How to Become a Full-Time Youtuber

Going full-time with YouTube is as rewarding as it is challenging. In this blog, I’m going to share a roadmap that will make it as simple as possible. I’ll provide some easy to follow strategies to take you from your very first YouTube video to your 100,000 subscriber. So be sure to read this blog until the very end, so you have all of the steps you need to become a full-time YouTuber and get paid.

Be sure to hit subscribe and ring that bell, so you’ll be notified the moment new videos, just like this one go live. If you are tired of hearing the exact same old platitudes, like ignore the numbers or your equipment doesn’t matter, or don’t think about the money or you just have to keep at it. Then this blog is for you. But first let’s define something important.

Becoming A Full-Time Youtube

What does becoming a full-time YouTube or even mean, or more importantly, what does it mean to you? Online technical seo experts often see our favorite YouTubers with millions of subscribers and think now that’s full time YouTubing. But full time as a minimum definition really means just spending an average workweek to sustain life financially. See, when we run the gamut between small channels, earning just a few thousand a month, to big channels, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month, it becomes clear that earning a sustainable living sits well within the realm of achievability.

As an example, I recently started a new YouTube channel currently with less than 10,000 subscribers. And I won’t share it here because that’d be self promotional cringe, but from a combination of ad-sense, affiliate marketing and e-commerce of my own products shared through the channel. I’ve had months yanking in more than $2,000, and that’s a perfect segue into the meat and potatoes of this video. The roadmap of how to actually go full-time with YouTube.

Step One Is To Define

Clearly define what a minimum take-home dollar amount is for you to methodically work towards, to be able to do YouTube as your primary source of income. Another set to define is your who as well as their why. In general, there are two types of channel directions, entertainment, and education. Who do you imagine your audience to be? And why will they watch your videos? What challenges can you help solve? What value does your channel bring to them?

I mean, will you entertain them by making them feel something, laugh or cry? Will you educate them by arming them with the knowledge and tools to improve their lives, make better purchasing decisions, or maybe develop a specific skillset by completing the first leg of this roadmap and having a very clear definition of your who, their why, as well as the exact dollar amount to strive towards, you’ll already be setting yourself up with success and are ready to move on in this roadmap.

Step Two Is To Focus On Value Out For Money In

That’s right. Unlike so much of the new channel advice parroting the sentiment of “don’t do it for the money.” If your goal is to do this full-time, money needs to be a part of the earliest considerations, but how you focus on the money is in actuality, how your channel offers a value to your audience in order to bring money in. Here’s an interesting thought to ruminate on. The best way to get what you want is to find out what other people want and give it to them. So, what do you want? If you click this video, you want to become a full-time YouTuber.

You need your audience, the who from step one, so dedicate your energy to giving them what they want. The why from step one, focusing on pouring out value is not just the best way, but in fact, the only way to build an audience that comes back video after video. And that loyalty is what will enable the eventual income to migrate to full-time on YouTube.

Step Three Is To Plan For Multiple Streams

I mean, Ad-sense doesn’t come immediately, currently requiring 1000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of combined watch time within 12 months. But you can simultaneously build your channel to those requirements while immediately offering other monetizeable value to your audience. It `might be affiliate programs that feature products or services aligned with your channels content, or it might be digital or physical products you create to sell.

We are Shopify after all and are so proud to enable over a million regular people, just like you and me, to sell online. Depending on your channel, this could be a perfect option for you to monetize early and consistently. I mean, maybe you’re a jewelry maker and so creating jewelry and fashion videos while selling your own creations just makes sense. But maybe you’re a sketch comedy channel and you think you don’t have anything to sell. But guess what? You do.

See writing recurring characters and jokes into your content can build a loyal following and you can sell clothing, art prints, or stationary that feature design callbacks to those characters or jokes that your audience grows to love. Everyone wants to feel a part of something and creating inside jokes is a great way to create a sense of belonging. If you are interested in selling products, but aren’t quite sure what to sell or even how to start.

We’ll link an awesome playlist that explores product ideas right up here. The ultimate point however, is that in order to go, full-time on YouTube, you’re going to have to marry the value you give out and create the conditions to leverage that value and convert it into inbound money so that you can keep on creating videos and growing your channel.

Step Four Is To Listen, Learn, And Apply

See it doesn’t matter how long you do YouTube. You should be able to learn something concrete after each and every upload. There are two general areas where you’re going to constantly be learning from. Your audience and your analytics. When it comes to learning from your audience, as you upload content, viewers will inevitably start to comment.

This all goes back to the value that you provide and what better way to give your viewers value than by listening to an offering back exactly what they asked for. I mean, every comment, even a mundane ha ha awesome. Or even this video sucks is an opportunity to engage and learn from them. You have the opportunity to reply, to comments, open dialogue, and learn directly from the very people that you need in order to grow to full-time YouTubing.

Now, when it comes to learning from your analytics, there are three to pay the most attention to your click through rate your audience retention and your watch time. So click through rate is the percentage of people who click into your video versus the number of people youTube shows your video to in their feeds. So this is all about your title and thumbnail and it can feel frustrating, but the fact is it doesn’t matter how awesome your video itself is.

Write Eye-Catchy Title And Thumbnail

If your title and thumbnail don’t make people want to click it, they’ll never have the joy of experiencing your awesome video. In order to grow your channel, you don’t just need your audience, but you also need a YouTube’s algorithm to recommend your videos. That’s what you want, but what does YouTube want? YouTube wants people to spend as much time as possible on their platform? So of course their algorithm is coded in a way to recommend videos that people watch for longer.

