How To Make Money On YouTube Without Making Videos

Wondering if it’s possible to make money on YouTube without actually making videos?

The answer is yes.

In this article, we will go over the ten ways one can use to earn money on YouTube without making videos. The main thing to do when it comes to making money on YouTube without showing your face is downloading videos from other channels. Some videos on YouTube can be downloaded and uploaded on your own channel.

This can be done as long as the video has a common creative license. You can even apply background music to the video and do a little voice over. You only have to remember to give credits to the original author of the video either in your video or description.

An example of a YouTube channel that does this is; Mojo travels. They employ the same strategy in their videos and they have a lot of views. They literally just make review videos, sometimes sharing the top 10 picks of places, events, etc. Their social blade stats (social blade is a chrome extension) shows that they make at least $2.6k – $41.5k every year.

Everyone can make as much as this if they could:

• Go to YouTube
• Find a video with a common creative license
• Download the video
• Upload video
• Monetize video

Monetizing your video is easier as long as you have almost a thousand subscribers and 4000 watch hours. The YouTube partner program pays very well depending on the niche so you might want to do your research on that too.

The ten ways to follow when it comes to making money on YouTube without making videos are as follows:

Create A YouTube Channel

I created a FREE YouTube checklist to help out as well – https://shellyhopkins.com/100k-youtube

It’s advisable to create a new Gmail account for your YouTube channel, so you can just keep adding other channels. After signing up on YouTube, you need to create a logo, profile picture, and banner to make your brand suitable for your niche and professional.

Here’s how to create a YouTube channel:

• Sign in to YouTube
• Choose a new channel or an existing brand account
• Click “create a new channel”
• Fill out the necessary details

According to studies, YouTube is the most popular social platform among U.S. adults. Nearly three-quarters of Americans use the social video site, compared to the 69% who use Facebook.

Pick A Niche

Your YouTube channel has to be about something right?

You have to identify the type of videos you watch the most on YouTube eg. pet channels, travel, meditation, etc.

This is important because you can re-upload these videos in order to make money. Monetizing your channel becomes easy by using ads and affiliate marketing. You should choose a niche based on the following:

Passion

Find a topic that actually interests you. Or else, you might lose interest in uploading videos and this may leave your YouTube channel long gone and forgotten.

Demand

Before starting out, you should do some research to see if there’s a high demand for the niche you are picking. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to get an idea of how many searches there are per month on certain search queries in your chosen niche.

You can set up a free account and add your keywords there. The tool will show you the average number of monthly searches and the competition levels.

Competition

YouTube is a big space so surely, there’s a ton of competition. And how do you intend to manage that?

Answer that question by looking at how many creators are active in your chosen niche. If the niche is oversaturated, then pick something else (if of course, you plan to monetize your YouTube channel)

You need to study other YouTubers by observing:

• What content do they deliver?
• Why do people watch them?
• How do they keep their audience engaged?
• What you can do differently?
• And more

Go through the comments and see if viewers are suggesting improvements and then use those suggestions to think about new topics. Examples of niches to consider include tech videos, gaming, product reviews tutorials, food, fashion beauty, travel, etc

Searched Words

Fill in your bio section or video description with keywords that have a lot of search potential. This will help you get attention to your channel when people search for those keywords. Your channel will pop up as a suggestion when a keyword is searched.

YouTube Partner Program

The YouTube Partner Program gives creators greater access to YouTube resources and features including YouTube Creator Support teams, the Copyright Match Tool, and monetization features.

However, becoming a partner has some eligibility requirements. You need to follow all the YouTube monetization policies. The YouTube monetization policies are a collection of policies that allow you to monetize on YouTube. If you’re a YouTube partner, your agreement including the YouTube partner program policies requires compliance with these monetization policies in order to potentially earn money on YouTube.

Some of these policies include:

• Live in a country or region where the YouTube Partner Program is available
• Have more than 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months
• Have more than 1,000 subscribers
• Have a linked AdSense account

If interested in another way to make money see how at the bottom of the article.

Getting Content

Coming up with new video ideas can be challenging at times. If you want to gain and keep the attention of your audience, it’s important you publish awesome videos consistently.

If you are unable to come up with new content ideas, here are ways you can get them:

• Look at other relevant YouTube channels

One of the easiest ways to get content ideas fast is by searching YouTube itself. Search popular YouTube channels that are in your niche and have a similar target audience to yours for new content ideas.

• Blog post

You can also get inspiration from online sources like blog posts. Search for blog posts from blogs in your niche and more often than not, an idea will pop up in your head while reading and you should write it down immediately and turn it into a video.

• Participate in online communities

Participating in online communities like Reddit and Quora is another great way to find content ideas for your YouTube channel. When you engage actively in these communities, you can find out what people are talking about and what they are interested in.

Optimize Videos

You need to have great titles, thumbnails, and tags to get views on YouTube. The amount of money you make on YouTube depends on your click-through rate (CTR) and watch time.

