Breaking down how I made my first a hundred K on YouTube. Let's go.
So what's the trick from going from $0 to a hundred K on YouTube in your first
year? Hey, I know what it is. You see, when I started my YouTube career,
I had one goal and that was to travel the world and make money while doing it.
That's it.
All that I dreamed about was replacing my income as an engineer so that I can
travel and explore whenever I wanted.
But what actually happened is kind of insane.
Not only did I replace my civil engineering income,
but I actually made more money than I did as an engineer. Crazy, right?
So if you're thinking, man,
making a hundred K my first year as a YouTuber isn't really doable.
Think again. Hey, if you're pump for today's tutorial,
go ahead and type in YT a hundred K and let's get started.
So I have to attribute a lot of the money I made to this one thing right here,
and that is called affiliate marketing. Now,
affiliate marketing is basically when you promote a product, a service,
something that's not yours, right? And you have an affiliate link to promote it.
And then when somebody buys that product or service through your affiliate link,
you get a commission. It's the oldest type of marketing, like in the book,
right? Ba basically think of it as, you know,
Macy's salesperson on the floor of Macy's when they sell a piece of clothing
or some makeup or whatever it is, they get a small commission.
It's the same thing. It's referral marketing.
And nowadays it is known to us as affiliate marketing in the online world.
And now I really enjoyed affiliate marketing for a few reasons.
And the main reason is because it gave me a lot of time to be able to travel.
I could travel hot from country to country, from Airbnb to Airbnb,
and rarely, or I wouldn't say rarely, but minimally work on my business.
There were some times when I would be gone for four days in a row.
Like for example, when I went to Noci Pineda in Bali for a four day trip,
I was gonna work, but I didn't because we didn't have internet. And so it was,
it was actually fine, right? I still,
I still kept generating traffic with my YouTube channel and driving traffic to
my affiliate links. So it didn't really matter. And let me tell you,
focusing on affiliate marketing was such a breath of fresh air compared to what
I was doing in the beginning of my career. And that was eCommerce.
I was doing Shopify. Whereas with that business model, I had to be there.
I had to be on the computer 6, 7, 7 days a week.
There was so many moving parts of that business with fulfillment, with the,
the branding of the store, with finding hot products with customer service.
It was crazy.
So affiliate marketing was so easy compared to what I had started with in the
first place when I started, you know, this whole online career online business.
And so by the way,
stick around to the end of this video where I'll talk about new strategies and
updates from YouTube and how they announce so many great new features that's
going to allow any new creator getting started on YouTube to really dominate
fast and to kill it and crush it with monetization and growth on YouTube.
Okay, so circling back to the topic of affiliate marketing,
I would say that the key here was that I just focus on one income stream
at a time. Because a lot of people getting started on this platform,
they're like, Oh man, like I gotta, you know,
figure out so many ways to make money because I, you know,
I'm not gonna qualify for Google. You know, one,
one type of income stream isn't enough. I have to make multiple income streams.
And that's just not the case.
It's the same thing just with anything in business.
You gotta focus on one thing first to make it grow before you can focus on other
things.
So you get one income stream going first and then you can focus on adding more
and more and more. So that's what I did. I focused on affiliate marketing,
I'm like, I'm gonna make this work. And that's exactly what I did.
So there's a few types of ways to do affiliate marketing on YouTube,
and that's like with doing reviews of products that you're doing.
So for example, there's a YouTuber that had followed in the past.
I think his channel is all about analyzing backpacks. Like, I'm not kidding.
He has a channel about analyzing bags and backpacks and different things
to travel with.
And so that is like a way to definitely do affiliate marketing where you're
saying like, Oh, you make a video like, oh,
the top five travel backpacks for digital nomads.
And then each backpack that you talk about in review has your affiliate link in
the description.
The other way to do affiliate marketing is like comparison of two direct
products.
So maybe you are in the online fitness consulting niche and you're analyzing
three different supplements.
You're going to make a video saying this supplement versus this supplement
versus this supplement my thoughts and opinion.
And so you'll analyze each one of them and then as people search for reviews on
this one type of product,
they're going to get your review of all the products and whichever one they
decide to buy, they will purchase yours through your link in the description.
So there's a lot of ways to mix it up and do affiliate marketing.
One thing I did in the beginning,
which is definitely a way people are still making money with YouTube and
affiliate marketing is called launch jacking.
So what you're doing is you're hijacking the search traffic of a new product
that is coming into the market.
So what do people do when a new market or a new product comes to the market,
right? They go to Google or they go to YouTube and type in,
you know, X product review, right?
And so they wanna make sure it's a legit product.
