Making money on YouTube requires some creativity and persistence. In today's post, you will hear from one of the top personal finance YouTubers out there and the exact YouTube secrets you need to know to find success.
In less than two years on YouTube, I’ve grown my channel to a community of over 158,000 subscribers. A blogger of five years, YouTube has doubled my monthly income and opened up opportunities I never had with my own websites.
I’m not alone. There are more than 26 million channels on YouTube and more than 300 hours of video uploaded to the platform EVERY SINGLE MINUTE!
That’s a lot of competition and new YouTubers are always looking for the secrets to a successful channel, how to create the content that takes their videos viral.
But a lot of the ‘how-to’ channels only scratch the surface of how to start on YouTube. In fact, there are some unspoken secrets you won’t hear on any channel.
Table of Contents
3 YouTube Tips to Help You Grow Your Channel (From a Pro!)
These three tips will not only get you started but will help drive you when so many other YouTubers quit in frustrating.
They will help you get views and make more money!
You Can Make Money on YouTube…but Not from YouTube!
Watch any video on how much YouTubers make and all you’re likely to see is how much YouTube pays for ads. It’s disappointing because YouTube pays next to nothing for its ads.
In fact, I studied 23 channels and found the average YouTubers made less than a third of a penny per view on their videos.
It’s because most YouTubers don’t know how to run a real business. They get started just casually sharing their life or playing video games.
They start getting paid by YouTube for the ads shown on their videos and think, “Well, that’s all there is to it.”
Really making money on YouTube is about creating your own products, getting sponsorships and signing on to affiliate partnerships. Like these top affiliate programs and networks.
Pro tip from Financial Wolves: Use FlexOffers or MaxBounty to tap into a network of thousands of advertisers to promote instantly. You don't need a website to promote these brands and start making money. Make sure you have an audience in advance, though.
This will increase your likelihood of approval into these networks.
It’s about learning and leveraging all the ways to make money on the platform. Here are some other ways to make money online without a website.
See Related: How to Make Money Selling Photos of Yourself
Quality Doesn’t Matter
Go to any how-to YouTube channel and you’ll hear one thing above all others, this is the one piece of advice everyone offers…”Make quality videos and you will be successful.”
Gee, some advice. Who would have guessed that a quality product will make you successful?
The problem is that new YouTubers get started and they want their first videos to be perfect. They spend hours filming, hours more editing.
Most never feel like their video is good enough to publish and the never put it on the platform. They get frustrated and quit.
Others eventually publish their video and get all of a couple of dozen views. They spent 10+ hours on a video that gets fewer views than a rerun of the Lawrence Welk Show.
The secret is, even if you think your videos are perfect now, do it right and you’ll look back in a year and cringe at the quality. Good YouTubers are constantly learning and improving their video skills.
Don’t get me wrong, you want your videos to look nice but not if that level of quality keeps you from publishing or being happy with your channel.
More important is to get some videos done, get started and plan for that constant improvement.
- Plan out five video ideas and outline the basics of what you want to say in each
- Set up your video equipment to record
- Record straight through each video with no stopping for little mistakes
- Spend no more than an hour editing each video, just add a few graphics but don’t worry about editing out mistakes
- Publish the videos!
These videos aren’t going to be great but they’ll get you started. You’re less likely to see the low views that plague all new channels and get frustrated.
Focus instead on that constant improvement for each new video and get started!
See Related: How to Make Money on Medium
It’s OK to Steal from Other YouTube Channels
OK, I don’t mean steal other channel’s videos or just reproducing their videos word-for-word but getting ideas and catching trends from other channels is critical to finding viral video ideas.
Put together a list of the best YouTube channels in the same topic as yours. You can search for keywords or phrases in your topic and make a note of the channels that pop up regularly in search.
These are not your competitors, they’re your peers!
One of the most frustrating things for YouTube creators is spending hours on a video only to find that people aren’t really interested in the idea.
The secret is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can look to other channels on YouTube to find video ideas you KNOW are going to be popular!
Here’s how it works:
- Make a list of 5-10 channels similar to yours
- Go to each channel, to the videos page and sort their videos by ‘Most Popular’
- Make a list of the top 10 videos on each channel in a spreadsheet, each channel’s list right next to each other
These are video ideas and topics you know are popular with viewers. In fact, make this list of videos on related channels and I guarantee you will see at least a few video ideas that are popular on more than one channel.
These are your biggest opportunities, video ideas that are so popular they get lots of views for anyone in the niche.
Once you have these ideas, do a Google search on the topic to see all the questions people are asking. Check out a few posts and videos for every detail being discussed and then make your own super-video worthy of ranking.
Besides this ‘video hacking’ idea, you can also regularly check in on similar channels to look for trends in your niche.
It’s not that the pros are trying to keep these YouTube secrets from you. A lot of times, they may not even know the hack themselves.
Other times, it might just go so far against the conventional wisdom that nobody is brave enough to question the ‘rule’. You can be successful on YouTube and you can make a lot of money.
Don’t be afraid to question the rules and find the secrets that work!