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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
How Small Youtube Channels Can Make $50/Day In 2026
00:52:24
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- [00:00]
A
If you want to learn how to make money on YouTube, then you are in the right place. Because in today's episode, I am interviewing world renowned YouTube expert, Sean Cannell. With over a decade of experience personally running multiple channels with more than 1 million subscribers and being the driving force, strategy and coach behind dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of channels with over 100k subscribers, Sean is truly the go to expert when it comes to YouTube. And in today's episode, he's going to break down the unique opportunity that exists in 2026. Because arguably ever before in the history of YouTube, small channels today can make serious income. And so in today's episode, I'm going to ask him to explain exactly how this is possible and answer some of the hard hitting questions like which niches are best and which different kinds of YouTube channels can make more money. Additionally, I'm going to ask him how you can get started and what your very first YouTube video should be. So whether you already have a YouTube channel and you're trying to gain your next thousand subscribers, or you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel and you want to gain your first thousand subscribers, or most of all, you want to learn how to make $50 per day from your YouTube channel without even needing 1,000 subscribers, then buckle up because you're in the right place. And one last thing before we get into the full interview, I'm going to do what Sean told me to do, which is that I'm going to ask you to subscribe here on this channel. Every single week. I post free educational videos giving you the latest strategies, advice and ideas for growing your small business on social media. So if that's what you're into, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. And without further ado, here's the full interview. Sean, welcome.
- [01:30]
B
Brock. I'm so fired up to be on the podcast with you today.
- [01:34]
A
Fired up to have you. A lot of creators believe that you need millions of views in order to make any money on YouTube. And I want you to start by dispelling that belief. Why is that wrong?
- [01:45]
B
Yeah, so the cool thing is you can make big money on YouTube with a small audience. And actually, I mean, this might be new to some people, but there's a famous article that many have probably heard of before. It's called A Thousand True Fans. And it's kind of the idea that a small focused audience that actually would transact with you in some way for a hundred dollars a year if you had a thousand true fans, that's $100,000 a year. That'd be a six figure income off just a thousand people and just $100. And you have an entire year to do it, meaning it's actually about eight bucks a month. So. Well, Sean, where's that money coming from? If I start a YouTube channel or any social media account, it's like, well, if you have an affiliate link or you're getting paid, because YouTube will eventually pay you for views or you even have your own offer of some kind or membership, community or fan funding like Patreon, when you break down the math, you actually see, okay, I don't need a huge audience to actually make significant money. And so that's one of the things we love helping people with. And if you can take it a little bit deeper when you position yourself right on YouTube specifically, YouTube pays you eventually for views. And it's called RPM. It's how much YouTube pays you for a thousand views. And if you wanted to make like, let's say $50 a day, if you had a $5 RPM, which is very common, you would need 10,000 views a day. Now that's going to take a while to do, but that actually sounds kind of manageable, not millions of views. Like, if your videos and your content you're posting on YouTube is getting 10,000 views a day, you would actually get $50 from YouTube paying you from running ads on those videos. And if you raise the rpm, which is a conversation we could have depending on how you position your topic or your target audience, if your RPM is $10, it'd only be 5,000 views a day. If your RPM was $25, it'd only be 2,000 views a day. Well, Sean, how do I raise my rpm? Well, when you pick a niche, like business or let's say real estate, sometimes maybe if your target audience is a little bit more affluent, if you're helping women in their 40s or women in their 50s, YouTube can understand and advertisers can understand or the, the audience you're getting in front of, even with maybe fitness advice or skin care or these different types of things. So you don't need big numbers, you need the right strategy.
- [04:08]
A
Gotcha, gotcha. Makes sense. So when you're saying $50 a day, even with like a quote unquote small channel, I know you brought up the idea of a thousand true fans that mean you need a thousand subscribers. Like, how small are we talking here?
- [04:20]
B
Yeah. So again, if we break down those numbers, it's like it really depends on what business are you in. And I think when we think about social media, building your tribe, you know, we think about are you in a. Get as many views as possible and let YouTube pay you for views? Are you really promoting other products, affiliate offers of some kind? Are you, do you have your own products or services and what business are you in? Are you in group coaching, one on one coaching? And are brands paying you? So knowing the business you're in is a critical first question. If you wanted to earn $50 a day and let's say you had a $50 digital product, it's really as simple as saying that you would only need to sell one a day. So if you were posting content online and on YouTube and it got you posted a video that got a hundred views and 1% of that audience was like, oh, I want to invest in whatever your, you know, fill in the blank. It could be actually physical products or merchants, then only one individual purchasing that would be, you know, that $50 a day. So that's kind of how I like to think about it that you know, Warren Buffett, the famous investor said the choice of boat that you pick is more important than how hard you row. What does that mean? It was saying like the vehicle that you choose, the boat you choose to get in is more important than actually how much energy and effort you're putting in. So I think for listeners you would strategically reverse engineer what business am I actually in? What would be the best way to am I working so hard to get views? And oftentimes for ad revenue you need a lot more views. Like to make good Money you need 10,000 views, hundreds of thousands of views. And it's kind of less about subscribers is actually how many views do your videos get. You have a viral video, it might pay you 5, 10, $20,000 even if it's just a one off video and your channel's monetized. But that's hard to do and it's hard to go viral all the time. So I like to lean towards what's like a predictable business model that I can be in. And if I'm going to be in brand deals and ad revenue, I also might lean towards, I want to position myself in health and supplements at some way because there could be good big margins there. Who am I partnering with? Am I doing direct selling and would I do that through YouTube? That's all strategic question of the business vehicle that you're choosing for positioning yourself on YouTube.
