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DEEP DIVE ARTICLE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Do YouTubers Have Other Jobs?

Do YouTubers Have Other Jobs?

YouTube has grown to the point that being a YouTuber is now a legitimate career path that one could aspire to, rather than an obscure Internet hobby, or something that only a select few lucky souls could ever succeed at.

Unlike a traditional job, however, there is no corporate ladder to climb when you become a YouTuber, no starting salary. That means that anyone starting out on the path of becoming a professional YouTuber has to lay their groundwork for success without the financial help that that eventual success might bring.

Not earning any money from your channel, in the beginning, isn’t always a problem. Many YouTubers start young, for example, when they are still living at home with their parents and have no bills to worry about. But YouTubers who have more financial responsibility when they get started, on the other hand, will need to cover those responsibilities somehow, and that means finding money elsewhere until YouTube can take over.

In this post, we’re going to be asking the question “do YouTubers have other jobs,” as well as covering a range of related topics.

Do YouTubers Have Other Jobs

Naturally, every YouTuber’s story is different. Some people come to YouTube after an incredibly successful career doing something else and do not need to worry about money in the immediate future. Some are not yet financially independent, like those YouTubers who start while they are still living with their parents that we mentioned above. Some might even take the risk of relying on their savings to tide them over until YouTube takes off.

Side note: YouTube is not the most predictable or reliable source of income, and we would strongly advise against relying on your savings to pay the bills in the hope that your YouTube channel will achieve success before you run out of money.

For some, there may even be an incredibly understanding and supportive partner who is willing to carry those financial burdens for a while while you get your channel up and running.

For many, however, the reality is that they will have to find a way to cover their bills themselves, and YouTube simply cannot do that in the beginning. Unless you come in with a huge following from somewhere else that can be translated to brand deals and sponsored content, you will probably be looking at at least a year before you could even consider quitting your day job. For many YouTubers, it is more like multiple years.

So, yes, YouTubers certainly do have other jobs a lot of the time, but things are not as clear cut as you might expect. Let’s explore a little further.

What Do We Mean by “Other Jobs”?

The lines between occupations have blurred considerably over the past couple of decades. In days gone by, it would often be the case that any given person could answer the question “what do you do for a living” clearly and unambiguously. For some who were particularly ambitious or who needed extra income, they may have a second job that would make the answer to that question a little more complicated, but these days it is becoming increasingly common for people to earn their living through a mish-mash of different ventures.

For example, if a YouTuber makes half of their income directly through their YouTube videos—the YouTube Partner Programme, sponsored content, brand deals, etc.—and the other half of their income from streaming on Twitch, would you consider them a streamer who YouTubes, or a YouTuber who streams? These days a person like that would refer to themselves as a “content creator,” but that kind of removes YouTube from the equation.

When we talk about YouTubers having “other jobs,” we typically mean more conventional jobs. A YouTuber might have a regular nine-to-five office job and make YouTube videos on an evening, or before work in the morning. In this respect, many YouTubers certainly do have other jobs.

So, the next question on your lips probably regards what is involved in going from a YouTuber who has other jobs to a YouTuber who doesn’t need other jobs to pay the bills.

How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money? 3

When Does YouTube Start Paying the Bills?

This is where things start to get a little messy. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how much success you need on YouTube to start earning enough money to live off of. Let’s tackle these different aspects individually.

The Value of Your Audience

For this section, we are referring specifically to money earned through the YouTube Partner Programme. We will get to things like brand deals in the next section. Not every video is worth the same in terms of monetary value, and because of this, you can’t be sure that a million views on your channel will earn the same as a million views on another channel.

The driving force between these differences is the value of your content to advertisers. The more advertisers are willing to pay to target their ads at your content; the more your videos will be worth.

Now, we emphasise “worth” because what your videos are worth and what they earn are two different things. The value of the ads being shown determines what your videos are worth, but the amount of engagement of your audience with those ads is what determines what you actually earn. You could make videos in the most expensive niche on YouTube, but if none of your viewers engages with those ads, your earnings will be severely limited. Similarly, if you could have one of the highest engagement rates on YouTube, but if your niche is saturated, you may that engagement won’t be worth much.

Now, you shouldn’t use this information as a reason to make significant changes to your content. Most YouTuber’s are guilty of at least the occasional video that is “for the views,” but you should not build an entire channel concept around what has the most earning potential.

Do YouTubers Still Get Paid for Old Videos? 1

Additional Earning Power

If you ask any successful YouTuber about earning through the platform, they will likely tell you that relying on the YouTube Partner Programme alone is a bad idea. Earnings from advertisements in this manner can be volatile, unreliable, and subject to the many different whims. Beyond that, YouTube themselves frequently make significant changes to their monetisation policies that have a tendency to drastically cut down the earning potential of many YouTubers, if not remove it entirely.

For this reason, many YouTubers rely on other means to monetise their channel. This includes brand deals and sponsored content, as well as things like affiliate programs. In the grand scheme of things, these methods are no more reliable than the YouTube Partner Programme, but they can offer a little job security in the short terms. For example, a brand deal might pay you an amount equivalent to what you would earn from the YouTube Partner Programme over the same period as the brand deal, but the Partner Programme can fluctuate and is generally inconsistent, whereas a brand deal is guaranteed income for the period it covers.

YouTube as a Promotional Tool

Many creators and entertainers have found YouTube to be an excellent platform for driving audiences to what they would consider their main work. There are many situations where this might be the case, but comedians are one of the most readily available examples of this. In this case, comedians make YouTube videos—often filmed podcasts or sketches—that may make a respectable income in their own right, but whose main purpose is to bring attention to the comedian in the hope that more people will go their shows and buy their comedy specials.

In these cases, the YouTuber has an “other job” in a very practical sense, though they will typically not be looking to make YouTube their primary source of income since their other job is what they want to do.

Advice for “Going Pro” on YouTube

This wouldn’t be much of a YouTube blog if we didn’t give you a little advice on taking your channel from that thing you do in your spare time to your main career, so let’s delve into that topic a little.

The first thing we will always say when talking about moving towards a career as a professional YouTuber is do not go all in too soon. We understand how exciting it can be the first time your YouTube earnings reach a point where you could realistically pay your way using that money, but it is important to remember that YouTube earnings can be volatile for the reasons we mentioned above.

In an ideal world, you would wait at least a year after hitting that remarkable milestone to ensure that your YouTube earnings are going to be consistent enough to rely on as your primary source of income. And, in advice that is more generally applicable outside of YouTube, it would be prudent to ensure that you have a backup plan, often in the form of savings that could cover your living expenses during times that your YouTube earnings aren’t quite enough.

This can also serve as a buffer in the event that you realise YouTube isn’t working out, giving you time to work out what your next move will be.

Advice for Building Your YouTube Channel While Employed

Whether you are working part-time or full-time, living alone or supporting a family, getting a YouTube channel off of the ground around a job can be difficult. Still, there are some bits of advice that transcend your specific situation.

Firstly, if you are not concerned with making YouTube your job, if you are making videos purely for fun, don’t let it become a chore. The only reason there would be pressure to achieve a certain level of quality or meet a particular upload schedule is if you were intending to grow your channel and succeed in the long run. If that is not your goal, don’t push yourself too hard. Just enjoy it.

For the rest of us, there is a balance to strike. On the one hand, if you don’t enjoy your YouTube venture, there is a far higher chance you will burn out and lose interest before you ever achieve success. But, on the other hand, if you don’t treat it with at least a modicum of seriousness, there is a higher chance you won’t succeed. Try to treat your YouTube channel like a job but within reason. If you find yourself neglecting essential parts of your life—work, family, etc.—you will need to reevaluate things and decide what is really important to you. But for YouTube success, consistent quality and uploads matter, and you should find ways to achieve that if you want to succeed.

On the subject of finding ways to achieve those things, you will probably have to accept that there will be some late nights and early mornings in your future—especially if you have a job and a family. There are only so many hours in the day, and you will already have quite a few of those hours spoken for. If the idea of getting up an hour or two early to get some YouTube work in before you head off to your day job is a deal-breaker, you may have to take a long, hard look at yourself and ask if you really want this as much as you thought.

But, hey, the good news is that if you manage to succeed in making your YouTube channel financially viable while also working a regular job, you will suddenly have more free time than you know what to do with when you do finally quit that job to do YouTube full-time. You will also be considerably better-placed to appreciate your new role in life.

Final Thoughts

Many successful YouTubers have tales of toiling away in the unsociable hours of the morning to get their latest video done before the kids wake up.

For the younger members of society, being a YouTuber is something they can aspire to, but there are plenty of people out there—people in their mid-twenties and up, right through to senior citizens—who never had the option when they were growing up, and now that it is an option they are already in a job and have financial responsibilities. For those people, YouTube is no less attainable than for the youngsters.

You just might have to work a little harder to get there.

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

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

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.

Can You Make Money on YouTube if You Are Under 18? 1

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.

Can You Make Money on YouTube if You Are Under 18? 2

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.

Can You Make Money on YouTube if You Are Under 18? 3

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.

Can You Make Money on YouTube if You Are Under 18? 4

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.

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. 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.

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

How to Make Money on YouTube Without Showing Your Face

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…

How to Make Money on YouTube Without Showing Your Face 1

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

How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money?

How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money? 3

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!

Do YouTubers Pay Tax? 3

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.

How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money?

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.

How Do YouTubers Receive Their Money? 2

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!

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BUSINESS TIPS DEEP DIVE ARTICLE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

7 Tips for YouTubers to Stay Sane When Working From Home During COVID

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Being stuck at home is rubbish.

