What It REALLY Costs To Grow A YouTube Channel

When you watch videos here on YouTube, if we do our job right, it looks like it's pretty easy to do right. You might start to think, well, if they can do it, why can't I do it? Or how are they staying consistent on YouTube? But I can't figure it out and I can't get my YouTube channel to grow like theirs. Well, there's a hidden secret behind making this all look easy, and that's money. Well, I'm going to get real with you here in this video and share with you what I pay every single month to make this look easy here on YouTube. Hey there, Trina. Here. And when I started my YouTube channel back in 2016, I felt the same way. I was watching other mom vloggers do their thing on YouTube and their channels continue to rack in views and subscribers and I thought, that looks pretty easy. I've got a one year old, I can do this too. So I took my daughter to Target, took my camera to Target and thought, here we go, we are gonna vlog this day. I'm gonna slap this sucker up on YouTube. We're gonna get views and we're gonna get subscribers. I'm gonna start making mom brand deals, right? Well, first of all, harder to vlog in public than I ever imagined. And so that didn't really pan out. My daughter didn't really want to cooperate with the idea I had for this video. And then when I got home from shopping, I then had to edit that video, I had to upload it, I had to take care of my one year old, I had to make dinner, I had to deal with the rest of my business and my clients. So what I wasn't really seeing is everything that's going on behind the scenes that those mom vloggers were doing to keep their YouTube up and running. And basically they were looking at their YouTube video as a full time job. We don't really see what everybody is doing behind the scenes to actually get those videos published every single month. And the help they are having to do that. Basically when we think cost of starting a YouTube channel, we're thinking equipment more than likely, or editing, right? And yes, you could really invest a chunk of change on video equipment if you want to get super fancy. But that's not where most people are spending a lot of their money. Because once you buy your equipment, it's bought, it's not reoccurring. They're spending a lot of money every single month to keep this presence up. So let me pull the curtains back and give you the Exact numbers on what I'm spending, who I'm spending it on. And then I want to share with you what your next steps should be if your goal is to get more consistent here on YouTube. The first category we're going to talk about is people. Yes, there are people that are behind the scenes here, more than just me helping me do this. So the first person you need to think about is a video editor. And I spend on average about $500 a month every single month for Annabelle to edit these videos to look beautiful for you to watch. There was a point in time where I edited my own videos, but it would take me two to three hours to edit my videos, taking me away from other things in life. And Annabelle can edit a lot better than I can. So these videos look a lot better and they look simpler. Right. But I'm not doing them because I'm paying every single month for someone to have it done. Next I'm going to talk about actual employees that I have like on payroll. This is a huge step for me this year, but I have a full time employee and a part time employee employee and I'm spending around $4,500 every single month to pay them in total. And what they are doing is they're helping me get my YouTube videos uploaded when I need them to optimize, you know, scheduled out. But they're also taking care of other things in my business. I have an agency director who she is managing our clients, our agency clients, making sure their strategies are done and uploaded so that I can continue to focus on creating content here on YouTube. Then my part time employee is focusing on coaching my members of video strategy Academy, giving them the support that they and also supporting my agency director too, again so I can put my time in doing these videos. Otherwise I would have a lot less time to create these videos. I wouldn't be showing up consistently and they probably wouldn't be as well prepared as they are because I just wouldn't have the time to do that. Next up is a social media manager and this is somebody that I hired in the past few months. And this allows me to stop spending time on Instagram and Facebook. And while I create these videos here for YouTube, we're generating content for, for Instagram. But I don't have to worry about creating the content where they are pulling actual content that I'm creating here on YouTube using my words and I'm saying here on YouTube, I'm posting it over to Instagram. So that has also saved me a lot of time. But it also makes you think that I'm able to do all of these things. I'm able to have all these balls juggling at the same time. But I'm not. As I've already said, that's four people right now behind the scenes that are helping me to make this look easy. So you do need to understand when you see other people showing up on YouTube pretending like they're doing it themselves, most of the time they do have a support system. Let's wrap up the other humans that I have helping me out, then let's move into software expenses. So I have a Pinterest strategist who helps me promote my YouTube videos over on Pinterest. That's about $375 a month. I have a podcast editor. If you haven't checked out the video refrain podcast yet. I've been podcasting as well to help grow my reach of my YouTube channel too, and grow my reach overall for agency clients and members for Video Strategy Academy. And she charges about $600 a month. And last but not least, the most critical person that I have hired that is one of the most expensive. It's my accountant who is making sure that my expenses aren't more than my revenue and that the business is actually making money and telling me when I need to slow down hiring or buying things, when I go a little crazy. And that's about thirteen hundred dollars a month. And then that's not including the agency that I've hired to run Facebook ads and the money I'm putting into Facebook ads. Okay, so those are all actual humans. Let's talk about the software and tools that I pay for every single month to make this happen and look easy. First up, custom thumbnails. This is a thumbnail agency that we've been working with for the past three months and I love this service. It's going to cost you about $100 a month for four thumbnails every single month. But it's been money well spent because I don't have to create these thumbnails and think about them. If you've watched any of my YouTube videos, I talk a lot about Asana, my project management tool. We do have a paid for version of asana that we pay 42 doll because of the amount of team members that I have and the clients that I have within Asana that we manage on a day to day basis. I also pay $20 a month for my Google storage, as in the storage for these videos that I need to