The Truth About Going Full-Time on YouTube (after 5 years) transcript

When I took the leap to go full-time on YouTube, I was making about $500 a month. And I have now been full-time on YouTube for 6 years almost. And I wanted to share some lessons, some things that I learned for those people who think that it's impossible. And also for those people who are wondering um you know, if they should take the leap. First of all, I want to say that if you think that YouTube is easy, on one hand, it is.

It it is easy if you do this compared to I used to do construction. Construction's way harder than YouTube, right? YouTube is easy. But that being said, if you expect it to be quick, you expect it to be a get-richquick thing. You expect it to be actually easy, it it it's not. This is a lot of work. It's not manual hard work, but it is mental work. It is a a long time to start seeing results. So, that would be one thing. it it would be, are you willing to do what it takes to go full-time on YouTube?

You can pretty much have anything you want in life, right? You can become a millionaire. You can have abs. You can do anything you want. The question is, are you willing to do what it takes in order to get that thing? You might say that you want abs. Most people do. And yet, like 1% of men uh above the age of 35 actually have abs. So, everybody wants abs, but not many people are willing to do what it takes in order to get abs.

But the question with YouTube is the same thing, right? Are you willing to put in the work that it is going to take to gain the skills of YouTube and actually start making money and be able to go full-time? For me, I had this obsession. I had this excitement. I thought it was super duper fun. And therefore, it was easy for me to put in the nights, the weekends, the grind, the the nots stop, the learning, the going to seminars.

I literally just bought a flight to go to another seminar that I've been to like three times now, four times now. Um, and that's something that like I'm always willing to do because I'm excited about it, right? So, the question is, are you willing to do what it takes in order to go full-time on YouTube? So, the next thing that you need to shift before you you start getting to that path is is well, really two steps here.

First of all, how much are you spending? I just got a a question from somebody on my Instagram. He's thinking about quitting his job, going full-time uh as a content creator. He's making about $5,000 a month, which is awesome. Uh he's like 24 years old. And he was wondering like, should he take this leap? And the one question that I asked him was not like uh you know, does he have the skills? It it wasn't like anything that you would think about his job.

It was actually how much money does he spend, right? He spent he's at $1,000 a month. So, he's probably living at home or something. I'm not really sure, but that is crazy. So, actually, your finances in general will be a big determining factor if you're successful on YouTube because it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. And if you're able to step away from your job, there's going to be some financial risk.

So, if your finances are in a terrible spot, you actually might not become a successful creator if you're in a lot of debt and you don't have time because you're working multiple jobs just to pay the bills and like all this type of stuff. So, actually focusing on your finances, which is a lot of what I talk about on my main channel, can give you opportunities to get lucky and make it on YouTube. When I quit my job, I was making, like I said, $500 a month from YouTube at the time when I quit my job.

And the reason that I was able to take that leap is cuz I had other assets that paid me every single month. I had uh very low expenses. I was in that couple thousand a month, $1,000 a month. And if you only have, you know, let's say $1,000 a month uh for expenses or $2,000 a month for expenses, and then you have $25,000 saved up, you have 1 to two years worth of living expenses that you can pay for. So, you have that opportunity to take that jump.

I don't think a lot of people think about or talk about when it comes to YouTube, like, oh, should you take that leap? Like, the rest of your finances are really, really important when it comes to this. And then that brings us to the second point, and that is subscribers do not equal income. Some people can make a lot of money. I've had my third channel, which is like a product review channel, has made $40,000 in the past couple years with 600 subscribers.

Stupid, right? Um, but the reason that it makes that much money is not because of subscribers. I'm not monetized even. Like, that doesn't matter. When you're thinking about taking this leap, you don't look about like, how many subscribers do I have? How many views do you have to get in order to start making money? None of that really matters. Like that doesn't make any difference. What matters is like do you have monetization systems in place?

Do you have multiple monetization systems in place? Because if you get, let's say, uh you do some affiliate marketing, which I do affiliate marketing. I that's like one of the many streams of income that I have. But if you have affiliate marketing set up and then one of your sponsors, it all comes like all of your income, you're making $5,000 a month. You're like, I should go full-time right now. This is great. But it all comes from one source.

That's incredibly risky. A lot of people that I know who do affiliate marketing, if you become successful at it, the the people will either change their program so that you get hit, they'll change their cookies, they'll change something on the back end, or they'll just get rid of their program once they get to a certain point. That happened to me with like cuts. I I I made a lot of money with them. Um, and then they change something, all my income just went away.

