5 Ways To Make Money Online With A SMALL Following!

Hi guys, welcome to another Juicy Vlog. In today's video, we wanted to sit down with you and talk about one of the questions that we get asked the most. How do we make money online? And how can you make money online with a similar size following to us or even less? People often think that you have to have millions of followers and subscribers to be able to actually make any money on YouTube, on Instagram, but actually it can be done with much less. Yeah, the truth is that you can make money with a small following, and we're gonna go through five ways to do that in this video today. We're gonna start by saying it's not about making money. I know that's why you clicked onto this channel, onto this video, but that's not the sole reason we started it. It's a nice bonus, isn't it? Yeah. But don't do YouTube, Instagram to make money. Exactly. See, like Lucy said, the core reason, sorry, you should be making online content is because you love creating something, you love telling a story, you love photography, you love video, something like that. If you're purely online in a social media environment just to make money, and that's the reason you start, some people can do it, I would say, but really you're setting yourself up to fail. A small amount of people can probably get through on that. If you're lucky, if people like what you're doing enough, but you need to have the passion behind it and the drive to want to do it and to create the content and love the content you're creating, and in that comes the money. Exactly. So this video is about content creation, building personal brand to then monetize. We're not talking about buying stuff on eBay and then selling it for more and all that. There's a ton of other videos on YouTube. What? Selling underwear. That's an underwear. I didn't say that. Didn't you? Oh, you did. It's not about those type of methods to make money online. We're gonna be talking about making money on YouTube, sponsorships, Instagram, that sort of thing. Should we get on with it? Let's do it. I feel like this intro's been a bit lengthy. It has, hasn't it, actually? Yeah, it wasn't meant to be that long. Number one. This, funnily enough, isn't making money. Should we just turn off now? Let's explain. So we probably didn't get our first paid brand deal, our paid advertising, whatever you wanna call it, on our social platforms until we got about 2,000 subscribers on YouTube and about 6,000 to 7,000 followers on Instagram. Yeah, I think you're right, yeah. Before that, when we had about 1,000 subscribers, we started to get some free stuff. So that was a couple of nights in hotels. We had things sent to us like hair products. I had some free treatments, didn't I, like my eyebrows and eyelashes done and stuff a while ago. Things that we were gifted weren't of a huge value, but great things, like really cool. And stuff that we wanted, and this isn't to sit here and say, look at all this free stuff YouTubers get, bloggers get, whatever. It was a fair trade. Even though we only had 1,000 subscribers, that was still 1,000 people dedicated to watching our content, who we could then recommend this hotel to. But we'd never agree, like we always say this, we'd never agree to a brand, like working with a brand. People have emailed us before and said, can I send you this? Like, we don't need anything back from you. But often we'd say no, thank you, because we're not actually interested in the product. Yeah. So unless we were gonna buy it ourselves, we wouldn't be talking about it on social media. Yeah, so if you've got a smaller following and you're starting out, this is kind of called product for post. Have you just made that up? I might have just made that up, but I think that's really good. This is called product for post. So basically, your post is worth a certain amount of eyeballs. You've got a certain amount of reach on your followers, whether that's 1,000, 2,800, whatever it is. Try it with less, like why not? We've never tried getting stuff for free with less than 1,000, but why not? And their product is worth a similar amount to that advertising for those amount of people seeing it. So the next thing is be bold. Just be bold enough to approach companies. Companies approach us, but we also approach companies. If we see a really cool company we wanna work with, we get in touch, we say, hey, we think our followers would genuinely like what you guys are up to. Is there any chance of a collaboration? And then we just explore it, and then the conversation goes from there, and we either do it or we don't. We make a decision on it. And like, what's the worst that can happen? They say, no, we're not interested. Okay, next. Anyway, on to actual money now. So that can develop into product and money for post. Being paid to- Not quite as catchy. Talk about a product or a service or a brand or a company. Anything else? No, that's it. So basically, the same kind of thing, but as well as a product, you're getting paid to talk about it. Sometimes it's a more expensive product, so you might have less money, or it could be quite a cheap product, so it's more money, or a bit of both. For example, then saying that, we still, with this amount of subscribers, have done stuff with product for post. For example, my laser eye surgery. I'm wearing no eye makeup today, so the people that follow are probably thinking, what's she doing? But that's because I've had my eyes lasered about three