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YouTube is a great way to make money, but only if done right. You don’t want to waste your time making videos that don’t work out at all, so Nate tells you the best ways to monetize your channel.
How do you make money on YouTube fast? Well, I’ve done it the slow way and I’ve done it a fast way. One of my channels I went from zero income to $100,000 in a month just in 6 months time frame. So, in this video, I’m going to break it down how you can make money on YouTube a lot faster. So, I want to share with you a story of a channel that I’ve produced that is it definitely has made money fast. I mean right now, it’s making between 5 and 6 hundred thousand dollars per month. And just 2 and a half years ago, we are almost making zero. And then after I share that story, I’m going to share with you the 4 ingredient formula to exactly how we got that growth so that you can implement that yourself. When we started the Kris Krohn channel, we were doing one episode per week. We did that for 2 and a half years and it wasn’t exactly one episode per week. It’s actually a little less because Kris took the summer off one time and… Any way, that most we’re doing one episode per week. But because we did it for an extended amount of time, we did grow the channel from zero up to 12,000 subscribers. And we are starting to get leads coming in. Meaning, people were commenting and saying, “Hey, how can I work with you? Do you offer coaching?” or “Hey, how can you can you help me buy real estate?” All types of questions like that and Kris not have anything to sell, but we knew that we had an audience and a following that was hungry for something. At the time, Kris was putting on local events and his hope was that people from around the country would travel to Utah and attend his local events. His events were great. He he puts on three-day events and by the end of the event, people are so excited and they’ve gotten to know him so well that they want to hire him for more. And that’s how he ran his business. Well on YouTube, where we had a great successful start to the channel and we had interest coming in, we weren’t monetizing at that point. We weren’t really able to make any sales. So, Kris started working on creating a course and at the same time we decided to launch 5 episodes a week instead of just one, okay? So, we kind of made 2 changes here. We’re going to be more aggressive with our launch schedule because we knew we’d have more exponential growth after that four-month mark and he started working on the course. We’d have a better way of monetizing the channel. And we had brought in a few hundred dollars in a month from ad revenue and we had a person or 2 over the previous year come to events. But not like we should have had, right? Well fast-forward 6 months, we did have a spike on the channel because of our increased frequency. We had grown the channel up to about 65,000 subscribers. And Kris launched his course. This is going back first of October of 2017. And in that month, over $100,000 of sales. And so, that’s cool. That was a pivotal point for us where we recognized, “Okay, this really is something. This isn’t just theory anymore. This isn’t just hypothetical.” Now, this is real. The lesson that we learned there is the audience that we had built, they weren’t willing to travel to Utah to attend his events. But they were very willing to buy a digital course. Here’s something interesting. Fast-forward 2 years later, today, now Kris does fill his events. He recently put on an event just a couple of weeks ago and the number is either 250 or 350 people. I don’t remember which. But he said the majority of the people in attendance there were from outside of Utah. They had come because being fans of his on YouTube. So, with a smaller audience, he wasn’t able to pull enough people in. Now, that he’s got a lot more momentum on the channel, we are approaching a half million subscribers on the channel if that kind of gives you a perspective. But with this big of a channel, now it does fill his events. There are a lot of ways that you can monetize your YouTube channel. A slow way is through filling events. A slow way is through ad revenue. A slow way might be through affiliate marketing. There might be a faster way. I would say the fastest way to make the most amount of money is through creating a digital course. Now, I’ve seen that many times now since we had that experience with Kris Krohn’s channel. So, that’s what I definitely recommend is the fastest way you can monetize your channel have something to sell. Have a product or a course and digital courses sell really well to a YouTube audience. Okay, put your seat belt on because now I’m going to share the 4 ingredients to get a spike after 4 months. Okay, that first ingredient is keyword research before filming. Before filming is so important. If you do keyword research after filming, it just doesn’t work. But if you do keyword research first, you find the questions that people are asking and that’s the title of your video; that’s what your content of that 10 or 12 minute episode is based around, okay? So, I’ve actually given away the second ingredient. The second ingredient is you want your videos to be 10 or 12 minutes in