How I Make Money from YouTube with Less than 1,000 Followers
You don't need a 6-figure YouTube following, advertising, sponsors, and affiliate partners to make money from YouTube.
Behind every successful content creator's curtain is the years of dedication from consistently producing content that compounds their audience over time. The problem is that most of us only see the final result–we think it's not achievable for us. We either don't get started with content creation or quickly give up.
But there is an easier onramp to making money from YouTube before you have a large audience. Here's the TL;DR:
Teach people something valuable
Convert YouTube subscribers to your email list with lead magnets on every video.
Sell a product that is easy and fun for you to produce.
Pro Tip: Try selling group coaching. It's simple & profitable.
Growing Your Email List with YouTube
Your email list is your most valuable asset. You control it; YouTube controls you.
My YouTube channel has 764 subscribers with lead magnets to my email list on every video. My email list has 634 subscribers. My goal is for my email list to be the same size as my YouTube subscriber list.
When I started on YouTube a year ago, I didn't know if I would ever sell anything to my audience, but I knew that getting emails from day one is super valuable. When your channel is microscopically small, you need to promote your content. There is no guarantee your subscribers will even see it. But with their emails, you can go directly to them with your new content, engage with them for content ideas, and sell to them directly.
In the age of social media influencers, email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for converting subscribers to customers.
Becoming a super influencer is hard. But all you need is 1,000 true fans to build a business around. Your true fans trust you and will consistently buy from you. You don't need to wait until you have 1,000 to start selling to your audience. I started selling group coaching to my audience when I only had 247 email subscribers.
I've tried blogging and every social media channel for growing my internet presence and email list. YouTube has been the fastest for people to find my content and grow my email list.
What makes YouTube powerful is how findable your content is. It took years for my blog content to show up in search engines for other brands I have. In the past year, my YouTube content had 3x more views than my established blog content.
In my videos, I mention my email list. I tell people, "You will be the first to know about my latest resources, and I send content by email that isn't on YouTube."
Sample Lead Magnet Landing Page using a Mailerlite template
I've experimented with various lead magnets. My content is for recent college grads on applying to grad school, scholarships, and finding jobs. My highest converting lead magnet is a pdf download of real grad school essays that got people into MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and UCLA. This works well as a lead magnet because it is hard to acquire information.
I use Mailerlite to create free landing pages, which auto sends my lead magnets when someone subscribes to my email list. I can create different landing pages for each lead magnet, and I have tags for each type of sign up, so it's easy for me to see where people are signing up from. Here is an example landing page, which took less than an hour to set up with a template.
What to Sell
It's uncomfortable to sell things. The bulk of my work is in the non-profit space. I know a YouTuber with over a million subscribers who doesn't like selling things to his audience. But he has enough subscribers to make plenty of money from ads and sponsorships.
If you want to make money early in the game, you need to sell something. It can be a product like an ebook, online course, etc. or a service like consulting, coaching, etc.
Deciding what to sell is tricky. People will tell you, "Online courses are so profitable...it's so easy to do an ebook, blah, blah, blah."
What works for someone else might not work for you.
You need to get clear on your intention, goals, outcomes, and understand your audience.
Some questions to consider:
What is your financial goal?
How many people do you want to serve?
How much money do you have to invest?
How much time do you have to invest?
How big is your audience?
What is the unique contribution you can offer your audience?
What is going to be fun and simple for you to create?
What are the underlying motivations that will keep you committed to creating even during the lows?
What does success look like for you?
You may not know upfront the answers to these questions, and that is okay. Just start somewhere and adapt as you learn and discover what resonates with your lifestyle and your audience.
When you have a small audience, you will be selling to less people. On average, 2-3% of your email list will purchase from you. If you have 500 email subscribers, that means 10-15 people will buy from you. If you are selling an ebook for $10, you will make $100-$200. Imagine if you are selling private coaching for $150/hour. Now you are talking $1,500-$3,000. Imagine selling an online course for $500; you will make $5,000-$7,500. When you have a small audience, selling 10 people a $500 course is easier than selling 100 people a $50 course. Teachable has great data on this and resources for starting a premium online course.
I initially thought of doing an online course, but time is what I don't have. From my previous online course experience, I know that profitable online courses require a lot of upfront work to develop and a lot of energy to market and launch.
My top priority was keeping things fun, simple, and time-effective.
My intention is not to make money but to give in-depth college advising to people like me. As a woman of color being the first in my family to go to college, I was clueless, and I want to save others from the lessons I learned the hard way. I've helped many young people of color get into top colleges, but all of them were in my personal network, and I wanted to expand my reach.
Paying attention to what your audience wants is the easiest way to develop a product. The most popular content on my channel are videos on applying to grad school. Once I realized this, I started doing free monthly office hours to build my email list and learn from my audience. I started getting regular emails from people asking for private advising. But that goes against my intention of making advising more accessible and being time effective. That is when I came up with the idea of doing group coaching as my product.
Group Coaching
Group coaching is an untapped product that many more people can employ. You only need a few people to make it work. Many folks come back multiple times. It's also super flexible & less prep work than a course or developing an ebook. These folks also become your true fans.
I've done group coaching as a facilitator and also in my online courses. I wasn't sure how it was going to work as a single hourly service people opt-in to. I took the plunge since it was simple, fast, and cheap to prototype.
I generally have around 20 people on a call in my monthly free office hours, and I have time to review 4-6 people's grad school essays. I then edit these Zoom calls into YouTube videos. I decided to do private office hours for $30 to join and limited to 4 people. Everyone gets individual attention for about 15-20 mins. It's affordable for them and a decent hourly rate for me. This rate works for my intention of making private college advising, which is generally over $100/hour, accessible to many.
When it comes to developing a price point, don't limit yourself to your standard hourly rate or try to be cheap. I've seen group coaching models where people are paying $5,000 or $10,000 for group coaching programs that are anywhere from 6-weeks to a few months long, and groups are as large as 50 people. Think about the Tony Robbins model. People pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to see him coaching in action and may not even get individual attention from him, but still get plenty of value out of the event.
Sample Ticketspice event registration page
With group coaching, students learn more. Often a challenge one person is having, many are having. They learn from seeing different examples in other people's lives. When you offer advice to one person, you need to make an explicit connection to a generalizable principle that they can all learn from. For example, I see many common mistakes in grad school essays, and I pause and acknowledge that this is something many people do and explain how to avoid the mistake. Often people don't even know what to ask for help on, but when they are overhearing another person's question, it triggers ideas about their work.
I don't have a brand website since I haven't thought of a domain name, and I didn't want to get stuck in analysis paralysis when I started. All my YouTube videos link to a simple events page on my personal portfolio website; that way, I don't have to update individual links on my videos.
Even if you don't have a website, you can easily create an events page with anything that can generate a custom link like a Google Doc or a Notion page.
For people to register and collect payments, I use Ticketspice, which takes a smaller fee than Eventbrite and is more user friendly. I create an event page one-time and duplicate it for each event. I can also send custom reminder emails that send a Zoom link for the actual event.
I've been doing group coaching sessions for the last four months and almost always sell out.
But most importantly, it's simple for me. I just have to show up, which is way easier than an online course. When life gets busy, I stop scheduling them. I'm nine months pregnant and rarely make YouTube videos these days, but my YouTube audience and email list are growing faster every month.
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