How to Earn Money With YouTube

Founded by three young entrepreneurs – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – YouTube was started in 2006. Within a year, the company was taken over by Google Inc for 1.65 billion USD.

Since the first day, YouTube has been growing steadily and fast becoming a preferred medium for Internet marketers to promote and market their products and services.

YouTube has so much content that one needs 600 years to watch each and every video!

As you are reading this piece and thinking about how to earn money with YouTube, you are getting increased access to around 200,000 videos every minute and every minute of YouTube video uploaded is worth 13 hours of visual time!

Amazing, isn’t it?

Of all the countries able to watch YouTube, USA has the largest number of audiences, followed by United Kingdom and Philippines.

From a marketing perspective, you have better sales traction when you use YouTube for marketing and advertisement. Of all the various categories of content published, music videos score the highest and films score the lowest.

The best thing is you don’t have to be a professional videographer to create and upload videos on YouTube – 80% of videos on YouTube are made by amateurs.

So, from this brief introduction from a marketing perspective, what did you learn?

• YouTube gives you global exposure
• YouTube gives you a wider market to sell goods and services
• YouTube is easily accessible and does not need any investment, per se
• YouTube means unlimited amounts of traffic – remember, millions of people visit YouTube daily.

Now, what did we miss?

Of course, our money making agenda!!! As you have understood by now, YouTube does not have any commission or referral programs like Amazon or ClickBank; therefore, what can an Internet marketer do to optimize on the immense amount of traffic freely flowing and be clever enough to capitalize on it?

Join the YouTube Partnership Program!

YouTube earns a large percentage of their revenues from advertising programs and to attract more viewers to their advertisement, they prefer to partner with those YouTube account holders who have regular page views.

When you partner with YouTube, you are entitled to a share in the revenue the website gets when people click the advertisement banners from your YouTube video. Not only does YouTube give you a share in their revenue but you can also rent out YouTube videos and create your own brand presence.

However, to take advantage of all these benefits, you need to become a partner; but the fact is, not everyone can become a partner.

YouTube has its own rules and regulations that they follow during partner selection. For instance, you need to be popular on YouTube and get lots of visitors daily.

Within this partnership program, there are two categories: account level partnerships and individual video partnerships.

In the account level partnership, you need to have a strong YouTube following and, as said before, get lots of daily views on your multiple videos.

In the individual video partnership, you can become a partner on the strength of a single video that is so popular that it receives thousands of visitors daily without delay.

In either kind of partnership, you earn when you allow YouTube to display relevant ads embedded with your video.

Suppose you have a video on a perfume manufacturing industry. Accordingly, YouTube will search for relevant ads and embed it either in the bottom or at the beginning so that it gets the visitor’s attention.

In short, here are some of the basic criterias to fulfill before getting accepted in the YouTube Partnership Program:

• You must be above 18 years of age.
• All the videos uploaded onsite should have your copyright. If someone else has made those videos, you need to have their written permission granting you the rights to use the content in any way possible. Any copyright violation will lead to account termination.
• You should have a good YouTube following.
• Your videos should have a good number of visitors daily
• This program is not available in every country. If you are from Germany, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Spain, UK, US, Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, France, Israel and Italy, you can become a partner.

Other Benefits:

When you become a YouTube partner, you have the opportunity to rent your videos. Of course, these are videos for which only you have the sole copyright and therefore, permission to rent or sell them.

If you have filmed something that you know people will be interested in seeing and won’t mind shelling out minimal dollars, you can use the YouTube Rental option. Please remember that this option is open for only United States residents.

Another benefit of the program is that you get to create and promote your own merchandise and use the traction to build your online brand.

You may start out with the intention of only making money from YouTube, but in the long term, this same source will help you to start and establish your business if you want.

Forget about your own merchandise for a moment; think about those branded companies who are willing to spend thousands of dollars just to be able to purchase advertisement space on your YouTube channel when it becomes ultra – popular.

Ford, Kia Motors, Hasbro’s Trivial Pursuit, Taco Bell, Pepsi, Colgate and GMC are some companies that have benefitted from YouTube branded campaigns. Through your YouTube channel, they promote their products and in return, YouTube pays you a generous share from their revenue.

After reading all this, you may question – what if I decide not to join the YouTube Partnership Program? Will it still be possible to earn money from YouTube?

Of course, if you are using AdSense on your website. Without being a partner, you cannot earn as an advertiser but you can earn by promoting your website where you can advertise.

Through YouTube, you can pull visitors to your website by creating content about your website and embedding it with your website link. Interested people will click on that embedded link and will be directed to your website. From there on, it is up to you whether you are able to do any business or not.

Earning from YouTube may not require upfront investment but it does require hard work from your part to make your account popular.

With thousands of videos being added every minute, your video content should be really worthwhile to make it stand out from the other YouTube videos published in a similar niche. Once you begin to get regular viewers, it is relatively a smooth journey from then on.

Let us know how you are using the YouTube phenomenon by leaving a comment below…