How To Monetize a YouTube Channel WITHOUT Subscribers

I've been making thousands of dollars every month from my YouTube channel since I've had 200 subscribers. As you may know, the most common way to get monetized through YouTube is by having 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. So essentially, when you meet those requirements, you get paid when people click on the ads that surround your videos. My channel recently just passed the 1,000 subscriber mark, which I'm very proud of, but I I still am working at getting my 4,000 hours of watch time. And even though I'm still not monetized, I made over $10,000 this past month from my channel. Today we're going behind the scenes and I'm going to show you how I've been able to do this so that you can start looking at YouTube and content in general from a whole new perspective. Hey friend, I'm James Allen, founder of Profit Your Knowledge, where we help people like you who are content creators, coaches, or people who are interested in that take their knowledge and expertise and turn that into online courses, membership sites, coaching programs and things and get paid sharing their knowledge. If you're really serious about turning your knowledge into a lucrative online business and you want to get the fast track to making this happen, I created a full 1-hour masterclass that is totally free. It's going to show you how to turn your knowledge into $2,000 per month of passive income in just 5 hours a week without complicated tech. Now, if you're skeptical on passive income, just watch the masterclass and you will see how it works. I'm going to share a bit of how it does work inside of this lesson, But if you really want a full deep dive in all the strategies, tools, templates, examples, all that stuff, go watch the masterclass. Okay? Again, it is free. There's a link down in the description and you can always go to profityourknowledge.com/masterclass. Now let's get into the strategy on how I've been able to get discovered on YouTube and then lead that to affiliate sales, online courses, coaching programs, that kind of stuff. The first thing we want to do is create the right kind of content. Now you don't want to be making content for the sake of just making content. You want to be strategic with this if you're gonna get discovered by the right kind of people through YouTube and then point them to the different products and things that you have to offer like your coaching programs or online courses or affiliate programs, etc. So what I'd recommend, if you know what you want to do, you know, you're, let's say you're helping people with fitness, it's a really easy example. We will go into the search bar inside of YouTube and we're gonna type in how to bench press. And right off the bat, you're going to see a bunch of different options. How to bench press more weight correctly. Madden 24. Can you bench press in video games? In Madden? I didn't even know that. Why? You seriously can bench press in Madden. Anyway, bench press with dumbbells. How to bench press for beginners without a bench for chest growth. More a person at home alone. Powerlifting, because that's different than training for hypertrophy with bodybuilding. You know, Powerlifters are going for strength. Totally different ballgame, which makes it great content. 225. Any dude has a goal of hitting 225 or hitting 225 for reps. It's just such a solid benchmark that that's great content that you can build. But what's cool here is that each one of these recommendations are recommended by YouTube because people are looking this stuff up. They are genuinely curious about how to do this. And when you ever have a problem or you're trying to figure something out, you go to Google or YouTube, and Google owns YouTube, so your videos can show up in Google searches as well. So how to bench press, any one of these, make a list of them and you can create this with content, but you can also use a different word like how to deadlift properly for beginners. All of this is content that you can then create that you know your audience would be looking for. But what's cool is that you can go a little bit further. You can say how to bench press A, B, C, and you're getting different. How to do incline bench press chest workout, how to incline bench press chest workout, how to bench press in a competition. Okay, so if you're a competitive coach helping people get into competition with like deadlifting, you can teach them about this stuff. What's cool too is that instead of how to bench press, you can also say what bench press, all right? What bench press? What does bench press do to your body? What grip for bench press? And you just want to be thinking about making content that your audience, the people that you can best help, would be looking up on the internet and trying to do themselves. So that's one great strategy to get you started with creating content that you know people are looking for. Now if we said how to bench press, we can type this in. And the other thing that you can do is something I like to call content hacking. This blows people's mind. It's a little controversial, but this is just how you grow on YouTube because people are doing this everywhere. So you find creators who are doing things that you want to be doing. These are what I call your heroes. You're like Jeff Nippard, for example, really big in the space, how to bench press with perfect technique, 5 steps. You can make a video similar to Jeff. Don't rip off exactly what he's doing. Jeff is Jeff, but you are you, so bring you to the table. but there's things that you can learn that Jeff is doing that is being successful. So what we'll do is go to Jeff Nippard's channel, we'll go to videos, and then we'll click on popular. What this does is organize his most popular videos from top to bottom, okay, over the span of his entire YouTube career. And you can look at how he structures things, the topics that he's talking about. Again, don't just rip off exactly what Jeff is doing. You can't be Jeff, first and foremost. But don't take exactly what he did for his thumbnail, his title, his intro, his content itself. Just learn bits and pieces that are working for him. Like right here, the fastest way to blow up your bench press, 4 science-based techniques. Jeff is really big on science, bringing science to fitness, which is really cool, and it's what makes him different. But look at like the before and after. You're like, oh, that's a great thumbnail. I really like something like that. You can make your own version of that thumbnail and even just the topic, the fastest way to blow up your bench press, but then you can go into a totally different niche like how to bake bread, the easiest bread you'll ever make for beginners, okay? And you can find different thumbnails from bread baking that you can apply to bench press, alright? So it's looking for inspiration outside of your niche as well, like this, good, better, best. That's a cool idea and you can come up with something with like 3 different ways that people do bench press, for example, and it would be like a little 3-part thumbnail and that would be awesome and you could turn that into your own video. Okay, so