$0 to $500K on YouTube // How Long to Go Full-Time on YouTube?

Now, the question I get asked the most now that I've seen a lot of success on YouTube is, Lauren, how long did it take you to go from doing $0 in revenue to actually being able to support yourself full time? So the quick answer to that question is it took me about two and a half years to go from making $0 on YouTube to actually earning a full time income. So what I want to do in this video is I actually want to go over some really interesting details. I'm going to show you some data from my personal journey and hopefully motivate and inspire you to keep going. Because YouTube is not a get rich quick thing, but it does take time. And I'm going to show you some data that you might find encouraging about my story that's maybe going to be similar to yours. If you're new to the channel, welcome. My name is Lauren Bateman and Full Time Tubers is all about helping course creators and teachers and service providers like myself learn how to leverage the YouTube platform so that they can sell their services, sell their course courses and make money off of the platform. Alright, so I pulled up my laptop with my data and my first year in YouTube was probably like a lot of typical YouTubers. I put up a lot of content, I didn't see much action happening and I got overwhelmed and worn out and I got really exhausted. So my first year I uploaded 39 videos and I gained about 236 subscribers. So nothing really to write home about. I got about 40,000 views and I will admit in the beginning I did a bad thing. Don't do this. I went to one of those service providers and I bought like 5000 views for one of my videos or a couple of my videos. And what happens is you get a bunch of views, nobody subscribes and the channel just stays flat. I got no benefit from doing that. So don't go out buying views or buying subscribers. It really doesn't help your channel at all. And how much money did I make in my first year? Well, I didn't get monetized because obviously I didn't have a thousand subscribers. So I made $0 in ad revenue on. But I did start my course. I recorded my first course in November of 2017 and I made about $590 a first year in YouTube I made $590. Nothing really to write home about. So let's go to 2018. So like most YouTubers, after the first year I got pretty overwhelmed and I got worn out and I only uploaded 17 videos in 2018. I was actually kind of surprised with that when I went back and look at the data because I thought I did more, but I guess I didn't. I didn't. That's like one, one and a half videos a month that I uploaded in 2018. But the content that I uploaded in 2017 kept growing and I did gain 1200 subscribers in 2018. So making a little bit of progress here, which meant I did get monetized in 2018, I got 147,000 views. My ad revenue was $109.86. My course revenue, on the other hand, was $3,220, putting me at a total of $3,329.86 for my second year in YouTube. Once again, this wasn't much to write home about and it wasn't really super motivating for me. So here I am, I'm two years in, I've uploaded what I thought was a lot of content, which really isn't. You really got to upload like 40 or 50 videos for YouTube just to start figuring out what your channel's about. So if you're not there, don't worry. It's not that things are going slow, it's just that the YouTube Algori is trying to figure out who your audience is and what type of person they should show your content to. So if you're like me in 2018, you're feeling like, okay, I'm two years in, this sucks, I want to give up. Don't do it yet because I'm going to show you over the next three years how my channel exploded. So 2019, I actually only uploaded 15 videos. I did less than I did in 2018, but I got 8,100 subscribers, I got 525,000 views, ad revenue, I made $2,045.80. And then course revenue, I made 8,250, putting me at a grand total of $10,295.80. Now that's again, that's not a full time income, but it's like, okay, something happened in 2019. And what happened in 2019 is one of the videos that I did in 2017 finally took off. I think I recorded this video in June of 2017. And here it is October, November of 2019. Almost a year and a half later, that video starts getting picked up by YouTube and starts showing to a lot of people. And I noticed all of a sudden started to make more course sales. I was getting more and more emails from teachable saying, hey, you got another course sale. You got another course sale. And I said, something weird's happening, happening here. So I went to my website. I saw a huge influx of traff. They said it was coming over from YouTube. So I went over to my YouTube analytics and I was like, holy crap, this video has just exploded. So we all know what happened in 2020. The world shut down. But my channel was already on an upward trend, which was super helpful for me because in 2020, I finally went all in. This is the year that I went all in on YouTube. People are like, when did you. When did you really go full time on YouTube? And I uploaded 96 videos. And in 2020, right. So 2017, I uploaded 39, 2018, 17, 2019, 15. And then 2020, I was uploading eight videos every month. Okay, 96 videos I did in a single year. And I gained 45,400 subscribers that year. I did 2.9 million views. And then AdSense really jumped up this year, about $17,000. And course revenue, I did about $112,000 for a total grand total of $129,385.43. So that is 100% a full time income. Now, I know a lot of you guys are saying, Lauren, how much is that? Is from COVID Well, I'm going to show you a little graph here from my teachable platform. And you can see there is a giant spike there in the middle. In April of 2020, I made $16,000 in one month with a really crappy sales page. I didn't even have a typical sales page. I probably could have, but I mean, I was still learning about this whole thing. And you can see that it starts trending down as soon as, you know, kind of the lockdowns ended and people are starting getting out. And as a YouTuber, this was a really depressing moment for me. I think this is a very important moment for you guys to listen because this could be a moment when most people would want to give up. They're like, okay, I just had all this success and I went back to having, like, nothing again, not nothing. I mean, I'm making. I'm making money, okay, Making a thousand, couple thousand dollars a month. So still a lot of income. But I was used to making $8,000 a month. 