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Before we jump in, this is your sign. Right now, as we speak, the YouTube growth sprint is happening and you can still join. You'll get access to live training that's going to help you start and grow your YouTube channel. Limited time replays and we're still giving away cameras, microphones and creator software. Just go to ytsprint.com, get registered and jump in. It doesn't matter that it's already started, you can catch up.
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So.
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So if you want clarity, traction and a real plan for your channel, head to ytsprint.com and jump in right now. All right, let's get into today's episode.
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We're going to cover 14 Ways to Make Money on YouTube.
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Even if you're new or you've got.
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A small channel, when you make money on YouTube, that's actually creating content and getting paid for views from the YouTube Partner Program qualifying for monetization. But the cool thing is if you make money with YouTube, that just means you're using your views to send people elsewhere. And the good news is you can start from day one. If you're starting from zero, you can monetize your channel from day one by making money with YouTube. We're going to be explaining in these 14 ways. This is actually part two of a two part series that we're doing. And so we'll link in the show notes to part one where we covered the on platform ways to make money with YouTube. But let's dive into these 14 tips.
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Let's go. First way, and this is off platform is affiliate marketing. I know you can totally speak to this. Let us have it.
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Yeah. So affiliate marketing is when you earn a commission from a product or service that you love and use yourself. All you gotta do is find something that's being sold online, find out that they have an affiliate program and then you sign up and they give you a backend dashboard where you can then get a custom link and then you'd put that custom Link in your YouTube description. So probably the best way to illustrate this is one of our students, the wild Floridian. And so she is in a tropical climate, Florida, talking about gardening. And she found a product which was raised garden beds. And they were a particular type of raised garden bed that was rust proof, that didn't rust, which was so important in this climate. And so she found a website selling these raised garden beds. She actually ordered one for herself to try it out and use it for her own Florida garden. She then signed up for their affiliate program. And then from creating strategic video, she was actually able to earn an extra thousand dollars in her first year of promoting the this product through affiliate marketing. But here's what's crazy is by her second year of creating some strategic videos, two to three videos a year about this. Besides all her other content, she's vlogging, doing other stuff, but she made a couple dedicated focus videos strategically about these raised garden beds. By the second year, she had made $15,000. But by year three, Nathan, she had made $55,000 collected in commissions from this one affiliate program. And so what's powerful is obviously if you're gonna make bigger money, of course your channel needs to grow and you need to create videos that get a good amount of viewership, but you can start immediately. And so some of the most known affiliate programs are things like Amazon. Com, it's called the Amazon Associate program. But there's also impact radius. And what these are is affiliate networks that have multiple retailers, tens of thousands of retailers inside of them. So once you sign up, you could start looking at all different opportunities for clothing or for fishing poles or for supplements. There's also ltk, which is a lot of times the makeup type of product, skin care, shareasale, Clickbait, which covers a lot of digital marketing products, usually in education programs. So there's a lot of opportunity in affiliate marketing.
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That's huge. It's one of my absolute favorite ways to help someone take a step towards monetizing off of YouTube is here because it's links. Yeah, there's some signup stuff, but in terms of like overhead, tax, so to speak, the setup, you know, setup time is very minimal compared to some other things we're going to go through here. But the second one is brand sponsorships. And Sean, how is this different? Common question, like, how's a brand sponsorship different than an affiliate link?
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A
Yeah, so brand sponsorships is, of course, we've all seen a video where it's like this video is sponsored by insert brand name. And so this means that that's the relationship. Some kind of a brand has basically hired you to promote their product. And a lot of times it could be like universal ones we've heard is athletic greens or NordVPN. You watch like these different big channels and those types of brands advertise across all types of videos. Now, the limiting belief is that I need a big audience to get started with brand sponsorships. And typically you do need a sizable audience. However, the terms that listeners need to know is micro influencer, nano influencer, and macro influencer. And nano influencer is like under 10,000 subscribers, between 1 to 10,000 subscribers. And then micro is kind of up to 30,000 subscribers. And then Macro was like established channel and much larger. And brands really like working with targeted, focused channels that are making high quality content in specific niches, even if you have a few thousand subscribers. But one layer deeper here is what's called UGC content, User generated content. And the cool thing here is it's not about having a big channel. It's actually just about making great videos. So you might have 75 subscribers, but you've been leveling up your skills. You are knowledgeable in your niche. You love going hiking and doing outdoor content, and you've figured out your camera or your smartphone and you can put a video together. What creators underestimate is that you're your own independent media company and user generated content could essentially be a brand hiring you to make a video that's less about the influence on your channel and more about how they might post that on their own channel or use it for paid advertising. And so we're not going to go deep into that here, but brand sponsorships would be another way that you don't need to be monetized to start doing them. You could do direct outreach once your channel is more established. There's what's called YouTube Brand Connect, which is like YouTube's influencer marketing marketplace. There's also websites like Aspire IQ or Grin where you sign up for these and they'll start funneling you brand sponsorships.
