Don’t make THESE 5 Monetization MISTAKES

– Reaching monetization and getting into the YouTube Partnership Program is the number one goal that creators under 1000 subscribers have on YouTube. But what if I told you even that goal alone is a mistake that you’re making on your channel when it comes to getting monetized? Well, sort of. In reality, creators should really be all right with taking a step back and focusing more on their content rather than simply reaching a milestone like monetization. On the other hand, getting certain things set up so that you’re making money while you’re working towards that larger goal is something you can do, and it may not take a whole lot of your time.

And yes, you heard me right.` You can make money on YouTube even if you’re not monetized yet. Recently, I had a conversation with Luria from Live Streaming Pros. Luria is dedicated to helping creators like you make money on YouTube, and I had a bunch of questions for her. Turns out there’s actually five monetization mistakes that creators are making, and the first one begins with mindset.

– I think the biggest mistake that creators are making when it comes to monetization is identifying as only a content creator and not thinking of themselves as really building a business as an entrepreneur. If you switch it in your brain to say I’m a content creator and I’m an entrepreneur, I’m building a business from my videos where I can have long-term sustainability, I can avoid burnout and really be strategic in the process. – So for example, let’s say that you open up a donut shop but also you have a passion for salads for some reason. So you come into work one day as the big boss in charge and you decide, I’m gonna put a whole bunch of different varieties of salads on our menu next to our donuts because I have a lot of salad ideas.

What’s gonna happen to your donut shop?

Well, you are about to invest resources into now serving salads where you once only had to worry about serving donuts. You’ll even need to change your marketing, the signs outside, the ads on the radio, to talk about the salads you sell at your donut shop. I’ll skip ahead and give you the spoiler. Things are not gonna work out too well for this imaginary establishment. You’ve split your focus on two entirely different things.

I know this is a very strange example, but this is what it looks like to an outsider who’s found your channel and you’re not thinking with a business mindset. Your channel needs to have a strong focus. No business owner in their right mind would take their entire restaurant and put everything at stake over some new menu item that they’re kind of passionate about. They might start a separate salad business, but only if they have the time and resources to manage that business on top of their successful donut one. Another massive mistake creators are making is only focusing on the YouTube Partnership Program.

Remember when I said you can make money without it? – Most content creators build their business on the platform itself. What happens if you get sick? What happens if the algorithm stops sending you all the love? What if you are going to experience what life is going to throw you, and that’s not a what if, that’s a when, and you can’t create content as much or as often, and that’s where the off platform revenue streams will help you really think like a business.

That will give you that long-term sustainability, and it will give you the ability to avoid burnout. – One thing I wanted to ask Gloria was about the biggest misconception that people have about monetization on YouTube. She said something that I’ve actually seen myself quite a bit working with channels here at vidIQ. Creators are, for some reason, under the impression that they actually have to have all of the views and all of the subscribers before they can actually start making real money on YouTube. That could not be further from reality, though.

– You can make money from a single viewer. One of my students, Andy Smiles, is a bookkeeper, and she wanted to do videos and hopefully build a bookkeeping business. She went live for the first time, and I was like, girl, you’re not gonna have any viewers because you have no audience. She took a post-it, and she literally covered up the view count on the screen. She had zero viewers watching live, and the next day, a single viewer watched and signed a $3,000 contract.

So it is very possible if you focus on the right viewer as opposed to the number of viewers – By now, I’m hoping you’re convinced, right? You’re listening to this and you’re saying, okay, fine. I can make money in all kinds of ways with my YouTube channel, but physically, how? Literally, how do I do that? Well, it kind of all goes back to building an audience, building a community.

If you want people to pay you their money, you need to earn their trust and you need to provide them value. – Engagement is really the thing that’s going to make or break your success. Engaged viewers are going to be the people who take action. Plan ahead to engage with them easier because when you;re engaged with them, they’re going to be more engaged with you.

You’ll see more super chats, more comments, a deeper connection with the audience.

– What this all boils down to is the age-old advice of make good content, and that takes practice.

But what’s your larger goal here? For a lot of people, it’s going to be that they winna do YouTube full-time. They want this to be their job, and that can happen for you. But that also brings us to the biggest mistake that creators are making when they’re in this process.

– One of the biggest mistakes that creators make when they’re first starting their channel is getting too excited to quit your day job.

It’s not something that happens overnight and if you do see fast growth, you’ve gotta make sure that you have that as sustainable growth over time. Getting too ahead of yourself will get you in trouble. When I first started 17 years ago, I was in a day job. I was working my 40 hours.

I was coming home. I was working all night long just to be able to create that long-term sustainability. While it only took five months for me, that’s not very common, though it is more common that you should wait six months to a year before expecting those kinds of results.

You can push through. It’s about prioritizing the right things to focus on.

When it does come time to quit your day job you should really have six months to a year’s worth of expenses to cover yourself and know that you have the capability to stick even if your growth stalls out. – I winna give a quick shout out to Luria, by the way, who has the goal of helping creators reach, reliably, $5,000 a month with their YouTube channels. To help you achieve this, she hosts, from time-to-time, free interactive masterclasses. And just in general, she has a ton of resources over at livestreamingpros.com.

I’ve linked her website right here and, in the description, below, so you can click on over there and check it out for yourself.

With ASN, there is only one way to fail… and that is by failing to try!