For many of us, the Covid Pandemic means that we’re trapped at home, trying to get our videos planned, shot, and edited while trying not to go stir crazy.

The line between working and playing gets blurred also. It’s all too easy to get stuck in a rut of doing a bit of work on your channel, then giving yourself ‘a break’ and playing a game or mindlessly scrolling through Instagram for an hour.

There are things you can do to make Covid enforced work patterns more enjoyable, however. A few little tweaks to your working practices can improve your mood and productivity when working from home.

It’s worth experimenting with home working practices too. One estimate reckons that 30% of the workforce will still be working from home regularly at the end of 2021.

So to help you better handle the current do-everything-from-home formula, this post has seven tips you can apply straight away to make working from home on your YouTube channel or any other job more enjoyable.

#1. Get Up and Get Dressed.

I’ve worked from home for myself for several years now, so I can confidently say that watching morning TV in your PJs while pecking away on your laptop is not the path to a healthy working habit.

Similarly, you may think you’re being clever when your all business up-top for your Zoom meeting, but all bedtime down below out of sight of the camera lens.

You need to treat your work like any other job. That means getting dressed in regular daytime clothes to signify that you have ‘left’ rest and relaxation behind and you are now ready to do some work.

The physical act of putting on a pair of jeans/trousers or skirt is a mental signal that your morning routine has started, and it’s time to get stuff done.

You don’t have to dress like you are going into the office, but you need to make yourself respectable enough to meet people outside of your usual home bubble.

A good rule of thumb is to dress smartly enough not to feel embarrassed when you open the door to the Amazon delivery driver.

The same advice applies to showering and brushing your teeth — at the start of the day, make yourself ready for the day.

You can see how I work from home in my own personal account of my own working from home experience.

#2. Have a Space Just for Working.

We can’t all have a desirable ‘battle station’ like the picture below.

Whether you’re planning your next video, working on a side-hustle, or just doing your conventional job, separating your work and play is vital for your mental health.

It’s also best to separate your work time at home from the rest of the household chores that need doing. Doing a bit of work, then tidying the lounge, then getting back to some more work mashes the day together into one confusing mess.

And while you may already have a place to record your videos set up in the corner of a spare room. Aim to have a particular spot in your home where you sit down to work too.

Desks are inexpensive to buy if you have the room. They come in a variety of sizes suitable for most needs, and if you have the budget buy yourself a proper office chair, too. It helps to encourage a healthy back posture while you work.

If your budget is small, keep an eye on the local ads on Facebook and Gumtree, as you can often find bargains on secondhand office furniture or even snag them for free.

If you absolutely do not have the room for a desk and chair, put a ‘work stuff’ bundle of items together. This can be your laptop or tablet and a selection of notebooks you use. At the start of the working day, set them up in the place you’ll be working in, like the kitchen table, for example.

Then, at the end of the workday, pack them up, and put them out of the way to signify that you have finished working and ready to start some household chores or down-time.

#3. Routines and Commuting

Psychologists call the separation of work and play segmentation. Some psychologists also claim that those who segment their work and relaxation properly perform better in each area.

It’s hard to switch your brain between working and relaxing in an instant — that’s why those who commute to work hold an advantage over home workers. The commute is when a worker can shift their focus on the day’s work ahead.

Similarly, at the end of the working day, a commuter has the opportunity to decompress from daily work challenges as they make their way home.

To segment your work and relaxation time effectively in these Covid times means that you need a method of transitioning between work and non-work — you are going to need to get into some routines and create a kind of ‘commute.’

Routines give us structure to our lives. They can make us more efficient and build up momentum to help hit our goals. So try to create your own ‘commute’ at home to ease into your working routine.

It may be as simple as taking a shower, eating breakfast, then 10 minutes of watching the morning news. As long as you do the same routine each day while understanding, you will be ready to start work once you have done everything.

In a few days, your commuting routine will become a signal to your brain that you are about to enter work mode.

It doesn’t matter what your best working hours are for this tip to succeed. You may be a night-owl and do your best work into the wee small hours — do whatever works for you — as long as you set a pre-work routine to help ease you in and out of work mode.

#4. Getting Stuff Done – Cut Out the Distractions.

There is a mental state that some call ‘the zone’ and others name ‘flow.’ It essentially means that you are unaware of anything going on around you while you focus on something. Not time, hunger, or even the need to pee.

You are totally at one with the task at hand.

Getting in ‘the zone’ is easier said than done, but there is no real secret to it. You just need to give yourself space to focus. The enemy of focus is distraction, so you should aim to eliminate all distractions from your workspace.

There is a great book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. It’s all about organising long periods of distraction-free time, so you can enter a flow state and produce your very best work. And it’s worth getting hold of a copy.

What are the causes of work distractions?

One study by a University showed that it could take up to 20 minutes to recover from the interruption of responding to email alerts. So if you are constantly checking your email, you prevent the chance for your brain to settle and enter into the mind frame of a flow state.

What makes the situation worse is having your smartphone within reach when you work as well. People in the US receive an average of 46 push notifications per day on their phones. So, with email and smartphones pinging regularly, it’s a wonder that anyone’s brain can settle down to focus.

Try and cut own as many distractions as you can when you sit down to work. If you don’t need your phone for work, switch it off or at least leave it in another room. There is also a choice of website blocking apps you can install to limit your time spent on distracting websites like Reddit and Facebook.

Another tool that some people find useful to manage productivity is a Pomodoro timer. A Pomodoro timer is a countdown clock that you set to work on a task for a set period. When your selected time session ends, you take a short break before starting the next short working period.

Many people work on a 25-5 Pomodoro system — 25 minutes working, followed by a 5-minute break. After four rounds of 25 minutes, you take a more extended break of 15 minutes. It works because you are only setting the challenge to work for a short time before you take a rest.

#5. Make Time to Exercise and Get Outdoors.

The pandemic has many of us glued to our sofa’s binging on the latest Netflix must-watch program like the Tiger King or The Queen’s Gambit. But, being sat on your backside for hours at a time is not good for your back, bum, or belly.

Doctors have called sitting down the new smoking. Inactivity is really bad for our health and can lead to all sorts of long-term problems like lower-back pain, diabetes, and even cancer.

I live in leafy West Yorkshire, close to some old canals. I take regular walks along the canal to clear my head and give my body some love.

Walking is a good exercise to fit into your ‘commuting’ routine, and most can find time to squeeze in a twenty-minute walk when the work of the day is done.

Walking is also a simple way to remove digital distractions. So, get some fresh air and think about your channel. I get all sorts of ideas for video content while I’m away from the desk having a stroll.

If you’re house-bound during the Pandemic because you’re shielding some who is extra vulnerable, then head on over to YouTube. Jo Wicks has a channel that uploads new home workouts several times a week.

You can do all the workouts with stuff you can find around the home, so there is no excuse not to give your body a little TLC and try to keep in shape.

#6. Make Time to Socialise.

Image Source

You don’t want to end up like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, hunched over your keyboard pretending to work while descending into madness. But it’s also quite easy for the more introverted amongst us not to make time to have other human contacts every day.

So you should try to find some time for your friends and family now and again. But It’s a tricky balance to strike, as the primary way we keep in contact with friends is with our smartphones, and as I mentioned above, smartphones are awful for our focus.

A new approach is to schedule a time for socialising. How about organising a Zoom lunch with your friends? Set an agreed time that you’ll all eat your lunch, and you can have a natter and a catch-up over a video conference.

One way to be more sociable and work on your YouTube channel is to try collaborating with other YouTubers, which will bring more human contact as you plan some joint content together.

#7. Mind Your Mental Health.

Mental health problems are one of the biggest risks we all face as we endure lockdown. Humans are social creatures, so the enforced home confinement naturally takes its toll on our mental wellbeing.

There are a few techniques you can use to improve your mental health.

Try and limit the amount of news you watch. You should keep up-to-date with the latest developments in your area, but becoming obsessed with increasing daily numbers or the length of time until life returns to normal is not healthy.

If you find yourself obsessing, take a news break for a few days. Trust me, not much changes in a few days, and you can turn your focus to learning a new skill.

Practice touch typing, improve your photoshop skills, or learn about those weird camera functions you don’t currently understand. It’s doesn’t really matter. Finding a new project to focus your mind on can benefit your mental health immensely.

Finally, try practicing mediation. Many assume that mediation is sitting in the lotus position and chanting. It’s not. Mediation is really about breathing. Sit or lie in a relaxed position, close your eyes if it helps, and focus on your breath entering and leaving your body.

That’s all. Just focus on your breath.

Meditation is scientifically proven to reduce stress and control anxiety. YouTube has plenty of excellent content around meditation; Headspace’s channel is an ideal place to start, with lots of content to help you learn how to meditate and improve your mental health.

Conclusion

Yes, lockdown and pandemics are rubbish! But don’t use it as an excuse not to work on your YouTube channel.

Surviving the new normal of working from home means you need to take a little care of how you structure your day.

Set a defined working schedule, and ideally, a place to sit where you only do work. Getting into routines can help your body and mind know when it’s time to work or play.

I hope this post has been helpful. Why don’t you try applying a few tips and see if they can help make you a happier and more productive YouTuber during this Covid pandemic?

 

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DEEP DIVE ARTICLE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

What is the Best Bitrate for YouTube?

What is the Best Bitrate for YouTube?

Providing the best experience for your viewers is a worthy goal that all YouTubers should strive for, and one that can take many different forms.

There are times when it is blindingly obvious what steps you should take. For example, if you are recording your audio using a built-in laptop microphone and the results are fuzzy, tinny, and a whole host of other adjectives you don’t necessarily want to associate with your audio, a decent microphone is a clear step in the right direction.

There are more subtle steps you can take, however, and one of those is the bitrate you upload your video at. Finding the right bitrate is a balancing act between quality and viewing experience. Fortunately, YouTube makes things easier by processing your video to ensure that the content being delivered to your viewers is up to scratch. That being said, as a general rule, the less work you leave YouTube to do, the better. Any time YouTube has to make changes, be it to the volume levels, the bitrate, the resolution, or any aspect of your video, there is a chance the results will not be to your liking.

So, what is a bitrate? And, more importantly, what is the best bitrate for YouTube? We’ll get to what it is below, but as for the best bitrate for YouTube (Source)

Type Bitrate (Standard Framerate) Bitrate (High Framerate)
2160p (4k) 35-45 Mbps 53-68 Mbps
1440p (2K) 16 Mbps 24 Mbps
1080p 8 Mbps 12 Mbps
720p 5 Mbps 7.5 Mbps
480p 2.5 Mbps 4 Mbps
360p 1 Mbps 1.5 Mbps

Please note that the above values are applicable to SDR video only. If you want the numbers for HDR, check that link above the table.

Uploading videos at these bitrates will ensure you are giving your viewers the highest quality you can while not hitting YouTube’s bitrate cap, which will cause them to lower the bitrate in processing. If you’d like to know more on this topic, however, keep reading.

What is a Bitrate?

Bitrate is the name given to the measurement of data encoded in a unit of time which, for video, is typically Mbps, or megabits per second.

As you might expect, the higher the bitrate, the better the quality of the video.

However, that higher bitrate comes with additional bandwidth requirements, which can mean a lousy viewing experience for people whose Internet connection (or computer hardware, for that matter) isn’t up to the task. They will be getting choppy, stuttering playback which is not fun for anyone.

A variety of factors affect how much bandwidth is necessary. For example, a video running at sixty frames per second will need twice as much bandwidth as a video running at thirty frames per second that is otherwise identical. Another significant factor is the codec used since that will alter the amount of data an individual frame requires.

And if this sounds like a foreign language, don’t worry, we’ll go over codecs in a little more detail shortly.

What Happens if I use a Bitrate that is too Low?

Using a low bitrate will result in a lower quality stream for your viewer. Now, whether or not this is a bad thing is subjective; if you are happy with the quality of the video at a particular bitrate, it doesn’t matter if it is low by any other standard.

In fact, the lower you can get your bitrate without bringing the quality down too far, the better since it means a smoother experience for your viewers.

Even if a viewer has the connection for a high-bitrate video, it doesn’t hurt them to view it at a lower bitrate if the quality is good enough.

What Happens if I use a Bitrate that is too High?

Higher bitrates will result in more bandwidth requirements for your user, which, may be necessary for certain video qualities. For example, streaming 4K at 60fps in anything approaching a decent quality is going to result in a lot of bandwidth; there’s no getting around that fact.

In cases where the bandwidth requirements are higher than your viewer’s connection can handle, they will get choppy, stuttering, buffering playback.

Unlike having your bitrate too low, we do have an objective consequence for having it too high. As you increase the bitrate of a video, you will reach a point of diminishing returns where the bump in bitrate results in a barely noticeable—or completely indistinguishable—improvement in quality.

In this case, the increase in demand on your viewer’s Internet connection is not worth it for the minimal improvement it grants them.

Match YouTube

As we mentioned above, anytime you force YouTube to make changes to your video, you run the risk of them doing so in a way that you are not happy with.

It is better to aim for YouTube’s preferred properties wherever possible, which in the case of bitrate, can be found in the table above.

That being said, YouTube put a lot of effort into making their platform work as smoothly as possible. The fact that the processing stage could alter your video in a way you are not happy with doesn’t mean it will. It is also worth noting that YouTube will be making more significant changes to your video at other resolutions, so this is something you will have to make peace with one way or another.

For example, you could upload a 4K video with the encoding settings so perfectly aligned with YouTube that it needs no processing whatsoever… to display in 4K. YouTube is still going to have to process a 1080p version, and that will be the version that most YouTube viewers see—though 4K is gaining traction.

In truth, the benefits of making your video match YouTube’s desired encoding settings apply more to other aspects, such as audio levels. But that doesn’t mean there are no benefits to making sure your bitrate lines up with what YouTube wants.

How to Make Money Online as a Singer or Musician 3

Audio Bitrates

Bitrates don’t just apply to video, of course; there are audio bitrates to consider as well. In terms of what these are and how they behave, for simplicities sake, just think of them as exactly the same as video bitrates but applied to audio.

The primary difference here is the amounts we are dealing with. Audio is considerably smaller than video, so the bitrates are also smaller. For video, we typically measure bitrates in megabits. For audio, it is kilobits. If you are not familiar with the naming system of “kilo” and “mega”, a kilobit is a thousand bits, and a megabit is a million bits. That makes a megabit a thousand times more bits than a kilobit.

Using the same link that we supplied above regarding YouTube’s preferred video bitrates, we can tell you that their preferred audio bitrates are as follows;

Type Audio Bitrate
Mono 128 kbps
Stereo 384 kbps
5.1 512 kbps

Codecs, Wrappers, and More

There are a number of other terms to deal with when talking about encoding a video, some which we have mentioned already in this article. We could probably fill an entire post on each one, but it’s worth touching on them here since they are important terms to get familiar with when dealing with video encoding.

Container or Wrapper

The container of your video is a type of file that allows multiple streams of data to be stored in a single file. Typically, a container will include metadata that can tell a player information about the file, such as the title. There are many examples of container files outside of the world of video and audio, but the important information that is contained in a video wrapper is the video and audio data. Different combinations of audio and video codecs can be embedded within the wrapper file.

YouTube’s preferred container is MP4, though the codecs you use will play a more significant role in how well YouTube processes your video.

How to Make Money on YouTube Using Other People's Videos 2

Codecs (Audio and Video)

Codecs are the method by which a piece of video or audio is compressed. This is necessary to reduce the size of the data so that it can be more feasibly streamed across the Internet.

I have a full deep dive in the best codecs for YouTube and the surprising differences in my blog.

Compression—and, as a result, codecs—work by reducing the data in a video or audio stream as much as possible. As an example, a stretch of video that is just blank screen and silence, if left uncompressed, will take up the same amount of space as a stretch of video of the same length that has plenty of action going on onscreen. With compression, that stretch of blank, silent screen can be significantly reduced in size since there is no need to store hundreds of frames of identical data.

Different codecs handle this compression in different ways. For example, some focus on preserving as much detail as possible, which gives the best results visually, but doesn’t necessarily achieve a great reduction in data size. Other codecs might focus on getting the size down but, in the process, lose a noticeable amount of fine detail.

As with many things in life, choosing the right code is about finding a good balance between those two aspects. That being said, YouTube’s preferred audio codec is AAC-LC, and their preferred video codec is H.264.

Framerate

The framerate is the number of frames of video that are shown per second. A single frame is essentially a still image at the resolution that the video is processed in. So, for a 1080p video that is running at thirty frames per second, you are looking at a slideshow of thirty 1920 x 1080 images every second. No wonder video takes up so much data!

The more frames your video has, the smoother a viewing experience it will be. That being said, it is not always a case of more is better. There are certain stylistic elements to consider. For example, twenty-four frames per second are the standard in cinema, and so video in this framerate tends to have a more cinematic look. If the video is footage of a video game, on the other hand, you would probably want sixty frames per second where possible.

The most common frame rates are 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, and 60, though YouTube does not limit you to one of these options.

Resolution and Aspect Ratio

The aspect ratio and resolution of your video are not quite the same things. The resolution is fairly straight forward, and even those with little knowledge in this area are usually familiar with the concept. The resolution of a video is the number of pixels being shown on screen, displayed as width and height. For example, 1080p video is 1920 x 1080, or 1,920 pixels across and 1,080 pixels down.

Aspect ratio, on the other hand, is the ratio of width to height, which describes the shape of the video screen. For example, the above mentioned 1920 x 1080 is a 16:9 screen ratio, which is the most common aspect ratio used on YouTube, but any resolution where the ratio of horizontal pixels to vertical pixels is the same is classed as 16:9. For example, 4K, which is 3840 x 2160, and 240p, which is 426 x 240, are both 16:9.

For comparison, a square video, where the width and height of the resolution are the same, would have an aspect ratio of 1:1.

Final Thoughts

Bitrates are one of those things that can be a significant problem, but probably shouldn’t be. By keeping your bitrates around the numbers suggested by YouTube, you shouldn’t have any issues with the quality of your video.

Granted, there will always be some special situations where YouTube’s recommended defaults just don’t work for you, but if you are encountering that kind of situation, you are probably knowledgable enough to figure out the best course of action. For the rest of us mere mortals, the best bitrate for YouTube will often be the one that they suggest.

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. 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.

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DEEP DIVE ARTICLE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

How to Collaborate On YouTube (Even During The Covid Pandemic)

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Collaborations are responsible for some of the best things ever — fish and chips, cheese and wine, even Tango and Cash (ask your dad).

Two complimentary things working together are often better than the sum of their parts. Collaborating with other creators on content for your channel is a great way to grow your subscriber and view count by tapping into the other creator’s audience.

One of the most useful collaboration types is meeting up with another YouTuber in person and recording content together. But, currently, that’s a no-go, as Covid lockdowns are keeping us all home-alone.