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A
Gotcha. So I want to, I want to come back to some of these topics and terms that you brought up. But first I know you keep talking about like picking the right vehicle, picking the right boat and like even getting started, like choosing what vehicle, choosing what business you're going to start out with. And I know that pretty soon here you're going to have a little challenge that people can join to like actually get them kickstarted. Can you briefly mention that?
- [07:11]
B
Yeah, we're doing this event totally free. It's called YouTube Growth Sprint. And it's three days and we are going through how to start, how to grow, you know, and a lot of people maybe have already started a YouTube channel, but maybe you kind of fell off, right, you plateaued or you've ignored for a few years. So if you want to restart your channel or you're totally starting from scratch and you're starting to see the opportunity of getting into longer form content, we'll be learning about not just why this is one of the best times to start YouTube. We'll be talking about the changes, but then giving people a simple framework for getting started quick and some accountability, a kick in the pants to like do the work, get videos posted. So yeah, it's called YouTube Growth Sprint. It's going to be a lot of fun. We also do some tech and giveaways and so it's coming up soon.
- [07:55]
A
Sweet. Yeah, we'll definitely, we'll link that up in the, in the show notes below. But you mentioned a few times this a word being affiliate marketing or being an affiliate. And I think there's a different a word that people oftentimes think about with like getting paid by YouTube, which is AdSense. People think about, hey, like you brought up Rpm. How much do I get paid for views? How much do I get paid for views on my reels on Instagram? How much do I get paid for views on a video on YouTube? But what I often tell people on Instagram is that that shouldn't necessarily be your focus. I think there are much more reliable, some people might say, even just flat out better ways to monetize. So tell me more about affiliate marketing and why and how that kind of fits into this puzzle.
- [08:36]
B
Yeah, you know, I think one of my favorite examples and stories around affiliate marketing is one of the people in our community named Jacqueline. She has a YouTube channel called the Wild Floridian. And so she loves gardening. She just shoots simple YouTube videos on her iPhone. She actually doesn't have a fancy mic or anything. She just holds it up, selfie screen and kind of does a vlog of videos in her garden. And sometimes she will literally do that. She'll actually sometimes go 30 days and kind of talk off the cuff, very relational. But other times she's done strategic videos with the intent of having money for the mission, building her income, doing this full time. Eventually she's able to, you know, quit her job full time from YouTube. How? Well, one of the ways is affiliate marketing. And so the first step is to identify basically an affiliate offer that aligns well with your channel and there's like little things that can tie into it. And so she found these, this website that sells raised metal garden beds that are resistant to rust because of this humid, you know, humid climate and whatnot. She finds this website, reputable product. And I think she, she orders one, not super expensive, tries it out. This is amazing. And she also. And this is where you can go deep with affiliate marketing. Let's define it. Affiliate marketing is where you get paid a commission when you promote a product online. You log in, they sign you up, you can have a custom link. And so when someone clicks your link and buys that product, you get a commission on that product. Maybe individuals are familiar that you could sign up for Amazon.com and earn anywhere from 1% to 10% on different products Amazon sells. Well, that's where affiliate marketing gets interesting is because you start thinking about the terms. You start, you start thinking about the total cart value or the alignment with your audience. So she finds out these raised metal garden beds, tries them out, finds out that these are really cool, and also looks at the terms on the website. Actually starts at 10%, but depending on the amount of volume you do, it'll go up to 15 or 20%. And then they actually tell you on the back end. Because when some of these e commerce websites, they could be selling anything, skincare software, whatever, they will have affiliate programs and learning about the terms. So what they actually said was, hey, if you do a certain level of volume, we'll raise you to 15% and if you do even more volume, we'll raise you to 20%. And the average cart value. When people come to this website and they're really into gardening and they want to get some raised garden beds is actually $500 because they order three. You know, they want free shipping. They, whatever it is, that's the average. So when she did this, she started to put out some strategic videos meant to be found solving this problem of what's the best raised garden bed or how you know, raised garden bed six months later, how's it holding up? Product name, a couple different strategic things. And that's some of the Stuff we'll be going deep on is how to identify these opportunities and package the videos on our YouTube growth sprint. But, you know, just for listeners right now, you can do this. What's the video that would attract individuals that are having an intent to solve that problem? They're researching or comparing raised garden beds. Well, here's the cool thing brock is sometimes YouTube can grow slow because in the first year, she earned $1,000 from putting a couple videos out with her affiliate links in the description. But by the second year, she had earned $17,000, and then three years into it, over $55,000 collected in commissions from this one website about raised garden beds. She's posting about three videos a year. And each year a little, you know, strategic, a different angle. And what I would call these. We call these ranked videos. What's a ranked video? It means it's a video that you post today on YouTube that keeps getting views after you post it. You know, maybe we've all we go to YouTube looking for, you know, an answer to a question, or we're searching for something, and you click on a video, it might be six months old, it might be a year old, it might be multiple years old. If it's still informational, if it's still quality. Well, here's the powerful thing. Let's try to simplify. So Jacqueline figures out the perfect affiliate product that ties into her channel for Florida or tropical gardening. She makes strategic videos with her link in the description that people can click on, go to the website and check out. And then she just has kind of a disciplined approach where this is not the only kind of content. It's not like her channel became a product review channel, but it's a strategic piece of her overall content strategy. So she posts a few videos a year, commits to that for three years, and has collected $55,000 on the other side of continuing to talk about it. And some of those videos, ranking, meaning people keep watching them whether she's posting new content or not, whether she's on vacation. And they're really set up to create true passive income or automated income for her, which is so powerful.
