Google+

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I Make How-To Videos

My goal is simple.  Make how-to videos that help people.  As much as I do enjoy helping people by creating tutorials, product reviews and answering questions in the YouTube community, I do have another motivation.  Back in 2007 when I landed my first job out of college I heard rumors of people earning money over the internet with virtually no up front investment or overhead.  So instead of playing fantasy football with my friends I learned how to use Google Analytics and set up an AdSense account.  Next I created a few blogs that failed miserably.  Awesome.  I made a total of $9.82 over the course of 3 years.  Pretty pathetic.  Come to think of it I'll bet my friends who played fantasy football made more than I did during that same time period.  I did however learn a valuable lesson from my failures.

The secret to earning money online is to generate useful information, get lots of web traffic and never give up.  It's not much of a secret but if your content is good people will be drawn to it.  Then you can either charge a fee for access or make it free and monetize with annoying little ads.  This is a very simple concept but also a very difficult thing to implement at first if you don't know what you are doing.  And like everything else in life there is no substitute for hard work.  Everything came together for me when I shifted from independently blogging to producing videos for YouTube, which happens to be the second largest search engine in the world.

In April of 2011 my do-it-yourself attitude and video production skill set converged within the platform of YouTube.  I realized that nobody cared to watch my silly home videos.  However once I started posting how-to videos that helped people my viewership increased.  And when views go up potential to earn revenue goes up.  The views came first and the revenue came later.  I posted roughly 30 how-to videos in 2011.  I saw revenue adding up in my AdSense account and finally my first direct deposit happened in January of 2012.  I say all of this to encourage you to set goals and stay focused on your goals.  If you are a content creator like me it is important to keep creating high quality content and it will pay off in the end.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks Caleb. Also thank you for sending me a private message you're a class act.

    ReplyDelete