Fortunately, you can still collaborate with other YouTubers, and this article sets out all you need to know about how to collaborating with other creators. The best people to approach and how to approach them. Plus, I’ll also cover the different types of collaboration you could choose to do.

Here we go.

Who Should You Collaborate With? (Finding the Right Creator)

It may be tempting to think, ‘I have a gaming channel. I wonder if PewDiePie is up for a collaboration?’

Not gonna happen.

Your ideal collaborator is someone who has a similar-sized audience to you. Why? It’s an unfair transaction otherwise. Both sides of the collaboration are looking to gain a bump in subscribers and traffic from the deal. If one channel has a vastly larger subscriber base, then why would they bother collaborating?

Also, along with finding a creator with a similar-sized channel, their niche should be one that meshes well with your content. You need to find a topic mix that makes sense.

For example, my channel is in the YouTube education niche, which is a topic that mixes nicely with many other subjects. I can collaborate with a gaming channel because I can teach the other collaborator’s audience how to grow their own gaming channel.

Similarly, the gamer can come onto my channel and talk about the three main lessons they learned from launching a YouTube channel. The topics work well together – they have synergy.

If your videos are all about cooking and your friend has a channel about dogs, this is not a happy topic mix.

Take a little time to think about the kind of niches that would blend well with your channel, and think about how a collaboration would benefit you and your audience?

How To Find Collaborators

The easiest type of collaboration is the ones you set up with your friends. These could be real-life friends or be people you’ve met on YouTube and built up a rapport with in the comments section.

In this case, approaching them to suggest a collaboration should be easy. You can brainstorm content ideas together, and there should be less pressure on getting the collaboration right the first time.

As I mentioned in the previous section, the collaboration should make sense from a niche perspective. If none of your friend’s channels mix well with yours, you will have to approach some content creators you haven’t previously had contact with.

The first place to look for potential collaborators is in your subscriber list. From Your Channel dashboard on YouTube, select the list of people who subscribe to your content. You can order your subscriber list by their subscriber count to find people who have a similar-sized channel to you.

It makes sense to try this first. If someone has subscribed to your channel, they like your content already, so organising a collaboration should be easier.

Start by checking out your existing subscribers’ channel pages to see if there are any that might make a good match for collaboration. If you have no luck with your current subscriber base, then you need to hunt down people to work with.

You can search on YouTube or use a third-party tool like vidIQ, which has features to help you track down your competition. But in this situation, your competitors could become your collaboration partner. Just remember to look for channels that have a similar subscriber count to you.

Don’t overshoot and try to set up a collaboration with a much larger channel – it looks like begging.

Contacting Potential Collaborators

You’ve hopefully now identified several channels you want to collaborate with. You will need a good-sized list because finding a collaborator is like being at the Junior disco at school. You are going to have to ask lots of people to dance with you before one says yes!

Next, you’ll need to get a list of contact details for the channels you want to approach. You should also message the person with who you want to collaborate directly. It doesn’t necessarily have to be their email address – a DM via social media is OK – but it’s not the best idea to spam their video comment section.

Consider this comment appearing in your comment feed: ‘dude, nice channel, we should collaborate!’ This approach is unprofessional; they didn’t even take the time to find out your name!

Messages like these most often come from someone who only wants the exposure to your audience because you likely have more subscribers. So, take the time to find out the name and contact details of the channels you want to work with.

Look first in the about section of their YouTube channel page. In the details section, there is a place to enter a business email address.

If they don’t have an email listed, you can usually find contact details for people on other social media sites.

What to Say in Your Pitch to Potential Collaborators

Your email or direct message to a potential collaborator is, in fact, a mini-sales letter. You need to grab their attention, then persuade with your words that you are worthy of their time and attention. Then finish with a call to action, such as asking them to reply to your message.

Just because you reach out to someone doesn’t mean they are going to say yes. They may be in the middle of a pre-planned series of videos or have tried collaborations before, and it didn’t go so well.

Remember, a good collaboration is the right blend of two channels that will benefit both people’s goals. So even if you think that a particular creator is perfect for you, you may need to persuade them that you are also ideal for them.

Start your email pitch by using their name. Using ‘Hey dude’ or some other impersonal greeting might seem friendly. But people respond better when you use their first name. You are also showing them some respect that you took the time to find out their real name.

Keeping your pitch short is also a way to show potential collaborators respect. It shows that you acknowledge their time is valuable, and they won’t want to read a long 1000 word email.

After you’ve greeted them by name, next mention one of their videos and why you liked it. Everyone likes a little flattery, so if you start with some praise, they will likely continue reading the rest of the pitch.

Now it’s time to get to the purpose of your message. Let them know you want to collaborate and mention two or three ideas of videos you could create together. You don’t need lots of detail, just some good enough ideas to spark a conversation.

This is the ultimate aim of any pitch message you send – getting a response and a chance to talk further.

Here’s an example of the kind of message you could send;

You will likely need to send out a few collaboration pitch emails before you get a response, so don’t be disheartened if your first few messages don’t get any – it’s a numbers game.

Once you find a partner to collaborate with, you next need to decide what type of collaboration to do. Let’s take a look at the different collaboration types next.

The Different Types of YouTube Collaboration

With the pandemic stopping you from meeting up with other YouTubers to record a collaboration, what different types of collaboration can you do? Here are four for you to think about.

The Shoutout YouTube Collaboration

This kind of collaboration is the perfect one to start with. It dips your toe in collaboration waters and is the first level of YouTube collaboration.

Giving a shoutout is a simple as mentioning another channel during one of your own videos. Say why you like the creator’s content and why you think your audience should head over to their channel.

Your collaboration partner will return the favour, and both of you should hopefully see a bump in subscribers and a spike in video watch-time.

I did a shoutout with Desiree Martinez. She has a channel all about content marketing that compliments my YouTube education channel nicely. As you can see below, I inserted an image from her into my video. I also linked to her channel homepage in the video description.

When you organise a shoutout, agree on up front where you will place the shoutout segment in your video. Positioning a shoutout near the start of a video is more valuable than ones that appear near the end.

Videos viewership drops as the video goes on. So an agreed shoutout near the start of your video should mean more viewers get to see it.

Video Clip Swap Collaboration

The video clip swap collaboration is a natural progression if you and your collaborator have found the shoutout collaboration useful. This type of collaboration involves you recording a clip and inserting it into each other’s video.

You might choose this one for when you want to cover a topic in one of your videos that your collaborator has more experience in. For example, let’s assume I’m going to do a clip swap collaboration with Desiree Martinez.

I could film a segment for her audience about video content marketing. At the same time, she could film a clip about promoting a YouTube channel via Facebook. In this situation, both of us are playing to our strengths, and the audience should find a fresh face helpful.

Here’s an example from Brian G Johnson’s channel with someone he often collaborates with; his friend Nick Nimmin. In the video shown below about growing a YouTube channel, Nick Nimmin, with his 700k subscribers, can offer his valuable expertise. So Nick recorded a short clip for Brian to insert into his video.

The Channel Swap Collaboration

This type of collaboration is a bit like a more extended version of the clip swap. This time, though, your collaboration partner takes over most of a video.

You will want to record a short intro/outro to sandwich their clip and let your audience know what’s going on, but in the main, your collaborator takes over.

When you channel swap with someone, they can bring you in as the guest star to talk about your expertise. Alternatively, you can also record content on the topic of the other person’s channel but from your perspective.

I did a channel swap a while ago with Sarah Sunbeams. Sarah has a Booktube channel, so her audience is more interested in all things bookish rather than my usual content of YouTube education.

I’m a big fan of listening to audiobooks, so I took over her channel to talk about my thoughts on all things Amazon Audible. Sarah recorded a video in return for my channel that was all about launching a Booktube channel.

We both got to talk about each other’s specialties and get our faces in front of a new audience.

The Pandemic Option

With the pandemic preventing close contact, you can’t appear on camera sat next to a collaboration partner.

One alternative you might try if you want to appear on the screen at the same time is to record a video call. Nearly everyone must have had a Zoom or Skype video chat in the last few months.

Why not try recording a Zoom meeting with a collaborator? There is a feature in Zoom to record a video call, though you may want to use proper screen recording software to have more control over the end product.

OBS Studio is free screen recording software that works on either Mac or Windows. Why not set up your video camera to shoot you from a different angle simultaneously so that you can edit it into your video later, as well?

Conclusion

The Covid pandemic shouldn’t stop you from collaborating on YouTube just because you can’t physically meet up with another YouTuber. Now that many people are either working or learning from home, technology makes it easy to collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world.

When you look for a collaboration partner, make sure to choose one that will compliment your channel’s niche. Search your current subscribers to see if they have a similar-sized channel that could have collaboration potential.

But, you should try to find a few possibles, because not everyone will want to collaborate – it’s about finding the right people at the right time.

When you have your list, send out a pitch message. Greet them by name, keep it short, and say something nice about their channel.

When you find a collaborator, decide which type of collaboration to do. It’s OK to start small with a shoutout or two, and later on, work your way up to a clip or even full channel swap. Good luck.

 

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MARKETING SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

YouTube Channel Art Size

YouTube Channel Art Size 1

Presentation is everything, and your channel art can play a huge role in how potential new viewers perceive your channel.

If you are running a channel aimed at businesses, having unprofessional-looking channel art could put your target audience off. Similarly, if you are running a comedy channel, your channel shouldn’t look too formal.

On a more fundamental level, having your art be too small will affect the quality it displays at, making it blurry and generally giving the impression that you perhaps don’t care about your channel. There are other factors to consider, such as the placement of your art within the overall image, and how it will display on various different platforms. Remember, YouTube can be watched on a plethora of devices these days, from desktop computers to television sets to mobile phones.