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This is powerful. Already at the beginning, if you're listening, I want to encourage you to think through how the skills that YouTube requires of you are the very skills you can use to go create other things. So already right there, right? Like UGC brand sponsorships, quick behind the scenes note.
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Sean and I aren't even in the same room right now. He's in Washington, I'm in Tennessee. And yet this still sounds like we're in the same studio. That's because we're recording on Riverside, who's also the sponsor of today's episode. And if 2026 is the year that you want to start that podcast creating that content, and you want it to look and sound professional without the tech headaches. Riverside has become our go to. It works from your laptop, from your phone, your travel setup, and it's not even just a recording tool. It's also a full workflow platform. Honestly, most creators don't get stuck on ideas. They get stuck on workflow, recording, editing, hosting, getting it published. Riverside makes it easy to Stay consistent.
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When it comes to creating content.
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With Riverside, you can record up to 4K with clean, separate audio and video tracks for each person. That just means if the WI fi got weird mid recording, you're not forced into a reshoot. Guests can join with one simple link. No downloads, no stress. And after you record, Riverside has a built in editor that's super intuitive. Trim by editing the transcript, adding captions and pull clips for shorts, reels and TikToks all from the same dashboard. And for podcasters, Riverside can actually host and distribute your show to Spotify and Apple Podcast and even publish on YouTube.
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So your whole pipeline lives in one.
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Place with analytics right inside Riverside. Use Code Think Media at checkout for one free month of their pro plan.
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Link is in the description, show notes.
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And again, that's Code Think Media at checkout. All right, back to the episode.
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But this third way is online courses. And I'm like, it just pairs so well. You're already making videos on YouTube, of course, you know, typically is on, you know, online videos that you're creating for a specific purpose. And so you already have the skills there to create a video. You might as well put those skills to use to put together a course that's like a deeper dive or a more linear learning path for your viewers, for your audience. And this is something that's, you know, close to my heart because this is kind of what I did. This was the first way that I monetized off YouTube. While affiliate marketing might've been a little bit easier, I just decided, hey, let's just build a course. So there's a little bit, a little bit goes with this. You kind of need a platform to host these modules that you're gonna put out there. But there's some great stuff out there. A kajabi, a thinkific, a teachable. There's a lot of great sites that'll host an online course for you. But this was wonderful. Because what's kind of crazy, Sean, is for me, as I looking back, I was like, okay, I think I was at, I was at 5,000 subscribers or like under 5,000 subscribers, and I was making thousands of dollars off YouTube because of my course that I put together. And now what's kind of cool is the content that I made on my channel. You don't have to work that hard. Like it's kind of easy. If you look at your channel, you look at what's popular, you probably have an idea of what your audience, you know, enjoys you covering. Just turn that thing and do a deeper Dive of a course. So for me, it was like my popular videos were about me teaching about a certain music software. So guess what? My course had to do. It had to do with. It was making songs in that music software. And it did really well. And that was a way that I was able to monetize off of YouTube. Took a little bit more to set that up, but once that was going, man, it was a total blessing in those early days for sure. But the fourth way is paid memberships. And Sean, can you break this down for us?
