How YouTube Replaced My Corporate Job With Only 5000 Subscribers! (Youtube Revenue Explained)

I recently hit a huge milestone!

You might have seen the video I created on YouTube about it. I reached 5000 YouTube subscribers, and today I’m going to talk about how making videos on that platform has been able to replace the income of my corporate government job where I worked 12 years! I’m going to explain my YouTube revenue, show you the data, everything about it, and how I’ve been able to replace that income with YouTube traffic.

Hopefully this will inspire you to understand the power of social media and how you, too, can do the same thing with just a little bit of effort each week.

First, let me start by saying a huge thank you if you happen to be one of the 5000 subscribers of my YouTube channel. I certainly could not have gotten to that level without you. And if you’re not a subscriber, I recommend that you check out my channel, DayJobHacks. There, you’ll find a ton of free content to help you earn an income online.

This channel was built with the goal of achieving 100,000 subscribers. I’ve also done videos for earlier milestones. So, 100 subscribers, 1000 subscribers, the monetization of the channel. And now we hit this point where I actually have the revenue now coming in from this channel that I was making after 12 years of working at a government job.

Table of Contents

What Have I Learned?

I’ve learned a lot over the course of building this channel and hopefully it inspires you to do the same thing. If you’re looking to build a YouTube channel for yourself to create revenue online make sure you check out the video.

So, on that point, what I’ve learned over the course of this channel so far is that you have a couple of obstacles that you’re going to have to get through. You have two main issues when you’re building your YouTube channel, and that is going to be the haters and the dinosaurs.

Haters Gonna Hate

You have the haters and if you don’t have haters then you’re not doing a good enough job. This is my opinion and I see haters all the time. They’re saying your content is crap. I’ve had death threats! It’s only been a year and I’ve already had one death threat. I believe the exact words were “You need to die”.

This is the thing you have to get past. In building a YouTube channel, you’re going to be exposing your information across the globe and you’re going to have people that come there and they’re not going to like you. I’ve gotten over that, and if you’re going to be successful, you have to be able to get over that too.

Dinosaurs on the path to Extinction

Then you have the dinosaurs. These are the people that are saying you need a job, you need to go to university, you need to get your ass out of bed and go to work every day. Those people don’t understand social media. They don’t understand how it works and they don’t understand the power of it.

The other people are the people that are always complaining. You’re building your business on someone else’s platform, YouTube. What if YouTube shuts your channel down? Well, if you’re if you’re working on a 9-5 job, you’re basically doing the same thing. You’re building someone else’s business , and as soon as they want to fire you, you’re gone.

There are so many different ways to look at this that you can’t care about those things. You just have to understand that this stuff actually works. That is the inspiration of the video and this blog post – to show you that it works.

Revenue Explained

So, let’s take a look at the data. I want to show you the revenue and then I’m going to describe each part of that revenue. Now, let me also say up front, I am not trying to convince you to quit your job. I’m not saying don’t go to university. I’m just showing you the other side of the coin here.

I’ve done both. Trust me. Let me just show you the revenue from September and then I’m going to show you how I got it.

YouTube revenue. That is the revenue that YouTube gives me for people watching my videos, $544.70.

Affiliate revenue was roughly $846.80.

Product revenue, $1739. Don’t worry, I’m going to go through all of these and then explain them here shortly.

We have a total of roughly $3130.50 USD. I live in Canada, which converts nicely to $4137.71 CAD.

Requirements

Now the requirements for me to start a YouTube channel, obviously I need an email account and a bank account. A little bit of knowledge in a particular subject is also important, but as long as you can create a Google account, you’re pretty much ready to go and you can start creating YouTube videos.

Compare that to the requirements needed for the government job. In this case, it was a government analyst job. That was the job I had that I quit in 2015. Trust me, I did not quit my government job for a YouTube channel. I had another successful business in place.

I was a media buyer. I’m still am a media buyer, and that is the entire content for my YouTube channel. I had a lot of revenue coming in from that business where I was capable, mentally, to quit that job – especially after getting support from my family to do so. So, this is not a blueprint for quitting your job to start a YouTube channel by any means.

But at the time I was making roughly $2,000 CAD bi-weekly, which converts to $4000 CAD each month. Now to get that $4000 in revenue I had to work several years to get to that point. I needed a bachelor’s degree that put me $40,000 in debt after getting that degree.

I had to be bilingual. At the time, I wasn’t bilingual, but I had to take training in French in order to be able to do this job. I needed four years’ experience. Now if you were to go and search this exact same job today, which I have done, you will see the job description has a lot more to it. And the salary is still the same, $1584 to $2200 biweekly.

