YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer

by Sean Cannell

make sure your content resonates with your experience, with your skills and talents, and with your personality.

Play to your strengths.

Are you a connector who enjoys making people feel welcomed and included? Then focus on creating connection and community.

The best content creators inform, inspire, educate, entertain, and build community all at once.

simple formula for success on YouTube based on the acronym CQC: Consistent Quality Content.

always start with what you have and then work to improve it over time. That applies to both your content and your production quality.

You might even consider running a survey using YouTube’s poll feature or a service like SurveyMonkey.

Your relationship with the audience is key to building trust, and that trust is where you’ll find opportunity.

It’s not enough to simply publish content on YouTube. You need to build a community.

In a way, people watching your videos is kind of like going on a date. If you can get them to subscribe, you’ve gone from the first date to a relationship.

The button looks like a bell, so if you can convince people to ring the bell, it’s like going from the first date to dating consistently to getting engaged.

getting married is the final step and would be if somebody becomes a customer of yours

Always ask your audience to follow you on social media.

Include links to your YouTube channel in all of your social media profiles, in your email signature, anywhere that will let you post it.

The creators who ask people to subscribe in every video tend to have larger audiences.

A good way to encourage subscribers might sound like this, ‘And don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss one of my brand new weekly recipe videos.’

encouraging people to leave comments on your videos.

On Video Influencers, we provide a question of the day for each video and invite people to answer in the comments.

The more comments and conversations the algorithm sees on your video, the more relevant the video will appear to be. This will help it rank higher in search results.

At the time, the people she responded to weren’t even committed fans. They were viewers leaving comments, tweeting, or making blog posts. Judy spent tons of time answering questions, continuing conversations on topics from her videos, and building community before she even knew what community was.

‘The size of the community doesn’t matter as much as the depth of the connections with them.’

Here’s the actual math, according to Kelly. You have to create enough content that you can earn, on average, $100 profit a year from each fan. You can do this by using the monetization strategies we offer in this book. Remember, it’s always easier to give existing fans more content than to find new fans. Create a direct relationship with them, so that they are paying you directly. That way, you keep the full $100 from each fan. Then, you only need 1,000 of them to earn $100,000 per year. That’s a great living for most people.

With money, you can maximize your effectiveness in the world.

Once your YouTube channel has over 1,000 subscribers and four thousand hours of watch time, it will be eligible for revenue sharing through the AdSense program.

creators in the US are paid an average of two dollars per one thousand views.

Affiliate marketing is relevant for any type of YouTube channel, but it works especially well for beauty, tech, and review channels.

Many YouTubers have created their own lines of merchandise, such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and other apparel.

You can turn any knowledge you have into a digital product and offer it to your audience.

We’ve seen YouTubers with small audiences make six-figure incomes from this strategy because they offer valuable, inexpensive content alongside their free videos.

You can find brands, companies, or businesses that will send you free products in exchange for a review or promotion.

When Benji rebuilt his real estate business, he decided to start a channel, HomeDealzTV, answering frequently asked real estate questions. He took the top questions people ask realtors, such as how to buy a house, how to price a house, and how to find a good agent, and provided the answers in a simple but compelling way.

we recommend you focus on building your influence first before focusing on building an income.

You can also host a paid online event or summit where you gather a group of speakers who share their knowledge and experience about your particular niche. Viewers who care enough about the topic will gladly pay for the opportunity to hear expert speakers.

Brand sponsorships happen at many different levels. Sometimes, you can initiate this by reaching out to a brand yourself.

There are also online marketplaces for brand sponsorships, such as Famebit.com.

Your side of the deal might be as easy as wearing the headphones on your videos.

you don’t have to be a large-scale YouTuber to take advantage of brand deals. As long as you have focused content, you might be able to generate interest with related companies.

companies refer to YouTubers like Heather as micro-influencers. According to Forbes16 magazine, 82 percent of viewers are likely to follow a micro-influencer’s recommendations, which proves companies don’t need to rely on huge channels to advocate for their brands.

Licensed Content Rather than creating their own videos, many companies are willing to pay YouTubers in order to license their content.

Travel vloggers who create videos about interesting and exotic locations often work with local travel boards in various countries, licensing or selling the stock footage they shoot.

Other influencers build their income by uploading their footage to stock video websites like istockphoto.com, videohive.net, or shutterstock.com. Stock video marketplaces give creators another income opportunity by making it easy to license their content.

Popular channels like Pranksters in Love often license their content to major media outlets for significant revenue.

If you’ve built enough influence and authority around a topic, you become a valuable candidate for speaking at industry events, conferences, conventions, and even local events.

Amy Landino, a marketing and business coach, has leveraged her YouTube influence into ten to twenty paid speaking gigs a year at corporate events.

JP Sears, noted speaker, coach, and consultant, serves as an interesting case study. When he created his character Ultra Spiritual JP a couple of years ago, the videos quickly went viral. As a result, he received many requests to speak in character at events. In fact, he received so many requests that he got overwhelmed, but this drove up his speaking fee.

Beginner Mistakes When it comes to monetization, the biggest mistake we see creators make is focusing on income first instead of influence.

On Video Influencers, we didn’t turn on YouTube ads for over a year and a half, because we didn’t want to hinder long-term audience growth with a shortsighted focus on making money.

Lewis Howes, creator of one of the top podcasts on iTunes, The School of Greatness, reveals that he ran his podcast for two years before he added sponsors and other monetization opportunities.

money follows mission.

make sure their product is appropriate for your audience. Even if they’re offering a lot of money, don’t agree to it if the monetization deal doesn’t provide relevant, meaningful content for your loyal viewers. Otherwise, you will hurt your channel and lose their trust.