All the years of videos I had done promoting them, it was all gone, right? because my only affiliate was this one shirt brand, which was dumb on my part. Luckily, I had other affiliate uh streams as well. But if you only have one stream of income and it's not something you have complete control over, like your own product or whatever, then it can be very risky to leave your job and do that. So, that's another part. It's like your finances and then also where is your income coming from?

It doesn't matter the sub the like size of your channel as much as your income streams because ultimately subscribers don't pay the bills, dollars pay the bills, right? And you make dollars by fixing people's problems, giving companies more value or whatever. So, um that would be another thing. And for those who are wondering like when you should start trying to make money, when you should start trying to monetize, like, let me tell you, from video one, I made over I think it's close to $4,000 off of this video right here, which is the first video on a brand new channel cuz I had a monetization strategy from day one on my main channel.

Took me like three years to run a profit because I didn't know what I was doing. And now that I know how to make different monetization strategies, you can make money from day one on a brand new channel. So, you never have to wait unless you don't have a clear path, in which case you need to like figure out what the heck you're doing and just kind of learn the skills, learn your niche, all that type of stuff. But then you can monetize from day one.

I have an uh like a super cheap affiliate course I'll leave down below if you're interested in like how I did that. The next thing uh I kind of learned is that YouTube has made me I think a a bit of a better person. But I think in order to be successful on YouTube, you have to have two different mindsets. You have to have service. You have to focus on serving people. You have to get your joy out of like I want to help people.

I want to create things that make people's days better. I want to make the best things I can make. And so, it's kind of two things. It's serving your audience and really focusing on them and how you can make their lives better, easier, um, more enjoyable, whatever it is. And then on the other side, it is do you have a growth mindset? And that's kind of broad. So, what I mean by this is like when it comes to YouTube and like being um like what I do is more educational YouTube.

What most people do is a lot of it is is taking information and you're kind of like repackaging it into other things. So, I read tons of books. I have a wall full of books. I've read well over a hundred just personal finance books. Like I read a lot of books, right? But my main thing that I do on my channel, it is me learning things, implementing it into my own life and then getting feedback from that and then taking that feedback, digesting it, seeing what I could have done better, whatever.

And then I take that information and I share it with people. That is what all of my channels are. Whether it's product reviews, whether it's how to grow on YouTube, whether it's whatever. I never talk about anything I haven't done myself. I take knowledge, I implement it, I try it on myself. I see what's good, what's bad, whatever. I adjust. I try to make it better. And then I report my learnings. And if you don't have a growth mindset, if you're not obsessed about learning, you're going to run out of things to talk about.

You're going to start repeating yourself. You're just not going to have anything new to bring to the table. If you're not implementing all this stuff yourself, then like people won't trust you. So, unless you have a growth mindset, you implement things yourself, then I really don't think that you'll probably be successful long term on uh YouTube. It takes a lot of like continuing to grow, continuing to obsess, continuing uh to like try to learn new things.

And that is like the the trait that I see uh very common in a lot of successful creators is just this obsession with learning and service. Those are the the two main things that I see most successful creators have. And I guess talking about that obsession is like I I think for me, YouTube has become one of my obsessions. And for a lot of creators uh that I see that are successful again it becomes like an obsession for them maybe a little unhealthy maybe it's a autistic thing I don't know whatever it is but like this is your thing right this is what you obset about this is what nobody else really cares about that you love this if that is your thing with YouTube then I think it is only a matter of time and like a matter of things that are learned until you can become successful on YouTube so um as someone who's been a creator on the platform for six plus years been full-time for four or five years.

I don't know how old am I? 29, 25. Yeah. So, five years. That would be my kind of uh advice for you to be like just keep learning for a long time, especially about how to make money with whatever size channel and you can figure it out. If you are interested in working with me directly, I'm going to be opening up my last cohort for like the next 6 months down below where I teach a small group of people live how to do everything that I do.

I get to know every single person individually and help you as much as I can. review your channel, give you monetization tips, teach you everything that I know. So, if you're interested in that, it's going to be the last one for a while because I'm having a kid uh at the end of the year. So, um if you want to get in before then, I'll leave a link. Thanks for watching. Hope this helped. See you next week.