Let’s just assume I was at the top of the scale, around $2000 biweekly. But you need all this stuff before you’re even considered for that job. This adds some perspective as to what actually is required to generate this type of income with a corporate job.

Now there will be arguments on both sides saying government jobs are more stable. You’re going to have a pension. Yes, of course you’re going to have a pension. Assuming you still have your job in 30 years, they’re going to pay you enough money to keep you there and you’re going to work only hard enough not to get fired.

Entrepreneur by Nature

Trust me, that’s how I felt while I was working for someone else. Now, I’m an entrepreneur by nature. I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to make money and I get excited about it. That is why I’ve created the DayJobHacks YouTube channel. If you’re not excited about a particular topic and you don’t have a desire to give information out, then YouTube obviously isn’t for you.

So now let’s go through each of these revenues and describe exactly how it works and why I was able to generate this much revenue after only a year of producing this channel and with only 5000 subscribers. Now, keep in mind, of those 5000 subscribers, most of the people that watch my videos are not subscribers. I can see that in the data. So, it’s about getting your content out online.

You can see I have 5015 subscribers. Again, if you’re one of those, thank you! I truly hope that you are enjoying this content. Now, here’s the estimated revenue for last month. This is the revenue that YouTube is paying me because I was able to qualify for their monetization program.

YouTube Replaced my Corporate Job with only 5000 subs

I’m getting views by people actually visiting YouTube and searching specific topics. My videos fall in line with what Google or YouTube want to show people. So, you can see here, all of my videos are monetized and that is where I’m getting that revenue from the views of themselves.

You can see all of my videos have special thumbnails and headlines designed to get people to click and watch, while at the same time, contain highly relevant content around a particular topic. So whatever topic you’re good at, whatever you feel like making videos about, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be the spokesperson.

Power of the Content Creator

I’ve said this before, you don’t have to be the person in the videos. You just need to create content that people in your particular niche want to watch and engage with, and then you qualify eventually for the monetization of the channel.

So this is a very small amount of revenue that you’re going to be making from your YouTube channel. I’ve always said that you’re not going to be making most of your money from the YouTube monetization.

If you’re going into YouTube and you’re thinking that you’re going to get rich by doing this, I’d say 95% percent of people are going to make enough money from their YouTube monetization to make it worth their time. Of course, there are people out there with millions and millions of followers and are getting millions of views.

My daughter watches these shows on YouTube where somebody is driving over toothpaste and he has a million views. Or the meditation channels with millions of views. Those channels are a completely different story.

Non-YouTube Revenue

Next, I want to get into my other revenues. The biggest amount of revenue that is coming from this channel is from the branding itself. The reason I created the channel is to brand myself and my training, which is why I’ve created PowerhouseAffiliate.com.

This isn’t a pitch for PowerhouseAffiliate.com, however, it is a product I created a while back that describes a particular skill I have for buying traffic, getting traffic to websites and converting it into cash, using affiliate marketing.

We do training on affiliate marketing. We are selling content and resources like landing pages, a community all inside the product itself. So, if you don’t have a particular product, then you can either create one or you can use affiliate products, which I’m going to show you here.

But first, let’s just cover the topic of my own product, which is PowerhouseAffiliate.com. We sell training and you can see from the Google Analytics for last month, September, you can see that roughly 700 users came from YouTube itself. Those users converted to roughly $1740 USD in sales of the product.

These are people that have come from my videos, from the links in my descriptions, and in my videos. They can even come directly to my site again, after having discovered it in the past. They want more training, more advanced topics and more structured training.

As you can see, these are not astonishing numbers, 702 people in a whole month, but I’m only creating two videos a week, at most, and sometimes only one video per week. So roughly we’ll say five to eight hours of work a week to create and maintain the YouTube channel.

Some people say that I am wasting my time making YouTube videos, and they wonder why I would even bother. Well it comes down to having something more stable and more strategic branding. You have full control of what you do and when you do it. That is why I create YouTube content, and it is absolutely not a waste of time.

Affiliate Products

OK, so let’s assume you don’t have a product and you don’t want to make a product. What else can you do to monetize your YouTube channel so that you can earn consistent money from the traffic that YouTube can generate? What we’re doing here is we’re basically just creating traffic; we’re creating content and we’re getting traffic to specific pages on the Internet. I can choose to monetize it with a paid product, or I can use affiliate products.

Here’s where we get into the affiliate products. Many of the videos on my channel refer to tools or programs that I am using to build my own media buying business. Looking at the videos, you’ll see many are dedicated to specific topics, for instance, pay per call. Obviously, I’m using tracking for pay per call.

