5 Clever Ways To Make Money On YouTube

YouTube is full of endless money-making opportunities and very profitable ones at that too. Here are 5 clever ways to make money on YouTube!

Most people may not realise this, but YouTube is one of the only social media platforms to pay you directly for the content you upload. You get paid in ad revenue. This is where people will pay YouTube to advertise before your videos and you get 60% of that money and YouTube takes the other 40%, courtesy of you using their platform.

On top of YouTube ad revenue, which can pay you A LOT of money per 1000 views, you can also branch out and start earning money elsewhere once you have been able to grow an audience big enough. This could be in the form of merchandise or doing sponsored videos, the possibilities are endless with YouTube.

1. Become a YouTube Partner and earn via ad revenue

For most creators on the platform, showing ads before their videos is where most of their money comes from.

To be eligible to become a YouTube Partner, you need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months across all your videos. On top of this, you of course need to make sure you keep your channel and content in line with YouTube’s guidelines and ad rules.

However, that isn’t where being a YouTube Partner ends as if you live stream to YouTube you can also be eligible to receive ‘Super Chats’ and ‘Super Stickers. This is when people will pay to have their comment shown above all else in which you get the money for it. This can be from as low as $1 all the way up to $500.

2. Become an Amazon Influencer

Amazon is the biggest marketplace in the world and with that there are hundreds of thousands of products to buy. With this, you can choose products that are in your niche on YouTube and ones that would appeal to your audience.

Once you’ve found the product you want to promote, you can sign up for an Amazon affiliate account and grab a link for that product. The amazing thing about the Amazon Affiliate program, is that once someone clicks on your link to the product you’re promoting, any other product that they buy after that you will still get a commission for, for up to 30 days!

Becoming an Amazon influencer is a very smart idea as your audience will more than likely already trust Amazon as a platform to buy from and so they will be more likely to purchase the product you’re promoting through your link. This will allow you to make more money on YouTube.

3. Work With Brands as an Influencer

Brands today are starting to engage and work more with YouTube stars and influencers as they are realising the opportunities and platform that YouTubers create and how powerful their audiences are in terms of monetisation.

This gives you as the influencer massive leverage over brands if you can show them what their investment into you will bring them, allowing you to set your own prices.

Data from WebFX claim that for YouTube channels of respective sizes they earn:

• $200 per video for a YouTuber with 10,000 subscribers
• $2,000 per video for a YouTube with 100,000 subscribers
• $20,000 per video for a YouTuber with 1,000,000 subscribers

To actually make sure your audience trusts the brand you’re promoting and for you to make the brand happy and that they have invested their money well, you need to make sure to be honest. This means that you need to be transparent with your audience and don’t promote anything you dislike just for the sake of making money. Doing so, you may damage the trust that you have taken so long to build with your audience.

4. Create and Sell Merchandise to your Audience

There are a plethora of products that you can customize and sell to your audience. These could range from the traditional t-shirts with your own slogan or design on it to cool wristbands that your subscribers can wear wherever they go.

Merchandise can further the relationship and trust between you and your audience as they buy into what you’re building and feel a part of your world.

You can easily set up your shop using services such as Shopify to create your storefront and then integrating services such as Printful which will print and handle the distribution of your merchandise while you take the profits.

5. Have Your Fans Pay You Directly

This one may seem a bit pushy and out there, however, fear not, as every YouTuber you know has fans that pay them directly in one way or another.

Usually, YouTubers will set up a Patreon:

“Patreon is an American membership platform that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service. It helps creators and artists earn a monthly income by providing rewards and perks to their subscribers.”

Wikipedia

With Patreon, you can have different levels in which your subscribers can pay and support you monthly. The bottom level may be $1 a month and you could send them a private message every now and then. The top level could be $100 a month and this could be you sending them exclusive content and putting their names at the end of videos to show how much they mean to you.

Another way of having your fans pay you directly is actually on YouTube. To earn money on YouTube directly with your fans paying you, you can set up Super Chats. Super Chats are comments on live streams where they appear above all overs for a set amount of time so you as the creator definitely see their comment.

Super Chats can range from a donation from as little as $1 to as large as $500 for one comment.