3 Ways to Make Money on YouTube Without Adsense Many of creators come to find out that YouTube is not a sustainable income source. Here's how to use the platform to actually get paid.
By Sam DeZeeuw Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Making videos on YouTube can be very lucrative if executed correctly. Unfortunately, many beginner YouTube creators believe that if they make quality videos, and allow ads to appear on their videos, the cash will begin to flow in. However, many of those creators come to find out that YouTube is not a sustainable income source. In fact, while it is impossible to give an exact number, you can estimate that a video will make a dollar for every thousand views.
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Why does YouTube pay so little to its creators? First of all, let's remember that this is YouTube's platform and it doesn't have any responsibility to pay its creators, but it chooses to regardless. You also have to keep in mind that there are many hands that the money from advertisers goes through before it gets to you. It starts with the consumers, who pay the advertiser, who then pays YouTube, who finally pays the creator. By the end, there isn't much money left over. So, what can creators do to quickly use YouTube to create a sustainable income?
Affiliate marketing
This is one of the most popular methods of making money on YouTube. Affiliate marketing is marketing in which you sell other people's products and take a commission for each item or service you sell through a special URL that is linked to your account. While so many companies have affiliate programs for which you can make a commission, one of the most simple, and most popular, programs is Amazon's Associates program, which starts the commission at 4 percent.
When you sign up for Amazon's program, you will be taken to your portal where you can search for virtually any item on the Amazon marketplace, and create a special link for that product. All you have to do is make a video highlighting a product that you love, tell viewers to click the link in the description if they are interested, and let your commissions roll in. The best part is that once your viewers click your link, you will receive a commission on anything that they purchase on Amazon within the next 24 hours.
Related: Here's How You Can Actually Make Money With YouTube
Selling your own products
We are of the understanding that YouTube will pay us a fraction of a penny of what they make from an advertiser. Affiliate programs such as Amazon will give us a larger percentage of sales, but what if we wanted to make 100 percent of the revenue and have full control of the money coming in? To do this, you need to sell your own products.
For example, let's say you create a mini online training program that you sell for $50. You will want to make a video that provides immense value and then at the end of the video pitch your course to get more value. At 1,000 views on that video, YouTube AdSense will pay about $1, but if you were only able to convince 0.5 percent of your audience to purchase your course (five viewers), you will make a total of $250 in revenue from your own product. Therefore, not many people are required to purchase your product to make more money than what YouTube will pay.
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Consulting
Ultimately, the fastest way to make money on YouTube is to give value of some kind. Uploading videos and hoping for the best is not enough. After gradually attracting your targeted audience, periodically pitch your consulting services for your viewers to receive even more value than what they are already receiving. Your goal should be to make your audience think, If I'm getting this amount of value from free videos on YouTube, imagine the amount of value I'd receive from a paid one-on-one consulting service. At that point it would be a no-brainer to pay you for your expertise, knowledge and time.
In my experience, many creators who get started on YouTube believe that they just need to upload videos to YouTube, turn ads on and let the compensation roll in. This is only true if you are looking to make a non-sustainable passive income from your videos. If you are looking to grow a brand and a business, be sure to provide value and sprinkle in these other income streams. Remember though, the only way each of these ways to make income with YouTube will be effective is if you provide value first, so let that be your focus and the compensation will come more naturally.
