– We’re talking about how do you actually make money on YouTube here on The Journey. (upbeat music) All right, so we’re answering your questions about how to make money on YouTube. And for that, I have a special guest, William of GoDaddy. – Hey guys, yeah, so I do a ton of stuff with marketing, YouTube included, advertising, I’ve helped businesses grow from 20,000 to four million in 13 months. Crazy stuff, right? I love marketing, I love figuring out how people can tell their stories, writing about this on Entrepreneur and obviously on the GoDaddy Blog. And I’m excited to dig in to some of the things that I was able to uncover with some of the big YouTube influencers that I was able to reach out to. – That’s awesome. So I think we first have to ask ourself, why do people want to go to YouTube to make money? What is so attractive about it? – Here you go. Yeah, that’s all I got, sorry. – That’s it? – No, $26 million though, that’s how much Ryan’s World made last year alone. – Okay. – Top grossing channel on YouTube. – That’s the little kid that started off just doing toy reviews, right? – Toy reviews, right. – That’s so crazy.
– When you think about that though, when we were kids, we were thinking about, “Hey, “I wanna be in the NBA.” I’ll get that later. We wanna be in the NBA or something, right? ‘Cause that’s where we’re gonna get, have our big aspirations of making millions and millions of dollars but for a new generation, this is their path towards that wild dream of being a multi-millionaire. – Right, like anybody can get started and make videos on things that they love, right? There’s kids that out there, a little dad I think son combo that cuts things in half and makes millions of dollars just seeing what’s inside stuff, it’s crazy. – Yeah, there’s a lot of examples of that. And what’s nice is, it doesn’t have to be just the people that are the most physically gifted to be in the NBA or something like that. This could be a niche of whatever that is that you’re into, which is exciting. Because there’s something for everybody. – So the question is, can you actually make money on YouTube? The simple is yes, right? – Right, you can.
And while we kind of just said that it’s very simple, it’s also incredibly complex. There’s a lot of things that you need to know, it takes a lot of hard work, it takes dedication. You need to keep doing it consistently. Find who that audience is. And that’s the part that we’re gonna hopefully help you walk through on this video. And simply showing up isn’t enough. You’ve gotta be able to show up in the right way, at the right time, to the right crowd. – You did a little bit of pre-work before this video to help out our audience. – I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just based on my thoughts, or things like that, ’cause while I do a lot within the marketing world, I’m not super deep into YouTube to the point where I am one of those people making millions of dollars on YouTube. So I wanted to get information that was relevant. From the people that are actually doing this on a daily basis, making a living from this.
And the first question that I wanted to ask them when I reached out was, what is the one tip, the best piece of advice that you could give to somebody, that wanted to make money on YouTube. – Do not go into it trying to make money. Go into it because you’re passionate about something. I read something recently about how influencers are not, they’re not just like, “I wanna have a following on Instagram.” They do something cool and they want to share it with people and they wanna teach people. So if you’re gonna start a YouTube channel, do it because you’re passionate about what you wanna do. Sorry I’m talking so fast, I just get so excited. And then share that with people. Share the story, share the journey, teach people. – Be productive, in other words, don’t expect to make just one video or 12 videos or 100 videos. You gotta really knuckle down and be productive, right? It’s gonna take more than you think. Be interesting, obviously, be entertaining. But also be interesting, in other words, what would you be interested in seeing? The most successful and monetized YouTube channels I notice generally have something very interesting that they’ve researched or they offer.
Whether it’s a tour of the world or explaining something that’s kind of difficult to understand in science or whatever, these are fascinating channels. And they’re interesting not because they’re eye candy, although slime is very popular last time I looked. They’re useful, in other words, you can, they’re educative, you can learn something from them and impress people with your knowledge. Also, be creative. There’s a lot to be said for just coming up with an idea and the most viral videos I have have been extremely creative that have been spawned just from my own interest in different celebrities, different voices, different poems, different view points that I wanted to express. And so that’s good. And be patient. Because even though we have a very fast moving culture and YouTube is very fast and everything is going very, very, very fast, you gotta be patient because like I said, you gotta keep putting things out and it’s not gonna happen overnight.
Or if it does, then what are you gonna do next week after it hits? – Great video there, awesome advice. And I love that he called out that you have to be interesting but also useful. And I think we try to just create content just to create content, but that doesn’t really provide value to the audience. – Yeah, there were two things that I really liked about what he said. And one was the idea of knuckles down, because it talked about that hard work. But like you said, the most important thing that I take away from that is first we found out what your why is for why you’re gonna do this. But even more important than your why now is why does this viewer care. – Right. – What kind of content are they looking for, why do they care to hear from you. Some people are looking for an escape, so one of the channels that we looked at, she’s documenting things that she’s doing all over the world and you can almost feel like you’re going around the world with her.
