What's going on everybody?
In today's video, I'm going to be interviewing my brother, Matt Leighton on how to make over
a $1,000 every single month on YouTube.
And he actually makes a lot more than that and we'll show screenshots and things like
that just for those people that don't believe him.
But we're basically going to talk about five core strategies you can use to make over a
$1,000 every single month on YouTube.
So let's get started.
Okay, so strategy number one and we'll talk about his channel a little bit, multiple streams
of income.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about your multiple streams of income?
Definitely.
Multiple streams of income, the first thing that everyone thinks about is YouTube ad revenue
and that's perfect, that's exactly where you should start but you shouldn't stop there.
So you have the ad revenue but what else do you have?
So for me, myself, I have a book that I also sell, I put that in the description of all
my videos.
That gets me a couple extra dollars but for yourself and your own channel, whether you're
a chiropractor or something else, you could be selling a book, you could be selling a
course.
You could have affiliate links in there, whether that's to Amazon or to a specific product
or a specific software.
Because a lot of companies out there are offering affiliate programs.
Now, myself, I don't have affiliate links just because as a real estate agent sometimes
the laws are a little bit hairier.
And I don't have that ability to do some affiliates.
But when it comes to multiple streams, I have the YouTube ad revenue, I have the book and
then I also have an audiobook, all of which combine to help make me over a $1,000.
Well, then you also have just people that watch, he is a real estate agent.
So people watch his real estate videos they also want to probably use him as a real estate
agent.
So if you're a chiropractor, real estate agent, whatever you are, you can make videos talking
about your services that you provide.
You can make income from that.
You can make the AdSense revenue, which is a lot of the income you make.
Yeah.
So I get the real estate clients, people in the Northern Virginia area that are looking
to buy or sell real estate that reach out to me.
But I also get people from across the country that are looking for a real estate agent and
then I can refer them to another agent.
I guess I don't say I use affiliate links but that's literally an affiliate program
in itself is referring a buyer or a seller to another agent.
And then I can get some of that commission.
So there's three main strategies, your main product or service, whatever it is you're
offering if you have a program, book, course, mentoring, a lot of people do that.
And then affiliate links, so there's really three strategies.
If you're just using one of those, you're leaving a lot of money on the table.
So let's get into number two.
Okay.
So you want to make at least 10 minute long videos and we learned this, we took Graham
Stephan's YouTube course, which we would highly recommend.
And if we had an affiliate link, we'd probably put it in here for you to take it as well.
Come on Graham, where is that affiliate link at Graham?
But basically the reason you want to do 10-minute videos is for the AdSense.
If you have a nine-minute and 59-second video, you can only put one ad in the video, basically
in the beginning, maybe at the end, I'm not quite sure.
But if you have an over 10-minute long video, you can put ads throughout the video and obviously
you don't want to just throw a ton of ads into different videos.
But you can double your ad revenue essentially if you put two ads instead of just one into
your videos.
Yeah, expanding on that a little bit.
When I first got started, I would make a five-minute video, this is back in 2013, 2014.
And I would think to myself, wow, this video is so long, is anyone going to actually watch
this?
And then I started making slightly longer videos, seven, eight, nine, 10 minutes.
Eventually, I made a 28-minute video, and of course, when I look at the YouTube retention,
people only watched 11 minutes of that.
But when I also looked at the YouTube retention, I was like, wow, people actually watch 11
minutes of this.
So Jeff's right, you do get to put the two ads at the front and the backside, which will
basically double your ad revenue.
But what'll also happen is when you have longer videos, that's going to help out with the
YouTube algorithm.
So when people are watching more and more of your content and more and more of your
videos, it's good to have two ads.
But it's also good to show YouTube that people actually enjoy your content, which the way
that you're going to make a lot of money per month on YouTube is when the algorithm hooks
you up.
And starts showing your videos to more people so that's one of the advantages of making
longer videos.
And just to add onto that point, the whole backstory with Graham Stephan, he's obviously
a famous YouTuber if you don't know who he is.
But he was comparing his channel with another personal finance channel.
The other personal finance channel was making like twice as much as he was, even though
they had similar views, similar content, everything like that.
And he was wondering like, what was going on?
And it was because the guy was putting an extra ad in the middle of all of his videos.
So he could basically like double or drastically increase the amount of ad revenue so try to
make longer videos.
You know when you're getting started maybe you just do the two-minute, three-minute,
eight-minute and then eventually you get into the longer type videos.
Okay.
So number three is to create a series of videos around a specific topic.
So Matt's channel and obviously I'll put a link to it, his are all about condos in Arlington,
Virginia being a real estate agent in Arlington, Virginia.
Homebuyer tips, seller tips, things like that.
As a real estate investor, myself, mine are more focused on how to make money in real
estate, marketing tips for real estate, different things like that.
But if someone watches one of your videos and they like it, chances are if you have
a series of similar videos they're probably going to watch those, which will lead to more
ad revenue.
It might lead to more people purchasing one of your affiliate links or buying one of your
products using you as a coach, that type of thing.
So try to stay focused on your topic.
You don't want a cat video and then a cooking video and then a real estate video.
Yeah.
So the biggest thing when it comes to creating a series of videos, well, it's twofold.
One, what is the series going to be about obviously?
And then number two, is the series actually going to make you money?
Is it going to make you ad revenue?
Are people going to watch it?
This isn't for a prank channel, this is for an actual video, an actual YouTube channel
that will make some sort of revenue and have a higher CPM.