days ago, and that was obviously quite an expensive treatment, about 3,000 pounds, I think, and because I was gonna get that anyway, it was an agreement where if I make videos for it, that they're gonna give me the treatment. Yeah, and companies are up for this, because if they see the value in what you can provide them, in this case, a ton of people watching our video about Lucy's eye surgery, her ongoing recovery and vlogs, she'll mention it in videos for a long time going forward. All those people seeing that with that company's name associated to it, that is real value for them. We got our first kind of paid deals around 3,000 subscribers on YouTube, 6,000, 7,000 followers on Instagram, so you do not need a huge following to do this. Just go out there, find brands on Instagram, we use Instagram loads for doing this, that you love and you love their products. Maybe you already use their products. Yeah, that's often a nice way to do it. And just approach them. Tell them a bit about your audience, what kind of content you're making, an idea you've had. Yeah, it could be in the form of a giveaway as well, because then it means that your followers are going to get something from it, as well as just knowing about the product and possibly buying it to benefit themselves. It's also the benefit of, oh, I could win the product. That's even more enticing and more engagement because it's a giveaway over several posts. Exactly, and a cool thing now is that you don't have to do this on your own. You can, but there are things set up now to help you with it. So there's apps like Tribe, Takumi, there's these, they're kind of like influencer brand agencies, I suppose, where companies will go through them. They'll have a bank of influencers with different numbers of reach and stuff. There'll be an agreed rate for a post before you even accept it. And I think for both of them, you only need 1,000 followers to be accepted onto the program. I think you're right. But with that, I don't think that, as it's more of a generic thing and they don't really know you as a, the company doesn't look into you and what you do. They maybe see less value in it so they wouldn't pay as much as if you did it yourself. That's true. But then they're the middle man, so you're kind of weighing that up. So the only thing about this is the relationship isn't there between the brand and the creator. So we always prefer to work with brands where we've actually had a real chat, like emails back and forward, Skype calls, meetings, whatever. We'd rather that relationship to be solid rather than just a campaign coming through on Tribe and applying for it. But it is a way to make some extra income online. And if you're kind of nervous about approaching brands, it might be a good way to start. If you're a bit nervous about thinking, like, what do I say to this company? You don't hide behind the app, but you can literally just be like, can I promote this for you? And they'll say, yeah. And it's like a conversation in the app instead of you having to do it yourself. You put in what you were charged and they say, ooh, a bit too much, how about this? And you go, yes or no. You should have got them to pay us for this. It's all kind of done. Isn't it? We've done this wrong. So we just want to reiterate, we're not making this video to say, look how cool it is we're making money on social media. We actually would probably rather not do ads in our content. We make our content because we love it. We run our Instagrams because we love photography. We love fashion. We love talking about things we talk about in our captions. We love engaging with an audience. That is why we do it. But a lot of people have been asking, how do you make money? And we're living in a really, really cool time now where because of this, you can make extra money online. And it's cool. And what I love about this kind of way of generating income, is that you don't have to charge your audience. That's so true. You guys, if you're our regular viewers, you guys still watch our vlogs for free. You don't pay to watch our vlogs. I don't know, once a month or something, we'll bring in a cool brand that we've been working with. And it literally, and you carry on watching our videos, means that we can do this kind of stuff. So it's not- It's such a cool model. And we're living in such a cool time where this wasn't around 20 years ago. And it's not like you pay to subscribe to someone and then you have to watch all these ads. This is free, this platform. And we don't ask for anything from you guys. We don't currently do merch or anything like that. We don't like the idea of asking for money, do we? No, not at all. Let me quickly check the chicken. Yeah. You need to whack the heat up because chicken needs a certain heat to cook properly. Does it? Yeah. But the great thing is any extra money we do make online, we always put back into the channel. Yeah, we've always said that. Yeah, it allows us to buy drones. It allows us to buy new cameras, new lenses to make our content better, yes. Our first AdSense payment, we bought a lens and we were so happy. Yeah. We can buy something that goes back into this channel that we love and we haven't had to pay for it. Yeah, exactly. And we were like really happy, like going up to the shop and we'd be like, oh, is that okay for me? This is lit. So that comes into number three, actually, AdSense. And don't get hung up on AdSense because unless you're getting millions of views- Millions. The