8 Ways To Make Money On Youtube That's Not Adsense transcript

I made $20,000 from this YouTube channel that isn't even monetized. In fact, AdSense and monetization is by far the worst way to make money on YouTube. I've made over six figures in most of these areas I'm going to talk about. From my large channel all the way up to brand new channels making thousands of dollars from the very first video with just a few thousand views. So, if you're someone who's trying to grind to get to 4,000 hours of watch time and 1,000 subscribers, just like stop bothering with that.

These are some actual ways to make money and some terrible ways to make money. Let's just dive into it. Let's start with begging. If you're brand new, you're not monetized yet, you're in the early stages, you can make money from begging or trading. This involves you reaching out to companies. As you get bigger, they'll start reaching out to you. But you need to start by reaching out. Even with under 1,000 subscribers, you can reach out to small companies, to small businesses, to different brands, and ask if they will give you 50 bucks or 100 bucks or 300 bucks or 500 bucks to mention them in a video.

If you're not providing value and actually reaching people and making decent videos that are helpful, you're probably not going to make money. But let's say you have a channel about your state and it's a travel channel and you make good videos, but they don't get a ton of views. Well, that's not super valuable to like big brands, but to a restaurant, if they can get in front of a couple hundred people who are really interested in travel in this state, well, that's worth money to them.

It's worth hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars depending on what they sell. So, you can start reaching out to hundreds of companies and make hopefully enough money to at least get somebody to edit your videos. Or you can do what I did on my other brand new channel where I reached out to about 50 sauna brands and I offered to make a video for them on my channel in exchange for a free sauna worth about 500 bucks.

And all of them said no. Yeah, it kind of sucked. But one of them agreed to send me a sauna if I would shoot a video and give that video back to them for them to post on their own Instagram as ads. This is called UCG. Uh, actually a ton of brands do this. They'll just trade random influencers who are tiny as long as you can make decent quality videos and prove that you can make those. They'll trade you a product for a video.

They don't even care about your channel or your audience. They just care that you are good with the camera. And you can get hundreds or even thousands of dollars of free products. I've gotten about $7,000 worth of saunas and cold plunges in the past year from simply doing that. But that didn't happen by accident. I gained skills of how to make good videos. And then I targeted an exact area that I thought I could help. and I reached out to pretty much everybody I could possibly find in that area.

So, that's a possibility for number one to get started. Now, before we get to some of the more scalable six-figure ones that I've done, I would say link dropping is an amazing one. I want to show you three channels. One's incredibly small, one's very large, and all of them make thousands to millions of dollars. Let me show you. We'll start off with my review channel. Uh, this is the one that's made $20,000 and it has 14 videos.

All of them take under an hour to make. They're very simple videos, but it's all 100% affiliate. So, I'll do my honest review on a product. I will get an affiliate link which you can just sign up for anywhere or ask for for most of the brands and they're happy to give it to you because it costs them nothing and then you can keep making money. Like almost every day I make like 50 bucks from this which is crazy. Let me show you a larger brand.

This is Central Media. Nate O'Brien and his brother do this and a lot of this is affiliate income and it's very very targeted. So you can see almost all of these are how to set up Amazon, how to do chat GBT, Tik Tok shop affiliate. And if you go into any one of these videos, you're going to see Shopify, you're going to see LLC, you're going to see different links, you're going to see ads, Snapchat ads, uh Beehive, then of course a lead magnet, which we'll get to in a second.

And even though these videos are not getting a ton of views, some of them do. All of these are built around affiliates. They might be getting flat fees as well, but everybody who's typing this in is interested in opening up a Tik Tok shop and doing affiliate marketing. So the chances that they open a Shopify or something like that is very large. And if they open a Shopify, they might make a $100, $200 for any one of those links that they are recommending.

So you get 17,000 people, get 100 people to sign up, now you're making 10 grand. And maybe that's spread out over, you know, the course of a year or 5 years. And then you do that 200 times. Now you're talking hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. probably I'm guessing this is a six figure a month business while making one video a week between two separate people and that's literally insane. They only started this a couple years ago.

