Have you thought about starting a small business or “side hustle” to make extra money in your spare time? Did you know that you can make money with videos? Many people are. There are literally dozens upon dozens of ways that video entrepreneurs (“vtreps”) have found to not only make a part-time income working with video but to start very profitable full-time businesses, too.
And you don’t have to be a “filmmaker” with a Hollywood studio set or any sort of fancy camera equipment. Most often, a quality smartphone, free video editing software, some light, and a healthy imagination is all you really need.
Do you like creating videos and sharing them online? If that’s the thing that you like to do, why don’t you start making money with your videos? There are many opportunities that you can use to make money with your videos right now. Usually, these money making methods imply making interesting videos and sharing your videos online in order to attract more viewers to your videos and monetizing the traffic that you get in your videos. However, there are many other types of video-related businesses that you can get going very quickly to make money with videos as well.
Here are 5 ways you can make money with videos and get started in less than one day:
1. Upload Your Videos To YouTube
This is probably the most common way that most video entrepreneurs begin to start making money with videos. It’s drop-dead simple to do and doesn’t require a large investment in video equipment to get started:
- Create a channel on YouTube
- Start uploading videos to your channel regularly.
When you start to accumulate viewers and you start to build the number of subscribers to your channel, you can sign up to monetize your videos by allowing YouTube to display ads on your videos. The more views your videos get, the more money that you will earn from those who view or click on your video ads. You can start a YouTube channel today but earnings will take a long while to build over time unless you manage to strike gold and create a viral video right off the bat. There are other ways to make money with your YouTube channel as well, though, which we detail in other articles here on Video Entrepreneur Magazine:
7 Very Profitable Ways to Make Money with YouTube Videos
Top 10 Ways to Make Money with YouTube Videos
2. Produce Videos or Offer A Video Related Service to Others
There are many people that want to start making money with videos, but they are incapable of creating professional quality videos for themselves. You can help these people to create high-quality videos for their project on a freelance basis. In this way, you can accept their orders to create, edit or even market videos and get paid for the services that you give them. Of course, you can also offer your video production service locally for special events, such as weddings and business conferences.
3. Create Video Lessons
If you are a subject matter expert in a certain niche or topic, it’s a great idea for you to start creating training videos related to your niche. How-to and tutorial videos, help your audience learn more information about a subject they are interested in, as well as to solve their problems. For instance, if you are a fitness instructor, you can create video lessons about how to do exercises to lose weight, how to do exercises to gain muscle, how to do certain exercises correctly, etc.
You can offer your videos via a subscription service, where your clients pay a monthly or yearly fee for continued access to your videos, you can offer them online on a pay-per-view basis or you can sell your videos as a bundle via download or by sending them on disc or other memory storage device. You can potentially make money with videos starting today by creating and selling tutorial videos.
4. Sell Your Stock Footage
Similar to stock photos, there are also online services that sell stock footage for commercial use. These stock videos and “b-roll” clips are usually used by commercial video producers to complete their projects. If you are able to create professional videos of interesting subjects, you can start selling your stock footage through those websites and make money with videos right away. Keep in mind that if you sell stock footage through these websites you will split revenue of all sales of your videos the service provider that hosts your stock footage; they host the video, handle the transactions and market their website. If your videos have a particular subject or focus, like underwater video footage, for example, you can also sell stock footage directly through your own website. If you have a large enough reach, you could potentially start making with your videos very quickly, but for most video entrepreneurs it will take a while to build a profitable market.
5. Affiliate Advertising and Selling Product Placement on Viral Videos
Another way to make money with videos is to create or acquire the rights to viral videos and then sell product placement or affiliate products through those videos. Viral videos are short pieces that people will enjoy watching and sharing. You can create inspiring, funny, controversial or emotional videos and share them via your social media accounts hoping that your social connections will comment and share your videos among their friends and that they will share them with their friends, too – but that is the hard way; there’s no guarantee a video will go viral and you may make one hundred of them before watching a video catch on and spread like wildfire.
There is a lot of untapped opportunity in videos that are just beginning to trend or go viral, however. If you pay close attention to various social media channels you can find videos that are just beginning to get attention. Find the source or creator of the video and make them an offer to split the revenue with them in return for placing advertisements and appropriate affiliate links. If you gain enough experience watching videos go viral, you will learn to spot videos before they begin to trend and learn the best ways to “help” a great video to go viral. With this experience, you will find opportunities to make money with videos earlier and get a better revenue split because the video’s creator may not know that he or she is sitting on a gold mine.
Just don’t be a dick and steal other people’s videos in order to make money off of them using these methods.
That’s 5 easy ways to start making money with videos right now. I dare you to try one or more of them! Perhaps you’ll start earning a steady income from your videos or video related services and stop starving your art.
You can thank me later.
Do you have a way to make money with videos that someone can get started in a day or less? Tell us about it in the comments below!
Comments (1)
Williamsays:
October 25, 2017 at 10:33 amI’ve never tried in this making video field. Maybe I will after reading your helpful article. Thanks a lot, Scott. https://williamreview.com/lifetime-studio-fx-review-best-graphics-tools/