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Most people want to make youtube their full-time job or income. They want to do YouTube full-time, so how do you make it happen when so many other people fail?
The reality is most people that try to make it on YouTube have no business experience they don’t know how to run a business. They go in from a job world and then they go into the YouTube world. YouTube on its own is like a business and if you treat it like a business you’ll be successful at it.
But most people don’t approach it that way. They actually approach it like a hobby and then the hobby turns into a successful business — which is okay. It’s a nice slow growth but as long as you’re consistent with it, it’ll allow you to percolate and transform it into a business.
How do you really make this happen? How do you become successful when so many other people fail?
How do I know this? I’ve got a bunch of YouTube channels.
- Backstageincome
- Tradersfly with 183,000 subscribers; and
- MyLittleNestEgg — just barely starting out, putting out a couple videos here and there
Is YouTube my full-time income? No. Not really. I look at youtube as a platform to distribute my content. A lot of the income is driven through other means and sources — that’s the way a business operates.
A business doesn’t operate from one stream of income. If you go to a grocery store, they don’t make their full income from selling only strawberries — unless of course you’re a strawberry farmer. Instead, they make income from selling corn, selling strawberries, selling meat, selling fish, selling milk, selling cheese — they sell a lot of different things. That’s what a business is all about. it’s about diversification of income streams using YouTube as a gateway to attract clients and audience. That’s what people don’t get.

A lot of the income that I generate comes from books, courses, products and so on. To take a step further, I take this income and then put it back into investments. Now, investments are a whole different story — they’re investments and not income.
Ultimately, when you look at all of these things, this is how a business operates. This is what we’re looking at as a business.
Most people look at YouTube as a means to make some money. When they say they want to do YouTube full-time, they’re referring to a job or income.
Money is the lifeline to your business.
If you don’t have money, you can’t sustain it. It costs to operate your business and the longer the runway you have, the more likely you’ll be able to make it.
That’s why people do it part-time and then, eventually if it does blow up and does well, then they can leave their job and so forth.

The YouTube pay on google ad revenue. When you look at the ad revenue that you’re making from Google, it’s not really good. Pay for advertisements and sponsorships is not a good payout.
At the beginning, just to get monetized, you need let us say a thousand subscribers and I think four thousand watch time hours — it takes time to get all this to happen.
What you could do is you can post a service. If you make 300 for that service, it may take you two to three hours of your time depending on your skill set and you make some money just from one clientele. So if you get one client or one person per month, you’re making three hundred dollars and three months later you’re up to nine hundred dollars from services. That’s how you fuel the business a lot faster than just doing ad revenue.
Ad revenue, at the beginning, you just make maybe 50 a month. It’s not a lot of money. It could be 500 a month if you really blow things up but it takes a lot of video views to make that happen.
Here I could spend two to three hours of my time and get two to three hundred dollars — depending on the service that you’re offering.
What a lot of people do is they make a bunch of these videos. They spend time making all these videos. They need to get the traffic. They need to get all the views. They have to get the approval and then they’re trying to get the sponsorship.
This channel right here makes less than five hundred dollars from YouTube sponsorships alone and it’s got 8 000 subscribers. Now, we can make more. Let’s say I can get a company to sponsor that YouTube channel. But from just the google ads, this channel doesn’t make more than 500 on a google ad revenue basis.
However, when you start combining it with all the products and services that go along with, it brings in money from people buying some of these products and the services, coaching, and one-on-ones.
If you’re trying to make this full-time, don’t think like everybody else.
A lot of people are going to think of having a YouTube channel — it’s going to be successful, I need a bunch of views, I need a lot of video — you’re looking at one stream of income.
One stream of income is tough to make something sustainable but if you have income coming in from other sources, whether you’re doing a service, that makes it sustainable because you’re using YouTube as a platform to bring in more revenue for you as a business owner.
If you’re just trying to make money on ads, that’s a risky business model. Because if the YouTube platform goes down, your whole business goes down.
If the ad revenues get cut, your business revenue gets cut. You should try to diversify, manage the risk.