And this is just one example of affiliate and they're probably getting flat fees as well, but affiliate marketing done really well. And I actually know a bunch of other friends who do this in very extremely hyper niches from co-plunches and saunas like I do to digital products and side hustles like this to like different software things and everything is built around helping people get started and getting affiliates for very specific things.

And when you are doing this, you want to target high ticket affiliate stuff. So these again are probably going to make anywhere from $50 to a couple hundred per signup. Same thing with my high ticket saunas and cold plunges. $50 is like the minimum up to $100 to $200 is what I would get when somebody buys one. Whereas for instance, I use this day planner and I get affiliate for that and I get 15 bucks for signup. So I have to convert so many more people in order to make the same amount of money.

Or I could just make hyperargeted stuff for high ticket products and I end up making a lot more money that way. And that's something that pretty much anybody who knows how to make good YouTube videos and understands like the basics of the algorithm can do. All right, let's move on to the next one. And that is to sell a solution. If you know how to do something really, really well, then you can create a product and sell the solution to other people.

If you know how to garden extremely well and you can guarantee that people will grow twice as many vegetables in half the amount of time and you can package all that knowledge and information together and charge $97 for it and you know maybe the average person will grow an extra $200 worth of food. So cuz you actually know what they're doing and they just don't know what they're doing with anything. Well, if you have a channel that is hyperargeted towards those people who are on YouTube specifically to solve their problem of their produce not growing, then it will be very easy, not very easy because there is like a lot of learning curve that you'll have to go through on how to market and psychology and you know building a website and whatnot.

But it will be relatively simple to target those people and then sell them a product that fixes their problem because they're literally on YouTube to fix their problem. So, if you have knowledge that you can fix people's problems and you can create a digital product, you make it once and then you target those people even without being monetized, you can start making money. I have a friend who has just a few thousand subscribers.

He gets a couple hundred to a,000 views per video and he had one video that got 3,000 views that made him $11,000 because he offered coaching and his program. And he makes like 20K plus a month with 5,000 subscribers. All because he has a coaching program and digital products. not a huge audience, not crazy numbers, but hyperargeting people who he can fix their problem because he has expertise and he spent, you know, thousands of hours learning the skills that fix people's problems very quickly.

And not to do like a self plug here, and this is exactly what I did last year. The year before I launched my 5-hour YouTuber program where we've had actually two people leave their jobs through it where I teach everything about how to make YouTube videos and then especially how to monetize your channel correctly by making an impact in people's lives and solving issues for them and how I'm able to run you know multiple channels on 5 hours a week by building systems which is really cool.

So while I hate promoting stuff we did just open the doors if you want to check that out. Uh there's a link down below. We we only open it a couple times a year, but like 15 people have messaged asking for coaching in the past couple weeks and so I'm opening it up again. The next thing to do is to start a friend club. Right now, despite how connected everybody is, a lot of people feel like they want to connect with more people.

Like I have people that I follow, I watch on YouTube cuz they're like my friend and I want to see what's going on in their lives. And you can join communities and get around a bunch of like-minded people who are into pickle ball with you, who are into finances with you. For me, it's like nerdy stuff like minimalism or YouTube. Like I don't know a single other person in my real life who does YouTube that I haven't met like online or at a conference.

That's the only way I meet other creators pretty much. And so you can create a free community for your people and then eventually monetize that through courses, coaching or charging a monthly fee for it. This is something that got really popular with school. And again, you're providing value by creating a place where like-minded people can get together for free or for a lower dollar a month and you can create monthly reoccurring revenue as long as you continue to provide value to those people.

