Hi there. This video is going to be about using YouTube to sell your online courses. So there's a few little tips and tricks to go through. So let's get started. So the first tip to really talk about is whether you should use YouTube at all. Okay?
So it works really well for me, um, but it's a decision to make. Okay? And the way that I use it, okay? So what I do is I take a small sample of my larger course and I just repurpose it for YouTube. I don't shoot specific stuff for YouTube. Sometimes I do, but often I'll just go through my course and go, all right, I've got a 20 video course I'm gonna grab.
Um, the intro always goes on 'cause I feel it's 'cause it's a good way to kind of cross-sell the course. But I also then look at maybe three or four of them that have a really kind of searchable terms, you know, like things that people would be interested, not really obscure titles. So pick some, like what I think are gonna be winners on YouTube. Then I, what I do is I record a little intro and a little outro. Okay? Check out my YouTube channel.
So, uh, youtube.com/bring your own laptop and you'll see what I do and I do a little, uh, just before the video, I'll do a, Hey, my name is Dan. This next video is a small extract from my large course, Photoshop Essentials. Uh, there'll be a link in the description on with the video. You'll see what I do. I do an outro at the end as well, saying, Hey, if you enjoyed the video, check out my full course on X, Y, and Z. I always say, uh, link in the description.
Okay? Because that link can be tracked, which is cool 'cause then it allows you to attribute that video that's on YouTube with a sale on your course. And also means you can change it, uh, later on. If you start with just having your courses on one of the marketplaces, that's where you can send them. But then later on you can, um, send them to your own site. Okay?
So you can change that link in the description really easy. Don't be tempted to say, um, speak out the URL during the YouTube video. Okay? So you've decided to upload it to YouTube, create your own channel, okay? And start uploading and don't just kinda like throw it up and hope for the best. You really need to be, um, really systematic about what you do.
This is not, I'm not gonna cover every single step you need to do, but you just need to know that it can't just, it won't just do well if you pop it online and do nothing else with it. Um, there's a lot of things you can do to give it its best chance of life. And that will come down to the naming okay of the, the title of your video, what's in the description, uh, tags you can add to your, um, uh, to your video so that it kind of appears in the right search results. There's lots of things you can do, okay? So don't just think you can throw it up and hope for the best. Make sure you go out and research how, how a YouTube video can do its very best in life.
Alright, last tip is monetization. So an option in YouTube is to tick a box that says, I'd like to monetize this video. And what that means is that they'll put ads over it and you'll earn some income from them. It's not much, okay? But it does add up and it has some strategic value. So some people just don't like to add ads and that's totally cool.
Me, I like it. And what I, how I kind of frame it in my head is I, first of all, it actually earns a reasonable amount over time. Um, I, it's kind of coffee money at the beginning, that's how I looked at it. I was like, all right, I earned, uh, this week I earned, you know, $4 and I can go get a fancy coffee with that $4, thank you YouTube. Okay. But after a while, it actually starts, like, just so you know where I'm at.
I'm not a, at any way shape or form, uh, YouTube celebrity, but I've got 40,000 videos, you know, they, people watch them and I get about between 600 and a thousand dollars a month depending on, uh, mainly if I release a new video and it gets lots of views, my income comes up. So every a year, that's a really good kind of income. And, and the way a good strategy is to, let's say you are earning $10 a week, is to take that $10 and use it to buy ads on YouTube. So basically take it from them to give it back to them so that you can promote your videos. There's various different ways you can do it. I like the suggested videos.
Okay, you can kind of jump up the list there, but you could just take that to kind of like compound your subscribers to get more views to potentially get more income that you can invest more into ads again and hopefully snowball this thing so that you're starting to drive some real traffic to your course. Alright, so that's YouTube for me. Um, I guess I wanted to just explain like how important YouTube is for my own website. So my instructor HQ hosted bring your own laptop site, and that does, like, it drives pretty much, I'd say 80% of my traffic comes from YouTube. They've watched a video, they like my style, they've come from my website and signed up. Okay.
And it starts slow. But like, as, as all of this grows, YouTube is becoming more and more and more successful. And, um, instructor HQ kind of links together. So it tells me actually this video, um, is actually coming through to, you know, and people are buying. So I can actually see which videos do well, so I can know which videos that I need to start making for YouTube, which ones I should release on YouTube, and how, how they're performing and how much they're earning. Um, so much so that I release quite a lot of my videos.
This is not what I'm saying you should do. It's what I do. I really long courses. Some of them are a hundred videos long, I'll release, um, sometimes a half of them all okay. Or a quarter of them all. So that's a lot of content.
I like it because it's content that's already made. Um, people can get a good sense of the course and if they, you know, if's not easy to follow on YouTube, a kind of a string of courses. Often people just see a unique course and come to, you know, come to my website to follow it all. And the real kind of king people can stitch them together And make their own, like mini course. It's not the whole thing. So that's, that's my kind of, that's what I like to do with YouTube.
Give away loads, add a little intro and outro. It's content I've already made and it drives a lot of my kind of subscribers every month. Yeah, I love YouTube. All right, uh, that's gonna be it for the YouTube video onto the next one.