How to Go Full-Time on YouTube with a Small Channel (Earn $25,000 to $100,000+ Per Year)

Welcome back to the cafe with the

channel

. I'm Sean Cannell and in this episode we're going to talk about how to work

full

-

time

, make a

full

-

time

living, and

earn

a full-time salary on YouTube, even if you have a

small

audience. and we're going to talk about the concept of 1000 true fans you just have to press record so today's topic is 1000 true fans how to make a full time living on YouTube with a

small

audience and let me know if you're watching this already Have you started a YouTube

channel

and what is your YouTube channel about now?

Today's episode is brought to you by speaking with the think.com link in the description below and we'll also post a link in the comments. Have you ever wanted to get in touch with us at think media because you've reached a point in your life, your business and your brand where you're serious and you want to start accelerating and maybe l

earn

more about some of our courses or our monthly training program or any of our events talk to think is the place to do it. You can schedule a 15-minute call with someone from the think media team and we'll find out if and how we can help you achieve your goals faster.

So here's the question: how can I make a living on YouTube without having a large following? How is it possible to make a living with YouTube? This could be true for anything, I mean podcasting on social media, we live in the new economy, the internet, right? where the ability to have an online business to make money online, but the question is, oh man, is it only for those with a million subscribers? Is it only for those who have a hundred thousand subscribers? Is it possible to make a full-time living if I don't have a large audience and the answer is yes and if you haven't heard of the concept of a thousand true fans, this is a fundamental teaching that you need to understand back in 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote an article and an essay about a thousand true fans. and this is the premise to be a successful Creator you don't need Millions you don't need millions of dollars you don't need millions of clients you don't need millions of clients you don't need millions of fans and that's the myth that the influencer marketing guy has told us, ah , I have to be super famous, so I need a million subscribers to reach a tipping point and make enough money from ads like YouTube AdSense and YouTube, and that is actually true if This is how you are going to make money, but in this In the same video we are going to open the curtain on how tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of micro-influencers like you and I can dedicate ourselves full time and make a living, as the article says. a craftsman a photographer a musician a designer an author an animator an app creator an entrepreneur or an online inventor you only need 1000 true fans, you know, my friend and one of the speakers in our recent growth event video wrote a book called super fans.

In some ways, it was inspired by this same essay from 2008, over 12

year

s ago, and it still rings true today. A highly recommended book by the way, Pat Flynn, super fans and one thing people were doing, let me know in the comments if you were part of our virtual conference recently. live growth video, trained on it and I'll be watching the recordings and next week we'll let you know, if you missed it, how you can get access. It was actually more than just a recording of the conference, it's really a step-by-step workshop on uh, how to build a real business with videos, but speaking of a thousand true fans, let's break down the math.

One way to think about this is to imagine you create something to sell, okay, just think of it like anything right now, you create some merch. you sell a sweatshirt, you create a digital product, you do online training in some way, people pay you through Paypal, you create a mug, you know the Rise and Grind mug, for example, it could be anything, so follow me on this. If you have a small audience, now you can have 10,000 YouTube subscribers, you can have 3,000 YouTube subscribers using YouTube as an example, not everyone will be a true fan, what is the definition of a true fan?

Well, a true fan is someone who is so interested in what you do, passionate about your content, passionate about your brand, that if you release something, everyone will be interested and let me know if there is anyone like that for you in the comments that I know today when it comes to music. Many of us probably just stream music and maybe buy less or no music like we used to, but I grew up buying CDs, right? I grew up buying tapes back in the day, in fact the first concert I went to in the first band I ever went to. a true New Kids on the Block fan.

I may be ashamed to admit it. Let's go step by step. Ooh, baby, I'll get to you, girl, okay, I shouldn't say, does anyone remember New Kids on the Block? I had the five new codes. Block's tapes, I think there were five main ones. I had the Barbies, that sounds amazing, like the dolls with the stage, like I was a fan of New Kids on the Block, you know, fast forward and there have been a lot of bands. I'm a fan of and guess what would happen if they came to town. I would buy a ticket to the concert.

If they released a sweatshirt or a hoodie or a t-shirt, I would buy the t-shirt, so let me know. Nathaniel says, what did I just walk into? Some people maybe are casual listeners of a certain band and listen to that band online. Other people are real fans. If that person comes to your area, they might get on a plane, they might fly to go hear an artist, or support. them whatever it takes right now nowadays I'm becoming a super fan of certain running brands. I really like running so I'm getting into Asics and I'm obsessed with different types of Asics running shoes as I like Asics so I don't necessarily buy one pair of shoes a

year

.