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Yeah. So paid memberships is number four, and then number five is crowdfunding. And I want to give you both both ways first to explain the difference. So number four, paid memberships. This is typically education content. So really, individuals want to pay a monthly subscription price for private content, education content and community. And in these environments you do monthly trainings, Q and A sessions, private live streams, maybe additional downloads, AI tools. Like, for example, we've upgraded our video ranking academy. And it's more than just like an online course. It's actually not a paid membership right now. People can actually get lifetime access, but it functions kind of like a paid membership because they get the benefit of the live Q&As and things like that for years to come. But ultimately a paid membership, you know, one of our students, Benazade, helps people with their metabolism and keto and health and you know, month by month, as many months as people want to subscribe, they're just getting premium education content. YouTube actually gives you YouTube memberships where people can pay right on platform. And that's a cool opportunity, but it's not my favorite because YouTube does take 30%. So if you were to charge $10 a month, they're going to take three of those dollars. Might not sound too bad at a low level, but imagine if you were making $100,000 a year, they're going to take $30,000. And so there's other platforms like Kajabi, like Circle, that you can use, and they're going to just give you a lot better margins if you're planning ahead. But that's paid memberships. And paid memberships are typically for individuals that want a community in the education space. So then number five is crowdfunding. And, and crowdfunding is typically more fan entertainment driven. So if you have a comedy channel or maybe even, even politics, maybe you're talking about current events and it's not as much. It might be educational, but it's not that the people are learning anything. It's like they Just love your information. They want exclusive access. Basically. Fans support you because they enjoy your content. And so artist channels do this, animation channels do this comedy. If you build a fan base of any kind and you're like, hey, you know, on Patreon or Ko Fi or buy me a coffee, these are some of the platforms and websites. It's a great way to support the channel, I think about a channel that I like that covers a lot of Internet, new Internet news and crypto and different stuff that's happening. And even like Scammers is Coffeezilla and his main episodes. He runs all the names of his supporters at the end of the episode. So he's like making an episode and then he just lists off all the Patreon supporters basically. And so two different options, a little bit of nuance between those and actually, by the way, we are going to cover the rest of these ways. We're covering 14, but one of the biggest mistakes people make is chasing too many of these monetization streams too early or chasing a monetization stream or setting up their channel around one that's just not the right fit. So we're actually doing an event to help people build their own custom roadmap. It's called YouTube Growth Sprint. And and if you want to register for that, you could go to ytsprint.com and it's going to be super fun. Nathan, we are going to have you, myself, the think media coaches. We're doing giveaways, camera tech, software giveaways and we are going to be helping people build a step by step plan. We're talking about how the algorithm's been changing, new shifts and trends on YouTube. We're covering some of the latest AI tools to just help people reduce their stress, reduce their overwhelm and get more done on YouTube faster. And we're calling it yt growthsprint.com, which is where you can register or click the link in the description because I know people are busy in these days. And so this is about helping you get fast results whether you want to start a channel or whether you want to restart and get refocused on your YouTube goals. And so you can check that out@ytsprint.com which brings us to the next tip.
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B
It's great. I love that you're talking about, you know, step by step plan because number six here is coaching is actually something that you can offer either in a one on one capacity or a group capacity. The cool thing about this is it's a pretty low barrier to Entry, like the platform you could use to set up coaching just to be able to meet with people could literally be as simple as like signing up for zoom and using calendly, which like has a lot of functionality at the free level and like, boom, there you go. Corresponding through email, like a lot can happen there. But you could also level up into platforms that have actually built an infrastructure for coaching where you can keep like session notes and kinds of stuff like a kajabi or something like that. But coaching is wonderful. And especially on the platform of YouTube, the nature of how people consume content, especially long form, you can give people a glimpse of a coaching session. I would say, Sean, like some of the best content out there, especially in the educational space, is, is a coaching session. It should be treated like a coaching session where you're really trying to help the viewer out with where they are right now and trying to close the gap to where they want to be. And that's no different than coaching. And so I think, I love the correlation, Sean, between making long form YouTube videos and offering some sort of coaching. Be that sort of like direct to your calendly. I've seen this before, like real estate agents even will do this or they want to get a text message or an email, whatever the preferred contact method is. You can kind of just put in the description and you've got a call to action that's really strategic and intentional. It can be a real seamless flow for the right person. And typically with coaching, you know, it can be a higher ticket offer. And so you only need one, you only need one person to like find your video, take you up on your offer, get on your, you know, on your calendar and you can talk to them. So I love coaching, Sean, either at the one to one level or the group level.
