Top 10 Ways to Make Money on YouTube

Want to make money online?

Consider working with YouTube!

YouTube gets more than one billion unique users a month: that’s a huge audience. Many entrepreneurial filmmakers are already making money there: YouTube boasts one million creators in its YouTube Partner Program alone. It’s easy to get started and the time in NOW to become a video entrepreneur. Use Google’s creator playbook. Before you know it you’ll have created your channel and will be ready to monetize. Below are ways you can make money with your YouTube channel.

1. Use YouTube to get traffic to your website and blog.

If you have a freelance website or blog which brings in income, you need traffic. Many websites were hard-hit by Google’s Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates. If this happened to you, you’re hurting. You can use YouTube to not only regain traffic, but also increase it. Get started using the Creator Playbook. Once you’re set up, consider repurposing some older content into videos, as well as creating new videos. Make sure that you link to your own website in the first line of your video descriptions, so you can funnel your YouTube traffic to where you want it to go.

2. Create products, do market research and promote them on YouTube.

If you’re creating your own products or would like to, YouTube offers unlimited ways for you to promote your products and make sales. Products you can create include eBooks, apps, art, and music. Create your products, and add them to a shopping cart. Then use YouTube to promote them. As we mentioned above, add a link to your product in your video’s description, so that viewers can buy.

YouTube is an amazing resource for market research, too – you can soon discover whether your brilliant, innovative idea is likely to be profitable. For example, if you’ve got an idea for a product, but need funding, create some videos before you create a Kickstarter.com campaign. The views and comments on your videos will tell you whether your idea is viable in its present form. The YouTube audience can even help you to make it viable, so that your efforts to get funding are successful.

3. Sell others’ products as an affiliate marketer.

“Affiliate marketing” means selling products in exchange for a commission. Hundreds of thousands of companies offer attractive deals to affiliate marketers who promote their products, including huge companies, like Amazon and eBay, as well as smaller companies. Additionally, there are many affiliate networks you can join. These networks include Click-Bank, Commission Junction, and ShareASale.com.

To make money from YouTube as an affiliate marketer, review your affiliate products on video, or create “how to use this product” tutorials, don’t forget to link to your products in your YouTube descriptions, make sure you’re using your affiliate link, or you won’t get credit for sales.

4. Get creative: Create a Web TV series.

Love telling stories? YouTube lets you create your own Web TV shows. You’re limited only by your imagination… and your budget. You can create a comedy series, a drama series, or your own talk show. Be aware that YouTube limits your show’s length to 15 minutes until you’ve become a partner. To upload longer videos, you’ll need to increase your limit. If you’re a frustrated filmmaker, TV producer or screenwriter, get a few friends together, and record your own TV shows. You never know. If you get lots of views, you may develop a new career.

5. Become a YouTube personality.

YouTube stars can make a lot of money. BlueXephos for example, has almost a billion channel views. At $7 per thousand video views, the income soon mounts up. If you’ve got quirky ideas, or are passionate about your interests but are camera shy? Get over your fears of being on camera and develop your YouTube channel! You never know, you may be the next YouTube star.

6. Monetize your videos with the YouTube Partner Program.

After you’ve created several videos, and spent time building subscribers to your YouTube channel, it’s time to join the YouTube Partner Program. All you need to do is enable your channel for monetization, and you’ll receive your share of the income from advertising on YouTube. Just as the YouTube stars do, you’ll get paid for each thousand views on your videos.

7. Teach: share your knowledge with tutorials.

Tutorials are huge on YouTube. If you know how to do something, you can teach others, and make money from your videos. Beauty and fashion videos are insanely popular.

8. Become an expert on metadata: use keywords to get an audience and offer your expertise to others.

One hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE. This means that there’s huge competition for attention. You need to do everything you can to ensure that your videos get found. Your videos’ meta data will help. “Meta data” is data which gives information about your videos. In its Creator Playbook, YouTube tells you how to create your meta data:

YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, and it uses metadata – your video’s title, tags and description – to index your video correctly. To maximize your presence in search, promotion, suggested videos and ad-serving, make sure your meta data is well optimized.

Optimizing your videos for search makes the difference between success and failure, so be sure to do it. Once you get the hang of ranking YouTube videos well, you can search for hidden gems, really great videos not getting the attention or ranking they deserve, and offer your video optimization services to the creators. You could also create an online video series and sell access through YouTube’s pay per view program, too.

9. Build your brand using YouTube.

As marketing guru Tom Peters pointed out way back in 1997, you’re a brand, and you have power. YouTube helps you to amplify YOU. Whatever you’re doing, and whatever your job, YouTube can help you to become known for your strengths, and make money. Even if you have no clear idea on how you could make money on YouTube, get started creating videos about your interests. You may just stumble across a gold mine… just as the people who turned their pets into stars have done.

10. Turn your child or pet into a star (and make money)!

Two cats, Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat, started out on YouTube, and have become worldwide stars, with book details.

“You do not have to be a singer to become a YouTube star. If you are lucky, you could shoot a video of your child, pet, or a double rainbow that strikes a chord and goes viral.”

So keep your video camera handy or, better yet, learn to shoot great video with your mobile phone, which you’ll probably have with you most of the time any way. If you see something cute, video it, and upload the video. You never know who or what will be the next video sensation. Create that sensation and you’ll make money.

So there you have it – ten creative ways video entrepreneurs can make money on YouTube! With hundreds of hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute, video content is clearly not a passing fad and YouTube is only one way that Vtreps are using the power of video to build their own businesses! What are you waiting for? The time is NOW to become a video entrepreneur.

Do you have additional ideas about how to make money on YouTube? Tell us about them in the comments below!