it's finding the things that are already working on the platform related to the topics that you know people are looking for. So when you start creating the right kind of content that's helping the right kind of people and getting you discovered, now what you want to do is get people off of YouTube. Now I know this is incredibly controversial, especially if you're a YouTube expert. What YouTube wants is for people to stay on the the platform so that they can pump more ads in front of people. Because when people click on those ads, YouTube makes more money. But we as creators, especially if we're smaller channels, we want to get discovered by the right people, build a relationship through our content, and then take people off of YouTube so that we can build an email list. Because when we build our email list, we can then start making offers. We can promote our affiliate products or our coaching programs or our digital products in the back end, and that's how you really make money. That's what I've been able to do when I only had 200 subscribers to start making thousands of dollars every single month. And my income has only grown since 200 subscribers. So the big question is, how do you get people off of YouTube? The way you do it is by creating great, valuable content so people are actually willing to get off of YouTube for you. But in your content, you want to offer a lead magnet. So all lead magnet is, is something free that you give people in exchange for their email address. Essentially, it's just a piece of content gated behind an email opt-in. In. To create a great lead magnet, just ask yourself this question: what is a persistent problem my audience faces, and how can I quickly solve that for them in a short PDF or video? There's many different types of lead magnets that you can build, but focusing on a short PDF that is a short guide, no more than 10 pages long, or a little one-page checklist to do something, or a short video as well— these are great assets. For example, if you're a fitness coach, Teaching people how to bench press, you can give them a one-page PDF that is a little checklist with different cues so that they can hit the perfect bench press every time. All they have to do is download it by giving you their email address, opening it up in their phone. So next time when they're in the gym, they look at it, they read through and say, okay, I'm going to do these different things and then I'll be growing my bench press from there. But you can also do that with deadlifts, back squat, dumbbell technique, whatever you want. Once you have your lead magnet built, you want to create what's called a landing page or a squeeze page. It's just a simple page that has a little bit of text on it. It basically says, here's what you're going to get with this guide. Put in your email or your name and email, click the button and download the guide right now. In this example, I'm using Kajabi, which is my favorite tool, but you can use Leadpages, Squarespace, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign. A lot of these come with different landing pages. That you can use to collect email addresses. And the last piece is just to offer your lead magnet. So inside your videos, when you're making content that people are looking for, offer it. Let people know about this thing. Like, by the way, if you want to get the 5 best cues to the perfect bench press every time, go to mysweetwebsite.com/bench and you can pick up the guide yourself. And it points them over to the landing page. If you do this in every video, each video turns into essentially an employee. That gets discovered by your audience, adds value to them, builds trust, and takes them off of YouTube to join your email list where you can make more offers for your business. So once you've done this, you want to create a marketing funnel. All a marketing funnel is, is taking someone from just getting to know you, which means they're finding you on YouTube, to ultimately purchasing a product or booking a phone call with you. And the most simple, easy landing page funnel that I would do if I were restarting my YouTube journey right now on top of everything else I've taught you here, is to take advantage of the thank you page. This is the page that people land on right after they opt in from your squeeze page where they give you their email address. The reason we do this is because every time somebody opts in for, in this case, your bench press cues, they're going to land on this page. And instead of you saying, thanks for opting in, check your email, you're gonna say that, thanks for opting in, check your email, and then have a little bit of text or a video by you that says, hey, thanks so much for picking up that guide. The fact that you did that shows me that you are serious about getting stronger at benching or whatever it is that you help people do. If you really are serious about getting this result, I want to help you out, which is why underneath this video you can book a 30-minute consultation with me. We'll sit down, I'll help you game plan how you're going to execute on whatever it is that you help them. Click the button below, book a time on my calendar, and I'll see you very soon. It can be that simple. But while every YouTube video is essentially your employee, you're getting discovered, adding value, getting people off of YouTube on autopilot because YouTube videos are always working for you even when you're not working. It lands on a video welcoming them, offering to book a call, and it's making offers for you every single day over and over again. I recently had a guy who found me on YouTube by searching something, ended up binge-watching about 10 of my videos, compared me to another person who is a colleague of mine and we've been in masterminds together and he found more value in my content than that other person. I mean, I'm super grateful for— I respect that other person, but he liked me. He got a lot of value. He opted in. He then booked a call with me. My YouTube channel essentially sold him on working with me and he felt that he already knew me just by watching my channel. And what I see is another appointment on my calendar randomly. We got on the call and this guy was a perfect fit and he paid in full to work with me for coaching. That is the power of using this strategy. If you want to make money from your YouTube channel regardless of your subscriber count, focus on creating the content that's going to bring in the right kind of people that you can help, help them in your content, get them off of YouTube by offering something free that's going to help them on their journey. Then you get an email address and then that lands on a thank you page where you can make some sort of offer. It can be that simple. And that's what I did when I was first getting started. If you want to learn more about marketing funnels and how they can get a lot more sophisticated, check out this video right here. I'll also link it down in the description, and it's going to show you a proven marketing funnel that has made creators like you and me millions of dollars. So take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. I will see you in the next one.