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.