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Yeah. And I think that this one is not for everybody. It doesn't fit every niche. But I think a lot of people underestimate how much different opportunity there is in the coaching space. I just know personally things that I've seen that might surprise people. I was a campus pastor in Irvine, California for a few years and I hired a coach and I want to say it might have been around a thousand dollars or something. And I think that was for a few calls for over three months. So it wasn't cheap. But it was also still a ministry world that was very important. I was a brand new campus pastor. I was like learning all these kinds of things. I was trying to accelerate my learning. And most people might like, oh, why would you do that? But it's like when you want to learn a specific skill or get a specific result and you need mentorship. One of the best formats to do that is paid coaching. One of our students in video ranking academy is a pediatric occupational therapist and she was doing that as her career and then moved it on to YouTube. And in addition to videos, she set up these consults through what you were talking about. You, you know, have a checkout page, a way to get in in contact and then talk for 30 minutes. And so people underestimate that there are moms or pastors or individuals that are looking for help. And I believe these coaching sessions at the time with her were like $50 a time. But that adds up. You want to start working from home, maybe transition out of your job or go part time at your job. You could consider doing coaching. And then of course the well known ones are social media coaching or like what we do, YouTube coaching, fitness coaching, but a lot of different things you could do there. Which brings us to number seven, which is books. And books can go deep because there's the physical book, the digital ebook side of things, and the audiobook side of things. I have firsthand experienced this with my book YouTube Secrets that I co wrote with my friend Benji Travis. We're something now at like 140,000 copies of that book sold. And that's the different versions. Physical ebook, ebook is global very easily because it's just a digital file that can easily translate into other languages. And so the ebook has been like a hundred different revenue streams because it's been downloaded in so many different countries and then the audiobook as well. And so you're basically, you know, selling your knowledge in book form. My favorite is the Amazon KDP program plus Audible ACX and that's uploading the audiobook. But there's also websites like Gumroad that allow you to also sell an ebook or paperback books, audiobooks. And I mentioned Benazadi earlier, but same thing. He has a book called Keto Flex, self published, wrote the book, put out the ebook, but then also took time to sit down with a good microphone and record a high quality audiobook, which I think is one of the most underrated income producing opportunities for a lot of people listening to this. I mean, half the people listening to this are on Spotify or Apple right now. And you think about podcast culture, video podcasts on YouTube. But people like you and me, Nathan, we love to learn, we love listening to content. Well, really I think of an audiobook as a premium podcast. It's so Polished. Every line is written and it takes the energy to create it. But if you have a good audiobook experience, you can earn a lot of money, not just from book sales, but even just from the link to Audible when people, like, sign up for a free Gold membership or whichever trial membership Amazon will give you, like a $5 commission just for people trying out Audible. And so there's a lot of different ways you could dig deep in books, but that brings us to number eight, which is digital products. Break that down.
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Pumped about digital products. This is basically something that's just anything downloadable that solves a problem. So think like any printable things. PDFs, templates, presets, spreadsheets, if you're in the financial space, 3D printer files, like you could. The sky is kind of the limit in this category. Anything that you put, you could put together in a digital format that someone can download and use. And you could host this kind of stuff on an Etsy, a Gumroad, a payship, or Shopify. But someone who comes to mind here, Sean, who's done this really well, is Kayla from his Word, My Walk. And I believe she actually got to that first stage of income that allowed her to kind of go full time off the back of $15 ebooks, $15 workbooks that she'd put together. So her channel's about, you know, spiritual development and getting deeper and growing closer with God, specifically through devotional time. And so her content format just lends itself really well to this category because she will do these daily Bible studies. And so it's as simple as she'll do a daily Bible study, the video gets uploaded, and she's also put together a PDF of a workbook for the Bible study. So her call to action is seamless because it's like, hey, by the way, put together a workbook as we're going through, you know, Matthew. You know, you can get your Matthew workbook down in the description. And Sean, I mean, I know you know as well, but there's a lot of books in the Bible. And her plan is to do a Bible study for each book and to have a workbook with each book. And so you can see, like, how this could scale for someone like Kayla. But even if you're listening, wow, what's like a quick thing you could put together digitally that would just be a quick win or super helpful for your audience. And don't underestimate the power of 15 ebooks or $15 workbooks or a $27 preset, because at scale, as you continue to create. These are the kinds of things that can just spread.