So for myself, I do do a lot of condo videos, I do do a lot of extremely local real estate
videos.
But those aren't the videos that make me the most amount of the YouTube ad revenue.
The videos that make me the most amount of ad revenue are the first-time homebuyer tip
videos.
So for yourself and your own channel, think about researching the top video.
For me, it was first-time homebuyers, okay, I just sort it by my most popular videos that
I've ever made and first-time homebuyer tips was that video.
And then I just made like 10 to 20 videos about buying your house, about being a first-time
homebuyer.
That way when they watch that first video, they're going to get sucked into the Matt
Leighton rabbit hole and they're going to go ahead and watch the rest of those videos.
So when you're creating a series, make sure that it's around a topic that one, pays advertising
dollars.
And two, people actually want to watch.
And as far as the videos that get paid the most on ad revenue are usually personal finance,
real estate videos.
Prank videos don't make anything on ad revenue.
If you want to make prank videos, that's fine but even if you get 10 million views on a
prank video you're not going to make a whole lot.
Because who watches prank videos?
It's 13-year-olds, I don't know.
People that might not necessarily have money to spend on different products and services.
Okay.
Number four, you want to research whatever your topic is, whether it's real estate, whether
you're a chiropractor, contractor, whatever the heck you are.
You want to research what type of videos already do very well and then model and create similar
videos to those topics.
Yeah, and you're not reinventing the wheel when you're starting the creative process.
It's fun to kind of come up with your own ideas and your own content but people have
come before you and your specific field and the successful YouTubers have left trails.
We're not saying, "Hey, just take someone else's video," but what are the most popular
videos?
What are your consumers, your customers, your loyal fan base, what do they want to see?
What gets the most amount of views?
And put your own spin on this.
You could even look in the news as a real estate agent forbearance, mortgage forbearance
is huge right now.
And if you type that into YouTube, you're going to see Graham Stephan and meet Kevin
and just a bunch of mortgage forbearance videos that have a ton of views.
So you're kind of news hacking the trending videos and the most popular searched videos
in your specific topic.
Yeah.
And yeah, you can just search on YouTube about whatever your topic is, just type in real
estate, type in chiropractor, whatever it is.
And then you can rank by the most views and some will be trending more than others but
that'll give you a good starting point, a good general idea of what your topic should
be about.
Okay.
So next up you need to optimize your videos, it's not enough to just create a video and
throw it up there.
If it's a good quality video, it's going to get views eventually but you might as well
just optimize it and that's talking about search engine optimization.
Where maybe you make your title, keywords, and description of your video, have to have
keywords that people are searching.
We use a service called vidIQ, which I'll put an affiliate link to below.
But it's a great service that tells you exactly what you need to do to optimize your video
so that it can get found by people.
Yeah, it's not enough to just publish your video and hope that people watch it unless
you're Will Smith or unless you're Oprah.
You could put video number 52 and people will watch it but you literally have to do a keyword
research, have to search on YouTube, and on Google to see what terms are ranking the highest.
And you really need to double down because if you don't optimize your title and your
description, people talk about tags.
My opinion is if you don't have a good video in the first place, the tags aren't really
going to help because YouTube is going to show it, it's not a good video.
And then they're not going to show it to other people.
So you want to make sure the first few words in your title are your keywords that you're
aiming for.
And then you can do a description, just basically use vidIQ and I actually have a tutorial video
on that.
It's only five or 10 minutes but basically walks through all the steps of optimizing
your video.
Remember the one real estate brokers that we saw and they were like, they were wondering
why their videos didn't get any views at all.
And we did, it took five seconds, we looked at their channel, there was 10 videos and
the videos were labeled video number eight, real estate.
And it just, it made no sense.
If this person had spent a minute or maybe five minutes actually looking to what it takes
to optimize a video, they would have realized maybe you should have a keyword in the title.
Maybe you should make a good thumbnail, maybe you should have a topic people are looking
for.
Just think about how much time it takes you to film a video, set up a video, write the
script, edit it, and then publish it and then spend a similar amount of time.
Maybe not the same amount but a similar amount of time coming up with your keywords, figuring
out what targeted keywords you want to go after.
Half of the battle is creating the video, is publishing the video, the other half is
the distribution where you make sure that people are actually going to find the video.
And just one last story so there's an agent I know, he has 50 videos but his topics are
so specific and I don't even know if I've showed you his channel.
His topics are so specific that nobody in their right mind is searching for this.
He does videos on first-time homebuyer tips, there's a million people searching that.
This other guy does videos on what your real estate agents should say on the fourth day
of a home inspection or something just so specific that it's no one's going to really
find that.
So you really need to do research and just don't fight the YouTube algorithm, just go
along with it.
It's good to have a specific niche but you don't want to be the YouTube channel for lefthanded
hamster owners who like tie-dye.
You want to be able to have an audience.
The first thing you do when you create a YouTube channel is figure out who your audience demographic
is.
It's okay to niche down like myself, Arlington condos, Arlington real estate.
The reality is not that many people are searching for that so sure, someone will eventually
call me about it.
But once I started doing first-time homebuyer videos, that just completely opened up my
channel.
So if you're wondering, "Hey, why am I not getting a lot of views?
No, one's clicking.
I'm not getting the keywords."
Try broadening your search, broadening your horizons a little bit.
All right.
So thank you very much for watching this video.
If you have any questions, drop them below in the comment section.
I'll put a link to Matt's channel so you can see what a $1,000 a month YouTube channel
looks like.
And we'll see you on the next one.
Take care.