- [13:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like step one is, is identifying, like, what kind of vehicle, what kind of boat do I want to have, what kind of, you know, business or lane am I going to be in? And then you're kind of thinking about, like, what products fit into, at least in the affiliate marketing sense, what products fit into this business, what services, what software is, what things am I buying that relate. But my question Is, you know what, at what stage do I start making these affiliate videos? Should I wait till I have a thousand subscribers? Should I do it in my first ever video? It sounds like I'm doing maybe a couple a year. At least. In Jacqueline's case, a couple a year of these rank videos. But at what point do I implement those?
- [14:08]
B
Yeah, so the cool thing is that you can monetize from day one. When you use this strategy to actually get monetized on YouTube, you need a thousand subscribers and 4,4000 hours of watch time within the last 12 months. Eventually, momentum on YouTube can build to where those numbers can be practical. But that can feel very daunting and might be months out. And, you know, sometimes individuals will say that YouTube is a marathon and not a sprint. It really is a compound platform. I mean, you encourage people too. It's like we. Sometimes we go viral. Individuals are going viral in your community. Ours as well, but it's both. And it's like, we might have a breakout video, but it's also just the disciplined approach of, like, building your brand one post at a time, being consistent, steadily growing your following, and that compounds over not just months, but even over compound years. Okay, so saying that is. It's gonna take time to be able to turn on ads on your channel, but you actually can do affiliate marketing from day one. And I think it's a mindset shift. This isn't like pushy sales or anything. When you pick the right video topic that is aligned with the logical idea that you're serving people by educating them about something that's going to help them, then there isn't really any weird friction there. And there's no reason why day one, you couldn't be putting out that video. To be even more clear, it'd be like if you wanted to host an online course and you made a video. Now, this might not be on brand for your channel, but if you were to just think, okay, I want to help people make a decision, because I've had to go on that journey myself. So I'm going to make a video called Click Funnels versus Kajabi, Teachable versus Thinkific. Then you think about this. The intent of the person watching that video, they're not like, feeling sold to. They're being educated about two different options. They're already at that point in, like, their journey by even clicking on that. So if you were to say, you know, three supplements that have boosted my energy, it's logical for the end user, what are the supplements? And could you please put A link to the supplements. Yeah, in the description you're really not selling at all, you're serving. But what's cool is you can earn a commission in the process. So what that's it's kind of exciting because you can serve and really make an impact on people while actually monetizing in the process. And it becomes a win, win, win. Ethical affiliate marketing really is like an economic stimulus package. It helps these really cool the brands themselves that have a life changing product. Talk about, so it could be a probiotic, right? Some kind of supplement, something that's changing people's lives. But they have a company they want to grow and get the word out. And then you've got you who you are or you've got the end user who like when they get a product that solves a problem for them, helping them have more energy, feel better. If we're talking about supplements and then you in the middle, you're trying to monetize your mission, you're starting a side hustle, you're growing your online business, you're bolting on an additional income stream. Everybody wins when you're educating. You know, affiliate prop. Affiliate means a product or a service. So when you position videos that educate people about these great products and services that you would like lovingly recommend to your mother, brother, father, siblings, friends, hey, what have you been using? Your skin is glowing lately. You know, you're not going to not tell them. You're like, oh, I'm so pumped. Let me tell you about this. And so when you do it right, it's just such a cool way to earn extra income. It can grow into big income and everybody wins in the process.
- [17:45]
A
Yeah, I love that. I mean my first venture into making money online was affiliate marketing. I had a friend's company and he sold like reusable water bottles back in the day before Stanley was what Stanley is now. And I promoted those and I talked about those and I love this water bottle and I'm reusing it and there was like a good purpose behind it. And to your point, I got a little kickback. But you mentioned something earlier that I didn't really think about when I was first getting started. And I think a lot of people don't even consider which is software. Like we think about, okay, you know, if I'm in like the gardening niche, I could sell like gardening tools and you know, raised garden beds. But you mentioned software. And so can you talk to me a little bit more about how you can be an affiliate for a software company and like what Would the Advantage be to SaaS or software affiliate marketing?