YouTube Channel Art Size

So what should your YouTube channel art size be? Well, there are a few figures to take into account here;

  • 2560 x 1440 is the recommended dimensions of your YouTube channel art. Remember; YouTube makes these recommendations for a reason, and you really should treat this as an ideal size.
  • 2048 x 1152 is the minimum resolution you should make your channel art image. Below this size and YouTube will not allow you to upload it. The aspect ratio must be 16:9.
  • 1546 x 423 is the safe zone for any critical parts of your channel art if you are using the recommended YouTube channel art size. If you are using the minimum size, the safe zone would be 1235 x 338. What this means is that anything you want viewers to be able to see, you should keep within an imaginary rectangle of this size that is centered within the overall channel art image. Anything outside of this safe zone may get cut off or hidden on various devices. That is not to say you shouldn’t put any effort into the rest of the channel art, but don’t put anything outside of that area if it is vital that it be seen, such as social media info, or schedules.
  • 6MB is the maximum file size your channel art can be. Anything larger and YouTube won’t accept it. You can, however, upload smaller channel art images.

If you need some examples of what a YouTube channel banner can look like I have pulled together a list of some of the best, worst and weirdest youtube channel banners in my blog.

The part that can be tricky to wrap your mind around is the different platforms, and how the sizes apply to each. So let’s take a look at that.

How Channel Art Displays on Different Devices

For the rest of the article, we’re going to assume we are working with the recommended YouTube channel art size. If your channel art is a different size, you will have to scale the dimensions we discuss to suit.

The first device we are going to talk about is TV. Televisions—or, more accurately, devices that use the YouTube app designed for televisions—are the only ones where the full 2560×1440 will show. Televisions tend to have a lower pixel density due to being much larger screens, which may explain why YouTube treats it more as a background than a header on this platform.

For every other device, there is one crucial number to remember; 423. This is the height of the displayed area of your channel art regardless of the platform it is being shown on. The width, on the other hand, depends on the device. The maximum width that will be displayed on desktops is the full 2560, whereas the maximum on a tablet, like an iPad, is 1855. For mobile phones, it is 1546. It is also worth noting that the desktop size is scalable, and can be anywhere between the maximum 2560 and the minimum 1546.

And this is the reason there is a safe zone of 1546 x 423, because that area of the channel art will be shown regardless of the device, so it is the only part of the channel art you can guarantee will be seen no matter what platform the channel is being viewed on. You can, of course, put whatever you want outside of that safe zone, but be aware that some people may not see it. And, given that mobile phones are among the most popular devices to view YouTube on, there is a very good chance anyone looking at your channel will only be seeing that minimum safe zone.

YouTube Channel Art Size 1

What Should I Put in my Channel Art’s Safe Zone?

Now you know which part of your channel art can be relied on to always show, what should you put in there? The answer to that is one that deserves a post of its own, as there are many ways to play the channel art game. You could have a humorous slogan, a matter of fact statement about what the channel does, an upload schedule, or really anything.

One solid piece of advice for what you should be showing in the safe zone of your channel art is information that accurately conveys what your channel is about. At the top of the post, we mentioned a formal, business-orientated channel having unprofessional channel art not being a great idea, and that about sums up this advice. Try to accurately represent your channel at every level, not just in any words that are said in the channel art, but in the tone of the image.

It’s not uncommon to see social media information in YouTube channel art, but don’t assume it’s right for your channel art automatically. Remember, there are no links in your channel art. If you are going to include your Twitter or Instagram, you will have to write out username on that platform in the channel art. If it is a long and complicated handle, it may not be the best fit. You can always link to them in the header links that YouTube lets you place on your channel page.

How to Set YouTube Channel Art?

Setting the art for your channel is extremely easy. Firstly, make sure you are logged in to YouTube and head over to your channel. You should see a “customize channel” button in the top right-hand side, just under the channel art. If you are on a phone or tablet, you are looking for a little cogwheel icon instead, but the location should be roughly the same.

Once you have clicked that you should be presented with a screen that looks like your channel with the exception that hovering over different elements of your channel page reveals a little pencil edit icon. Clicking on one of those icons will allow you to edit the element in question, so head on up to the channel art and click on the edit icon in the top right-hand corner of it.

From here, you can choose to upload a new image, select one your previous headers in “Your photos”, or choose something from the gallery that YouTube offers. Once you’ve chosen an image—assuming it is not too small in dimensions or too large in file size—you can then crop it to suit, click done, and that’s all there is to it.

How do I Change my Channel’s Icon?

Since your channel is tied to a Google account, you have to go there to change your channel icon. It can help to understand why this process is the way it is if you think of the channel icon as more like a user profile picture.

Fortunately, getting to the right place to change this icon is not that difficult. If you are logged in, you should be able to go to your channel hover over the channel icon, which will reveal a little camera icon. Clicking that will take you where you need to go, allowing you to upload a new image. If it doesn’t show up straight away, don’t worry. Sometimes it can take a little time to update on other services, and YouTube technically counts as a different service to Google.

Branding

It can be easy to overlook branding on YouTube, particularly if you are not the kind of YouTuber that thinks in terms of marketing.

It is worth wrapping your mind around the concept of branding; however, as it can make a significant impact on your channel.

If possible, try to incorporate a consistent theme to your online presence. It may be a logo or icon, but a colour scheme works surprisingly well, too.

The goal is to have viewers associate your branding with good content so that, when they see it in other places, they recognise it almost immediately as something they will like. It is much easier to pick up on a particular combination of colours that you are familiar with than it is to remember the name or recognise the face of someone you are not familiar with.

Once your branding is established in the mind of a viewer, it will draw their attention in thumbnails, and any other places your branding appears. And, as many of you will know, getting a viewers attention is a significant part of the battle. Once you have them looking at your thumbnail and title, you are well on your way to getting a view.

And, of course, your channel art is one of the primary places to show that branding. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the centrepiece of your channel art—though it certainly can be if you prefer—but it should be incorporated. From there, you can go on to include it in other places, but the main area you should try and tie in is your thumbnail because that is the spot where your branding will be recognised the most, and where you will be able to attract the attention of those who are familiar with you.

It’s worth noting that branding sentiment can work against you if your content is good. Viewers will associate your branding with the experience they had watching your content. And, if the experience was bad, that is the emotion that your branding will conjure up. As always, good content is fundamental to success on YouTube.

Other Uses for Channel Art

Your YouTube channel art doesn’t have to be a one-trick pony. In fact, as mentioned in the branding talk above, it would actually be better if it wasn’t just used on your channel page. Using your channel art in other places helps with that branding, but it also allows you to focus extra time or money on making one good piece of channel art without worrying about having to do the same for other places.

Some of those other places include the header image on social media sites, artwork for things like stickers, and even overlays for streams. Of course, a purpose-made YouTube channel art image won’t necessarily drop into all of these roles without any effort. In the case of social media headers, you should be able to get away with just cropping the image to suit, but there may be a bit more work involved with something like a stream overlay.

Conclusions

The ideal YouTube channel art size can be seen as something of a misnomer, given that YouTube has a minimum size and will not allow you to upload channel art that is smaller than that. Still, the difference between the minimum size and the recommended size is enough that you could see significant degradation of your channel art if it is stretched to fit wider screens. For that reason, we would always recommend uploading your channel art at the recommended 2560×1440 resolution.

You can, of course, create a larger channel art image; however, the cropping process that your image goes through after upload will produce an image of the size YouTube wants regardless of what size it was going in, so you none of that extra resolution will make it to your channel page. That being said, it can’t hurt to have a higher resolution version of your channel art available. It could come in handy for things like printing on merchandise. And, of course, with screen resolutions continually increasing, the day will come when YouTube decide to increase their recommended channel art sizes.

Now, if you’re ready to get making your channel art, there are plenty of tools to help you make excellent channel art, not to mention services to make your life easier, and resources to help you learn.

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

Does YouTube Have an Affiliate Program?

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.

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

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.

Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly?

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.

YouTube Tips for Teachers 4

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.

10 Best Tools to Grow Your YouTube Channel 3

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.

Do YouTubers Pay Tax? 1

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.

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YouTube Tips for Teachers

YouTube Tips for Teachers 2

YouTube has proved to be an invaluable resource for people who are looking to learn new skills, as well as people who want to impart their wisdom to the world.

This typically takes the form of life hacks and DIY videos, but YouTube is just as useful for educational purposes as it is for people who just want to know how to bake a cake and don’t want to take cooking classes or spend a fortune on recipe books.

Whether it’s through using YouTube videos as part of a lesson plan or making YouTube videos to help your students, YouTube can be an invaluable resource for teachers; you just need to know how to use it.

So, in an effort to do our bit for education, here’s our top YouTube tips for teachers!

There are two main ways in which a teacher can use YouTube to assist in their teaching, as we briefly mentioned above.

They are using existing videos to show your students or creating videos to show your students, and some of our tips are specific to one method or the other. To that end, we’ve broken the next section of this post into two parts;

YouTube Tips for Teachers

Tips for Teachers Using YouTube in the Classroom

One of the good things about a platform as large as YouTube is there is already an enormous amount of content out there in just about any topic you can think of, which has obvious advantages if you are looking for learning aids to help your students.

Let’s get into some YouTube tips for teachers looking to use the platform’s existing content in the classroom.

At the end of this section, we’ll list off some of our favourite educational channels that you might be able to make use of in your classroom.

Vet Your Choices

We’re sure that, as you are a qualified teacher, this doesn’t need saying. But in the interests of covering all of our bases, we’re going to say it anyway.

