How to Start Making REAL MONEY on YouTube (works for all niches)

If you have a million subscribers on a channel, like, what kind of money do people make from that?

You can make 7 figures off your channel.

Okay.

You need audience, you need long content, you need consistent content. If you have a million subscribers but you're posting, you know, once every 3 months or something, that's not gonna work. And if it's short content, it's not gonna monetize. But long-form, consistent content, like 1 to 3 times a week, if—

or more.

You're in the financial space, so the ad rates are much higher.

Right, right.

You can make a lot more. You're gonna get a lot of insurance companies, credit card companies, banks putting ads against your content. People say, how much can you make from a YouTube channel? It completely depends on the niche. You can make 100 times more for the same view compared to a recipe channel or like a slime channel or something, right? So you don't need as big an audience to turn it into something, but it's hard to make it an 8-figure AdSense business, but you can make it a 7-figure AdSense business. So here we are with Brian, member of our mastermind community. Part of that, we're doing our one-on-one here. So what's up, man? How can I help?

You know, here's what I was wanting to talk about is obviously we've been doing for probably a year and a half the real estate channel. Yeah, it's been going great, starting to get business from it, getting leads from it. And again, it's always going to be small. It's very specific. It's very niche, all that stuff. So even these next couple days while we're here, what I want to talk more about is what I'm calling Complete Money Playbook. Gonna start a brand new channel from scratch. So obviously that's a little bit different because even this channel, the real estate one, it was a channel from like '15 that I just never used. We just put stuff there. So really the big thing is trying to figure out one, how I might be able to use the existing channel to help a new channel. But when you're starting from scratch, like what's the best way to get that rolling along?

Well, tell us what is Complete Money Playbook.

So what it is, um, In my real estate career, what happens is, is obviously I'm sitting in living rooms talking to people about real estate. And what always became very frustrating to me is how many people have very little financial literacy. So what I started doing, I have a 27-year-old son, 23-year-old daughter, started meeting with them and their friends probably a year ago talking about all things just basic, basic finances. Because my degree is in finance and economics, and I'm one of those people, fortunately, we talked about money from the time we were little. And so just basic stuff, if they just learned some basic principles, I always say to them, you can be, what I always ask them is whatever their definition of wealthy is. So again, everybody's playing a different game because depending on where you're trying to get to will affect on how you wanna set up your stuff for long term. So I just was trying to figure out a way to get this and more information to them. So I've been doing this with my son and his friends now. We were meeting once a month for about a year. And it's amazing how all these just little things that they had no idea about. It's like college graduates, and some of these guys are making in their early mid-20s anywhere between 60 and 100 grand a year, know nothing about what to do with their money. So that was the idea, was doing what I'm doing with them and figuring out how to talk to a larger audience with it. So that's kind of what we've been calling it.

What's the business model?

That's part of the discussion on it is, I mean, honestly, so I make a great living selling real estate. And if I were to be honest, in a perfect world, I'd be able to put out all of this financial literacy information on a YouTube channel and there would be no business model. It would just be me providing them enough information where honestly the channel could just pay for itself. Ideally, I think what's gonna happen is at least initially there has to be some sort of probably 4 or 6 week type of class that'd be relatively inexpensive that they can learn about. I've watched a few other people do sort of like a weekly thing where they're just giving out information or having guest speakers or doing that kind of thing. And they're charging them $20 or $50 or whatever it was to have them in like sort of some private group sort of situation. Trying to figure out long-term what the actual business model's gonna be, but more just trying to get the information out.

The challenge with financial literacy is just like people don't have money.

Right. Well, exactly.

So it's hard to turn that into something that is higher ticket where you're generating income and like, okay, if you're selling $40 courses or something, you need so many before it ends up paying off. Usually the model with that would be sponsorship. So like even now, even as you're starting up, who— you're not going to be able to get them views yet, but who wants to be associated with this that they might even put ad budget behind? Marketing budget behind, even in Reno, right, where you are, or if it's Reno, California, wherever you're going to be.

Yeah.

