Your guide to building business on YouTube
For Millennials, YouTube is more than just a video source, it’s the new entertainment capital of the world. According to a recently published study, young audience spent more time in watching videos on YouTube than on TV. And guess what? This isn’t a Millennial-only trend, but an epidemic that’s catching up fast with those up the age-ladder.
In the process of creation and accumulation of this visual content, YouTube has produced some millionaires who have earned really big by regularly posting vlogs and video updates. Shane Dawson, Ryan Higa, Natalie Tran, Joey Graceffa, Fred Figglehorn to name a few; some who’ve successfully turned their hobbies into money making business. The good news is that you too can reap the benefits of YouTube and make some good bucks, if not some additional income. Having said that, it’s good to note that this isn’t the place for those who want to make some quick bucks. With the kind of intense competition for viewing hours among millions of content creators, generating a consistent revenue stream on YouTube needs a great amount of effort.
6 Steps to make money on YouTube
- Creative your channel
It all starts with setting up the YouTube channel. You can either use your existing Google account or create a new Google or YouTube account to start the channel. Both ways it gives access to other Google products. On setting up the channel, you can upload video content in a structured manner. Uploading all of your ready-to-go-online videos in one shot without structuring it makes it difficult for visitors to find the best content you have. Order your channel based on the content’s relevance to the current happenings, market conditions and keywords.
- Gain subscriptions
Your channel’s subscriber base and demographics are critical factors that determines your earning capacities on YouTube. As gaining the initial audience isn’t easy, most people would aggressively promote their channel, welcoming all sorts of audience. Though a large audience base is important, from an advertiser point of view, a clearly defined demographic is even more important. If your subscribers consists of men and women in the age group of 20- 60 years, advertisers wouldn’t be interested in your channel as it’s vague and general. They key is to create videos with a specific group of target audience in mind and try to get people from that target group hooked to your channel by sharing it social media platforms, blogs and elsewhere on internet.
- Become a YouTube partner
Enrolling for the YouTube Partner Program is important, especially if you are here to make some bucks. As a YouTube partner you’ll be able to monetize your content on YouTube through advertisements and paid subscriptions. To make money out of your videos, you need to ‘enable monetisation’ on your channel. This can be done by checking the “Monetize with Ads” box under the Monetisation tab, after checking your channels eligibility and accepting the YouTube partner terms. Here is what YouTube says on why you should enable monetisation – “Once your video has been submitted and approved for monetisation, YouTube will place ads inside or near the video. After you’ve associated an AdSense account with your YouTube account, you will earn revenue that is generated from the ads.” That brings us to the next point setting AdSense account.
- Setup Google AdSense
As per the Google’s one-account-for-all policy, activating your AdSense account is easy. All you need to do is just provide your information such as website, account type, payee name, address, contact details etc., along with your PayPal or bank account details. The money that’s earned from through your YouTube videos will be transferred to this account.
- Promote your videos elsewhere
When all the above steps are completed, it’s time for you to promote your videos and earn some bucks. Uploading your videos on YouTube and waiting for audience to arrive is a little too ambitious or rather quixotic. What’s required is to go out in full stream and post your video links in social bookmarking sites and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and others. You can also embed your videos on your website and blog pages, as all of this will increase the chances of higher visibility, clicks and subscribers.
- Collaborate
Collaborating with other YouTube creators is one of the most powerful ways to add new subscribers and build the audience base. The key here is to first identify the creators that your audience also watches and then find out if they are willing to collaborate on a video project. Such collaborations bring mutual benefit by cross promoting each other on another’s channel, social media and other platforms.
