I was making a full-time income when my
channel had less than five thousand
subscribers.
Hello everyone, today we are joined by...
Andru Edwards. Hi Andru and what is
your channel, how many subscribers do you
have? I am at youtube.com slash gear live
also youtube.com slash Andru Edwards
it's the same URL or same destination,
roughly 155 thousand subscribers at this
point. As you were growing your channel
and becoming more experienced as a, I
guess, video creator, what was the light
bulb moment? When did you finally think I
understand this to a certain extent? The
way that I knew that YouTube as a
platform worked for me, the lightbulb
moment was really accepting the fact
that it is a social platform. So
originally because I've been on YouTube
since pretty much day one, yeah, I've been
making videos for about 14 years, I
treated YouTube as file storage, it's
free file storage. So I go to youtube but
upload a video I put in a title
description and I would embed it into a
blog post and I would never go back to
that video page again. I didn't
care who was commenting or anything like
that, and it took me roughly eight years
in fact, between when I started and eight
years later I had grown to only fourteen
thousand subscribers, because I never
paid attention to the subscribers, never
talked to them. And then between year 8
and year 9 I went from 14 to over a
hundred and that's simply by changing my
approach. So realizing that it can be a
two-way conversation and you can talk to
people in the comments and they actually
want to interact with you, that was the
key. So YouTube is a community.
Correct. What was
the best YouTube decision you think
you've made so far? The best YouTube
decision I've made, interesting. I think
the best YouTube decision I've made goes
back to tip number three where it was
don't limit myself to being a YouTuber.
I have made so many relationships
with brands who find me on YouTube but
want me to do things aside from YouTube.
So if I didn't spend the amount of time
that I spent building my youtube, also
building Instagram or Facebook
I'd be making a lot less revenue if I
was only focused just on YouTube, because
some brands, you know, sometimes have a
youtube budget and they have a Facebook
budget and they have an Instagram budget
and so if their YouTube budget is, you
know, done for the year I still have
something to offer them. Whereas if you
only focus on YouTube you're out of luck.
Let me put this question to you then
about revenue, yeah, and they tend to
ignore like other revenue streams if
people were to maybe not consider
Adsense as a primary source of income,
yeah, where should they start first for
different revenue streams on YouTube.
Yeah you know what I think you kind of
hit the nail on the head and that's why
I tell people not to get stuck with
being a YouTuber for that very reason. I
personally think Adsense is not that
great as to me. Adsense is a bonus. I
can't even tell you what my Adsense
income is because that's how little I
pay attention to it because I pay
attention to what works and adsense
doesn't really work that much. So if you
can't monetize you're just not
monetizing with Adsense you can start
making relationships with brands almost
irregardless of the size of your channel.
I was making a full-time income when my
channel had less than five thousand
subscribers just by making relationship
with brands, having authority and
knowledge about my niche and
communicating that with brands, that's
number one. Number two, there's things
like patreon and others where if you
have a great relationship with your
audience they want to see you succeed
they want to get your content they want
extra attention from you and you get it
that way. So I would say, you know, almost
forget about Adsense. If you can't get
Adsense don't worry about it there's
plenty of other ways to monetize if you
look at things. I think you
just delivered the perfect
video title:
I started making an income with five
thousands. There you go. Awesome! Right
we're obviously an analytics
company, what's the analytic that gets
you out of bed every morning?
What I like the most is the the
the little scorecard.
it's like a little report card when
you're, when you're uploading your video
and putting your tags in like I always
try to hit I think it's the maximian I can get
is 40. I always try to get as close to 40
as possible. I want to get
the triple, the triple, triple triple,
keywords, and the double keyword and all
I try to get all that done. I don't know
when I see that that number turn green
I'm feeling good. That is always my goal
yeah okay thank you very much for your
time Andru. Absolutely.
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