Now I prefer to try different ones so Asics can count on me to pay them at least a hundred dollars a year, as if I had just bought some. Dynaflight three, that's a hundred. I just found the Nova Blast shoes and actually bought them on a different website but it all goes back to Asics so I'm spending at least 100,200,300 a year on Asics with my running habit. and I am a fan of Asic shoes, are you a super fan or a real fan of that? Whatever you follow, they release something new, they release something cool and you're on board.

Tyler Woods, he has 28 pairs of shoes. you know, I mean, bgs, life is like yeah, New Kids on the Block, I totally agreed with Joey, come on, I remember Joey, so think of something you're super, super fan of now, let's say that you have 5,000 YouTube subscribers 10,000 YouTube subscribers, a portion of them are the people that really connect with you, so when you have a thousand true fans, that means when you post something, you put something out into the world, they're like man, I understand it, I understand it. he, I totally agree, so they will buy what you sell, that's the point, so imagine you have a product 37, for example, for a year, you have 12 months to do this, okay, you sell 83 units per month until YouTube through live streaming through Facebook live, whatever you're doing through podcasting, that's 2.7 a day, that would be an income of 37,000 a year now, that's about a teacher's income here in the United States, where I'm streaming and recording this from right now.

So, for example, Fly Ride, who is one of our Video Rating Academy and Inner Circle students, actually has a hoodie on his Teespring. Now I understand that there are fees. I get it there. I understand, but he just goes with me for a second. It costs 38.99 to buy that. hoodie okay fly ride car automotive lighting now let's say you're actually going to do a merch drop what's that when you release a limited line of merch until it's sold out and then it's gone? Let's say you did it only four times a year. I did a summer fall winter spring merch launch now this could be magazines right, this could be a bunch of different things okay and press like you're getting value from the workout so far, let's even say you're going to make 25 profit off of that because, again, you use it as a Teespring or some kind of on-demand t-shirt printing and maybe it's not that, just follow me, okay, with me, so you'll do four 1000 unit merch releases a year. spring summer autumn winter that means you are a thousand true fans, you are a thousand super fans, they will buy it and you will earn 25,000 in spring, twenty-five thousand dollars in summer, 25,000 and Fallen.

Twenty-five thousand dollars in winter, see how powerful that is? It's an income of 100,000 a year to put a product selling something as a creator to your super fans with your three thousand subscribers seven thousand you could be saying Sean, I'm Start off right, this is something that needs to be developed, but here's the good news : You don't need to have a million subscribers, a hundred thousand, or even fifty thousand for this to be super practical and I'll share some examples, so buckle up. your seatbelt because we are the rabbit hole goes deeper and I just broke down an income of 100k a year which is pretty extraordinary especially to have a life on your own terms.

Freedom, imagine this is all you did in a year now in the year. you can make videos live, send direct messages to people, post on Biz Dev social media with brands, email people, go to events, connect, collaborate, this is how you are making money, all you have to do is sell, you know, 2.7 units per day. which we described in the previous article to potentially make 30, 40, 100k a year right now, I think that while there are cool things to sell, like you could do merch, you can try to get people really excited about your promotion and grind coffee mugs, it could be anything, there's one thing I believe for YouTube creators and entrepreneurs in general, that the best industry to get into and the best product to sell is digital products, specifically online courses, and here's why which Forbes did an article on. from a previous article now that says that e-learning, that is, people who want to learn things online through online courses, is ascending to a $325 billion a year industry by 2025.

So if you want knowing what's next, Sean, what's happening in the next five years what's the next wave going to be is this now this research came out before the lockdown and the pandemic so this number has only gone up. We're seeing e-learning, online learning, digital learning, explode across the planet and people are looking. This includes universities, colleges that have online courses, but this also includes, even if you look at this article, they mention things like lynda.com, which is now LinkedIn Learning Udemy Skillshare, as well as the ability to maybe host your own online course with thoughtful and teachable Kajabi.

