How to Make Money on YouTube in 2023 (How I did it)

As a small YouTuber with only around 15,000 subscribers, I managed to make over $20,000 on YouTube in 2022, and I'm projecting to do over $75,000 in 2023.

Here's a breakdown:

So the first and actually less contributed income stream would be YouTube AdSense.

You know, each time you watch a video of mine, and you watch or click on an ad, YouTube pays me a little bit of money.

How much money I take home depends on my CPM, the cost per mile, which basically means how much an advertiser is willing to pay me for every 1000 views.

Learn more about that here (watch from 6:55 min)

Generally, a topic that is finance or money-related has a higher CPM than, for example, a video about a productivity framework.

From every ad revenue, YouTube takes 45%, and I’ll get 55%.

Earnings:

In 2022 I made a "stunning" $2,800 dollars on AdSense revenue.

You know, I couldn’t care less, this channel is still relatively small, and I’m actually making more money indirectly from YouTube...

Affiliate Marketing

The second income stream would be Affiliate Marketing.

When you look at the description of my videos, you’ll find different links to products and books, which are all affiliate links, which means each time someone clicks on one of those links and signs up for a product or orders a product or book, I’ll get a small commission from the company.

This can be a one-time fee, which happens with Amazon Products, for example, or recurring revenue if someone signs up for software.

Besides the description on YouTube, I do send a weekly newsletter to my subscriber base as well, which contains over 2,000 subscribers at this point, and I actually do get a lot of clicks and conversions from this newsletter as well.

Sponsorships

The final income stream, and by far my biggest income stream, would be sponsorships.

Almost every video has a Sponsor included, and although my channel isn’t that big yet, I do have a loyal and very specific audience that sponsors are willing to pay for.

On average, a sponsor pays me $300 per video.

And while this is, in my opinion, really good money, the real money comes from upsells.

Whenever a sponsor wants to sponsor one of my videos, I send them this sponsorship sheet with all the other possibilities to promote their product. Most of the time, they choose to sponsor my newsletter and a sponsored tweet or social media post as well.

Which brings the total value of a sponsor to about $480 dollars.

Earnings:

In total, I made around $10,000 on sponsorships alone in 2022.

Total Income from YouTube

So the total revenue income, directly or indirectly, from this YouTube channel for 2022 is….. $20,800!

Which isn’t bad at all, to be honest.

However, our goal for 2023 would be to scale to over a hundred thousand subscribers and to make at least 75,000 dollars.

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Stay productive! 🫵