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If you’re brand new to the YouTube space and you’re trying to pump out and create videos. Maybe you have a handful of subscribers. Maybe you already got a monetize and you’re ready to make some money. Your paycheck might be a little small — and that’s really the tough part.
If you’re a small YouTuber, you’re making videos online. You’re trying to make some sub income, it’s not a lot of money to supplement and totally quit your regular day job.
I’ll tell you this from experience.
For example, one of my other channels has a decent amount of subscribers. It does generate some revenue from the YouTube ads but it’s not anything or anywhere near maybe the revenue that it generates as far as having memberships, doing coaching, and even some of the courses here that I have.
These are all much more valuable in terms of income than having just YouTube ads.
The backstageincome channel that you’re watching right now, we actually offer subsidiary services through the team that does a lot of my other content for my other channels. They create video edits, thumbnails and so on for YouTubers, maybe like yourself. I just take a cut. In a way I’m the investor in this business and company and they work and do the work and they get paid for it.
When you focus in and look at just the ad revenue on your YouTube space, it’s just not a lot of money and income. Because you need to have a ton of views to help generate enough revenue to make it sustainable.
It’s really tough to ramp those things up. So you got to have good views. You also have a lot of advertisers in a good popular niche that’s actually making money.
For example an advertising in investing pays much more than maybe having a YouTube channel on creating paper cards or origami. Because paper costs maybe five or ten dollars.
But in the investment world, people are dealing with larger sums of money. So the advertisers are willing to pay more because the value of the client is worth much more.
What should you do instead?
What should you do if you have a small YouTube channel and advertising is the starting point, but what should you do to make and generate revenue pretty fast or instead of doing ads?
Probably, one of the faster ways to generate some revenue is offer a service.
One of the fastest service that you could do is coaching service.
Let’s say you’re in the personal finance space, you could offer a service like bookkeeping and accounting. That could help people out and you can charge a certain amount a dollars per hour.
As you get a client, you make that per hour. So, if you charge $50 per hour to sort things into different categories, into their QuickBooks and manage their expenses and reports, now you’re making fifty dollars an hour rather than waiting for maybe ads to kick in and for a video to blow up and make some revenue.
Let’s just say that revenue was $100. Even then, YouTube takes a cut and they take a percentage. Your end payout might be $20 on that video.
You could make some money from ads but it’s not that quick and efficient.
Typically, a better approach is to offer a service. That way you can make revenue and generate it quickly.
Even if you have a fairly large YouTube channel, you have to really monetize these ads.
The thing is when these ads change the formula. Let’s say there’s a lot of risk involved. This is why I don’t put all my eggs in one basket.
Let’s say the formula changes. The algorithm. Let’s say your channel gets deleted. It’s rare but it does happen.
Let’s say you get penalized for whatever reason. Somebody hacked your channel and they did some malicious thing, then you got penalize. It takes you one to two months to deal with it.
I’ve seen these stories on YouTube. So you got to watch out for these risks, the problem that may happen.
When you have a client, you can speak to that client. If YouTube goes down, you still have these clients that are making you revenue.
It is under your control, in a way, because you control the relationship. Once that client is built and formed, you’re just using the platform of YouTube to generate clientele.
That’s what I want you to think about as far as growth goes. As far as where’s the revenue coming from because you do have risks when you’re tying yourself to any single platform that are could be exponential. It could create some serious trouble for you if you get hacked. If the formula changes. If things get deleted and it’s not under your control.
Think of MySpace back in the day or even Yahoo, how popular it was if you’ve been around since then. All of those things tumbled with time as new things evolved and got created.
So be very careful as you continue to grow and evolve in the online world. Client relationships are more important than the numbers on YouTube.
