

Put the excess money you are earning into the backup buffer fund we mentioned above. Once you’re sure that level of income is sustainable, pull that trigger!

Summing Up

Do YouTubers get paid monthly? Yes. Sometimes… if they want.

The exact frequency of payments to YouTubers depends entirely on whether they are successful enough to meet the criteria for joining the YouTube Partner Programme or making money through other avenues that also require a good deal of success.

It also depends on whether that YouTuber is consistently making enough money to meet the various payment thresholds many companies have in place.

That being said, “monthly” is as close as we can get to a typical payment schedule for your average YouTuber.

Most companies work on a monthly basis and, while some YouTubers may get paid far less frequently, very few—if any—YouTubers will be getting paid more frequently on a consistent basis.

Tags adsense, adverts, how to make money on youtube, money, youtube income, youtube money

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How Many Views do you Need to Make Money on YouTube?

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 31 October 2020

The numbers surrounding making money on YouTube are not always particularly transparent to those on the outside.

Indeed, even the methods of making that money can sometimes be a little opaque to the uninitiated. If you are one such person, fear not; we’re going to run the whole gamut in this post, from how many views do you need to make money on YouTube to how you can go about making that money.

But for those of you who are a little impatient, the short answer is – assuming your content is advertiser friendly, you need around 30,000 views per day to make money on YouTube. This could make you around $60-90 per day based on a fairly average $2-3 RPM. This can change with seasonal ad prices with winter being more profitable compared to New Year and early spring.

But before you run off to start making videos, you should be aware that there are caveats to that number. For one thing, there is no set-in-stone amount that you earn per view. Some people will be able to make a killing on 30,000 views a day, whereas others might get twice as many views but struggle to get by on their YouTube money alone.

It is also worth knowing how we reached this number. After all, it is possible to make money with far fewer views than 30,000, but, generally speaking, fewer views means less money, so what metric are we working from?

Keep reading, and all will be revealed.

How Much Money is Enough?

In order to make a judgement on how many views it takes to make money on YouTube, we first have to establish our standard for making money.

Technically speaking, if you earn a single cent from your YouTube channel, you are making money.

Granted one cent a month is not exactly cause for celebration, but it is technically money. On the other side of the spectrum, PewDiePie—by far the most popular individual YouTuber in the platform’s history—potentially makes as much as half a million dollars a month from YouTube ads alone! Most people can agree that, while they might like to be making that kind of money, they don’t need that much money.

We should clarify that we don’t know how much money PewDiePie makes, but based on the average YouTube CPM and PewDiePies average monthly views, we can make an educated guess. It’s also worth remembering that we’re just talking about YouTube earnings here—PewDiePie may have sponsorships and brand deals that further increase his earnings.

So, with all that in mind, what numbers are we looking at? Well, we’ll be honest, we’ve picked a relatively arbitrary figure that should represent an amount of money somewhere between the United States’ poverty line and the average salary earned by Americans. We’ve gone with this because we feel confident that no one wants to be on or below the poverty line if they can help it, but you might be prepared to earn a below-average income if it means you get to live the YouTube dream. So what are those numbers?

How we Calculate Our Numbers

According to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), a person in the United States is considered to be in poverty if they are earning less than $12,760 a year.

Meanwhile, the average annual salary for an American is a little over thirty thousand dollars a year. As mentioned above, we have picked a spot roughly in the middle of these figures on the basis that most aspiring YouTubers would be happy to earn a little less than average to chase their YouTube dream, but not perhaps so much less that they are officially in poverty. But how do YouTube views translate to these amounts of money?

And, just to be clear, we are only talking about YouTube Partner Programme money here—money earned directly through ads being served on your videos by Google.

The metric used for measuring the views to earnings ratio is CPM or cost per mille. CPM is a measure of how much you earn per one thousand views, and is used all over the Internet for a variety of audience-related statistics. The actual CPM your channel has will be entirely determined by the type of content you make, how engaged your audience is, how advertiser-friendly your content is, and so on. That being said, the average CPM on YouTube is around $2. That means that, on average, a YouTuber earns two dollars for every thousand views they get.

Using our 30,000 views a day average figure, you would theoretically make somewhere in the region of $22,000, which is almost right in the middle of our poverty and average salaries.

Why It’s Not That Simple

Unfortunately, YouTube CPMs are not nearly that simple. As we stated earlier, some YouTubers will be able to make enough money from far fewer views, while others will struggle with more views.

A great deal of factors come into play when talking about how much your views are worth. Firstly, you have to be part of the YouTube Partner Programme, which has certain eligibility requirements (more on that shortly).

