Have you ever wondered how people make money on YouTube?
Well, if you’re just starting out with your YouTube adventure, or you’re a veteran with YouTube marketing, one sure thing is, YouTube is a hidden goldmine for people uploading and sharing their videos online. Research reveals that every day, over 5 billion YouTube videos are being watched all over the world with an average view of about 45 minutes. If you’re a marketer, trying to make money online, this statistic is all you need to figure out the potential in exploring the YouTube platform.
Although, YouTube platform allows for everyone to be a partaker to the windfall that this video channel offers, the downside to this is that not everybody really knows how to make money from the videos they uploaded. Recent events also suggest that some people are already given up on using YouTube platform because they believe video marketing is a waste of time. In fact, a piece of news recently circulated online of a girl who gave up her beauty tip channel and returned to her day job because her video channel was not making enough to live on despite her channel recording a huge number of subscribers.
Indeed, such are few horrible stories you hear around. However, YouTube can make you money if done correctly. I mean real income that can make you ditch your 9-5 job. This is why this guide is written to show you how to tap into this billion-dollar goldmine and start making a living just by uploading and watching/sharing videos.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to make money on YouTube through different means that has proved to be successful to many marketers.
Table of Contents
How to get started making money on YouTube
Before you start making money on YouTube, you need first to register an account!
There are different ways to start making money through YouTube platforms, including using paid ads and selling your product or services. Here are some other ways to make money on this video channel:
1. YouTube ads
If you’re looking for cost-effective means to advertise your product or services, YouTube advertising platform is one of the most result-oriented you can find around. YouTube platform can help you target very specific user groups that will be interested or passionate about what you are offering. Whatever your make of business, whether online or offline (brick and mortar) taking advantage of the YouTube video ads can boost your brand awareness, increase your subscriber base and more importantly, improve your conversion rate.
As it’s now, online video sharing platforms especially platform like YouTube is fast replacing TV reach and also surpassing it when it comes to user engagement – with the average viewing session of person going between 40-45 minutes, this is why running ads on YouTube channels is getting more competitive from advertisers and with user engagement is increasing almost on a daily basis.
How to get started with YouTube ads
Getting your YouTube ad campaign up and running is quite easy. But before you can start to reap the benefits the YouTube ads will generate, you need to link your YouTube account with your AdWords account and from there (your AdWords account) you can have access to create a new online video campaign. Once you have set this up, AdWords will guide you through an easy step by step process where you will be able to choose your target audience, your budget, including every other important marketing parameters.
Right video ad format
There are different types of ads you can run on YouTube – The skippable and the widely used but expensive non-skippable ads. Of the two video ads format, the non-skippable ads are by far the most effective ads you can run on YouTube in terms of its cost per thousand impressions (CPM) the downside, however, is that such video ads don’t last or stay for a long time because most of them are meant to test the actions of viewers to products or services. These ads can appear pre, within or after video clips
Targeting your audience
Your target audience is also a very important aspect of successful YouTube ad marketing. After you’re done with choosing the best ad format, you need to find your best audience that is passionate about what your product or service is all about. The best approach, in this case, is to define an effective approach that will include your demographic and the keywords they are using to search for your product. For instance, your target can be on men who are over 50 - 60 and are looking for permanent cure or useful information for erectile dysfunction problems and watch videos on men’s health or women in their mid-thirties 30-35 years looking for information on how to stay beautiful and elegant and will gladly watch videos of products that will keep them looking youthful.
The most important thing is to make sure your target audience is in tune with what your video ads are all about and what benefit they will get from using it.
Other successful YouTube video ad tips
Whichever ad type you decided to go for, here are some additional tips you can use to get the best out of your YouTube ad campaign.
Making money on YouTube video ads is quite easy if you constantly adjust and fine-tune your video ads to be more targeted and successful.
2. Using brand products on your videos
Another way to make money through YouTube is by offering Business brands space on your video to advertise his/her product. It’s just like what you have on TV’s; sometimes you’ll see some tv presenter’s wearing, e.g. some t-shirts with a brand logo on it. The same can be applied to your YouTube videos. For most Youtubers with lots of subscriber base, this can be an easy way to make money online.
Here’s a quick tip for walking you through how you can start earning some income with your YouTube videos.
To get in front of big business brands, you need to have a very active video channel. Although there are various methods to grow your audience on YouTube quickly, the most important is to make sure your audience is targeted to a particular niche or category.
For instance, it’s better to target a small niche of people that have difficulty in managing their home affairs with their business. Targeting such audience with video information on the best ways to manage this task can increase your video subscription with laser targeted people.
When you have such a target audience, it becomes easy for brand to found you with juicy offers. While some brand can have you wear a custom t-shirt to show their brands, some others will want you to display their product on your video or give a shout out about their product.