You can optimize your videos on your YouTube channel by:

• Create attractive titles. Just like you would do when optimizing text content, you’ll use an SEO tool to first identify keywords you’d like your video to focus on.
• Optimize your video description. YouTube only displays the first two or three lines of text, after that viewers have to click “show more” to see the rest of the description. That’s why the description should be front-loaded with the most important information
• Categorize your videos. Once a video is uploaded, it can be categorized under advanced settings. Grouping your videos with similar content on YouTube allows it to pop up in different playlists and it gains more exposure.
• Design thumbnails every time.
• Edit your videos.
• Tell stories.
• List videos under the common creative license.
• Consistency.
• Upload subtitles and closed captions.
• Organize live YouTube videos. This process is called curation and it’s just like an in house publication of medium

Monetizing Your YouTube Channel

It’s advisable to put ads at the beginning, middle, and end of the video. Try to make the videos around 8 to 10 minutes long and ensure not to put ads through the whole video.

Go to YouTube search, type your keywords within your niche, tick creative commons in the filter section, and sort by count view.

Creative commons is a feature that indicates that you can use the content in the video as long as you do some edits without being copyrighted. After you find the content that you are going to use, make the modifications required, and create a video of your own. Videos such as compilation, ranking, controversy, pranks, and challenges tend to work really well on the YouTube platform.

When you finish the editing, add a compelling thumbnail, and use the keywords that you initially used for your research. To achieve fast results, upload videos every day for a month. You should be able to monetize your channel and make money fast following this model.

Editing Videos

For this step, you are going to need editing software. You can try OBS, or Fillmore or better still, use YouTube editor. YouTube offers a web-based video editor that is completely free and accessible through its platform.

Here’s how to use the YouTube editor:

• Sign in to YouTube videos
• On the left bar, click videos
• On uploads, click the thumbnail of the video you want to edit
• In the left sidebar, click editor
• Trim the beginning and end (to trim your video, select “trim”, it’s right next to the video timer and above the timeline panel)
• Drag to cut off parts of the beginning or end you don’t want to include in the final version
• Preview your edited video and if it’s good, save it
• Then, on the timeline panel, click the end of the clip you want to trim and press “split” again
• Lastly, click on the blue line and drag it to the other side to trim it out of your video
• Preview and save
• End screen (it is not compulsory to add an end screen but If you want your viewers to watch a related video, playlist, or subscribe to your channel at the end of your video, click “ADD AN END SCREEN” in your timeline panel)

Upload Your Videos

You should upload at least 30 to 50 videos even if they are three minutes long. Before uploading your video, make sure your video file is supported. Fortunately, YouTube supports almost all video files.

And if your file is not supported, you will need to re-export using a supported format or you can check out YouTube’s troubleshooter to find out how to convert it.

Uploading a video on YouTube is as easy as:

• Logging in
• Clicking on the video icon at the top right side of the window (it’s right beside the user icon, messages, apps, and notifications)
• Click upload video
• Click “select files to upload” to find the file saved on your computer
• Add description and tags, if you want your videos to be found by viewers, you should also change the name of your video, or else, it will still be named as when you uploaded it from your computer

Thumbnails

A YouTube thumbnail is the reduced-size version of an image. It is the first thing a person will see when they are browsing and trying to decide which video content to view.

YouTube thumbnails are small clickable images that a viewer can click on to watch any video of their choice. Thumbnails are very important on YouTube videos. It helps generate traffic thereby increasing the click-through rate (CTR). It also lets viewers see a quick snapshot of your video as they’re browsing YouTube.

After your video is uploaded, you can make thumbnails yourself or just go to Fiverr to hire someone to make it for you. You can add thumbnails on YouTube with the following steps;

• Sign in to YouTube studio
• Select videos from the left menu
• Select a video by clicking on its title
• Choose an auto-generated thumbnail and click “save”

Analytics

A lot of people ignore analytics but it actually helps to see when people are dropping off your videos. You can check analytics to see your most popular videos.

Analytics lets you see the success of your YouTube marketing efforts and you can use it to monitor your progress on subscribers and views. Below is a guide on how to use YouTube analytics:

• Login to your YouTube account
• Click the profile icon on the top right corner and then select YouTube video
• Select channel analytics from the channel dashboard
• Toggle between overview, reach, engagement, audience, and revenue
• Click “advanced mode” in the top right corner for a more detailed breakdown of analytics

These steps might be different for mobile users, easy steps are explained below:

• Open YouTube
• Tap the profile in the top right corner. “click” YouTube studio
• Download the YouTube studio app
• Sign in to your account
• From the dashboard, click “View more” under analytics
• Toggle between overview, revenue, discovery, audience, interactive, content, and playlist

If for some reason you didn’t like this way of making money then you should seriously check out my #1 Recommendation To Make A Full-Time Income Online. It does cost $7 but you get so much more than what you pay for, let me say that again, so much more. If interested check it out here –  https://shellyhopkins.com/business-builder.

Final Words

So now, you understand a lot about making money on YouTube without making videos. YouTube is not all about making videos. It’s also about recording audios, writing descriptions, and editing which is also very entertaining and lucrative.

Let me know if you have any comments.