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A
Number nine is events. And these could be either in person or virtual. So remember, we're talking about 14 ways to make money with YouTube. And so the point is, YouTube is a marketing channel. It's a channel to meet people, a channel to connect with individuals that didn't know you before. And once they start to know you, you could host an event for them. Easiest is going to be virtual and online. But of course, you could also do in person as your audience grows, maybe you survey and you learn where people are. And, you know, I was talking to somebody recently that I'm doing coaching with, and he did his first ever event. And in my mind, I was like, man, this was a couple years ago when he did his first one. And he's like, yeah, it went. It went really good. And I made tens of thousands of dollars. And I was like, how many people were at your event? Like, 100, 200. And he goes, six. I go, what? He's like, yeah, no, I mean, I had six people at my first event. And it was a much more immersive, transformational men's experience planned out over multiple days with a lot of features integrated into it. Now, I'm not saying you're listening to this and that's the first thing you start up, but I think we underestimate the power of small beginnings and immersive experiences that we could do for individuals. You don't have to host huge events. They could be workshops, meetups, summits, live classes. And there's a lot of free online events that individuals host a summit. You know, we have our free event that's coming up, but you also could just start right off with paid. Like, it could be a 10 event, a $25 event. I think that a lot of creators listening to this and entrepreneurs are underestimating the power of doing a summit. Like, if you can build your network, meet a few people, invite people to speak, and this is virtual, so all they have to do is do it from home.
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You.
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You could get a couple subject matter experts, 3, 4, 5, 10 of them, and host a summit. You could capture their sessions prerecorded and just play them. I've been a part of many of those where I wasn't speaking live. I pre recorded the session, and then they ran the summit live. It's just a whole nother skill set and thing that you could build out. But this is another way to use YouTube to build awareness of an event. And you could sell tickets on Eventbrite you could use Zoom, you could use Hopin, you could use Kajabi and all kinds of different ways you could run events. Now, number 10 is merchandise. I'm sure listeners are pretty familiar and on a base level, shirts, hoodies, mugs, hats, you put your logo on it. Now I think it's overestimated, Nathan, like how many people want to wear your channel's logo. I mean, I think the fake logo is pretty cool because the Think hat, yes, it's our logo, but like it's kind of, you know, think. The other day though, someone was like, hey, did you used to work at IBM? And I was like, no, but I mean some people get that reference. Like I think I forget what IBM's thing was, but basically it's like think different or whatever. Think it doesn't matter. I was actually to buy some vintage Think IBM hats just because I thought it was niche and funny. I was at an airport. This was a true conversation. And the guy kept asking me. I was like, no, I, I don't work at IBM and I never have. But all that to say is if you get creative with merchandise, I think if you think identity based merchandise, like maybe Mom's Rock or something like it's not necessarily people want your YouTube logo on a T shirt. Like you could use the YouTube merch shelf, spreadshop, Printful, Teespring, Shopify and really build out merchandise. And again, you don't need your channel to be monetized to start doing these things. You could make a video with only a few subscribers and put a link in your description. But in a previous episode. And I want to remind listeners to check out episode one where we're talking all about the on platform ways. Once you get to 500 subscribers, you can start integrating the Merch shelf not just to Amazon shopping affiliate stuff, but even to your own website or print on demand shop. And so merchandise is another one that you could tap into.
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B
That's huge. I'm actually just real quick before move on to number 11. I am proof, proof that there's a market for this category because I love swag, Sean. I just love it. And I think you're so right. I think about the stuff that I've bought from a creator or from a company business and I'm buying their mission, I'm buying their values on a hat, I'm buying their ethos on a hoodie. That's the stuff that like, man, deck me out. I'll spend hundreds and have spent hundreds of dollars from one single creator. Because I was just all behind what they stood for. So I think it's a great call out. It's not just like your logo, maybe there's a place for that, but it's about the identity and mission and really brand of what your channel and what your videos stand for. I think there's some powerful stuff there. Well, number 11 is Freelance Services. This is, I think this one has a little mystery to it, Sean, but like freelance services, that just kind of means like using skills to make money for others. But I think a lot of people underestimate how they could do that early on.