Secondly, your individual videos have to be eligible for monetisation—if you get 50,000 views in one day, but 40,000 of them are on videos that are not eligible to be monetised, you are can only count 10,000 views towards your CPM.

The next factor is the kind of content you are making. CPM is not a static, universal figure that applies to every YouTuber—the actual number is determined by the ads that are shown on those videos, and the ads are targeted based on the audience.

Though it doesn’t necessarily translate directly to YouTube, it can help to think of a salesperson who earns a commission. If a salesperson going door to door selling small items that cost tens of dollars will make a very small amount of money per sale. On the other hand, a salesperson in a flashy showroom selling luxury cars will make a considerable sum of money per sale.

Granted, in this scenario, the door to door salesperson will probably make a lot more sales than the car salesperson, but on YouTube, we are comparing an equal number of views.

So, if you are getting an average of 20,000 views in a niche with a high going rate for ads, you stand to earn a much higher CPM than someone in a niche with low ad rates.

Another factor is the engagement of your audience. As a general rule, pop culture videos tend to have poor CPM because their audience is much more diverse in terms of their interests. They will have come to the video to be entertained and, as a result, are not necessarily interested in any particular product or service that might be advertised at them, even when Google is serving ads targetted to that person specifically. On the other hand, a channel that is specifically about reviewing computer hardware will have an audience that is likely interested in buying computer hardware—hence why they are watching review videos. That audience will be far more likely to view a full ad or click through.

This is the main reason why a channel with a smaller audience can earn more than a larger channel. To go back to our salesperson analogy, the door-to-door salesperson has no idea if the person answering the door is going to be interested in their products, whereas the car salesman can be relatively confident that anyone walking into their showroom is at least partially interested in purchasing a car.

Another critical factor to how high your CPM can be is the length of your videos and your average watch time. Longer videos represent an opportunity for YouTube to show more advertisements, which means the potential for more money.

You can increase your CPM and improve your channel income but you might need to change your content or mindset – for more information on how to boost your channel CPM check out my deep dive blog in how to increase youtube CPM.

That being said, if your viewers regularly only watch the opening few minutes of your videos and then click away, the rest of the video—and the ads that could have been served—are not doing you any good. Though you should always prioritise the quality of your content before that video’s earning potential, it is generally recommended that a video should be at least ten minutes long, as this is the minimum length of time for YouTube to make use of mid-roll ads.

YouTube’s Partner Programme

To make money directly through YouTube, you need to become part of the YouTube Partner Programme, and in order to become part of the YouTube Partner Programme, your channel has to meet certain requirements. Those requirements include;

Living in a region where the YouTube Partner Programme is available
Having more than 4,000 watch-hours over the previous twelve months
Having at least 1,000 subscribers
Having a linked AdSense account

Now, granted, none of these requirements guarantees that you are getting a particular amount of views by the time you qualify for the partner programme, but it would be difficult to reach a point where you are getting 4,000 watch hours a year and have 1,000 subscribers without at least amassing a few hundred—if not thousand—views a day on average.

The truth is, even with these requirements in place, most YouTubers who join the partner programme as soon as they are eligible barely make any money in the beginning. Given that AdSense has a $100 minimum payout threshold, it can easily be many months from you first joining the partner programme before you see any money in your bank account.

Other Methods of Earning

So far, we have been focussing exclusively on the YouTube Partner Programme as a means of earning money from your videos. In reality, the partner programme is not the best way to translate YouTube success into revenue, as CPMs are often too low, and the necessary viewing targets too difficult to achieve to make it a viable source of income. It is also the unfortunate reality of YouTube that, for some YouTubers, the number of views they would need to turn their CPM into a viable income is forever out of their reach. This is not because of any failing on their part, but a natural limitation of the niche they are creating videos in.

The more focussed your niche is, the more value each viewer represents, but the fewer viewers there are. Going back to our salesperson example, the door-to-door salesperson might not know if they are knocking on the door of an interested customer, but they have lots of doors to knock on.

In contrast, the luxury car salesperson knows that people walking in are interested in buying a car, but won’t get many customers walking through the door.

If you assume that you need at least 30,000 views a day and you are creating videos for a niche where there are perhaps a million interested viewers, that means that each of your videos has the potential for a little over thirty days viewing before everyone who is interested has seen it. And, truthfully, you’re unlikely to get a view from everyone who is interested in that niche, regardless of how popular you are.

