I got onto YouTube because I needed to have a way to bring leads into my service-based business when my air force family was getting relocated to the other side of the world. What’s happened since then has been truly amazing – which is why I wanna share with you how I make an income for my service-based business because of YouTube.
Because of the longevity of this channel, the amount of content that I have produced, and how long I have been in the social media and content marketing space, I have been able to have a multiple six-figure business from this channel that starts here.
Let’s get into it
That’s what All-In-One Social Media, my agency, brings in. I’m not here to break that down for you because I gotta keep some things a little bit of a mystery and also makes my husband a little uncomfortable. Regardless, these are the numbers I am ready to share with you because I want you to know that you can make a significant amount of money on YouTube as a service-based business.
At the time of this recording, I have around 17,500 subscribers on my YouTube channel. I am somewhere in the vicinity of 1.3 million views and I have hundreds of videos uploaded to this channel. I make money in multiple ways, including affiliate marketing, sponsorship, YouTube ads, speaking opportunities, and of course my book.
Now some of these might not apply to you, but for the most part, you can do it with all of these. Let’s start with the big one first: affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing
For a quick breakdown – affiliate marketing is where you partner with an online service or tool or product and you’re able to get a percentage of the sales based on you promoting their product. Now, if you have been watching any of my videos in the past, you know, that some of my partners include Stream Yard, TubeBuddy, Kapwing and Sendible, which are my four favorite tools that I have built a great relationship with because I first and foremost was a fan of their tool and a user of their tool.
I was like, look, I have to do more with you guys. I love what you’re doing and I want to promote you and share you with people because I think that you would benefit greatly from them. And so with those, I am able to get a percentage of every sale because all of those businesses have established an affiliate program.
By getting myself established with their affiliate program, every time someone clicks my links that I have down in the description below to sign up for the service or check out that service. That little cookie gets implanted on your phone or on your computer. Whenever you sign up and then you start paying for the service, if you decide to, I get a percentage of that every single month.
Now is it monumental amounts of money? No. Can it be? Of course! I have some very good friends who are just full-time YouTubers who make somewhere in the vicinity of five to six figures from some of the affiliate programs that they partner with.
Show me the money!
Here are the financial breakdowns. So here’s most of the brands I’ve been working with who are paying me in affiliate marketing fees, based on what’s going on. These include StreamYard, Kapwing, Tube Buddy, Sendible, Convert Kit, Live Pigeon, and Amazon. Between these seven platforms, I have made $3,278.29 in 2020. Now what’s really great about affiliate marketing is it definitely rolls from year to year. As people continue to keep using the tools and more and more people find out about the tools from watching my videos, that will continue to snowball.
So you can believe that in 2021 those numbers will actually be higher. Now, if you’re trying to figure out how you can use affiliate marketing for your business, you’re gonna need to look at what are the tools that you are using? Or the products that you talk about and use all the time? How could you partner with those brands to get a residual income from them?
It’s not gonna hurt you at all to go up to their website and see if they have a partnership or affiliate program at the bottom of their screen or you can reach out say, Hey I’m on YouTube talking about your products and service. I’d love to work out an affiliate program where I get a percentage of the sales.
However, it works for you, You should do that. Because, it’s going to be a great way for you to make the little bits of money that are going to add up to a lot.
Adsense
Let’s talk about YouTube AdSense. So many people think that YouTube is paying us creators a buttload of money to do things. When in fact, YouTube AdSense oftentimes is one of the lowest forms of income that we can actually make depending on what your niche is. Mine just happens to be social media and small business.
You can make less or more amounts of money, but there’s a barrier to entry. In order to qualify for AdSense, you have to have over 4,000 hours of watch time in a 12 month period as well as a 1,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel.
Now, this is just one of those things that kind of stinks. They implemented this around 2018 and it’s just one of those things that we all have to do to play the game. YouTube wants to know that you’re serious about creating content so that they can make sure that the right advertisers will show up on your channel to help them and of course, to help you.
