- Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
So today I want to share something with you,
I want to be transparent with you
about my multiple streams of income,
specifically how I built eight income sources
that allow me to make over $18,000 a month on average.
Now none of this is to brag
and some of you may be new to the channel
and I know that it might seem
like a bunch of entrepreneurs flex
or they down people that have a nine to five job
but I was somebody who was making $6 an hour
when I started in the workforce
and I worked my way up in my 30s to being somebody
who makes six figures a year.
And so all of this is really just to kind of like
help you understand how something like that can happen,
how much hard work and sacrifice it really takes.
Maybe some of this will help you
in building just even a side hustle
and knowing that if you stick with it long enough,
there are amazing things that can happen.
Money is still somewhat of an uncomfortable topic for me,
just the way I was raised in growing up
in an immigrant family, growing up as a minority,
you really don't get to talk openly about money,
there's this like huge stigma around it
and I think it actually holds a lot of people back
when they don't have like good information
or when there's nobody to tell them certain things.
There were things that I believed about money
and credit and about people who make money
that just really weren't true
and if I had somebody, somebody like me to talk to about it,
it would have made a real difference in my life
and I wouldn't struggle nearly as long as I did
and I could have avoided a lot of hardships.
So that's really what this video is about
and I just wanted to make that absolutely clear
to anybody watching who may not be familiar with me.
So I think the first thing we're gonna do
is I'm gonna actually list
my eight primary income streams for you.
Obviously YouTube ad revenue is one of them.
As an influencer,
sponsorships are of course part of that as well.
I do very well with affiliate marketing
because of the type of content
that I put out here and on my blog and in social media.
And then of course there's actually my coaching business
which has three different income sources for it.
So the coaching business Awesome Creator Academy
has digital product sales,
it has my monthly membership group,
and it has my one-on-one coaching offers.
So that has multiple income streams and it's just built in.
Then there's public speaking,
less of which happens during quarantine obviously
but there are still virtual events
and some of them actually do still pay speakers like me
so that's actually something I wanted to bring up.
And then there is my B2B consulting and private workshops.
I used to do a lot of that in public actually
and I would either travel to clients
but now we do everything remotely.
So those are the eight income sources
and then I'm gonna break each of them down
and I'm gonna talk to you a bit about how I approach them.
So let's talk about YouTube.
When I talk about my YouTube money,
I actually show you guys the real analytics
on this actual channel, I don't hide that from you.
Not everyone does that
so I'm just really transparent with you guys
about how much money I make in YouTube ad revenue.
Part of that is because by you guys watching the channel,
you guys supporting, liking, hitting the subscribe button,
notifications, all those things actually do help a lot
and so with a average of a quarter million
to 350,000 views a month,
this channel tends to do 2,000 to 3,000 plus a month.
There have been higher months obviously
and I put that stuff out in my YouTube income reports
over on the blog,
but that's pretty much what you can expect
in terms of advertising from this channel.
Now that is drastically different
than other people who get those views
and I don't want you to get the wrong idea.
Most YouTube content creators
get about $2 to $5 per every 1,000 views on their video
and technically that CPM rate isn't really accurate.
YouTube recently introduced a new metric called RPM
so you can see how much you actually make per 1,000 views,
not what YouTube charges the advertisers which is CPM.
Again, this gets a little complicated,
I'm making a video about this
and how much money YouTubers make.
And this channel, since it focuses on online business,
marketing, and social media,
tends to do really well and averages anywhere
from 15 to $30 CPM rates.
So usually around $20 CPM rates
which means on average, for every 1,000 views,
I probably earn 10 to $12 in terms of revenue
per 1,000 views on these videos,
and that's just YouTube AdSense.
A lot of people think that I make most of my money here
as a YouTube content creator,
you're gonna find out very differently
if you keep watching the video.
So next let's talk about sponsorships.
I've done some very detailed elaborate videos
telling you everything you actually need to know
about sponsorships as a content creator,
as an influencer.
Those videos did not get as many views
as I would have thought since everybody says,
"Nobody tells the truth about sponsorships,
"tell us about sponsorships
"tell us how much money you make, blah, blah, blah."
I actually did a lot of that in that video.
I can't for NDA purposes tell you exactly
how much money every deal makes,
I actually put out my rate card
and my own media kit publicly and I put it into those videos
and you can see how much I tend to charge sponsors.