Always vet videos that you intend to use in class.

Though it doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, many of the content you will find on YouTube is made by people who do not necessarily have any formal qualifications in the thing they are creating videos on.

Again, it doesn’t automatically make them wrong or unsuitable, but you should give any video you plan to use in a class some thorough scrutiny before adding it to your lesson plans.

This is especially true for younger children, as you will also be vetting the video for inappropriate language and themes. Seeing as you will be showing the video in class, the video doesn’t necessarily have to be perfect.

You can always interject to correct or clarify on particular points, but if the video is quite a way off the mark, outdated, or just inappropriate for a classroom, you don’t want to be the teacher that accidentally plays because they weren’t paying attention.

YouTube Tips for Teachers 1

Look for Entertainment

Finding a video that teaches the right methods is only part of the battle. If you are going to go to the trouble of pulling up YouTube content in class, it should be entertaining for your students.

After all, you could stand at the front of the class and recite text directly from a book if the only goal was to convey information.

The goal is undoubtedly to engage the students so that they take an interest in the topic, and have a much better chance of retaining the information. Look for educational channels with large subscriber counts, as that is usually an indication that they are entertaining.

You can then check out their videos to ensure they suitable from a content standpoint.

YouTube Tips for Teachers 3

Go Bitesize

Some very informative and detailed educational videos on YouTube can run into hours in length. As a general rule, we would advise not using these videos.

It is not that they are not good, it is just that your students can watch hours of YouTube at home, they shouldn’t be doing it at school as well.

If you stick to videos that are 3-10 minutes long or use longer videos but break them into smaller chunks, you can incorporate them into your lesson, rather than have them be your lesson.

This also gives you more opportunity to make your mark as a teacher. Many people can recall at least one teacher that made a significant positive impact on them as a child.

You don’t want your chance to be that teacher for someone taken away by YouTube.

Pay Attention to Feedback

You will no doubt want to check that your students have understood what they watched, and helping them wrap their brains around anything they were unsure about is a natural part of teaching.

Beyond that, you should be on the lookout for signs that a particular YouTuber is not meshing well with your class.

If a few students struggle with a particular concept, it is probably just those students and that concept.

If, on the other hand, a lot of students regularly struggle to understand things in a certain YouTuber’s video, it may be that the YouTuber’s method just doesn’t work for your students.

Educational YouTubers: Our Picks

As promised, we’ve put together a list of educational YouTubers in a variety of topics that you might find useful for your classroom. We don’t expect you to agree with every suggestion we make, of course, but if you don’t like a particular YouTuber we suggest, be sure to pay attention to the recommended videos sidebar.

There should at least be some recommendations of a similar nature by other YouTubers for you to try.

  • Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell – Ideal for younger students, Kurzgesagt covers a variety of topics within science in videos that rarely run longer than 10 minutes, and are beautifully animated with a distinctive art style.
  • Veritasium – Run by Derek Muller—a man with a PhD in physics and a healthy curiosity about, well, everything—Vertitasium covers a huge range of topics across many areas, from videos on where the Sun gets its energy, to videos on the most radioactive places on Earth. There is even a helpful playlist for people who are new to the channel.
  • Tibees – Toby has an undergraduate degree in physics and maths and makes videos on physics, maths, and astronomy. Her content often has a quirky spin on it, such as explaining complicated mathematical premises in the style of the famous painter, Bob Ross. She has also been known to make videos breaking down past exam papers.
  • English With Lucy – The name of the channel tells you all you need to know. Lucy is a teacher herself and makes videos on a range of things to do with the English language, such as comparing British, American, and Australian English, or how to use certain words correctly.

YouTube Tips for Teachers 4

Tips for Teachers Making a YouTube Channel

One of the beautiful things about YouTube is that it is open to almost anyone, and there is nothing to stop you making your own content if you can’t find what you need on the platform already.

Or if you just feel like you could do it better than what is already available.

If this notion appeals to you, keep reading for some more YouTube tips for teachers who want to make videos.

Public or Private?

Before you start making videos for your students, you should take a moment to decide exactly who these videos are for.

If you are specifically making videos for your class, and you don’t necessarily want people outside of your class seeing them, you should upload them as unlisted, and share the link to the video with your students. Of course, there would be nothing to stop your students sharing the link, but that is, unfortunately, one of the limitations of YouTube.

Another reason to make this decision before you start filming is that it could make quite a difference in how you put your videos together.

If you are making videos for just your students, that is a relatively small audience and one that you can get immediate feedback from.

If, on the other hand, you are making your videos for wider public consumption, you will need to put serious thought into how your videos are put together. It is not enough to merely be accessible to everyone in the world; there has to be a reason to choose your video over one of the alternatives. Try to make your videos entertaining and, above all, clearly explain the subject matter.

Avoid “Cringe”

A trap many people fall into on YouTube is doing things they are not comfortable with for the views. This can happen in many ways, but as a teacher, you should avoid letting this happen to you.

Children today are constantly connected to the Internet and, as a result, each other.

There are many benefits to this, but it also means they are very aware of things and, to be frank, quite blunt about what they see.

If you make a YouTube video where you are trying to be “hip” and “cool” while teaching maths, your students are as likely to make your life miserable over it as they are to learn from it.

Be Careful About Involving Your Students

Involving your students can be a great way to get your class engaged in the process and help them absorb the subject matter more readily.

However, parents can be very twitchy about their children being filmed and posted on the Internet, even if the video is unlisted.

We’re not saying don’t do it, but you should certainly seek the permission of your student’s parents or legal guardians before putting them in a video.

Have Local Backups on Hand

Making videos isn’t easy, and if you go to the trouble of making a YouTube video for your students, you’re going to want to use it. Many schools don’t allow YouTube through their firewall, and even in today’s connected world, Internet dropouts can happen.

If you plan to play your videos in class, have them with you on a local device, such as a memory stick so that you can play them regardless of what the situation with the Internet and YouTube is at your school.

Film Entire Lessons

If you are a particularly entertaining teacher, it might be worth filming your lessons in their entirety.

This would also serve as an excellent way to help students to catch up when they have missed school for whatever reason. Rather than giving them notes, you can send them the entire lesson as it happened.

Granted, you would have to be a very entertaining teacher—or teaching an incredibly interesting topic—for this kind of video to have a broader appeal beyond your immediate students. Also, given the number of school days in a year and the number of lessons in a day, it would very quickly run into a lot of videos, so you might have to consider only keeping the latest lessons.

However, this kind of video would also be the easiest to make, as there would be no need for editing. You could simply press record at the start, stop at the end, and upload the result.

Try to Make Your Content Evergreen

If you are not just recording your lessons in full, as suggested above, we strongly recommend making your videos evergreen.

Evergreen content is content that holds relevance long after it has been uploaded. For example, a video on a clever method to work out the multiples of nine would be evergreen, as it would be as relevant in ten years as it is today.

However, a similar video but using fleeting cultural references to help get the point across could well be outdated in a year. Or less given the half-life of some celebrities these days!

By making your content evergreen, it becomes a valuable resource for you to use to help your students for years to come, not just the students you have when you make it. And, if you choose to make your videos publicly available, the same logic applies.

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Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly?

Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly? 2

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.

Do YouTubers Still Get Paid for Old Videos? 1

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.

Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly?

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.

Do YouTubers Get Paid Monthly? 1

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!

Do YouTubers Pay Tax? 3

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.

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

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

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.

Do YouTubers Pay Tax? 3

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?

Do YouTubers Pay Tax? 2

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.

Do You Need A YouTube Intro and Outro? 2

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.

Can YouTubers Control Which Ads Are Shown? 6

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.

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DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?]

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?] 2

YouTube shorts is the first new and large feature to be added to the YouTube app and platform for years.

This could be the start of a land grab for attention that we all need to pay attention to as Youtube positions itself to take on the vertical video format platforms like TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram Reels.

Quickly, what are YouTube Shorts? – YouTube Shorts are vertical format videos like TikTok. 0-60 seconds in length, uploaded using the YouTube Shorts App or uploaded as a normal video and tagged with #shorts in the title or description. These can be displayed on the stories shelf under suggested videos on mobile devices.

YouTube has even started a YouTube Shorts Creator fund to monetized YouTube shorts (something I deep dive into here).

This could be the next big land grab in the YouTube platforms history so in this article I am going to step you through all I know about the new feature.

What Are YouTube Shorts?

TikTok has rocked the digital world by grabbing the attention of the younger generation who want to share their videos and express themselves – and where the youth goes, so does the potential future of digital media.

We have seen this play out time and time again when a platform ages up too much that something new and “cool” comes along for the younger generation to play with.

MySpace was killed by the new Facebook.

Facebook got too widely used with even your grandma having a profile so people started to take selfies on Instagram and Snapchat.

Instagram got swamped with professionals and people worried that it was “too late to start a  YouTube Channel?” and so TikTok was the new home of the younger up coming demographic of content creators.

YouTube saw this trend and understood that if they want to stay on top of the video creation wave, they will need to win over the next generation of video makers back from TikTok – enter YouTube Shorts!

How To Make YouTube Shorts

Initially the YouTube Shorts tool is a closed beta in India to capitalize on India’s ban on TikTok leaving a very large gap in the market for YouTube to convert into new users.

How do I make a YouTube short? – You can make a YouTube short in the YouTube Mobile App by clicking the + icon at the bottom of the screen and choosing “create a short”. If you can’t see this feature you can upload vertical video under 60 seconds in length and tag it with #shorts in the title or description.