money is small. When YouTube said if you don't have a certain amount of subscribers or watch time- Oh, yeah. Then we're taking away the ability to get AdSense. And we made a video on this and everyone sort of, people sort of said, well, is it all right for you to say because you have over this and you can make money with AdSense. But literally, it's so small, like it took us months to get our- To even get- Months and months, maybe a year to get our first channel. To even get over the threshold to be paid. And I think the threshold is like 60 pounds. Yeah. But, you know, it does bring in a little bit of money and we're grateful for it because it does help pay for things like that. And YouTube's a free platform and they're paying us. Like, that's ridiculous. Isn't that crazy? I know I've just said it's nothing, but even the fact that they're paying us, but we're allowed to put our videos in there for free. Exactly. When we see people moaning about like Instagram algorithm, and YouTube not paying them as much, we get it. We get it. But like the platform's free. So the sponsorships on YouTube actually are quite different to Instagram. So on Instagram, we'll kind of tend to do one or two posts for a brand using their product, linking their account in the caption. On YouTube though, it's slightly different because we tend to do what is called a vlog inclusion. And if you've got a small following, you can definitely start doing this. We haven't actually, I don't think ever, done a video that's purely about the brand. Yeah, we would try not to ever do that. Because that is like, you would see we've uploaded, click on the thing, because you've obviously all got the bell button on, and you see that, you'd go into email, click on the link to go watch our video, and it would be an advert. And we don't like that, because although it's still gonna be something we're happy with, and we talk about, and we would wanna promote, still a bit like, you've clicked on us, and you haven't got any of us, you've just got an advert. Yeah, and this is a tip when you're first starting out with a smaller following. Don't alienate your audience. If you've got a certain niche, certain content you're making, I don't know, gaming, vlogging, beauty, fashion, whatever it is, don't then suddenly do a whole video dedicated to, I don't know, one hairdryer, or. Can we turn on the? Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, 1,000 subscribers are we at? Yeah. If that, a brand came to us and said, we're gonna pay you 200 pounds to talk about our product, and we thought, bloody hell. We were like, cool. 200 pounds, like we've taken a year to get 60 quid from YouTube. They're paying us 200 pounds. Sick, let's do it, what is it? Designer condoms. Yeah, which. No, no, no, hang on. No, it's not just the fact that it's designer condoms. They wanted a detailed, I'm just gonna say a detailed review video of how we found the condoms. Yes, so this would have been fine if it was a channel who was talking about that. There are plenty of channels on YouTube talking about sex, relationships, advice, all that kind of stuff. There's channels out there for that. So it was a bit of bad research, actually, on the brand's behalf, and we didn't accept the deal, obviously, because it wasn't right for us. It would have alienated our audience. It would have literally looked like we'd done it because we wanted to get paid, and that's not what we're about. That's not what we're in it for. Again, like George said, there are people that we subscribe to that would be perfect for that, and if they'd approach them for this deal, then it would have been great. Are you thinking of the same person I'm thinking of? I am, actually, yeah. If you're watching, you know who you are. So the fourth way to make money online is using skills that you have or skills that you can quite easily teach yourself through free tutorials. Using a platform to learn something and then make money from it. Genius. What a genius plan. So how we do it is through photography and video production. So we knew nothing about photography about a year or two ago, but very, very little. But now we've done work for brands, which includes taking photos for them. So nothing to do with us, nothing to do with Juicy Vlog, nothing to do with George Boynton and Lisa Castano. Literally. They hire us as photographers. Thank you. You're welcome. And all we had to do, if you're sitting there thinking, but I don't have skills, I don't have skills that I can monetize, learn them. Like, we don't know. We went on YouTube and went, how do you take a photo with a DSLR? What does aperture mean? What is shutter speed? And there's hundreds of videos on YouTube talking you through how to use a camera and get good shots. And a lot of the time, you think you've not got the same skills as people that you aspire to on YouTube. We think that. We're like, oh God, they're so good at this. But actually, what you've got can be a lot better than other people. So it might be that just, you might be one level up from the cafe that you're approaching to make a video for. And they think it's the best thing they've ever seen to put on their Facebook page because they don't have anything in that skill at all. Like, they can't do it. Yeah, exactly. So think outside the box as well. You might have copywriting skills or logo design or whatever it is. And approach companies. Like email them. Make a hit list of 20 companies in your area and just email them. And