What I Learned From Making $500k in YouTube Adsense transcript

I have made over $500,000 on YouTube AdSense alone over the course of 470 videos. So, while that's over $1,000 per video on average, focusing on AdSense was one of the worst mistakes that I made when it came to my income. And for years, that made my income be about 10 times lower than it should have been. And so, if you're trying to make money on YouTube, watch this video so you don't make the same mistakes that I did. that once I fix them, pretty much about 10x my income.

For years, I thought if I could just make a couple hundred to $1,000 per video, that would be solid, right? I make 52 videos a year. I post once a week on my main channel. And if I average $1,000 per video, that's $52,000 per year. All the stuff that goes into outsourcing YouTube, even slightly, can be a little bit expensive. And so, that wouldn't even be a livable wage after I paid my editor. And so it took me a couple years to learn this, but AdSense should be the smallest way that you make money, and it should be the last thing you focus on.

I don't actually look at my AdSense on any of my channels. I've mentioned this before, but I have a channel with 700 subscribers that's made $40,000, and it's not even monetized. Like, monetization is is kind of stupid unless you're averaging crazy views, right? It was focusing on how much I was making per video and trying to figure out a higher paying niche and and different topics to talk about that would pay me more AdSense.

If all your YouTube money comes through AdSense, well, what happens if you know people stop having interest in your videos and they don't get as many views as they used to? Your your income is just going to dry up. And naturally, pretty much every year my income will go down by like 50% and then it'll uh be about triple that for a month and then it'll drop down by 50% and then another 50. It's like all over the place.

And if I relied on that to pay my bills, it would be incredibly stressful and just a very bad experience overall. It was a very bad experience for multiple years. Trust me. A couple other mistakes that I made very on was undervaluing myself. I was getting thousands of views per video and I just accepted free t-shirts to do multiple integrations. And uh that was definitely a mistake. I realize now that even if you're a small creator, you're averaging a couple hundred to a couple thousand views per video without AdSense at all.

Whether it's by a sponsorship or by your own monetization systems, you can make easily $1,000 per video without AdSense. Right? Like even though I only average a few thousand views per video on this channel, a sponsorship can still be a couple thousand. And again, that should just be one of the the many ways that you make money. And for me, at the beginning, I didn't value myself at all. I didn't realize that I had value for brands, for exposure, and especially when you're niche content, you have a lot of value for brands.

And averaging a,000 views for a video, if you're actually very niched in what you talk about, you could probably make at least $1,000 per sponsorship, which is, you know, 50 cents to a dollar per view, which is kind of crazy. Definitely not the AdSense model. And I'm not saying this is true across everything. Some niches make you no money at all. And that's why like it's important to pick a niche that actually has a potential to make money and make sure that that aligns with everything.

That's a whole another process. So, it took me about I think four years on YouTube to shift from paycheck to portfolio on my YouTube channel. And I think this is something you should really think about, especially as you're getting started, you're trying to make money. So, when you have a portfolio, you can drastically change how much money you're making. So, if you can go from saying like, "Hey, you could sponsor uh a main channel video.

That's all I make money." Well, when you can have a whole portfolio of things that make you money, everything's going to change, right? So, instead of just saying, "All right, I got 50,000 views. I made a few hundred bucks. It hardly paid for my editor and YouTube sucks. Nobody makes any money. Everybody who does is lying." That's one direction. Number two is you turn that into a portfolio. That same exact video, that same exact amount of views.

Now you have a sponsor in it. Now you have affiliates that are worked in. Now you have lead magnets that bring to an email list. And maybe you have shorts or other platforms. You now take that thing that made you no money. You can possibly get a sponsor on it or sponsor it yourself if you have your own product. And then you can talk about it in a short, you can talk about it in your email list, you can talk about it in long form.

And let's say a brand was going to pay you $1,000. When you lump in the other things, maybe now it pays you $1,500 or $2,000. Plus, that's still working for yourself cuz you're collecting emails out of it or you're getting affiliates. So now each video has like five different ways to monetize. And it doesn't super matter how many views they get. as long as they are the right people, you're having a chance at making money so many different ways that one of them is going to click.