- [18:33]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. Because if we go back to thinking about how could you earn, let's say $50 a day? And that's, you know, we're, who here listening wants an extra $50 a day? I'd raise my hand for that. Or who here wants to start making their first $50 a day? So you could think about the RPM, the CPM of a video and try to get monetized, but you're also still waiting for that. You're growing your YouTube channel, you could think about affiliate marketing. And for $50 a day, you could ask yourself this question. If you're earning $10 per sale and five people per day, click on your link and make a purchase, then that would be five sales a day. That'd be $50 a day. And so simple math. If the product costs $500, if the product costs $50 and you earned 10%, you'd earned $5 times five, forgive me, Brock, probably times 10. So whatever it is like, like the amount of money and, and so that's where you're asking yourself, here's the framework. It's like what's the price point of the product? And then also what's your percentage? So that's always two big questions to ask with affiliate marketing. So bringing it all the way back, that could be any product, a hard good, etc. But it's also interesting because oftentimes on Amazon it might be like 4% or 2%. And then how expensive is the product? So then we bring up software. Software is one of my favorites because a lot of times software is expensive to make. There are developers behind it. Whatever company lost launched the software. But there also is margin there. And what you'll see is software companies will, oftentimes they'll give you 20%, 30%, 50%. And so depending on what that software is, step one is if you do get 50% of a $50 a month software, that's $25. But then the second thing, Brock, is a lot of times these software offers will give you continuity. Now what's continuity? It's that not just the month that that software is being sold, but it's the fact that if that person stays subscribed, you get paid every single month from that software. So this is interesting because, you know, in B2B, like in business, we might think about like social media management tools or, you know, CRMs or even financial opportunities and different things. But if you could think about apps in general, Subscription services for meditation, for relationships, for different life. Like digital software as a service. It could be an app, it could be a website. And you know, we teach YouTube at our company. That's why we're doing a YouTube growth event. And one of our favorite softwares for serious YouTube creators is called Vidiq. And Vidiq, it does a bunch of different things for you. But to use it as a case study of something that's really aligned with the fact we teach YouTube and it's a YouTube optimization software and analytics, et cetera. We've been doing this for years and our brand has grown quite large. But I want to say we earn something like anywhere between $18,000 and $22,000 a month from that one software as a service. Because lots of people have signed up, they love it, they stick with it, and it's a compound of all of those individuals every month when they get billed, then we also get a percentage of that. So back to the vehicle. It is interesting to ask yourself, and if you think outside of the box, sometimes we'll have people in the faith space say, hey, I mean, I'm talking about the Bible or I'm doing Bible studies. What possibly could I do as an affiliate? And we'll be like, well, one daily grace company which is like journals and pens and all this other stuff. But then we're like two, how about Logos Bible Software? And to that exact point you're like, oh, that's crazy. Like, yeah, it's a software that maybe a consumer could use if they just wanted to do a Bible study. Or actually a professional in this case, like a pastor at a church. There's that higher level plan. That plan can actually get pretty expensive when you have the entire pastoral library in this Logos, Logos Bible software. So when you find the right thing that's a good fit, you could really go deep on that. And then it's not just the percentage of that software. The one time someone invests, you might actually build up an audience that is sticking with it for months, even years, and then that becomes reoccurring revenue every single month.