I know. I'm throwing a lot at you but this is the e-learning industry and I think online education that combines promoting and benefiting from your knowledge is the best thing you can do as a YouTube creator, but let me mention a few others. important beliefs I think that when you are positioning yourself on YouTube there are really two big categories there is entertainment and there is education entertainment is someone I want to be a famous vlogger I want to be an incredible comedian but that doesn't lend itself so much to positioning to create an online course;

However, if you plant your flag in an education niche, you could help people learn to work with wood, you could help people learn to quilt, and quilt and sew, you could help people create music. . It could help people learn to play guitar or piano. It could help people learn about social media or digital marketing. If you have an education based YouTube channel, it actually leads perfectly to monetizing your knowledge and monetizing your content through an online course very well, in fact, talking to people at thinkific I was at a conference before the lockdown on 1 March 2020 at that time before things really started to lock down and I was talking to thinkific and they said that YouTube creators are the most successful users because they have a platform that allows them to host their course online and we'll put a list of some of our top recommendations in the description of this episode of coffee with Cano on our think marketing YouTube channel, but thinkific is good and they said it is the most successful and it makes sense because if someone is discovering you, they are trying to learn a language foreigner, you are trying to learn a particular skill, you are trying to learn how to skateboard, people do this and how to increase your jump and learn basketball skills or learn soccer online, learn like people do.

This massive industry is locked down and it's the best way to make a full-time living with a channelsmall or a small audience. All you need is 1000 true fans. Let's dig a little deeper and look at a couple of examples. is one of our McCain Dogs students. They actually have a physical dog training business with 70 employees in Canada, right where you can bring them their dogs, your dogs, they also have a very successful YouTube channel, medium sized, although when I say very successful. has a million subscribers, it's not half a million and they have pooled their knowledge as a source of income in their business into a course called my dog ​​can train dogs online and you can get a step by step. instruction from a professional dog trainer in an online course now again, if that course costs, say, a hundred dollars and they have a thousand true fans of their YouTube channel from thirty thousand subscribers who can't be there locally with their business, they could earn An extra hundred thousand dollars a year for selling that online course in a 12 month period is crazy and that's just using this rounded number of a hundred thousand dollars per year.

Another example, remember, Fly Ride, he has the sweatshirt with hood, well this is what we talked about earlier as merchandise, so it's part of our monthly Inner Circle training program and their channel is about learning the what, how, and why of auto lighting, like custom building. um headlights for your imported cars and all that, and it's actually packaged, you created a five-month, five-figure lightingcourse.com online course on how to build lights as a side job, so when you're actually training people , what you should do is learn how to buy raw materials. or buy lights and turn them on online and I have another local friend here in Las Vegas who is doing the same thing.

He's got a little bit where he started in his garage and started flipping car parts and stuff a lot. A lot of times the way people do this and that's how you can overcome the recession and really make your business recession proof. You could take what you do in your business if you are a business owner and also package it like you do online. Of course, to create an additional stream of income and YouTube is the best place to position your business and your brand to do so, so this started. Chris has things like YouTube ads affiliate marketing, the ability to create these custom lights, build the lights and rotate them. he turns it on and actually makes money from it, but he's also creating a course on how he does it or how you can do it and make money from it and create an extra stream of income around it.

See how powerful it is, let me know what your aha is, the momentum so far of this training and how this could apply to your channel and your brand in the comments below here is a place called udemy, not necessarily a place where I recommend to organize your course, but it is a public marketplace for online courses and you can see people making things like a complete guitar system. How do you know how to play the guitar? And these are online courses that cost like twelve dollars or two hundred two hundred dollars for different lectures and training so you can learn to play guitar online, so what's the skill? or a passion that you could teach and let's look for a second what people who do online courses are all about if we actually go to udemy, let's look at something like using lighting design to transform your home and I didn't get that from anywhere, I just I looked this up before, so here's an online course on how to use lighting design to transform your home.

So you'll learn three layers of light to create a dramatic and cohesive lighting display scheme in any room. It's two hours of video. There are eight articles, there are some downloadable resources, so we will teach people how to use lighting to do interior design like a pro. This course costs 94.99 and Udemy actually tells us how many students this course has, so there are actually 6,170 students in this online. course, so if we look at 94.99 over the lifespan of this course and it was recently updated, so I'm not sure when it was first created, let's multiply that by how many students are within the course, we can see that this course has made $586,88, let me tell you, again, that's over half a million dollars from the sale of an online course that Erica created.

See how powerful that is? This is what I want to encourage you with. I know. might get you excited you're like half a million what are we talking about like there's a long powerful tail to this where people earn and what I mean by long tail is that some people earn several million a year a million a year, several figures a year , but some people make an extra thirty thousand dollars a year, five thousand dollars a year, two thousand extra dollars a year, plus multiple streams of income, monetizing their influence, their YouTube channel, and their knowledge, this is the best way.