When using the feature via mobile tool (as of Oct 2020) it has very limited tools to assist with content creation but you can speed up your footage and set a timer for hands free recording.

While uploading the video as a normal video might give you a little more flexibility to record a vertical video and then edit it just like a normal video with overlays, music, transitions etc

  • Create: Creation is at the core of short-form video, and we want to make it easy and fun to create Shorts. We’re starting to test just a few new tools for creators and artists with our early beta in India:
    • A multi-segment camera to string multiple video clips together,
    • The option to record with music from a large library of songs that will continue to grow,
    • Speed controls that give you the flexibility to be creative in your performance,
    • And a timer and countdown to easily record, hands-free.

Why make YouTube Shorts?

You have been on the YouTube platform for years and you have always been told to stick to horizontal rather than “ugly looking vertical£ videos – why start making vertical videos now?

YouTube wants to win the new young creator demographic away from TikTok and to do that they are pushing the feature very hard to viewers.

Your videos could show up under the first suggested video on the mobile app giving you a large boost of views. Adopt it early and you could see great results before EVERYONE uses it! Make eye catching relevant videos and you could get featured against established large youtube channels.

Imagine if you could be one of the first people on YouTube all those years ago. Or one of the first people to grow an audience on Twitter and Instagram… this is your chance at a fresh new medium, but this time its supercharged by YouTube!

Even YouTube is exited about the tool

Get discovered: Every month, 2 billion viewers come to YouTube to laugh, learn and connect. Creators have built entire businesses on YouTube, and we want to enable the next generation of mobile creators to also grow a community on YouTube with Shorts.

I have been testing YouTube shorts and seen huge jumps in views even when the channel has only 65 subscribers!

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?]

Where Can I See YouTube Shorts?

YouTube shorts are currently curated by YouTube and displayed under videos on the mobile app.

It has its own shelf that you can swap through and the youtube shorts normally match the topic of the main video above – for example if you are watching a tech tips video you might see tech related short stories.

YouTube Shorts Explained [What, Where, How, When & Why?] 1

What is YouTube Shorts sizes? ratio?

The standard aspect ratio for YouTube Shorts 9:16. YouTube may add more padding for optimal viewing. The padding is white by default, and dark gray when Dark theme is turned on.

Recommended resolution & aspect ratios for YouTube Shorts.

For 9:16 youtube shorts aspect ratio, encode at these resolutions:

2160p: 2160×3840
1440p: 1440×2560
1080p: 1080×1920
720p: 720×1280
480p: 480×854
360p: 360×640
240p: 240×426

Can I monetize YouTube Shorts? YouTube Shorts Monetization

As with all video platforms people want to know if they can monetize it – because what’s the point of a large audience if you can’t make some pocket money from it.

Can you monetize YouTube Shorts? – YouTube has start to monetize YouTube Shorts with the YouTube Shorts Creator Fund. This is decided by YouTube selection the best shorts created per month. This fund will expand overtime to more creators, content and countries.

YouTube Shorts FAQs

Does YouTube Shorts watch time count towards monetization?

I the YouTube Short is viewed as a short from a YouTube Shorts shelf under a view then the watch time does not count towards monetization totals. However, if the short is watched on the YouTube channel as a native standard video then it does count towards channel totals.

Do I Have To Pay To Make YouTube Shorts?

No, YouTube Shorts are free to anyone. You can make them using the mobile app by clicking the “+” icon at the bottom of the screen and clicking “Make A Short”. Alternatively, you and upload the vertical video that is under 60 seconds as a standard video and tag it with #shorts in the title or description.

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. 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.

Categories
SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE YOUTUBE TUTORIALS

How To Bold YouTube Comments (Plus Strikethrough and Italics)

Auto Draft 17

Sometimes plain old boring text just doesn’t cut it when you want to leave a comment on YouTube. Maybe you want to get noticed by your favourite influencer, or perhaps you want a comment to be understood by readers on a deeper level.

Whatever the reason, YouTube permits some text formatting when you leave a comment under a video. There are three effects to choose from to dress up your text; bold, italic and strikethrough.

Unlike word processors and email clients, there are no text formatting icons available with YouTube to change the style; instead, you have to type in other special characters either side of the text you want to style.

So let’s jump in and take a look at how you can format your text in a YouTube comment.

How To Add Bold Text To a YouTube Comment

Bolding words is a centuries-old technique of dressing up the visual appearance of text. Bolding strengthens the emphasis of a particular word or phrase, and you might do this because you want to highlight the importance of a point.

For example, ‘I can’t believe she did that’ sounds different in your head when you read it as ‘I can’t believe she did that’.

In the olden days, scribes used a quill and ink to hand-thicken writing to emphasise a word. Later on, printers used a different font style to emphasise words. Then, in 1845, an enhanced ‘Clarendon’ font typeface was designed, that contained an extra set of type in the same style, but bolder.

To change your text style, so it displays in bold in a YouTube comment, you need to add an asterisk (*) either side of the word or phrase. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t add in and additional spaces.

Meaning each asterisk (or star) should be next to the first and last letter of the text you want to display as bold. If you are struggling to find the asterisk (*) it’s located on most English layout keyboards as the alternative character to the number 8.

Hold down the shift key and press 8 to test it yourself.

Here is an example of bolding text. Copy and paste the following string of text into a YouTube comment yourself and hit the ‘Comment’ button to see how it looks.

Don’t mind me, I’m just figuring out how to make text *bold* !

After you’ve posted your comment, the text with the asterisks on either side is displayed in bold. The asterisks have disappeared from the posted comment, and your’s now stands out from all the drab standard text above and below it!

Note: If you want to add punctuation after a comment you have boldened, you need to add in a space after the closing asterisk. If you don’t put the space in, it will ‘break’ the instruction, and your comment will display the asterisks.

How To Italicise Text in a YouTube Comment.

Italics is a font style where the writing slopes from left to right. They were first designed in the 1500s, and Wikipedia says that using italics is ‘the print equivalent of underlining‘. Some grammatical conventions say that you should use italics when writing spoken words too, like;

Jenny bounded up the stairs and said, here I am!

Other conventions say that you should use italics when you identify something like a book or a film. One example that works for both is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Whatever you choose to italicise, it’s another form of emphasis you can add to your writing. There are no hard and fast rules, though, so use it however you’d like.

To make the text display in italics, you need to follow the same process as for making text bold, but this time instead of the asterisk you should use the underscore sign (_) directly either side of the text you want to change.

The underscore is a bit of a funny character. It’s found on the same key as the minus sign, or hyphen, and is a character that a lot of people often confuse.

To get the underscore sign press the dash/minus character button while holding down the shift key. The underscore is most often found to the right of the 0 (zero) in the horizontal row of number keys.

Here is an example of italicising the text. Copy and paste the following text string exactly as it is into a YouTube comment section.

Now I’m typing in _italics_ , there really is no stopping me!

Once again, after you have clicked on the comment button, stand back and admire your newfound power. But don’t let it go to your head just yet – there is more to learn.

How To Add a Strikethrough Effect To Your YouTube Comments.

Sometimes instead of deleting something you have written, you might want to strike it out instead, to show the reader that you have changed your mind but let them still read what you previously thought.

Interestingly, the writers of the Domesday Book did strikethrough some entries with red ink. But in this situation, they were doing a medieval version of underlining rather than striking through a written word so they could use another. Conventions change over time.

Today, strikethrough is generally used in two ways. Firstly, in the usual manner, for example, The meeting will be held at Newcastle-Under-Lyme Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Many people, though, use it for humour. Like, ‘today I have been watching Netflix in my onesie working my butt off on an essay’.

To make text display with the strikethrough effect in a YouTube comment, again you need to place a special character either side of the word you want to format. The character used for strikethrough is the minus or hyphen sign (-).

Here is an example of strikethrough text. Copy and paste the following text string exactly as it is into the YouTube comment section.

Gaze upon my glory as I perform the magic of -strikethrough- !

Click the comment button to update your entry and take a look at that lovely effect.

Advanced Usage

OK, I hope you’re sitting down for this part because it’s likely to blow your mind. You can combine all three effects into the same sentence!

I know this information may be more than some readers can handle. But let’s plough on regardless.

Here’s an example:

First they told me I couldn’t *bold* , then they said _italics_ was beyond my capabilities, and they laughed and pointed saying ‘you’ll never know -strikethrough- ’. Well *whose* _laughing_ -now- !

Use Your Powers Wisely

In all seriousness, don’t overuse text formatting in your YouTube comments. Sometimes when you learn how to do something new, you can go a little overboard and get carried away.

Additionally, formatting the whole of a long comment in bold or italic means that you will stand out, but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of drawing in attention to your comment, people will assume you are a little crazy, and ignore your comment instead.

Bold, italics, and strikethrough are there to emphasise a few words and communicate what you are saying more effectively.

Bonus: How To Add Emojis To a YouTube Comment on the Desktop Version of YouTube.

Of course, it’s easy to add emojis to your YouTube comments when using your smartphone. Smartphone keyboards aren’t physical like desktop keyboards, so it’s easy to add in extra functions and characters.

But if you’ve ever wondered how to add emojis to your youtube comments using a physical keyboard with a laptop or desktop PC? Let me tell you the secret; there are three ways.

On Apple Mac, you can bring up an emoji menu using the keyboard shortcut control+command+spacebar. This gives you access to the same group of emojis you find on your iPhone, and you can click on the popup to add in an emoji wherever the cursor is flashing.

If you use Windows 10, then there is a similar emoji menu pop-up with a keyboard shortcut. Press the Windows key plus the full-stop or semi-colon key to bring up the emoji selector.

