Hi, all!   I've not posted anything here of much value for quite some time now.  I feel really bad about that (Thanks for waking me up, Shawn), so I'd like to share something with all of you, which you won't even find in my "Make Money With Puppets eBook".  It's how to make a nice passive income on YOUTUBE, with your puppet videos.  I've been pretty successful with this and would like to share some tips with all of you.

STEP 1:  Create a YOUTUBE account, and create your own YOUTUBE channel.  Give it a name that will help describe your channel to potential viewers more or less.  In my case, it's JellyBeanKidsTV .  This is a channel where I showcase my puppet cast from JELLY BEAN JUNGLE (and a few other puppet projects I've created) in short video story adventures for children ages 2-7.  

STEP 2: In your settings for your new YT channel, be sure to monetize your videos, and then go to Adsense.com and connect your new YOUTUBE channel to your Adsense account.  Google will then place related ads on your channel. If a viewer clicks on an ad, the merchant pays Google a fee and Google then pays you a part of that fee.  You get a check from Google each time you reach up to $100 in earnings.

STEP 3: Create engaging content, which does not infringe on any existing copyright.  Use your own music or music from Kevin MacLeod's Incompetech.com. Keep your videos family friendly for the most part.  YOUTUBE has guidelines on monetizing content that is too "adult" in nature (although YOUTUBE seems to ignore this with the much bigger and more popular YOUTUBE channels... hypocrites!).  Make 1-2 new videos each week, and always encourage your audience to Subscribe to your channel. (NOTE: DO NOT encourage viewers to LIKE your video. YT has recently changed their policy on that and will take a video down if you do that).  Keep your videos short, and make them engaging within the first 15 seconds.  The average viewer stops watching a video after 15 seconds if you don't grab them from the start.

STEP 4: Design your channel's unique look, with a customized banner and profile pic.  There are tons of YOUTUBE banner templates found on Google, to help you design a really nice banner that fits perfectly as the header of your channel.

STEP 5: (Optional) Create a "welcome" video, and set your channel so that this is the main video playing as one visits your channel.  It can even be a trailer showing scenes from your videos.  Some people (like me) just like to make their last uploaded video their "Featured" video.

STEP 6: Create other sites on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to promote your new YT channel.  I created a FB page for mine HERE.  Link your channel to ALL of your Social Media Sites.  There is a feature in your YT channel settings that allows you to link to your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites.  

STEP 7:  PROMOTE PROMOTE PROMOTE!   This is the part where people get lazy.  If you don't make an effort to promote your channel, you might as well not bother reading ANYTHING I've suggested here.  Take about 30 minutes a day, to get involved in the YOUTUBE community.  Your goal is to get viewers and Subscribers.  The more views and Subs you get, the more ad clicks you will get.  Subs/Views = Ad clicks = $$$$ !   So sign into your YT account, and search for similar videos to the ones that you make, in terms of topic, theme, style, genre, etc., and COMMENT on other peoples videos.  And not just, "Nice video".  Be really specific and intelligent in your comments, so that they see that you really did watch their video.  Even subscribe to channels that you like.  If other viewers who comment on other people's channels, see YOUR comment and regular presence, they will eventually become curious about you.  They'll click on your username, and be taken to YOUR channel, where they'll probably Subscribe and view YOUR content.  THAT is how you get Subs and Views, and hopefully LOTS of money!

There are SO many more tips, and YOUTUBE has a great CREATOR ACADEMY to help channel owners become successful on YOUTUBE.  Take advantage of all of it.  We are living in a GREAT time where one can make their own TV station of sorts for FREE on YOUTUBE, and then create your own little TV shows so to speak, and share them with millions all over the world!  So go for it, and best of luck! ... Pauly
PS: If you've found any of this helpful, please SUBSCRIBE to my channel here, and LIKE my FB page here

Thanks Paul! Nice to hear from you!

Yes.. nice to see you around. Good stuff. A friend of mine just opened a 3d animation channel for kids. They made about 2000$us last year. I have tried to keep my main channel ad free, but youtube seems to be plastering them in there anyway.. so the writing is on the wall, we will all be forced to place advertising whether we like it or not, so it is becoming more tempting to take the money... My son went through the process last year... warning: it was at least a 10 step process including the trick of setting up a website where it must earn at least 10 dollars worth of advertising before youtube  would send a cheque. They really are notin  the youtube business to be nice.

Alot of great info! Thanks Paul!!

Thanks Paul!  I am actually gearing up to do this, these tips are extremely helpful!  One question though, should the channel act like a television station or should each type of video have its own channel?  For example, my mascot puppet will be doing a variety of random vids.  Interviewing cosplayers at Comic Cons, interviewing and visiting local businesseses and attractions, etc...  Then I will have another puppet doing a science show.  Should I keep them under one channel, or seperate them on YouTube?