So what you do and what I did for a lot of products that came out is
I created videos around these new products.
And so what I would do is create a review on it like a week before it came out.
Cuz all you had to do really is ask the company like, Hey,
can I try out the product? Can I get some affiliate resources for it?
Can I get some email swipes and other marketing tools?
And of course the company's gonna say yes.
So this is how I was able to make a quick couple thousand dollars is I would do
a review video on these products that just came into the market.
So I would get a lot of views in a short amount of time. This is okay,
but I would say like if you have a channel that you wanna dedicate to
reviews, great,
but in the long run you may get a little bit bored of it just being honest.
The good way or the evergreen sustainable way to do affiliate marketing
is if you're just talking in general about, you know,
tutorials and giving value based on what it is you're doing and what does this
even mean? So for example,
if I make an evergreen video about how to be an opera singer,
okay, I don't know what affiliate products are, there are for opera singing,
but let's just say you're giving tips about how to be a singer in the operas
genre and you're talking about a,
a lesson or tutorial or whatever,
a coach even that helps you tremendously grow and develop your singing
abilities.
You can refer that service or that whatever product it is and have an affiliate
link in that one.
So basically that's more evergreen and it's more sustainable because with like
launch jacking and even some review tutorials,
they will get outdated because if you do like the iPhone
10, like obviously that's already an old phone,
or if you do like an iPhone 13 review and we're all the way in
2040, that's gonna be a little bit outdated.
So the trick is to find a way to make affiliate marketing tutorials with
products and topics that are evergreen.
So no matter if your video is searched next week or in three years,
it's still going to be relevant and you're still going to make a lot of money
with your affiliate link in the description of that video. And so, by the way,
if you're an entrepreneur, business owner, you know, coach, consultant,
freelancer,
any one of those who's really looking to take YouTube seriously and use it as a
platform to leverage and drive massive amounts of organic traffic to your
product or service,
definitely download my Subscribers to Sales Blueprint up here or the link in the
description because that goes over my journey and the six steps that you will
need to take in order to make a profitable YouTube channel from day one as soon
as you post your first video. Okay, so now you might be asking, Okay, Marissa,
so was this the way you made your first a hundred K? Nope, it wasn't.
Let's continue and share more of how I created that six figure mark on my first
year on YouTube. And that next income stream that I got was Google absence.
So I got monetized relatively quickly within just like
three and a half months is when I got my first check from Google ad Sense
and I got monetized within two months or something like that.
And that was because I was posting a lot, like every day,
if not every day it was every other day.
Sometimes I doubled up if I didn't post every day. That's not healthy.
I'm not recommending anyone post every day because that's just,
that'll just just burn you out like crazy. But that's what I did.
And so trust me that those Google ads sends checks back then were
definitely necessary because my first year on YouTube I was definitely trying to
pay back hundreds and thousands of dollars of credit card debt.
So I needed the revenue really. But yeah,
I was able to get monetized fairly quickly with the YouTube partnership program,
which I have an update coming on that as it relates to YouTube shorts at the end
of this video. So stay tuned.
But my first absence check was relatively very high.
It was like $1,200. And I was like, Whoa, I wasn't expecting this.
I was so, so happy. But you know,
that was definitely a great chunk of change that I was earning as a new creator
with less than 5,000 subs.
And once your channel does qualify for the UT partnership program of a thousand
subscribers and 4,000 watch hours within a 12 month period,
it's a beautiful thing.
And so the next revenue stream that added to that first hundred K was online
course creation. Yes,
I stepped into the online course creation cuz I realized really quickly that
this was like a thing like the online education business,
it's a billion dollar business,
it's like 240 billion business or something
insane like that and it's only gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And so basically I pulled my audience, I was like, Hey guys,
what is it that you want to learn from me? More in depth,
Like if I were to teach you something, like a course,
like what would you buy from me, right?
And the number one thing they asked was affiliate marketing, of course.
Because that's what I talked a lot about in the beginning of the channel.
And so I'm like, okay, I created a course,
I packaged it up I created it maybe within a couple weeks I created a
sales page from it and I had a checkout and so that people could pay
with their credit card or PayPal I believe.
And I sold it for $197.
It was called like Affiliate Breakthrough Academy or something like that.
And I was really excited. I felt like, man, like I'm official, I have a course.
It was really, really fun. And that's when I got super, super,
super enthusiastic about online course creation.
And I knew that it was something I wanted to double down on in the future,
which has actually happened. Okay? And so for you course creators out there,
YouTube is a no brainer, okay?
