If you are looking to make money from home in 2021, one of the best ways to do that is by starting a YouTube Channel.

If you have a smart phone and a reliable wifi connection, you can start uploading high-quality videos to your very own FREE YouTube channel today and begin making money off those videos by the end of the week. No it isn’t using AdSense, which requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of content watched in the past 12 months, it’s using Amazon Affiliate Links, the easy program that you can sign-up for today and begin creating easy passive income (or time-leveraged income, as I like to call it).

How do you do this? It’s pretty simple! A lot of the people online who write blog posts or make videos about this sort of stuff already have huge audiences, but for this project, I started from scratch! A new channel with 0 views, 0 subscribers, and 0 direction. That’s right, I just started uploading random youtube videos of the things around me and, after 2 months and about 5 hours of work, I am already earning almost $1/day. That might not seem like much, but considering how little effort (and how much strategy) I’ve put into this, it is very obvious that it can be turned from a $1/day side-hustle to a $100/day side-hustle very easily.

Making Money On YouTube for Small Channels

The first thing you are going to need to do is understand what value you are going to be providing to people. A lot of content creators get on YouTube with the idea that they can just talk about their problems and people will commiserate with them, both creating views and raising their self-esteem. This rarely works out the way people think it’s going to and when it does, it usually produces tragic outcomes. Just look at who the most “popular” next-generation content creators are, without a doubt, a huge portion of them are people who are just “relatable”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but the audience is fickle and their attention really isn’t worth that much, particularly in the given context.

Figuring Out What Content Works, Even if You Have 0 Subscribers

What I recommend doing it just filming 10 random objects around your home and talking about what they are, what value they provide, and how you would improve upon them. Maybe its your socks, maybe its frozen dinners, maybe its bicycle parts. Whatever it is, film a 1:30-2:00 video about ten items and upload it to YouTube, giving each video a specific and detailed 60-90 letter title. An example would be you filming a can of tomato sauce for 120 seconds, reading off the ingredients, the product copy, and your general interpretation of it. This might seem like nonsense and, in a narrative sense, it is nonsense, but it is only nonsense because you are not specifically looking for information about tomato sauce. For the dozen or so people who google or youtube search “tomato sauce” and come upon your video, it will have moved from being something random and arguably nonsensical to something that actually provides value to an anonymous viewer. You can then COPY + PASTE the affiliate link into the description of the video and about 0.5%-1% of the people who click on it (based on my experience wit this tactic) will make a purchase. If these numbers seem low they are, but we are going after quantity not quality.

Optimizing Small YouTube Channels for Profit

You are only going to be able to upload 10 videos a day to your YouTube Channel once its verified as real. At some point, this restriction goes away, but I haven’t gotten there yet. However, filming 10 videos a day is a task, even if they are simple and without narrative structure. You are going to want to check in on your YouTube Metrics and your Amazon Affiliate metrics every week or so. It will be tempting to check multiple times a day, and you probably will at first, but resist! Once you have about 100 videos posted on your YouTube channel, sort them by most viewed, then take the top 10 most viewed videos and use those as your “content seeds” for the next iteration of 100 videos. What do I mean by a “content seed”? I mean that, if you got 2500 views on a video about chicken salad, you should make 10 more videos about chicken salad because that’s the seed that is going to produce the most fruit. Fruit is money. I am talking in food metaphors here. Deep stuff.

Do you really need to post 10 videos a day for this to work? No, I only did about 10 a week. It’s hard remembering to post 10 videos every day and even if you have the time to, sometimes it’s hard to get inspired. You really need to focus on reliably and continually uploading videos for this strategy to be most effective, so if you can’t do 10 a day, cut it back to 10 a week, but make sure you are keeping consistent with that 10 a week because that consistency is what signals to both YouTube and Google search engines that your content is probably up-to-date and this more relevant. This doesn’t mean that older videos are worthless, but it is a proven element of both search engine algorithms that you shouldn’t ignore.

What Results To Expect

Your mileage is going to vary on this one based on the products you choose to promote, how often you are promoting the products, and how effective you are at producing future iterations of the kind of content that you are tracking, but after 2 months (and about 5 cumulative hours of work), I am currently making about $1/day off of my small YouTube channel. What I am doing is not even close to maxing out the potential of this channel, so I encourage you to become a subscriber of it (and this website’s newsletter) to track my progress! That being said, I don’t see any reason why this can’t become a $100/day revenue stream after a year or consistent work. There are TONS of ways to optimize this process, to automate content creation, and to scale, both vertically and laterally, but we will keep those more in-depth and advanced strategies for a different post! If you are having a hard-time finding a niche to start with, here’s 50 Free Niche Youtube Channel Ideas!