What we're gonna do since I get brand deals
not only for this YouTube channel but for my Instagram,
thank you guys for helping me
get to almost 20,000 followers over on Instagram,
I really appreciate it.
With those platforms plus also some sponsored content
that I do in Linkedin from time to time,
we're going to just average it out for the year
and conservatively say that it's $5,000 a month.
Again that's not an exact number but I explained why
I can't give you a hard number for that.
If you do watch the sponsorship videos,
you see the exact rates
that I tend to charge in my media kit
and then that makes a lot of sense.
Next up is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is something I talk about
constantly here on the channel
and it's something that I really believe in
because I usually deal in software
as a service based affiliate marketing,
so a lot of it is recurring monthly commissions,
there are a lot of different programs that I promote.
It's the stuff that I use day to day in my coaching business
and so it's very easy for me to advocate for those things
and it's also things I use fo this YouTube channel.
TubeBuddy is my biggest affiliate program
and I'm a super affiliate there, I earn 50%.
In the last four years of using and promoting TubeBuddy,
I've made about a quarter million dollars
in the last four years as an affiliate
for that one affiliate program
and it's because it's a great product
and people don't even leave it when they're using it.
If you're a YouTube content creator,
there's really not reason not to be using TubeBuddy.
And so even if you're going to use the free trial version,
the free trial version is free forever
as long as you want to use it
but if you upgrade to the paid version
and get all the features,
I do get a commission when you use that.
And so by having so many people in the community
that you know are using it and are supporting the channel,
that's how I've been able to earn those commissions.
I average about five to $6,000 a month from TubeBuddy alone
so that's substantial,
that would be a very good living for probably most people
and I don't take it for granted,
but I don't wanna lie to you,
it's not something that happened overnight.
It took four years to be able to build up that traction
and a lot of content.
So just keep in mind,
there are over 1,000 videos on this channel,
so anything I make in ad revenue,
anything I make in sponsorship,
anything I make in affiliate revenue
that's related to YouTube
has been a long hard path of making 1,400 videos
over the last seven years
and I didn't start making a lot of money right away.
The first two or three years of that
weren't making hardly anything at all.
So grain of salt, people, grain of salt.
Now TubeBuddy isn't my only affiliate program
and so when you add up those affiliate programs
and it is sporadic in terms of what they earn,
we can average it out conservatively to $7,500 a month
to $9,000 plus a month.
I've actually done several videos
about affiliate marketing here on the channel.
If you want to check those out,
I talk about affiliate marketing,
I talk about passive income
and how you gotta work hard up front
and you don't get to make money in your sleep overnight.
I am very straightforward about that, guys, very much.
So next we have my other three big sources of income here.
These are multiple revenue streams,
they're tied to awesomecreatoracademy.com,
and so that would be my digital products
like the YouTube Starter Kit.
I built a $99 product that has over 100 Photoshop templates
with YouTube thumbnail template designs
that you can customize, YouTube channel artwork,
we did the 100 video ideas to launch your YouTube channel,
the 20 perfect video title formulas,
I did all this stuff and I put it in a $99 package
and I sell it on my website through Kajabi.
So that is one of the big money makers
for Awesome Creator Academy.
Then we have the membership program,
that's typically $59 a month,
and where the way that works is that me
and another coach Andy Rivera,
we actually host on Tuesdays, we do the webinars,
so we do live training, we do 90-minute trainings
and it's pretty deep.
And then on Thursdays we do live Q&A
in our private Facebook group
and so between those live streams
and then the monthly group call on Zoom,
we're very involved and active there,
so I wouldn't call that passive income
but it is recurring income and it's a big chunk of it.
And so we have the membership
and then I also have one-on-one coaching,
that's not passive either.
The digital products are passive,
the coaching, the membership group that's not.
And again, the membership is recurring
so I have the YouTube channel reviews
and I have the 90-minute business development sessions.
So when you combine all of those,
Awesome Creator Academy averages
about 6,000 to $9,000 a month on average.
For this like last 30 days, we made $9,355,
so that's actually really solid,
that is again, a crap ton of money
and so that is how the coaching business works
and that represents three of my eight income streams.
So real quick, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time
on public speaking because 2019
was a great public speaking year for me doing VidSummit,
doing Social Media Marketing World,
all these different events.
Now not all of them pay.
Public speaking events for me are $0 to $5,000.
And so that's actually really solid for a public speaker.
I've done over probably 75 different events by now
but 2020 was very different, thank you quarantine.