It's a no brainer for you to start a channel if you haven't already because it's
incredibly powerful. Just the type of traffic that you will get going to,
let's say your webinar funnels going to your higher ticket coaching
programs,
YouTube will drive the best sales and organic traffic to your courses and
programs hands down. And so the breakdown of that first hundred k,
I just went over it, not rocket science, just affiliate IT marketing,
Google absence revenue. And my very first online course that I created the most,
I would say like 85% of the revenue did come from affiliate marketing because
back then I,
I forgot to mention I was promoting a high ticket affiliate product or program,
which you can definitely do because I would say right now it doesn't matter
whether you're driving traffic to something high ticket or something lower
ticket, the general conversion of a solid product is 2%.
So if you do the math on anything that you're promoting,
just think about how many views you need to get, you know,
a certain amount of leads and just evaluate how your funnel is doing. Like if,
I'm not saying if you're promoting like an Amazon camera or something like that,
that's kind of impossible to track.
But if you're promoting a legit program or a subscription based model or
something like that,
you're gonna wanna be able to track how many sales you can get from this
product.
And this goes whether you're promoting your own product or an affiliate product.
Cuz what you'll do is you'll say, okay, in the month of January, right,
the channel got 20,000 views, okay?
And so let's say with 20,000 views,
you got five sales on either an affiliate product or your own product,
then you can kind of backtrack and get the conversion rate of what that is.
And you're like, okay, so if I, you know,
double down on my top content the next month in February,
let's say we get 30,000 views,
then that'll create approximately eight sales or something like that.
So you'll know how the product converts. And this is very, very important too,
scaling your affiliate revenue and even your own revenue as a business owner.
So now let's talk about why now more than ever in the history of YouTube
that it's easier to grow and monetize faster than ever. Okay?
So now if you're a creator or if you're a small creator or you're somebody
thinking of starting a channel soon, just jump in because for these reasons,
our path to being successful is so much easier than it was before.
And that first reason is we know the algorithm,
we can figure out what makes the algorithm tick.
There's so many videos and helpful resources out there,
especially that YouTube distributes that says, Hey,
this is what the algorithm likes. It's a no brainer.
The algorithm loves watch time and retention and creators that can keep their
audience on the platform for as long as possible. So we know the algorithm.
The second reason is because this new thing called YouTube shorts.
Now Shortz creators have a much lower barrier to entry to being successful
on YouTube. And now the creators that have been, you know,
the OGs that have been creating long form content can now really double down on
their shorts.
The cool thing that YouTube just announced is that now it's much easier to be
discovered with your short form content than it was before.
So now you're short form content can get your long form
content discovered, which is huge, huge, huge, huge.
Because before YouTube was separating out the shorts content with the long form
content because the short, once you saw a video on the shorts shelf,
it was kind of like TikTok.
You can maybe see that creator again or maybe you would never see that same
creator again. But now if you see a shorts video,
you can then see that creator's long form content on your home feed,
which is absolutely amazing. And now for the first time ever,
you can create a shorts video directly from your long
form content.
And the best part about it is that that YouTube short video will have a direct
link to the long form video that is absolutely bananas, .
And the third reason is we know the pillars of great successful channels.
We know that it has everything to do with video quality, good video quality.
We also know that the algorithm loves frequency.
And the more you post and the better you are at showing up.
So whether your consistency looks like posting two amazing videos per month or
two videos per week,
as long as you're showing up and keeping up the frequency that you make for
yourself, the algorithm is going to love it.
And the third pillar that we know to be true of the YouTube algorithm are the
topics and the thumbnails.
Now we don't need to reinvent the wheel on how to create solid topics and
thumbnails. It's really a no brainer.
We can just go to other creators and other example channels out there who are
doing really well and model after they're winning titles and winning thumbnails.
And of course this means doing it in your own version.
This isn't like copying what they're doing exactly.
This is remixing it and putting it into your own voice and your own brand as a
creator and making it pop.
And also now being a smaller YouTuber isn't so intimidating because YouTube's
constantly updating things. Like for example,
now all you need is 500 subscribers in order to access the community tab.
And the community tab is a way to get more traffic to your videos.
It's a way to get to know your audience,
ask them pull them post videos,
post pictures of yourself, and have it be like a true feed,
almost like you're on Instagram or something like that. Okay?
So on this video you'll notice that I didn't talk about my YouTube equipment
hardly at all.
So definitely if you're still interested in this topic in getting started,
I highly advise you go right now to click on this video and watch it.
It's all about my YouTube equipment that I use now and also the equipment I
started with in the beginning.
The only equipment I needed to get me to six figures. And I'll give you a hint,
it had a lot to do with this phone right here. So I'll see you on that video.
Click right here. Have a good one.