This is where other methods of earning money from your YouTube success come in, methods like membership platforms, merchandise, and brand deals. With membership platforms—such as Patreon, or YouTube’s in-house solution—your viewers can chip in a small monthly sum to support your content, providing you with additional earnings and a more reliable source of income. Brand deals and sponsorships are less predictable since they can range from a single video for a few hundred dollars all the way up to a multi-video sponsorship for thousands of dollars.

The important part about these alternative methods of earning money is that they are not inherently linked to your number of views. Granted, more views means a bigger audience, and a bigger audience means it is more likely that you will be able to attract members to your membership platform, or brands to offer you a deal.

But viewing figures are not the hard barrier that they are for the YouTube Partner Programme and your earnings through that programme. You are not required to have a certain amount of views before you can sign up for Patreon, nor will a brand refuse to sponsor a video if the view count isn’t high enough when there are other factors at play. Marketing is evolving all the time, and brands are increasingly about quality over quantity.

You could, in theory, convince a brand to sponsor your content before you’ve even uploaded your first video.

You probably won’t succeed… but you could.

Tags how many views do you need, how much do youtbers get paid, make money on youtube, make money online, youtube money

BUSINESS TIPS HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

4 Books for New Entrepreneurs That All YouTubers Should Read

Post author By Alan Spicer - YouTube Certified Expert
Post date 24 October 2020

They teach many subjects at school, but one that I think is missing from the syllabus is entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is the art of turning muck into brass, the practice of taking an idea and nurturing it until it blooms into a money-making powerhouse.

Some people say that you can’t teach entrepreneurship, because you have to have a particular personality or an elusive ‘x-factor’ to have any chance of success. I think they’re wrong.

Entrepreneurship is a skill that can be learned by anyone, and I believe everyone should try to launch a business at least once. So, if you’re a new entrepreneur, and are looking for some help and guidance from those who have tried entrepreneurship and succeeded, here is a selection of books you should consider adding to your bookshelf.

I am much more of an audiobook “reader” as I tend to take it in easier – I even use Amazon’s FREE Audible trials to load up on 2 free books every month.

Book 1: Crushing It!

Author: Gary Vaynerchuk

Number of pages: 288

Published: 2018

Why should you listen to him?: Gary Vaynerchuk is a global social media superstar.

Known affectionately as Gary Vee, Vaynerchuk was born in Belarus in 1975 but emigrated to the USA with his parents at a young age. Raised in New York City, Vaynerchuk showed entrepreneurial spirit as a boy, buying and selling baseball cards at school. He joined his parent’s wine business at 14, and after he took over in 2003, he grew it from $3 million to $60 million a year in revenue.

Vaynerchuk spotted the internet’s potential early, launching a channel on YouTube in 2006 to promote the wine business. Famous for hard work and ‘hustle’, Vaynerchuk now owns a $100 million social media digital agency, VaynerMedia, and gives inspirational speeches internationally about entrepreneurship and social influencing.

Book Synopsis: The book is part motivational and part social media strategy manual. Vaynerchuk explains how personal branding over social media is crucial to success today as an entrepreneur.

The book is in two parts. The first part gets you pumped up for the road ahead and gives you eight foundational principals on which to build your business.

The second part delves deeper into different social media platforms, covering YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and a few others. Vaynerchuk shows you how to use each platform to gain attention and grow your entrepreneurial endeavours. Each chapter is illustrated with real-life case studies from successful small businesses who have followed his framework.

Even though the book is nearly three years old, it’s often found near the top of the charts. It ranks top 10 on Amazon Audible in the categories for Social Media, Web Marketing, and E-commerce. Many people consider it one of the first books to buy when you are thinking about starting a business.

The book is available in several formats. There are the usual hardback and paperback, plus Kindle too. The best way to absorb it is via Amazon Audible, though. Narrated by Vaynerchuk and two other colleagues, you get to understand and learn the book’s lessons via Gary Vee’s unique style of delivery.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 2: Primalbranding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future: Create Belief Systems that Attract Communities.

Author: Patrick Hanlon

Number of pages: 272

Published: 2011

Why should you listen to him?: Patrick Hanlon is a world-renowned branding consultant. He has worked with the likes of Levi’s, PayPal, and Shopify to help them develop their brands and connect with new audiences.

He gives talks and lectures internationally on the topic of branding, is a contributor to the major news networks, and owns several consulting businesses which offer advice on branding in the digital age.

Book Synopsis: How do some companies like Tesla, create a horde of devoted followers while other businesses, despite access to the same level of resources, struggle or even become objects of scorn?