And so a lot of the events that I've been doing
have been virtual events lately,
I've actually been doing quite a bit of those.
Not all of those pay, very few of them do
and in fact, it actually me and Andy,
we've been talking and she's been really encouraging me
to pursue this.
I've been looking at doing our own virtual event,
a paid virtual event
and I'm looking into how we actually can do that
and do it well
and make it worth people's while.
And so we're looking at that either for the end of this year
or the beginning of next year.
I'm planning my business honestly,
I'll do a video about this,
I'm planning my business with the assumption
that unfortunately the virus might be with us
until the first quarter of next year at a minimum.
And so I've been just kind of planning
my business model around that.
I had to change a lot of things I was doing
just based on this.
So public speaking has not been a fantastic income source
but it would be zero to $5,000 per speaking engagement.
And so that would just vary
but I thought it was important to talk about it.
And so finally, income stream number eight
is private consulting and private workshops.
Now in this one I can't give you a price range
'cause it just is ridiculously variable
based on the client and their needs
and it's also sporadic.
I actually turned down quite a lot of this,
believe it or not,
so that number because it's a B2B relationship,
can be pretty good, it could be very well paid,
and when I was doing more private workshops
where I would actually fly out
to whatever company I was working with,
they would usually cover travel as well.
So that actually was actually
a very practical part of the business
because I didn't have to pay for the travel,
sometimes as a public speaker
I actually had to either pay my own travel
or I would pay upfront and then the event would comp me,
and so the only benefit to that
is I get to claim it on my taxes.
So there you have it, those are my eight income streams
and how they conservatively earned me an average
of about $18,000 a month or more.
And again, some months can be extraordinarily high
compared to that,
very few months fall short of that.
So that's why I went with that number.
And like I said, none of this is to brag,
none of this is to flex on you guys,
I actually live a pretty frugal lifestyle.
It may not seem like it
because of how much I spend on tech and gear
but that's an investment back into my business,
that's something I had to claim on the taxes
and I pay a lot of taxes.
And I just feel really grateful to be in a position
to have been somebody who was a broke kid,
a community college dropout, didn't have a lot of money,
just was trying to not only get by
but actually to help my family.
And so to go from making $6 an hour where I started
to be someone who makes multiple six figures a year
is just something I can't even put into words
how much that actually means to me
and like how much I want more people to understand
that it is not impossible
but it does require a lot of hard work.
And I know plenty of you are working hard
and you're not getting those results
but I was working hard at so many of the wrong things,
I was working hard in ways
that didn't really make practical sets
that weren't really in my best interest
and the reality is that a lot of it came down
to I had to cut toxic people out of my life
and I had to cut out a lot of bad habits
and ultimately I had to learn how to respect myself more
and understand where my best efforts
were gonna pay off,
where I was gonna put my time and my energy
into something that mattered to me
and not because I thought I was supposed to be doing it.
So much of what is limiting your potential
is limiting beliefs, people putting you down,
people making you feel like you're not enough.
And so none of this is supposed
to make you compare yourself to me
or to make you feel bad about what you do or don't have,
it's supposed to help you understand
that if you do the best, the true best you can,
truly the best that you can
with what you have, where you are,
and you just move in the right direction,
the one that you know to be right,
not the one that your parents convinced you is right,
not the one that society is telling you,
not the one the culture is telling you,
but what you deep down
know you should be doing right this moment
that things can change for you.
If I can go from making $6 an hour as a broke kid
to going to making six figures a year,
and yeah it took forever, it was not easy,
it was painfully hard,
but it was something that I felt I wanted and needed to do
that was going to give me a future
that a lot of us don't get to have.
And so I would just like to end the video
with encouraging you to look at anything you can do
in your life to have a better result than yesterday.
Look at any small improvement and count it as a win
and realize that when you start building yourself up
and when you start learning how to respect yourself enough
to say no to some people in your life,
things are gonna get better for you,
things are going to be different for you
and that is the biggest lesson I can teach you.
Anything I teach you about entrepreneurship,
anything I teach you about business,
anything I teach about marketing,
is really just about a path
to making things better in your life
and trying to reach your full potential.
Question of the day, what is the most valuable thing
you got out of today's video?
What is the most valuable thing
you've got out of this channel and spending time with me?
Let me know in the comment section
and let me know what other videos I can make for you.
Like this video if you like it,
don't forget to subscribe,
check out the other awesome content here on the channel.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget, go out there
and create something awesome today.
Take care.
(upbeat music)