[Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 17: How to make money on YouTube with a small channel - Sara Nguyen (2024)

Hello, and welcome to this episode. If you’re new to YouTube or if you have a small channel for a while now, qualifying for the YouTube Partner Program can take much longer than you anticipate. The great news is there are other ways to make money from your YouTube videos without needing to qualify for the YouTube Partner program. In this episode, I talk about my top 5 ways to make money on YouTube in this podcast episode. Stay tuned.

Episode 17: How to make money on YouTube with a small channel – Podcast Transcript

What are the best ways to make money on YouTube, particularly if you’re just starting out or you’re a beginner on YouTube? I’m going to talk about the top five ways that you can monetise YouTube, and this is covering the strategies that I think work best, particularly for beginners, where you’re not struggling with the YouTube Partner Program and meeting that eligibility and meeting that requirement.

Hey, Thrivers. I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of the Thriving Creator Academy, and I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving YouTube creator. Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to be a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with the people you love or downtime for yourself.

You’ll hear about the hard lessons I’ve gone through so you can avoid making the same slow and costly mistakes on your journey, as well as my super weapons to help you dig deep and do the work it takes. I’m honoured and grateful to have this opportunity to share this together with you right here on the Thriving Creator Podcast.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started. I’m so pumped to talk about today’s topic because it’s a question I get all the time. A lot of new creators when they start their journey on YouTube have a focus to get monetised and to qualify for the YouTube Partner Program, because with that concept in mind, they think that you can make money from YouTube from your videos and then it will solve all of your money problems.

But the problem that comes with the YouTube Partner Program is that there is an eligibility requirement where you need 4000 hours of watch time in twelve months, which is like almost a quarter of a million minutes of watch time, as well as a thousand subscribers.

And this just takes time for people to accumulate and it takes time, particularly if you’re brandnew to video, you’re brand new to creating content for you to kind of get the feel of what content will you create, what resonates with your audience and then for you to start generating enough videos that generate enough views that give you the watch time.

So in the Meanwhile, while you’re trying to get monetised and make a living from YouTube, what are the different ways that you can actually make it work for you? Because there are lots of different ways to monetise on YouTube, and I’m going to talk about them today, particularly if you’re new, right?

Particularly if you’re new to YouTube and particularly if you don’t have a large following. These are monetisation strategies that I think work best that I’ve seen creators of all sizes be able to implement themselves and to make a liveable income from YouTube.

There are lots of different ways to make money on YouTube. You’ve got the YouTube Partner Program or YouTube AdSense. You’ve got affiliate programs where you sign up for programs such as the Amazon associates program and you get a percentage or a commission based off the sales when people buy from your links, you’ve got sponsorships where brands pay you to create videos, but I think that these are kind of nice to haves.

In terms of making a real income in terms of creating income that you can rely on and you can live off, these are kind of nice to have income streams that are not as easy for you to control versus having income streams from programs, digital offerings and digital services that you create yourself.

Ideally, this is where I want you to focus. Five programs, services, income streams that I highly recommend my students, my clients set up one on one coaching, pre purchased services, online programs, done with you and mastermind.

Let’s go into these one by one. First one that we’ve got here is one on one coaching. And the concept behind one on one coaching is that you spend one on one time with a client. And this really works best when you have a curriculum that you take people through.

The mistake that I see people make with one on one coaching is that they think they can just rock up and talk to a client for an hour, give them some advice and call it a day. But in order for you to be successful with coaching and in order for your client to see results, ideally you want to have a curriculum that you take them through.

The aim is for you to help your client work through the pain points that they have so that they I can get a result so that they can see transformation. And you can sell coaching packages, set number of sessions for a set price.

And then you continue to evolve that. This is a really easy one to set up because in terms of the mechanics of it, you can do it really easily with Zoom calls, you can do it on Skype, you can do it on Google Hangouts. So the technical set up is not hard.