- [23:08]
A
Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. And you know, you threw out the massive number of 18,000 to 25,000amonth. But even if we were 10% of your audience size, that's 1800 to 2500amonth, right? 1% of the size, 1% of the conversions, and, and that's 180 to 250 bucks every single month. And the way I kind of think about everything you were describing is if we were just doing, let's say an affiliate sale for a raised garden bed. I need to make a sale to make money. Like it is a one to one conversion. One new customer generated equals X number of dollars that I'm generating. Whereas with this, you know, software being an affiliate for software as a service or any of these different companies you mentioned, I can get five affiliate commissions today and then next month if I do no extra work as long as those people stick around and stay, you know, paying subscribers to that company, I'm getting that same five affiliate commissions next month. And if I do another video the following month, now I have three more people, so now I'm at eight. And then a couple people stop the subscription, but I'm still at 6, right? And so I totally can see how that would, you know, really spiral and how that can really snowball in the positive direction. So that, that makes sense. Now earlier you mentioned the idea of like different niches have different RPMs and that's something that I've never actually really even considered on YouTube. But it makes sense because YouTube is selling the attention that our videos are getting to advertisers and not every customer is created equal. Right? Like a 16 year old watching a Roblox video is probably going to be spending a lot less money on YouTube than a 35 year old who is watching financial investing tips YouTube videos. So can you tell me a little bit more about that? And then also, are there any niches that are just known for having really high RPMs or paying really well or the inverse like niches that you're like, hey, I might stay away from that if I was you because it was a kind of low, low RPM niche. Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level? Meet Brevo, the all in one marketing and CRM platform built to connect you with your customers, boost engagement and grow your business smarter. With Brevo, you can manage all of your customer interactions in one place, nurture leads with their built in CRM, reach your audience through email and SMS and keep them coming back with powerful automations. But here is where it gets really exciting. Meet Aura, Breville's AI assistant. Aura helps you craft smarter campaigns by suggesting personalized content, optimizing send times, and even analyzing performance data to improve strategies in real time. It's kind of like having a marketing expert on your team 24, 7. 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- [29:27]
B
Yeah, so this is a great question and I came prepared, so I have a few notes. So let's look at a couple different tiers. So again, RPM is revenue per mil, which in my opinion, it's like they just try to make it as confusing as possible because they're like, that's the Roman term for a thousand views. And you're like, why are we talking about 2,000 years ago terms? You know, how about RPT, like revenue per thousand or something? But so how much money does YouTube pay you if your views get. If your videos get a thousand views? Now, the key is kind of a footnote that it means monetizable views. There's like such a thing as ad blocker. There could be different things that are taking place. It's like assuming the ad plays so. So it's not necessarily always super linear. Like I got a thousand views, but this is how much I earned. But it gives you some clarity. So to earn anywhere between 1 to $5 per 1,000 views, a 1 to $5 RPM, that's like gaming vlogs, reaction content, comedy, entertainment, usually the most broad appeal stuff because it's Also it's. There could be a lot of really good customers in that pool, but there also could be a lot of very casual people like to your point, 17 year olds like. So it's usually lower when it's the most viral, broad appeal type of topics.
- [30:45]
A
Makes sense.
- [30:45]
B
You want to step up to 5 to $12 per minute. Travel, food, fitness, tech reviews, DIY. This is a good medium level travel can and food can still be in fitness. Very broad but higher like serious people. Because then the mindset here is also thinking about who are advertisers advertising to. If people are thinking about travel at this point now, they're not just a generic audience. They might be buying plane tickets, they might be in buying dinner reservations. Tech reviews are actually buying tech. Then you step up to let's say 12 to $25 RPM. This is very high real estate makes sense. What's a real estate lead worth if they're getting a loan? Or what is a real estate transaction worth? Software, tutorial, small business, home office. But there's a higher level. You could go $25 to $40 RPMs per 1000 views for digital marketing, some AI stuff, B2B tools, coaching, high ticket offers. And you said is there any really high, you know, niches? Another one is medical. And if you think about it, another lens is what type of audience is most prone to watch this. You mentioned earlier a 17 year old. Now 17 year olds have buying power actually no doubt. And they have access to maybe parents funds or credit cards still potentially. But let's do a comparison between the 17 year old and the baby boomer that is looking for, let's say one, a financial planner to help them manage a million or 2 million or $3 million in retirement and to get the best returns. And that financial planner is going to earn a 1.5% commission on those dollars. What's that? That's, that's crazy. Like what would they pay to acquire a customer that's a baby boomer with, you know, one to $3 million in assets to manage. Same thing. What would you pay to get in front of a customer that's maybe Gen X or a baby boomer that is dealing with some health challenges, that's looking for expensive medical treatments, hospitals, different things like that. This is just the thinking. It's like okay, that makes sense. There's a teenager, you know, scrolling on entertainment, rap videos and Minecraft stuff versus that individual that has buying power that's in a certain season of life. And then you just kind of take a Step back. Yeah. So what are they watching? You know, what are they clicking on? B2B content or business content? I mean, I would like our two channels have higher RPMs when, if we teach how to make money or how to get leads, you probably, you brought it out a little bit. If you talk about just how to grow on social versus maybe social media for I actually speak a lot to real estate agents and it's much smaller numbers but much higher earning in terms of RPMs, which is not the main thing I'm after. But even that content. Here, here's a way to summarize it. What you even call out in the title, things you might name in the video. Again, if you were to call out, you know, helping women thrive in their 40s or helping women thrive in their 50s. They're at an economic place and what are they investing in? They're buying red light therapy masks for 350 to $750. And if I'm an advertiser, I don't want to advertise that mask to an 18 year old male or female. They're probably not interested. They're not at a point where they're thinking about anti aging, you know, et cetera. So that is a smart thing to think through and can really inform the strategy for listeners going ahead. Not that you necessarily need to change your niche or your business positioning. The cool thing on YouTube is it could inform some topics that it might either give you more energy to talk about or you go, actually that's smart. I could do a whole series on a particular topic that would attract a particular type of audience and that could be a good source of impact as well as income for my online business. Because I'm thinking through the type of audience that would be watching.