Whichever option a brand decides to choose, you still get paid for showing their product on your video.
3. Affiliate marketing
If you think running video ads or looking for a big brand to sponsored your video is a big task, here’s something you might love doing with your YouTube videos that can generate for you daily/monthly income if done correctly.
Promoting other people’s product or services is much easier with YouTube videos. All you need to do is set up your YouTube channel and upload your video and make people click your affiliate link to purchase the product from the merchant website. When this action is performed – making your traffic to buy, the product through your affiliate link, you instantly receive a commission for such referral.
Here are some methods to get your YouTube and affiliate methods on the way:
There are many affiliate programs out there that you could sign up with to start making money from them. Such include affiliate programs that sell the digital product only and others that have cross-product – digital and physical. Among the popular affiliate program that allows to sign up and promote their physical product is the Amazon associate program.
YouTube plus Amazon
Using your YouTube Videos to link to your Amazon affiliate program can make you money if you know how to set them up properly. Firstly you need to know how the amazons affiliate work. But this guide is not about Amazon or how to join the Amazon network, but this guide is about how to use your YouTube videos to make money from Amazon marketplace.
So after signing up with Amazon affiliate, copy the link and paste it on your YouTube Video description so viewers can watch your video and subsequently click on the link. One thing about Amazon affiliate link is that it can be very long and ugly, so a good tip is to use a URL shortener provided by Amazon to shorten the links.
Build a decent website for Amazon
If you don’t have a website already, this should be your first option. The reason is that Amazon associate does not (most of the time) accept new affiliates without a website to participate in their affiliate program. And if you’re relying on your YouTube Channel or videos alone for promotion, Amazon does not allow YouTube channel links as part of their affiliate network.
Amazon expects you to have a very detailed, informative website that relates to product you want to promote. If your website or the content does not correspond with what you are promoting, the team from Amazon affiliate will reject your registration – Every website submitted for Amazon affiliate program first go through the Amazon team to check for eligibility for their affiliate program. Except your website is ready and live, don’t apply for the Amazon affiliate program!
Create affiliate links for your promoted products
Use Amazon affiliate link that is assigned to every product you promote. This step is very important and you should not skip it for anything. To make money from Amazon, you need to use the affiliate link and not the product link you find on the pages. Using the product link will not guarantee you any commission even when you send floods of traffic to Amazon.
So make sure that before you start to promote any product from Amazon, you’ll need to first create your affiliate link for that product before promoting.
Using YouTube and Amazon affiliate link is a good strategy to make money online. It can practically boost your overall income from your YouTube videos compared to selling shout outs and running video ads. Also, there are tons of other affiliate programs you can sign up with and link your YouTube videos directly without requiring you to have a website. However, the Amazon affiliate program is a tested and trusted network where affiliates can easily sell any product without much promotion and are paid regularly.
4. Sell your own product or service on YouTube
Selling your products or services on YouTube is great, and it can make you money in no time. The difference between selling your own product or services and selling affiliate products like products from Amazon is that while you only get a small fraction of what you sold in terms of commission when you promote affiliate offers the case is quite different when you sell your product or service. When selling your own product or services, you get paid every penny you demanded, and nobody can cut you off from your profit no matter what profit margin you make.
The YouTube platform is a billion-dollar marketing platform where you can easily get your product or services in front of millions of viewers in just a matter of minutes. If you’re planning to sell any digital product or hoping to sell physical goods from affiliate networks like Amazon.com on YouTube hear this:
To start making g money from your YouTube videos, you need to drive targeted traffic from YouTube to your landing page. To do this correctly you’ll need to:
Add a custom link to profile banner
There is a much better way to make you and your video channel stand out unique from the crowd. Making your profile page look awesome is one thing with your profile pictures and (not default blank image) uploaded including a well detailed about you should get viewers to trust your channel.
YouTube allows you to add 5 links on top of your video channel profile banner. This is also very important as many subscribers will surely want interaction with your social profile. Making sure your social profile information is updated with relevant informational links pointing either to your other social media pages including also your website where you have your product or services waiting are very important.
You can take the opportunity of these links to drive your subscribers and viewers to your website to let them know of your product or service, including sending them to the right offer page. Doing this will guarantee clicks from viewers on your YouTube Video channel profile which inevitable will also guarantee sales from people that lands on your website.
Pro tip: You can take advantage of the “Link title” option to invite your visitors to click on it.
Conclusion
The YouTube platform is a sure bet to make you money if you follow through what is stated in this guide. Making money has never been easier with YouTube either through YouTube ads or running an affiliate program. Indeed, finding the right methods to tap into this multi-billion dollar video platform is a sure winner for every newbie looking to start making money from YouTube.
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