Is there a local bank that you could partner with where you maybe even film out of their, their facility, but they pay you, right, to make the content and they help distribute the content to their— it's small, it's just their local area, but they're paying you to do it, right? And at least covering— they may not be paying you six figures to come in and do this thing, but they're paying the cost at least of—

and honestly, that would be great if you do it yourself, right?

But then they get to go and share this with their audience because someone like bankers suck at making content. They're never in front of the camera, and it's always formal, and nobody wants to go talk to a banker. So you make a deal with a local bank, you go and film out of the location, you humanize it, You give them collateral to go put on their marketing to say, hey, we partnered with Brian and we're doing this new series, Complete Money Playbook, and that covers your expenses plus. And then it might even just be leapfrogging to different banks with bigger budgets to then— ultimately, you get 1 million subscribers on your channel, you're making money off of AdSense.

I didn't even know how that worked. Like, if you have 1 million subscribers on a channel, what kind of money do people make from that?

You can make 7 figures off your channel. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you need audience. Right. You need long content.

Right.

You need consistent content. Right. So if you have a million subscribers, but you're posting once every 3 months or something.

Yeah, it's not going to work.

And if it's short content, it's not going to monetize. But long-form consistent content, like 1 to 3 times a week or more. You're in the financial space, so there's a lot of— the ad rates are much higher.

Right. Right.

So you can make a lot more. You're going to get a lot of insurance companies, credit card companies, banks putting ads against your content. So you can make— when people say, how much can you make from a YouTube channel? It completely depends on the niche. You can make 100 times more for the same view compared to a recipe channel, right? Or like a slime channel or something, right? So you don't need as big an audience to turn into something, but it's hard to make it an 8-figure. AdSense business, right?

But you can make it a 7-figure AdSense business, which honestly would be great because I'm one of those people— it's— I'm fortunate I make a great living selling real estate already. So for me, even creating the content, doing it, I could probably spend $2,500 a month. Like on my real estate channel right now, we put out one long form. We were doing more short form until you guys told us don't do as much short form. So doing the consistent content, doing all that stuff isn't— that, that's not really— it's not that expensive, it's not that hard to do. And on this, honestly, because like I said, I think the people that need the information the most are like you just said, they can't pay for it anyway. So in reality, I would love to be able to get to a point where you had a channel big enough where you're literally giving out the information for free in exchange for people wanting to get in front of your audience. I mean, ultimately, I think that would be, for me, what I'd love to be able to do it that way if I could. But it sounds like just starting off in your local market, getting some people involved.

Like, who would benefit from this without getting exposure? So like, you can't give them much exposure yet. Right. You're not going to drive business to the bank.

Right.

Or whatever company. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, and even when you're— if you get a million subscribers on the channel or when, like now your, your Reno channel, the goal is never a million subscribers. It's not going to happen. Right. But that's a different intent. This one. Yeah. Like you should be going for— you want to solve this problem for America.

Right.

Right. A million is small.

Yeah.

Right. The opportunities that will come to you financially, having that setup will be so much greater than just making 7 figures off of AdSense. So you'll get book deals, you get speaking gigs, you'll get brand endorsements, you'll get equity plays, you'll get join our board of advisors, you'll get like tons of stuff that you can't even plan out yet. But for most of the people that we end up working with who have millions of subscribers, yes, they're making 7 figures from AdSense, but they're making even more from all the other things because of now their brand. Presumably you're still the guy, you're making the content. I want Brian, so Complete Money Playbook is the brand, I guess, but it's like you're, if it's, you have 40 different people creating content for the channel, then it's less valuable because you're not building you up as a part of it. So you won't get as many deals. Where if you're always the guy, it's like, yeah, we need Brian to come speak at our event, right?