- [35:01]
A
Gotcha. Makes sense. It sounds like it is probably an oversimplification, but there's almost like an inverse relationship between viral potential and rpm. So like if I'm imagining like a video that's breaking down investment tips for baby boomers who are preparing for retirement, there's probably not a billion viewers on the planet who are going to be interested in watching that video. But if there's, you know, but along that same sentence, the rpm, the viewers who are watching that video, they have a big purchasing power and the thing that they're going to be purchasing is a pretty hefty expensive thing. Whereas maybe a, a Roblox video or like a music video or reaction video might have mega viral potential, but the, the pay per view essentially is going to be lower. That Makes sense. Now, you mentioned, like, pivoting niches, or you can do, like, a series. So if someone picked one of these lower RPM niches, or maybe that's just like the. The area that their business is in, are they stuck there or is there, like, a way to pivot?
- [36:06]
B
That's. Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, anything is. Everything is figureoutable. But we also need to not get, like, overly romantic about or hopeful. Like, hope is not a strategy in business. So it does. It's not helpful for us to complain, to be like, well, what I want to do is kind of like lifestyle vlogging on YouTube, but I want it to pay me what, you know, videos targeting baby boomers that need medical solutions. Like, okay, I'm sure you desire that, but, like, you chose to position yourself there on YouTube. And so I think, you know, we. We talk about this Venn diagram often, and it includes, if you drew three circles, that how your position on YouTube should be at the intersection of your passion, your proficiency, and then profit. And so there is a level of. When you're picking your niche, your topic, you want to do something you're passionate about. And if you should also ask yourself, what are we solving for? Are we also solving for passion? Like, money's kind of secondary, but, like, I'm very, you know, I want to build a community. This is what I want to talk about it. If I can make money, great. But, like, that's not necessarily what I'm solving for. Passion is that first lens proficiency. Then what am I really good at? And what would give me longevity? What could I commit to for a few years? But then there's the profit p. And that is asking the question, how profitable is this niche? What are the types of business things that I could do in this? Of course, if you're Jacqueline, many people don't know the wild Floridian, the gardener. There actually is affiliate opportunities that could take what you feel like isn't super monetizable and earn you 50k. Like, you know, that sounds wild, but she's shooting on her smartphone. It took a couple years to do, but that's real in almost any niche. So it's like, there's ways to do it. However, when you really think about profit, if you found yourself at a crossroads, right? And maybe this is the test, you're like, I'm really passionate about educating people on online business and how to make money online. And I'm also really passionate about snowboarding. Something you're really passionate about, right? So that building up a snowboarding channel could be lucrative. Probably could start calling, you know, if you're vlogging, maybe you're taking people through tours of, of different resorts and they might start giving you free lift tickets. Maybe if you got big enough, they might pay you to fly out. You could do affiliate deals for, you know, boards. It could be a lucrative thing, but it's going to be kind of at that mid tier. And so what are we solving for? If you were solving for, I want to build a seven figure business, it's choosing at the beginning what boat you're in and to that point in alignment with. Some people shouldn't start the snowboard channel because they're going to catch an edge. They don't even have the skill or the opportunity to travel around America. Maybe cover all the resorts, depending on the model. So I know I threw a lot out there. I think I wouldn't answer the question necessarily in a binary way. You can always pivot your niche. Today could always be the day where you maybe reorient. What is your North Star and where are you heading? It's a kind of a good question to ask. What is it you want to happen? Are we solving for a six figure a year YouTube channel? It might mean, if that is absolutely one of the top priorities, it actually might mean that out of three different positionings, three different topics, you are going to choose, you're choosing one where you're like, it's not really my number one for passion, but I'm still super passionate about it. I do have some years and some experience on it and people have acknowledged that, yeah, I could help them. I'm a few steps ahead. But also this would be the most lucrative opportunity. And yeah, I'm on a mission because I want to retire my partner. I want them to go part time, I want to go part time. Then that becomes your framework for making a decision of, of making a pivot on your channel. And you absolutely can always, any day is a good day to think about your future, think about your goals and maybe think about where's my current trajectory taking me. It might be hard, it might be a little bit painful to rebrand or pivot, but it's okay to do. And I'm making that decision in an informed way, a strategic way and a reflective, thoughtful way based on my current target.
- [40:18]
A
Gotcha. Let's dig deeper then into this, this money making. Let's say that we're at the crossroads and we're, we're kind of doing what you were just Saying, like, I found something that I've been doing for a few years, so I'm proficient in it, I'm passionate about it, I care about it. It might not be like my, my life's mission, but I'm passionate about it. But, like, my primary goal is the profit, the income. Okay. I want to drive revenue through my YouTube channel. I want to build the seven figure business through, through YouTube. You mentioned earlier this, this wild Floridian channel. She's posting maybe a couple videos a year that have the specific intent of ranking high and answering the question of, you know, what raised garden bed is best, or comparing this raised garden bed to that one. And these are affiliate driving episodes. If my goal was primarily building revenue, profit income, how often should I be posting videos that have a primary intent of, of driving people to an affiliate link or making a sale?
