Monetize on YouTube: How to Make $5K a Month on YouTube

We’ve consistently been making over $5K a month from YouTube, month after month after we started monetizing for the first time last year.

monetize on youtube

Want to learn how you can start making the same and more with your channel? Keep reading.

So we’re going to show you the exact steps we took when we start to monetize on YouTube.

And then at the end of this post, we’re going to show you 2 bonus ways you can make additional cash from YouTube.

Let’s get started!

1. Started posting videos – a lot

While our channel is 6 years old, we didn’t start posting regularly until about a year ago.

monetize on youtube

Now, there are requirements you have to meet in order to monetize your YouTube videos, and we’ll cover those in a minute…

…but rest assured you’re not going to meet them if you don’t post videos often.

So the first thing we did was brush the cobwebs off our channel and start posting videos again.

2. Perform YouTube keyword research

The second tip we have to help you monetize on YouTube.

Instead of posting videos blindly, we let keyword research guide us in which topics to create videos around.

So what do we mean by YouTube keyword research?

Well, the words that people type into the YouTube search bar are called keywords.

Even if it’s a whole phrase like “social media marketing,” that’s still one keyword.

So, we picked YouTube topics based on the keywords our target audience was searching.

Which then begs the question, how do you know what keywords your target audience is searching?

We answer that question in our YouTube keyword research post and show you the exact tool we use to conduct all of our YT keyword research.

But essentially, there is a tool that shows you exactly how many times a keyword is searched a month on YouTube, otherwise known as search volume.

So that’s really important and we don’t want you guys to miss this, that we did not make YouTube videos around what we ‘thought’ our audience would like.

We made YouTube videos strictly based on research and data.

If our audience wasn’t searching for videos around a certain topic, we didn’t make videos on that topic.

So creating videos regularly + and also making sure we were creating videos we knew our audience cared about…

…is really what helped us drive those initial video views and subscribers.

Remember that views and subs are part of the requirements mentioned in the list of things you have to monetize on YouTube.

So let’s go over that list really quickly.

In order to monetize on YouTube videos, you have to become a YouTube Partner. These are the requirements to become a YouTube Partner:

You have to follow all the YouTube channel monetization policies.
Live in a country/region where the YouTube Partner Program is available.
Have no active Community Guidelines strikes on your channel.
Have more than 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months.
Have more than 1,000 subscribers.
And have a linked AdSense account.

So most of the things on that list are easily doable right out of the gates.

But the two things you sort of having to work towards are getting more than 4,000 public watch hours and more than 1,000 subscribers.

So those are the things we strived to tackle immediately by amping up our posting frequency and being strategic with the topics we posted about.

3. Utilize community polls

In order to keep our subscribers engaged (and therefore subscribed), we started posting community polls.

monetize on youtube

That’s because polls take minimal effort from people to participate in, and people love to answer them.

We made our polls be related to the topics of the videos we were publishing that week as well to increase our views.

4. Optimize your channel

We do this by including keywords in our about section and channel tags.

We show you where to find those sections in our how to get 50K subs on YouTube post, so we’re not going to spend too much more time on it here.

But it’s important to at least understand the SEO behind doing this.

Similarly to us creating YouTube videos around certain keywords, you want your channel to be optimized for certain keywords as well.

This helps your channel get found when people are searching those terms on the platform, and of course, will help you monetize on YouTube.

5. Share your channel absolutely everywhere

We already had an existing follower base on other platforms like:

Instagram,
Facebook,
LinkedIn, and
Twitter,

…so we shared snippets of our YouTube videos to those platforms with a CTA to watch the full video on YouTube.

So if you already have an audience on another platform, take advantage of that! And send them to your YouTube channel.

Now all the steps we took that we’ve listed out so far were goal-oriented around driving as many subscribers and views as we could…

…to meet that initial requirement we needed to monetize our videos.

For these last few steps, we’re going to tell you what we did after we started monetizing to start scaling our efforts and therefore revenue.

6. Make playlists

Once we had a handful of videos out, we started making playlists categorized by platform.

We did this to encourage binge-watching.

If someone searched for an Instagram marketing topic and that’s how they found our video…

…it’s likely they’d be interested in other Instagram marketing videos, right?

Our playlists make it easy for people to find what they need and keep them on our channel.

content marketing strategy

This helps us to increase views and subscribers, thus, helping us monetize on YouTube.

We show you how to create a YouTube playlist in this post so be sure to read it next.

7. Test everything

When YouTube Shorts came out, we started publishing Shorts almost immediately.

We’ve tested different thumbnail styles, and still are!

We stay on top of our YouTube analytics to see which search terms are bringing us the most traffic and allow that to guide us on which post to make next.

We’ve tested different description formats.

If you start plateauing in your growth, you have to test out different elements to see what’s going to be the thing that jumpstarts your growth again.

That’s true of most anything in marketing and holds true with making money on YouTube as well.

Now before we wrap up, we do want to leave you with these bonus ways on how to make money on YouTube.

2 Bonus Ways To Monetize On YouTube

Bonus tip #1: Work with other brands to sponsor your video

That is if it makes sense to given the nature of your business. This is something a lot of influencers do.

Now, we know a lot of you reading are small business owners, so it may be hard to envision how another brand sponsoring your content would make sense.

But just to throw this out there, it could be that it’s an influencer sponsoring your video. Kind of like the inverse of influencer marketing.

Let’s say, for example, that you sell yarn and knitting supplies and there is a YouTuber out there who does yarn tutorials…

…they’re not your rival in the sense that they are also selling the supplies you sell.

But your two channels probably share a similar target market.

So if the YouTuber is wanting to grow their subscribers, maybe they reach out to you and say,

“Hey, I’ll pay you X amount to mention my channel in your next video.”

You’re not going to lose business by doing that because again, they’re not a competitor, and you get a little extra cash for doing it.

Just something to consider.

Bonus tip #2: Take advantage of all of the YouTube Partnership tools

Outside of advertising revenue, here are the 4 other ways you can make money by being in the YouTube Partnership Program.

a. With Channel memberships, “your members make recurring monthly payments in exchange for special perks that you offer.”

b. With Super Chat & Super Stickers, “Your fans pay to get their messages highlighted in chat streams.”

So those two methods allow you to capitalize on the loyalty of your subscriber base.

And take those who are the most invested in your business to the next level of your marketing funnel.

c. With Merch Shelf, “your fans can browse and buy official branded merchandise that’s showcased on your watch pages.”

So if you’re an eCommerce store we would definitely look into this.

d. With YouTube Premium Revenue, “you get part of a YouTube Premium subscriber’s subscription fee when they watch your content.”

And that’s it! That wraps up everything we did to make $5K a month on YouTube + 2 extra bonus ways to make money.

We hope this guide will help you start monetizing your YouTube channel.

Check out our YouTube promotion services if you need more help marketing your videos on your YT channel.

The post Monetize on YouTube: How to Make $5K a Month on YouTube appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog.

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Monetize on YouTube: How to Make $5K a Month on YouTube