Excited About Monetizing

I never thought I'd be blogging about monetizing and I'm definitely no expert on the subject, so please, I hope no one expects some new revelations or tricks of the trade here. So why am I writing this? Well, it's because my family and friends think I spend too much time on the computer uploading videos, writing my blogs, and researching monetization. They're right, I spend a lot of time, ALL THE TIME, uploading videos to YouTube especially. But there's a reason why I'm willing to spend the time for a few dollars a day.

In 2009, I decided to start blogging, thinking that many would want to read my thoughts. I posted a couple of times and set up a Google Adsense account. Because I'm an extremely impatient person, and since there were hardly any views on the blog, I ignored it. I ignored it until election night, November 2012. On that day, I thought it might be a great idea to start another blog about working in media in Washington DC. Covering election night results from a studio near the White House, I decided I'd take some photos and write about what it's like working behind the scenes in the news industry. Although hardly anyone read that blog as well, I made a discovery. While setting up my new blog with my same old Adsense account, which I hadn't looked at for 3 years, I noticed that I actually had made about $5 and some change, from those two posts I had in 2009. To me, that was a big deal.

See, once I learned that I made a little money, it proved to me that it was possible to make much more. I only had to ask myself "if you can make $5 over three years, then what do you have to do to make $5 a day?"  I also noticed that out of the $5, there was about $2 made from a family video I had placed on YouTube. That's when it dawned on me. I work in television, I'm a videographer in Washington DC, and I can upload a ton of original content.

I googled the subject of monetizing blogs and YouTube and read much about how I shouldn't expect to quit my day job since most people don't make much. I understood that. But something happened this month (January 2013). On the 16th of January, I once again looked at my Adsense account and saw that I was making between 25 cents and 80 cents a day from a video I had placed on YouTube in November 2012. It was a video of a musical performance that I was invited to film. It received about 6000 views in a couple of months. I decided I would start posting at least a few videos a day, and did. One video in particular, a video of a firefighter falling off a ladder, received almost 10,000 views within 24 hours of posting it. The next day I made almost $8. The day after that I made $33! Once I made the $33, I thought I could quadruple my efforts and make $100/day. Unfortunately for me, that didn't happen. In fact, I haven't made anywhere near those $33 since. I had no idea why, but I'm still excited and plugging way.

I had watched a video on YouTube of a really smart kid who was talking about how he just recently begun blogging and monetizing and he was making a couple of dollars a day. In the comments section he received much praise for his advice, which I learned from as well. Again, I thought to myself, "if that kid is excited over $2/day, I'm making on average $10/day, that's $300/month." And that's where I am right now, between $10-$13/day. I post about 30 news related video clips each day. None of them give me the views that that firefighter did. He's at about 150,000 views now. If there's anything you take away from this post, it should be these two things:
1- When someone falls, RECORD IT! People love to see people getting hurt. It's sad, but true.
2- Monetize your YouTube account and any blogs or website you may have. Do it now!

As I said in the beginning of this post, I'm no expert. But I can tell you what I've done and what I am doing, so, if you want to ask, I'll do my best with my answers. I guess what's good about what I have to say is that I'm not selling anything, and I'm not promising the world. I'm going to gather my thoughts for my next post, where I'll share exactly the steps that I took so far.

By the way, since I started writing this post till now, my Adsense account went up by 76 cents :-)