The effort is on your side where you are delivering the coaching and taking people through an actual program. So this is one of the really easy ways to get started and you can offer this and you don’t need to qualify. Unlike the YouTube Partner program, it’s easy to set up and you can give value really easily in exchange for some money.

The thing that you want to be cautious of when it comes to coaching is that you really want to set the boundaries up front in terms of okay, if a client has purchased a coaching package off you, what does that include and what doesn’t that include?

So that they are very clear on the boundaries and they’re not calling you at 01:00 a.m. in the morning because they’ve had a light bulb moment and they don’t expect you to answer or 01:00 in the morning. They know when the contact hours are, what’s within the remit, whether it’s emails, whether it’s calls, whatever it is, but you set that up front so that you don’t end up like resenting the client and resenting the packages.

The second offering that I highly recommend is pre purchased services. This is where you offer a service that people buy in advance and you deliver it to them afterwards. And I did a lot of this in my early days as well.

I did a lot of social media packages where I would do social media set up and website set up and people would buy the package in advance and then I would deliver it to them in agreed time frame. Right. This works really well if you’ve got a service that you can package, whether it’s a design package or whether is a consultancy packages.

Accountants work really well for this, legal services work really well for this. The problem with this is that in order for you to scale as you get more clients, you do need to add more resources. You do need to add more help in order for you to deliver.

But it’s one of those things where it’s like it’s a great problem to have, and you can address it when you kind of get there. It’s really important that you’re super clear on what your package includes so that you don’t get any scope creep.

Now, the third income stream or offering that I really love and one that I use as well is online programs. And this is a really time leverage offering that you can have. And it’s where you create a program online and people can watch it in their own time.

The beauty of an online program is that you don’t have to be there one on one with the student or the client. And it works really well where you can take people through a curriculum and deliver it on video and they can work through it in their own time because everyone has things that they need to commit to with their time.

And it’s much easier for them to be able to work around it on my program, that for you to have set hours where they have to attend. I love all my programs, I think they’re a great way, particularly if you are new to YouTube, for you to start generating some income, have that exchange where you deliver your expertise and then make some money.

It works really well. The problem that I see people come across with online programs is that when they first get started, they kind of throw everything in the kitchen sink into it. Right. They try to give so much value because they’re afraid that people won’t get value out of it.

Then they put so much into it. But I really think that the course needs to focus on having one outcome that the student gets through. And then you can add more courses for the next part of the journey where they can purchase the next part later as they progress through.

Online programs are definitely a great source for you to kind of think about if you’re on your YouTube journey. Once again, you don’t need to qualify for the YouTube Partner Program. You can create it and then you can have mechanisms to kind of get people through it and buying it.

Now, the next one is something that I like to call, Done with you. And this is where you take your online course where people can kind of work through it on their own, but you add some support to it. You add some coaching to it, som scheduled coaching to it.

And this allows the students in the program to get feedback, ask questions and for you to help them. And with done for you programs, they’re usually priced a little bit higher than online courses alone because you’ve got that extra time that you need to provide for the students where they can come to you.

For them, it’s about paying to access you at set kind of times. So done for you, is definitely one that I love and leverage as well. And I think that this is particularly good when you have programs that can be delivered or completed over slightly periods of time, whether it will take six months or twelve months, because people like that time to implement and they like the ability to get access to you, to review their work, to give them feedback on what they’ve done and to help them kind of tweak and refine.

Done with you is definitely one that I absolutely love as an offering, particularly if you’re new and particularly your packaging, your knowledge and selling it. Last one is a Group Mastermind. Group Mastermind is a concept where it’s less structured, whereas with an on my course and a coaching program, you have a curriculum that you want to take people through.

With a Group Mastermind, it’s more about meeting regularly with a group of people. Typically, I see Masterminds run for six months to twelve months and people join because they want to be part of your community and they join because they want that support from you and they want the accountability with like minded people.

