Making Money from YouTube

Making money is not difficult. But, it is often not obvious how to do it. Here is a quick lesson in how to do it.

Have something worth watching

It sounds obvious, but without something on YouTube which people want to watch, it's very difficult to make any money from YouTube. So, whether it's a 'how-to' video, or a product review, or a video of you doing something interesting which other people have asked about, make sure you film it and put it up. 

Also, you might have something that lots of people view but it could be valueless because it is not what people were expecting. For example, I have a video on YouTube which I took in India while I was working there. It has had lots of viewers (over 21,00 at the moment) but I have made a couple of cents from it. It has a great title but the video is short and pretty disappointing. Learn the lesson. Make interesting videos!

Make the most of the 'DESCRIPTION' area beneath the video

This is often neglected and incorrectly used by people putting videos on YouTube who want to make money from them. You can use this area to encourage people to visit another website. This could be your own website or the website of a company whose product or service your video is covering. 

It's effective and underused by most people putting videos on YouTube.

Place URLs into the 'description' area and make sure you place the 'http://' in front of the web address that you want to promote. I see many URLs without the 'http://' and it makes visitors have to work to hard to connect to the site. Or, the URL is missed off entirely. 

Make it easy for people to visit the website you are promoting!

Become an affiliate

Make sure you join one or two affiliate schemes appropriate to your video if you are not promoting your own website. For example, join the Amazon Affiliate scheme, or the eBay Partner Network. 

Create affiliate links to the products or services you are promoting in the video into the 'description' area mentioned above but make sure you shorten them using something like the Google URL shortener service so you don't have long, unwieldy links. 

Also, ensure that you have short descriptions before the affiliate links so that people know where they are linking to.

Quite quickly, you will see a build of clicks from the affiliate links below your video. eBay offers a 'pay per click' service. Amazon pays a commission on sales. You can make more money from a sale on Amazon from your link, but you get paid whether people buy or not on eBay when they click your link. You could put links to the same product on both platforms. 

Of course, there are other affiliate schemes so look around for what's appropriate to your video. 

Monetise on YouTube

When you upload your video to YouTube, you are asked if you want to 'monetise' it. You may not be able to do this right away because you have to have a certain number of views on the video before YouTube invites you to monetise it . But, don't worry. If your video is interesting enough, you will soon reach that threshold.