say, hey, this is what I do. This is an example of my work. Do you want to chat? Can I come and meet you and just have a chat about this? I think your website could do with a video. I think your logo's a bit outdated. Be polite. Yeah, I've mocked this up. Do you like it? Could we chat? There are just so many ways now to teach yourself skills and go out and execute on them. Be prepared for rejection, of course. A lot of companies, especially bigger companies, hire agencies to create their content or... It's all head office internal stuff, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go for the little smaller companies, small to medium-sized businesses in your area. Local to your town, yeah, exactly. And just introduce yourself. And then you're suddenly making money doing something that you love. So if you use skills that you are genuinely passionate about, you find yourself in this place where you're like, that didn't even feel like work. Yeah, that's very true. And I've just been paid to do that. Which is actually an incredible feeling, I'd say. Number five and our final tip is all about affiliate links. The links in our description of this video, which is to all our camera gear, are Amazon affiliate links. So basically how affiliate links work, you sign up to an affiliate program. How many times am I gonna say affiliate? And a lot of companies do this. Amazon's a very, very common one because everything's on Amazon. A lot of even smaller companies do it. Yeah, so you sign up with Amazon affiliate program. We then create links for the products that we wanna talk about. We put them in our description. When anyone clicks on an affiliate link, it takes them through to Amazon. They don't even know anything is different. The only difference is the person who set up the affiliate link, the creator, gets a small commission if that person then buys that product. Through the link. Or continues to buy some other stuff on Amazon. Yeah, yeah. So that's the cool thing. Even if they click on it and they go, no, actually I don't want that. But then, oh, actually I need to order this lawnmower on Amazon while I'm here. Because they've gone through your link, you get a commission of that sale. And again, it's not hundreds. It's not 50% of the product you're buying. It's very, very small amounts. But it adds up. If you're playing out a video every day, and then every day, someone who watches it clicks through to Amazon, just because they're scrolling through your description. Yeah. It adds up. And we wouldn't just stick, like, you know, the TV we watch and the... Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be relevant to what we're talking about in that video. Exactly. Or about the camera gear we're using. So we've got four or five links below because we get loads of messages saying, what camera do you vlog with? What microphone do you use? What tripod are you using? So we just put them in. We might as well use affiliate links. And we were doing that before we knew about affiliate links. We were literally putting the links to the gear we were using because people often ask and we could just say, oh, it's all linked in the description if you wanna know. And you're not charging your consumers, you're not charging your audience anything. It's not like 50p more to go through us, is it? Exactly. Amazon are just paying the commission. There's no extra charge on anything. So that is another great way to do it. And loads of your favorite brands probably already do it. And you don't need a big following to set them up at all. If any. In fact, you don't need any following to set them up. No, just any link. Exactly. Just put it on your Facebook page and get your mates to buy stuff from it. That you can't do. So those are our five tips for making money online. We hope that answered some of the questions that we get asked on a regular basis. We hope that was kind of useful. And we hope we've inspired you to kind of push yourself. It's so, so cool that we're living in a time where we can make money doing things that we love doing. It still baffles me a little bit. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. If you've got any questions on anything we've spoken about, any of the five tips, anything else to do with our channel or Instagram or anything like that, make sure you drop a comment below and we can have a chat down there. We've also linked our Instagram. So now we've spoken about the brand deals we've done on there before, below as well. So make sure you go and give us a follow and subscribe to this channel if you're new and you've come here from finding our video. And if you're interested in growing your Instagram, we've made a cool video here. You're gonna put it here? Just like here. Do you think we can fit it in that? It's probably gonna cover up our faces. Go and check that one out. That has loads of tips just on Instagram, how to grow your following. We're like, we're interested in this a lot. It's a new-ish thing. It's been around a while now, but we're like learning every day ourselves. We're so into it. We love making content. We love just creating stuff and telling a story and being connected to you guys, our audience. We just love it. Thank you so much again for watching. Subscribe if you're new and hit that little bell button if you are new to the channel. We really appreciate that. And give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. That really helps us out. And we'll see you very, very soon. Bye.