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A
Yeah, I mean, the truth is this is that a lot of people are jumping into the creator economy because they want to just make videos, get monetized and have YouTube pay them for views or they want a very leveraged way of making money. And that's like affiliate marketing. You don't have to have your own product or service, you just promote somebody else's. That's why we listed it as number one. And it's one of our favorite ways to make money because it is highly leveraged. I think what people often don't think though is like the reason I wanted to make videos is because I didn't want to work. But here's the truth. It's like, I mean, I know they want to hustle, but it's like you're trying to avoid work. Like you got to work either way. Like, you know, you either are making great content and you're building brand relationships and you're learning how to craft videos, but you also got to like put in the reps. Like it takes time to build momentum on your channel to the point where you can use these leveraged ways of making money, where maybe the only thing thing you do is make videos. YouTube pays you maybe a couple other income streams. When I think of freelance services, the truth is this. You are going to be putting in hours to actually serve a client essentially. Now there's ways to do this that could be very leveraged. For example, you know, even the recent Gemini AI update, it is insane how much a regular everyday person using vibe coding, which is basically just verbally prompting AI, can build a world class website. And listeners need to know that the world does not know about this yet. Just because you're listening to the Think Media podcast, you're in like a small group of people that's on the bleeding edge of technology. If you're here right now, like when it comes to some of these AI tools, if you become an expert in how to solve problems for people Web design, copywriting, you know, even YouTube channel management, filmmaking, editing, and all kinds of different things. You know, even being an executive assistant or a virtual assistant. Point is, maybe you don't love your job, you don't love the culture. You, you, you don't love the commute. You know, I'm, I'm living kind of in the rural Pacific Northwest right now, and a lot of people commute from where I am into downtown Seattle. And I'm like, bro, like, that is a hour drive and it's two hours in traffic. And I know individuals that do that both ways. They commute two to four hours a day. Now, respect to listeners who are in that situation, that's probably why you're able to consume all these think media podcasts. You're like, bro, you were my lifeline. Why I'm on the road and I'm stuck in LA traffic or wherever you're at. So you start just thinking about, I think you could get freedom to work from home faster if you set up a strategy of, I'm going to market my freelance services using YouTube and social media. I'm going to identify what those freelance services are and I'm gonna work from home doing it. Like, don't be afraid to maybe say, this is something I'm gonna do for a while, because it absolutely is. I would say the fastest way to start making money immediately, because you could sign up on Fiverr or Upwork or Freelancer or Cantara, and you ultimately then are able to position what your services are. And then when you get good at making YouTube videos and you know what we teach is we teach ranking YouTube videos. We're going to be covering that more in depth on the YT Sprint event that we mentioned, so definitely register for that. You're going to make smart videos that bring you leads and then let people know, hey, here's. Here's some education about it. Here's some trends that are happening, let's say, in marketing or web design. And by the way, if you would like me to just make your website for you. And never underestimate the fact that there's people all around the world that are ready to pay you. Because sometimes what happens is you start thinking, man, who would want a web designer when it's easier to just use Squarespace or to use AI now to build a website, millions of people. Because there are business owners, there's individuals, they don't want to look, they don't care if you use AI, they just want the result. So if you can get people the Result, then freelance services is not just a great way to make money with YouTube, but it's one of the quickest ways to start earning money and working from home.
