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

by Sean Cannell

We call them The Seven Cs: Courage, Clarity, Channel, Content, Community, Cash, and

Consistency.

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” —Zig Ziglar

“Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s the willingness to act despite the fear.”

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

To build a sustainable business, you need all three: passion, proficiency, and profit.

When you combine passion, proficiency, and profit, you find your niche, and you’re one step closer to defining your end goal.

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

The first and most widely understood way of making money on YouTube is with the AdSense program.

Once your YouTube channel has over one thousand subscribers and four thousand hours of watch time, it will be eligible for revenue sharing through the AdSense program. This gives YouTube permission to play ads on your video, and a portion of the ad revenue is granted to you.

The amount of money you can make from AdSense varies. As a typical rule of thumb, creators in the US are paid an average of two dollars per one thousand views. Therefore, if you want to make $2,000 per month from YouTube content, you would need one million vi...

The most common affiliate program is Amazon Associates, which you can join by applying online. Once approved, you can create your own links to Amazon products, and any time a viewer clicks on a link, you receive a percentage of the product’s price, which could be anywhere between 1 to 10 percent.

Affiliate marketing is relevant for any type of YouTube channel, but it works especially well for beauty, fashion, health, finance, tech, and review channels. That’s because these kinds of channels tend to discuss specific products, services, and software. If there’s a product related to your niche—physical, digital, service, or live event—there may be an affiliate program for it.

Whether you’re a full-time YouTuber with one hundred thousand subscribers or you’re new with less than one thousand, getting free products is as simple as reaching out through social media, sending an email, or even picking up the phone and asking. You will be surprised at how many companies will say yes.

If you’re a current business owner, ask yourself what kind of value you could deliver through video for your potential clients or customers. Are there questions you could answer? Tips or advice you could provide? When you create value for viewers, you drive people back to your business.

Brand Sponsorships Sponsorships, also called “brand deals” in the YouTube community, are a form of monetization that has become extremely popular on YouTube, especially for the bigger influencers. It works similarly to the free product trade we discussed earlier, with the added perk that companies pay real money in exchange for product promotions.

For example, if your YouTube channel does toy reviews, a toy company might reach out to you with an offer to work together. In exchange for bringing awareness to their company’s products, you get paid a generous amount.

Brand sponsorships happen at many different levels. You can initiate them by reaching out to a brand yourself. However, some YouTubers work with agents who connect them with relevant brands. There are also online marketplaces for brand sponsorships such as AspireIQ. Signing up for AspireI...

In fact, companies call YouTubers like Heather micro-influencers. According to Forbes 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.25 We encourage you to consider which brands you want to collaborate with so you can start using brand deals to build your income.

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

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.

To learn the best and most current methods for making money with YouTube, watch our free YouTube monetization web class at TubeSecretsBook.com/FreeClass.

Influence comes first; income comes second. Add massive value and build trust before trying to monetize your audience.

You must have the determination and willingness to treat YouTube as a marathon and not a sprint.

For example, if you’re a teacher, then having a digital product to teach additional techniques and skills might make more sense for you than doing a brand deal. If you entertain people through lifestyle vlogs, and you’ve grown an audience that likes and trusts you, then a brand sponsorship makes sense.

Turning on YouTube ads is the simplest way to start monetizing, but with a low number of views,

it won’t produce much income. Even so, it’s a starting point. Affiliate marketing might be a better starting point, because you don’t have to create any products yourself. All you do is make recommendations and get paid.

Just as financial advisors recommend diversifying your portfolio, we recommend you diversify your income streams. That way, if something should dramatically change, like it did for Philip DeFranco, all of your eggs are not in one basket,

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Rom byggdes inte på en dag

YouTube rewards consistent channels by pushing them higher in the search and recommended lists. Don’t forget, as a business, YouTube generates revenue by selling ads on videos. Therefore, when you create consistent quality content, you position yourself for YouTube to promote your videos to a wider audience. They love to reward consistency.

While you can’t control which video will be the one that does it for you, commitment to consistency creates the best chance to make it happen.

if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

For more in-depth tips about shooting good video, check out the following video from Think Media: TubeSecretsBook.com/Checklist.

For a detailed walkthrough on where to find these metrics inside of YouTube Studio, check out the following link: TubeSecretsBook.com/Analytics.

(AVPV). If your average view per viewer is five, it means that on average people who watch your channel will watch five videos in a row.

It’s called Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World. Feel free to check it out.

The best way to do this is to use YouTube “end cards,” which are a feature in YouTube Studio that allows you to select a specific video in your library that will show up on screen during the last twenty seconds of your video. The viewer can click on the image of the video, and YouTube will take them directly to it.

predictions like “How to stay motivated to lose weight,” “How to stay motivated to work out,” “How to stay motivated on YouTube,” “How to stay motivated to study,” and “How to stay motivated in tough times.”

Creating search-based content is one of the best ways to start getting views when you’re new, and it can lead to millions of views over time.

However, search traffic on YouTube is only responsible for 10 percent of the traffic on YouTube.36

By the way, if you’re new to the term “traffic,” it essentially means ...

Another aspect of discoverability on YouTube that you can tap into is “suggested” or “related” videos. The biggest source of traffic on YouTube is suggested videos. More than 70 percent of what people watch is determined by the recommendation algorithm.37

For even greater insights, including discovering how many people per month are interested in specific topics, we like to use tools such as KeywordsEverywhere.com, Wordstream.com, and vidIQ.com.

our favorite tool for keyword research and topic research is vidIQ.com. For a quick tutorial on how to use it, check out TubeSecretsBook.com/vidIQ.

If you’re interested in learning the exact details of the best new tools and software for finding money-making video ideas, ranking them, and monetizing them in multiple ways, check out Sean’s free one-hour web class at TubeSecretsBook.com/FreeClass.

Bonus Tip: To find the latest trending videos on YouTube, you can always visit YouTube.com/trending. However, there are numerous tools that will help you spot hot topics and trends related to your niche. Some of our favorites include BuzzFeed, Google Trends, BuzzSumo, and Reddit. You can also check out industry-leading publications or blogs in your specific market.

A tentpole is a way of capitalizing on recurring events and holidays throughout the year. For example, let’s look at Halloween. People get interested in Halloween months before it occurs. That is the beginning of the tentpole. When interest peaks, that’s the center of the tent.

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” —Michael Jordan

Fiverr.com has services as low as five dollars per job for all of your graphic design needs. You can even hire a virtual assistant on a site like Upwork.com. You don’t have to hire someone for an insane amount of time.