But before you dive into your content creation with both feet, let’s rewind for a second and assess exactly what this will involve and what it means to be a YouTuber. How does one go about making money on YouTube? How much can you expect to make?
It’s important that you understand the business model here as that is of course going to affect the way that you approach your content creation and your general approach to making money online.
Advertising on YouTube
The main way in which you make money on YouTube then is via advertising. Google has its own advertising platform and it uses this to allow companies and brands to pay to show their adverts on your channel. This is a form of AdSense for those who know what that is, which means it’s PPC.
In plain English, this means that the advertising uses a ‘Pay Per Click’ system, although you can also get paid when you get a certain number of complete views.In other words, you aren’t getting paid a ‘flat fee’ for your advertising or getting paid per month. Rather, you are getting paid each time the advert is shown and each time someone clicks on it.
Of course not everyone who comes to your channel is going to watch the adverts all the way through or is going to click on them – but you can generally assume by pure statistics that you will get a certain amount (which is called your ‘CTR’ or ‘Click Through Rate’). This then means that for every thousand views on a video, you’re likely to get paid a certain amount of average.
Now this isn’t very much and to be honest you’re probably going to need hundreds of thousands of views daily in order to make a decent amount of money and certainly if you hope to make a full time living from YouTube. But it can be done and you can get there, if you’re willing to not only work hard but also work smart!
Other Ways to Monetize YouTube
Advertising is just one option however and there are actually many more ways you can monetize YouTube if you want to. One great example is just to promote a product of your own and to sell that. If you can create an ebook, a clothing line or anything else, then you can promote that using your channel and drive sales – and this will work very well if you can focus on that value proposition and promoting the lifestyle as we’ve discussed earlier.
Don’t have a product? No problem. You can likewise promote products that other creators have made and earn a commission on the sales. This is called affiliate marketing and it pairs particularly well with YouTube, seeing as you can be very persuasive when people actually get to see you talking about the product in person – you can even demonstrate it right on the screen!
And finally, you can try and get sponsorship deals. This works very well if you’re in a visual medium like fitness, where it’s common to get sponsorship from clothes manufacturers, supplement producers and even companies that make training equipment. You can then demonstrate the products that you’re promoting in your videos and that way get a lot of exposure for them.
Often these companies will pay per video, while in other cases they might pay a monthly fee – which is up to you to work out with them.Consider these factors and the type of monetization strategy you intend to use at the time of creating your channel idea. Different subjects will make it easier or harder to find sponsors and generally, a bit of pre-planning can go an awfully long way.
YouTube: The Forgotten Marketing Powerhouse
When you start learning about internet marketing, you’ll find that there are a lot of different subjects for you to tackle. These include the likes of SEO, of social media marketing, of writing press releases and more. You’ll have to learn about autoresponders and email marketing, about how affiliate marketing and about link building.
But something that often gets overlooked is video creation. This is strange, bearing in mind that video can have an incredibly profound impact on your brand’s visibility as well as your sales and is one of the most effective ways to stand out.
So why do people tend to ignore it? One possible answer is simply that it is too complicated and difficult for many people to understand – so they’d rather just overlook it!
Why Video is SO Important for Your Internet Marketing
But it’s this ‘difficulty’ that makes video production such a powerful marketing tool. Simply put, anyone can create a blog and anyone can create a sales page. When you build either of these things, you could still just be someone working from their Mum’s basement.
Video creation on the other hand requires expertise and expensive equipment. To make high quality videos, you will need a good camera, a great lighting set-up, a good microphone, editing software and know-how. All of this communicates that you are a serious business with serious money to invest and that professional sheen is what will inspire trust in your visitors.
What’s more, is that video allows you to talk directly to your audience and to use both your own voice and music to persuade them to make a purchase. Video is naturally more engaging and it makes people feel as though they know you, all of which is incredibly useful from a marketing perspective.
When creating video there are several ways you can use it as part of a marketing campaign. One is to add a video to your homepage or your sales page. Either of these things will help you to immediately grab attention and increase conversions. Another option is to create a YouTube channel. This makes it very easy to reach a big audience and can even be highly profitable on its own. A video getting 100,000 views a month can easily earn you in the region of $200!
How to Get Started amount of equipment. You need a camera with good autofocus and the ability to record in at least 1080p at 30fps (ideally better on both fronts). Even more important is good lighting, so invest in a soft box or another professional lighting solution.
Sound is also very important. A H1 pocket recorder paired with a lav mic will make a big difference at a low price point. You’ll then need to edit all this together in a piece of editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro.
It all sounds a lot but trust me, it is more than worth the investment in terms of what you’ll get back out of it!
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