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B
Huge. I love the correlation between what you do on YouTube through a video can really just demonstrate your skills. Like I think about that in my own niche was like music based and production and I was doing videos teaching people about how to produce music. But I'm using one of my own songs or like a song from a buddy that I'm mixing or something. And like people hear what's going on and saw what's going on. And that led to reach outs and inquiries about like, hey, could you mix my song? Or hey, could you tune my vocals? Or hey, could you whatever. And so I love that correlation between your skills can be on display and you can, you know, pair that with, well, I can help you do this. You know, check out fiverr, check out whatever. That's also similar to number 12 speaking engagements. How break this down because this is something I don't think anybody really thinks about.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah. So when it comes to speaking engagements, this is kind of powerful because by putting yourself on YouTube you are already crafting a skill and that is public speaking. Like you're learning to communicate. And this isn't for every niche, but there are all kinds of events that do want speakers. You could do local small events, you could do bigger conferences, you could do corporate events, you could do niche industry events and get paid to speak at conferences, workshops, organizations. You might do keynotes, you might do trainings, you might do panels. But here's the other thing. I mean, some people might be wondering like, Sean, is someone really going to pay me to go do a speaking engagement? I would encourage most listeners, probably not. But here's like the interesting thing that most people don't know is a lot of times you'll be having to, you'll be speaking for free. But you can ask questions like, hey, can I promote something? Can I give away something free? And you could get emails from the event, could I? Actually, I'll speak for free. But then you create some other type of service. So you then use the speaking engagement to get clients. And so by positioning yourself on YouTube and especially for subject matter experts, and a lot of people listening to this already want to be a paid speaker or whatnot. It's kind of two sides. You might get paid to speak or you might speak for free. I do this a lot and have done this a ton over the years. You want to eventually build out essentially what is your Product suite or your service suite. And how can you leverage that speaking event? We don't have time to talk about it here, but in private coaching, I was talking with an individual. There's like 20 different ways you can monetize a stage. What's a stage? A stage actually could be virtual. It could be speaking on somebody else's podcast, it could be speaking on a summit, a virtual event, as we talked about earlier, or it could be an in person stage. And they're like, you know, are you paying your speakers or like, no. Well, there's like 20 questions you could ask. Well, could I do this? Could I do this? And they're like, sure, fine, yeah. Could I have a booth at the event? Because I'm going to speak for free. Would you allow me to have, have a booth where I could sign up and maybe give people an assessment? You have not because you ask, not. So actually learning about how you could develop your career, your brand, your business, I think is a big opportunity when it comes to speaking engagements.
- [33:13]
B
So number 13 is E commerce, the idea of building your own product line. This is probably one of those things that just like speaking personally, I'm like, you can envision your own stuff. You know, if you're like one of these creative people, you're like, oh, I could make this and it could be my own. Could you break down the specifics of what it takes to do this category, though?
- [33:34]
A
Yeah. So I want to clarify the difference between 13, E commerce and 10, which was merchandise. And so when we say E Commerce, we're actually talking about a higher level than just putting your logo on some swag and talking about building out your own product line. But I think, Nathan, the limiting belief a lot of people have is they just think like, oh, that'd be too complex. I have to like have my own warehouse. I got to deal with shipping and whatnot. But we're living in a world where there's just a lot of solutions that can actually make it easy for the everyday creator to start their own product line. Probably the biggest opportunity in this space is what's called white labeling. And so let's say you were a fitness channel and you realized like, when it comes to supplements, a lot of them are similar. Now I understand some have different fillers and the quality of it, but like, at the end of the day, maybe for your bodybuilding regime, you're like, you know, what people really need is they need a particular type of whey protein, a certain amount of grams of creatine. They need some like L theanine or some other BCAs or something in there. And so you just say like it's these four ingredients that I want to put into one product that people drink after their workouts and turn it into a powder and have that all put into one tub and then slap my logo and my brand on it. There's websites that'll do that for you. White labeling. And so it could be supplements, spices, your own planners, beauty products, your own beauty products. You know, it's wild that at the end of the day, and I don't want to offend anybody in the beauty space, but it's like there's way more beauty products than there really is difference between the products. The point of these individual products is the personal brand behind them. I get it, there's certain shades and certain ingredients and all of those things. But the leverage is the personal brand. And so if you've built these channels and these brands up before you actually manufacture something yourself and rent warehouse space or doing any of that, you can get into the e commerce game sooner than you probably realize. And there's platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce fulfilled by Amazon. Of course, Amazon themselves allows you to even get your products