However, when you are trying to promote yourself, you should always be on the look out for any opportunities to make money.And one of the easy ways to make money from your music videos is...YouTube!
With 1billion+ users each month YouTube makes around £24billion/year just from advertising and all you need to do is follow some simple steps to earn your share of the pie!
Monetise your videos
First things first: to make money on YouTube you need to select 'monetize your videos' in your channel settings.
Here's how:
Step 1 – Make sure that there is no copyrighted, sexually explicit or gratuitously violent/offensive content in your videos and the tags and titles that you have defined are all relevant and not at all misleading.
Step 2 – Go in the monetization tab and tick 'monetize with ads' before uploading your video.
Step 3 – Once you have uploaded your video, tick the '$' button alongside the video you want to monetize.
Once you are done with the process, you will be able to make money on YouTube.
Just remember :
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The revenues you will be earning through Google Adsense require you to be over 18 years of age.
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You will be earning money when someone clicks on an ad and when they view it entirely (55% ad revenue). [Read our article: How to get more views on your YouTube video.]
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The pre-roll ads that are displayed before your video starts, will only count as viewed when they are watched for at least 75% of their duration.
Use YouTube's Analytics tool to your advantage
The Analytics tool on YouTube is a great help to identify which videos are working for you. Remember the 'view time' of a video carries more weight that the 'number of views' because YouTube's algorithms favour videos which are watched longer in comparison to those where lots of people clicked away after only a few seconds. [Read: How YouTube statistics can help you.]
What else can you do?
Apart from uploading your videos on YouTube, you can also start your own blog or a website and make accounts/pages on different social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. You can post your videos externally on these accounts and pages, linking your external content to your YouTube videos. It will help you gather more views for your YouTube videos from external sources, increasing the revenues you earn from your blog/website.
Become a YouTube partner
Once your music starts attracting more views and subscribers and you are gaining popularity, you can apply for YouTube partnership. It will enable you to earn more money from every click and view. Even though you can apply for this any time, but you will need to have at least 15000 cumulative watch hours in last 90 days for your best ones.
Once you are accepted as a partner, you will gain:
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Community support to help you with your queries.
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An increased visibility through search engine searches, featured or recommended videos, etc.
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Tips from YouTube.
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Eligibility for prizes that are given according to number of views, subscribers, etc.
Now that you know how you can earn money on YouTube from your music videos, you should also know that it will take time and a lot of videos before you start earning substantially from YouTube. Anecdotes and statistics show that creators average between 0.1p and 1p per view in earnings. The key is to have a big collection of your popular videos uploaded on the channel to draw in continuous views.
Shubhit S., @Epik Music Videos 2014
25/03/14