More than 2.3 billion people visit YouTube from all over the world at least once a month. No wonder it’s the second-largest search engine on the planet. If you’re a content creator with something interesting, informative, and entertaining to share, the question then becomes how to make money on YouTube.
People spend more than a billion hours watching videos on YouTube. From the user’s point of view, YouTube is the greatest platform for non-stop entertainment. But if you’re a creator, it’s a powerful and proven medium for monetization if you know how to make money on YouTube.
The best practices for making money on YouTube
Before we get to how to monetize content on YouTube, it’s good to know the best practices. Once you cover these, it will be easier for you to make money from the platform.
Find a niche: Focus on an area that you’re interested in. Your aim should be to be associated with that domain. The more specific you can get, the easier it will be to find viewers. Remember that you will have to create content for months and years on that topic.
Know your audience: Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Define your audience in terms of both demographics and psychographics. For example, “housewives” is too broad a user group. Are you talking to single mothers, college-educated working wives, or at-home suburban mothers?
Create a unique brand: Your brand is the combination of your name, logo, audio, and video elements. Find a name that’s short and memorable. All your videos should have the same introduction and ending with your branding elements to facilitate greater recall. Your channel thumbnail should also be chosen carefully.
Ways to make money on YouTube in 2022
Now that we have covered the basics, here are some proven ways in which you can make money on YouTube.
Become a YouTube Partner
Apply to become a YouTube Partner to avail of monetization features and the ability to serve ads and showcase your merchandise. To become a Partner, your channel should have added at least 1000 subscribers over the past year and a minimum of 4000 watch hours.
Make sure that your channel is compliant with the platform’s guidelines. You will also have to set up your AdSense account as part of the process. This is how you earn money and get paid. If you have several channels, remember that all of them can be linked to a single account.
After you have created your AdSense account, it’s time for review where YouTube will check whether your channel is compliant with its guidelines. Once you are accepted, you can set up ad preferences to enable monetization from your channel. Depending on your channel’s performance these include channel memberships, advertising revenue, super chat, super stickers, merchandise shelf, and YouTube Premium revenue.
Sell merchandise
Selling merchandise is an effective way to make money on YouTube. You can sell products that you already have on other platforms or start a new range. What you need to keep in mind is that your products should be in sync with and value addition to your content.
There are several ways to do this. You can find an online designer and get products designed with your channel’s branding and its design elements. Remember not to invest too much in your merchandise.
Once you have your designs, a sensible strategy is to use on-demand manufacturing where the third-party producer will create the product only after they get an order. You can also use those on-demand sites to create an online store. Remember to promote the products in your videos and with a link in the description.
Partner with brands
If you’re wondering how to make money on YouTube with your content, brand partnerships should interest you. The beauty of it is that if you have a well-defined target audience that regularly consumes your content, brands would be interested in long-term partnerships.
The key is to find the right brand for your content and target audience. For example, if your videos are about European cities, you could look at regional airlines, hospitality brands, ticket booking sites, travel insurance companies, etc. Once you get a sponsorship deal, be transparent and share it with your viewers.
Start affiliate marketing
The principle behind affiliate marketing is that if you can drive traffic to a brand’s website and if your viewers buy their products or services using your link, you will get a commission of that sale.
The biggest advantage of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to have a large number of viewers. What you need are users who are interested in and have a demonstrable intent to buy the product or service.
If you are new to affiliate marketing, you could start with Amazon Associates, Target, or Best Buy. You could also join CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, or Impact.
Get viewers to pay you directly
Another strategy is to earn income directly from your fans. YouTube Partners can use Super Chat, for example, which will highlight the comments of paying fans in live streams.
You can encourage fans of your channel to become members, which will give them badges, custom emojis, and invites to exclusive live chats. You can also encourage your viewers to become YouTube Premium members. But you will only get revenue if they watch your channel after taking the membership.
License content to the media
If any of your videos goes viral, news channels would be interested in featuring them. But they will have to pay you a license fee to use that content. To make this a viable monetization tactic, you will have to routinely create videos and importantly, be the first in your category to generate content on topical issues.
To make it easy for media houses to get in touch with you, your profile should be updated with your contact information. You can also contribute your videos to a marketplace like Jukin Media that news outlets use to pick videos.
In short
How to make money on YouTube is all about great content, frequency, and audience engagement. If you can regularly produce and deliver compelling content, any of these monetization methods should start bringing in money.