And again, I have done this and I know people who make five figures a month doing this. But a lot of these come back to targeting the right people with your YouTube channel. Now, this next one is actually a horrible way to make money, but I see a lot of small creators doing it. So, I want to mention it, and that is like a like a tip jar or buy me coffee or check out my merch. Don't do that. Okay. On my other channel, I had hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

I made merch. I sold like 20 t-shirts when I did a merch drop. Mentioned it in two videos. I probably could have made $10,000 if I had mentioned something else. And I didn't make any money. Actually, I lost money on that. Don't do merch. Unless you're like a big entertainment type of channel, maybe targeting like kids or like very like cultlike following. Don't make merch. Don't do a buy me coffee. Don't do a Patreon.

It might make you 10, 20, 50, $100, $200 a month if you're extremely lucky. Or you could make a digital product that literally helps people improve their lives and sell two of them or get like, you know, 50 people to donate five bucks. That is definitely not the correct math uh on that. But the fact is a lot of people, especially smaller creators, don't think that they're worthy to help somebody with a problem or don't think that they can do affiliate or don't think that they can get a small brand deal.

But the amount of effort that you put into making a merch drop or doing a you know a Patreon that really doesn't make any money is just like it works for very very few people. Whereas a lot of these other ones especially if you're offering large solutions are so much easier to monetize with a small audience. A lot of those if it revolves around again $5, $10, $20 profit at a time. The scale of how many people you need to sell to is incredible as opposed to $100 or $1,000 product. like to make $1,000, you do one uh sale of a high ticket product.

You set 10 sales, you know, like a $97 digital product, or you're doing like this many buy me copies. Like, this is way less effort than this. Trust me, I have done it. I have tried this. It does not work. So, another way that you might not think of is a side hustle. So, I gained the skills of YouTube by failing at YouTube for years. And I'd never picked up a camera before that. But, I learned how to make decent videos.

And I actually turned that into a side hustle. You know, if YouTube hadn't worked out, it probably would have been my thing, to be honest. where I started filming things for like City Foster Care, believe it or not. I did like real estate photography and videos. I made videos for other people and I charge them money. And I was able to make like 500 bucks a day by having the skill of being a good videographer. So even though I wasn't making money at YouTube at the time, I was making, you know, hundreds of dollars a month, sometimes thousands a month by just having the skill of being good at making videos, which I learned over a couple years trying and failing to grow on YouTube.

I also have a friend who learned how to edit really well and now his channel is doing pretty good. But he got offered hundred,000 and then $300,000 a year to edit for somebody because he learned the skill of being really good at editing. So if his channel ever doesn't work out, he can definitely make minimum $300,000 a year editing because he took two and a half three years obsessing and learning how to edit really well.

I also have another friend who learned the marketing side of YouTube. So even though his YouTube channel isn't super successful, he helps other creators with theirs because he learned again spending years of his life learning how to do marketing and now he can help other creators. So while he got into the niche by trying to do his own thing, it ended up helping other people and being really successful at their backend stuff.

So there are a lot of different ways that you can monetize your YouTube channel. Now, when it does come to AdSense, it is pretty cool. I have friends who make a lot of money doing it. I have made a lot of money doing it, but I've also had it go from 20,000 a month to $3,000 a month inside of a year because you have like two videos that do bad or you have two videos that do good and it drastically changes like everything that is super super stressful if that's what you're relying on.

But when you have like four ways that you make money and most of them doesn't matter with as much with the views because you're really targeting people like the stress is just so so much less. So you don't have to totally discount AdSense unless you're like an entertainer and you're getting millions of views a video. It's probably going to be the most stressful way to make money. Now, if you want to create your own digital product or your own offer, I'm going to leave a link down below for a 21-day free challenge.

You can check it out. It's pretty much everything you need to know from finding your target audience to creating and making your first dollar online inside a 21-day course. It's very simple and provable path. Or if you want to work with me directly, feel free to join the cohort when we have that open. We've had two people leave their jobs in the past year and the goal is to get to a hundred because this is such a great way where you get paid to help people and do what you love.

I just so passionate about this. So, hope you enjoyed this. Don't forget to subscribe and all the stuff.