Another one that we’re gonna look at later on, they are helping people learn Spanish. And so some people are looking to learn something but ultimately there’s a reason why somebody’s trying to watch that video and think about that person, ’cause that’s what’s going to help your videos connect. – Right, and I think what a lot of people get stuck in the trap of the sales mindset. When they create content, they are doing it to try to sell something and if that’s what you’re going on YouTube doing to make it rich and just try to sell, sell, sell, you’re not creating any value and no one’s gonna wanna watch that.
Value first, get your viewership in there, and then you can lead in different things. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later. – The other question that I wanted to dig into was the idea of I don’t like having to learn from my own mistakes. If I can learn from your mistakes or somebody else’s mistakes, it’s less pain for me, right? – Right. – So the other question that I wanted to ask them is what is the biggest challenge that you faced when you’re trying to monetize your YouTube channel? – The biggest issue that I’ve had with trying to monetize content on YouTube is the changing content guidelines. YouTube is always changing its advertiser friendly guidelines, so it’s best to stay on top of that and know what kind of content you can and can’t make. And if a video does get demonetized or deemed unsuitable for all advertisers, not only do you lose out on ad revenue, but also potential viewers because the algorithm is less likely to recommend a video that’s been deemed unsuitable for advertisers.
– See I didn’t even realize that with creating content on YouTube that you have to kind of stick to those guidelines because they can change and then deem your content unworthy and then it’s not shown to anyone. – Right, and it’s not even so much that they can change it, it’s that they will change again. It used to be just 10,000 views, now it’s 4000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers. So they’ve significantly made it harder for people to get to that point where they can begin monetizing on the YouTube platform. – We really wanna talk about the algorithm. Did you know that 70% of the videos watched on YouTube are due to the algorithm themselves? – Well, it makes sense when you think about it from their perspective. So YouTube’s a business as well.
They’re trying to make money. And if they change the algorithm, they’re changing the algorithm based on how people are watching things, but now when they’ve changed the algorithm, if they can’t monetize the video that you have, all of a sudden YouTube’s algorithm is gonna demote that video. It’s not gonna show up as high in the normal search results that people are doing. So now that type of video content is just less relevant. – Right, and I mean, at the end of the day, YouTube’s main goal is to keep you on YouTube.
So if you watch a video and then have a video that’s similar that you’re like oh cool, I check that out, and then I’ll check that out, and then I’ll check that out. Kind of puts you deeper down the rabbit hole of that algorithm. And then with that, the content itself, you really wanna think about the algorithm when you create your content. What are the latest trends that are happening? I know there was a big update with mid-rolls, so everyone just jumped on board, started making 10 minute videos because they had to have that mid-roll.
It might change in the future and then you’ll wanna jump on that trend to really get on that algorithm first. Make sure you’re monetizing your videos. – Right, and we see this not just on YouTube, but all sorts of channels, right? There for a while, I don’t know how much you guys keep up on some of the other trends, but, certain keywords were really hopping into like a post title, right? And it was like click bait. But then algorithms started catching onto this click bait, not driving actually good content, and so the algorithms change to promote stuff that people actually want to read and experience and enjoy and watch on YouTube. So touching base on your mid-rolls. – Wait, you’re touching what? – Not, well, the mid-rolls in the actual YouTube ads. That’s another example of where all of a sudden certain people had access to those but not everybody did.
And so we kind of call that ad-pocalypse. Where certain, let’s say, video creators have access to other features and ways to monetize that some smaller advertisers don’t have. So it’s important that you keep up with all the different trends on what’s going on with that algorithm because that’s what YouTube is looking for. – Yeah, not only do you need to be up to date with the trends, you also need to be up to date with the rules and policies too. – Good point. – Yeah with the latest update, as of right now when we’re filming this video, you can’t market to kids anymore. So when you create your content you have to mark is this geared towards kids or is it geared towards adults because if it is there’s gonna be no advertising for them. And ultimately, it’s to make the internet a bit more of a safer place. But you have to make sure that you’re aware of these things, so it doesn’t hurt you.
– Another technique that I like to use when I’m trying to figure out how to do something is deconstruction. Looking at something that was successful and figuring out how did they do that? Why, what made that successful? So the other question that I wanted to ask these influencers was just what is your most profitable video and why do you think it was so successful? – Yeah, let’s check it out.
– So our most popular video on YouTube is how to make small talk in Spanish. It has almost 600,000 views. Why do you think it is our most popular one? – Well I think it’s because we were able to dominate the SEO search results for some of the terms in the title of that video. So search engine optimization has a lot to do with your success on YouTube. If you’re making videos that are answering questions that people are searching for, often times it’ll show up in Google or YouTube itself when people search for those terms. This can help generate a lot of organic traffic for your videos.
