How do you make money and make your channel financially sustainable so you
can continue to provide the content and the value to your audience that they
want from you? Hey guys! Great to see you. My name is Tim Schmoyer and I have been
working with YouTube creators helping them grow their audiences since 2010.
Let's do a quick recap here to make sure you're tracking with where we're going.
Number one, you need to grow a solid YouTube audience. And number two, you need
to know exactly who that audience is. It was called the target audience. Who's
the most ideal subscriber for your YouTube channel.
And then why should they subscribe in the first place? Number three, that value
proposition. What are they subscribing for? You need to be able to define that
and clearly articulate that. And then you need to know what your revenue streams
are. Now if you are making money on YouTube, you actually already have
somewhat of a business model in place, and you have a product already. If you
look at your channel like "what's my product?" Well, there's two ways to think
about it. Either your audience is your product, or your audience are, they are
your customers, and you're gonna sell something to them directly. In this video
I want to talk about if you are treating at your viewers as your customers.
YouTube already has a feature built into their system that makes it easy for you
to start doing that, and that is the Super Chat during live streams. If you're
not already familiar with Super Chats, it's simply a way that viewers can pay
to promote one of their their chats during a live stream to the creator.
And the higher the amount of the viewer's purchase for that Super Chat, the longer
that chat comment will stay pinned to the top of the chat feed during the
live stream. Personally, when I livestream on my channel at Video Creators, the
Super Chat has been an amazing opportunity, not only for me to connect
better with my audience and for some of them to connect better with me, but
also it's a good value exchange. They're supporting me financially while I'm
doing my best to deliver good value to them through the stream. Let me share
with you guys a few things that I've learned personally from using Super Chat
on my channel, sometimes earning up to several hundred dollars an hour from
my community. Like, they are amazing, I appreciate them so much.
Number one, it's important that you first acknowledge that this feature even
exists. A lot of your viewers aren't as educated about YouTube as you are, and
they might not even know that this is an option that they could have. Two, when you
do talk about it, focus on the benefit it has for the viewer. Don't just talk about
like "hey you guys can give me money" as if, remember back to our mindset, it's not
about trying to just extract value and extract the money from these people, but
it's more about like "how can I serve these people in a way that makes them
feel like compelled" like they want to support this, and they want to be a part
of this, and they want to take the next step in our community here on this
channel. Number three, when you do get a Super Chat, act excited. Like show your
appreciation to that person who is giving up some of their hard-earned
money to support you and be in front of you and connect with you during this
live stream in a deeper, more meaningful way. Now that can kind of be hard
sometimes though, if you're trying to do like a produced show or produced live
stream. You just can't interrupt yourself constantly whenever a Super Chat comes
in, right. So what I recommend you do is have a "Super Chat commercial break", where
you're going to deliver the content and the value through the live stream that you
want, but at set intervals you're going to stop and you're going to catch up on
all the Super Chats that have come in so far.
Just catch up, respond to each one of those, and then continue on with your
content. Another way to deliver and capture good value through your YouTube
videos when your audience are your customers is to create a product that
you're going to sell to them. And this is where knowing your target audience and
your value proposition really becomes important. The way I think about like in
terms of creating a product that you're going to sell, is how can you deliver 10x of
that same value that they're subscribed like the thing they already want from
you, what is that thing they want? How do you sell that 10x value in a package
that they're willing to pay for? Let's say you have a woodworking channel where
you're teaching people how to build things with wood. So you make a video
just showing how you are gonna make a coffee table, right. So you make that
whole video showing how the coffee table, and that's like 1X the value. But
then you say at the end of the video like hey maybe the product is you know
for $9.95 they can buy a PDF that's going to have video of
every step of the way, like video instructions. It's going to have the
entire like list of all the materials they need to buy so they can go straight
to a store and just buy everything that they need to buy. And then it's gonna
have the cut list, all the supplies laid out, it's gonna have nice big pictures of
every cut, every screw hole. Now let's say though, for example, you're not an
educational channel, you're more of an entertainment channel. Like "Tim that
makes perfect sense for the DIY, tutorial, how-to type of channels. But I am
actually like I'm a vlogger, or I'm a gamer, or I'm a comedy channel or
something like that - how does that work for me?" Same principle applies. What is
the value that your target audience wants to consume from you, and then how
can you package that and 10x that same value in a format they're willing to pay
for? So in that example, let's say you're a family vlogger, and one of the things
you're gonna start doing on your channel regularly is start doing something
called Family Adventure Day. And let's say that's just a day that you go out
and your family tries to experience something new in a way that's, you know,
relatively inexpensive. All for the purpose of building relationships with
the people in your family. Let's say you start doing a family adventure day once
a week. And then in every single one of those videos, you can easily integrate a
product of your own saying "hey guys this is what we're doing to build
relationships as a family. If you guys want some ideas of how you can do this
with your family, we have a PDF you can download. It's called
52 Family Adventure Day ideas that cost $10 or less." So they can get 1X in the
video watching your story watching you guys build your relationships together
as a family. But then they can buy this PDF and say like here's a whole like
fifty-two more ideas I can do one of these a week for an entire year and
build relationships my family. You get what I'm saying? So same principle applies. One
of the great things about YouTube, though, is that your revenue streams are limited
pretty much just by your creativity. You can come up with a lot of different
ideas than the ones we've suggested here. And I want to hear from you in the
comments of this video - what other ideas have you implemented on your channel? Or
maybe you're thinking about implementing on your channel? And read the comments
other people are leaving down there, you're gonna learn a ton from them. If
this is something you're thinking through, you're gonna
a lot of other ideas from those people down there as well. Thanks for hanging
out with me a little bit here, and we will see you guys at the next Creator
Academy Master Class. See you then, bye! For more lessons from the Creator Academy,
check out the links in the description and be sure to subscribe. Thanks for
watching!