In this informal Toronto YouTube meetup hosted by Evan Carmichael, local creators share practical advice on turning a YouTube channel into a revenue source. The session opens with Evan introducing the meetup’s purpose—sharing monetization wisdom, shout‑outs, and channel reviews. MJ emphasizes that solid, audience‑building content must come first before any monetization attempts. Evan expands the conversation, urging creators to think beyond ad revenue and explore sponsorships, brand deals, merchandise, and affiliate links. He introduces his "4 Ps" framework—persistence, passion, patience, and playlists—advocating emotional, value‑driven playlists as a way to deepen viewer engagement. Speaker C illustrates how YouTube can serve as a funnel to sell external products, using an Udemy course as a case study. Throughout, the tone remains conversational and encouraging, with each speaker reinforcing the idea that diverse, audience‑first strategies are key to sustainable YouTube earnings.
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What's up everyone? It's time for another YouTube meetup here in Toronto. I did one last month, it was super successful. Really proud of the work that Toronto and city YouTubers are doing, so I thought we'd put on another one. This one we're going to talk about how to make money on YouTube, we're going to share some wisdom and expertise, do some shoutouts, and then also do some channel reviews and videos and help each other out, give some feedback, potluck style, for 3 hours tonight. Alex is off at 2 birthday parties, Nina's off at something else that she's gonna come later, so I'm setting up solo today. Hopefully it goes well, and I'm gonna be including some other YouTubers on this video from Toronto to share their advice on how to make money. So I'm gonna set up and stay tuned.
Hello, this is MJ from Toronto Real and MJ Illustrates. So the tip today is is how to monetize your YouTube channel. The best way to monetize your YouTube channel is to first have good content to be able to increase your audience, and then you can worry about monetizing your channel. That's what I learned today.
Hey guys, David here, and my YouTube tip on monetization is just think outside the box. So a lot of people think about just making money through ads on YouTube, but sponsorships, brand deals, and even selling merchandise is a great way to make money on YouTube as well. I'd like to talk about the 4 Ps: persistence, passion, and patience, and playlists. Just create emotional playlists that create value and do what you love, and that's about it really.
Keep creating content, so don't let— yes, there's affiliate affiliate links and their sponsorships, but don't let that prevent you from making that video. Because when you're inspired, don't wait for the affiliate link, just create the video and trust that the inspiration will just keep coming. And as you build your channel, you're building your brand. You're building your brand as you build your content and your channel, so it becomes easy to just connect the dots and build that mosaic that is your content curation.
Thanks, My advice is if you want to lead people back to a product or service that you offer, YouTube is a great place to do it. So for example, I have an online course and my YouTube videos, I'm just picking different tips that I have, um, throughout my YouTube videos, on my Udemy videos, and my whole goal is to offer some tips, get people interested in what I'm saying and in SEO, and then lead people back to my Udemy course. So a great way to hopefully monetize my Udemy course.
So I realized we only had 5 tips from the YouTubers that came out, so I'm going to add 2 of my own tips on how you can make money through your YouTube channel. So rule number 6 is look at the AdWords tool. If you're trying to make money from advertising on YouTube, it really is about if you're in the right niche. So YouTube will pay you based on how many thousands of views you get on your channel. It's called CPM. So it might be— I think the average is like $1.50 to $2.50 CPM. So for every 1,000 people that view your video, you will make $1.50 to $2.50. It's somewhere in there, but there's a big range of where that can go. So a lot of my videos will make more because I'm in the business niche. If I did videos on insurance, as an example, that's a really high-paying category where I might be able to make $30, $40, $50 CPM. Per 1,000 views instead of $1.50 or $2.50. So it really depends on your niche, and a cool tool to use is the AdWords tool. This is a free tool that Google puts out, and it's more for their Google side of things and the search results than YouTube, but it usually carries over. So you can type in different keywords and see which ones are more high-paying and then create content around that. I would just give you the caveat that you still need to create content that you care about. If I turn this channel into always talking about insurance because it pays me really well, you guys would tune out because it's not interesting, right? It doesn't, doesn't float the boat. You don't care about insurance, right? That's probably why it's so high-paying, because it's hard for them to get good views on videos. And so I would look at using that AdWords tool to help you fix your titles, to help you maybe pick some of the topics, to help you round out your tags and description, as long as it's really relevant to your niche. And it may give you ideas to do Just make sure that you, you are feeling the videos that you're making and you're not just doing it trying to make money. And number 7 is push the brands that you work with. Brand deals are a big thing. Everybody wants to make brand deals. It's one of the fastest ways that I've grown my channel is partnering up with different brands and getting paid to create content and help give them exposure and promotion. What I almost always find is the brand doesn't really know what they're doing on YouTube. I've always had to push a brand in a greater direction. So they almost always come to me, either the brand directly or an agency that they're working with, and they have a plan. And it's usually a small plan like, "Hey, we want you to make one video on this topic. Is that something to be of interest?" And usually their idea is just okay, mostly because the brands and the agencies don't have a lot of YouTube experience. And so they just see a big market, but they don't really know how to effectively communicate with them. And so when I first started I thought these guys were the experts, like, "Oh, you know, I need to learn from these guys." But I really discovered in working with them that they don't know what they're doing, and you need to guide them to something that will work for you and for your audience. Because how you interact with your audience may be different than me with my audience and somebody else with their audience. And so I almost always take the project that they initially give me and modify it to fit what works for my audience, and then push it to a bigger deal. Where one video won't really have a big impact for the community, but if we do it consistently, if we're doing it for a year, a video a month, every month for a year, that can help really build a lot of goodwill towards your brand. So I'll almost always try to push for a longer-term engagement after pushing around that first thing they came to me for. So I find you really have to do that with brands, and they appreciate it, because again, they don't know what they're doing, they need somebody to educate them on YouTube, And it's also how you can charge a higher, more premium price because you're giving them knowledge, you're giving them strategy, much more than just giving them an audience. Alright, it is coming up on 10:30. Just finished up. We gotta pack up. Nina has already started. There she is cleaning up. Nina brought this awesome stir-fry. We were supposed to bring food and I wasn't going to make anything, so I had to ask Nina like, "So, uh, am I going to buy something or what do you want to do?" She's like, "No, I'm going to make some stir-fry for everybody. Just make sure you bring my spoon back," was the message, right? Yeah. So thank you guys for watching. Thank you for joining another series here, the YouTube Meetups in Toronto. Hopefully you're doing something to contribute back to your local community, and for those of you Torontonians, I look forward to seeing you at the next one. And for those of you who aren't in Toronto, come to Toronto for the next YouTube meetup and let's talk about your channel and your business. I'm super pumped. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe and we'll see you soon. See how low I have to get to match Nina, okay?