Hanlon argues that companies like Tesla succeed because they build a following of people who become true believers and advocates for their brand.

Primalbranding identifies the seven pieces of ‘primal code’ that humans instinctively use to form groups. He then applies this to branding and shows you how you can use these hardwired human dynamics and apply them to shape your brand and attract a legion of followers.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section explains the seven elements of the primal code. Including concepts such as ‘the creation story’, ‘the rituals’, and ‘the leader’. Hanlon then shows how these parts come together to foster ‘primal belonging’.

Sections two and three then show how these immutable traits can be used by just about anyone or anything to market and promote their products.

The book is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle and also as an MP3 CD (hello 2011!). If you want to build a following that will shout your name from the rooftops and promote your brand freely, it’s an essential one for your reading list.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 3: Innovation from Desperation: The Unfiltered Failures & Successes of an OG Social Media Marketer

Author: Desiree Martinez

Number of pages: 234

Published: 2020

Why should you listen to her?: Desiree Martinez is an entrepreneur, YouTuber, and all-round social media guru. As a military spouse, a life moving from base to base with her Air Force husband left her with few career opportunities and forced her to act for herself and think entrepreneurially.

She was surprised to learn that Facebook, a platform she knew well from her college days, was becoming an essential platform for businesses. So she started a social media consulting firm and has since helped hundreds of businesses shape their social presence.

Book Synopsis:

My 5* review for this book which I posted to Amazon reads:

“A real heartfelt walk through the ups and downs of working in media and social media in this current age. Running a business, raising a family and growing a brand is not easy. This is a warts and all story sharing some truly inspirational lessons. Well worth a read!”

The book is part autobiography and part how to launch your own business. It provides an unfiltered account of the ups and downs of launching a business with little support and no roadmap.

There are many lessons to learn from the book. Desiree covers topics like becoming a better content creator, what to do when a new social media platform becomes hot, and how to keep on going when everything seems to conspire against you.

Released in 2020, it also contains a chapter covering the impact of the pandemic. It’s a book to read if you can’t see yourself in any of the thousands of books available about entrepreneurship. Desiree says that she was the girl at school you who would never think could launch their own business, never mind write a book!

If that sounds like you, then this is a book worth reading.

The book is available in paperback and on Kindle, and it’s one I really recommend that you read.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

Book 4: The 4-Hour Workweek

Author: Tim Ferris

Number of pages: 416

Published: 2011

Why should you listen to him?: Tim Ferris is a writer, podcaster, investor, and entrepreneur. Many know him today for his podcast about lifestyle and smart working, but it was this book – The 4-hour Work Week – that propelled him onto the global stage.

He has advised or invested in many well know internet startups, like Evernote, Stumbleupon, and Uber.

Book Synopsis: One of the best books about entrepreneurship available to read.

Ferris argues in this now-famous book about how you should strive to avoid the 9-5 and instead choose to live life on your terms by building lifestyle businesses.

Ferris writes about how he started work after college and found himself working 80 hours a week for $40,000 a year. After a little experimentation with various business ideas and working strategies, he launched his own brand of supplements and soon started earning $40,000 every month, working just 4 hours per week.

Ferris achieved his success by working smartly. He used the 80/20 principle made famous by Italian economist Pareto and outsourced most menial tasks to cheap virtual assistants overseas.

The 4-hour Work Week gives you the tools and the inspiration to build a business of your own, and enjoy the benefits while you are still young by taking ‘mini-retirements’.

Essentially, you design and launch a business that can operate day-to-day without your presence. Something that earns money on autopilot so you can head out into the world and seek out unforgettable experiences.

The book is in four parts; Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. Each step in the framework guides you through his approach to building a lifestyle business and contains lots of real-life examples to illustrate the points.

The book is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and audio CD. It’s become a classic of the genre and regularly makes it into top-10s of books about entrepreneurship.

Amazon Link To Book: Buy The Book Now.

I hope you find this list of books useful.

Remember, if you sometimes struggle to find the time actually to sit down and read; there is an alternative. You can listen to a book when you are out and about—maybe travelling to work or out getting coffee.

You can download and listen to many useful books about YouTube and entrepreneurship using Amazon Audible. Every month for a small monthly subscription, you can listen to a book often narrated by the author themselves.

Educating yourself is the single best thing you can do for your career, so why not try listening to two of the books mentioned above with a 30-day trial of Amazon Audible.

Tags books for entrepreneurs, business advice for entrepreneurs, business lessons for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, how to avoid burnout as an entrepreneur, make money on youtube