created, ship them to Amazon, Amazon holds them for you. And you gotta crunch the numbers because sometimes there's a holding fee plus Amazon's gonna take a per, you know, percentage. And a lot of businesses sometimes struggle because the margins doing FBA fulfilled by Amazon could be of course much lower in terms of the margins than handling the distribution yourself. The trade off is you don't have Amazon's massive platform and prime and everything else. So this isn't necessarily day one. I don't, you know, you're a brand new creator, you don't just start building your own product line from day one. But as you listen to this, I think, Nathan, it's about capturing vision. It's about realizing not just where am I today, but where could I be in the next three years, five years, six years? And recent stats came out about the crater economy that said that the crater economy is going to grow 4x in the next seven years between now and 2032. The creator economy is valued at about a $250 billion industry and it's going to grow to over $800 billion in the system. Now the math on that doesn't cover the fact that creators may launch their own supplement line, that creators might launch not just their own swag line, but their own clothing brand. So I think when you start thinking about vision, I Think that is powerful because the grit it takes to start a channel, to create content, to build trust, to build relationships with people. You can think about it like phases. You don't do phase five when you're in phase one, but you might think about phase five. Like, okay, this first year I'm building momentum. I'm going to start with affiliate marketing, but someday I might tap into E commerce, build my own product line and at a huge level. This is Logan Paul with Prime drinks. This is Mr. Beast Burger and Mr. Beast Chocolate Bar. This is Emmett Chamberlain and her coffee line. And it's not just for giant creators. I think individuals could get into this sooner by realizing the levels to the game and maybe doing something like private label suppliers, white label and things like that. Which brings us to number 14. And I want to encourage listeners not to jump off as soon as you hear it because, Nathan, you have a case study and just kind of an example of this. But this one could be its own 20 part episode on the Think Media podcast. And we've covered 13 different ways to make money with YouTube. But number 14 is leads for your business. Nathan. Break that down. Oh, I love this one.
- [38:14]
B
This is near and dear to our heart. I mean, all these are at Think Media, but especially this one. This is where you're using YouTube to get customers for an existing business that's like already off platform. So the goal is, how I'll phrase it, Sean, is you are a business owner in a YouTuber's costume. That just means you're playing a little bit different of a game. You know, it's not about going viral. It's about going viral for you. It's not about getting all the views. It's about getting the right views. It's not about trying to have the most massive YouTube platform you possibly can. You're just trying to make videos that are going to get people aware of your services and offerings. Right? And someone who has really exemplified this well this year is just one of our students, Lorena. I got to have a conversation with her on the podcast earlier this year, but she went from $2,000 a month to $12,000 a month in just six months this year. So this year so far, she's averaging like on the view side of things, about 30,000 views a month. But what's even cooler is how she is turning those views into leads through strategic calls to actions that she's putting in every single video. For someone like Lorena or a business owner like yourself that's listening or aspiring business owner, you see A video as an asset that can bring awareness and a gateway to into your products and services. And so she just to be honest, Sean, she's kind of a good person to kind of wrap up this episode because at this point, Lorena has an artillery of ways she's monetizing through and with YouTube, the whole AdSense thing. But she's built her email list, she's selling products and courses, she's doing coaching and consulting. She's in the insurance world. In every single video, she's generating leads for her business.
- [39:51]
A
Yeah, and of course, there's a bunch of softwares that can help you set this up. They can be an email CRM like kit or mailchimp. There's platforms like click funnels. A huge one that's blown up of course is go high level. They keep adding more features and then things like Kajabi. So that's a conversation to pick the right basically SaaS product or CRM product that fits your business. And also I want to encourage listeners, especially if you actually are a business owner or you have an existing offer or you're finishing up your offer and you specifically want to generate leads with your YouTube. We do have a coaching program designed for you if you want to learn more about it. You could go toviral video coach.com. there's just a simple application there. It'll give you a chance to talk with our team. And we only work with people where it'll be a good fit. So if you're maybe thinking about. No, that's the one for me. You know, I don't really even want to do affiliate marketing. Sure, I could earn a few dollars over here, but I have my own products and services and I actually want to tap into doing YouTube in a strategic way. Way to get qualified leads, get customers, and actually build my business with YouTube viral video coach dot com. We'll link to that in the show notes. Just head over to that page, fill out the simple application, and if it's a good fit, we'll jump on the phone with you. And I think that we could really help you Crush it with YouTube this year to generate more leads and sales for your business.
- [41:13]
B
Well, hey, which of these 14 income streams has caught your attention? Which are you already doing? What you've dabbled with, what has caught your eye and you would like to learn more about. Would you let us know, like rate, share, review wherever you watch or listen. This is the Think Media Podcast. I'm Nathan Eswine and I can't wait to connect with you in a future episode.