16,000. 8,000. It's like, man. But it gave me hope. It also gave me hope. I was really depressed over the summer because my AdSense revenue came way down. You was making like $4,000 a month. It went down to like $1,000 a month. So I was like really depressed that I'd had this big success and then I lost it all. And for a lot of people that's really demoralizing and they want to give up. But for me, I tried to flip it. What I said to myself was, Lauren, you know what, if this is the kind of traffic you need to make that much money, then you just need to get back to that traffic point. So I'm like, I really gotta dive in on this. So at the end of the year, I moved my course over from teachable to Kajabi because I thought it was a much better course platform. And I really dug in. And in the last three months of the year, I made over $55,000 in the last three months of 2020 by just really digging in, pushing my marketing, pushing my course, and really starting to sell using the YouTube platform. So it just goes to show you what a mindset switch can do for you guys. So here we are, 2021. There's about a month left. And you know, I've done. I'm going to do another 96 to 100 videos this year. Still doing twice a week. That's my posting schedule. I post twice, twice a week. And this year alone so far I've gotten 96,000 subscribers. I'm going to break 100,000 subscribers just in this year alone. And speaking of subscribers, if you guys are interested in subscribing to the channel, don't forget to subscribe and turn on those notifications. Not only that, on views, 5.8 million. I'm going to go over 6 million views by the end of this year. Ad revenue last year was 17,000. This year I'm almost at $46,000 in ad revenue and core sales were at about 426,000. So this year alone I'm going to make over $500,000 as a YouTuber, uploading videos twice a week and just doing what I love to do. So if you're a teacher like me and you really want to start digging in to the YouTube platform, I would highly recommend that you go check out one of my YouTube courses in the description below. I have a great jumpstart program for anyone that's under a thousand subscribers. And if you're a little bit of a bigger channel, over a thousand subscribers, then I do have a full blown YouTube course where I show you all the back end secrets, the do's and don'ts of YouTube. What makes a good thumbnail, what makes a good title? All the important things that you need to focus on to get explosive growth. YouTube. I just showed you my entire journey. This is not a six month thing, this is not a three month thing. We're not making viral cat videos here. What we're doing on this platform as educators is we're building a service. We are showing people our knowledge, what we know about a skill set, something that we're an expert at. And we're showing them what we can do and how we can help them. And what we're doing is we're telling them how, hey, if you're interested in my course, just like you saw me do here, okay? If you're interested in my course, go to the description below, click on the link and learn more about how I can help you. All right? I get so many people who message me and say, I saw your video on YouTube. Actually, I watched four or five of your videos on YouTube. I really loved your teaching approach. I went over to your website and I bought your course. I get emails like that all the time. So if you're an educator, if you're a musician like me, right, You're a fitness person, you're a plumber, you're a mechanic, you have a skill set, you have a teachable skill that you can share with others, then you know what, you can come onto the YouTube platform, right? There's plenty of room here. There's still plenty of space for you to grow and start a channel. As I showed you here in this video, it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take two to three years for you to finally make that full time income. But if you committed better and bigger than I did in my first two years, I showed you those first three years, they were horrible for video uploads. I could upload a ton more content and maybe I would have gone full time in 2 years or 18 months. I don't know. I can't tell you. But all I can tell you is that if I had the tools that are in some of my courses, I definitely would have gone on this journey much, much faster. And I would understand that, you know, there are these ups and downs and that YouTube goes slow and that it's gonna try and grind you down, but that you gotta stick with it because even though you're starting at ground zero right now, just look at me, you don't know where you're going to be four or five years from now. Okay? Play the long game with YouTube. Four or five years from now, you could be making half a million dollars a year just uploading content and doing exactly what you love, sharing it with the world. All right, so I want you guys, if you're interested, go to the description below. Go check out those course.