Guitar Teacher Becomes Millionaire on YouTube

Can you become a millionaire doing YouTube and selling courses? Absolutely. I had a friend who just did a video reel and I was shocked because he actually featured me in one of his videos as being a content creator that has made over a million dollars online in course sales. And yes, you can totally do this on YouTube, but I want you to understand some context behind that reel and that, you know, that is accumulation over time. And that when I started on YouTube, I wasn't really making a lot of money. I was making pennies, especially with YouTube ads. When I first got monetized with YouTube, I was making like 2 cents a day, 3 cents a day, woohoo. So in order to qualify for YouTube advertising, for those that don't know, you need to have 4,000 hours of watch time. 1,000 subscribers. It's not easy to do. All right? I will admit it's not easy to do. You see this channel, this is a newer channel that I just started. And you know, I've only got a few hundred subscribers and it's taking its time to grow, but I'm out here putting out the content and getting things going. So when I talk about some of these, these topics, people are like, well, what are you talking about? You only have 700 subscribers, understand? I have another channel here on YouTube. I'm a guitar teacher. I have about 350,000 subscribers on that channel. I make anywhere from 6,000 to $8,000 a month on YouTube advertising alone. But where I make most of my money is as a course creator. So I use YouTube as a tool to get people to know me. Just like I'm doing here. I'm putting out free content, helping people, letting people get to know me. And then I'm saying, hey, if you want more help, go sign up for my free crash course or go buy my guitar course so that I can help you learn. If this is something you really wanted to do, go buy something from me, okay? Or give me your email and go get this free thing that I'm going to give you. But in exchange, I'm going to get your email so that I can at least market to you. You see a lot of people, they jump on YouTube and I coach a lot of people and they're just like, oh, I'm going to YouTube ads. YouTube monetization. YouTube monetization. It took me about three years of posting content fairly consistently on YouTube to get monetized. And again, like I said, in the beginning, I was only making pennies. Pennies, okay? But the end of 2017, I created a course I published that. And every time I saw the course, you know, it started, it was $77. Every time I made a sale, you know, I make $77. But that was better than the pennies I was getting on YouTube. So can you do a million dollars in sales on YouTube alone? Absolutely. You know, over there's lots of channels that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on YouTube advertising. They do seven figures in YouTube advertising. I do not do that. I tell content creators, if you are someone like me in the education space, okay, you're a fitness person, you're a yoga instructor, you're a mechanic, all right, you're an artist, you're a photographer, whatever you're doing. I'm a music teacher, okay? If you're like me and you're a music teacher, you have a skill that you can teach people, you have experiences that you can teach people. And what you should do is get that into a course. Because as your YouTube channel grows, you will sell more and more products because you'll be reaching more people, you'll be helping people. And people buy from people they like. All right? Nine out of ten times, when I survey people who buy my course this, they say, I watched a few of your YouTube channel videos, and then I came over to your website and I bought your course. Oh, I watched a few of your videos. I really liked the way you teach. I like your personality. Then I went and bought your course. All right? 80 to 90% of people who are buying from me have either seen me on YouTube, all right, or maybe they went over to my website and I helped them with learning a song or something. But they know me, and the reason they are buying is because they like me. So if you want to do million dollars in courses, what you have to do is one, create a product that is going to help people. A very, very deep pain point. Think of something at the beginner level. What are the top 10 pain points or top 10 questions that your clients would ask? Okay, solve those problems, throw them into a free mini course. Yes. Throw your best solutions to some of these problems into a free mini course. Get people to know you, because then what you do is you set up a sales sequence. So I have a free crash course. People sign up. It's absolutely free. I give them some lessons, they give me their email. I give them a little workbook to go along with the lessons, and in exchange, I market to them after the fact, saying, hey, you know, if you found this helpful, you're going to really find the full course super helpful. Okay, so you think of a free course where you can help people have a quick win, a quick aha. Where they're like, okay, this was absolutely free and this was phenomenal. If this costs 297, that's the cost of my course. Now it's 297. What am I going to get for this? If this is free and this is 297, what's in here that's going to help me? And that's where you want to go. You want to get them in, get them to know you and then send them over to a course. And of course we, we upsell them. We have different bumps and upsells and offers that come after that. But the key to being successful as a content creator, as a course creator is one understanding your audience and their pain points and creating content, whether it's here on YouTube, whether it's on Instagram, TikTok, wherever your audience is hanging out. I highly recommend YouTube because it's one of my favorite platforms, especially for educators. I think it's still the best platform for educators and long form content. You can build relationships so much better with clients. So find your platform. Help people. Because it's the law of reciprocity. The more you help people, the more they will give back to you. Okay, I have people who've reached out to me and said, I don't need your course, but I just bought it. Because you have helped me so much on YouTube, I felt obligated to give you something. Right? It's the law of reciprocity. If you help people, they will want to help you, they will want to support you, they will want to share your content, they'll want to shout you out. So keep that in mind when you're making your content. Is this specific to my audience? Is this going to help them? Is this providing value? If you do that over a long enough period of time, yes, you can make seven figures selling courses again. When I first started my first year in the YouTube business, I think I maybe made one or $2,000. I'd have to go back and look, alright, and then the next year maybe I made like $10,000. And then the third year probably made like 30, $40,000. And it kept escalating from there and there. And now we do that in a month selling courses. Okay? So what you want to do is focus on getting the ball rolling, okay? Getting that snowball effect going. You got to start somewhere and don't get discouraged by only making $100 a month. Understand you're looking at me. Five years down the road, seven years down there, I started YouTube. 2017 was when I really started going YouTube all out and uploading content about guitar lessons and guitar teaching. It is now 2023. So I've been doing this for six and a half years now. Okay? So if you're just getting started, I am six and a half years ahead of you. So could you make a million dollars in six and a half years? Absolutely. I've proven that you can do it. Okay? So if you put the time, the effort and the energy into it and you make the right content that helps your audience, you can do it, too. And I'm not the only one. All right? This video showed multiple people who had made seven figures, and some people have made multiple seven figures online selling courses, helping people, educating people. So if you're a YouTuber and you want to make money on YouTube, I highly recommend that you treat YouTube advertising as the icing on the cake. Get yourself a course. Get yourself something that you could sell for 100, 200, 300, $500 and start selling that to people, because that's where the real money is, in the online content creation space. And if you're looking for a good platform to host your courses on, I highly recommend you check out this video over here, where I go over the hosting platform I use for my courses, my community, and everything I do with my marketing for my courses. Go check that video out right over there.