Have you made your first dollar online? · NewTubers YouTube Skool

Have you made your first dollar online?

👋 Hi, my name is Woody and I’m here to make money on the internet! (Just not with OnlyFans 😅)

Jokes aside, I’d be lying if I said I started on this YouTube path simply for the glory. Sure, I like the attention 😉 but the dream is to build something that helps pay the bills, and maybe one day replaces my 8-5 job.

To be completely transparent, I’m still figuring it out myself.

I’ve made a couple thousand dollars from YouTube and other internet marketing related activities over the last few years, but I’m a far cry away from quitting my job and moving to an island paradise.

There is still work to be done, skills to be learned, offers to be made, and services to be sold.

I’d love to know if you’ve already made your first dollar on the internet or not. I’d also like to know if making money online is something you’d like help with. If you care to share, you can vote in the poll and/or comment what you’re thinking on this post.

*Here are three of the ways I’ve made money online in recent years:*

Affiliate income - I have made a few hundred dollars as an Amazon Associate. This is free for anyone to sign up for (different than Amazon Influencers). You pick an Amazon product, create an affiliate link for it, and put that link somewhere people are likely to click on it. The cool thing here is that you earn a commission on anything they buy within 24 hours of clicking the link, even if they don’t buy the specific thing you made the link for. There are some rules when using affiliate links that I won’t cover here—we can save that for a future conversation.

Self-publishing my own book - in 2023, I learned that anyone can write and publish their own book on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). This is for physical books as well as ebooks. Amazon will literally print them to order - no need to get a book deal and store hundreds of copies in your own inventory. I decided to publish a 2-page ebook just to learn the skill of how to do it. I didn’t think too hard about what the ebook topic would be. I wasn’t already making YouTube videos at the time and had a bunch of potential video topics and outlines scattered throughout my Apple Notes and Google Drive, so I picked one I thought would be easy: “5 Things I Wish I Knew In My 20’s” and I started to write my two pages. I got the 5 bullet points down pretty quickly, but then something in me took over and I started really digging into it. Each of the 5 things became its own chapter with multiple sub-points and anecdotes within it. I was waking up early to write and revise pages before work, and I did this every day for weeks. I decided I wanted it to be a print book as well, so I needed to make a front and back cover, and a table of contents, and introduction and conclusion. I decided I should take the opportunity to also learn a thing or two about email marketing, letting friends and family know about what I was working on, creating a landing page to collect emails so I could let them know when it came out. I put a lead magnet in the book to hopefully build the email list further. I asked my wife to help me edit it. The final version came out to around 50 pages, not a huge book but still 25x more content than what I originally intended. I released it, and I made a couple hundred dollars from it. It’s still on Amazon if you want to check it out. The eBook is free with a Kindle Unlimited free trial, or you can buy the print version for a few bucks (also an affiliate link 😉)

Coaching and Consulting - thanks to Skool and this community, I have been fortunate enough to connect with some new YouTubers who wanted 1-on-1 coaching to shorten their learning curve and expedite the growth of their channels. Rather than pay $1000 for some self-paced course that they knew they would never finish, they saw an opportunity to get personalized guidance and accountability at an affordable price from someone just a few steps ahead of them who doesn’t claim to be a guru. I don’t say this to brag, nor to pitch you my coaching services. I say this to point out that we all have knowledge worth sharing, and somewhere out there in the world there are people who are willing and able to pay you for that knowledge. Odds are that they have an internet connection—you just need to locate them. There are many ways to go about this, but the two primary ways would be 1) Content, and 2) Community. And when you think about it, communities are just platforms for multimedia content (text, images, videos, etc) so really it comes down to making the right content and then distributing it effectively in the right places. I could go on about this more, but this post has gotten long enough!

Outside of the 3 things I just mentioned, I have built websites, made blog posts, started various social media accounts, email lists, new YouTube channels other than my main channel, etc etc and most of these things have fizzled out, but I’m grateful for the experience and the friendships I’ve gained along the way.

If you have questions about how any of this works, I’m an open book. Drop a comment, send me a DM, or email me at [email protected] and I’m happy to support you however I can. I want to see you make your first dollar online, and YouTube is one of the best ways to facilitate that. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a part ofof NewTubers!

- Woody

I have made my first dollar on the internet!

I am still trying to make my first buck

I am here for fun, not to start a business/side hustle

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