Also Read: WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR YOUTUBE VIDEOS

There are two metrics you need to pay attention to: watch time and audience retention. Now both are very closely related and often get confused with one another. With audience retention, you can see the percentage that people viewed of your video. You can also see the points that most people watched and where they decided to close your video or change to another one. Watch time shows you the number of minutes and hours that people are spending, watching any particular video. Both of these metrics give you insight into how audiences are responding to your YouTube videos.

Let me explain the difference. You can create shorter content with longer audience retention. For example, you could create a three minute video and people watch 100% of it, or you can create longer content with higher watch time, but less audience retention. For example, you could create a 40 minute video, but people only watch 35% of it. The key is to find the sweet spot that has people completing your videos while also remaining on the platform. If you look through your analytics and notice that there’s a steep drop-off where viewers close your video at say, I don’t know, the three minute mark of a 10 minute video, rewatch your video and piece together why that is.

Improve Your Content

Apply your learning to your next video and systematically improve your audience retention as well as your watch time. And if you want a few ideas to get started, you can create playlists, craft more enticing introductions, add incentives to stay until the end or create pattern interruption in the scripting and editing, to keep things engaging. A quick side note, when it comes to learning how to master YouTube, there’s what to do in general, but there’s also what to do specifically.

This video was exploring what to do in general when it comes to becoming a full-time YouTuber. But if you want us to create a video that does a deep dive into what to do specifically, like how to create an experiment with compelling titles and thumbnails, let us know in the comments below, but going back to the point, listen to your audience and your analytics, learn from all of them and apply these lessons to ultimately offer more value to your viewers.

This in turn will keep your audience on YouTube and that’ll translate into more recommendations, more views, more subscribers, more ad revenue, and more growth to enable YouTube to become your full-time income.

By the way, the Shopify team had the chance to interview one of the biggest channels on the platform called Yes Theory when they were just starting to explode. And if you’re interested that interview was turned into a detailed case study that you can find linked in the description below. At the time of that interview, they had just crossed over the 300,000 subscriber mark. But today at the time of recording this video, have over 7 million. How about that for some inspiration.

Step Five, Create Your Brand Elements

Moving right along to step five, create your brand elements. If not for your audience, at least for making creating content easier for yourself. But let me explain. You see a brand is critical as you grow your channel, since what your audience is, subscribers become attached and loyal to is a story that they tell themselves about you. Branding and brand elements are what you say and how you represent yourself, but your brand is what they feel about you.

That’s something that evolves over time, and it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about branding elements, which will help begin to represent you, but more importantly will make creating videos easier for you. You see the most basic brand elements are a logo, type faces as well as primary and secondary colors. And setting these up will enable you to have a standardized, consistent look and feel for your videos.

You won’t have to waste time thinking about what colors to make your text, nor which fonts to use in your text and graphical overlays in each of your edits. But more importantly, in the context of growing your channel to your full-time endeavor, you’re going to create a sense of familiarity with your evergrowing audience.

This will also help inform the graphic design considerations of your thumbnails, that every important element of channel growth to boost click-through rate, but also to have anyone who has ever viewed any of your videos immediately recognize any of your other uploads in their feeds. Brand elements, lead to brand recognition, brand recognition, combined with consistent value leads to brand loyalty.

Brand loyalty leads to growth and growth leads to you earning a full-time living on YouTube. That convenience of setting brand elements to enable you to create color and font templates.

Step Number Six, Develop And Optimize Your Process.

See growing a YouTube channel involves a lot of individual tasks that need to be done consistently. This includes brainstorming video ideas, research, writing your script, filming your A-roll, shooting your B-roll, video editing, taking your thumbnail photos, editing your thumbnails, coming up with compelling titles, writing your descriptions, optimizing them for SEO, filling into your meta-tags, adding cards and editing end screens.

All of these individual tasks per video have one thing in common. They take time and time is the greatest equalizer. And optimizing your use of it through process-driven action is the best way to bring sanity and confident clarity throughout your YouTube journey. When it comes to becoming a full-time YouTuber, creating videos is your main job.

To optimizing your process and reducing the amount of time it takes to go from ideation to upload will enable you to have the choice of how to use that saved time, whether it’s creating more content, creating the same amount, but better quality content or using that save to time for rest and greater work-life balance.

Step Seven Is To Just Start

Finally, step seven is to just start. And this applies whether or not you’ve started your channel yet. If you haven’t started your channel yet, start with your first video today and just make it your channel trailer. You don’t have to stress about what people are going to think because let’s face it, not many people will even see your first video, but go through the paces, try to think of your process.

Likewise, most importantly, take step one of this roadmap and film yourself, talking to the who you defined and share the why you believe they’ll care about. The value you’ll provide them. If you’ve already started your channel, start your next video or revisit step two, and start to think about bringing more money in.

Whether it’s through signing up with aligned affiliate marketing programs, or maybe drumming up a product ideas that you can sell that offer aligned value with the content you’re already putting out for your viewers. And Hey, if you’ve decided you’d like to monetize your YouTube channel by selling your very own products. I welcome you to sign up for a 100% free, no strings attached trial with Shopify.

It’s got powerful e-commerce tools. That’ll help you find customers drive sales and manage your day-to-day. And having a website in general for your YouTube channel is a great idea because it’s a home that you own and have full control over. You can use it to build a greater connection with your audience. And even if you don’t have anything to sell yet, we have plenty of tutorials to help you decide on a product or business model.

Shopify makes creating a website super easy. So even if you just start with a blog to offer supplementary content for your viewers, it’s a great way to establish a presence online, build an email list and encourage audience loyalty. Click the link in the top corner of this video or in the description below to get started with your free trial. This right here was a bird’s eye view of how to go full time on YouTube. And one of the things we focus most right here I learned was Shopify is giving you the knowledge you need to succeed in business.