– That is huge. So many people don’t realize that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world. And many of the creators aren’t SEO experts. So if you take some time and invest in the SEO of the titles you use, of the descriptions, the keywords and things like that. – Exactly. – You can dominate that search engine. – Well and I think that’s the important part here is that there’s two elements to SEO, right? There’s the technical side. Making sure you have the right tags and key words in your post, but that’s only one part of it. And it’s an important part. I say it’s kind of like the bones, right? So before you’ve got a bunch of bones, you’re gonna try to put together this fossil or whatever right, this dinosaur that you just discovered, you gotta know which bones go where. But once you’ve got that, to really start deconstructing let’s say the tyrannosaurus rex, you’ve gotta think about like well why does it have these teeth and what was it doing with those teeth and why these short arms and stuff like that.
That’s the rest of this and I’d say that’s probably the more important part of SEO. And I look at that as just simply saying, what are people asking? Start there. When you’re trying to make a video about how to learn Spanish, well, what are the things that people would ask when they’re ready to learn Spanish? It’s probably not top 10 tricks for Spanish, maybe it is, but mostly likely it’s gonna be something along the lines of how do I say this or what about this. – Yeah, and that’s crucial.
So there’s two couple of resources that I have for you. One is go on Google and start typing whatever the general keyword is. Google will try to pre-fill the rest of the phrase. – Such a good idea. – And you essentially have your answer right there. There’s also AnswerThePublic.com where you throw in your keyword or your phrase and it’ll give you relevant keywords and questions that actual people are basically asking online. You can tailor your content to that.
– The good news here though is that you don’t have to rely just on monetizing through YouTube. There’s a lot of ways that you can make money from the videos that you do on YouTube. – When it comes to profitable content, almost every video on my channel makes some kind of money. However, the things that generate the most money on my YouTube channel are my live streams. And the reason for that is because we have people’s attention from anywhere from three to six hours almost every single week. And during that time, we have a bunch of different questions that we’re answering about YouTube and over and over and over again, a lot of the tools and things that YouTubers use that I get an affiliate commission off of are linked to in the video descriptions of our live streams.
And because of that, it makes it easy for people to find when we’re talking about them and we present them as solutions to the problems that people commonly have on YouTube. In addition to that, our live streams also generate super chats, they generate ad revenue, and at a higher level, our live streams because we sit there and we prove for three to six hours straight that we understand our subject matter. Because of that it creates additional opportunities outside of YouTube as well that are also money making opportunities. So because of that, the live streams, hands down, are the biggest money makers that I have on my YouTube channel. – Yeah and what I love about that video is he was essentially diversifying his revenue stream, it’s not all coming from the advertising itself. And a way you could do that is with YouTube Premium views. It’s similar to Patreon where you have your viewers pay a monthly subscription fee of whatever amount and they get extra, exclusive content only for them. – Yeah, and there’s even more things, even within YouTube, as far as super chats, live streams, there’s a lot of opportunities on the YouTube platform to monetize, but there’s also a lot of opportunities off of the YouTube platform to monetize.
And this comes down to just being creative about how you go about that, right? So one example is you might be an ecommerce store. Well you can use this to showcase your products and then end up sending people to your website to convert. – Right, and that’s, he talked about affiliate links. If you’re creating a video that it makes sense to say hey, check out the product that I’m using right here, that I’m reviewing.
Here’s the link down below, you get a little cut behind that, or I know a lot of people will basically create swag or shirts or stuff of their own brand – Big time. – To sell directly on YouTube or on their website too. – Let’s find something that’s really exciting to your audience, and that might be, depending on your content, I know Brian Ging does a lot of this with SEO.
Well he has courses and ebooks and things like that that you can download, that you can buy, that you can use that for his services and purchase those things as well. – Absolutely, and I was gonna bring up video influencers. They’re a great brand. – Totally. – Talks a ton about how to create awesome videos. But they also have links to their courses and their ebooks and all their other content. It’s just adding more value because anyone could make a shirt, but if you give extra content like that, it actually changes someone’s life that uses it, that’s where you’ll win. – And again, just to break it down, diversify your content, add value to the people who are watching this, and make sure that if you do sponsored content, follow the FTC guidelines. So I got a lot of great responses from so many people with amazing information, but I think the one that I wanna leave you with today is this one. – My best piece of advice for people looking to make money on YouTube is to just start. So many people get frozen by the creative process and think what they have to put out has to be perfect, it absolutely doesn’t have to be.
So jump in, get involved, have fun, and find your voice first. – I love that, just start. We get so caught up with what are people gonna say, am I gonna have the best video, is it gonna be perfect. Just do and get better as you go on. Practice makes progression. – It’s true I think for just about everything in life, right? Sometimes you just have to get started. – All right, you are ready to make some money on YouTube. Make sure you like this video, add a comment below, subscribe to our channel and ring that bell to see these episodes first. This is The Journey, we’ll see you next time.
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