With Group Masterminds, I think this is definitely a great offering to consider, but you really need to be selective about who you let in, so it can’t just be every man and its dog because the dynamic of that group reflects on you and you want to have an environment where you’ve got nice people, and you like working with them and the people like interacting with each other and they’re like helping each other in addition to just being there for you.

I think Group Mastermind is definitely a great way of creating products that really work for you and making money from YouTube. Here’s the reality. I talked about my top five programs and services that you can start and you can create as a YouTuber, particularly if you’re early in your YouTube journey.

And if you are really serious about making money on YouTube, you can’t rely on YouTube AdSense alone because it’s so fickle. It is really inconsistent. And I talk about this analogy a lot where it really is like having a psychotic boss where they’ll pay you one amount one month and then the next month it may drop or it may rise.

It may drop or it may rise, but you don’t really know what’s coming because it fluctuates so much and it’s really kind of unpredictable for the most part. So with that said, you know, if you haven’t kind of got your head around YouTube AdSense, the way that it works is that YouTube has this metric called cost per thousand, CPM, and it’s the amount that advertisers pay per thousand views.

And you get a cut of that amount when advertisers put ads on your YouTube videos, you can’t control that. You can’t control what they pay and the amount that they pay really varies. There are like some categories and some niches that just pay lower in general, like the beauty niche, the vloggers niceh, lifestyle niche, entertainment niche where they can be as low as $2 per thousand views.

That’s not a lot of money. And then you’ve got higher paying niches such as the finance niche, the tech niche, the business niche. And you’re like, oh, great, I’ll just go for that. But you don’t control that. You don’t have control over whether you will have a high CPM necessarily or a lower CPM.

You can have content in that category, but you don’t get to choose how much they pay you. You’re kind of at the mercy of how this whole system works. I’m constantly saying the YouTube AdSense and the YouTube Partner Program is a nice to have.

If you really want to make a liveable income off YouTube, you need to be looking at creating your own products and your own services and offering them adding value and creating income that way. I really want you to take home one thing, if anything, and that is that YouTube really works better when you use it as a tool versus when you rely on it completely.

When you leverage it as a tool and you go, okay, this is how I’m going to create content that gets me visibility that helps create that expert status so that people can feel validated that I know what I’m talking about in this category, and then I can start nurturing a relationship with them so they can buy from you that way.

And when you do this, this is a non sleazy way of doing it, as opposed to thinking of YouTube is a platform where I’m just going to pick money and pick clients and make money that way. The mistake I see a lot of creatives make is that they create a video, and at the end of the video, they’ll be like, all right, that was my top tips for how to plant a home garden.

Now, buy my course. And when I see that, I’m like, no, you don’t understand YouTube. Like, the relationship is not quite there. They’ve just met you, and you’re asking them to take out their wallet, swipe their credit card, and buy from you.

There needs to be touch points in between that in order for them to convert. When you do that, that’s kind of a little bit like, you know, asking someone to marry you on the first date or not even! Like, that’s asking someone to marry you when you just kind of literally just met them.

It’s too soon. It’s way to soon, no matter what you feel and no matter how adamant you are, you need to kind of step back, take a breath, and make sure that you nurture an actual relationship before you ask for them to give you something. So that’s just something to consider there.

The episode is over, but it doesn’t have to end. Head on over to thrivingcreatormasterclass.com. The link is also in the show notes. If you’re ready to go from confusion to clarity and to finally ditch that self doubt so you can build the profitable YouTube channel you know, deep down, you’re always meant to create, then join me inside my signature program, Thriving Creator Academy, where you’ll get the content, coaching, and community you need to successfully implement my proprietary system so you can start reaping rewards of running a thriving YouTube channel.

The Thriving Creator Academy is a coaching program for creators who are ready to transform their creative ideas into thriving YouTube channels. Sign up to the Masterclass now to learn more at thrivingcreatormasterclass.com.