How to Make Money on YouTube with a SMALL CHANNEL!

Looking for ways to monetize your YouTube channel, but haven’t met the requirements for the YouTube Partner Program just yet? 

If you’re a new YouTuber, joining the Partner Program and enabling YouTube ads can take a lot longer than you’d like. 

Important: When available, we use affiliate links and may earn a commission!

While it is an easy way to generate income from your videos, there are other revenue streams available to YouTube channels of ANY size that can generate income much sooner! 

These other revenue streams can actually generate MORE revenue than the Partner Program because they keep scaling as you grow. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to make money on YouTube without monetization or Adsense.  We’ll discuss several revenue streams that will allow you to make money online, even if you’re just starting out!  

These are the YouTube income streams we’ll cover: 

Make sure you stick around until the end for our number one tip on how to grow on YouTube! 

Let’s get started. 

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you’re paid a commission for referring a sign-up or sale of a specific product or service. 

When you register to be an affiliate, the company will give you a unique link or URL. When people click those links and sign up or purchase, that’s when you receive your commission. 

What we love about affiliate marketing is that it allows you to sell products without needing to have a product of your own. You don’t need to come up with a great idea, manufacturing, warehousing, support and all of that stuff. 

If you’re wondering how to make money on YouTube for beginners – affiliate marketing is a great place to start

You’re able to leverage the existing products, sales and support teams that are already out there to help generate revenue for yourself as well.

It’s not just physical products like cameras and lighting that you can be an affiliate for – think about the tools and systems that you use each and every day in your business that you would recommend. 

Amazon and the Amazon Affiliate Program is what a lot of people first think of but there are so many other products and services that have affiliate programs as well. 

Some of our affiliate programs include live streaming software like Ecamm Live and Streamyard, video transcribing services like Rev, and email marketing software like ActiveCampaign. 

You’ll receive a unique URL for each of your affiliate products that you can share with others

Then it’s as simple as mentioning those products or services in your YouTube content. You could even do a review or walkthrough. Make sure you include your affiliate links in the YouTube description so your viewers can access them. 

If you’re looking for some ideas on the different types of affiliate programs that are out there, check out our Gear & Resources page. It has a list of all the gear we use here at Primal Video and that we recommend to others.

How To Make Money Consulting Or Coaching

This is one of the best ways to generate fast income off the back of your YouTube channel. 

Consulting or coaching is where you’re using your skillset to help someone fix a specific problem or achieve a certain outcome. 

An example of this is offering YouTube management services to local businesses in your area. Knowing how to set up and maintain a YouTube channel is a big opportunity to get paid by local businesses who don’t know how to do it themselves. 

Offering one-on-one services is another way to make money from your channel without YouTube monetization 

So think about the skills, hobbies or interests you have and how you can use those to help other people. 

The best part is, creating YouTube content around these areas will allow you to get found by new clients. This increases demand for your services which means the rate for your services will go up too! 

How To Make Money With Digital Products

This one is a high leverage income stream! You can create a digital product once and then sell it an unlimited amount of times. 

So this could be an ebook, course, template, checklist, presets or even something like a membership site that you can set up once and keep selling for the life of your channel. 

Ebooks are another great example of digital products 

The more your channel grows, the more people you can guide to your digital products. 

Obviously you need to invest a bit of time in creating the digital product but it is a great way to start generating money from your YouTube channel really early on. 

Here at Primal Video, we didn’t have any digital products or courses from the beginning. But now we have our Primal Video Accelerator membership program. It’s a monthly fee for access to all of our advanced training and resources. 

PRO TIP: Building an email list is a great way to leverage your digital products as well. 

The digital product we offer here at Primal Video is our Accelerator course

How To Make Money Dropshipping

You also have the ability to make money on your YouTube channel with physical products using things like dropshipping. 

This is where you have your own online store selling the products that you want to sell, but you don’t need to worry about manufacturing, stocking or shipping the products out to anyone anywhere in the world. 

Dropshipping is another one of the best ways to make money on YouTube with a small channel

That’s where services like Shopify manage all of that for you. So you just choose the products that you want to sell in your store. When someone makes a purchase, the dropshipping company handle the rest. 

You can use your YouTube channel to mention or review the products to help drive up your sales.

How To Make Money With Brand Deals

This is where you’re working with brands or companies who are paying you to speak about their products or services.

A lot of people think they need a massive YouTube channel or a really big audience to be able to get sponsor deals. But depending on your niche and the type of videos you’re making, this is something you can implement with a very small audience or even a new channel. 

You don’t need to have a big channel to get sponsorship deals

There are members inside our Primal Video Accelerator program who have been getting five-figure brand deals with channels that have less than 1000 subscribers!

You just need to work out what value you can bring to that company. 

Ask yourself how you can help them get the message out around their products and services and how you can start to build that relationship with them.

So, How Do We Make Money On Youtube?

Out of all these methods, the two that we currently use here at Primal Video are affiliate marketing and digital products. 

When we first started the YouTube channel, Justin would do a lot of one-on-one work like video production, creating videos for people and consulting. But now we’ve put systems in place so that we can work on more high leverage tasks.

This means we can focus on releasing on YouTube video a week which feeds and fuels the rest of our revenue streams.

If you want to learn more about how we make money here at Primal Video, check out our article on How We Make $1M+ From YouTube

Our #1 Tip To Grow On Youtube

The best advice we can give to help grow a YouTube channel is to start building an email list. 

This is something we decided to do early on… Thankfully we did because it really helped us accelerate all of our revenue streams and continues to pay huge dividends today. 

Email is not dead – it’s actually far from it. It’s still one of the best ways to grow all of your income streams and to do it completely on autopilot.

Email allows you to instantly contact your subscribers without worrying about algorithms 

The earlier that you implement it, the better your results are going to be. So no matter which revenue models you choose, you definitely should start building an email list right now! 

To learn more about growing an email list, check out our free email growth workshop. We share the three steps to build an email list growth engine. 


Links

When available, we use affiliate links and may earn a commission!

Recommended Email Marketing Software:


Recommended Gear & Resources

Check out an up-to-date list of all the gear, software & tools we use and recommend right now at Primal Video on our resources page here!

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