have. I pay $97 a month for FG Funnels, which is a funnels software. And why I need this is because the whole reason I'm creating these YouTube videos is to funnel viewers into my business because that's where I'm making my money. Whether you're buying my prep system, whether you're becoming a member of video strategy academy or you are becoming an agency client, these funnels help me get you on my list, helping you learn more about me, and ultimately getting you to take action to buy something in my business. This is critical. This funnel software would not allow me to hire my full time employee, my part time employees. All of this money would not be able to be made without FG Funnels. And the funnels that I have set up for my business, ConvertKit, which is my email system, I spend about $150 a month on that. Again, very important to actually make money in my business. So it's critical to have rev. I spend about $150 every single month just getting captions and transcriptions of my YouTube videos. Tailwind is a Pinterest scheduler and that cost me about $15 a month. But that allows me to consistently promote my YouTube content. It gets more people over to YouTube. I still see a lot of traffic coming from Pinterest, so that's a necessary software as well. I also need Zoom, which is $15 a month, to be able to talk to my team members and make sure my strategy is on track and talk to my video editor when I need to. I also have Vidiq in Tubebuddy, which helped me plan out my content. You've heard me talk a little bit more about not so much. Keyword research is my core tactic anymore here on YouTube. But I still very much use TubeBuddy and Vidiq to figure out what topics I wanna talk about, what topics my audience really likes. And that's about $30 a month total for the both of them. Loom is another tool that I use. So this is also great if I need to communicate with my video editor or anybody on my team. It allows me to record myself, my screen and explain anything that I'm looking at. So if I see something not working on my YouTube channel, I'm able to say, hey, I would like to see this and this and that change. And then I can send that to my team and they can implement that so I can again focus on creating new YouTube content for you. And last but not least, and this isn't a complete list, I pulled up my profit and loss statement to see all the Important things that fit for YouTube. There are more expenses that I have within my business. But the last one I want to talk about Here specifically for YouTube is QuickBooks, which is an accounting system that allows me again to pull the report that I just talked about, the profit and loss statement. And it's really important if you want to be making money from your YouTube channel, you want to make sure like you're doing the right things with it. So if we add up everything that I just talked about to get a total expense expense each month for me to show up here on YouTube consistently and make it look easy. $10,000. Over $10,000 a month for me to do that. And I run a tight ship over here. I don't have a whole lot of employees. I don't do anything extravagant like I am not getting a videographer in here to film me. I am not reserving like a recording studio every single month. So that's a pretty tight ship for just $10,000 a month to allow me to get these videos up consistently. And when it comes down to what I make on YouTube, my AdSense, it's just about $500 a month. So you can see why it is so important to have a business Strategy off of YouTube to be able to do what you love. If you love doing these YouTube videos and you love showing up on video, you've got to have a business system that's going to support this so you can do it well. So what are some small steps that you can start doing right now to level up your YouTube game but not jump into $10,000 a month in expenses? Well, the first thing you can do is find one thing to outsource. Usually the most easy thing to outsource is video editing. And I will tell you, I spend $500 a month. You can expect to spend anywhere between four to five hundred dollars a month on a good editor. And I will give you some tips here on working with an editor. You need to realize it's going to take time to train them and provide them feedback. You need to train them in the way you want your videos to look. And it's not going to happen instantaneously. Right. They're not in your brain. So some things you can do to speed up the process is give them samples of what you're looking for, write out a script and give notes on what you want to happen on the video during different parts of the video. When they send you a draft, give them as much detailed feedback as possible so they can really understand what it is that you want. You cannot send a video to an editor and expect them to magically create this perfect video on the first try. You've got to put some time in at the beginning to ensure you're getting what you want and to continue to have a happy relationship between you and your video editor and not have your video editor hate you. Another thing that you can start doing right now, now is start listing everything that you do on a day to day basis and if there's something that you see you're doing over and over and over and over again, write that down as a process. You could ultimately find somebody as like an assistant, a virtual assistant that can help you take over that process so that you can again spend more time focusing on your content here on YouTube, focusing on looking at your analytics here on YouTube. So think about all the things that you're doing every single day a week and is there something that's step by step easy to do, that you are constantly doing, that you could outsource source? Because trust me, you cannot do this alone, especially if you are running a business as well and you're using YouTube as a lead gen for your business. So I'm actually thinking about sharing more about how to use YouTube to drive traffic to your business, how to use YouTube to make money in your business, and how to do that all as well as getting your YouTube channel to where you want it to be. If those are some topics that you are interested in seeing more of from me, leave a comment below on some of the business topics that you would like me to dive a little bit deeper in. You know some of these videos, notebook style videos that I've been sharing with you and make sure that you are subscribed or you hit subscribe. Because if I see this video is generating subscribers, I know that you are interested in these types of topics and I know that that's the kind of content that I need to focus on moving forward on this channel. And lastly, if you really want to see behind the scenes of how I do this entire YouTube production, watch the video that's on your screen right now. Because I literally take you from doing my hair to makeup, to setting up my equipment, to uploading my videos for my video editor, the entire process in this video on your screen right now. And I'm looking forward to hearing all your suggestions about video topics below.