So in 2020, I made $8,424.31 with my assets. My biggest form of income on this YouTube channel besides my service-based business is my sponsorships. Now because I have been doing this, the time in this reporting, for three and a half years, I am an expert in some specific areas.
Sponsorships
I’ve become known on YouTube for live streaming, social media, content creation, and things like that. And so my sponsorships are related to what I talk about.
Some of the brands that I work with for my YouTube channel and also for my Women Of YouTube podcasts, pay me to create content about them and for them in support of them whether it’s for brand awareness, problem-solving or just for recognition and clicks to their product.
I get paid a monthly fee, whether it be a 1,000 $1,500 a month from these different brands and that gives me at the end of the year a five figure income from each of these brands. I also will do individual sponsorships for videos as well. If I think that they’re a right fit for you and they’re gonna help you with the mission of this channel, which is to help you grow your business with better content marketing.
The only sponsorships I accept to do are three or more video series. I never wanna do one video cause it’s never made sense for my audience ’cause you guys want more. I have a really good click-through rate on this channel because you guys are like, I really liked what she said about this. And she said, I should go watch this. So let me go do that.
Establish expertise
So in 2020, my sponsorship income was $18,800. Now because of what I’ve been doing on this channel, establishing myself as an expert in the video content marketing space, I have been offered some really interesting speaking gigs. Now, a lot of those speaking gigs went away in 2020 because, COVID, but I was able to do at least one from this channel at the beginning of 2020.
That was a $2,000 sponsorship in addition to covering all of my travel costs and a per diem. When you establish yourselves as an expert, I think I’ve kind of said this a lot, I am known for these specific things here on YouTube. I know what I’m an expert in.
You know what you’re an expert in. It allows for YouTube to classify you better and find the right people to put your content in front of. So the more you niche down and the more you know, who you’re talking to, the better your YouTube channel will be for your business and you can have these other streams of income.
Books
Now, one of my big goals for 2020 was to write a book. I wrote a book in 2020. I’ve been working on it since 2019 and I doubled down on it really hard to get it done because I wanted very much to share my experience as a mom, a wife, a female creator, someone who was an O.G. in the social media space.
When I became a social media manager that wasn’t a job yet; that wasn’t something that people paid for yet. There was so much educating, all this stuff and it’s been kind of a crazy adventure. So I have my book that I sold and I’ve made money off of.
I do have a whole plan in 2021 to relaunch my book. I’m gonna have a new cover. I’m gonna have any title and I’m gonna have a bonus chapter that I add into it about what COVID has been like for myself, my family and how it’s affected my business. So the title of my book is going to be Start, Suck, Get Better and it’s going to be a business memoir where I hopefully I’m giving you inspiration and comfort and then the fact that business is a crazy adventure.
There’s so many stories of success, but not enough stories of being dragged through the mud and all the crap that really comes with owning a business. I hope that you can find comfort and solace and relatability from this story. The sales for my book in 2020 were $431.93. This is between my paperback and my Kindle version. I did self-publishing through Amazon.
Multiple streams of income
I think that it’s important for you to know if you are a service-based business that you should be having multiple streams of income. When I was first starting out in my business, I only had my services to offer and it made it really hard for me to know consistently how much income I was able to bring in. I was literally relying completely on my clients sticking around and being there for me and I don’t want that to happen to you.
And that’s why I want you to learn from me and what I did with my YouTube channel. It started off as a lead source for me, and still is, but also turned into other ways for me to make money, so that if all of my other customers went away I still was able to have some financial success.
And the total is…
So what is my grand total for how much money I made from this YouTube channel that has nothing to do with my service-based business? $32,934.53.
It’s something, it helps and I am not ungrateful for it any way, shape or form. I can’t wait to see how this continues to grow year after year.
Now, if you’re wanting to know more about how you can get started with video marketing for your business, I want you to watch this video I have for you right here where I walk you through how to get started so that you can have success like me on YouTube.
Remember, you are impossibly amazing!
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