[Speaker] And the whole reason, like, There's twofold for wanting to do this. One, I watch my son and his friends and I'm like, you guys are doing all the things, right? They went to school, got degrees, are working out there, they're doing their thing. And they literally, it's amazing to me how they can make it through college and they have no financial literacy. It is like the most ridiculous thing to me. And you can find it, obviously there's a million people teaching it all over the internet, but for whatever reason, they just have to find the right person they connect to. And for whatever reason, this group and his friends, I mean, they come talk to me about stuff. I'm always surprised what they're willing to talk to me about. So for that, my hard part is with my real estate business, I've been doing that for 25 years and you're kind of tied to your community. If I'm not there, like for example, while we're here, I've sold 3 houses while I've been in Toronto for the last week there. But the problem is, is that eventually you call me to say you want to sell your house, I got to go to your house. Where this I could do from anywhere. I could literally sit here today and borrow you guys and say, hey, I need to make some content today. Make content, go live, do whatever from anywhere. It doesn't matter so much. And so I thought long-term that was more of the thing. My daughter got her real estate license, so she's starting to be more involved in my day-to-day work. And again, my clients, for the most part, if I go sell your house and I do it once, everyone I'm selling their homes are people that I don't have to go back. Once I've done all the work and I've seen your home and we're on the market, we picked the price, all my expertise that I need, I can now do that from anywhere. But if you call me and say, my brother wants to buy a house, I gotta drive around and show him houses. So that's always been the dilemma with real estate. It's been great. Trust me, I love living in Reno all these years. But now, as I want to be able to go do more other things with grown kids and now being able to do whatever the hell I want to.

I mean, there's still a model there too, in that normally as agents are building up their practice, I mean, you're doing everything yourself, cool. Then you hire an assistant, cool. Then you hire the buyer side. But then you can hire the seller side too, right? It doesn't have to be you.

Absolutely. And we're getting there.

And then you're just the brand and you're making the content, you're building the relationships. And it's like, yeah, here you go. Here's Johnny, he's gonna go, and he's the seller's agent now. And that's like usually the last thing to get rid of is the seller agent, right? But you can, and people have done it. And you then just continue to build the brand. If that was all you're trying to accomplish, like that's easy enough to go and do with the—

Yeah, we're getting there. Yeah, I mean, at that part, it's kind of funny 'cause you're just so used to sitting in living rooms with people and doing what you do. And it's just funny because I could teach someone to do 80, 90% of it. It's that last little bit where you're able to just put the deal together that it's hard to teach someone else how to do that part. So, you know, you make that part work, you can find people to do it. Even at the end of the day, if my real estate business at the end of the day did a little less business or we did more business with because they were more people, whatever it is.

Well, yes, it's you training and coaching and like you're a great coach and trainer. Like you care about your people. So that helps.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, that's the whole reason why I got into this whole money thing, because what drives me crazy is You know, you'd help some person that's old enough to be my mom or dad, and they're broke and they're in their 70s or 80s. And you're like, how did you get here? And that's what I keep trying to explain to my son and his friends. I go, you know, the funny part is, is when they would come over at first and the questions they would ask. I'm like, you guys have to understand, if I gave you a list of 100 things and said, here's everything financial I would tell you to do over your lifetime, and you literally just did the first 20, And you never did another one. You just did the first 20 and just forgot about the rest. I go, you probably get where you want to go. The key is figuring out how to make more money and then being smart with the money you make. I mean, you know how it goes. When all of a sudden you went from, hey, I have a channel with 1,000 people to now you've got people like us coming here paying lots of money to come do these things. And you're— I don't know how often when your income explodes, if you were like, what do I do with this? I don't know. You get a financial planner, but hopefully it's someone you trust. It's trying to figure those things out. I'm really at the end of the day trying to figure out how to help people in their 20s and 30s set themselves up. The hard part always becomes for people is when you're playing a 40, 50, 60-year game, it does— I always say it doesn't feel like you're winning because it happens so slow at the beginning. So that's the part where they struggle with, but we've helped 2 or 3 of them really kind of get somewhere, and it was just small, small, easy stuff that they can do that if you just do it and you have 40 or 50 years of time, you're gonna win. It's really not that hard.

So I've done deals with 5 different entrepreneurs where I own a piece of the business and I'm like coaching, mentoring, guiding, training. Like this is one of them, this dance studio here. One of the guys, his name is Jeremy, and he's the first guy I did a YouTube business partnership with. He was a young kid, like 21, 22. Learned none of this stuff in school and just went to YouTube and typed in something like, How do I make money?

Right, right, right.

It's like you don't even know what question to ask. I know. They're not talking about what is compound interest. It's like they don't know what to ask. And so he went to YouTube and found one of my videos and then came to my event and then asked like, can I— I just want to be around you more. Can I walk your dog? Can I wash your car? It's like, dude, I don't, you know, we don't— I don't need that. But I just love this hustle. Said, what if I teach you about YouTube, 'cause people were coming to me all the time saying, hey, can I hire you? I was like, no. I didn't have anybody to give them. I can give them to you if you represent the brand well. So I trained him. He was working at a grocery store at the time, like just stocking shelves. And then when he made more in a year than he made, more in a month than he did in a year there, he burned his apron, quit the job, And now he's got a 7-figure business. Oh yeah. But all from like, so he learned all about that stuff, but he started off with how do I make money?

Exactly.

And now he's following Warren Buffett and he went to the Berkshire Hathaway event recently and he's all into this stuff. But it all started with like, I just don't know anything about money. And so it's like the most basic, basic, basic questions.

It's literally like 20 or 30 terms. Some basic stuff on good debt, bad debt, what really are assets, what aren't. It's like, it really at the end of the day isn't that hard. And it's funny, because like I said, I went to college and my degree is in finance and economics. And what's funny is they teach you how to do corporate books and how to run a company and not just your personal everyday, how do I run my personal finances? And it's like you said, it's really not that complicated to figure out. I don't think, but it's amazing how they don't know. I just couldn't believe how they don't know. So with all that being said, if you go back to start with a channel with zero, right, obviously you gotta start making content. I'm always a big fan of having at least a month's worth of content before you ever even post the first thing so that you've sort of built up this group of content. But for a channel like this, I know for my Lessinger Team channel, you guys were really big about one long form, you know, at least 10 minutes or more, and only one reel, and not doing multiple reels versus that. And on a channel like this, would that be different where you're just trying to get as many eyeballs to it as possible? Because at least initially I'm not selling anything.

Two different channels.

Yeah.

You have the Complete Money Playbook and then Complete Money Playbook Shorts.

Right.

You do your long form on the main channel and you do 10 shorts a day if you want.

Yeah, right.

On the other channel, it doesn't matter. Just so that the shorts don't hurt the long.

So how does that work? Like, that's the part, like, I don't understand. I mean, to me, 'cause we've been posting for a year and I have a person that actually does the posting of it. I'm trying to make the content.

Yeah.

So all that analytics and stuff that happened in the background about why the short form hurts the long, like, I don't understand how that works.

So there's two things. We're gonna, I'm gonna, there's slides on this tomorrow.

Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure we're gonna go, I'm gonna talk a lot about this.

But high level, there's a couple things. First off, Shorts, people don't watch long-form content. So if you look at your data, you'll see the crossover of how many people watch. It'll show you like not just theory, but actual data. How many people watch your long? How many watch shorts? How many watch both? And in thought leadership, you're looking at the 3 to 10% range watch both. So now you're bringing in an audience that isn't watching, that is not watching the long-form content. 'Cause the theory has always been, well, If they watch the short, they'll like me and then they'll go watch the long. But it's not mapping out. They're not doing it. The consumption behavior is I watch a short and then I want to watch more shorts. I don't want to watch the long. So 3% to 10% is the range. That might be different in different industries, but education, thought leadership type of videos, that's what it is. So short people are not watching long. Okay, so now you're building up a short audience. Not necessarily a bad thing. You're still gaining subscribers. Like the fastest way to subscribers and views is shorts. You're still gaining subscribers and views. The channel looks good, just your long-form content isn't doing well. The next thing to look at though, this is where it gets damaging, is when you put out a long-form piece of content, you look at the related sources of traffic, like where are you getting videos from, because you want to win in suggested. The play for you would be look at all the top money videos, right? See what their titles are, make your version. And do it better, right? Go longer, do it better. And you have a great film crew and you're great on camera and like you could do it. So we want to be ranking against these other people's videos. When you have a heavy Shorts audience and then you look at the suggested traffic, you'll start to see all sorts of super random videos.