Email List Building – AWeber

I mentioned the tools that I’m using for Facebook ads. I’m obviously using Facebook, but at the same time I’m building email lists and I’m using tools like AWeber, which is an email marketing platform.

All of these products that I need to use in my day to day business, I am an affiliate for, meaning I get paid if I promote their products. All I need to do is get a little link from their affiliate program and I put it into my descriptors.

Or what I have actually done is I’ve created redirects on my website. So for example, every product I promote is always going to be DayJobHacks.com/ whatever product it is. So for example, if I’m promoting AWeber, it’s DayJobHacks.com/AWeber.

This makes it very easy to manage because, down the road, if the affiliate program changes their affiliate links or changes the way their product is being pitched, I only have to change my redirect on my website. If I didn’t do it that way, then I would have to go through all of my product videos or all of my videos and try to change those affiliate links.

That would just be ridiculous. So, I’ve structured it that way to make it very easy to manage. Now, let’s just give an example.

Webhosting – Bluehost

One of the products I’ve recommended is the Bluehost hosting platform, especially for newbies who are looking to build a website. Last month in September, I earned $430 in revenue from YouTube referrals. Basically, in my videos you’ll notice I provide links to a domain which is PowerhouseAffiliate.com/action-plan.

It is a page that talks about how to build a website. A lot of my videos, I say, “Hey, look, if you want to build a website, I’m not going to go through it in this video. Just go to this link and you can learn how to build a website.” They go to that page and they come here, and you can see it has resulted in roughly fifty-four clicks.

In September, over 10% converted. This is a crazy conversion rate. So over time, as this channel builds and more people go to that site and that page, obviously it’s going to convert more and it’s going to grow.

This isn’t a sleazy tactic. I’m just showing people one way to make a website. They need hosting. They need to build a website, and this is a product that helps them because it’s super easy. It’s a one click deal.

Landing Page Builder – OptimizePress

Another product I recommend a lot is OptimizePress. I actually use this in my day to day performance marketing campaigns. And as you can see, in September I converted three customers for a grand total of $158 in earnings. Again, I signed up to the OptimizePress affiliate program, got the affiliate link, and created a page where I talk about all the great reasons to use it. Go to DayJobHacks.com/OptimizePress and you’re going to be able to see the OptimizePress link.

Spy Tool – AdPlexity

Here’s another one, AdPlexity. I’ve done videos on AdPlexity showing me spying on other competitors to see what they’re doing, and how to find ads. September resulted in a $278 revenue stream.

These numbers obviously go up and down. But as long as my YouTube channel is growing and I’m providing great content, it’s going to continue to earn that type of revenue.

Now, other revenue that I didn’t even factor into this is the overall the growth of the brand, PowerhouseAffiliate.com, DayJobHacks.com, and the AdSense revenue coming from my blog. That growth over the months and years has been steady.

If we go into the revenue, you can see it’s been a constant growth upwards. It started in April of this year because that’s when I finally qualified to be monetized and you can see it constantly going up daily. It’s getting up to roughly $20 to $30. Again, nothing to get super excited about yet, but these numbers are trending in the right direction.

If you look at the reach and the audience the numbers are all going upwards. The goal here is to keep producing more and more content this year. The spike was a paid ad, but everything else is organic growth, meaning I’m creating videos with good headlines that I know people are searching for. I’m also writing descriptions with those include keywords that I want people to find when they’re searching YouTube.

YouTube Research – TubeBuddy

The tool I use is called TubeBuddy. I use this every single day. The keyword explorer is a very valuable tool. This is where I find the topics for my videos. If you want to learn more about it, check out my article DayJobHacks.com/tubebuddy.

Final Thoughts

This brings me to the end of why I “waste my time” creating YouTube videos. I love it. It is one of those projects that I truly enjoy. I like seeing the activity and I like producing content. Would I make more money doing Facebook ads or Google ads? Hell, yes. And that is why I continue to be a media buyer and by traffic and train people on this channel on how to be a media buyer or ancillary marketer or someone who makes money online.

I will continue down this path of YouTube. It is one of the most stable forms of income I have online. Hopefully you enjoyed this article and check out my YouTube channel, DayJobHacks for more free content on how to build your online marketing business!

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Joey Babineau

Hi I am Joey Babineau. I am an online media buyer & entrepreneur since 2002. Please provide comments or feedback below or help me by sharing & linking to my content! Thanks for visiting. Check out My Free Book Unstoppable Online Income.