If you want to make a healthy income from YouTube, you need to stop seeing it as a monetized medium only. You should broaden your idea to think of YouTube as a catalyst instead. The real way that you can make money off YouTube is to leverage the network and there are a number of ways that you can do this.
Sell Your Own Goods On Shopify
Most people do not realize that after Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. This means that from a marketing standpoint, it would make no sense to ignore the network. One of the best ways to make money with YouTube is to use it to sell your own physical products.
Assuming that you have a physical product that you are ready to sell, you will set up an e-commerce storefront with a system like Shopify. You can then create videos that fit into the niche your product relates to. At the end of these videos, you will be able to create a calculated CTA which funnels the traffic from the video to your product landing page.
Of course, there is generally more to it than this, but this will be the basis of the conversion funnel that you should be using. If you have a good product and make good videos that are simple and engaging, your funnel is going to work well.
Sell Premium Videos
If you have an end goal of actually making money from videos, you need to look beyond the ad revenue that you get which is generally fairly low. What you should be doing is creating a YouTube channel and building up an audience. Once you have a reputation on the site, you can start driving traffic to a landing page where you up-sell viewers your premium video content. This post on how to sell videos on Youtube covers the whole thing.
Direct Traffic To Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is still a hugely popular method of making money online. The primary issue is that most affiliate marketers do not put a lot of effort into generating a sizeable income. This is something that you can overcome when you use YouTube.
Instead of relying on your blogs and websites, you can try creating a YouTube channel which directs people to your affiliate links. The internet is moving further toward video and you need to keep with this movement. Getting ahead of the curve will help you increase your affiliate revenue.
Attract Sponsorship
If you look at the most successful YouTube stars, you will find that they have advertisements and sponsorships in their videos. These deals are generally opportunities that the video maker has discovered on their own.
The great thing about sponsorship is that you will not have to provide YouTube with a cut of the revenue. You will also be able to negotiate your own contract based on your impressions and the size of your audience. In most cases, the amount you generate will be a lot more than what you get from YouTube ad revenue.
Transition Into Live Speaking Engagements
Another way that you can leverage your YouTube reputation is to get live speaking engagements. If your channel focuses on a specific niche or audience, you should research some annual conferences and other events that need keynote speakers. You will then be able to use your YouTube statistics and some of your best clips to pitch to the directors of the event.
Live speaking engagements can be very lucrative. An hour-long presentation has the potential of generating thousands of dollars of income. This is one of the reasons why you need to look for these opportunities and never overlook a chance to grow your audience.
It is possible to make real money with YouTube. However, you will not do this by relying on the impression-based ad revenue that they offer. You have to look at other ways to leverage YouTube to increase your revenue.