Good question, Tyger ... When you create a YOUTUBE channel you can add PLAYLISTS to your channel.  So you can categorize each playlist with different types of shows.  For example, on my channel I have a playlist called JELLY BEAN JUNGLE episodes, and another called LITTLE NICE MICE episodes, and one called, JELLY BEAN KIDS MUSIC VIDS, and so on.  So yeah, one channel to showcase ALL of your programming can be done.  But of course you can have a channel that focuses on only one brand, and that's fine too.  Whatever works for you

Yes.. nice to see you around. Good stuff. A friend of mine just opened a 3d animation channel for kids. They made about 2000$us last year. I have tried to keep my main channel ad free, but youtube seems to be plastering them in there anyway.. so the writing is on the wall, we will all be forced to place advertising whether we like it or not, so it is becoming more tempting to take the money... My son went through the process last year... warning: it was at least a 10 step process including the trick of setting up a website where it must earn at least 10 dollars worth of advertising before youtube  would send a cheque. They really are notin  the youtube business to be nice.

   Hey, pagestep007.  Yes YOUTUBE is gonna put ads up on your channel whether you monetize your videos or not.  So you might as well monetize and cash in.  Why should they get all the profit?  It's YOUR content!

Thanks Paul!  I am actually gearing up to do this, these tips are extremely helpful!  One question though, should the channel act like a television station or should each type of video have its own channel?  For example, my mascot puppet will be doing a variety of random vids.  Interviewing cosplayers at Comic Cons, interviewing and visiting local businesseses and attractions, etc...  Then I will have another puppet doing a science show.  Should I keep them under one channel, or seperate them on YouTube?

Paul has a great suggestion. But there's another reason you should probably stick to one channel: if you have lots of different accounts set up, you have to promote each one of them. It's far more efficient and productive to promote one channel than a whole bunch of them. Don't forget that unless you market your youtube account, people won't see it or at least much of it. So create less work for yourself and have them all in one place. If you want to highlight a specific topic, as Paul says create a playlist. Then you can post on facebook or twitter or whatever a 'theme of the week'. I found when doing my School of Puppetry site this worked well. Find a post I wanted to highlight, then tweeted about it as the "post of the week". It was a good way to bring up content that was old and get more page views, and get it in front of new subscribers. Plus I found tracking what was popular through addthis.com was helpful. I could pick up on what went viral and then tweet about it, giving me more views on top of the ones the post was already getting. Far easier than creating a different location for every genre of puppetry, because everyone knows "ok, that post was from SOP, let's follow them for more".

Nice to see you are still around Na.I hope things are looking up for you.
 I have several channels, and I agree with you Na. It gets to be a headache having totally separate accounts, with all the google junk and complications, administration, learning new surprise messings around with the organization of the channels by google, double email and passwords, etc...  I literally have to keep a folder hidden somewhere with all my passwords and stuff, just because I can't remember it all.
    Within each account, you can administer up to 50 channels....but at least you only need to remember two emails and two passwords. However, with more than one account... and every channel within each account, it is a separate deal as far as public goes. eg: although I have going on 19,000 subs on my main channel, with around half of the subs speaking Spanish, I opened a  mirror channel in Spanish, which is listed on the main channel, and I put links annotated on all new videos, and it still has taken over six months to get only 60 subs to transfer over to the Spanish one. Even though they are within the same account, they seem to act totally independently from each other as far as audience dynamics goes. If you are getting started, I would suggest the playlist route, and if you find that you are getting a following  several years down the track , open a separate channel, along with a lot of promotion to go with the transition.
    Unless you have had some success in TV or live in the past, where you already have a fan base to call on, it literally takes years to build your audience. Never underestimate how much work it is. But you can do it. First you must enjoy doing what you do even if you don't get an immediate following. Keep at it regularly, and look over the horizon to the long term. With new channels, I find you will not  get much traffic, but you must keep uploading stuff regularly anyway. That is  so that when people start to trip over your channel there is a good  base of material which shows you are serious and regular, and people start to sub.

Nice to see you are still around Na.I hope things are looking up for you.

Thanks. Things are ok, am currently exploring a new business option which I hope fits me better than the previous things I've been doing.


 

However, with more than one account... and every channel within each account, it is a separate deal as far as public goes. eg: although I have going on 19,000 subs on my main channel, with around half of the subs speaking Spanish, I opened a  mirror channel in Spanish, which is listed on the main channel, and I put links annotated on all new videos, and it still has taken over six months to get only 60 subs to transfer over to the Spanish one. Even though they are within the same account, they seem to act totally independently from each other as far as audience dynamics goes.

You make a good point, one that's not often touched on. It's that if you have a plan going forward it's far easier to maintain a momentum with subscribers. I found for instance that splitting my site into two was difficult because I had to get old subscribers see the new site, encourage them to resubscribe to new accounts, and that actually one site ended up being more popular anyway. When it came to moving content across sites it was best to simply redirect the url because apparently people don't like following instructions to go to the new page. The point is that if you decide halfway through that you need to split channels, it can be very hard to get people to move from where they are. So if you do decide to split, do it now before you begin and then stick with the plan. It's far easier to recombine accounts into one place than it is to split and encourage people to look in more than one place.