Now, what this is going to look like on each channel is going to be different. Like sometimes it's 20 30% AdSense and then like 60% sponsors and 10% affiliates and self-products. Other times it's 5% AdSense and 80% self-products and then a little bit of affiliate stuff. On another channel that I have, it's like 90% affiliates and 10% sponsors and zero AdSense, right? This is drastically going to change depending on your strategy.

But the main thing with all of those is that AdSense is always the last way you should think about making money. And if that's the first way you're thinking about, you will never make money on YouTube unless you go super viral, which is incredibly hard to do. This is where I had my aha moment kind of. And I realized that I need to solve bigger problems for people. And so that's one of the reasons why proportionately my smaller channels make anywhere from 5 to 20 times more than my big channel.

Like proportionately. And and that's why I've been focusing more on smaller things this year is because even with a few hundred subscribers or a few thousand subscribers, you can make a full-time income on YouTube. And when you realize that and you focus on that first instead of trying to get views first, how you make your videos changes. If your goal is to make money on YouTube and your way of making money is affiliates, you make incredibly different videos than if you're trying to make AdSense, right?

If the main way you make money is through one-on-one coaching, the way you make your videos, the tone you use, the subjects you choose, the way you shoot your videos is all going to change because you're trying to make money in a different way. You're trying to reach different people. And so, if you don't know who you're trying to reach, you're just trying to reach views, it's going to be really hard to make money. And so, this is also why systems beat spikes.

My graph looks a little up and down. It is all over the place. I've had $20,000 months with AdSense and then it's dropped down to like $3,000 after that and it's just all over the place, right? And so if you're constantly riding these spikes, these highs and lows of YouTube, you're probably going to get burned out and quit to be honest. But you need systems to actually make this doable. not only like systems to run your channel on 2 to 5 hours a week like what I talk about in the 5-hour YouTuber, but also consistent ways to make money that whether you're getting a few hundred views or a few thousand or tens of thousands of views, they all have a chance to consistently make money.

And those ways of making money, it can be an evergreen mini offer. This could be a cohort style. This could be sponsor packages. There are lots of ways to make sustainable income so you're not riding the highs and lows. I've seen this so many times where people will make great money and then no money for a few months and then great money and then no money and just the stress will make them quit and go back to the safety and security of a job.

But that's because they're just randomly taking whatever the algorithm gives them. So I'll just say on the main channel I've had incredible success. I'm about to pass 700,000 subscribers um averaging tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of views per video. And I'll just say this channel was not built correctly. I am slowly like terraforming it, but it was not built correctly to make money. And so, if I could encourage you to do anything, it would be from the very very get-go like I have done with the the the new channels that I've started, start the channel that has a chance to make you a full-time income with a few thousand subscribers.

That is incredibly doable if it is built correctly. If you're interested in doing that, I totally recommend following a proven path. When I started, the reason I didn't make money is because I was winging everything myself. And so, and so that's why actually over the past like 2 or 3 years, I've been obsessing over just taking everything I've learned from the past 7 years on YouTube and condensing it all and putting it down into actionable steps that other people can follow.

And this isn't like and one of the things that bugs me is when people teach how to grow on YouTube, but all their experience is just teaching other people how to grow on YouTube instead of ever being successful themselves. And so I think that's one of the things that makes what I built a 5-hour YouTuber so different is because I've actually done it in a bunch of different ways. And then I just kind of packaged it into a way that almost anybody can follow these steps.

Whether you're just getting started or you have an established channel, you can follow proven things that just work on YouTube and ideally save an insane amount of time and just follow step byep on how to make better content. And so that's what I I teach inside the 5hour YouTuber. It's how to come up with proven ideas, how to actually make money from day one and find a niche and a an idea and a product and and an income stream out of all the ways to make money on YouTube.

Different ones work for different niches. Like I talked about, I have three different ways I make money. And so I break down the different ways that you can make money and it's not the same for every space. So I don't know if you're interested in checking that out, there's there's a link to that below. I hate selling it, but like I know it's better than almost anything else out there. So but if you do want to check that out, there's a link down below.

Hopefully this gave you some value. I'll keep dropping as much value as I can here for free. Thank you so much for watching. I'm going to drink some coffee. What do you think of this thing? It's got a hood. Never had one with a hood before. Feel weird.