My YouTube Income Report January 2020

Each Month I Publish a YouTube Income Report showing you how much money I made on YouTube as well as breaking down some lessons I learned that contributed to that success and outcome.

My goal is to give a transparent look at how YouTubers make their money and I give you a common-sense approach to YouTube and being a content creator, what is possible, and more importantly what is practical.

*Combined totals are from YouTube Adsense Earnings, Combined Affiliate Marketing, Brand Deals, and Merchandise Sales. Please reference our Earning Disclaimer if you have questions or concerns.

Updates to the Channel in January 2020

Starting off the new year I decided to make some changes to the channel, including NEW Channel Artwork and committing (whenever possible) to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday upload schedule for my viewers.

I also wasn’t as focused on the channel as I could’ve been since I actually have been working on improving 2 of my main PRODUCTS that help content creators. The YouTube Starter Kit Templates and the Formula for Awesome Videos Course.

Here are the major changes in no particular order:

1. Heavier focus on topics around Earning Money Online
2. Experimenting with Thumbnail Designs and Photography
3. Making the Business and Branding Focus Clearer
4. Increased Consistency and Upload Frequency
5. Adding Mid-Roll Ads to videos over 10 Minutes
6. Creating NEW MERCHANDISE Designs in Teespring
7. Prioritizing Topics that Performed Well the Previous Week/Month
8. Using YouTube Stories and Community Tab More Frequently

The main thing was just getting into the routine of uploading regularly again and being disciplined. January is a busy time for me with doing things like Bookkeeping and taking calls from coaching clients.

Making my content a priority again at the beginning of the year is challenging but I know that it is something I want to do consistently.

In fact for me the theme and messages I want to drive home this year is the importance of CONSISTENCY in everything we do.

BIGGEST LESSON LEARNED

From a view, subscribers, and revenue generation standpoint there are clear TOPICS that perform better than others on my channel. Videos focused around Passive Income, Affiliate Marketing, and Social Media Marketing tend to perform the best on my channel as long as the title and thumbnails have specific outcomes tied to them.

These topics also have higher YouTube Adsense CPM values, with videos specifically about making money online having CPM’s of over $20-$30 on average and Social Media topics average about $12-$16 CPM.

Before the end of the year, I have set a challenge for the channel to try to double last year’s YouTube earnings via YouTube Adsense and Monetization. There are some specific markers that have to be hit in order to achieve this:

1. Increase Monthly Channel Views to At least 600K views/mo
2. Maintain Consistent Video Uploads 3-5 times per week
3. Focus on Topics that generate a combination of high earnings and higher overall traffic, where I can rank in search.
4. Produce evergreen topics with high YouTube Adsense CPM rates to balance a steady overall traffic source with search and recommendations from the YouTube Homepage
5. Create Evergreen Videos that tie to affiliate products the audience has proven to respond to like Tubebuddy.

NEW INCOME OPPORTUNITY

Casual viewers of the channel won’t necessarily buy something like the YouTube Starter Kit or do 1:1 Coaching with me, so I finally decided to make a real effort when it comes to my YouTube Merchandise.

But I wanted to make merch than even a casual viewer can buy that doesn’t rely on them having to be very loyal to me specifically, I needed something that would be cool enough to buy on its own.

Last year I only earned around $120 from YouTube Merch, I’m happy to report that in the month of January 2109 alone we beat that milestone!
By designing new merchandise and promoting it on Twitter mostly, the revenue dramatically increased in a short period of time.

I’m actually fairly certain that in videos that mention the new merchandise when there is nothing else to promote in the video, that this will eventually be able to generate $150/week in profit. I think creating merchandise is highly underrated but also most content creators (myself included) don’t promote their merchandise, and they don’t make it something a casual viewer would buy.

Ideally, I’ll be reinvesting those profits back into one of the major overall expenses for the channel, the Closed Captioning for Videos via Rev.com

If you want to professionally caption your videos, here is a $10 off coupon for Rev.com

YouTube Income January 2020

With only 7 uploads this month I didn’t meet my original goal of uploading 15-20 videos and the beginning of the year. Largely this had to do with technical difficulties with the audio port on my main camera shorting out. I lost a lot of good footage because I couldn’t salvage the audio to my standards.

I replaced my main camera with a Sony a6600 which produces the same level of video quality and I’m very happy with the results and the audience mostly didn’t notice. I am using it with a 24mm F/1.4 G Master Lens.

Based on this I can assume that I may have been able to double the AdSense earnings and increase the other revenue sources if I had been able to upload that content.

Top 3 Highest Earning Videos

The top-earning videos for my Youtube channel in January 2020 isn’t that surprising beyond the fact that a video that I made in 2017 is still bringing in $100/month today alongside a video from 2018. It just shows you the value of EVERGREEN video content on the platform and why it matters to make content that has a long lifespan rather than just making trending topic videos. The CPM Rates also are reflected in the fact that what gets views doesn’t always earn the most. CPM’s are a mystery to most YouTubers but topics dictate everything on the platform including revenue.

YouTube Earnings Breakdown

Total YouTube Income Breakdown

GOALS FOR FEBRUARY 2020

For February 2020 my main goals around the YouTube channel are to continue to focus on consistency and make sure that I’m providing the right value to the audience while monetizing as many ways as possible and reinvesting in long term growth. Topics I will likely focus on both due to the data and the comments and viewer demand and what is driving subscribers will be: Affiliate Marketing, How to Make Digital Products and Courses, and YouTube Growth and Instagram.

This includes everything from updating my YouTube Channel Trailer to make the value of the channel clear to new potential viewers and possibly tapping into a trending topic at least once a month for relevancy.

1. Add several new merch designs to the YouTube Merch Shelf
2. Upload at least 15 new videos in February
3. Increase Affiliate Earnings to $10K+ average each month
4. Increase Merch sales to average $150/week (20 sales/week)
5. Make a 2020 YouTube Channel Trailer (needs a refresh!)
6. Be More Active in YouTube Stories
7. Cover some YouTube Camera gear and also promote and launch my New Gear Channel with content. Monetize before the end of the year.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL EXPENSES FOR JANUARY 2020

Updated: Many of you requested a breakdown of the expenses/cost associated with the YouTube channel. This is difficult because of the overlap with my other business ventures outside of YouTube and content creation. The way I decided to approach it, was to include the expenses I would ONLY have if I were just a content creator/influencer. And so that is how I determined the cost of being a YouTuber for myself and included it here. This will be present in the future income reports going forward. This amount is fairly consistent month to month unless I make a major purchase for the channel.