If you don’t like either of these options, or you are on an older version of Windows, then you can copy and paste emojis directly into YouTube comments.

Go to a website like Get Emoji. This site has a list of all the standard emojis, which you can copy and paste into YouTube comments and a whole host of other social media applications.

Simply highlight the emoji you want and copy it. Then, navigate back to your YouTube comment to paste the emoji in. Voila!

So there you have it. I hope you liked this little guide to enhancing text comments for YouTube. Head over to my YouTube account now, and leave me a comment using bold, italic, or strikethrough.

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. 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.

Categories
DEEP DIVE ARTICLE HOW TO GET MORE VIEWS ON YOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS & TRICKS YOUTUBE

Best Time to Upload Videos To YouTube for MORE VIEWS

YouTube Best Time to Upload 6

YouTube has been around long enough now and made enough people quite wealthy that succeeding on the platform has become something of a science.

People analyse the way the algorithm behaves to try and glean what it considers to be recommendable content. They test different thumbnails styles for better click-through-rates and experiment with alternative titles.

They even consider the placement of their “don’t forget to subscribe” pop-up down to the second. And, yes, they put a great deal of thought into when the best time to upload a video is.

The truth is, all of these things can have a surprisingly large impact on the success of any given video.

In this post, we’re taking a look at those upload times specifically. We’re going to take a deep dive into what factors are at play when you upload in the morning versus when you upload in the evening, and whether the middle of the week is better than a weekend.

Unfortunately, there is no single YouTube best time to upload that we can throw out there as a one-size-fits-all solution. But when people ask “When is the best time to upload videos to YouTube?” I tell them – An upload schedule is unique to each channel. Look at your audience location and age range then match your uploads to their live patterns. For example school kids before and after school, adults more evenings and weekends. Overtime your audience will show you what they like and when.

However, this a complex topic with a lot of moving parts, so make yourself comfortable, and let’s dive in!

YouTube Best Time to Upload 1

Why Are Upload Times Significant?

The first part of this question is simple enough—YouTube places a lot of stock in popularity. If a video is getting lots of views, YouTube is more likely to see it as something worth pushing out to recommendation feeds.

The fleeting nature of viral videos and trends leads to a “strike while the iron is hot” mentality in which YouTube will want to capitalise on the popularity of a video while it is hot so as to avoid missing the window since they don’t know if the interest will still be there in a few days.

So, it pays to get a lot of attention to your video in a short space of time, even if you are making evergreen content that will still be relevant months or years down the line. And the easiest time to get a lot of viewers at once is when you first upload.

YouTube users are typically very liberal with their subscribing finger. For most of the people reading this post, the chances are that if you look in your subscriber list, there are far more subscribers than you actively keep up with.

There’s nothing wrong with this behaviour—most of us do it—but it does mean that notifying you about new videos can be problematic. If you have a hundred channels you are subscribed to (not uncommon) and at least fifty of them upload on a weekly basis, there’s a good chance that some of those videos are going to clash.

The next problem is that we are not looking at our YouTube notifications all day every day, so we don’t always see notifications in real-time.

The problem here is that YouTube does not like bombarding users with notifications. It isn’t very pleasant, and a surefire way to push people to turn their notifications off entirely, and YouTube certainly doesn’t want that.

So, if you open up your YouTube app and there have been eight new videos from channels you are subscribed since the last time you looked, YouTube won’t always show you notifications for all of those videos. Indeed, they might only show you one!

Even getting your subscribers to “ring that bell” is not a guaranteed way of ensuring they are notified since your video could hit the same bottleneck if a subscriber has multiple videos vying for notification attention at the same time.

YouTube Best Time to Upload

TV is not a Good Model

In the early days of YouTube, as the platform started to settle into more than just short videos of people visiting the zoo, many YouTubers took a cue from broadcast television when deciding their upload schedule.

TV show schedules have been carefully honed over years of experience, and typically involve saving your best content for the evening. This is when the most people are going to be sat watching their TV.

For the younger members of our audience, it might be worth pointing out that this kind of system was worked out long before video-on-demand services like Netflix, and even before DVR capabilities. There was a time, not too distant, where shows were broadcast live and if you wanted to watch a show, you had to be in front of your TV during that live broadcast, or hope for a rerun in the future.

That may have worked for those early YouTubers, but the paradigm has well and truly shifted since the late 00s. People have come to know YouTube as a new medium that isn’t beholden to the restrictions of TV, rather than a mere extension of it.

And, with YouTube views increasingly coming from mobile devices, the watching habits of users is further skewing away from those traditional TV schedules.

Timing for Noobs

Before we get into any specific talk about when you should post your videos, it’s worth pointing out that none of this really applies to new channels.

If you are just starting out, you almost certainly don’t have an audience you are trying to please, so there is no sense in trying to work out when the best upload times for that audience are.

In the beginning, you should focus on establishing a routine that works for you. Until you have built up an audience, the important thing is consistency, rather maximising your potential.

Pick a time that works for you and try to stick to it so that the viewers you attract can get used to your schedule. As you grow as a channel, you can begin experiment more with the things we are going to go into below.

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Knowing Your Audience: Timezone Edition

Before you can determine when the best time to upload for your channel is, you need to establish the timezones of your core audience. Unfortunately, this will be trickier for some channels than it will be for others.

On the plus side of things, this part being trickier is usually a sign that you are doing well as a YouTuber.

If your channel has a very clear audience geographically speaking, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

For example, if your audience is almost entirely UK-based, you can just mark it down as GMT (or BST depending on the time of the year) and move on to working out what the best time of day to upload is.

Unfortunately, if your audience is a little more widespread, things won’t be so simple. For example, English-speaking content that is not geared towards a specific region (people in America probably don’t care about local news in the UK, for example) could theoretically appeal to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—countries that cover a whole gamut of timezones.

Depending on the exact part of each country we are talking, it could be the middle of the night in the US and Canada, early morning in the UK, late afternoon in Australia, and early evening in New Zealand. All at the same time.

Needless to say, working out the best time to upload in this situation is a little more complicated.

The best bet here is to try and determine if you have a primary market. For most YouTubers, it will likely be the region they live in, but if you have one region that consumes your content noticeably more than other areas, it might be worth focussing on that.

And, if you don’t have that one region you can zero in on, you can just pick the one you prefer, or go back to uploading at a time that suits you first and foremost. As we will explore shortly, the exact upload time isn’t the be-all and end-all of YouTube success.

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Knowing Your Audience: Age and Habits Edition

We talked a little above about how YouTube has well and truly moved away from those viewing schedules set out by broadcast television, but how does that help you establish your own upload schedule?

Before we get into this, we should clarify that none of these are hard rules—there are always exceptions. Also, we’re leaving out Generation Alpha, which consists of people born between the early 2010s and the mid-2020s.

Given that, at the time of writing, the oldest example of Gen Alpha will be around eight years old, there’s no sense talking about when the best upload times are for them, as there are a whole other set of rules to factor in when making content for children.

Zoomers

Firstly, let’s talk about the Zoomers, also known as Gen Z, which covers people born between the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s. These are children and young adults who have always had the Internet—and mostly had YouTube—their whole lives.

They will usually be in some form of education (unless you’re reading this in ten years) which will put a limit on their viewing time. If your primary audience falls into this bracket, you probably want to focus on early mornings and late afternoons.

This age range is not particularly suited for late-night, as younger Zoomers will likely be in bed, and older ones will be busy being teenagers and young adults.

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Millennials

This generation covers people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s and is notable from a YouTube perspective as being the generation that YouTube’s success was built on.

Gen Z may be surpassing them in terms of user numbers, but it was millennials like PewDiePie, Philip DeFranco, TomSka, Jenna Marbles, iJustine, and countless others of that age group that ushered YouTube into the age of success it currently enjoys.

Millennials are mostly out in the world now, meaning they tend to have jobs, and not many jobs allow you to sit and watch YouTube while you’re working.

But, while this generation may remember a time before smartphones and broadband, they have nonetheless grown up with it, and are very comfortable using the technologies that are built around these things. In other words, you may lose your millennial audience during the mornings and afternoons, but you could still catch them on their lunch breaks thanks to the ease with which YouTube can be watched on the phone these days.

Evenings can be a bit hit and miss, however.

The millennial age range is both young enough to still be out socialising on an average night, but also old enough to have slowed down a little, and nights in more than nights out.

Generation X

Generation X, also known as the MTV Generation, the Latchkey Generation, and the Lost Generation, is a generation of people born between 1965 and 1980.

This generation had mostly hit adulthood by the time the Internet started changing the world, and so tend to be less embracing of technology than their younger counterparts.

This generation doesn’t tend to be accessible from a YouTube perspective outside of their downtime, which means you’re far less likely to catch them before early evenings.

You may get some traction in the mornings, but you are unlikely to get a significant amount of Gen X watching YouTube on their phones at lunch breaks.

Baby Boomers, Silent Generation, and Greatest Generation

Though some Baby Boomers are still young enough to be in the regular workforce, we’re lumping these generations together because they are all more or less in the same situation, which is retirement.

For older YouTube viewers, the upload times are far more flexible, Generally speaking, you want to aim for before early evening, but other than that you should be good to go.

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Experiment

Where possible, try experimenting with different upload times. Bear in mind that the videos will need to have a similar level of expectation for the experimenting to be effective.

There is no sense comparing a video that you expect to do really well with a video you hope will at least be average.

Ultimately, the congestion caused by multiple video uploads and the unpredictable schedules of individual users will always make the ideal upload time something of a guessing game, so experimenting may be your only surefire way to know.