How To Make Money On YouTube
How To Make Money On YouTube
Learn how to make money on YouTube! Currently, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world. It is estimated that people spend over 3 billion hours watching YouTube videos every month! That is a huge amount of hours every day that people spend glued to their computer screen watching videos. What if you could take a slice of these hours and make money from it? This article will show you how.
To help you get started as quickly as possible we will introduce you to two primary ways you can make money on YouTube.
The first one, which many people opt for, is using Google AdSense. If you have spent any amount of time on YouTube watching videos, you must have seen ads playing before or in the middle of a YouTube video. This is what we are referring to. The channel owners get paid for the ads to be displayed on their videos.
The second option to make money with YouTube is paid advertising. This simply means providing a “shout out” to a brand to promote its products or services among your viewers and subscribers. The method is like the old school banner ads that bloggers usually employ.
Now that you know the primary ways to make money with YouTube, let’s go through every step that will help you accomplish your revenue generation goal.
Steps to Making Money on YouTube
We’ll keep things simple and break them into five steps. Without further ado, here we go:
Step1: The Basics (aka Setting Up Your YouTube Channel)
The first thing you should do is set up a YouTube channel. Opening a channel is very simple! For the first step, all you need to do is log in at YouTube using your Gmail account. If you don’t have a Gmail account, sign up for free at http://www.mail.google.com
When you sign up for a YouTube account, you will have to name your channel. You can have different channels under the same Gmail account, but for now just pick one. Choose a name that will be easy to remember for your channel. This will help you build a strong brand that prospects can easily remember.
Make sure you fill in all the details about your channel. For instance, you want to say what your channel is about, provide links to your social media pages and websites, determine the audience of the site and so on. Filling your profile out completely will help viewers to discover your brand on other YouTube channels and this can be important for lead generation. So fill in as much as possible.
Step 2: Determine Your Niche
The next thing you should do is determining the audience you want to reach. This audience will guide you on the content to produce. Depending on your passions or what you would like to achieve, you can go for niche content or general content. Going for a specific niche is important especially if you are serious about making money on YouTube.
If you check the top earners of YouTube, most of them provide niche content. Finding a niche is important because it’s easier to sell to the audience if you specify in a niche and look like an authority on the subject. Moreover, if you have passion for a specific niche, you will enjoy creating videos around it. Even if you don’t have passion but are willing to learn about a niche, you can make good money from the content you produce on YouTube.
Step 3: Determine Your Content
Now that you have your niche determined, the next thing to think about is the type of content you will produce. YouTube allows users to upload videos or audio (although they must be converted to video format).
You can produce different types of content based on the interests of your audience. Examples of content you can produce include picture slides, video tutorials, songs, commentaries, animations, video compilations and so on. Your creativity is the limit with regards to the type of content to produce.
However, understanding the needs of your audience should give you a good idea on the type of content that will be best for them. For example, if you are producing computer tutorials, you may want to add supporting materials through a link embedded on your videos where viewers can get access to what you were working on.
Step Four: Optimize Your Video
People discover YouTube channels by using outside search engines (e.g. Google.com) and YouTube’s built-in search engine. You would be surprised how many people type search queries inside YouTube when looking for information.
There will be other people with similar content as to what you are uploading that will also appeal to the audience you are targeting, so your goal is to beat these competitors and have your videos seen by the viewers first. This means you have to optimize your videos to be ranked high for various search terms both within and outside of YouTube.
On-page video optimization is crucial to the position that your videos will appear for search queries. Use your target keywords in the Title and Meta description areas of your video, just like is the case with website on-page optimization. Do not over-optimize the Title. Simply having the target keyword and a compelling description is enough.
Step Five: Drive Traffic to Your Channel
Optimizing your videos’ Titles and Meta descriptions will only go so far with driving natural traffic to your channel. So you will need to also drive outside traffic Your videos. It is important to get new subscribers and as many views as possible for your videos to make money from Google AdSense or get sponsorships.
Driving traffic is the core of making money with YouTube. You can also funnel your YouTube viewers to another online platform and monetize them. For example, if you are providing tutorials, you can leave a link on your channel where viewers can access premium tutorials on your membership site.
Driving traffic to your YouTube channel is all about knowing where your target audience hangs out and what they need. If you solve this equation, you will be on your way to make money on YouTube. Natural search traffic can only give you a few cents for every ad view, therefore, to achieve significant earnings, you need to retain the viewers and turn them into subscribers.
One of the ways you can encourage viewers to turn into subscribers is to simply tell them to subscribe. Have a call to action in the middle and at the end of your videos encouraging viewers to subscribe to your channel.
Ready to Make Money on YouTube?
The above is a simplified guide to making money on YouTube. There is still a lot you will have to do behind the scenes to make your YouTube channel successful. For instance, there’s stuff to do with the quality of your content, how to get subscribers, frequency of posting content and so on.
For more tips and strategies on growing your YouTube channel and other online business money making methods, make sure to subscribe to our Operation Awesome Life VIP Newsletter.
– Matt & Karen Hale
