How I made $1000 on Youtube – You can earn this money too!
Does that seem like a dream? It can be reality, in fact, it became reality for me. And I will tell you exactly how in this article. Along the way I will share what I have learnt, so you won’t have to make the same mistakes I did, and you can focus on what is important. At the same time, you’ll probably get a good idea if this making money on Youtube thing is for you or not. After all it really is possible to make $1000 on Youtube.
You can trust me that this comes from a completely honest guy, I am not here to try to sell you anything, I just want to motivate you and share my passion for Youtube! I also started with only 1 subscriber.. then 100, then 300 for a long time, then 1000 and now I am sitting at 8472. This gives you an idea, that is is possible to make as much as 1000 US dollars with less than 10.000 subscribers.
Let’s start at the beginning, I actually opened my Youtube channel back in 2007. My first video, was one of me flying my favorite, and probably ONLY, 7 m2 power kite… pretty funny and a little cringy for me to look at again after 13 years… 😉 but anyways, after that first video I didn’t do Youtube seriously at all for at least 10 years. The channel was there but only to upload the occasional video to show to my friends really.
Then in 2018 I started getting more into videoing and Youtubing, mainly because I had by that time acquired a computer that could edit videos properly, and got my first GoPro gifted by my wife for my birthday. So I started recording my favorite activities which happen to be kitesurfing and kitefoiling, paragliding, and other flying too, and traveling in general! So I ended up with plenty material on the harddisk to be sharing with the world. And that is my passion for having this channel in the first place. I love to share the amazing sports and adventures that can be had on our planet, and I’m super excited that I am now slowly slowly getting better at sharing those with you and the world via Youtube!! So a major takeaway here is, before anything else
Make sure you enjoy yourself doing Youtube!
Now, let’s get to the really exciting bit. Doing videos on the stuff you love like kiting and paragliding and travelling, is all good and well. But if you want your channel to do good, you’ll have to also think about what your viewers actually are interested in seeing! So I chatted with the wife, thought about it for many nights… and eventually, the wife actually came up with the idea of filming the grand opening of the newly constructed Doha Metro here in Qatar. I thought straight away it was a great idea, although a little scary to run around in public with a camera trying to film this properly.. But hey, we went for it, I filmed the process of entering the station… buying tickets… getting on the train… a look around the train, and of course looks around the various stations on the line.
It took about 3 hours that morning to take the footage, I then went home and sat behind the computer, to edit it into something watchable! That same evening, because it was such a time critical event, I managed to upload around 7 pm… and straight away the views started coming in, so much faster than any of my other videos before. It just showed to me, and now of course, to you, how much power is in optimisation of your videos.
Make a video around what people want to see, not so much around what you like doing only.
Of course, its even better if you can film around a combination of those two things! And to be honest, to this day, I still make videos that I make for me, I enjoy a lot and I don’t think what my viewers are going to think. Then later, other videos are much more about what my viewers will like, and less about my first passions like I mentioned, kitesurfing, paragliding, sailing.. It could be of course that you just want to enjoy and get good at making videos. Then go ahead, just make videos about what you love. But if you’re interested in growing, always think about what people want to see, and create the video around that.
Anyway, after that Doha Metro video, that was not the end of it of course, although it did get me thousands of subscribers 100 thousands of views, and of course got me straight into the Youtube criteria for having my channel monetized. The criteria for getting monetized are 4000 watch hours in the previous year, and 1000 subscribers.
After that first video, it suddenly wasn’t that difficult at all anymore, to decide what my next video should be about.. Obviously, something about the Doha Metro! But it would still be nice to centre it around a bit of news related to the Metro. So I did new videos on that when the next lines opened, the first was the red line, then gold then green.. All of those videos, got me so many more views than any other videos before.. I would say on average around 50.000 views per metro video.
This all happened during the course of 2019. By the end of most of my Doha Metro videos, my subscribers had grown to 6000 and my total views to about 900.000.
Guess how much money I had made by then? It was 301.05 USD for the whole of 2019. Even though I had that first really successful video on the Doha Metro. Because I only got monetised after that, you could say in a way I lost out on all of that income. But really that’s not how i see it, to me it was awesome that that enabled the monetisation for me, and any video after that had the potential to earn!
So the first 3 months of 2020, I enjoyed myself, I recorded, I uploaded what I felt was fun, and I didn’t think that much about what the world would want to see. income was not very significant, about 15-20 USD per month until May 2020.
Until the Corona hit, COVID-19, and you and probably all of us, were suddenly stuck in the house.. and we had to come up with creative ideas to keep ourselves at least alive, second, hopefully also mentally stable, and if you really push it, it would be nice to still enjoy yourself at the same time. So our answer was to get ourselves a mobile pool, and set it up within the confines of our own house!
And so we did, it was awesome fun, we could swim, and relax and play there every day, without a worry. Instead of going to the beach, which is what we would normally do with most of our free time before Corona.
And so then it triggered to me, that we were probably not the only ones having set up our own pool at home. So I did videos on the pool itself, our lovely Bestway pool. And the equipment we have been using around it, such as the Intex filter pump we installed, the pool lights, the vacuum cleaner for the pool and so on.. They turned out to be big hits, achieving more than half a million views combined in a few months time. I have now reached 8472 subs and 1.7 million views, and the income was $280 in May, $529 in June, $514 in July, and $440 in August. Because the videos are so seasonal, it’s now dropping off, of course… So I am ready for the next idea! The take-away here is that you are probably best off:
Try to make evergreen content that is always popular
On the other hand, if you are trying to grow, it can be very beneficial to make content on a trending topic. Especially if you are one of the first, like I was with the Doha Metro, it can become a very popular video for in a really short time.
So that is my story of earning the first 1000 USD on Youtube.
I hope that this article is a huge motivation for you! If I look at it myself, it is definitely a little mind blowing and super exciting!!! I am not trying to brag here, I just want to show you how it is possible.
Keep in mind, not many people have ever had success without having failed a few times before. It’s just about believing in yourself, knowing what you are after, and not worrying about what other people might think. They’ll be doing that anyway, and your life is too short to spend time on that!
And remember if you never give up, you actually have a really good chance of actually getting what you want!!
If you would like to see the video that goes along with this article, you can find it here on Youtube:
