Top 5 Ways To Make BIG MONEY With A Small YouTube Channel

Most people think if you want to make decent money on YouTube, you need a ton of subscribers. While having a ton of subscribers is obviously helpful, there are several ways that you can make thousands of dollars every single month with very few subscribers. 

So I'm going to walk you through the five different ways that you can make money with a small YouTube channel. 

It's great to have a bunch of subscribers on YouTube but, in reality, subscribers are just a vanity metric. They don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. 

What really matters is the amount of views that your videos are getting. 

But even before you start getting a ton of views, you can still make full-time income from YouTube if you implement all five of these income streams. 

I'm going to start with the smallest earning potential and work my way up to the highest:

1. YouTube Monetization
2. Brand Deals
3. Merchandising 
4. Affiliate Marketing
5. Selling Your Very Own Digital Products

#1 YouTube Monetization

As a small channel, you’re likely not going to get a flood of views every day, so your channel will not create full-time income solely from being monetized, but it can be nice side cash. 

The more opportunities for ads that you allow on your videos, the more money you can potentially make through monetization. Because yes, there are several different types of ads that you can allow, and different placements that you can allow on your videos. 

On top of that, niching down (being very specific with who your audience is) will increase your CPM, or cost per mil, which is how much YouTube is willing to pay you for a thousand views of your video. 

To learn more about how to increase your income just from YouTube Monetization watch THIS VIDEO.

#2 Brand Deals

You might think that companies are not interested in doing brand deals or working with smaller channels, but you are mistaken. 

Companies often prefer to work with micro-influencers with smaller audiences that are very laser-targeted over large influencers that have very broad audiences that aren't as targeted. 

So get excited, being a micro-influencer is powerful! You have a loyal, targeted audience that many companies and businesses would like to be in front of. The most common brand deals when you're a really small channel is being compensated with products or services. 

On top of that, it's possible that you could get paid to do specific videos about a product or a service. However, the smaller the channel, the less likely that you’ll be paid in money.

Don't poo-poo being comped products or services! Let's be real, it's just as good as money if you were going to spend that money on that product or service anyway. So it is a good thing and something that can definitely benefit you. 

I have an awesome example of this... My friend, Brad, runs the channel AGeekyGuy, and it's been a hobby channel for him. He has less than two thousand subscribers. However, it's actually been a very profitable channel. 

He does a lot of unboxing videos. Unboxing videos and review videos are his thing. And he has been compensated a ton of products. 

He really likes his dogs, so one of the things that he unboxes all the time are monthly dog box subscriptions that are filled with dog stuff. He has been compensated years worth of these monthly dog boxes which is thousands of dollars worth of product because of his channel. 

On top of that, he actually did a video where he was instructing people how to install some car parts that he had purchased. There was no brand deal in place but when the company saw such a great promotion, they actually fully reimbursed his order, which was over $1000!

Nice, right? 

Feel free to snoop around on his channel to learn how small channels can get great brand deals. 

So how do you get brand deals? 

There are websites like Famebit or Insense that allow you to share that you are interested in brand deals and also seek and look at what's available for brand deals that would fit your current audience. 

#3 Merchandising

Merch is actually much, much simpler than you probably ever thought possible. YouTube has made it easy for creators to fully integrate the channel’s merch within YouTube. 

From the monetization tab within YouTube Studio, you just click on Merchandise, and you can get started. 

YouTube is integrated with a company called Teespring, and if you click on the Merchandise link in your YouTube Studio, it will open up and show you all of the products that they have. 

Teespring has tons of different things including home decor, apparel, socks, phone cases, accessory, mugs, and much more. This is another way to add income to what you're doing on YouTube. 

I have a good friend, Keysha Bass, who's doing this very well, she's got a beautiful brand on YouTube, she's got 27,000 subscribers. So she's smallish at this point. But she's very well-branded and when you go to one of her videos you're going to see all of the great merchandise that she has available. 

If you choose to do merchandising, this is how it's going to look on your channel.

#4 Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is simply where you are referring your audience (your traffic) to purchase someone else's product or service. 

Think about Amazon, you find a cool product on Amazon, you can be an Amazon affiliate. You can put a link to a book that you're reviewing in your video, and tell people to purchase it there. That's how simple affiliate marketing can be. 

We have a video about “How To Build Your Online Business” where we showcase a very specific program called My Lead System Pro. In the video we talk about the program, who it's good for and how it works, and then we have a link right in the description for them to check it out and learn more. 

Even as a small channel you can rank for many smaller keywords that consistently get some level of traffic, and you can make a lot of money through that. 

#5 Selling Your Very Own Digital Products

There is a massive marketplace out there for people who are looking for very specific information, and if you're building a loyal tribe and audience on YouTube they will be happy to make a purchase. 

This could be a simple ebook for a couple bucks or a full training course for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. This has been a great income stream for our business. 

If you take a look at our channel, you'll see that we have quite a few older videos that are all about Instagram. Why is this? Because we used to sell an Instagram course and several of these videos were ranking for keywords. They weren't necessarily popular keywords, but they were keywords that got consistent traffic, and as someone who has spent a fortune on advertising before, it is much nicer to have organic traffic just come in and make sales that are all profit versus having to spend advertising money in order to get something back in return. 

I'll take those organic sales all day long. 

Now, if you're not yet monetized on YouTube yet, maybe you don't know how, or you just want to monetize as fast as possible, you need to watch this video next. I'll see you there.