Right, right. And with your finance video being up against some guy bowling at some whatever, right?

Kid brings a gun into IKEA or something, right? Like, why is my long-form video showing up there? About money showing up against this crazy video, right? Or politics or recipes or whatever. But that's more the Shorts feed. When you're in Shorts, one thing is next, it's all over the place. When you're consuming through long, if you look at the suggested videos, they'll all be similar themes, right? You click on a money video, you're going to see like 80% money videos now showing up. And so that's the challenge is now my long-form video is showing, I get against these completely random videos, which is gonna kill your click-through rate.

So should you have, literally, if you're doing long-form content, have no Shorts on there at all?

Yeah. Okay. Two channels. Shorts are great, but just do two channels.

Okay.

And then if you're using your channel as a, the Shorts channel should grow faster.

Yeah, I would think so.

For views and subscribers. It won't convert much of anything, but even for your real estate channel, You can use your channel to gain, you know, people, we have X number of thousand subscribers, come on our show. You can still use the interview process for the second channel 'cause you're gonna still clip up the content. So if you're doing your money channel and your long-form channel is like 10,000 subscribers and your shorts channel's 100,000 subscribers and you're gonna do some interviews, you can still say, hey, come on my main channel, but we're also gonna clip it for our shorts channel that has 100,000 subscribers.

[Speaker] Well, and that's where we've been getting most of the shorts now too. So what we did, 'cause, When we first started the real estate channel, obviously I wasn't talking to you guys yet. And we were doing one long form at the beginning. They were probably 3 to 5 minutes. And I didn't, you know, I was so used to doing 30-second reels.

Yeah. Yeah.

5 minutes seemed like a really long time. And I remember when you first started doing them, 'cause you're talking really fast and you're trying to get 'em all done. I'm like, oh, I got all the time in the world. I could go slower.

Yeah.

But then we were doing at the time 3 shorts and the channel, you know, went from 30 people. I think I'm about to hit 2,500. In a year and a half, but I am starting to get clients and business from it. And again, none of those long-form videos are all of a sudden gonna be seen tons and tons of times. I think I've got a couple now that are over 20,000, but most of them when they first come out, it's more than a few hundred, which is fine. At the end of the day, I'm trying to just find 15 or 20 people a year to buy a house. If I do that, it covers itself, it's totally fine. This would be totally opposite of that where you're trying to build up a big audience audience of people?

So you go up to the main topics that everybody's talking about. You focus on all the lessons. Now we're moving into thought leadership category, not biz dev show. Yeah, yeah. Right? So the retention really matters. The thumbnail really matters. The title really matters. Yeah. And then the two different channels, I would do both. The biggest problem for someone like you who's— I mean, we've helped a lot of people who are like, now, okay, I want to start a new channel. The patience to let it work. Yeah. And so are you going to wait 3 years to make money from this thing? And usually it's a no, right? So how do we make money faster from it?

Right.

And usually it's a biz dev strategy that doesn't work for you here because it's going to be a lot harder to biz dev it. But a brand sponsorship integration with a local company that then you level up to different banks or insurance companies or credit card companies or whatever. To humanize them, where they're paying you not for your audience, but they're paying you just to be associated with you.

Right. But I kind of have this feeling it's gonna take a while. I mean, my real estate business basically funds being able to even do this.

Yeah.