To work full time with a small audience, there are critical elements to being successful at this and really breaking through the noise, but what I want you to see is literally how powerful this can be. Let's look at another quick example here if we talk about drawing. talk about drawing a drawing skill and you think about maybe all these different parents, all these people who are at home who maybe want to help their children learn to draw and let's go even deeper, let's not go to the top result. We're going to look at something a little bit deeper down here, how to draw cute cartoon characters, okay cool, so we looked at this and it's a 54.99 online course.

Now you have a YouTube channel where you are creating free content and learning. how to grow your YouTube channel and you're gaining fans overall and some of those people become real fans and they say: Hey everyone, I have a course if you want to check it out, here's the link. or links in the description below and there are many different key skills to learn to promote and sell your online course, but that conversation is for another day, so this course costs 54.99 and there are 15,210 students in this course in particular, that is, 836,000. this course has won, I don't know about you, but it's a moment that leaves me speechless, like wow, this is crazy.

I could promote the package and benefit from what I know, this is how I can turn my passion into profit and combining YouTube with an education based YouTube channel and packaging your knowledge into an online course is essential now I understand that there are many different questions and There are a lot of traps that people fall into that leave them stuck when it comes to this and that's largely what our think marketing channel and our think marketing podcast are all about, so be sure to subscribe to the think YouTube channel. marketing, the think marketing podcast, and remember we also have some accelerators like our monthly training program that helps you with this, but look at a couple quick examples just to simplify this, you have an online course that is 97, okay , I know it could be cheaper, it could be more expensive, there's a huge variety, so if you wanted to make ninety-seven thousand dollars a year. you would only need to sell 1000 of these a year and let me say it again, this is assuming you are no longer you, you are probably no longer trying at this point, this is not like man, I have to go to work and then develop my use .

It's like all year long, I get it, you have to take care of the kids and you have other things that you know happen in your life responsibilities, but could you live on 97,000 a year? Let me know in the comments, could you live with that? a good starting point for you or maybe you have 22 kids and you live in midtown Manhattan and you couldn't because you're like, I mean, that's 97, it's not going to lower my cost of living, but for probably a lot of us, Depending on where we are in the world, ninety-seven thousand dollars a year could be a great income or a good baseline, so let me know, so imagine being able to dedicate all your focus to serving people, creating content, and developing your marketing. your messages and all that kind of stuff well, you could do this well 97 courses per thousand a year, but let's be super practical, even really practical, and say you know that in Year One, at the end of the year, you could only sell 250 and all your hustle you're still learning you're still studying you're leveling up bookmarking your message even bookmarking your course whatever if in the first year you only sold 250 that would be twenty-four thousand two hundred and fifty dollars and maybe that's a side hustle year, Man, I have things to do.

I have my main job. I do this on the weekends. I'm working on other things. I'm building this. Can you see how practical that could be? And then of course, get better at the packaging promotion skill set and leverage your online knowledge, so in the second year you sold 500, so you were now making fifty thousand dollars a year. Please note that when you do this particular on YouTube, you might also have some affiliate links in the description of some videos. You're also creating YouTube ads from your videos' audiences. You might even have a brand that wants to work with you and they want to pay you to make a video because there are a lot of them.

There are a lot of different ways you can create income streams, so this is just your course income, so you could make 50,000 that year that second year on your online course, but then you could make another 5,000 on YouTube ads or 15,000 on affiliate marketing and you really can. snowball with all the multiplicity of ways there are to make money in the new economy and then number three, like year three, you have this thing marked, like give yourself three years to improve, learn the skills, level up, can you see how powerful that would be? and even if you go what you would perceive as slower than someone else, I think about how long it took me to learn this.

I mean, at this point we've made several seven figures in online courses, uh, through thinking. means, but there were years where I was just investing in courses, going to events and watching trainings like this and still trying to figure it out being like a friend, I got a million questions and it takes time, it's definitely what I hear about. In this industry it's the easy myth: I'm not trying to make this sound too easy. I'm not trying to say it's easy. I'm just trying to show you that it's worth it and it's practical, so once you really see a clear vision. from wow, okay, what will my niche be?