- [41:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. And there's a lot of different, you know, theories or philosophies on this. I mean, I'll tell you, I think there's two big mindsets sometimes when people say, when you're starting online. I'll never forget I sat down with Lewis Howes years ago, might even be 10 years ago now, and he talked about starting the School of Greatness podcast. And he said, you know what? And I was talking about, you know, if you were going to start a brand from scratch. And he said, hold off monetization. Hold off on monetizing for as long as possible. Basically hold off on, like, asking your audience to do something, you know, or taking from your audience as long as possible. Okay, that's one point of view. But I also think that it's maybe in a way a flawed perspective. Meaning, like, I don't want to take anything from my audience ever, you know, and I don't like, I like that's. And that's not maybe exactly what Lewis said, you know, great guy, friend, but it's like, it's, it's like, I don't know that you need to hold off on monetization. It depends on how you do it, you know, and where you do it. And it's back to that idea that if the very first video you ever uploaded on your YouTube channel was about three supplements you should take for more energy, then you're not taking anything. You're actually giving value. And I'm a big believer that your income is correlated to the amount of value you add to the marketplace. So what do I do personally? Or what would I do today? I mean, personally, I would, I would Give a call to action in every single video. That's what I do. And we have multiple different formats now when I say we, I started like anybody, right? I started by myself, image videos on a low cost camera, editing of myself. It's grown into. We have multiple different content creators that create a variety of content across a couple different YouTube channels now. It's wild that YouTube could even turn into that. And, and so it's like I think of. And I think audiences have matured because. Brock, let's talk about it. Can you think of any influential podcast video podcast that doesn't have like an ad spot in it? Most of them have brand deal spot. Yeah, like 100% of them do.
- [43:30]
A
All. Can't think of one.
- [43:32]
B
Yeah, it's like it's. And so now it's like there's sort of been a shift and I, you could look at, you know, there's a character named Alex Hormozi that's pretty well known. And I think one of the things, you know, he often said was like, I have nothing to sell you. And he said that for a couple of years while selling his book, ironically, I mean it was only 99 cents, but like, literally, I have nothing to sell you except the book that I want to sell you. And people buy it physically, whatever. Respect to Alex, it was a big deal. He didn't go for like that. As Gary Vaynerchuk would say, jab, jab, jab, right hook. It was like the delay of the right hook. Totally cool. Okay, you're building your brand. Flip side, it's like for most people, why not educate your audience about valuable things that can help them on day one? That's what I would lean towards. And so then backfilling that a little bit, I go into every episode just asking myself what would be or could be the relevant call to action of this video. And in some cases, again, you might have nothing to sell and no affiliate video, no affiliate offer comes to mind. I still think you should, from day one be in a way almost warming your audience up to always be taking action on something, even if that's like, hey, so I hope you got value out of this video and subscribe. There's a call to action for the next one. And then as you get more sophisticated, you might say, hey, I hope you got value, you know, today. And by the way, if you want to go deeper, I have a free checklist that solves a problem. A problem or a free resource. Now you build in your email list and for those very. Your audience is very familiar with this. You still might be. I don't have an offer yet. Okay, build your, like, build your email list. While you're figuring it out, build your email list and maybe someday you could email them about an affiliate offer. But even if you don't have that, it's like you're giving a chance to build an email list that later you might present something and then more directly, maybe you do write a book. And eventually, you know, I wrote a book called YouTube Secrets and it would make a lot of sense. And by the way, if you enjoyed this video, I actually wrote a book. It's also available on audible. It's called YouTube secrets that you give a call to action to that. It could be very relaxed. That's not a high pressure sale. I think a lot of times think of sales as education. You're giving free, valuable education away on YouTube and then you're also educating your audience about an opportunity to get even more value. And that could be something free, something paid, an affiliate offer, something of your own. And so, Brock, maybe an interesting opinion. I get both. I get the tension of both arguments. Yes, you could hold off and yes, build your brand first or build your influence first. Great. But I actually don't see any problem from honestly selling, quote unquote, selling from day one or making offers from day one. I think it's more about the vibe of how you're doing it. That's kind of more about the expectation of the audience. And mid vlog, it might be kind of weird to just start saying something, but this is all strategic questions. Mid vlog, that's totally unrelated. That's a vibe. You get to control your brand. You get to control what feels weird or what is like super chill and just educational. I think the mindset is, yeah, from day one add value and from day one build your business.
- [46:49]
A
Yeah, makes sense. Totally makes sense. You know, to, to use the. You brought up Hormozi. I was thinking about this. If we're going back to that earlier topic of like, you know, we're at that crossroads, are we pursuing passion or. Or the thing we're really knowledgeable about or the building the profit and making an income. He already had a very successful business, multiple very successful businesses at the time. And so he didn't need to sell a course on marketing. He didn't need to necessarily sell, you know, a membership or an academy or anything like that. He had other revenue streams that he didn't need to rely on. And so he was able to build his personal brand around this idea of I have nothing to sell you, while we understand he was selling something, but with this kind of tagline along the way. So that, that totally makes sense. And I definitely, I definitely understand both sides, I definitely tend to agree with you, which is like, you can monetize from day one, you can start air quotes selling from day one. But I love the way you reframe this and that. It's, it's serving people right. You're just answering their questions, you're educating them, you're helping them, you're not taking from them, you're giving them the knowledge and the resources and the recommendations that they've basically asked for through their YouTube and Google searches that ended up allowing them to find your videos. So with all this being said, if someone's listening today and they're like, okay, but YouTube, isn't it like a slog? Isn't it just another platform? Like Instagram's been a pain in my ass and I've been following all Brock's tips, but I'm still struggling on Instagram. So Sean, why should I listen to you? Like, why should I consider starting or restarting or going all in on YouTube?