length. That’s the default. Some videos are going to go longer. Some videos are going to go shorter. But let’s shoot for an average of 10 or 12 minutes. You’ll thank me later as monk says. 10 or 12 minutes is the sweet spot of getting good average view duration on YouTube. So, is that easy? Is that hard? Well, if you’re an influencer, say you’re a coach or a speaker, you really know your content. So, if you start with the keyword research, you find the question that people are asking, I want you to go in-depth. I want you to share all your secrets. And to do that in 10 minutes, sometimes that’s actually pretty hard. You want to keep it tight. You want to keep people’s energy going. And if you’re going for 12 minutes, maybe you said some Ah’s and um’s. Maybe your restate it’s something. I’ve done that in this episode. My team edits it out. So, you’ll end up with a 10-minute episode. If you get 7 minutes into an episode and you find, “You know what? I really don’t have anything more to say. We don’t want it to drag on. People are going to leave once you’re done with the good content anyway. So, go ahead and end that episode at seven minutes. But by default, yeah, shoot for the 10 or 12. The third ingredient may surprise you. You want to post 5 or more episodes per week. So, how do you do that if you’re a business owner or if you’ve got a busy schedule? When my clients come to Utah, we film 20 episodes in a single day. And posting 5 episodes a week, that gives us four weeks worth of content. So, we found a systematic way to film in bulk so that we can be a lot more efficient with our time. You know, whether you do that exact approach or not, I do recommend filming in batches or filming in bulk. So that you can be more efficient. Whatever way you work it out, 5 episodes a day. For some reason, the YouTube algorithm really likes that level of consistency or more. And when you do that and you have the fourth ingredient that so I’m going to tell you about in a minute, then at that 4 month mark, you’re going to have a spike. So, for the first 4 months, you’re posting, posting 5 episodes a week. It’s a lot of work and it’s kind of weird because you don’t have a lot of activity. Meaning you’re not getting a lot of views. You’re not getting a huge surge of subscribers. It’s just growing bit by bit. But then on that 4 month mark, YouTube really starts to promote you and you experience what we call a spike. So you’ll get… You might go from 500 views in a day, channel wide to 10,000 views in a day. And you think, “Wow! This is amazing.” A few weeks later, you get 30,000 views in a day. “Wow, this is more amazing.” So, that’s what I mean by spikes. And it happens with these four ingredients. So, I’ve shared with you 3. Keyword research before filming, you’ve got 10 or 12 minutes per episode, 5 episodes per week. And that fourth ingredient is you want your average view duration to be 45%. If it’s a 10-minute episode, you’ve got a retention rate of 45%, you’re going to have an average iteration of 4 and a half minutes. That’s the minimum. I love to try and shoot for 6, 6 and a half, 7 minutes of average watch time or average view duration. If you’re posting videos to YouTube and they’re getting a good click-through rate, you know, you’re following these other steps through 10 to 12 minutes in length but you’re only getting a minute or a minute a half or 2 minutes of retention rate or average view duration, you’re probably not going to experience a spike at that 4 month mark. And that’s painful because you’re you’re working a lot to make all of these episodes. The great thing is is that YouTube analytics will tell all this to you. The analytics will tell you which videos have a higher retention rate or have a higher average view duration. And you can compare it to those that are performing less. So, dive in. Follow the first 3 ingredients and then study the analytics to see “Am i keeping people’s attention?” And you know, just as a bonus tip. Some things that you can do to increase average view duration is in the beginning of your episode, let people know why they’re here. Like, “In this video, I’m going to teach you ABC.” All right, now they know they’re in the right place. And then summarize what’s coming up in the video. You know, “First, I’m going to answer that question then I’m going to share a story of how this applied. And then I’m going to teach you the 3 steps of how you can make it really effective in your business.” Then I’ll give you some concluding advice at the end that will really help you understand the whole picture. So, just by summarizing what people are going to expect and getting experience in your video, you’ll get people that will watch the whole video or watch it a lot longer. One other side piece of advice is when you do the keyword research before filming, people are finding what they’re searching for. And those people are much more likely to watch the whole video and so that will give you a higher average view duration. Now, there’s another video that I made that I recommend you watch now. It’s my leaf strategy video. And that’s all about how to do this keyword research for filming. You’ll know, how to find the questions that people are searching for so head over there now and check that video.