What am I going to pack? What will my online course be? What will my positioning be? What will be my difference? And then what are the skills I need to learn to do this? This could develop year after year. year after year and eventually give you a business based on freedom where you have the autonomy to be able to do these kinds of things again working from wherever you want. This is the kind of business you can do with a laptop and a USB microphone on a Webcam is an incredibly powerful business and it makes me think of Matthew, so Matthew, um, has 34,000 subscribers, weekly videos to help you create music, so it's an educational channel, and Matthew is building an email list and we talked about that in other episodes of the think marketing podcast and he has free drum sounds for the MPC, so you actually give it, you sign up to get these sounds for free because he helps you with the MPC and the music creation tool and then he lets people know how hey, if you want my seven hours where I go through all the features of the MPC, learn what they do the buttons, he learns to program them and he has a course 37 and Matthew is a nurse, his main activity is his main job and he is very grateful. for him especially this year and serving in the midst of the pandemic, but he is serving and helping people and basically recently told us that he is part of our Inner Circle community.

He said that he has basically equaled his monthly income from his day. work with your online income what you've been doing is taking most of that money to reinvest in yourself in your learning and scale and team and team because you have a vision of what you want to do so you're basically doing a part at the place right now where you can work part-time or even full-time if you try hard, but you're combining both and it's not just about your YouTube channel and AdSense and tech affiliate marketing and other things, but who has learned and has learned how to promote and is leveraging his knowledge online, this is Manny, who is a speaker, really a preacher, traveling minister and he actually got crushed at the beginning of 2020 because all his concerts were canceled, the way he made a living and paid the mortgage for himself and his wife Tia.

He had 24 speaking gigs this year and they were all cancelled, so he actually went all out and packaged his knowledge into an online course called Speakeasy to start helping other people learn how to particularly teach the Bible to preach in a way. more powerful again. a skill thatdeveloped something that I had been investing in for years my question is what is a skill what is something that you know and what can happen is that sometimes you undervalue what you know and what is already inside you things that you just learned life like gardening is easy for you and you like to be amazing at gardening you keep the aphids away your neighbor's garden all their plants are dying all yours are blooming like whatever there are different skills that can be very practical that you can pack promote and benefit and completely replaced his income by moving online and again he overcame the recession specifically in this year so we have an episode on the think marketing podcast with Manny where you can learn some powerful tips from him and again these are all just other people who are part of our Inner Circle program and therefore your Speakeasy 59 course, 10-part e-course, helps you become a better speaker, especially for young speakers, pastors, conference speakers and people who want Learn how to teach the Bible. things like that, this is Nicole from Kids OT help, she's an occupational therapist for children and, same example, she has a package deal for new moms where there's a lot of things that new moms need to learn.

She costs 333 dollars. She's actually created a couple different online courses, but um, that. one is a package of her trainings, so what is the skill? Tell me in the comments what skill you have, maybe you already have an educational YouTube channel or what is just a skill you have that could possibly be included in an online channel. Of course, let me know below and listen over the next five years this industry is growing, as Forbes told us, for a $325 billion a year industry, that's how much money is going to go into e-learning and People who want to learn remotely will learn on their own.

The terms are learned from home and as those numbers grow, especially with the lockdown, basically this is what we are talking about, that means that by 2025 this will be a billion dollar industry. per day, let me say it again, that's a billion with a B per day. 2025. I hope you're glad you're looking at this coffee with a candle right now because what we're revealing here is that this is the beginning of a major wave like this, it's like looking back and saying: shoot, should you if you had invested in stocks Amazon, you know what I mean, if you had invested like $10,000 in Amazon stock in 1998, literally, I don't know, would you be ridiculous today or, if you look back, you're like man, I should have seen the Tesla thing coming, Come on, Elon Musk, I just want you to see this coming, so if there are skills to learn, what are there, if there is even positioning for you, what is my position, what is my channel on man, how.

Do I build this whole business empire potentially out of knowledge? Well, you have time, but it's time to go all out because you want to position yourself now to ride the wave again like when the waves are good. One of my friends, Jeff Morris, who lives in Southern California. when there are good waves, he goes out and rides, he wants to see that opportunity and go ride the wave, when there are good waves, when there is nothing there, he relaxes at home, drinks coffee and goes out with his family, so when you see a wave coming Hello, that's time to position yourself that's time to level up that's time to lean in Are you curious about the programs and services here at think?

He wants to chat with a real person to help him in his next steps well, we've got you covered. on the phone for a quick 15-minute discovery call with a think media certified coach to help you with your next steps, simply visit think.com to schedule your free call.