- [48:26]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. And I do think that big idea number one, you could do YouTube successfully in five or less hours a week. Now that's not nothing. We're busy. We all one 100% of listeners. You know, if we challenged, you could find five hours if we had to. And at the same time, I mean, like right now I'm a dad of a three year old and a five year old and running a business and stuff also at the same time, whether that's rest, whether that's, you know, family time, yeah, time is precious. So that's not nothing. But that's also not crazy. And so I think, you know, it's such a great book called Atomic Habits and it's got the quote, we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. I think success on YouTube is about keeping it simple, defining, you know, our targets, creating a simple strategy, and then having habits and routines weekly for five or less hours to consistently put out some content that would map towards like one strategic video, long form video a week, and then committing to doing that over the long haul. So I think it can be done. It's possible. Think systems, not hustle. But I think it's probably better if we also zoom out and consider the roi, because it's like if you have a strong enough why you could. You'll figure out the how and you'll make time for it. So you just got to ask yourself, what's your big dream? You know, where do you want to be in the next one year and five years? How much does your mission matter to you, your business? How passionate are you about your products, if you have products or services and how they could transform people's lives? And, you know, do you want to reach more people with those? How defensible do you want your brand to be? Marcus Sheridan said, in the next five to 10 years, your YouTube channel is going to be more valuable to your brand than a website. It's going to be more important than a website might already be true that like your, your. If you're taking your personal brand seriously, having a powerful presence on YouTube is maybe the peak of personal branding that the. And you'll see this even as people start on TikTok and they, they see, like, I started on TikTok, I got big, but like, I want to turn professional and actually have a YouTube presence and it doesn't invalidate the TikTok. Like TikTokers think that way. They're like, yeah, I want to. I would love to get. And we are seeing that YouTube is the town square of the Internet. It's being watched in more American living rooms than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu. YouTube earns more ad revenue than like Disney and Paramount combined. Like all these other Hollywood studios, YouTube is now like the kingpin of media and it's accessible to everybody that wants to jump in the game. So if you get a strong enough why and you think this is going to take work and it's going to take consistency, but if I reverse engineer back from where I want my brand to be, my personal brand to be. And, and so that's when, when I keep the, the, the powerful reasons. Reasons come first, results come second. And when I keep those strong reasons in front of me, I think, man, what's the impact? I want to make the email list, I want to build the revenue I want to create. I then get up and I'm like, I don't feel like filming today. I remember the reasons, okay, I'm going to film. You know, it's like I don't feel like. And I'm investing, I'm planting in this for the long haul. And this is going to be a compound thing. And anyone who's built a powerful media brand, and that's probably not everybody's desire here. And by the way, you don't have to go to that scale. If you want like a few more leads and some more conversions and stuff you might have, you determine where YouTube is on your, you know, priority list. But man, if you want to build like a powerful brand or even just be the go to authority in a smaller niche, which is so possible, you know, with a different. You don't need 100,000 subscribers. A 5 to 10,000 subscriber YouTube channel is like a very authoritative thing. We have, we help a lot of real estate agents do that. When you have a 5000 subscribers as a real estate agent, 1500. The stats actually from national association of Realtors revealed that that the trust that goes up from the consumer that expects the real estate agent to be there, that if they have listing videos that only 9 out of 10 agents even have those and that the amount of conversions that go up, it's just having like a powerful presence on YouTube. So I know I'm throwing a lot out there. It's like really get clear on the reasons because Brock, I'll, I'll hit you with the counter. Some people, you know, Sean, why should I do YouTube? Maybe you shouldn't. I mean, you're busy, you already got a lot of stuff to do. Count the cost. I think you should, but it's like it is count the cost. It's not going to have to take over your whole week, but it's going to take a few hours a week to do YouTube. Well, if you do it, I think it's worth it. Reverse engineer back from your goals, get a simple system and then go for it.
- [53:24]
A
I love it. Awesome. Sean, thank you so much for being here. We will link up the YouTube growth sprint down in the description below. But appreciate your time and your expertise.
- [53:31]
B
Thank you. Brock.
- [53:33]
A
If you've made it to this point in the video, that means clearly you like something and hopefully you learned something. Don't forget to hit that thumbs up button. Hit the subscribe button so you can get served with more content just like this. And don't forget to click the link down in the description below to learn more about Sean's upcoming YouTube growth sprint.
- [53:48]
B
Sam.