And I know it's gonna take time to do it, and that's kind of, for me, sort of more of a long-term play anyway. 'Cause I mean, at the end of the day, if I keep selling the number of houses that I sell, and this turned into— literally, if all of a sudden, Sunday, I made $100,000, I would think that was a big success. And who knows, like I said, maybe it takes off and it goes into some big thing and off you go. But I keep watching, when I watch Dave Ramsey or Ramit Sethi or Graham Stephan or these people and I listen to their information and I'm just like, who are you guys talking to? And what drives me most crazy about all these guys is this, is that, you know, you see tons of videos now about renting versus owning. And I'm a big fan. I will never tell you that there's never a good time to rent a house. Obviously I sell real estate for a living. There are times where renting makes sense. But it's not a long-term strategy. You know, I know it works different in Canada than it works in the States, and different parts of the world it works different. But in our— in U.S., it's like, if you're not going to get into real estate at some point, you're just— it's, it's, it's just not a good idea. But so I was watching these videos, it just drives me just bat crazy when I listen to these guys. And like, they're talking about this stuff, I go, I'm actually sitting in people's living rooms talking to actual buyers and sellers and people about this. So it's like, how do I take that real estate expertise and work it with just a couple of long-term financial strategies like you're talking about, or even before, like where they don't understand how compound interest works, or— I mean, it was just simple questions I used to ask them all the time because everybody hears about the dreaded 1 percenters. I'm like, do you know how much money you had to make to be in the 1%? And they were like, well, no. And at the time, I think it was 2 years ago when I did it in the US, it was like $600,000. I go, trust me, making $600,000 is not a bad thing, but that is not some earth-shattering, evil, terrible 1% person. I go, most people that are making that kind of money are doing fine, but they're not private jets and yachts. That's a whole different group of people. That's the 1% of the 1%ers. I go, most, I call them everyday wealthy people. I go, it's not what you think it is. And so it's just like a handful of simple questions. Again, I'm thinking about what do you think making a lot of money is and what is your definition of wealthy and how do I get there? It just wasn't that hard for them to start doing it. And as much as The one that Ramit drives me crazy on is he doesn't want to call it a budget. He wants to call it a conscious spending plan. And I literally go, excuse my French because we're on camera now, I go, call it whatever the fuck you want. It's a budget. I go, now hopefully someday you make enough money, you won't have to worry about it anymore and you won't have to pay attention to it so closely. I go, but when you're making $100 grand and you, or whatever you're making, and it's every nickel counts, I go, you have to at first. And then over time you won't have to anymore.

So two last things. One, I'd say I would just start it. Don't wait for a month of content, whatever. Like the launch doesn't matter. So even start from your studio. So then you have something to show the banks or different partners. And as you start doing it, you start getting more.

And does it matter early on if it's not every week?

No, I would try, but like just start. Get it out, build momentum. You have something to look at. And don't stress about having a month worth of content. That's nothing. It doesn't mean anything. And the second is any piece of content that gets you fired up, like when there's emotion, that's the content to make. So talk about Ramit. Talk about Dave. Talk about the 1%. Whatever. And you can even show a quick clip and then react. Like, he said this. And then you say what you want to say. But the emotion, when you're fired up about it, because finance is such a boring—

Oh, yeah.

People are afraid of it, they hate it, they think about accountants and professors and like, I don't, I don't want to learn this stuff. So if you're fired up about something, your energy is going to carry me through caring about budgets, right? You think of like the most boring thing and you're like, budgets, guys, you know, if you get all excited about budgets.

Yeah. And it's painful. I mean, no one wants to do it. I can tell people you don't want to do it. And in some ways, the hard part for these kids is Because it sounds old school, and sometimes I almost wish they actually had to actually physically write a check and mail it in for a payment rather than everything happen automated all the time. Because it's easy to not realize what's going on when everything's a debit and a swipe and a this and a that, and then you don't realize what you're doing to yourselves. Where back in the day, we had to literally write a freaking check and mail it in, and you sort of knew what you're— without even doing a budget, you sort of knew because you were physically doing it. But yeah, when I get on there, I get fired up when I have more of a voice and sound like myself.

Yeah.

It was like, well, when I was here yesterday thinking, I'm like, I finally get to come do this and I'm not even gonna be able to talk. It's gonna be brutal. I was thinking the same thing, you know, tomorrow when we're doing our little speech, I'm like, I'm not even gonna be able to talk for 10 minutes. I'll give, I'll give my best 5 minutes I got. Go from there.

So anyway, you did great.

I appreciate it.

Brian Lessinger.

There you go.

Appreciate you, man.

Yep.

Cool. To see me coach other entrepreneurs, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You don't need to tell people to subscribe to your channel. Yeah, for me, it's all about energy. Like, you just need to give them a reason that, man, when I'm with her, I just feel better, and so I want to subscribe and watch more videos.