Making money from YouTube - A beginners guide

Money Shed member Skinnylatte has been making money from YouTube for a number of years now. She found her niche is providing entertaining birthday/celebration videos on YouTube and worked out early on how to monetise them by combining them with AdSense. In this blog post she talks about how you can do the same.

I make a nice amount of money, currently £400-£600 per month online from Youtube using the Google Adsense program. This works by uploading videos to my channel that people search for, enjoy watching and will want to share. The money bit comes when they click on the adverts that the Google Adsense program places on each video.

I am no expert, in fact my video animation skills a very basic, and I’m sure there’s loads I don’t know. But here’s my top tips if you want to start a Youtube channel.

For the mechanics of becoming a Youtube partner and applying Adsense to your account, see the Youtube guide here.

Top Tips!

Plan your channel first. Choose a topic you have a passion for, you’re going to be making lots of videos, and it will likely become tedious, so choose something you enjoy doing. A hobby, perhaps making cupcakes, fixing bikes, boot camp exercises, knitting whatever you think people will want to watch. A friend of mine found a really good niche, breast feeding, but his wife wouldn’t entertain the idea lol.
Choose keywords that people already search for, use Google’s keyword planner tool to find phrases that people are already searching for. For example there are 74,000 monthly searches for ‘how to knit’ but only 6,600 for ‘learn to knit’. Also the planner will give you lots of ideas for videos you maybe hadn’t thought of for example finger knitting, knitting stitches. You have to sign up to the Adwords program to make an account but it’s free.
Concentrate on making good quality informative videos to begin with. It will be sometime before you make any money unless you’re really lucky. As a guide my best month was August 2013 when I made £600, I had 1 million video views. So to get £6 you’ll need at least 10,000 views
You might need to invest in some decent video and sound equipment. My videos are usually animated not filmed, although I’ve got a bit of both.
Watch out for copyright, you need to ensure you have the rights, or permission to use the sound and images within your video
Use your key words in the file name, title, description and tags of you video when uploading to youtube. But use sparingly once, don’t overspam.
You don’t have to make the videos your self, you can use sites like Fiverr.com to get people to make them for you, just ensure you tell them what you want the video for.
Build your channel and your subscribers before you even think of making money. Comment on other peoples videos, subscribe to other channels to get more subscribers to your own, set up a face book page and comment regularly. Link your channel to a twitter account, Google+, Pinterest etc etc to help spread the word. Join forums and post a link to your channels where you’re allowed, don’t spam.
Do not ever click on your own ads, Google knows and you will get your account banned for it!